Rewriting the book on growing old

COURTESY PHOTO Mary Christofano Baby boomers are edging into later life. But Mary Christofano is proud of her generation for the ways in which it remains youthful. At 60, she gets up at 4 a.m. every day to jog on the trails near her home. Then she works out at a gym before going to work as the business manager for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement's crime lab in Fort Myers.

Her latest endeavor is writing. It's a habit she picked up in 2004 while thinking about debunking the myths of being 50 and older.

"I was a child of the 60s," Ms. Christofano said. "I never expected to live to be 50 when I was in my 20s."

The result is called "Fifty Isn't Fatal Anymore." Now she's working on at least two other books.

"The hard part about being a writer is you want to spend every waking moment doing it," she said. "It started out as a hobby, but I feel like I'm compelled to write. Some nights I stay up all night writing. And I find at 60, I have the energy to do it."

Ms. Christofano lays out on the first page of "Fifty" what aging is not. For instance, it does not mean you must be uncool, overweight, a conservative dresser or give up on love. It doesn't mean you should no longer "dare to dream."

"I was having the best time of my life at 50," she said. "My son was off on his own. I had all this freedom."

"Fifty" was self-published through iUniverse in 2007. It confirms for anyone approaching that decade or in it that getting old is in many ways a personal choice. A good attitude, a healthy diet and exercise are her basic remedies for staying youthful.

Ms. Christofano's second book, a fictional account of a serial killer, draws on her experiences working near crime lab technicians. Some characters are based on co-workers.

"Some people will recognize themselves," she said. "The names have been changed, obviously. I'm good to my characters because they're good people. I'm in awe of these individuals."

She's also writing a third book, a fantasy novel about a little girl.

Ms. Christofano composes her first drafts on legal pads before transferring them to a computer for the editing process. Although she wrote a few magazine articles when she was younger, she said the writing bug bit her later in life. But she used to make up stories and tell them to her son, who is 38 now, when she was young. One story, which she plans to adapt into a children's book, is about a house toad.

Ms. Christofano grew up in Schiller Park, a suburb in Chicago, with five siblings. Her mother was a housewife who later went back to work and her father ran grocery stores. After graduating from Elmhurst College in Illinois, with a degree in business administration, she worked in residential and commercial real estate near Chicago for more than two decades. Her parents retired to Naples and she moved there in 1993.

She worked as an accountant for about four years before landing her job as a business manager with the Department of Law Enforcement and moving to Fort Myers.

Ms. Christofano is a fan of crime novels, fantasy and also the self-help genre. She prefers biographies and nonfiction to fiction, and is "a voracious reader of health books."

In her spare time, she enjoys her gray parrot named Maggie who talks. She also loves walks on the beach and the orange cake at The Bubble Room on Captiva. And she is thinking of writing a follow up to "Fifty" called "Sixty is Sensational."

"Sixty was harder for me," she said. "Fifty was a piece of cake, but 60, I started thinking 'how much longer do I have left?'"

But she isn't troubled by the thought.

"None of us are guaranteed tomorrow — it should be a sobering thought, not a depressive thought," she said. "If there's something you want to do, find a way to do it now."

For more about her books, check out www.marychristofano.com.