Getting older means getting better for many of today's seniors

SAN JOSE, Calif. — She has been old for so long that she can remember when the first graying hairs and the withering of her churned milk complexion seemed to matter, as if the obliteration of her youth signaled the end of something. That was 20 years ago. At 82, Helen Connolly is actually — measurably! — getting better every day.

At the Saratoga, Calif., retirement home where she has spent the past four years, Connolly chooses from one of four exercise classes every day, plays bocce regularly with friends, and gets in a round of golf at least once a week. Her muscles are pumped, and so is her spirit.

"My golf game is better now than it was 20 years ago," she says. "I hit my drives longer than I ever did." She hasn't had cataract surgery yet, but she thinks it might improve her game. "I keep waiting to get it because I can't see as far as I hit my golf ball."

What was it Bette Davis said? Old age is no place for sissies? She walked the walk — with painful osteoporosis that shrunk her, but never cut her down to size — while speaking up for America's fastest growing demographic: the golden old people. They are the liver-spotted gray panthers, the elder-hot cougars, the silver foxes and the not yet senile septuagenarians who are making old age new again.

Medical advances have combined with a greater emphasis on fitness at all stages of life to make it far less rare for people to live into their 90s. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of centenarians will grow by 660 percent over the next 40 years.

Hip and knee replacements have created a generation of bionic baby boomers, just starting to be fitted out for walkers with tennis balls stuck to the bottom. That's just how they roll.

Expensive retirement centers like these in California -- the Classic Residence by Hyatt in Palo Alto, the Tower in San Francisco and the Saratoga Retirement Community — where Connolly lives — have transformed the dreaded old "nursing homes" to something more like Club Med than Club Dead.

And with Viagra, LibiGel and other chemical stimulants improving the quality of older people's romantic lives, there is anecdotal evidence that hooking up has replaced — or at least supplemented — nap time as the afternoon delight of choice among widows and widowers.

But to Sheldon Breiner, 73, a longtime resident of Portola Valley, Calif., and one of Silicon Valley's entrepreneurial inventors, old age is not a stage of life worth worrying about. "I don't look at these as the 'golden years,'" he insists, before boasting that his resting pulse rate is a youthful 45 beats per minutes. "What's different? It's a continuum."