A Buffet Line Of Activities Elita Sohmer Clayman

A wise man does not need advice, and a fool won’t take it. These are very wise words and if there are any fools out there, they will not even read these words. These are not my words, someone else wrote them and I picked them up off of the Internet.

Another wise one is “I choose to make the rest of my life, the best of my life.” Many times, seniors think since they are in their seventies, eighties and even early nineties, that life is nearing the end and they sit back and do nothing. They may go out and eat dinner in a restaurant once or twice a week and they think that is about all they can have now, that is kind of fun. Mom use to love dressing up and going out to eat dinner with my family or the friends she had in her apartment complex. They mainly would go to a Chinese restaurant or a family style buffet. She enjoyed the buffet a lot because she could choose the various and plenty dishes they displayed. It was an inexpensive and tasty meal and the place then was called Horn and Horn and it was located, I believe in a mall or the Rotunda.

Once, we went because Mom really thought the food excellent and especially the price and they gave seniors the ten percent off of the meal, which in those days was rare. You walked in, paid in advance and then as you walked past each station of food, you took in your plate, all you wanted. There is only so much you can devour even though your eyes and thoughts think you can eat even more. When they were finished, some of her lady friends went for more and then got a doggie bag and took the leftovers home. I think they stopped the taking of doggie bags, because they realized that the people were finished eating and then bringing more to their plates and taking too much home.

She loved to go to the salad bar and also to the dessert type bar and there you could make yourself an ice cream sundae or a piece of pie or cake with the ice cream on it. There was another place that had a similar type buffet with hot and cold items and an ice cream machine and you could put all you wanted on a cone and eat it for your dessert.

Mom looked forward to her dinners out and she had been a good, gourmet cook long before the word gourmet was applied to people cooking at home. She made everything except bread from scratch and everything she cooked was excellent.

Salad bars and buffet dinner bars are not as prominent as they were a few years ago and I loved going to them too, as Mom did. It was fun to be able to choose and pile your plate with actually too much food, because your eyes were wider than your stomach allowed to be filled with that enormous amount of food.

I always say there should be other kinds of bars like the salad bar and buffets that are still around. There could be a knowledge bar where there were stands and you could walk by from standing in line and you could gather knowledge on certain subjects you might be interested in. For instance, if you liked the subject of psychology, there could be professionals who were psychologists standing there and they could give you a book they had written to look over or you could ask them a question about something you were interested in or was bothering you. There could be people standing there who could answer your questions if you wanted to learn to knit, if you wanted to learn to ballroom dance (you knew I would insert that in, for sure), there could be people there to show you how to make your rooms at home look prettier by pieces of material they had displayed or small pictures in or not in frames and colors of paint displayed on a sample paint paper. There could be people who could advise you if you wanted to learn to play an instrument even at a late age; they could take you over if you were interested to bang on the piano and show you how easy it is to learn the basics. There could be people over there in this bar or buffet to tell you how you could look with a different hair-do. Others could be there to show you how to make inexpensive, but pretty casual jewelry out of beads or pearls.  Another person could be there to show someone how to make simple things sewing by hand and not using a sewing machine. There could be professional caterers who would show you how to make a simple, fast meal that was inexpensive too.

I would call this a Buffet Of Life Activities. You would pay a small admission fee of about five dollars per person and this entitled you to ask questions of as many people who were showing off their professional work and even there would be cookies and bottled water. I bet that many people, seniors, not yet seniors and even young folks who would be interested to learn these things.

It would consist of book learning, sewing, bead making, room design, knitting, ballroom dancing, cooking and even suggesting a good book, old or current to read to enliven your knowledge of different people and their ways of life.

This Buffet Of Life Activities would activate lots of brain use and in perhaps, people who only get out eating dinner now and then. It would be social type of buffet bar and fewer calories than a real salad or dessert bar.

So many folks would benefit from a bar of this sort and it would be similar to going to the Timonium Fairgrounds the end of each August, where you can partake of lots of activities, vendors, farm activities, cake baking contests and live animals. This would happen maybe four times a year and the people volunteering their time to show you bead making, knitting, ballroom dancing, or anything else would benefit because they may get clients seeking their services from this showing of it in advance in a fun manner. You could even do as I do and write down your thoughts on everything and perhaps, your grandchildren would love to see how life was when you were young and their age.

So I choose to make the rest of my life the best of my life would certainly apply here. We should all be active each and every day and have some adventure with an activity we are just learning. Another saying is “stay strong and beautiful because things will get better, it might be stormy now, but it cannot rain forever.”

The rain will go away, but we will still be here running for the new ideas, journeys and thoughts we gain from our Buffet Of Life Activities. Even if my imaginary buffet line never happens, we can seek out these things to do and make our own buffet of adventure.