Joel Stein
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She and Uncle Bruce, who are of the preboomer generation, live with people who are mostly their age. So they've gone to performances in the clubhouse by the 70-year-old comedian Robert Klein and 1950s rock bands. There's a dance committee. "We do the Lindy, we do the Electric Slide. We're doing all the things that we know because it's hard to learn new things," Harriet said. For that to make sense, you have to understand that many of these people's kids had bar mitzvahs in the 1980s. Also, the Electric Slide does not require picking your feet up very much.
When I told my lovely wife Cassandra the good news that there are smaller, newer retirement communities where we can live with our contemporaries, she told me that we are not going to live in any retirement community. "You know how I have to convince you not to go to a random book party or the opening of a restaurant?" she said. "Retirement living would be like that times 10. I picture just reading books. Gardening. I picture doing a lot of stuff by myself." Where are we going so she could do all that stuff by herself? "I would like to live in a college town with old professors and young people," she said. "Except I wouldn't because those academic types are annoying."
Maybe she's right. My plan was flawed because we don't all age into more sophisticated versions of ourselves as I figured. Everyone in my retirement community will be rewatching classic superhero movies, eating cupcakes, rocking out to gangsta-rap cover bands and explaining the Celtic translations of their smudged tattoos. We are definitely going to have to move to a college town. And I'm going to have to become a professor. So I have students and faculty to talk to. Because apparently, no one is going to be talking to me at home.