My wife and I addressed the issue of retirement during the depths of the George W. Bush years and we had little stomach for perpetual war, much of which was waged upon freedoms to which we had grown accustomed. I had always intended to retire in the Cherokee Nation, get myself a small place out on Lake Tenkiller, and kick back.
That was before I got caught sitting in the wrong pew in the tribal elections and suddenly could not get the time of day around tribal government offices, excepting a few people I had known for many years who were divided about my situation between embarrassment and denial. I never intended to spend my golden years locked in political combat, so both the USA and the Cherokee Nation had serious drawbacks.
We started considering other countries. Canada did not want us because at our age we were likely to burden the health care system for which we had not paid in our younger years. The American ex-pat communities in Mexico were inviting but getting to and from those communities had become a matter of running a drug cartel gauntlet at high speed through Tamaulipas, a bit more excitement than we had in mind.
Countries outside our closest neighbors that would accept American ex-pats quickly sorted into whether we wanted to be rich people surrounded by poor people or to be poor people surrounded by rich people. Neither option seemed attractive to us.
In one Central American country, an old friend who had been living there offered to recommend a security guard who would provide his own assault rifle, this apparently being a selling point we had not considered. It struck me that if in your old age you hire the wrong person to care for your lawn, your plants die. If you hire the wrong security guard, you die.
Being poor in a rich country is no improvement. While my wife was born to the middle class thanks to a working mother and a father with a good union contract, I spent my working life moving out of poverty. It's a state of mind as much as a status, and not a state of mind to which I care to return.
If I chose to retire to an Indian nation other than my own to be off of US soil, I would in most cases be back to being a rich guy who happens to be eligible for Indian Health Service. Combine that with my mixed blood, and I become an understandable magnet for resentment. No, thanks.
So we wound up back where we started in central Texas, for no more complicated reason than being close to kids and grandkids. We found we could no longer afford to live in Austin, where we met, but we fit pretty well in what used to be a small town but has become a burb. We have two kids to the south and two to the north, at least for as long as my platoon sergeant son is stationed at Ft. Hood.
We live in Sun City, a subdivision with zero index crime in the last five years, probably because it's geezers only--55 and older. There are always kids around but they are never unsupervised because everybody knows everybody.
People drive around in golf carts. Neither of us golf, but the cart came with the house and it's cheaper to drive than a car. There's a summer camp for grandkids every summer, but it's so popular you have to win a lottery to get your youngster in.
The geezers here in geezerville come from backgrounds in this order: military, academic, business. Everybody has a life full of stories. There are no rich people and there are no poor people. We have managed to find a habitat for the endangered species we represent, the vanishing American middle class.