Fannie Flagg - Standing in the Rainbow

Every town looked exactly like the last. Every gas station had the same mini-mart inside. It was hard to tell one state from another.

In Vero Beach, the man had said to look for a shopping center with a big Publix drugstore, but every shopping center they passed had a big Publix drugstore and Macky finally had to stop and ask directions. A man poked his head in and said, "Sure, go about five miles up past the WinnDixie and take a sharp left, right into Leisureville."

They found the sign with the arrow that said "WELCOME TO LEISURE VILLE CENTRAL, FLORIDA'S FINEST GATED COMMUNITY" but as they drove in they saw row after row of little mint-green, oleander-pink, or lavender stucco houses that, Aunt Elner noted, were the same color as those candy mints that Miss Alma used to keep in a glass bowl by the cashier.

As they drove in they did not see any vital, silver-haired, good-looking couples, as were shown on the brochure, standing around the pool, cocktail in hand, laughing and chatting with others of the same age with the look of "I've got the world by the tail." All they saw was a bunch of people who looked old to them but looked young to Aunt Elner.

They soon discovered that what had been advertised as Citrus View Patio Homes meant there was an orange grove across the street and a slab of concrete in the postage-stamp backyard. When they walked into their new home Norma was silent. The cottage-cheese ceilings were lower than expected and there were stains all over the mustard-gold shag rug, which did nothing to enhance the olive-green stove and refrigerator.

The fact that the house had been closed up for three months and smelled like mildew did not help ease the initial shock. The walls were a dingy color described as champagne beige, popular in the fifties, as were the cheap aluminum sliding doors and windows throughout the house.

Macky was already wondering how hard it would be to sell it when Norma surprised him, as she still could, by saying, "Oh, Macky, it's not so bad. I can whip this place into shape in no time." Sonny had no qualms about the shag rug and happily scratched away at it after depositing a welcome-to-your new-home gift. They stayed in a motel until Macky could get the rug pulled up and have the walls repainted.

Norma went to Sears and bought a new white refrigerator and stove and had Goodwill come and pick up the old green ones. Macky laid a new sheet of white linoleum on the floor in the kitchen and in the bathrooms. A week later, when the van carrying their furniture arrived from Missouri and everything was put in its place and the stucco house looked at least a little familiar, Macky sat down on his old chair from home and flipped up the leg rest and thought to himself, "Now what?"

The next week a new magazine came and he stared at it and asked Norma, "What the hell is AARP? It sounds like a dog throwing up."

Norma said, "It's a magazine from the American Association of Retired Persons. Everybody gets it after they hit fifty. It tells all about your senior citizen discounts."

Macky mumbled and went out to take a walk. What was going on? He was not ready to be a senior citizen there seemed to be a national conspiracy to label anybody over the age of fifty-five a "senior" and move them on out of the mainstream. That's not how he remembered it when he was young; an old man was not old until at least seventy-five or eighty and even Old Man Henderson had still been doing his yard at ninety three for God's sake. Macky was still young; he had years left before he was old. Rest up for what, he wondered, to get ready to die?

Take a short rest before you take the long one? Norma was sailing into the bay of senior citizenship with the wind to her back and with a smile on her face. But not him.

Macky wandered around the complex. Not only was he in a different state, he was in a different world and he was lost. Lost in Leisureville.

After a few months Norma had made a lot of new friends and Aunt Elner was as happy as a lark with all the bingo games they had down there.

Sonny the cat was delighted to be living in a place with so much sand to dig in, but Norma was worried about Macky. As she said to Linda on the phone that very morning, "Your daddy is not adjusting to retirement."

Norma had been reading the volunteer-positions-for-seniors column to Macky, as she did every other day, and as usual he'd resisted her suggestions.

"Norma, I've told you, I am not going to stand around like some old senile fart and welcome people to WalMart, for God's sake."

"I didn't say Wal-Mart. There are plenty of places that retired people go to work for… McDonald's… Burger King. Look, it says here you can even volunteer at the high school cafeteria or the library.

They want seniors to set a good example to the young people. What's wrong with that? At home you used to do all kinds of things for the community."

"That was different."

"How can it be different?"

"It was my community; this isn't my community."

"It is now. Young people are just the same everywhere don you want to be a role model… be a good influence?"

He left the house and took a walk around the complex. It was only the end of November but some people had already put up their Christmas wreaths, brought with them from other parts of the country. The huge decorations, which might have looked fine on some door of a house in New Hampshire or Maine, looked bizarre in the glaring Florida sun, like an entire community had gone mad and decorated for Christmas in the middle of the summer. One pale orange house had put a fake snowman on the small front porch but had neglected to remove the pink plastic flamingo on the lawn. Macky knew by the calendar and by the ads that had already started on television that it was about to be Christmas but other than that, one day was no different from the next. All the earmarks of the season that he had gone by for the last sixty-two years were gone.

At home he knew when it was fall. He smelled it. He raked it up in the yard. He and Norma had a routine. At the end of September she collected all their summer clothes and put them away in the bottom drawers and moved the sweaters up to the top. All the winter coats were brought from the back bedroom closet and put in the coat closet.

Summer shoes were replaced with winter shoes. He could count on a month or so of everything smelling slightly like mothballs. Then when May came around, back they went. But this year the clothes did not change. Everything was still seersucker and short-sleeved. They only had a few sweaters but that was mostly for air-conditioning, not weather. Macky had read somewhere that a person's ability to adjust was a sign of intelligence.

So far he was failing the test. Not that he had not tried. In fact, at first he had been much more enthusiastic than Norma. But after the initial excitement, after he had done all the work on the new house, learned the neighborhood, and seen all the sights, it had slowly begun to dawn on him. Life as he had known it was all over. Life in a town where your family had lived for over a hundred years and everybody knew not only you but all your family was over. Here he was just another stranger. Just another transient. Nobody special. At home he had an identity. He was Macky Warren. Son of Olla and Glenn Warren. His father had owned and run the hardware store for fifty years, and then he had owned it and run it. For most of his life, whenever he had been anywhere where people did not know him and they had asked, as men do, what line are you In? he had been able to answer, have a little hardware store back home. Now nobody ever asked what line he was in or what did he do. If they did ask, he had to answer by telling them what he used to do. What he used to be. Now what was he? Who was he?