Sarasota Or Bust

An old friend who just learned that we plan to move full time to Sarasota Florida emailed with a series of questions about the quality of life there (summer heat and humidity, white trash at every turn, distance from the Northeast, etc.), prefaced by a statement in mock anguish about losing the prospect of visits on the beach, lunch under the wisteria climbing on the gazebo, and so forth.  Well, the funny thing is that he had long since decamped to the warmth of winters in California and years later my husband and I had moved to the beach up here south of Boston, and the result of all this was that indeed we have very rarely met either for lunch or dinner in the last two decades.  He did not feel compelled to fly back for our wedding.  It is interesting that I note those who were present and those who were not and record in my Book of Memory their reasons for not attending.  One, a very dear old friend, felt that she had to attend a conference to lend support to a former student who was presenting; another, although she had long since known of the impending nuptials, chose to take on a conference presentation herself.  Withdrawal is very much the nature of growing older, and I do indeed recognize this, and therefore become neither enraged nor sad (although I am sure a psychiatrist would say otherwise), but rather disengaged.  What interests me is whether I turn away so as to spare myself further rejection or in recognizing their turning away, I simply surrender to a kind of human lassitude, a disinclination to pursue relationships.  When I was younger, certainly from my twenties through my forties, I could not get enough of socializing--lunches with colleagues at the university day after day, or with students, colleagues over for drinks and dinners.  I remember so well the years when I would entertain at sit down dinners for ten or fifteen, the laughter, the boozing, the food, and the nuttiness of it all.  It was supplemented by long, gossipy telephone conversations, giggles and laughter, nasty wit, and more nuttiness.  And all that came to an end--I wonder if it was tied in with the decline in libido.  One did not use the telephone, or at least I did not except to call one friend on the West Coast, with whom I spoke almost daily for fifty years until her death.  There was the internet, there was the email.  The cellphone has been my constant companion as I wait for that moment when the elevator stalls mid floor, the car swerves out of control and I am in a culvert, the trembling fingers dial 911 as the vision blurs, and the words slur, but in the interval I almost never use it.  It is not a thing that I find handy, too small, to hard to hear, to difficult to speak into, a sort of non thing, that's what I think of it, always threatening to sink down between the pillows of the sofa into permanent invisibility.  Then there were fewer and fewer email messages until I realized, like the guy with bad breath whom nobody wants to dance with at the junior prom, that everyone had decamped to something called Facebook, and it was joined by a variety of other systems, none of which I use or can quite imagine.  My four children and six grandchildren are in constant communication and know everything of each other's doings, while I have altogether lost touch.  That seems to be true of most of my contemporaries, who either do not know how to manage the new technicals of life or are not quite all there upstairs when it comes to remembering who it is they might want to communicate with.  So living one place or another does nor really matter for the sociability of it all.  Because I am a talker I once planned to get us admission to one of those residences for older people where there is the graduation from independence to dependence within the same campus and dinners with ten random persons nightly constitute the new village square.  The financial collapse of 2008 put that out of the question for which my husband was devoutly thankful.  And then there was Sarasota.  I speak to people on the next treadmill at the Sarasota Bath and Racquet Club, I speak to people at the morning buffets for donors at the Asolo Dramatic Student Conservatory or whatever it is called.  There's something agreeable and restful in the fact that we are all old enough that none of it or us really matters and the simulacrum of companionship is really quite sufficient.