Way Stations to Eternity
The winter of the fifteen storms was too much for my old friend Peter. He decided to put a snow shovel on his shoulder and head west until someone asked him why he was carrying the funny canoe paddle.
When he got to Tucson he waved it in my face and asked me what it was.
I told him that it was a funny canoe paddle and that no one around here owned a lawn mower either, in case that was going to be his next question.
Peter was looking for a way station to eternity... a place to retire... and he did not wish to go out like Uncle Umaluk. He explained that he had been told that in the Frozen North when Uncle Umaluk and Aunty Ooma were too old and tired to wrestle polar bears, hunt seals, or cope with the cold the family gave them a retirement party and floated them out to sea on an ice flow
I explained that we don’t do that in Arizona. We drop them off at nice a retirement community.
Retirement communities are interesting places. Security is very important. I remember one Tucson development that put up a tastefully painted sign that said , "Adult Living in Walled Security." I understood that. We have a facility for that up in Florence…the prison.
The wonderful thing about walled and gated communities is that they are so annoying to your guests, who must endure interrogation by a guard, or try to cope with some secret code punched into an electronic keypad that they can’t quite reach through their car window. This discourages casual visits. It does not discourage burglars who simply hop over the wall out of sight of the keypad.
Retirement communities advertise themselves as geared to an "adult lifestyle." On the face of it that’s nifty! You know what adult bookstores and adult entertainment offer, so you may suppose that the "adult lifestyle" must come with facilities for a little of what you fancy... the ol’ slap and tickle... that sort of thing.
Actually "adult" means "old." That’s okay, because it’s nice to be able to talk to someone who can actually remember hearing (and disapproving of) Roosevelt’s fireside chats. It also means "no teenagers" and for the most part it means white, conservative, and rich or rich-ish. There is little or no chance that you will have to associate with someone who is astringently radical.
The great advantage of a retirement community is that the homes are new. Their plumbing is probably in better shape than yours, and the model homes have wonderful names chosen to suggest either rolling tree-crowned hills (The Woodmere) or the sun-drenched ease of the Southwest (The Feliz .)
You enter the "Feliz" through a set of double doors that can best be described as "baronial" and step into a circular entry hall with a twenty-five foot ceiling, from which hangs an ornate brass chandelier with eight or ten light bulbs cunningly artificed to look (sort of) like candles.
Great! Can you imagine some retired geezer up on a fifteen foot ladder trying to dust that sucker or change a light bulb? Of course you probably wouldn’t even notice that it needed dusting for the first two or three years you lived there... assuming you lived that long after you moved in.
Even then it would probably only be after spiders started to drop down from their webs in the chandelier..
Don’t you love the decoration schemes in model houses ? They are so chichi. The furniture is new and the settings and arrangements fuel fantasies about gracious living in ways that your tatty old furniture from the old home place in Elyria, Ohio wouldn’t.
Everything is airy and open. Well why not... there aren’t any doors in the model (they have all been removed and stacked in the two-car garage.) The windows are swathed in elegant fabrics, but with no window coverings at all. There would be no dashing out to the kitchen in the altogether... or your shorts... in the "Woodmere". The folks in the next retirement mansion over, about fifteen feet away, would have a clear shot at you through their un-shaded windows.
Retirement communities are fantasies. Nowhere is this clearer than in the bathrooms, which are only a little smaller than the garages. I saw one with an enormous imitation green malachite tub, on the spacious rim of which were perched a champagne cooler, magnum size, and three candlesticks. The shower stall was wrapped in clear glass, which is pretty daunting to those of us who have reached the sagging sixties and beyond.
After driving him around for a day I asked Peter what he thought. His reply reminded me of why we were friends in high school: "I’d rather live in a whole community." Okay, but what then. You know, later...
"I think I’ll reserve an ice flow."
