By Shaun Tumpane
Laguna Woods Globe columnist
Retirement, commonly referred to as the golden years, is the final frontier. No more deadlines or pulling all-nighters preparing for next morning’s dog and pony show to at least give the impression to the company’s grand poobahs that you’re worth what they pay you.
No more college tuition payments for your erstwhile cherubs, now sporting four-day-old scraggly facial hair that, in their formative years, you’d lovingly refer to as peach fuzz. The kids have moved out and moved on (after two or three false starts), and you’re finally an empty nester. Now your kids have kids, and some of those kids have kids. The circle of life.
Now, every day is Saturday and the world is finally your oyster (oysters and I have a symbiotic relationship of sorts; I don’t eat them and they don’t cause me intestinal ischemia).
The golden years bring with them their own set of joys and sorrows, positives and negatives, surprises, both good and not so, and a myriad of issues and decisions attendant thereto that many of us paid absolutely no heed when told by our folks what the final frontier has in store for us.
Annual doctor appointments give way to monthly appointments. The occasional aspirin has been replaced with a war chest of pills, lozenges and balms.
Dental questions change from “Should I get a root canal and a crown, or just get a filling instead?” to “Do I really need that tooth somewhere in the back that throbs and not in a good way, or should I just buy some string, find a doorknob and eliminate the $950 extraction fee?”
America is on wheels. In our dotage, many of us look askance at our motor vehicle and opt to head for Staters in the ubiquitous golf cart. After a lifetime of washing and waxing our steel chariots weekly in an effort to outshine the neighbors’, it seems now the weekly issue is whether to have a car at all.
We’re proud when we tell our friends, “You know, my 12-year-old land yacht only has 13,000 miles on it.” Is that something to be proud of?
The first three years that I lived in Laguna Woods retirement community, I took my chariot to the car wash weekly (since there’s some sort of prohibition regarding washing cars in the ‘hood, plus the fact that when you’re 70+, interest in gleaming chrome and shiny hubcaps wanes abruptly).
The big three issues of life used to be, in order, sex, food and health. In the golden years, the order is health, or lack thereof, food, and I can’t remember what the third is.
Shaun Tumpane is a Laguna Woods Village resident.
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