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More 70's-Something Blues
I've been thinking more about retirement home living, and besides all the other things I wrote about earlier, here's something else:
Susan and I just returned from my 80-year-old cousin's funeral in Jacksonville, which was a very sweet, gentle service at a funeral home -- followed by a punch-and-cookies reception at her and her husband's retirement home for their friends who were unable to come to the service itself. Everyone was dressed in their Sunday best: the ladies in dresses and the men in suits or navy blue blazers. One gentleman there was from Kentucky and was wearing a red bow tie. Nobody was as crazy as a loon or disoriented, and almost everyone made some thoughtful remark about my cousin or her husband. It was a very friendly, considerate, polite, and civilized group of people who had come to pay their respects to one of their own.
And that's when it struck me what I don't like about retirement homes: everyone's the same age! But who am I to talk? I'm that age too! What I remember about growing up in Florida, and then living several places here in Atlanta, is that those neighborhoods had people of all ages living on the same block. Young married couples with babies in strollers lived across the street, the Gerisch's, a retired inventor and World War II veteran and his Australian wife, lived next door (he taught me how to repair almost anything, from lawn mowers to door knobs), and Dr. Teague, a retired dentist, who taught me everything I know about growing roses, lived on the other side.
My current next door neighbor is a single mom with a 13 year old daughter, who plays with my dog and feeds and waters her when I'm away, and my back yard neighbor is a crabby old retired Presbyterian minister who complains about my trees casting shade on his lawn.
If I lived in a retirement home my neighbors would all be perfectly coiffed blue-haired ladies of a certain age and distinguished looking elder gentlemen who wear white shoes. I'm not sure Susan and I are ready for that.
But: my family and I lived in company-grade officers' housing when I was in the Air Force, and I lived in a dormitory or fraternity house when I was a college student. I didn't mind being just another pea in the pod back then, so maybe my reluctance to live in a retirement community comes from something other than a puzzling desire for diversity.
Maybe it's a fear that age-related infirmities are contagious, that I would end up sitting and dozing in a room with 20 other senior citizens, all of us staring numbly, dumbly at a daytime television show like Oprah. Maybe it's a fear that if you're in Independent Living today, you'll be in Assisted Living tomorrow.
I live in a paid-up ranch bungalow, and maybe I should just have the spare bedroom made into a laundry room so I won't have to go up and down the basement stairs, and stay here. It would be cheaper than paying many thousands of dollars a month as rent, or coming up with a huge purchase payment to live in a retirement community.
And then again, maybe not.
Trying to plan ahead is getting harder and harder.
081910
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