DECEMBER 31, TUESDAY

THE AMERICAN WAY (1)

New Year’s Day, 2025, with only one years to go until quarter century is complete, a century which in my mind just began and will then be one quarter of the way done.  Another 13 years until I, myself  will have lived a century, which is unlikely, but the notion that I couldn live for a century, when there are only 21 centuries since Christ and maybe 40 centuries of recorded history.  How could so much have happened in 40 lifetimes, almost all of recorded history.  My mother lived until 98 which is just an inch away from a century.  My grandfather Mosher lived until 99 1/2 which was even closer.   How could I live a century.

So yesterday I went to two New Year’s Day parties.  The first was an open house at the apartment of Trish, whom Kathe, my wife taught to knit years ago and who is now a friend of Susie.  It was also a chance to see the inside of an apartment in Capitola Mill in Marshall.  The Capitola Mill apartments are in the former Cotton Mill, back when little Marshall had industry, a factory, back in the heyday of the textile factories all across North Caroline including the Beacon Blanket factory and Owen factory in Swannanoa.  The Cotton Mill was abandoned and has now been transformed into modern apartments in a building then is now on the national registry of historic buildings with wooden beams and very high ceilings and brick walls still remaining from the original building.

Susie wants me to rent my Swannanoa house and move to Capitola Mill and I am very much tempted.  I’ve been overseas for a month or more fifteen times in the last three and a half years.  The reason is because travel is so stimulating with a new adventure every day and with nothing routine about it.

But I have also noticed two things each time I return home.  One is that as an old married couple there is always someone else in the house, and as an old married couple you get invited to events with other old married couples.  An ancient gentleman isn’t often invited by old married couples and, to tell the truth, there are less and less old married couples around to get invited by, now we old folks are mainly widows and widowers.

The solution, if you have plenty of money, is to enter a retirement community with endless activities and common dining and living areas where you can meet up with friends.

But retirement communities swallow up all your money as the price of admission.  Once in, at least in my case, there can be no escape, you are there for the duration through assisted living and long term care and a small memorial service in the fellowship hall.  

Travel is one way to break out of and to avoid this routine.  I am off to San Miguel de Allende in central Mexico in about ten days, with little idea of what I will find there but certain that whatever comes will perk me up.  

But then I will be back here for a month or two before flying off again.  What I have noticed is that the same thing that makes strip malls and their endless parking lots so empty, the American way of life, is the same problem as all of us have in old age.  The American suburban way of life means that each home is in the center of a large lawn, the more money you have the larger your lawn.  In Biltmore Forest, where the rich in Asheville live, the lawns are immense with trees everywhere as if people a living in a forest.  In old age the rich live and die, bunkered, far from their neighbors whom they hardly know.  But the same is true to a degree on my suburban street.  We all know each other and have for years.  We will all go out of our way to help each other.  We have a marvelous street party once a year.  But we rarely enter each other’s homes.  We  talk, but it is usually when we take trash containers out for pickup on Wednesday mornings   And as we get older and die, house after house has one person in it.  The problem is not that we don’t like talking to each other, it is that in our lifelong desire for privacy and a place of our own, the only way to get to the barber or grocery store or doctor or restaurant is to get in our car and drive for 15 minutes.  That is fine when we have a houseful of kids, who also have to be driven everywhere, and even as empty nesters, but for a single person who would like company once every day suburban life is pretty alienating.