After a hectic few days of re-connecting with Bears training camp and Bourbonnais, Ill. (neither of which I can recommend),  and attending a Doobie Brothers concert where middle-aged white people attempted to hear some funky Dixieland and dance a honky tonk (not a pretty sight), I spoke this morning to a group my husband likes to call my “people.”

He says this as a dig, of course, because after 18 years of marriage, compliments are viewed suspiciously by both of us.

“My people,” as he calls them, generally fall into the category of all those over the age of 70. And he’s right. I love older people.  For starters, I feel I have a lot in common with them like persistent heartburn, a fondness for eating at 4:30 and a penchant for talking about the next meal beginning at breakfast.

Maybe it’s because, as the youngest of four children and separated from my next-closest sibling by seven and a half years, I spent a lot of time alone in the house with my parents. Aside from picking up my father’s Maalox habit, I bonded with them to the extent that I still feel most comfortable with people in their age group.

I should point out that my mother exhibited almost none of the qualities associated with older people. Before she was sick, she stayed up late, slept in, kept the air-conditioning blasting and rarely wore a sweater.

Along that same vein, my in-laws – other than packing for trips two weeks ahead of time, and starting each day in the middle of the night – are also atypical for their age group.

This is particularly true as it relates to their social life, which is busy and exciting and involves more movies and dinners out in the average month than my husband and I have experienced in our entire marriage.

My goal is to be half as cool as they are some day.

That said, what can I say, older people like me and I like them. I don’t mind when they call me “Mitzy” instead of Missy, I envy them for their choice of sensible shoes and give me a good piece of pound cake over tiramisu any day.

I often get invited to talk to senior groups and if I can, I always accept, even when I’m paid in mandel bread. This morning, I spoke to a men’s club gathering that was preceded by a half hour or so of business matters.

Once, I spoke to a women’s temple group in which the business matters (raffle, silent auction, tributes to past members and, of course, minutes of last meeting) took up the first three hours of the three-and-a-half-hour program.

Today, it only seemed like three hours.

“I’m sure all of you know ‘Walt,’ ” the first speaker, who we’ll call Ed, told us. “He’s around here all the time and wears a brown suit and walks stooped over?”

The membership nodded.

“Well, he died this weekend,” said Ed.

Sighs all around, as they passed a get-well card for someone else.

We were told of gallbladders removed and blood work done and weakened conditions until I vowed to check myself into the hospital for a full work-up as soon as I left.

Seamlessly, Ed segued into a regular feature known as dirty one-liners. This is a popular portion of the senior men’s club circuit. Warms them up for the woman sportswriter. It’s about this time that I try to conjur up the raunchiest lockerroom tales I can remember.

But first, there was more serious business to tend to, in this case the passage of amendments to the club by-laws.

During this part of the meeting, I seriously considered slipping out the back door for fear that it would eventually have to be broken up by police in riot gear. This made Morty Seinfeld’s re-election campaign for president of the condo board at Del Boca Vista phase III look like real life and my morning like a sitcom.

Men cursed and were shouted down and then things got really unpleasant as one member asked that the amendments be read over again.

It was about this time that a doctor was paged to help with someone else in the senior center, which provided a much-needed break in the proceedings as I silently hoped no cutting-edge medical procedures were required.

My people were out of control.

Thankfully, order was eventually resumed, I knocked ‘em dead – well, you know, not really – and I was out by 11:35, only 35 minutes past lunch hour but still a good four before dinner.

Sometimes I feel like I am getting this unemployment thing all wrong.
 
For three weeks now (or is it two? Or maybe four?), I have been all charged up (aside from just a few intermittent bouts of crying and that was early on) and excited about the adventure of exploring all the new and wonderful possibilities for the future.
 
In fact, I have filled up almost an entire spiral notebook with all of these new and wonderful possibilities. And I have spoken with scores of people to gets ideas on even more new and wonderful possibilities.
 
Up until now, I have not, as I thought I might, retreated to the Double Stuf Oreos (one “f,” I checked, as this was important to me both as a reporter and consumer) or any number of TLC marathons (“Little People, Small World” and  “Half Man, Half Tree,” being particular favorites).
 
But then yesterday, it hit me. Somewhere between being rejected as a ghostwriter; told I needed to “inform, impart ideals and move minds” if I wanted to be a successful speaker; and finding out that an eight-year-old would soon be covering hockey for the major daily for whom I used to work, I became, well, a little down.
 

This morning, I got frantic phone calls from my sister and my mother-in-law asking if I was OK. No blog entry for more than 24 hours and I must be dead. This actually brought back warm memories of my father calling and checking if I was dead when I missed a day in the paper shortly after I began working for the Tribune.
 

I’m not sure he would have always noticed, except that my Uncle Dan would call him first thing in the morning telling him my byline was missing and asking what happened to me, causing my father to immediately call me and ask if I had been fired or any number of other catastrophes had occurred.
 

This was not unusual in my family. My mother rarely began a phone conversation without the words, “Hi honey, it’s mom. There’s nothing wrong. Are you OK?”
 

But I digress.
 

I didn’t know they still used the word “ghostwriter,” but apparently they do and I was referred to a large, out-of-town corporation that wanted me to “ghostwrite” a white paper for one of their executives. This all sounded very exciting, even though I did not know what a white paper was and still really don’t, which may provide some clue as to why I was rejected.
 

The speaker thing was another slight setback. For years, I have spoken to virtually whomever has asked. When we’d get to the part where they asked for my fee, I’d go into my standard negotiator mode and immediately stutter, maybe laugh and say I didn’t really have one. This typically resulted in many speaking engagements for which I would receive a thank-you, a pen and once in a while, a Starbuck’s certificate.
 

Not that I didn’t appreciate all of the above. But without a paycheck, Starbuck’s is going to have to come up with more options if I’m going to do my future food shopping there.
 

And so I decided to get some advice (and perhaps some high-paying jobs) from the highly respected head of a highly respected speakers bureau, who first yelled at me for taking free gigs.
 

“You need to tell people, ‘I’m a journalist, so I believe in free speech but not in free speeches,’ ”  he told me.
 

I told him this sounded a bit off-putting to me. But clearly I have been setting a bad precedent in the speaking world, running around and taking pens as payment, so I told him I would try to do better.
 

But then he told me that in today’s climate, people hire speakers “to help them achieve their business objectives.” I took that to mean that my story about B.J. Armstrong and Ron Harper and I simulating birth in the Bulls’ lockerroom wasn’t going to do that.
 

I asked him if entertaining was good enough, and wasn’t Dave Barry a highly successful speaker, and wasn’t he entertaining? And he said, essentially, “You’re no Dave Barry.”
 

I would have been really depressed at this point, except that I actually know Dave Barry, have been friends with his wife Michelle, a sportswriter, forever. So, borrowing a scene from “Annie Hall,” with Dave playing Marshall McLuhan, I called and asked him about the art of speaking.
 

“I have no message,” Dave said. “Nothing useful, whatsoever.”
 

Which is why I love Dave Barry.
 

Still, short of stealing his speeches, I understood the speaking guy’s point. So maybe I’ll stick to writing. I was a respected sportswriter for many years, wasn’t I? I’m confident in my craft, aren’t I?
 

Then a friend e-mailed and asked if I heard about the eight-year-old from Batavia who was going to write hockey in the paper.
 

I said I hadn’t.
 

And then I headed for the Oreos.