We moved recently. After 24 years living a very short walk from the Gulf we now have arrived to a new property that is a 10-minute drive from that same Gulf. It’s a retirement complex, i.e.“Independent Living”. Here, every amenity possible has been incorporated to make your final years slip by as easy as possible.
Growing old has its perks. What they are eludes me at this moment except that young people do call me “sir” which is nice since I thought that word had been stricken from their vocabulary.
Nevertheless, in this independent living community, they have a perky program director who offers you way more options for fun than you could possibly wish to participate in. Probably cocktail hour (at 4 p.m. sharp ) is the most popular perk since it seems to fill up the bar and many of the surrounding tables.
They offer you a drink of the day which is mainly fruit juice with a splash of liquor. Kind of an old person “Shirley Temple.”
Dinner is 5 to 7 p.m. lest you fall asleep and miss it, and lights out either from the drink of the day or time, 8 p.m., whichever comes first.
My bride of more than half a century plus has taken to this lifestyle with great enthusiasm and I am grateful for that. We have been empty nesters for well over a quarter of a century and our grandchildren have their own busy lives but do get in touch when we remind them. Text is a perfect way to stay in contact.
My bride is a wiz at email but yet to master Roku. We have cable that brings us as many as maybe a million unwanted stations should I bother, but back-to-back Jeopardy is enough for me. I’m trying to find something on Netflix that has little or no violence, however the previews are enough to give me the vapors. I expect to see Snow White and her merry band knocking off the local grocery store and absconding with several dozen cartons of eggs.
I did watch one of the many awards shows recently, actually those shows, as my wife pointed out, have the same movies or television shows with the same actors up for the same awards to the point you wonder why can’t they just do one?
Could it be like the Super Bowl but without Kansas City and Cedrick Lamar? Okay maybe not! But how cool to do like in basketball until they are down to the finals and realize most of the movies have been sold or the actors have gone to another movie studio for obscene amounts of money like in sports.
I lost my little Bichon, Madame, French you know, several months back. She came to us through a neighbor 15 years earlier. Madame was a rescue but only in the sense she was being groomed to be a show dog (having already won in the small dog division) but never reached the height required. For that reason she was very afraid of people and would neither let anyone pet or touch her, me being the exception.
We brought Madame along to our new digs, but even thought they had a dog run and other animal amenities. Uunfortunately, she had begun to fade and I had to put her to sleep. Several times over that 15 years I thought about telling her she was a dog but she would just have laughed and gone to her room. After all she was family.
I vowed that when Madame passed there would be no more dogs. This was taken very hard by Chewy who we and most other pet lovers understand is a great monetary loss.
How do I know? If you could count the number of sturdy cardboard boxes overflowing with trash that are piled up on curbs all over this country and maybe the rest of the world Monday mornings for the garbage collector you would understand that pets are a zillion dollar business. Same goes for the vets and the grooming salons. My mother was wrong; vets are a better gig than OBGYNs.
Recently we had a 70’s Disco Party as one of our “activities” here at Happy Hollow. There was a mirror ball and a dude spinning music. It was illuminating to see 90+ year-olds shaking their bodies. Well, they were shaking and at the ripe old age of 90+ it could had been a named disease!
Here’s a factoid to share. There is a planned trip to Vegas coming up shortly, chaperoned of course, because the folks find Biloxi just okay and as the ad says, just okay is not okay. I’d go but since the slots don’t roll cherries and oranges and other identifiables, but instead spin characters from the Fantastic Four, Star Wars and Harry Potter, I am not just in the weeds but the tall grass as well.
I continue to work several days a week while my wife on the other hand has taken up games primarily mahjong. It’s her newest passion. Luckily she is not interested in canasta, but maybe has set her sights on Puerto Rico dominoes, which I’m highly suspicious could be a cover for a Bingo cartel. Time will tell.
(Charles Siskin and his wife, Diane "Cookie" Siskin, are former Chattanoogans who can be reached at charles.siskin@gmail.com)