The Stream of Life

More than 50 years ago, when I was an assistant buyer at the late lamented Abraham & Straus department store in downtown Brooklyn, I lived not far away, in Brooklyn Heights. It was a summer day when I decided not to take the subway to work but to walk. In truth, the store wasn't very far from my apartment, no more than forty minutes by foot.My boss, a formidable man who inhabited my nightmares for years after I left the store, somehow learned that I had walked to work. He asked me why I hadn’t taken the subway, a trip of about ten minutes. I told him that it was so much more pleasant walking than descending into the depths of the earth, waiting on a hot platform, and then traveling in a crowded subway car. He was displeased. “Stay in the stream of life,” he said.

During my three terrorized years as his assistant, he taught me several valuable lessons, of which that was one, although its application to walking is, in my opinion, mistaken. The general principle is sound, however, and I thought of it recently when visiting old friends at their summer home in western Connecticut. Theirs is in a planned community whose houses are nestled among woods on a rustic preserve of 325 acres.

Our hostess drove us to the community’s office, so that we could send a fax in connection with the renovation of our apartment. At the office our hostess introduced us to another resident, an energetic woman of a certain age. I don’t remember how it was that we told her the fax we were sending was to solve a particularly frustrating problem in our renovation, but she responded, “You should build a house!” She built one in Florida, where she now lives most of the year, migrating to her home in western Connecticut only for the summer.

She had summered for years in our friends' community, but had spent the rest of the year in New York, before moving to Florida. “I never thought I would say this,” she told us, “but there are 40 reasons not to live in the northeast.” And then with the fervor of a religious convert she told us how good her life was in Florida. There are lots of things to do at the clubhouse, which seems to be the center of her life there; she can drive there from her home in just a few minutes; and she can wear practically nothing at all in the winter, while we in New York are bundled up like Eskimos.

To each his own, of course, but the idea of retiring to Florida appeals not at all to my wife and me. We want to be part of the life around us. At our age it would be hard to sink roots into the community at large if we moved away from New York. Our lives are here, where we began our married life, where our children, my wife, her parents, and grandparents were born, where the institutions with which we are long familiar are found, where our daughter and her family and many of our friends live. For the same reason that we hope never to move into “protected living” or worse yet into a nursing home, we would hate to live in Florida, isolated from the life around us. Even our neighbors in Brooklyn, mainly young families with children, give us a sense of being in the midst of life, as we interact with them and watch their children develop. How arid, in comparison, would be a life centered around a clubhouse, frequented almost exclusively by other retirees.

True, New York winters are hard, especially for the elderly, but there’s a sense of accomplishment and pride in withstanding the worst that the snow, sleet, and cold can bring. And for our perseverance, the glories of spring, summer, and autumn reward us. This progression of seasons, a progression that reminds us of the cycle of life, is sadly lacking in Florida.

"Stay in the stream of life,” said my boss, and he was right.

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