Macky wandered around the complex. Not only was he in a different state, he was in a different world and he was lost. Lost in Leisureville.
Seems Like Old Times
AFTER A FEW MONTHS Norma had made a lot of new friends and Aunt Elner was as happy as a lark with all the bingo games they had down there. Sonny the cat was delighted to be living in a place with so much sand to dig in, but Norma was worried about Macky. As she said to Linda on the phone that very morning, “Your daddy is not adjusting to retirement.”
Norma had been reading the volunteer-positions-for-seniors column to Macky, as she did every other day, and as usual he’d resisted her suggestions.
“Norma, I’ve told you, I am not going to stand around like some old senile fart and welcome people to Wal-Mart, for God’s sake.”
“I didn’t say Wal-Mart. There are plenty of places that retired people go to work for . . . McDonald’s . . . Burger King. Look, it says here you can even volunteer at the high school cafeteria or the library. They want seniors to set a good example to the young people. What’s wrong with that? At home you used to do all kinds of things for the community.”
“That was different.”
“How can it be different?”
“It was my community; this isn’t my community.”
“It is now. Young people are just the same everywhere—don’t you want to be a role model . . . be a good influence?”
He left the house and took a walk around the complex. It was only the end of November but some people had already put up their Christmas wreaths, brought with them from other parts of the country. The huge decorations, which might have looked fine on some door of a house in New Hampshire or Maine, looked bizarre in the glaring Florida sun, like an entire community had gone mad and decorated for Christmas in the middle of the summer. One pale orange house had put a fake snowman on the small front porch but had neglected to remove the pink plastic flamingo on the lawn. Macky knew by the calendar and by the ads that had already started on television that it was about to be Christmas but other than that, one day was no different from the next. All the earmarks of the season that he had gone by for the last sixty-two years were gone.
At home he knew when it was fall. He smelled it. He raked it up in the yard. He and Norma had a routine. At the end of September she collected all their summer clothes and put them away in the bottom drawers and moved the sweaters up to the top. All the winter coats were brought from the back bedroom closet and put in the coat closet. Summer shoes were replaced with winter shoes. He could count on a month or so of everything smelling slightly like mothballs. Then when May came around, back they went. But this year the clothes did not change. Everything was still seersucker and short-sleeved. They only had a few sweaters but that was mostly for air-conditioning, not weather. Macky had read somewhere that a person’s ability to adjust was a sign of intelligence. So far he was failing the test. Not that he had not tried. In fact, at first he had been much more enthusiastic than Norma. But after the initial excitement, after he had done all the work on the new house, learned the neighborhood, and seen all the sights, it had slowly begun to dawn on him. Life as he had known it was all over. Life in a town where your family had lived for over a hundred years and everybody knew not only you but all your family was over. Here he was just another stranger. Just another transient. Nobody special. At home he had an identity. He was Macky Warren. Son of Olla and Glenn Warren. His father had owned and run the hardware store for fifty years, and then he had owned it and run it. For most of his life, whenever he had been anywhere where people did not know him and they had asked, as men do, What line are you in? he had been able to answer, I have a little hardware store back home. Now nobody ever asked what line he was in or what did he do. If they did ask, he had to answer by telling them what he used to do. What he used to be. Now what was he? Who was he? Just another displaced stranger trying to pretend that a get-together at the complex clubhouse was just like home only better.
Aunt Elner was making so many new friends her own age that she was loving Florida but Norma had problems with Macky. She came in after one of her flower-arranging classes and said, “Macky, I talked to my friend Ethel and she said that Arve went through the same thing and his doctor identified it as a male identity problem. And that what you need to do is to connect with your inner male.”
“Oh good God, Norma, what did you tell her?”
“Nothing bad, I just said that you were depressed, having a hard time adjusting to being retired. It’s not anything to be ashamed of, evidently a lot of men go through it. Anyhow, she talked it over with Arve and he went for help and she says it really helped him.”
“Norma, Arve is an idiot. Do you really think that wearing gold chains and sticking a curly black wig on your head at seventy-five is adjusting? He’s a joke.”
“All right, so he may be a little silly but he’s happy and isn’t that the point, to be happy? Anyhow I’m not going to argue about Arve; the point is she gave me this brochure for you to look at.” Macky took it and read where once a week, groups of men organized by Jon Avnet, Ph.D., gather to “reconnect with the warrior within, to drum, talk, weep, and tell their stories in a safe place.”
He looked up at Norma and said nothing.
The Ant
MACKY WANDERED over to Ocean Park, sat on a concrete bench, and stared out at the blue water. The world he had known was gone. Not only was he living in an alien place, but while he had been busy all these years making a living, someone had changed all the rules. For all he knew, he might as well have gone to sleep and awakened on the moon.
When he’d grown up, everybody had more or less agreed to a certain way of living. A certain standard. You didn’t lie, you didn’t cheat or steal, you honored your parents, your word was your bond. You didn’t try to weasel your way out of things. You married the girl. You paid your bills. You took care of your children. You didn’t cuss around girls. You didn’t hit women. You played by the rules and it was expected that you would be a good sport if you lost. You kept your house, yard, and yourself clean.
Norma said you have to just swing with it and try not to let it bother you so much. He wished he could but somehow it seemed this new world was easier for the women to accept and adjust to. What bothered him and other men his age and older was that the things they had been willing to die for were no longer appreciated. Everything he had believed in was now the butt of jokes made by a bunch of smarty-assed late-night-TV so-called comedians making a salary you could support a small country with. All he heard was people saying how bad we were, how corrupt we had been, and how terrible white men were. He had not felt like a bad person. But just the fact that he was a white man of a certain age, a lot of people he did not know hated him. He had never knowingly been mean or unfair to another human being in his life. Now it seems he was the oppressor, responsible for every bad thing that had ever happened in the history of the world. War, slavery, racism, sexism—he was the enemy and all he had tried to do was live a good and decent life. History was being rewritten by the minute. All of his childhood heroes were now being viewed as villains, their lives judged in hindsight by the current fad of political correctness. Hell, now they were even taking Huckleberry Finn out of libraries, for God’s sake. It was all too confusing.
You never saw people anymore, everything was self-service, everybody behind glass windows. And you could not get a real person on the phone. Everywhere you called, a recorded message connected you to another recorded message and then hung up on you. And everybody was mad and screaming about something. He did not know which was worse, the radical right or the radical left. It seemed nobody was in the middle anymore. We used to be on the right track and then we took a wrong turn but he did not know where. Was it the dope or television? Was it having too much that did it? He had tried to read what the experts thought but they did not know any more than he did. All he knew for sure was that after the ’40s and ’50s, when he had been raised, the world had flipped over like a giant pancake and everything was backward. When he was a kid everyone had wanted to be Tarzan; now they all want to be the natives. People were sticking rings in their noses—even pretty little girls were running around with green hair, their bodies pierced everywhere.