Companion care in Chula Vista

• Norman Park Senior Center, 270 F Street. Classes, games, dancing, and a room full of people their own age. Plenty of people won’t walk in alone the first time, and keep going once someone has gone with them.
• The public library. Chula Vista has branches at 365 F Street, at 389 Orange Avenue in South Chula Vista, and inside Otay Ranch Town Center, with services in English and Spanish and a quiet place to read the paper.
• Third Avenue. The older shopping street in western Chula Vista, for a coffee, a haircut, or a walk past shops a parent may have known for decades.
• Church. Sunday Mass or a weekday service, at a parish where the service is in their language, or back at the church they went to before they moved.
• Old friends. Lunch or an afternoon with a friend across town, the kind of visit that quietly stops once someone can’t drive.

Some of the loneliest older adults don’t live alone. They’ve moved into a son’s or daughter’s house in Otay Ranch or Eastlake, the family is out at work and school all day, and they’ve lost the neighbors, church, and friends of the place they lived before.

A few visits a week can give them a routine of their own again: a morning at the senior center, a trip back to the old neighborhood, a standing lunch. It takes pressure off the family too, who no longer have to be their parent’s whole social life in the evenings.