Tuesday, July 7, 2009

Not too much sex in this part of the city . . .

If you haven’t guessed it by now, Wally and I ended up in what is essentially a retirement village. Wrinkleville has a population of approximately 3000 with 11 buildings in an area smaller than a city block. As I mentioned before it has all the amenities, I quickly realized why.

The mall can service almost every need you have, from filling your prescriptions to outfitting you with a brand new scooter, or some brand spankin’ shiny new handle bars for your shower (in case you are a little shaky on your feet). In Wrinkleville there is a bus arriving perfectly on the half hour to whisk you downtown (if you are into furthering your horizons). It’s a place where the grass is always green (literally), and you can find daily aquafit lessons in the summer – free of charge. A person that is a few steps away from the grave really couldn’t ask for more!

A few days after we moved into our 7th floor apartment in our new village we were being introduced to the Benchwarmers in front of our building by our parking buddy. One lady told us “You won’t ever have to worry about moving again. The only way they get you outta here is in a body bag – ha!” Wow, thanks for giving us the heads up Bernice. I immediately pulled Wally aside and made him promise me that we would indeed leave this place walking with our own two feet. He promised.

Here are a few things we’ve learned after having lived in Wrinkleville for over a year:

People around here don’t stray too far from home.

Proof: Last Christmas Eve we had a large snowstorm pass through. The roads had been covered and the city was moving slow. I had gone out early in the morning to the grocery store (a good 50 paces away) and on the way back to our apartment ran into our neighbour. She was asked how the roads were. I said “Well the side streets around here are still fairly covered but Main Street (which is about 75 paces from our building) is clear, just stick to the main streets and you’ll have no troubles.” She looked at me as if I’d just come off of a rocket from Mars then replied: “Well, I certainly don’t plan on going that far!”

People here only recognize you in the context they are used to seeing you in.

Proof: We have 2 pooches. We walk them three times a day. People have come to know them very well. When they see us walking they don’t actually see us, they see the pooches. There is one little old lady that makes sure to remember and say each of their names every time she sees them. Once a friend was with her and she was doing her best to recite the pooches’ names but she was trying so hard to get them right the other lady thought she was trying to remember our names. We continually say and believe that people around here don’t give a hoot about us, just the dogs. “Where’s the ‘team’? You don’t have the dogs with you tonight? Where are the boys? Oh hello, I didn’t recognize you without your dogs!” We’ve even had perfect strangers see the dogs in the elevator with us and say: “You must be the couple with the two little doggies I’ve heard so much about!” (The person who said this didn’t even live here!). And several other times we’ve be walking without the furballs and the people who normally greet us with a bright smiling hello, don’t even give us a glance.

People here no longer struggle with their body image.

We moved in at the peak of the summer season. The outdoor pool was open and as I mentioned before aquafit was in full swing. I had an invitation to join our first night here. I briefly considered going (I am a social person and had no social circle). However, I’m not the type of person that will run towards the chance to prance around in a bathing suit, or swim in icy waters so I didn’t end up going. I soon learned that any reservations I had about my body being on display were unfounded. Though I am about 20 pounds over weight and have scars that look like I have roughed the waters of giving birth (even though I haven’t), I really had nothing to be ashamed of. The ladies here definitely had something to teach me. In Wrinkleville there is no shame over sagging skin, wrinkles in places you didn’t think wrinkles could be, or body parts that had escaped their original origin. It was all fair game for display and there was no need to hide it. I still chuckle to myself when I see the ladies walking ever so slowly to the watering hole in their loosely draped housecoats with a good portion of their nearly expired bodies on display. I guess I have a lot to learn…

Movin' on up . . .

Once I started back to school Wally and I knew there was something we HAD to do, and soon: get our house ready to be sold. We knew that there was no way we could keep up a mortgage, pay twice the tuition, books and commuting. We were already paying twice as much in cars/gas/parking as we were in mortgage payments. We knew the smart thing to do would be to sell the house and move to an apartment where the school was located. Our goal was to get through school without any debt. If we were starting over we were going to do it smart.

The first semester I was in school we fixed up the house as I went to school full time, worked every waking moment I wasn’t studying, Wally completed his first co-op. I remember this being one of the most stressful times for us. We knew that we had only two months from the completion of my first semester to get the house sold (and hopefully get what we were asking for in the process - by the time that semester was over we only had enough money to get us through 2 months and after that we didn’t know how we were going to live). The house went on the market on a Monday (a week after I was done) and sold the Friday, for only $1900 under our asking price. Whew!! We had 3 weeks to find a new place and move out.

Just to give a bit of context to the situation I have to tell you that Wally and I had pretty much lived in the same place all our lives. The town we were in only had a population of around 2000 people, and the city we were moving to had a population over 350 000. A big change for us - to say the least! We had never lived in an apartment building, taken a city bus, done much city driving, or lived over an hour away from our parents (my parents lived 2 blocks away). We were infants to this new world we were entering. However we did it anyway.

We didn’t even know where to start looking for a place to live. We had heard a few things but not enough to really know where was a good area and where wasn’t. We soon found out. We checked out a couple of places and settled on one. The rent was decent, the apartment nice, it was on a bus route, and it had a dog park close by (he have 2 pooches), what more could we want? We had all the paper work signed and ready to go in to accept the place. Wally was going to drop it off on the way home from school that day. At lunch he mentioned to his school pals the place we’d be moving to. 4 sets of eyeballs dropped to the floor. One friend told him that we simply couldn’t move there. Apparently it was one of the roughest parts of the city, lots of gang activity, crime and all that fun stuff. So we were back to square one . . .

Fortunately the friend that told us we couldn’t move there sent us a link to a building complex. So we set an appointment to check it out. It was quaint, safe, had a mall right there with all the necessities and once again on the bus route - we took it on the spot. As we got in the car to drive home we both felt a huge sense of relief and excitement that we finally found our new home, but then I began to notice something . . . there were a lot of people with walkers, canes and white hair roaming the sidewalks. After the fifth or sixth one I thought to myself ‘Oh dear, what have we done?’