An Old Story and a Cautionary Tale

There are those who fade like cut flowers when they retire, there are those who won’t even try to stop working because they don't know what to do with themselves other than labor for a living, and there are those who can hardly wait for the free time and lightened pressure of unlimited leisure.

We belonged to that third class. One of the things we looked forward to was giving up the ever-increasing number of voluntary commitments we had been making for over 40 years together, and that doesn’t count time before we married. At a distance of nearly 800 miles from where we had grown up and reared our own children, there was a sense of adventure for a new place, a new culture to be learned (south vs. north), a new landscape to familiarize ourselves with, adjusting to all strangers in a community well established before we ever saw it.

Once before I’ve mentioned the challenges of entering a "retirement community." For us there was a novel lift in being the youngest people on the census list — for a while. We heaved a kind of psychic sigh, and prepared to play away our golden years within our limited budget.

Nothing like the flattery of being considered some kind of authority. I suppressed my determination not to be persuaded and agreed. My husband, once he had added all the small conveniences to our cottage (think cup hooks, extra shelving, programmable thermostat, etc., etc.) agreed to help out with a small task in the health care center. In short order, we had been photographed by the then owner of our community and provided with badges and uniform jackets. In a matter of months, we were futilely trying to stick our fingers in the dyke of our autonomy. The result was predictable.

That turned out to be one of those proverbial "best laid plans." Within days (literally), I was summoned by a resident who had been taking care of cataloguing for the library. Here I must say that we had even then one of the best in any such facility in North Carolina, but that's another story. Somehow this lady had discovered (I suspect from the Marketing Department) my past working in our small town's public library. After seven years, she was tired of doing the cataloguing and strenuously urged me to take it on.

When there's a lot to do that has to be done by those who feel it's needed or essential, and when there are simply not enough able bodies to get everything done, it takes a stern character to refuse to help. Neither of us possessed that attribute of selfishness or self-preservation — whichever definition suits — and we were caught up in the flood of responsible citizenship.

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Relationships and Going Places, Money and Computing, Moving and Retirement, Senior Women Web, Articles, Joan L. Cannon, Authors

An Old Story and a Cautionary Tale

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