How community and buses saved my retirement

It is Saturday, late in July and hot as blazes in Louisville, Kentucky where I live. I’ve been here for many years.

I sit in a McDonald’s restaurant close to my home. The place is just about empty. I am here after a short walk from my house, about half a mile. I am happy to be here—happy, that is, that I can manage to walk this far, even in the heat.

I own my own home, worth quite a bit lately, I’m told, in a good neighborhood, paid for too, but it feels like a prison sometimes if I must remain there for 24 hours at a stretch. I no longer have a car—too much for repairs and insurance, taxes, and other costs. So I do without, and I notice my available cash situation has improved. Maintaining a car costs a good bunch.

I am 83 and a retired social worker, but find my life gloomy, yet getting better lately. I don’t walk as well as I once did, but I still walk, and am improved somewhat since a couple of months of rehab, compliments of Medicare. They came to my house once a week for ten weeks and taught me exercises to improve my muscles and my mobility. It has helped considerably.

I think of LBJ, former President Johnson, and remember Medicare was his creation, and I silently thank him.

I go to McDonald’s just about every day. I feel I almost have to get out of my house. To remain there for a 24-hour stretch is discouraging—hell, depressing. The time away, several hours, helps enormously, makes the night which follows easier by far. But I am less discouraged, as I said, for only this past week I got myself a bus pass (TARC). I join the poor and disabled and elderly with a transportation system, at a cost of about eighty cents a ride. It makes me feel freer—more in control. Now I can go places when I feel like it.

Also, in the coming weeks I plan to visit a close-by Baptist church which offers a daily hot meal for old folks like me. I don’t eat many such meals nowadays, but I can repay their generosity, I believe, because I speak a passable conversational Spanish and charitable outfits like the church can use what skills I have to offer. So, things are looking up!

At McDonald’s, I’ve come to know a lot of people. I know many staff but also customers too, regulars like me. They include Dottie, Steve, Linda, Ed to name several—all persons who live on the edge, not on the street, but not thriving, either. Most are younger than me by some years. Dottie is 61, with out-of-control diabetes and kidney disease, and Linda, with several missing toes—an accident, I’m told—she is 72, the oldest, and barely able to walk. And there is Ed, with a withered arm from a stroke. He is close to 70, and Steve, with multiple illnesses, almost grossly obese, but mentally impaired, too. Sometimes he is in another world. He is 57.

These folks know me pretty well by now, and know I am not nearly as needy as they are. Nobody ever asks for anything, but I offer a dollar or two every so often when I see the need. Nobody has a driver’s license, much less a car. They all have bus passes like mine. Indeed, I learned of the bus system from them, and now it works for me.

So I go on in this way with this setup I’ve established, and I feel more upbeat each week. My family support is meager. My daughter, my only child, lives in St. Louis, but she is busy with three children and a career. She offers what she can, but St. Louis is distant, almost 400 miles from here.

My ex-wife is around town, but she is, after all, an ex, and remarried. I shall not expect anything from there, and I don’t. But still, I see my latest plan workable, even expandable. It gives me hope, which I have been short of until now.

Some days I think of the old novel, Robinson Crusoe, written by Daniel Defoe.

He speaks of stations in life. To be enormously rich, as royalty is, is deadly, he writes, as is to be in abject poverty. To be in between is what is agreeable, livable, according to Mr. Defoe.