At 104, Laura Simon worries for her aging children

LAURA SIMON—She’s 104 on Thanksgiving Day
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By Donald H. Harrison

SAN DIEGO—Among the celebrants of November birthdays at The Patrician senior residence in the University Towne Center area yesterday was Laura Simon, the oldest of them all.  Today, Thanksgiving, she turns 104.

Simon smiled when Milica Todorivic, a member of the dining room staff, brought over the large birthday cake that would be shared among the celebrants and guests, and expressed delight when she received from well-wishers a gift of a pink Snuggie blanket which she can wear while listening to music or the news in her independent-living apartment.

However, she confided over a hearty lunch of salad, soup, and a combination of chicken and lamb entrees, birthdays really hold no excitement for her.  It’s not because she has had so many birthdays, but  rather because her children also have had so many.   Simon has a son Mayo and a daughter Sydelle, whose ages make them well past eligible to live in the same senior residence that Simon does.

Getting old is like “climbing Mount Everest,” says Simon, who four years ago when she turned 100 had her memoir, I’m Still Here, published.   The book now is being serialized by San Diego Jewish World.

Being elderly is very hard, she says. It upsets her to think that her own children are now facing the period of their lives when they may have to suffer the same kinds of  indignities of age that she has.  She’s too stoic to complain about health problems–“everyone has them,” she says–but she intensely dislikes the way that American culture tends to forget that elderly people have led full lives , contributed a great deal to this country and have wisdom and experience to share.

She also said she worries that her children will have to be old during a time of severe economic downturn.

Simon told me and my wife Nancy that she is very skeptical about the announcements from various federal agencies that the current recession shows signs of ending. “I don’t believe it,” she declared.

She said the day before the Great Stock Market Crash in 1929 which signaled the beginning of the Depression, she had read similarly rosy economic forecasts in the Chicago newspapers.

Simon said she still recalls how well-to-do people become suddenly poor, even homeless. She can still picture people sitting on street curbs during the Depression, trying to heat up food with small fires set in street gutters.

Today, with eyesight so poor that she is classified as “legally blind” and needing a metal walker to get around  the Patrician, Simon says she is painfully aware how much more difficult her life could be if such a facility were beyond her economic means.

She said that she fears for seniors whose savings may become  so depleted they won’t be able to afford to live in such a facility.

When Simon was just a little girl, her father left her mother.  So, her mother had to work, and Simon had to take care of herself.   “I got street smart and I’ve been  taking care of myself since then,” she said – meaning a century of self-sufficiency.  Having to be independent, and having to overcome hardships, made her strong, she said.  Perhaps that strength accounts for her longevity.

Although on the one hand, Simon clearly is proud of being 104 and her ability to avidly follow current events and enjoy literature on tape, she’s doesn’t want anyone to pigeon hole her because of her age.  Chronologically she may be 104, but she said she thinks of herself as perhaps 40 years younger–  mine and Nancy’s contemporaries, in other words.

She certainly is as well-informed—maybe even better informed—than many people of my generation.

This afternoon, her son Mayo, a New York City-based playwright, is expected to arrive in San Diego to be with her on her birthday, and on the following day, Rabbi Moishe Leider of Chabad of University City is expected to drop by The Patrician senior residence as he usually does on the last Friday of each month.

Being with family and friends are the real components of a happy birthday, Simon says.

It’s the same with Thanksgiving !

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Harrison is editor of San Diego Jewish World