God's Waiting Room

The Sunshine State

It was always my dream to one day move to Florida and get out of the cold weather from the North, and to have “beach” year round. I get back to the Maryland area for a few weeks each Summer to escape the real serious Florida Summer heat, but I don’t consider myself a “Snow Bird”.

The “Snow Birds” leave Florida right at Easter and are not seen again until January. I consider us full time residents of Florida. Moving to Florida at 49, and not waiting until retirement was the very best decision I’ve ever made.

Unless you count marrying the wife, which saved me from a life I don’t even want to ponder.

Of course I’d always heard that Florida was “God’s waiting room”, and that Florida was too full of retirees. I’d been to Florida a great deal on sales trips, and personal vacations, I’d been to Miami, seen all the gray haired retirees, the shuffle board courts, the garden apartment complexes full of “over 55” residents. I’d seen the oldsters in their natural habitat, but I’d also seen a real vibrant Florida, full of youth, vigor, and vitality. It wasn’t all “just waiting to die”, there were pockets of full-time fun.

But last evening the wife and I ran up to Jupiter to dine, and Holy Hell, with all the Snow Birds gone, fewer tourists, and only the permanent Florida resident left here to socialize and dine out, we wandered into a rather nice restaurant to find the clientele was “the land of the living dead”.

Now look, I’m sixty-six, I realize to the vast majority of the population I’m old. Mentally I haven’t advanced past twelve, and in truth I think of myself as being only forty-five. Forty-five except I wake up and the back is toast, the neck hurts something awful, and things are off somedays where I attribute the malaise and aches to the blood pressure acting up. I tell the wife those are “low energy days”. She complains that I’ve given in to old age far too early and that she will remain youthful and fight this aging process that I have apparently given into.

In my head, when she begins to berate me for my lack of enthusiasm for all things exercise, movement, or getting off the sofa on a “low energy day” I just think “You wait, you just wait, two more years and you’ll be my age and the aches and pains will kick in, man, I’m going to take a perverse pleasure in hearing how you suffer”.

Marriage is like that. After fifty years together the love gets mixed in with a swirl of hate, and the two get intertwined so deeply, that you can’t tell them apart. I think that is God’s hand at work keeping the marriage “interesting”.

Anyway the wife and I ended up at this rather fine dining establishment mid-week to find the average age of the clientele was “dead”.

A visit to this restaurant was as if we were experiencing time travel, women with hairstyles and make-up not seen since at least the 1980’s. Men dressed in fashion that could have been 1975, 1985, 1995, I mean, how can you date a pair of plain grey slacks?

Every male patron had the same shuffle. They all walked like “Lurch” from the old “Addams Family” show. I had to glance toward the back of the restaurant to see if there was a mortuary, I thought perhaps there was a casket fitting going on in between courses.

I turned to the wife, who was wondering how on earth we got to this restaurant early enough they had a third menu, an “early bird” offer, when it was past six-thirty. Had they made a mistake, didn’t they realize it was well past six, or was business so bad in this off season they decided to extend the “early bird” menu until seven?

I don’t think my wife and I have ever been in a restaurant when they were offering an “early bird” special. I haven’t eaten meals at five-thirty since I was a kid and dad-the-welder got home at three-thirty, which necessitated dinner at five-thirty.

The only reason we were in the place to begin with, and don’t get me wrong it is a very nice place, and in season draws in the Jupiter wealth, but the only reason we were there was because I had announced earlier in the week I wanted a “good steak” for dinner one evening and that it made no sense to pay thirty-five dollars to buy one to cook for myself at home, when for sixty I could sit and be served in a white-table-cloth restaurant and not have to cook at all.

The wife had decided she didn’t want “red meat”, as she is beginning to believe any and all bullshit on morning talk television about how poisonous and awful meat consumption is for you, and how we all need to eat gluten-free and more vegan.

The wife will be one of the first in line to eat bugs.

She actually believes the bullshit they peddle on television about food. I’ve tried to tell her for sixty years it has been “eggs are bad”, wait, no, “eggs are good”, no wait “the yolks are bad, the whites are good”, to “oh, hey, no, the entire egg is good as long as it is free range”.

Have you lived long? Live long enough you begin to see through all their bullshit.

Do you remember anyone, and I mean anyone back in 1965 being “gluten-free”? I mean as long as you didn’t reside in some California nudist colony around Los Angeles. I’d guess that Sharon Tate was gluten-free, that would make complete sense. Past her I doubt anyone in America would have ever heard the term.

So while I had my heart set on Okeechobee Steak House, or even the Capitol Grill chain, the wife thought a compromise where she could get a more healthy fish dish but still allow me a steak, was the better option, which is how we ended up in the “land of the walking dead”.

So if you are out there in the hinterlands wondering about the state of Florida these days, and whether it still deserves the moniker “God’s waiting room”, I’d say that depends on the season.

Visit Jupiter in season, get out to a Guanabana, or U-Tiki, you’ll see the very rich, young, and fashionable at play. Bentley’s line the parking lot, half the crowd is beautiful, even the men, and you are happy just to be able to be in their playground if for even a night. You hear about One Thousand Ocean across the way and it sounds enticing, you hear about the Blackbird and hope you can get a reservation where you too can dine in style with the “right crowd”.

But man, the Snow Birds leave and go North, the tourist flow ebbs, and you find yourself wandering into a restaurant off season, stop and look around and think, did I make a mistake, is this a morgue, did I wander into the “Feldstein wake” by mistake?

So this idea of Florida as the land of the retired and aged is alive and well. And apparently, being on a fixed-income, they all have a penchant, or need to do the “early bird” and take advantage of the discounted meals. Perhaps if we had decided to dine at seven-thirty or late we would have seen a younger, more vivacious crowd.

Maybe therein lies the problem, at sixty-six we are sliding toward the “early birds” and away from the eight PM diners. Oh, no, Good God, man, I’m not ready for that.

As we sat chatting and dining, and watching the patrons get up, open their walkers, and make those small, choppy steps toward the door, I noticed that some tables were all women, and that in fact even the larger tables of mixed company were dominated by women. And realized that even in paradise the men are felled early. Only the women remain. I heard the waiter exclaim, as he laid out plates to the table of four elderly women next to us, “And for you the usual, Mrs. Johnson”, and realized that this group of women were regulars, and could be counted on to be there at five-thirty a few evenings a week, “Waiting for Godot”.

How and why only the women survive into old age and the men depart is a column for another day.

Do they feed upon us slowly, slowly, eating us away from within absent any realization that we are being hollowed out over time, and only too late realize they’ve sucked us dry and dead, and we are gone? Leaving them to enjoy the sunshine, fresh air of Florida, and a nice pistachio encrusted grouper after we are gone? Is there some grand female plan, where they have perfected the art of using up all the male resources until we are but a shell, and we fall, leaving them alone to enjoy life unencumbered by our presence? How is it we have to exit early, as they get to live without us for years on end?

Being in the presence of the extremely elderly the other evening did not make me feel fresh, youthful and vibrant. It showed me my future, made me far too keenly aware of my mortality.

At least the steak wasn’t bad.