Why I left the capital of the New Age for the capital of Old Age
How I wound up in Century Village, God's waiting room
This is the Snarky Sunday edition of Snarky Senior — the newsletter from Erica Manfred, which you can read about here. If you like it and don’t want to miss an issue, you can get it in your inbox by subscribing.
I don’t play canasta. Or bridge. Or Mahjong. Or Bingo. Or pickleball. In fact I hate games, all games. I also hate gated communities with pretentious names like Boca Pointe and Hunters Run. So how the hell did I wind up on Interstate 95 with all my worldly goods in an old Ford Focus driving from hip Woodstock, New York to the cultural and architectural wasteland of South Florida?
Blame it on my mom, now long gone, who moved to Century Village in Deerfield Beach in the 1970s. Back then it was the affordable retirement refuge of New York City’s civil servants like my mom, a New York City schoolteacher. I used to visit my parents in Florida regularly. When I got off the plane I would take a deep breath of the humid tropical air and revel in the sweet breezes. But I swore I would NEVER move there. Century Village looked like man’s first settlement on the moon back then, stark white buildings stretching as far as the eye could see. I was much too cool, much too New York hip, and Florida was the epitome of everything ugly, crass, uncultured and materialistic in America.
Never say never. Florida was secretly doing its work on me even back then. My mom died in the late nineties and I missed my trips to Florida to visit her. I especially missed the heat and the ocean. And I missed hanging out with her and the “goils,” a group of her friends who met every night for dinner and spent their days visiting the beach or the museum or the mall. It was not an exciting lifestyle but it was sweet, with a reliance on friendship that I came to long for as I grew older. With all my old friends scattered around the country or worse, dead—that meant a lot to me.
The weather was a primary motivator. No one warns you how intolerable cold will be when you get old. When you’re young you think that the fluffy white stuff is a source of entertainment. Snowball fights, ice skating, skiing. I used to love all that. But by the time I reached seventy winter had become a relentless enemy that could not be defeated, only escaped. A demon had set up shop in my lungs and would not be cast out. I was convinced it wanted to either choke me to death or drown me in my own fluids. I was used to getting a cold that turned into bronchitis every winter, but during the depths of the winter of 2013 the word bronchitis didn’t do justice to what I was suffering. Strangulation was more like it.
The view from my window in Woodstock, NY was so unrelievedly gray that I caught an incurable case of SAD. Every once in a while the sun would come out and shine weakly onto the snow and despite being barely able to move, I’d rush into my car and drive to the Hudson Valley Mall—the only place high enough to catch some rays. I wouldn’t shop, but sit in the car facing west—away from Best Buy and Staples and the rows of empty parking spaces in front of them-- towards the Catskill Mountains and the afternoon sun-- like some pitiful flower desperately in need of photosynthesis. Why do people call the heat of August the dog days? Winters are the dog days, when the cold demands curling up with your dogs. My dogs kept escaping from the yard because I never walked them--it was too cold. Top of Form
I was deep in a morass of self-pity--convinced everything was my fault:
It was my fault I had no friends in Woodstock. I’d been living there for fifteen years and my social calendar was empty. I thought I would love living in this artists’ colony but I felt like an outcast-- probably because I couldn’t help insulting the locals with snarky comments about gluten free diets and yoga.
It was my fault that I could never get over my nasty divorce. It didn’t help that I lived two miles from my ex and the new wife he’d left me for and they hated my guts.
It was my fault my daughter didn’t want to visit me because I was a terrible mother. She preferred her younger, livelier, less self-pitying stepmother. My divorce fantasy was that we’d be at least cordial and stay friends. Instead my ex and his new wife bad-mouthed me to my daughter and treated me like a pariah.
After twelve years of trying to co-parent my daughter it was clear that I had to leave town to move on.
Florida called to me—probably because I couldn’t think of anywhere else warm to go—and at least it was familiar.
Nonetheless, I was terrified of leaving Woodstock alone, knowing not one soul in Florida. I was 73 years old and not in great health. In addition to the COPD which attacked my lungs, I had arthritis which made walking any distance difficult.
I was reluctant to leave my beautiful house in Woodstock which I truly loved and my former foster daughter Tina--my only family and pretty much my only friend--who lived in the basement apartment, plus my beloved dogs, my only bedmates.
But at this point it was clear— I was dying snowflake by snowflake and rejection by rejection...
Even though I’d been a snob about South Florida—bad-mouthing it as a cultural wasteland when I’d lived in New York City before I’d moved upstate--. Woodstock cured me. If you’re old in Woodstock you don’t hang out with young people. You rarely see black or brown faces or hear foreign languages. I was desperate to live in a metropolitan area even if it wasn’t packed with theaters and museums. Anywhere warm. Anywhere more diverse and less age-segregated
So I decided to do a trial run and drive down to Florida for two weeks to scout out the possibilities. Woodstock did not want me to leave. The day I was scheduled for departure, there was so much rain that my driveway turned into a river of mud. My car tires got stuck and refused to move.
I begged the AAA to come but they never did. Hours passed as a neighbor tried to push me out. Eventually a few husky firemen who were responding to an electrical fire down the block got me out but it was so late in the day I should have postponed leaving. But nooo, not Ms. Foolhardy. I drove for hours in torrential rain and zero visibility and finally almost drove off the road before lucking into the parking lot of a Motel 6 somewhere outside Baltimore.
I drove blind for the next three days through rains, floods and gridlock traffic in Washington DC before finally hitting dry weather in North Carolina.
I felt like I was being tested—I’d braved the shoals of Scylla and Charybdis to eventually emerge into actual bright sunshine, which I hadn’t seen in months. I remember waking up in a motel somewhere below the Mason Dixon line and seeing a palm tree. I wanted to hug it. Instead I sat under it waiting for the AAA since my battery was dead.
I know people who drive from New York to Florida in two days. If you’re me it’s more like five. I need my rest. 1,500 mile car trips are not practical for people who don’t get up until 10 am. By the time I got on the road every day after breakfast, it was almost time to get off the road.
Somehow I made it to Deerfield Beach to the Ashley Brooke Motel which was a dump but which seemed like paradise to me. I can’t remember exactly what I did during those two weeks, but I felt like I was in heaven just sitting on the sand and watching the waves. I realized during that time that I had hit a wall—the old age weather wall where you just know living in a cold climate will kill you. I’d always considered myself hardy and indestructible. Finally I had to admit I was neither. So I made my preparations.
The next summer I packed my essential possessions in my old Ford Focus and moved South following the I95 trail—a route so many followed twice a year—arriving in December and leaving in April.
My first place was a condo pretentiously named Colonial Club which I chose because it was on the water and had a lovely pool, but the landlord kept raising the rent so I moved to Century Village because it was cheap. And there was a certain inevitability about it.
I will admit that I like telling people here I’m from Woodstock. Everyone else seems to be from Long Island, or the Bronx or Connecticut, or even less hip places like Cincinnati. Hailing from Woodstock gives me some street cred and an aura of hipness even when I admit I wasn’t at the festival.
No one knows how stultifying those years were and how happy I am to be in a place with its own Twitter hashtag, #Floridaman, which chronicles the insanity that is South Florida, somewhere with extremes—of craziness, of color, of culture, of opinions--even if I have to put up with Trump supporters who would have been run out of Woodstock on a rail.
No way I’d ever go back. I’m a #Floridawoman now.
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I think this one's my favorite. You should do a part 2 about how in FL you broke the generation barrier and made younger friends.