Day 22

Name: Sandy Gerston

Profession: Water aerobics teacher

Location: Her home in Scottsdale, AZ

Question: Why are you there?

Answer: My active lifestyle

Seventy-something Sandy Gerston is anything but a senile senior. A water aerobics instructor, world traveler, social butterfly, outdoorsman, and artist, Gerston keeps herself busier than most people half her age and does so with remarkable energy.

“You see, when you get older and you stop working, your associations dwindle. But if you stay active and you work a little, you keep your social aspect up,” she said. “It’s fun. If you don’t do that, you don’t have all the friends, and that’s what happens to older people. They get a little cloistered. So it’s nice to be able to have your friends.”

Most of her friends, in fact, come from the lessons she teaches at the Jewish Community Center. First beginning the job after retirement, she slid into the position after taking over her classes when her instructor was absent or late. This happened so often, she explained, that she decided to get certified so she would get reimbursed for her efforts. She now teaches an average of four days a week for two hours a day.

When she isn’t teaching, Gerston enjoys painting and the outdoors. Her love of fresh air compelled her to stay in Scottsdale forty years ago—when “it really was the Wild West”—after her husband was expected to oversee a project there and return to New York City a year later.

“It was supposed to be just for temporary. Just temporarily,” she said. “We learned to love Arizona and all the beautiful lakes and we used to motorcycle and we did a lot of camping here in the west. We had originally camped in the East, or as far as we could get our holiday time, you know, two or three weeks. We’d go from New York to as far as Tennessee or something. But now we were out west. So we could go to Idaho, Montana, Iowa, we went to California, Nevada. We camped everything out west. It was exciting. We spent a lot of time in Mexico, south of the border. So moving out west was really nice. We let the children grow up here and they learned to motorcycle.”

Three of her four children, now grown up with families of their own, live in close proximity to their mother and father. All five of the Arizonans have a lunch date planned for next week.

“I love them. They’re terrific. Smart and best part about them is they’re all very hard working. They have a very strong work ethic and I think that’s important,” she said. “It’s easy to sit back on your keister with a sense of entitlement. But you have to be a participant, and you have to participate. Going to school, of course, is every significant, but these are tough times. You have to work a little bit. Earn a couple of bucks.”

Gerston spoke warmly and easily about her daughter in Texas, an editor, special events she plans for her and her friends, her husband’s career in photography and engineering, her home, her granddaughter, and her contentment with the way things are going. She plans to continue teaching swimming, which for her, “is retirement,” until she is no longer physically able. She also hopes to revisit Europe soon, when her husband’s health recovers from its current ailment.