Where I live an elderly (way over 65) woman stared out the window at the people who go by, with a eye filled with disdain. She especially is afraid of dogs.
At the office an elderly (retirement age + some more) woman receptionist was spying on me, lurking outside and giving me an almost comical evil eye.
I recently saw a comedian on Comedy Central who joked that when people get old they start becoming suspicious.
Is this behavior part of the aging process? Is it old women or old men as well?
Where I grew up, we had elderly couples living on either side. The wife on the left was always reporting on the comings and goings of the neighborhood.
The one on the right was less vocal about it, but no less diligent, and was frequently seen peeking out her window. My parents nicknamed her “Spook.”
Now the Spook is 86, and my 65-year-old widowed mother goes to lunch with her about once a week for something to do. And guess what my mom does now?
I’ll chalk it up to suspicion and also something to do.
I’d guess they’re mostly females simply because women usually outlive men. The older you are, the more likely it is that your friends have died and that you’re too sickly to be very active. If you spent most of your adult life raising kids you may not have had time to develop hobbies or your hobbies may have fallen by the wayside with the changes of aging. This leaves you bored and lonely. So there’s not much else left to do but watch what everyone else in the neighborhood is up to.
We used to live in a house with old Greek widows on both sides. The results were lots of cakes over the fence and no chance whatever of being burgled. It was awful. Especially the cakes.
Older people as they lose mobility and develop medical problems start to feel powerless, fearful, and vulnerable. To purse snatching, robberies, vandals, burglars, etc. They have time to watch the news and read the paper, and it’s all everything going straight to hell in a handbasket. And Who is doing all these anti-social, dangerous things? The young, duh! That bunch of neighborhood kids out there speeding up and down the streets, smoking dope, blasting noise, swearing, and fighting amongst themselves? They might be decent sorts who will band together to paint old Mrs. Jones’ house and carry her groceries in. But to the elderly, they’re loud rowdy rude monsters who are out to rob, kill, and maim.
There is a grumpy, inert old guy who spends his days sitting on his balcony a few doors down from me, visibly disapproving of everything and everyone who goes past, especially me and whatever young man I’m holding hands with.
I’m with salinqmind, and I want to add that old people get stupid enough to watch sensational news bulletins and take them seriously.
My grandparents were freaked the fuck out when I moved out to Amsterdam, because of course you’d get mugged, raped and killed every day over there.
ETA: I was only mugged once in 12 years, and I’m still alive. Oh, and no rape.
Oh! You reminded me of the two geezers who used to sit on their porch across the street from the dumpy old house I rented with three friends in college. They were ALWAYS there. I don’t know if they were father and son, or brothers, or hell, lovers. We called them Bartles and Jaymes, because this was at the height of the “Thank you for your support” ad campaign.
We used to keep our garbage can (with lid) outside the side kitchen entrance, well, because it was convenient. That side of the house was shaded and you couldn’t really notice it. And the people next door wouldn’t have cared because they were college kids too. Besides, it wasn’t like this particular dive neighborhood had an HOA or anything like that.
One day we got a notice that we had to move our garbage can to the back of the house (where there was no door) because of some ordinance.
You KNOW who dropped the dime on us.
Every single one of my female friends who’s moved from la région to Montreal has gotten this speech. May be accompanied by “gasp You take… the metro???” (Yes, matante Mathilde, just like a million other people every day, who somehow remain unmurdered.)
There’s an old guy who lives across the street, and spends way too much time working on his lawn. I swear I’ve seen him edging the grass on his sidewalk with a pair of scissors. At any rate, he once criticized the mailman for kissing his mistress out in public.
How do I know this? I’m the “mistress” and that mailman is also my husband. I was leaving the house one Saturday and happened to run into him on the front walk, delivering our mail. I gave him a relatively chaste smooch (on the lips, no tongue) and headed off to the store, wondering what an unknowing passer-by might think in a situation like that. I didn’t realize that a neighbor wouldn’t recognize who the mailman is! I chuckled at how many times he’d - allowed by the Postal Service regulations - taken his lunch break at our house, and suspect the guy thought he’d been in for a quickie rather than a snack.
Since I live in a wealthy area, and the woman in question knows I live in the same building, why would she be afraid? It strikes me as paranoia, fear without reason. If I’m sick and bedridden, I don’t suddenly become afraid of puppies and people without white hair.
Maybe you should go “hold hands with” this old guy, and he’d be less grumpy? 
Or maybe this old guy should get some rabbits, and instruct them in Disapproval.
Life has many cruel surprises for you ahead.
As you get older and move into the “elderly” point of your life your brain function will decline.
Declining verbal abilities, short-term memory loss, poor reaction time, and slower intellectual performance is just a teeny part of the fun you’ll have.
Not only do the nerve cells in the brain decrease, but the ones you keep lose function.
To add to the ho-down the blood supply to your brain will decrease by about (on average) 20%.
Cracks in your spinal column and slower impulses in your peripheral nerves will give you the joy of having slower reflexes and make you more clumsy by giving you the gift of decreased sensation. Also, the bottoms of your feet become less sensitive so it’s easier to fall. FUN!
Add in a little bit of hearing loss and decreased sensory abilities combined with the knowledge that they are fairly helpless can make them extra fearful and paranoid.
So if you’re lucky you’ll grow old enough to experience all of that and you’ll know just why she’s acting the way she is.
On very simple reason why those old folk spend so much time watching and being dissaproving of *younger *people is that, by the time you get to be their age, everybody is younger.
They’re bored and it gives them something to do. I volunteer at a retirement home on Fridays and all the residents love to hang out and talk about the kids in the park across the street. The way they talk the whole world will be ended in 50 years cause none of the G-D kids can pull up their F’ing pants. 
My favourite residents are three elderly knitters that always seem to be knitting something. They sit and gossip about everyone that walks past the home. Between the catty remarks and the knitting they are having the time of their lives.
And it’s not just people. I will take care of my neighbor’s dogs when they go away and they have an old one, like 13 years old and a young one like 2 years old.
The old guy comes out plays for five minutes then walks to the front gate, sits himself down and wags his tail a mile a minute with a stupid grin on his face. He’ll do this for hours on end. No kidding. Sometimes when I let the dogs out, if it’s a nice day I’ll take my laptop and sit on their porch and one time I was using my computer for EIGHT hours out there, it was a nice day so I stayed. The old dog sat by the gate for eight hours, happily wagging his tail and watching the world go by.
The young dog wanted to play, he’d run around the yard, he’d come up to me to get petted, he slept under the bush. Not the old guy. He sat at that front gate just watching the world go by, very happy to do so.
Just because we decline with age doesn’t mean we have to get nasty.
My grandmothers didn’t spy on the world, but my grandfathers did. There was some disapproval, but also a lot of wonder at whatever newfangled thing they were looking at. My parents are bracketing 70 and they also have a much better attitude than that being described here. My guess is that if the elderly are nasty and disapproving now, they’ve always been that way.
I finally had to threaten to nail a large piece of plywood over my mother’s kitchen window if she did not stop peering into her neighbors yard and reporting on every single one of their comings and goings. She lives in a rural area, and the neighbors are not exactly in spitting distance. Not only did she peer at them and report to me every time they had a bowel movement, but every comment she made about them was critical and disapproving.
I don’t know what they had ever done to deserve such scrutiny, but it drove me batty.
She was REALLY pissed off when the old guy next door died. It was like he had done it just to spite her. Totally ruined her entertainment.
My mom is the same. Although she goes to enormous trouble to avoid the neighbors at all costs, she knows ALL about them, where they go, what ails the husband, the lawsuit the wife filed, who the “boarder” might possibly be, what new plants they put in their garden…it goes on and on and on. The neighbors on the other side of the house are, much to her disappointment, hardly ever at home and are rarely seen when they are.
I hate to admit this, but I’m essentially an old person then. Except that with modern technology, I no longer have to lift the curtain to spy on my neighbors…I just read celebrity gossip sites instead, which is really the same thing when you think about it. Best procrastination there is.
Yeah, was thinking just this. In a few years, or maybe already, the grumpiness will be directed online instead of out to the street.
So those nasty-ass trollers you are reading might not be 14, but 84! :eek:
I know I’ve often wished I could get my mom to learn the basics of the computer and the web so she could entertain herself on days she can’t get out due to weather or whatever. I think she’d be a lot happier.
Edit to add: All I could think of while reading this thread was the Muppets guys 
http://www.jdmfilmreviews.com/images/muppets-no-country-for-old-men1.jpg