Vacations can be many things — relaxing, adventurous, educational, recuperative. My week off in Chicago, during which my wife and I stayed five days in a high-rise for people 62 and over, could best be described as informative, as in an informative preview of old age.

Catherine and I were there to visit her mother, who had moved into her northeast Chicago apartment on the 18th floor of a 34-floor building in October, which boasts an amazing view of Lake Michigan.

Her building is The Breakers at Edgewater Beach. We’d considered getting an Airbnb nearby, but opted to rent a guest suite they have available for residents’ visitors. It was on the 32nd floor, and a cafeteria-style breakfast in the first floor dining room was included. That was a selling point, breakfast being the most important meal of the day.

I’ve been gray since my 40s, and I’m white-haired at 57, so, yes, I was at times taken for a resident. This happened most often while waiting for or riding an elevator, a big part of life in a 34-floor building populated by senior citizens.

Catherine had warned me about the building’s four slow elevators. When we arrived, they seemed like they worked just fine. Then I got on at breakfast our first full day, and I began to notice how often we stopped between floors. Over the course of our stay, we would sometimes start out from the 32nd floor and, at meal times, the elevator would fill to capacity by the time we got into the low 20s.

Often the doors would open and the person hoping to get on would have a comic exchange with the others already stuffed in it: “Next one,” someone would say. “This isn’t an elevator, it’s a hellevator,” one man said.

The elevators functioned just fine, but the people getting on and off of them move at a much slower pace, many using walkers or riding mobility scooters. That meant a lot of slow exits and entrances.

“This is what we do here,” I heard a woman say to another as they waited for an elevator. “We wait.”

Riding and waiting for the elevator is how I met Tom, formerly of Seattle, who lives on the 32nd floor. We started talking because we kept running into each other at the elevator, and I learned he’d been to Bend, back in 2017, when he came to see the solar eclipse.

I wondered, but didn’t ask, how much older he was than I. He was more spry than a lot of others there and had moved there from Seattle at some point after the pandemic.

On one uncrowded ride, a woman told me her favorite part of visiting her mom at The Breakers was the elevator conversations.

I knew what she meant, but by my third day there, I was getting more determined to use the stairs. Once when I was trying to get from the third floor fitness center to my mother-in-law’s, I took one look at the group already waiting and turned toward the stairs.

I made it as far as 11 before I decided to try the elevator again. I hit the button, hoping lady luck was smiling at me. Instead, when the elevator arrived, it was the others who’d been on 3.

“You’re the fella who took the stairs,” said a woman with an English accent.

“It’s true,” I said. “I gave up.” We all laughed.

But Tom had correctly warned me that tempers sometimes flared on the elevators. One time when an argument broke out, he exited the elevator during one of its many stops rather than stick it out.

On one crowded ride up, I was wedged in a corner far from the buttons, so I said, “32, please” to no one in particular, which I’d observed as the protocol among the trapped.

A woman holding a framed painting assumed I was talking to her, even though she was one of several closer to the buttons than I.

“You could do it yourself. I have my hands full,” she snapped. I was speechless, and therefore polite. “OK,” I said.

“I’m feisty today,” she said, adding after an awkward pause. “You look very young.” It was not meant as a compliment, but rather another reason why I should do it myself, dammit. No one had pressed 32, so I snaked my hand around bodies and reached the button.

When the feisty woman was exiting at her floor, she said, “I know I’m not easy to live with,” to which one woman replied, “What?” as though she hadn’t the foggiest why the feisty woman had said that.

I didn’t say anything. I felt kind of bad in the end, but when you behave rudely in group settings, you get what you get.

After I’d had enough rides to get the bigger picture of life at The Breakers, which is celebrating its 40th year, Tom explained to me during one of our waits that the elevators had been designed for the more able-bodied, not necessarily folks using mobility scooters and walkers.

And of course, a lot of the residents had started their lives there walking just fine, but they continued to age, and started needing the assistance of these devices. To a person, the ones using these aids seemed like the most patient elevator riders, and I admired their fortitude.

Living among them for a week was a strong reminder that we are all just at different points on a one-way road, and that there’s a big old ditch we’ll never get out of running right alongside each of us.

The trick is to stay on the road and out of the ditch, and the people I saw and met at The Breakers are doing a heck of a job. Some are just feistier than others.

Tom told Catherine and me to say hello next time we visit her mom.

We will, but I think I’m staying in an Airbnb.