Word: octogenarian
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Condo Complex. Most Condo Complexes (and there are many) have similar features: swimming pools, shuffleboard courts, tennis courts, clubhouses, lots of old people, and lots of completely identical buildings to house the old people. They also generally have imposing walls and gates staffed by crack walkie-talkie-toting octogenarian security forces. Grandma assures me this is to provide protection from the hordes of degenerate muggers and rapists who swarm around South Florida after the sun sets...
...Sarah is not ready to join her. "You can die if you want," the octogenarian says, "but I am not ready." Indeed she's not. She has to visit with Tisha, a friend of 50 years, and maybe start a little romance with Mr. Maranov, a vestige of the Russian nobility who has, since the Russian Revolution, spent his life visiting friends. He's a gentleman, as Tisha puts it "the last of the cavaliers, and rich, as in idle...
...Live By." The topic is vintage Esalen: an attempt to marry impulses physical and metaphysical. So too are the seminar leaders: Joseph Campbell, mythologer supreme and godfather to many a '60s quester, and Chungliang Al Huang, a Chinese-born master of Tai Chi. For six hours each day, the octogenarian Campbell sits cross-legged on the floor and improvises passionate lectures about Navajo paintings, the dangers of spiritual feudalism and why Hindu elephants are "clouds condemned to earth." Whenever the talk gets too cerebral, Huang, a beady-eyed Boswell to Campbell's Johnson, leaps up and leads the group...
...emerging as Deng's leading rival is another octogenarian, Peng Zhen, 84, chairman of the National People's Congress and a Marxist of the old school. Peng, a contender for top party posts in the early 1960s, was purged in 1966. He is reported to be bitter that he has never been elevated by Deng to the party's top echelon. However, he has turned the Congress, once a legislative rubber stamp, into a center for opposition to Deng's reforms...
...Beyer, a pharmacy clerk in San Francisco, is in even worse condition. Her octogenarian parents' life savings of $30,000 were devoured before her father's four-year battle with cancer and a heart condition ended in his death on Christmas day. She is still responsible for her mother, who suffers from Alzheimer's disease. "Now I am having to dip into my own savings, and I will probably have to go through all of it," says Beyer. "I have been to every agency to ask for help. I am bitter, but I try to take...