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By Root 1868 0

the olive-green stove and refrigerator. The fact that the house had been closed up for three months and smelled like mildew did not help ease the initial shock. The walls were a dingy color described as champagne beige, popular in the fifties, as were the cheap aluminum sliding doors and windows throughout the house. Macky was already wondering how hard it would be to sell it when Norma surprised him, as she still could, by saying, “Oh, Macky, it’s not so bad. I can whip this place into shape in no time.” Sonny had no qualms about the shag rug and happily scratched away at it after depositing a welcome-to-your-new-home gift. They stayed in a motel until Macky could get the rug pulled up and have the walls repainted. Norma went to Sears and bought a new white refrigerator and stove and had Goodwill come and pick up the old green ones. Macky laid a new sheet of white linoleum on the floor in the kitchen and in the bathrooms. A week later, when the van carrying their furniture arrived from Missouri and everything was put in its place and the stucco house looked at least a little familiar, Macky sat down on his old chair from home and flipped up the leg rest and thought to himself, “Now what?”

The next week a new magazine came and he stared at it and asked Norma, “What the hell is AARP? It sounds like a dog throwing up.”

Norma said, “It’s a magazine from the American Association of Retired Persons. Everybody gets it after they hit fifty. It tells all about your senior citizen discounts.”

Macky mumbled and went out to take a walk. What was going on? He was not ready to be a senior citizen—there seemed to be a national conspiracy to label anybody over the age of fifty-five a “senior” and move them on out of the mainstream. That’s not how he remembered it when he was young; an old man was not old until at least seventy-five or eighty and even Old Man Henderson had still been doing his yard at ninety-three, for God’s sake. Macky was still young; he had years left before he was old. Rest up for what, he wondered, to get ready to die? Take a short rest before you take the long one? Norma was sailing into the bay of senior citizenship with the wind to her back and with a smile on her face. But not him.

Macky wandered around the complex. Not only was he in a different state, he was in a different world and he was lost. Lost in Leisureville.

Seems Like Old Times

AFTER A FEW MONTHS Norma had made a lot of new friends and Aunt Elner was as happy as a lark with all the bingo games they had down there. Sonny the cat was delighted to be living in a place with so much sand to dig in, but Norma was worried about Macky. As she said to Linda on the phone that very morning, “Your daddy is not adjusting to retirement.”

Norma had been reading the volunteer-positions-for-seniors column to Macky, as she did every other day, and as usual he’d resisted her suggestions.

“Norma, I’ve told you, I am not going to stand around like some old senile fart and welcome people to Wal-Mart, for God’s sake.”

“I didn’t say Wal-Mart. There are plenty of places that retired people go to work for . . . McDonald’s . . . Burger King. Look, it says here you can even volunteer at the high school cafeteria or the library. They want seniors to set a good example to the young people. What’s wrong with that? At home you used to do all kinds of things for the community.”

“That was different.”

“How can it be different?”

“It was my community; this isn’t my community.”

“It is now. Young people are just the same everywhere—don’t you want to be a role model . . . be a good influence?”

He left the house and took a walk around the complex. It was only the end of November but some people had already put up their Christmas wreaths, brought with them from other parts of the country. The huge decorations, which might have looked fine on some door of a house in New Hampshire or Maine, looked bizarre in the glaring Florida sun, like an entire community had gone mad and decorated for Christmas in the middle of the summer. One pale orange house had put a fake snowman on