The Real World
We leave, in just a few days, to return to what we all call “the real world.” Our time – one month – in a rented home on Longboat Key will soon be a warm memory, treasured in the cold of winter’s last blast up north. Longboat Key hugs the Gulf coast of Florida, just west of Bradenton, like a suntan hugs the skin, separated from the mainland by short bridges whose traverse marks the transition from that “real world.”
Yes, we’re “retired,” and yes, being here makes us “snowbirds” – both names that signal somehow a loss of connection with life, responsibility, and home. We’re in, as my son puts it -in phrasing that Florida tourism officials would not appreciate - “God’s waiting room.” The population has a decidedly gray tinge, but all these phrases, often dropped in conversation with a gentle mixture of humor and disdain miss something significant that happens here.
The people who walk the beaches and the paths through Mangrove swamps, who attend the plays and concerts, who sit in the outside cafes on St. Armand’s Circle, who lounge on the sun-drenched decks in 65-degree breezes, and who watch the pelicans glide over the bay with wingtips that seem always just an inch above the gentle waves do not seem as if they have retired from anything.
They talk about their lives, their families, those they have lost or are afraid of losing – just like everyone else. They pick up shells and wonder what magic of nature produced such a profusion of colors, textures and shapes – and then swept them ashore every morning as if stocking the shelves of a boutique whose wares had all been gobbled up the day before. They watch a white heron stand next to a stork in a tidal pool – and watch, and watch – mirroring the patience of the birds. It’s as if neither bird nor human has anywhere to go until satiated with the sustenance essential to their survival, each in his or her own way. They absorb the music of an opera or relish the dancers who grace the stage of the purple-painted concert hall along Sarasota Bay – seeing the triumphs of the oldest civilizations in the youngest of its members. They finally read that book, take that walk that they had been promising themselves, watch the waves slam the shore after the cold front that just swung through – all those things they had always put off in their lives until they had time. And in the recesses of their minds, they wonder where that time went and, perhaps fleetingly, regret all the time lost storing it up for these moments. Yes, they also talk on their cells and access the net, though perhaps more because they have moments and photos from their digital cameras to share with those whose lives they appreciate just a bit more for having the time to think about their own.
Few of us can – or perhaps even want to – live this special kind of life all the time. Work, responsibility and home call us back to “reality.” But the work of truly living, the responsibility to appreciate life before losing it, and the understanding that home is not a place but a state of mind that connects us to all we love and want desperately to love is the “real world” too.
When we head over the drawbridge back to the mainland, we’ll try to keep that in mind. To the extent we can succeed, we will enrich the real world for ourselves and perhaps for those who need this every bit as much as we do, but are not as fortunate to have had it.
Photo Credit: Annie!
