Week One in the Retirement Community (During the Coronavirus Pandemic)

What You May Learn

If you were compulsive before you came, you will be compulsive when you open your suitcases in the retirement center. Determination to make these rooms feel like home instead of a hotel will lead to the recurrence of the back pain that has already turned you into a drug addict.

The second thing you will pick up quickly is that you don’t need to hurry to the door in response to the buzzer. It takes a small army to run this place and every member of it has a key to your room. (Remember that old worry that you would fall and no one would find you until next week? Understand now that such anxiety comes with a privilege called privacy, which you can forget already.)

If making new friends is on your agenda, this is a chance to strengthen your delay-gratification muscle. Since you chose to come during the covid pandemic, the retirement home is now sometimes called the slammer. You can’t go walking in the hall, much less visit with other inmates until you’ve served the appropriate sentence: for hours on airplanes with masked strangers, days of solitary confinement.

One friendly neighbor may sneak in without permission when the cleaning woman leaves the door open and will introduce himself in an inviting way, but he will have half his face covered, and your chances of recognizing him when you finally see him in the dining hall are not good.

By day three the medical team will be asking very personal questions in such a friendly and sympathetic way that you will confess every leak and creak as well as the cause of your limp. This actually makes everything better.

Surely by day four you will realize that dinner delivered at 4:30 in the afternoon is not like a command to eat. It can be reheated in the microwave anytime between now and the arrival of the trash pickup cart tomorrow morning.

On day five the x-ray machine will invade your room searching for things you did not reveal or maybe did not know about yourself on day three.

If you stay up late watching a basketball game, you will regret it the next day, just like you did in your big house. The difference is that here three meals a day will come to you like magic while you snooze.

Mail delivery might become the bright spot of your day. Someone with remarkable sensitivity could start a Say-Something-Nice-to-Her Campaign, instigating a deluge of cards and notes. People you’ve left behind will say they miss you, but they think you are smart and brave. People who don’t yet know you will say they look forward to it.

Suddenly you will land on the Get Out of Jail Free square. You have survived your sentence and tested negative three times, and now you are invited to the holiday party that begins in an hour and a half! Not only that, but the whole lot of us may get vaccinated by the end of the month!

Summary: Just as in the rest of the world, the resident of a retirement community needs purpose and people.