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Health & Fitness

Making Friends at the Cupertino Senior Center

The Cupertino Senior Center provides a place to us to make friends and fit into our new community.

When you move as a child, you are quickly integrated into your new environment through school and sports; as an adult through colleagues at work.  For seniors newly retired or newly relocated to this area, there is the wonderful Cupertino Senior Center.  Located on 21251 Stevens Creek Boulevard, it offers a haven for mature adults (those 50 and over) for the very low annual membership fee of $22 for those resident in Cupertino and $26 for those not.  Warm and welcoming, it is very well-run and offers a large variety of activities ranging from free get-togethers like sports activities, card playing, and book clubs, to those that charge a small fee like theme luncheons and classes, to more pricy travel packages. 

When we first moved to Cupertino, my husband Fu-Tin gravitated towards sports, joining the tennis and ping-pong players.  I signed up for four classes, all of which would not have been available in the Central Pennsylvania area where we used to live — tai-chi, hula dancing, play reading, and Mandarin.  It’s great to see mature adults so engaged and active, and my husband and I were soon introducing new friends to each other with the opener:  “How old do you think he/she is?”  

We marveled at seniors playing tennis well into their eighties and hope to be just like them.  My hula dancing class was made up of a group of mature dancers who enjoy dancing, fellowship, and  entertaining others with their gentle, graceful dances.  I particularly admired a couple in their nineties, Jim and Betty, in my play reading class gamely taking on roles in the avant garde feminist play, In the Next Room (also known as The Vibrator Play) and in the classic Black theater play Fences by August Wilson.  It was wonderful to be in a class, very capably led by our instructor, Andrew, so earnestly seeking to understand the effects of prejudice and discrimination on a minority group, of which they were not even a part.

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 I enjoyed the expert teaching and the company of new friends in my Mandarin class.  (Mandarin, like French, is one the most beautiful languages in the world.)  I really thought I was making great progress when I could perfectly understand some of my fellow students, until I realized that they were speaking with a heavy Cantonese accent, which I speak.

The most wonderful thing about the Cupertino Senior Center is that it provides a home away from home for seniors.  Here, being forgetful, hard of hearing, or slow of movement will not ostracize you.  And seniors have the most wonderful, most honest stories to tell and, as a senior, you have the time to listen to them all.  When you are retired, you can view your career from the perspective of the end point.  When your children are grown, you can judge whether the tradeoffs you made in terms of time and resources were correct.  When there is no more redo, you come to terms with the major decisions you have made in your life.

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