Ever thought about spending your golden years kicking up your heels?
“Contrary to popular belief, nursing homes are more than just some kind of middle ground between a B&B and a minimum-security prison — they can be havens for the kind of rowdy, rebellious, and ribald behavior you’d think people were designed to age out of,” said the article Seniors Gone Wild. “But it turns out that housing a bunch of elderly people together can be the perfect cocktail for shenanigans.”
What kind of shenanigans? Wild drinking, dirty dancing, getting tattoos, tucking dollar bills into the g-strings of male strippers. In one memorable case, “a 68 year-old resident named Peggy Klemm was caught having sex in a public square with a man 19 years her junior. The incident was honored by a local bar that designed a ‘sex in the square’ cocktail in Peggy’s honor.” Wowzer! What a legacy!
Neighbors with benefits: Peggy and David were caught in full swing in this pavilion at the heart of The Villages, giving new meaning to their slogan, “Florida’s Friendliest Home Town.”
Neighbors with benefits: Peggy and David were caught in full swing in this pavilion at the heart of The Villages, giving new meaning to their slogan, “Florida’s Friendliest Home Town.”
Not surprisingly, the older I get the more I hear about friends shopping around for senior-oriented housing, but so far nobody’s found any with amenities including strippers or neighbors with benefits. Personally, I’m planning to age in place forever. But of course, you never know when the Universe is going to throw you a curveball, so the practical side of me pays attention whenever a particularly glamorous new senior living facility opens nearby.
A few weeks ago, I got a card — yes, actual snail mail — with a picture of a grey-haired couple laughing uproariously, as if contemplating delicious mischief. Inside was an invitation to learn more about a new Continuing Care Retirement Community. “Should we check this out?” I asked. Rich tapped the name into his computer’s search bar.
And all hell broke loose.
The computer screen instantly filled with pulsing blocks of type. An icy, loud, AI-generated voice (the kind usually reserved for “This spaceship will self-destruct in sixty seconds. Fifty-nine. Fifty-eight…”) announced that our computer was locked down due to a security breach and we must NOT shut it down or restart it.
| I reeled back, stunned, but Rich never hesitated. He shut down the computer, restarted, and everything was fine. It was a scam trying to frighten us into clicking on the phone number shown on the screen. “Scratch that retirement community off the list,” I said. Finding a safe, comfortable, affordable home isn’t easy at any age, especially in these turbulent times. Which is why I was so interested in the innovative approach taken by a Sonoma County woman named Kate. Thirty-two years ago she bought several rural acres with a cluster of cottages, and what began as income property blossomed into a close-knit community. |
Kate sitting among the flowers in front of her cottage
“How did you come to start this place?” I asked Kate this week. I love a person with a checkered past, and I suspected (rightly) that hers was a doozie.
She grinned. “I’m one of those people who never figure out what to do with their life.”
Her first post-college job was studying monkeys in the West Indies. “I was given four monkeys, three males and one female. They were very sexually active. So I got interested in sexuality, and when I decided to go to graduate school, I ended up choosing a program that was a master’s degree in psychology with a minor in human sexuality.”
Kate studied African Green monkeys like these. Photo: Aaron Mencia
After earning her degree, Kate was hired as interim director of a San Diego sex therapy clinic that followed the Masters and Johnson approach using surrogate sex partners. After several years there, she said, “I came back up to the Bay Area and established myself as the only female sex therapist in the Bay Area. And I did that for twenty-five years.”
During that time, she bought the property in Sonoma, but discovered that maintaining her practice in the East Bay, starting one in Sonoma County, and restoring the cottages as rental units was just too much. “I burned out. When I realized I couldn’t do my psychotherapy any more, I decided to expand my tenant business. By the time I was 55 my entire income came from tenants.”
Bob was sitting outside his cottage reading a book when I wandered past, and like the other tenants I met, he gave me a cheerful welcome.
At first it was all business. “But at some point I said, you know, I want something more. So I changed my advertising. I had these questions. Tell me a little bit about yourself. What’s making you need to move? What about a community appeals to you? I would say 85% of the people respond obliviously; they simply want to know when I’m going to do a showing. But from the remaining 15% I get wonderful responses.”
She currently has ten tenants in their forties to seventies and is interviewing a twentysomething couple about filling the single vacancy.
“How do you keep it all going?” I asked. “How do you make decisions — as a group?”
Kate laughed and shook her head. “I’m a benevolent dictator.” Yes, that would simplify things; I’ve seen co-housing collectives where endless meetings are required to reach consensus over every minute detail.
“I trust them to be adults, to be respectful and mindful. I make sure we have reasons to get together, to form relationships.” The group doesn’t organize collective meals, outside of the occasional BBQ, but they often gather for movies, game nights, and other casual fun. I thought of one of Mr. Roger’s sayings: “Imagine what our real neighborhoods would be like if each of us offered, as a matter of course, just one kind word to another person.”
Kate, Rich, and I spent an hour wandering around the property, which was overflowing with flowers, tranquility, and handcrafted charm. We passed the time of day with various good neighbors: humans, chickens, pigeons, large fuzzy caterpillars, bees, and a pair of dragonflies who blithely continued doing their mating dance as if no one was watching.
This is the dragonfly equivalent of a cozy bar with low lighting, good wine, and someone playing smoky riffs on a saxophone.
It seems to me that what we’re all looking for, especially as we age, is a living situation that makes sure that we are not invisible and not alone. We want reasons to get out of bed every morning looking forward to something in our day — ideally the kind of emotional connections that will let us feel, if only briefly, the full rapture of being alive.
For some, that means a cottage in the country surrounded by congenial neighbors. For others, it’s a luxury golf condo. For a few radical souls like Peggy Klemm, it’s about breaking all the rules.
Four days before she was caught making whoopee in the village square with fellow resident David Bobilya, Peggy had been arrested and put on probation for drunk driving a golf cart. The judge sentenced Peggy to six months in jail, and while follow-up reports are sketchy, it appears she has paid her debt to society and returned to the senior facility and to Frank, her husband of 50+ years.
“I believe everyone deserves a second chance,” Frank said.
Now that’s a forgiving man. Luckily for me and my marriage, I’m not the slightest bit tempted to go on a sexcapade crime spree like Peggy. Instead, I am living by the wise words of Edith Wharton, which have been taped to my refrigerator for twenty years, gaining new meaning every day:
“One can remain alive long past the usual date of disintegration if one is unafraid of change, insatiable in intellectual curiosity, interested in big things, and happy in small ways.”
Years ago, when I saw these two pranksters in a Seville café, Emil Zola’s famous words sprang to mind: “If you ask me what I came into this life to do, I will tell you: I came to live out loud.”
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