Saratoga Stereopticon

There's too much baggage for retirement home

By Willys Peck

If I were in real estate, I'd probably be doing the same thing. That is, I'd probably be making cold calls to people with listed Saratoga phone numbers, asking them if they'd like to put their houses on the market. The incentive: really big bucks.

I fielded one of these calls a while back and it was an interesting experience. The woman started out by telling me how much she had just sold a house for and I started out by telling her I had no interest in selling mine. It didn't faze her. When I answered her next question by saying I'd been living in my house for 48 years, I figured she'd get the message that my wife and I simply aren't into house-hopping. It didn't take. In her next gambit she really led with her chin.

Where, she wanted to know, did I think I might want to go if I ever did move?

"I was figuring on the cemetery at the end of Oak Street," I said, referring to Madronia. That pretty much ended the conversation.

Don't get me wrong; there are plenty of reasons someone might want to cash out here and go elsewhere. For instance, someone could sell their house here and lead a ducal life in a Sierra foothill town. My dodge is that, although it wasn't my idea to come here in the first place--my parents were living here when I was born --I've never had any good reason to leave. Why go elsewhere when it's all right here? Scenic setting, ideal climate, proximity to urban centers, we really have everything.

However, a retirement home or senior housing development would be a logical choice for people in my and my wife's age range, and the selling price of our Saratoga home would get us pretty well set up in one of these places. Retirement homes meet a real need, as I have found in the case of my own family, and with clients when I was practicing law. I've had the opportunity to see and appreciate the operations at Sunny View Manor in Cupertino, Pilgrim Haven in Los Altos and The Meadows in Los Gatos. They are homelike, sponsor interesting activities for residents and have the added advantage of nursing-care facilities on the premises.

However, I don't think I could make the cut at a retirement home. Too much baggage, and I mean physical rather than emotional. For instance, I doubt if any of these places would cotton to the idea of a resident having an antique printing press and large type cabinet in the living quarters. They might also look askance at the fragments of old airplanes adorning the ceiling and wall of said "press room." There probably would be even less tolerance when it came to a two-foot-gauge miniature railroad around the grounds. Or a working blacksmith shop. Or a conventional workshop, for that matter.

But these are things that, in my sunset years, keep me off the street corners and out of the pool halls, as we used to say. Without them, I could see myself turning into some kind of superannuated delinquent, spending my time devising new computer viruses. If I could ever learn that much about computers, that is. I'll take hand-set type any day.

The clincher, though, when it comes to keeping me out of a retirement home, probably would be the presence of Titus, a guaranteed persona non grata in any such surroundings.

Titus is a mounted human skeleton who started after-life in a doctor's office many years ago. I named him (my medical friends say it is a male frame) for an ancestor, Lt. Titus Peck of the Continental Army, who died of the camp fever in 1777. When we got him, my wife and I couldn't figure out the best way to fit a skeleton into the decor. First we tried him out the bathroom, but that proved a bit unnerving for visitors who hadn't been apprised of his presence beforehand. When the room we modestly call the Great Hall was added onto our house, Titus found his niche. He peeks out coyly from a space beside a large cabinet, where he can also look over the shoulder of the person playing the piano. People who come to concerts, poetry readings and other gatherings simply take him for granted. It's at the annual Halloween spook house, though, that he really shines. Titus lives for Halloween.

It seems to me that I've heard somewhere that it's illegal for a person to have any portion of an unused human body around the house. If so, then I have a bone to pick--several, in fact--with anyone questioning the legality of Titus' presence. He's been in residence going on 30 years, and I say that's enough to have him grandfathered in.

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