Cathy Minnis, 82, leans on her walker with her right arm, then wipes the table at the McDonald's on Moorehead Avenue in West Conshohocken with her left in slow-sliding arcs.
As she works, the morning sun lights up her hot-purple nail polish - the color of dangerous flirtation, a customer jokingly nudges.
``People tell me to take it easy,'' says Cathy, who looks more properly like a Catherine but disdains that ``old-fashioned'' name. ``I never take it easy.''
Easy is too much like death. Easy is overstuffed chairs and inert afternoons, empty as Nevada. You take it easy, says Cathy-not-Catherine Minnis of the purple polish, and you are done.
Minnis and other senior citizens who work at area McDonald's restaurants are laboring for money, sure, but they also work because they're afraid they'll wither.
``If you don't get up in the morning and do something,'' one member of McDonald's senior class says, ``you'll be dead in five years.''
The seniors speak of work in almost religious terms. Dawn-rising priests of labor, they don McDonald's uniforms like vestments. Work gives their lives shape and meaning and vigor. They are from the generation that showed up on time, without attitude, and got the job done.
These days, when people retire at 65, they may well have 10, 15 or more years of life left. As folks live longer and stay in good health, demographers say, they require more than Social Security and meager pensions. Then, too, they also need something to do with their days.
This could be what the future looks like. Economists have a fancy name for it - the ``McDonald's phenomenon.'' But all it really means is that more and more older people are augmenting their fixed incomes by abandoning Oprah in the afternoon and heading off to work. Seniors are finding low-paying positions in the service industry, notably in fast-food restaurants.
To be sure, seniors can be found working for other fast-food chains, banks, large retailers such as Walmart, and other service-industry employers. But one of the most visible workplaces for the elderly in the Philadelphia area is McDonald's.
No one in McDonald's corporate offices, local or national, can say how many senior citizens work for the fast-food giant. There's a similar paucity of statistics on the number of elderly people in the service industry from the federal Bureau of Labor Statistics and the American Association of Retired Persons. But it's clear that a workable match has been struck:
Older folks like McDonald's because the hours are flexible, and they don't need special skills. McDonald's likes older folks because they're more reliable than teenagers, the population pool from which the company typically draws workers.
