Maybe We Should All Retire Together in Boca

Over President’s Day weekend, we went down to Florida to visit my dad and stepmom (aka Poppy and Nonna), who just bought a house in Boca (sight unseen!) this past year. When we arrived, it was dark, but we were immediately impressed by their new abode. “Where did all this furniture come from??” Apparently, a lot of it came with the house. Even better was the impeccable landscaping (with outdoor lighting!) around the perfectly sized inground pool. “Who takes care of the property?” Apparently, it’s part of the maintenance fees. I can’t imagine what it would cost to do all that landscaping and maintain it at our house on Long Island. Plus, Poppy’s backyard will look equally as beautiful all year round! The weather that evening was an ideal 78°, the pool was heated and the kids immediately jumped in, even though it was 10pm. We ate sushi poolside and had some cocktails. This is the life, we joked.

But, like, seriously.

On Saturday morning, Mike and I woke up, but the rest of the house was still sleeping. We made coffee and sat in the screened-in porch, playing Wordle and reading the news. At 9am, I asked Mike if we should wake the kids. “Why?” Mike answered. “Poppy and Nonna aren’t even awake yet.”

In Boca, people sleep in.

When everyone was finally up (at around 10:30am!), we went swimming again in the pool (why leave?) and then drove a golf cart to lunch at the main restaurant within the community. The menu looked like a diner, due to the myriad of menu sections (omelettes, burgers, pizzas, deli sandwiches), but they also have a huge array of build your own salads, grain bowls, stir frys and smoothies. It’s like no matter what your dietary needs— vegetarian, pescatarian, dairy-free, keto, you could figure it out on this menu. I had so many options to choose from (sesame chicken salad or farro grain bowl with pesto butternut squash???) I took forever to decide. “It’s like food for Jews with stomach issues! You’ve found your people!” Mike joked, before I pointed to the tuna poke bowl with crispy wontons on the menu that had his name written all over it.

I’m not entirely clear how payment works (I think you get an itemized bill at the end of the month), but there are no prices on the menu. Which makes the whole experience feel oddly similar to the movie Defending Your Life. Have you seen it? It’s Albert Brooks and Meryl Streep living in some idealized form of purgatory, while they wait for the higher ups to decide if they can get into heaven. Purgatory consists of everyone wearing white caftans, riding around in golf carts and eating all you can eat buffet dinners with no prices or calories. At lunch, feasting on my delicious grain bowl with no price tag and looking out at a sea of golf carts with people dressed in tennis whites, I thought, was that movie based on Boca???

I believe it was at that point in the meal that a tableside magician showed up to do some tricks just for us. Mike and I burst out laughing. It was too much! I was thinking this was going to be a kid magician doing typical fare like quarters behind the ears and pouring milk into a newspaper. But nope! This dude asked us each to select any card IN OUR HEADS and then produced a sealed envelope from his inside pocket with all our chosen cards inside. All six of them. WUT. “Did you think I was going to suck?” he asked. I did think he was going to suck, but oh my god, I was wrong. I forgot that I was sitting in the magical land of Boca where everything is AH-MAZING. Mr. Magician immediately launched into three more equally impressive tricks. Throughout the meal, Mike kept referencing the scene in Goodfellas where the women are talking about Boca in the nail salon. He pulled it up on YouTube for us all to watch. One of the women says, “It’s like you died and went to Jew heaven.” Indeed.

I’ve always known that a lot of people move to Florida when they retire, but my interpretation for the move was mainly because of the weather. I didn’t really idealize it from any other perspective. In fact, I’ve always been anti-Florida, and that was way before I knew anything about their politics. My grandparents lived in Kings Point (a retirement community significantly less fancy than Boca) all throughout my childhood, so we used to go there at least once or twice a year. Almost every day we were there, my grandmother would tell me how much better Florida was than New York, like she was either a broken record or she secretly worked for the tourism board. It was like the only thing she could think to talk about with me. We’d just be sitting there in the car, she’d purse her lips to spread her lipstick with this puckering sound, and then she’d turn to me to say, “You know, New York doesn’t hold a candle to Florida.” Out of nowhere like that! I didn’t say anything because you don’t talk back to Grandma, but I’d sit there quietly seething as she insulted my hometown. “The weather, the pool, the shopping, the restaurants, the free samples at the grocery store… it’s all so much better in Florida.” I came up with this idea in my head that she had to tell herself that New York was terrible, so she felt better about being old and in retirement. Florida was about contentment and comfort (boring!), while New York was about big dreams and possibility. I was very little when I decided that Florida was the opposite of New York, and by definition, NOT FOR ME. Maybe I’ve lived here all these years to spite my Grandma.

But being in Boca with my dad in his new house, I got it. I can see how Florida living, and retirement communities in particular, are more than the weather and the comfort. When I talked to my stepmother about her reasons for buying the house (they will spend the winters in Florida and the rest of the year in New York), she talked about many of the same desires I wrote about when I explained our decision to move to Tribeca. They have a few friends who already moved to the area and were seeking an easier lifestyle with an established community. I mean, obviously life in Boca looks a lot different than life in Tribeca (lizards instead of rodents, for one thing) but our desire for strengthened community is the same.

It’s interesting to me that so many people, in so many different walks of life are coming out of the pandemic with the same desire for more community. I think it’s both about losing our communities while we were all social distancing, and also realizing what was missing from our lives pre-pandemic that we didn’t notice. Or maybe because we are home more now, we see less people and some of the aspects that made the strangers around you into a community have been lost. Creating a community seems like it has to be more deliberate than it was in the past. And now that we’ve spent so much time on zoom, we’ve realized how important proximity is for solidifying friendships. Which is why, when I asked my readers to tell me where they are from, in the hopes that maybe they could connect with other Apparently subscribers in their area, over 2000 people commented. The largest response I have gotten to a post, probably ever.

We’ve only been in Tribeca for two weeks and already my life has changed exponentially. Yes, our apartment is bigger, but that isn’t the thing that has made the biggest impact. It’s the fact that I am now walking home from school drop-off with a few other moms; sometimes on purpose and sometimes by accident. It’s that I have an established morning coffee group three times a week. It’s that we’ve made dinner plans and playdates all within a few short blocks and seen more people socially in two weeks than we would have in months living in the East Village. Harlow’s dance studio is just a few blocks away and I recently found out that one of the girls in Harlow’s lyrical class lives in our building (coincidentally, the mom shares an office with one of my best friends), so we’ll all be getting together before next week’s class to hang out first and then bringing our kids to dance together. Community.

Throughout my life, I’ve always liked to live a little against the grain. Nothing radical, but I like making choices that don’t follow a set path. I’d say living in the city instead of the suburbs is one of those choices. When Mike and I have talked about what we’d like to do when we retire, we like to dream big. Maybe settling down in Italy or traveling the world. Something that feels unique and special. But after going to Boca last weekend, I’m not sure “unique” is where I will ultimately find happiness. So, I have a new dream. A totally cliche dream, because it’s shared by so many people, but perhaps that’s precisely what’s so great about it.

When I get old, I want to live in a community with as many of my friends as possible. They could be fellow Jews from New York City, they could be friends who left the city for the suburbs or they could be online friends from all across the country and the world, like you guys. Both women who pursued careers and women who stayed home to raise their kids. We’ll all be at a stage of life where those differences don’t really matter anymore. I just want to spend my last days in good company.

It doesn’t have to be Boca, but I want the weather to be nice and the food to have as many dietary options as possible.

What do you think? Where should we all retire?

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