I’m at an age when friends and relatives are dropping like flies, not a pleasant thought, not a pleasant image. Here in maybe the best community Del Webb ever created, Sun City West, Arizona, we residents enjoy a way of life that may never again be duplicated. I remember in one of John D. MacDonald’s novels, One Fearful Yellow Eye, Travis McGee comments on the Sun City Syndrome: “Instead of fun in the sun in the golden years the oldsters find they’ve locked themselves into a closed society with a mortality rate any combat infantry battalion would find impressive. You have to make friends fast because they aren’t going to be around long. Spooks in the sunshine. Change the club rosters once a week. For Sale signs sprout as fast as the pretty tropical flowers and trees. . . . The separate generations belong together. No matter how lush the flowerbeds, how spirited the bridge games, the shuffleboard competitions, the golf rivalries—nor how diligently the Hobby Center turns out pottery waterbirds, bedspreads and shell ashtrays, this kind of isolation still makes a geriatric ghetto where, in the silence, too many people listen to their own heartbeats.” I’m happy to report that McGee was “dead” wrong about life in a senior community. I know more young old people here than I ever knew anywhere else, and even though we lose friends with some regularity, we do not, as Dylan Thomas implored us, “go gentle into that good night.” None of us here in Sun City West spend our twilight years rocking life away on our front porches. Most of us are engaged in activities we never had time for in our younger lives—biking, swimming, tennis, golf, painting, and volunteering in many ways to help out anyone who needs help. And as for needing young people around, forget it. I see all the youth I need whenever I go to a movie, and most of the high schoolers I see, I don’t want to see. I miss teaching but I don’t miss most of the kids.
A quick comment on that now ubiquitous man, Donald Trump. I just read that Jack Nicklaus has said he’d vote for Trump. Whoa, Jack! I thought you were maybe the most careful planner in golfdom. What can you possibly see in Trump as our next president? He’s a misogynist, he’s an egomaniac, he’s a dangerous man who shoots his mouth off with no regard for whoever or whatever his mouth hits, he’s completely clueless about what he’d need to know to lead our nation and guard the world. Please, Jack, say it ain’t so. You aren’t really going to vote for this arrogant boob, are you?
I've always collected errors in diction, things people mis-hear, like "windshield factor" and "the next store neighbors." Years ago, one of my students wrote an essay in which she described the world as being harsh and cruel, "a doggy-dog world." I've since come to think she may have been more astute and accurate than those who describe it in the usual way. My Stories - Mobridge Memories -
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Most of what I've written has been published as e-books and is available at Amazon. Match Play is a golf/suspense novel. Dust of Autumn is a bloody one set in upstate New York. Prairie View is set in South Dakota, with a final scene atop Rattlesnake Butte. Life in the Arbor is a children's book about Rollie Rabbit and his friends (on about a fourth grade level). The Black Widow involves an elaborate extortion scheme. Happy Valley is set in a retirement community. Doggy-Dog World is my memoir. And ES3 is a description of my method for examining English sentence structure.
In case anyone is interested in any of my past posts, an archive list can be found at the bottom of this page. I'd appreciate any feedback you may have by sending me an e-mail note--jertrav33@aol.com. Thanks for your interest.
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