The Bonus Years

Bonus years? What does this mean?  Just read an advertisement for a lecture here in the Sarasota area.   What is a bonus?  A reward for good performance?  Something quite unexpected?  My sisters who are ninety two and ninety are hinting that their excellent health and energy is a kind of downer.  The older of the two is dynamite; she walks out every day with her cane or whatever four blocks to have coffee with her daughter.  The younger goes on a scooter down to her pond and gets into the water for a swim.  But the fact of that matter is that they are both rather sick and tired of doing the repetitions.  Life has absolutely no surprises.  I used to love working in my garden, but that has become too tiring, the struggle with the rapacious weeds, the constant oversight of the pruning and deadheading process, well, I am just tired of the whole thing.  I've had gardens since I was a boy in Iowa, gardens everywhere, in home after home, and some of them quite large, the last one at the seashore a considerable fraction of an acre.  I used to kneel down to trim and then came the epic struggle to right myself.  Plastic flowers is the way to go.  It was interesting to notice that in central Rome you just don't see old people my age, not on the street not in the restaurants.  Also interesting is that the city itself has without meaning it, I am sure, established a million traps for the elderly.  I have never seen so many stepped up segments of pavement, meant to be a graceful stair I guess?, but  of course just a perfect invitation to tripping over.  And in a city so breathtakingly beautiful they are not going to mar such disruptions with yellow warning lines--the idea is grotesque.  Better a dead old soul than ruining whatever is otherwise the "bella figura" of the city.  So I guess the Roman bonus years are spent away in a closet or some other impediment to movement. And remember the incredible heat wave in France a few years back when thousands of old people perished in Paris apartments lacking air conditioning while their children and grandchildren disported themselves on the beaches during the August annual vacation period.  I calculate that I haven't the strength to do the walking, the gardening, the hours of attending theatrical productions, walking through museums peering intelligently at paintings, so I am not sure in what sense these years are bonus?  Maybe in the same sense that the somewhat worn out clothes you pass on to your servants are a kind of bonus, perhaps even a tip, although make-do items tend to  remain cast off.  So we old folks here in Sarasota can go to this lecture to hear about these so-called bonus years?  It will take me a while to figure out what the expression mean.  Sounds like an invention of AARP