Thinking of a Move to New England in Your 80's? Sure, why not!

I love New England, love Boston, live here. When I moved to Boston at 82, everyone said things like, “Are you out of your mind? It gets cold there!” I sense the accuracy of that statement when the weather report says it’s 27 degrees outside. 27? That’s freaking warm here! I have three winter coats ranging from knee-length safe-to-50-below, through a shorter, black Bernardo with trendy red satin piping on the lining that’s okay for short trips out, and a little featherweight crème puffy jacket I got in Oregon just to wear home from the pool in winter. 27 degrees in Boston only requires the crème puffy. Really, you just need the right gear, and I have acclimated. Sort of.

That is, I handily survive outside. Inside, nah. My gorgeous corner apartment with gorgeous wood floors and gorgeous marble countertops has 18-foot ceilings and 5 ten-foot-high, single-paned windows in the living/dining/kitchen area. It’s impossible to heat, so I’m sitting here typing in a turtleneck plus a heavy sweater, winter hat and scarf, all under a polyester throw draped tentlike over my head to preserve body heat.

“Why TF are you living in an unheatable apartment in famously Siberian New England?” others reasonably ask. Hey, I love seasons and the Boston Symphony and lucked into the best deal for 200 miles in any direction! Boston rents are astronomical, the worst anywhere short of NYC, and I just stumbled into this over-62, lgbt-affirming apartment complex with breathtakingly affordable rent. It was built in 1912 as a high school, recently gutted and refurbished at unbelievable expense to house Boston’s old gay folk (and other old folk who can cope with a lot of rainbow décor.) It’s billed as an “intentional” community by the organizers, although I’d vote for “utopian,” and we all know how those wind up.

But for now it’s all zany and intriguing and an absolute goldmine for sociology grad students looking for dissertation topics that will offend the Trump administration. I moved in with no furniture and nothing but some paper plates and a plastic fork on November 1. I knew nobody and the cavernous place was still half empty, which will undoubtedly create dramatic nightmares for me if I ever think about it. Charles, the too-smart-for-this-job onsite rep for the management company got me one of the beds they have for the requisite number of homeless folk necessary to meet a labyrinth of funding protocols. It had a plastic mattress (ycchh!), but was still much preferable to the floor. Done deal. Then came the election and the most unlikely possible pal in a utopian social experiment I’d planned to just sort of blithely ignore.

This place is assiduously lgbt “affirming,” and the “t” stands for trans. Not my thing. I support “TERF” organizations (Trans Exclusive Radical Feminist) that fight to prevent males who identify as female from competing in female sports or being incarcerated with girls and women. The rest of it I don’t care about, am perfectly happy for anybody to claim any identity they want as long as women’s sex-based rights aren’t obliterated. Then on the god-awful day after the election I happened to meet another resident, Bunny, and that thing happened where you just, for no apparent reason, sense a kindred soul. Except Bunny is a trans woman, until three years ago a male concert violinist, gifted, charming, Jewish, completely outrageous, no taller than I am and prone to neon eye shadow and false eyelashes that would be the envy of the giraffe world if any giraffes happened to notice. And wigs. Bunny knows wigs.

“We can’t think about it (Trump), it’s too depressing,” Bunny insisted. “We have to do something fun!” I’d casually said I’d always wanted a wig, although I don’t know why. I have hair. But suddenly Bunny was driving us thirty miles away to a shop in a faceless industrial park. A wig shop, offering, per Bunny, the best deals anywhere. We had a ball, tried on every wig and split the “buy one, get one free” deal, went for coffee and never thought about the political ruin about to descend.

A month later my furniture finally arrived from Oregon late at night, but the beefy Russian movers, who seemed to be fleeing some dire threat, were in a rush and refused to assemble my bed. I raised old lady hell until they agreed, but then they couldn’t find the hardware. They quickly fled and I was just going to sleep on the mattress on the floor and call Task Rabbit in the morning. But Bunny had been helping all along, left and came back with a plastic tub of nuts and bolts left over from dismantling somebody’s above-ground swimming pool. I gratefully watched as Bunny in mesh tights and a miniskirt crawled around on the floor deftly patching together the frame for a bed I fiercely needed to fall into. Something mine at last! And a gift.

I’m still a TERF and we argue the details, but Bunny was and is my first friend in a traumatic, lonely, dangerous and way-too-late-in-life-for-this 3,000-mile move, and I won’t ever forget. If Elon Musk comes for Bunny, he’ll have to fight his way through me. I mean that. So much for just casually ignoring the demands of a utopian social experiment.

Bunny and I plus wigs.

Stay tuned for further tales of unusual senior living.