Letter from America Jim Holt
NEW YORK: When does life begin? That sounds like a philosophical question. But if you ask a middle-class suburban American of a certain age ‘When does life begin?’, the answer will probably be ‘When the last kid goes off to college and the dog dies.’
These happy events bring with them an exhilarating phase of late-life freedom: the ‘empty-nester’ phase. How to exercise this freedom? Perhaps by a change of venue.
One option, if you live in the northeastern US, is to escape the winter tyranny of the snow-shovel by relocating south. Your dreamed-of destination might be the Gulf Coast of Florida, where the taxes are low, the sun is warm and the drinks are cool; where the sand on the beach is as blindingly white as sugar, the water as limpidly blue as window-cleaning fluid.
Decamping to the Sun Belt has long been a popular move for American empty-nesters. But is that really life, or even ‘life’? Do you truly want to be environed by fellow leathery oldies arrayed in childish pastel-coloured shorts and manoeuvring their oversized SUVS in terrifying fashion down a five-lane highway to a big-box chain store to buy discounted golf balls? Do you want to live in a place where the only culture to be found is in plastic yoghurt containers?
Increasingly, retirees of the better sort are saying ‘No way!’ Not for them the sun-scorched Gulf Coast gulag. Instead, they are plumping for a darker and grittier option. They are forsaking their suburban roots and moving to Manhattan.
I have seen them myself. At a string quartet recital of avant-garde music in a Greenwich Village concert hall I attended recently, the audience around me was an unbroken sea of grey and white hair. My own apartment house near Union Square is slowly turning into what we call a NORC: a ‘naturally occurring retirement community’. Among the burgeoning crowd of oldies who have moved into the little ‘studio apartments’ around me and who kibbitz (that’s Jewish for ‘socialise’) together in my lobby is a retired stand-up comic. The other day he buttonholed me to complain about the woes of age. ‘I’m getting so senile and forgetful,’ he said. ‘The other night I went down on my wife, and the next minute I was thinking, “Now what did I come down here for?’’ ’
The raw numbers confirm the ‘I’ll take Manhattan’ trend. The oldie crowd here – meaning sexagenarians through ‘supercentenarians’ – grew by twelve per cent between 2000 and 2010, the last census period. By 2030 there are expected to be nearly two million oldies doddering along the sidewalks of New York.
Is this wise? Can oldies really flourish in such a noisy, crowded, nerve-jangling place, one that is frequently pronounced a ‘hell-hole’ by the younger residents who live here? Yes, they can. Indeed, there seems to be something positively salubrious about New York. In the neighbourhoods where retired oldies from the suburbs gravitate – like Manhattan’s Upper East Side – the average lifespan is 85 years, much higher than in the rest of the US and comparable to Japan.
OK, but what do you do with this added lifespan? Well, there are the museums, galleries, theatres, concert halls, plus (at last count) some 24,000 restaurants – all reachable without the bother and expense of a car. Culture is the obvious advantage of New York for oldies. And their growing numbers here keep the wheels of culture turning. Could the Metropolitan Opera survive without its faithful base of geriatric subscribers who listen to its productions through their hearing aids?
And there are less-obvious advantages. For one thing, New York City offers ample scope for retired busybodies. Every neighbourhood has a ‘community board’ composed of volunteers, often elderly, appointed by city officials. If you show up to enough meetings, you might find yourself wielding considerable obstructive power. You can thwart the installation of a new bicycle lane in your community, or frustrate a powerful developer who wants to put up a new luxury high-rise.
Another advantage of New York, paradoxically, is that it caters to oldies who pine for rural life. The farmers’ markets here are the envy of tourists from France and Italy. Four mornings a week I can walk over to Union Square and exchange rural repartee with hundreds of colourful farm characters as they hawk their equally colourful produce. It’s like country living without all the nasty manure gasses.
Finally, there is the sun. Admittedly there is less of it here than in the Sun Belt, but is that a bad thing? In Britain, the twin evils of old age are gout and prolixity of narrative. In the United States, the twin evils are skin cancer and cataracts (also prolixity of narrative). Both are brought on by exposure to sunlight. Manhattan is sunny enough, but owing to its rectilinear street grid one can always find a shadowy side of the street, regardless of the time of day. No need for those welder’s goggles that old people in Florida have to wear against cataracts as they cross their giant sun-baked parking lots. When my dermatologist asked me what I used for sunblock, I brightly replied, ‘The Empire State Building!’
But there is still one strong argument for escaping to Florida in old age: the cocktail hour. It comes earlier there. In New York, young professionals begin drinking at 8pm, but old people (and also construction workers) are allowed to start at six. In most of Florida, by contrast, the cocktail hour is mandated to be four in the afternoon. Best of all is the isle of Key West, the most remote of the Florida Keys, where so many distinguished and superannuated poets and novelists reside. There, I am told, the cocktail hour begins at 9:45 am.
‘I bark, therefore I am’