We all play fortuneteller to our own lives, peering into the future through the cloudy crystal balls of our imaginations, trying to envision how we will live in 10 years, 40, 55.
Lately, the people I know, particularly the women, have taken to engaging in this personal soothsaying in a new way. We are people screeching toward the middle of our lives, hardly young but far from old, people with a long trail of life behind us and a spookily long blank road ahead.
We spend some of our fortunetelling time tilling the familiar thematic turf of sex, love, family, work. But our talk of the coming decades has expanded into something new, has broadened to embrace a word that not so long ago seemed too obscene to cross our lips, too obscure to cross our minds.
Retirement.
When we talk of retirement–on the phone, in each other’s living rooms, perched on each other’s office desks–the talk is not practical and pecuniary. We may make a passing reference to our 401(k) plans, may whimper about the insecurity of Social Security in the year 2020, but mostly our talk is made of something dreamier. We are concocting our retirement homes.
We don’t, of course, call them retirement homes. The term “retirement home” sounds too much like “maximum security prison.” We intend to blaze through our sunset years, not to go gently into anything that resembles a stereotypical retirement home.
No canasta games in Florida for us. No institutions with fixed mealtimes. No crotchety nurses. No forced sing-alongs. No, the retirement “arrangements” in our crystal balls are the kinds of places we’d move into today if we could afford them.
For the fun of diversifying my portfolio of fantasies, I have signed on to several different retirement schemes with several different friends. We are all in different states of family attachment and obligation at the moment, but we have in common the suspicion that we will finish off our lives with people who are not family.
Those with children don’t expect their children to be their nannies in their waning years. The women, the married and the not, have a hunch that the men who are with us now will exit this good Earth a few off-ramps early. And so we plot our retirement years with these probabilities in mind.
One friend and I dream of running an intellectual dude ranch for retirees. The ranch, with discounts for close friends and relations, would welcome retirees for extended stays. Each week, the ranch would feature a different author, artist or other luminary who would offer workshops and mingle with the guests.
On our retirement ranch, we could stay in touch with old friends and make new ones, providing intellectual and physical stimulation for our peers as well as for ourselves. We would hike, ride horses, do yoga and dance on Friday nights to the Temptations and the Rolling Stones.
We have not worked out the finances.
With other friends, I have another scheme. Each of us would purchase a fabulous home in some scenic corner of the world. One would buy a villa in Tuscany, another a farmhouse in Provence, one a large apartment in Paris, another a spacious New York flat, and yet another a Rocky Mountain hideaway. We would drift around the globe, sometimes alone, sometimes together, landing in each other’s places for extended stays.
We have not worked out the finances.
Another friend and I plot to share a rambling home in the Northern California redwoods with a couple of other old lady friends. In a variation on this scheme, we old ladies would buy separate but neighboring houses, allowing us to share daily meals and conversation without witnessing each other’s every vulgar habit.
We have not worked out the finances.
In each of these retirement fantasies, there are common themes. In our old age, we want both independence and the comfort of old friends. We want community but know that the community of our retirement years won’t be the one we live in now. We dream beyond our means.
But these fantasies make retirement a more attractive destination. Like a queasy sailor on a stormy sea in the middle of a long journey, we feel better if we can imagine land and a glint of sunlight on the far horizon.
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