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Some months ago my snide friend Bill Shakespeare wrote a rather typical piece about the Santa Clarita Senior Center for the Beacon’s satire section.  It was “typical” because it was characteristically judgmental for the pure purpose of satire.  Today I would like to balance Bill’s blatantly sophomoric piece with a more sobering look at what the Santa Clarita Senior Center is today.  Remember, I write from the perspective of a senior citizen in my sixties who believes there should be good senior centers all over America, even in snowy villages in Alaska with fewer than 100 people.  

We are nearing the winter holidays, which is traditionally for us mammals a season of hibernation and reflection.  There is a wonderful movie we could rent or order from one of our movie or book stores to set the tone for our reflection.  The movie is the great Swedish director Ingmar Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries,” whose hero is simply a quiet senior citizen.   

Bergman, who wrote the screenplay to the 1957 “Wild Strawberries” while he was hospitalized as a young man, created a tour de force of a man in his final months of life forced to take a long car trip to receive a lifetime achievement award.  Along the trip he encounters a diverse group of personalities, each of whom serve as a mirror to some phase of his past life.  These episodic personalities range from a free-spirited hitchhiker to a quarreling husband and wife.  

After many people reflected his past back to our hero, we see that our man – played by Victor Sjostrom in his final film experience — has exhausted himself observing the playing out of his long life. It becomes clear he will be unable to complete his journey to receive his prestigious award.  But while he lies in bed, he hears from outside a choral Christmas song. From his window, he sees that the young people of the village where he has stopped – a provincial town that would have known nothing about his professional achievements – and the youngsters have arranged for him a Christmas serenade.  This holiday serenade scene has been described by film historians as among the most efficacious scenes ever put on a screen. 

In many respects, the final scene of Bergman’s “Wild Strawberries” serves the balm function of a senior center. 

Like a Christmas serenade in a small provincial town, a good senior center honors a long life without judgment.  Unlike a lavish life-time achievement award ceremony, the little serenades played out in a good senior center celebrate the quiet private triumphs that no one but the senior citizen really knows. 

To avoid the judgmental style of satire always put by the likes of Bill Shakespeare, I will write the rest of my piece about the Santa Clarita in the gentle form of non-judgmental questions.

For example, is the above photo of Santa Clarita Senior Center fairly represented as the lead picture in this story?  This picture was actually the photo highlighting the senior center’s website.  If you were designing the website, is this the picture you would use to represent the senior center and everyone who uses it?   How could a different photo do honor to Santa Clarita Valley seniors?  How could a different photo make you ever want to visit the place? 

I beg a few more questions:  

  • Does the furniture in the Santa Clarita Senior Center do honor to the people using it?  What kind of people use such furniture? Does the local senior center in any way resemble the furnished senior centers of neighboring cities?  What planet did our senior-center furniture come from? Was any effort made to receive tax-deductible donations from all those nearby fine furniture stores that either closed or were forced into extensive clearance sales over the past red-ink year?
  • Does the food in the Senior Center really taste as bad as Bill Shakespeare wrote?  For the two or three dollars paid for lunch, is there any effort to add some non-profit funding to give lunch some flavor and visual presentation so that family members can stand to share meals with their senior relatives?  Could the management for example offset the effect of boiled meat with at least some spices and garnishments?  Can food that tastes this bad actually be healthy?
  • Could it really be true that the game rooms are furnished with chairs without arms, leaving the danger that an older person falling asleep in such a chair could wind up on the floor? Is there an underlying understanding that this senior center is not really designed for seniors who have been spoiled on good furniture, good food and chairs with arms?  Is this senior center somehow supposed to have a “poor look” because it is associated with non-profit organization fund raising?  How do they fund raise? Do they write to the United Way? 
  • Does the library reflect any discernment in its selection of literature?  Or is it just full of any old books that find their way here from local garage sales and garbage?  Meanwhile, what happened here to the idea of “large-print” books for seniors?   

I hope I am being helpful here with my criticism and my questions.  I give it the old college try!   Personally, I think I have a pretty flexible sense of humor for being so old.  And even my valued former wives have told me the one thing I am really good at is asking questions and Being the Critic.  

Wait a minute.  That’s two things I am really good at. 

Chris Sharp- Commentary                                             

Chris Sharp is an Educator and a prize-winning professional writer. His commentaries represent his own opinions and not necessarily the views of any organization he may be affiliated with or those of the West Ranch Beacon.