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Gene Cohen’s prescription for a long and healthy life sounds like advice from the Poor Richard’s Almanac: If you want to reduce your chances of going senile, take up sculpting. To lower your odds of getting cancer, learn to play the piano. Want to fend off depression, diabetes and other debilitating illnesses? Write that novel you’ve always dreamed about.... Read more

COLCHESTER — Reggie Peters, 73, started smoking while serving as a combat medic during the Korean War. Now a disabled veteran, he goes through two packs a day in his room at the Holy Cross Senior Housing in Colchester, where he's lived for the last 10 years.... Read more

The Champlain Valley Senior Center is a good place to meet women. I won't be officially retired until 2049 - but hey, it doesn't hurt to plan ahead.... Read more

It is commonly believed that we humans get more conservative as we get older. But the half-dozen senior Vermonters profiled here demonstrate that aging doesn't mean leaving the Left, that being retired doesn't make one retiring. On the contrary, these men and women happily remain a thorn in the sides of wayward powers-that-be, and an inspiration for those who would follow in their feisty footsteps. After all, injustice, too, is age-old.

Green Queen
MARION LEONARD, ROCHESTER... Read more

BURLINGTON - Jean Forden said she couldn't deal anymore with living in Florida, where many younger drivers would give her "the finger" simply because she had white hair and drove more slowly than they did. Forden, 75, is a feisty ex-New Yorker who spent more than two decades managing Planned Parenthood offices in Canada before finally settling in Burlington.

"I was on the cusp of feminism," Forden said, "and now I'm on the cusp of a generation that's not going to stand for the kind of crap that happened to earlier generations."... Read more

Brian Davis didn't come out -- he was pushed. He was at college, in the early 1970s, when he received a call from his mother. She was really upset. "I said, "Mom, what's the matter?... Read more

My mother is 92. She's 2000 miles away. I'm an only child. These are just three of the myriad factors in what's become an increasingly complex equation for me, the daughter of an aging parent. And while I have to deal with my mother virtually on my own, I share the dilemma with millions: the baby-boom generation, uneasily coming to late middle age ourselves, turning into the caretakers of our elders. Both groups exist in numbers unprecedented in human history.... Read more

The lights are off at the Vermont Kung Fu Academy in Essex Junction, creating a womblike darkness. Fierce-looking martial arts weapons rest unused against a wall. Janet Makaris, the soft-spoken Tai Chi instructor, leads her students through a series of relaxation exercises and movements. She invites them to envision their spines as stacks of checkers; to perform "tootsie rolls" with their feet; to imagine a moon floating in the silence of their minds.... Read more

At first glance, the building at 47 West Spring Street in Winooski looks a lot like any retirement home. On the Wednesday afternoon before Thanksgiving, the walls are decorated with construction-paper-cutout turkeys and autumn-colored leaves made by the nurses.

A bingo game has been going since 2 p.m. in the main dining room; two blue aluminum walkers are parked outside the door. A disembodied woman's voice echoes in the front hall. "N 45," she says over the loudspeaker, "N, 4, 5."

Technically speaking, this is not an old-folks home -- it's the Our Lady of Providence Convent.... Read more

Vermont is showing its age. Each year, the number of "old folks" in our ranks gets larger, both in real numbers and as a percentage of the state's total population. Like the rest of the nation, Vermont is on a collision course with the Baby Boomers -- the generation born between 1946 and 1964 -- who are approaching retirement age. Within 20 years, this demographic bubble will strain every facet of our economy, from housing and health care to transportation, labor and industry.... Read more