Senior Forum Before you turn your back - physically and emotionally - on the city of your career, and move off to a retirement paradise, consider this: You are giving up more than you know. Sure, winter is coming and you dread the snow and ice. Certainly there is less adventure in this place you've lived for 20 or 30 years. And, yes, the house is so tattered as to be more than you want to fix up. All those things make you want to turn your back and flee come the golden years. But wait. You are going to miss the old place terribly. What will you miss about the city that has been your bedroom for so long? You will miss the locations - like landmarks and brick institutions and back roads and short cuts. The action of getting around is known to you now and is a convenience to you every day. Taking an alternate route from home to market or from downtown to rural farmers market happens with a secure map in your head. When you go elsewhere, you will not even be able to pronounce the street names like 'Wazee" and "Calliope" much less remember where they take you. (The names are wah-zee and cal-ee-owp.) You will get used to the new place. But the shortcut through the park to get home won't be there like it is back in the town you have forsaken to live retirement in some fancier place. You will miss the look on the faces of your adult children when they come home. That's because your new place to live will be not much more exciting or sentiment-filled than a roadside Holiday Inn. You think that your adult children will come home with spouses and babies only to see you. No. They will come home to relive a little bit. They will forever come to your house - and even to your gravesite in that old home place - to relive something that was important to them. If you turn your back on the town or city of your career - and your family building time - expect polite but otherwise blank stares from them as they look around your new digs. You won't do that when you run into acquaintances at the supermarket of your retirement town. All points of reference will be recent. All comments will be shallow. You will glad-hand without benefit of reminiscing, since you will have nothing to reminisce about with the new people in a new place. Oh, I am sure some readers reject the suggestion that supermarket chat with new friends is shallow. But move to a different place for the golden years and you will never again have a conversation about your daughter's eighth-grade math teacher or your son's moment of glory with the high school football team. Maybe more than all the sentimentality noted above, moving to a new community for retirement will change your concept of being a stakeholder in a place. You are a stakeholder in the community of your career. You have paid taxes, voted on bond issues, petitioned the city council and complained to the police about things in your neighborhood for years. All that you've accomplished will be forfeited when you move out of town. You own a bit of the town for all you've invested in it. And the place is probably better for it. Are you will to walk away from that investment? Either you stay put and keep it or you move and lose it. Your new retirement community will encourage you to invest, lay claim, and participate in it. But it will take years to invest, claim and participate to the depths of what you turn your back to physically and emotionally when you quit the place where you are reading this column. © Copyright 2003-2006 by Findlay Living™ and DynamiKComm, Inc. |
