My interest in the idea of cooperative aging is rooted in a trip my family took to Europe when I was a pre-teen in the late 1960s. In Denmark we happened to visit a community where the nursery school and senior center had been deliberately placed adjacent to one another to encourage cross-pollination. The idea that growing older could be socially engineered made a lasting impression on me.
Later, in the early 1970s, my father proposed the idea that his extended family should buy some affordable land -- I think he was advocating North Carolina, which would have been an unpopular choicer for all the Jewish relatives living in Queens and Long Island -- and install all the great-aunts and -uncles there, with teenagers in the family sent to spend a helpful year of service sometime while they were in high school. Since my grandmother had been one of ten children, just her siblings and their descendants would have been enough to generate a community of their own.
It never happened, of course. The relatives didn't bite, and even my parents pulled back. Later, after they retired, they considered putting down a deposit for a space in a Quaker-run Kendal continuing-care retirement community, but concluded that they were too private people to enjoy the sociability Kendal offered.
Now my dad is of the age where he would have been one of the people living on the North Carolina homestead with his cousins, perhaps with one of my children spending the service year there helping and getting to know the elders. Instead he is living in the snowy Northeast in a detached hoe that he has thus far been able to continue to maintain. In many ways he is lucky -- after being widowed he entered into a happy second marriage to a younger woman -- but if anything happens to his wife he'll suddenly be an eighty-four-year-old man navigating New England life by himself. Observing his experience has heightened my interest in developing a plan for my own aging.
