Page 3

"I can't talk," my friend Matt says, "I'm working." I hear his fingers clacking on a keyboard. Matt works two jobs at once; he is on the payroll at one place and runs his own business at the same time.

"I think I made a terrible mistake," I say. "It's lonely here."

"I don't have time for this," he says. "Just talk to people," he says. "They're old. They're lonely too."

What was it in the fifties that caused retirees to begin moving, en masse, to Florida? It's been attributed to the advent of Social Security in 1935. Nothing like it had ever occurred before. Suddenly, elderly people had a guaranteed income. They were no longer forced to work until they couldn't, and then, if they were lucky, die in their children's house. They could choose how and where they wanted to grow old.

I wonder if any of the elderly people questioned the motives behind Social Security. Did they feel taken care of? Or did they feel like they were being pushed out of the workplace too soon? It's not as if anyone prized their wisdom and experience anymore. Old-timers knew how to milk a cow, or foxtrot; that didn't help Colgate sell more toothpaste. Georges Minois, in "History of Old Age," writes that the elderly, "living in this world, felt they no longer belonged to it. The activities, attitudes and distractions of the young were forbidden to them."

Never before in human history had senior citizens decided to get up and move far away from everyone else, their families and hometowns. But that's what happened. At the age of sixty-five, they decided to become pilgrims and start a new colony. They went to Florida, and claimed their Shuffleboard Zion.

So I've been trying to approach the retired people here and start conversations with them. I force myself to walk up to them mid-wax. I just want to bite the bullet, and accelerate the process of adjusting to the retired life. It will pay off in forty years, when I'm far more ready for the transition than my friends and loved ones are.

Walking up to strange people is a terrifying prospect, even if they have friendly, wizened old faces like the people down here in Florida do. But I learn after a few attempts that most people around here are open to me. This is mainly because they assume that I am someone else's grandson.

"You look like Sybil. Are you Sybil's?" one says.

"Which Sybil?" says another. "Fourth floor or ground floor?"

"I'm not Sybil's," I say. "I'm here to try out retirement early."

"That's a good idea," they say. "Whose grandson are you?"

Once I convey that I'm nobody's grandson, the retirees tend to get cagey. "What are you selling, then?" they always ask, half joking and backing away. Young men who aren't anybody's grandson are probably scam artists trying to fleece the elderly out of their savings. I've seen the flyers around the community warning residents to "Report Salesmen and Unregistered Visitors to Security!!!!!!!"

So I usually tell them that I'm a professional writer. I tell them that I used to write jokes for David Letterman, and that always seems to placate them for a few minutes and open them up for a little conversation. I seem more like a vacationing professional and less like an off-putting weirdo who is living in their community for no discernible reason.

"So is retirement what you expected?" I ask them first. It's my icebreaker question.

"It's hard when you first get here," a man admits to me, as he waxes his car. "Especially if you're alone like I was."

"I know," I say, "that's what it's like for me down here too."

"Yeah," he says, a bit confused.

"Do you have any advice," I say, "about how to get through the early days? How to adjust faster?"

"Well...it helps if you find some common interests with people. Do you have any interests?"

Interests. Do I have any? Is "Tivo-ing" an interest? Probably not. At my old office, I once used rubber bands to construct a bouncing ball the size of a large mango. Does that count?

"I don't really have any," I say.

"Sure you do, kid, what kind of stuff do you like?" he says. "You collect something? Stamps?"

"Really, I don't have any interests," I say. "Nobody I know has any interests."

"Oh," he says. "That's too bad."

At that, the man goes back to waxing his car at six forty-five in the morning. I head back inside and go to sleep until noon.

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