An Open Letter to My Retired Neighbors

Written by: Andrew McLean, The Reserve Clause


Dear Retired Neighbors:

Stop it. You’re killing my dreams, making me question all my life goals.

I’m getting ahead of myself though, so allow me to back up a bit. It’s not that I don’t like you. Quite the contrary. You actually seem like perfectly pleasant people, although in the four years since I moved in, neither of us can realistically be accused of being overly social to one another. But that’s okay. I’m not really a stop-and-talk-about-the-weather kind of guy anyway.

And I genuinely enjoy my neighborhood. It’s mostly quiet and peaceful, a good place to raise my two boys. But there are a lot of retirees, an unusual amount for the three short blocks that make up my little neck of the woods. If my hometown named neighborhoods like New York City, I’d live in Little Boca Raton.

So let me just lay it out here. It’s about your lawn. You have a problem. It does not need to be mowed every day. I promise. You’re retired, well-deserved after what I assume to be many, many years of hard work. So good for you. But you’re spending your twilight years making sure the grass on your 1/8th of an acre of the world is as short as humanly possible.

Meanwhile, I’m young in my professional career, decades away from retirement, and I look longingly forward to that magical time when I get up when I want, spend my waking hours however I damn well please, and altogether take advantage of answering to absolutely no one. But you’re ruining all that. You’re making the retired life seem like no more than pass after pass on a John Deere.

I’m sure my view of the retired life is a bit idealized. They say the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. But in our case, it’s just shorter. Much shorter. I get that retirement can’t all be vacations and interesting new hobbies, but it’s got to be better than a loud buzz at 8 in the morning, followed by a second pass a few hours later just for good measure. You mow your lawn like I buzz my hair at the beginning of summer. One complete pass, let it get wet, then go over it again to get all those scragglers. But mine is more about minimizing how stupid I look as a 28-year-old man with a buzz cut. Yours amounts to nothing more than agricultural OCD.

In closing, I simply ask that you seek help. There’s a 12-step for everything these days, some motivational guru who will sell you a set of DVDs to cure what ails you. I’ll even pitch in. No need to spend your 401K dollars on that. You’ve wasted enough already. If it means you stop killing my dreams of waking up at 10, learning woodworking and building a lavish gazebo and hitting on mildly-attractive waitresses, then it’s a sound investment.

Sincerely,

Your Concerned Neighbor