Some Things in Life Just Shouldn’t Be Hurried Along

There is a time for (1) selecting a place in which to retire and (2) for learning to talk.

These lessons were brought home to me when my wife and I spent the holiday week in Fern Valley, Idyllwild, about one mile away from a daughter, son-in-law and grandchild who live on “the hill” the year around. The first lesson began to evolve the second day we were there when we went into the village to buy groceries.

“I feel so much better in this climate,” announced my wife, bundled and swathed to the eyes.

Snow lay on the ground. The cleared roads, bordered by windrows of snow piled there by the snow plows, were glazed with ice that crackled merrily beneath our cautiously driven pickup truck.

We bought the groceries, and I think that if my wife had not been restrained by me we would have bought a mountain cabin, too. She had peered, enchanted, into the window of every real estate office in the village at pictures and prices of cabins.

“Look,” I said, “This is my vacation, and I don’t want to spend it slogging through ice and snow with an agent, looking at cabins. Besides, we can’t afford one, unless we sell our home, and then we’re talking about a retirement place. Is that what you want, to live up here permanently?”

That got her to thinking. It was a useful ploy I’d learned through experience with her. It seems that whenever we vacation someplace we like, my wife wants to live there, “away,” in her words, “from crowds, smog, freeways, airplanes roaring overhead.”

It’s not that I don’t sympathize with the way she feels. I feel largely the same way. But I believe there’s a time for making a decision about a retirement location, and that’s after you retire. Then you’ve got lots more time to devote to traveling about and stewing over whether you’re going to land someplace different or stay put.

As it was, we ended up doing the wise thing. We spent some time walking and driving around Idyllwild and observing where the sun shone through the trees and warmed the houses and the dark areas where the ice lingered well into the late afternoon. If in a couple of years we should move there we will not have bought a place in the summer that is an expensively heated icebox in the winter.

Daughter Julie, son-in-law Dwight and grandchild Justin live in a fine, weather-gentle part of Idyllwild, a community of many mini-climates. We spent Christmas and the New Year with them, getting to know little Justin better. A darling, small-boned “waif” of a child like his mother was at his age of a year and a half, he is a healthy, active boy, experimenting eagerly with the language. I’ll swear his vocabulary was increased by at least a dozen new words during the week we were with him.

It is astonishing to watch such rapid verbal progress. My wife and I share a theory that babies, almost from the time of birth, begin building a storehouse of language. When they’re ready to talk, they will; they can’t be hurried into it.

When the time is right, the words begin to flow. Furthermore, we believe babies understand far more than they are able to express at this stage. For example, his mother and I were talking about Justin while he played at our.

“They’re really selfish, lazy little creatures that expect you to wait upon them hand and foot,” Julie complained lovingly.

“Well,” said I, “That’s what mothers are for.”

At that instant, Justin looked up from his play and said clearly and emphatically, “I know.”

So, as I say, there’s a time for selecting a retirement place to settle into and a time for learning to talk. And you shouldn’t push either one.