Yes, the title of today’s RobZerrvation is a Jimmy Buffett song. And it serves today as the inspiration for a thoughtful piece on where I will be spending my golden years.
Yeah, right!
My son thinks he’s found it for me. We were in the car joking about how he would someday have the power over his mom and I on where we would be placed. He said something about how if his mother didn’t mind her P’s and Q’s in the coming years, he was going to put her in a home with a beautiful view of a cemetery. The “Doom and Gloom Estates” is where she would spend her last days.
It was very funny. Now, before anyone sends me hate mail, his mother is an amazing woman and they have a fantastic relationship. But the Zerr boys have this odd sense of humor it seems, and he’s always giving me a run for my money.
After running the course of the Doom and Gloom’s amenities the attention turned to where I would be going.
He didn’t have a good answer, perhaps because he didn’t want to tell me to my face that I have a room reserved at the old Doom and Gloom, too.
But that got me to thinking… where would I end up? I used to think I would end up next to the Ziffels in Melbourne. But as we know, that didn’t work out. I even went so far as to pick an old folk’s layout for the glorified trailer, with extra wide doors for walkers and wheelchairs and no stairs. Pretty smart, eh?
I’m actually glad it worked out the way it did. I found out yesterday that even though there is still has almost $200,000 owed on it, is only worth $143,000 on the market. In the world of upside down real estate, that’s pretty bad. Even my childhood home, which is a 60-year old decrepit toilet now in Renton, is worth $100,000 more than this new home in Melbourne on the same acreage. I knew I should have bought my mom’s house.
Of course, I live in old people central now. The condos that line North Hutchinson Island are mostly for the geriatric crowd. Even at 53, I’m still the young pup in the complex.
I won’t always be, however, and since I rent. I know this won’t be the place that I end up taking “last call” at.
I have since given the issue a lot of thought about my final resting place (in retirement). As a guy who writes for a living, I like most artists, am relatively poor. I am OK with this, mind you. I didn’t sell out to “the man” and I make a decent living in one of the best ways you can – by your wits. People pay me for what pours forth from my fertile mind, into my fingertips and onto the page. Pretty cool.
This won’t last forever, however. I know this. Someday the old hands will be shaking so much that my brilliant piece of prose will look like this instead: O vsn drr yjsy O vsn’t y[ue yjod drmyrmve smu,pte.
And it was such a good line, too.
So I will be destined for a home somewhere. I originally thought it will be filled with old ladies who thought I was quite the catch. But do I really want a bunch of wrinkly old grandmas chasing after me down the hall in their walkers as I try in vain to find a safe place to hide, cursing all the while because I’ll have to miss the start of Bingo?
I hope not. I don’t like Bingo. As an entertainer, I have been to a lot of nursing homes, assisted care centers and retirement villas over the years. So I have a good sense of what I like and don’t like.
And then it dawned on me: The perfect place for me to retire and enjoy the golden years, growing old as a pirate, writer and bon vivant who led a gypsy life without a place to call my own.
An Alzheimer’s Center. That’s right. The perfect place. Now, it would only be perfect if I didn’t have Alzheimer’s myself. If I did, then I guess it could still be the perfect place, I just wouldn’t know it was.
If you’re assuming that I would like it because I could meet so many new people each day you’re wrong. I can’t remember people’s names now, so what’s really the difference? Famous people have walked right by me and I didn’t even know it (or really care).
Remember, I still want my mental faculties. Everyone can have lost theirs, however. I told my son that all I want to go with me is one of my guitars and my iPad (or whatever they have in the long distant future that can hold all my songs).
Every day I would entertain the Alzheimer’s patients. Hell, I don’t even need to be able to remember more than one or two songs by then. Each day they can hear the same songs I did the day before.
And every day they will walk up to me and say: “Love your songs, thanks. Have we met before?”
I have the perfect audience. No one ever bitching that I’ve done this or that song too many times. I can play a “Pirate Looks at 40” over and over again and my fans will adore me, at least for a moment or two before they have another senior moment.
And then I can go into “I Have Found Me a Home”…
The days drift by, they don’t have names, none of the streets here look the same…”
I think they call that a Silver Alert these days.
Out on the Treasure Coast trying to figure out the drum solo for In A Gada Da Vida so I can play it for the old people some day,
– Robb