Charlie

We just got home an hour ago from the Kia dealership in a new Kia Soul. We bought it because our previous second car was getting too hard for us old men to get in and out. We had researched and then tried climbing in and out of a bunch of cars before deciding on the Soul, because it had the easiest access. (Our other car is an SUV.)

I have never been sexually attracted to my doctors, although most of my PCPs have been gay. However, I have had two dentists who really turned me on, even with drills in their hands. When I was a young man, I had an affair with a doctor who never treated me: he was a forensic pathologist.

Yes, it does, but it is hundreds of miles from Carmel (though just as expensive as a place to retire).

One of my dear friends, who had AIDS in the early wave of the epidemic, essentially starved himself to death rather than to face the potential physical afflictions for which there was no effective treatment at that time. He could not have done it without the active support of his partner and another friend. Although I could objectively understand his motivation, and knew that his supporters helped him out of love and respect for his desire to control his fate, I could not have done it myself. I have never felt suicidal myself, and can't imagine wanting to bring my conscious being to an end, no matter how dire the future. BTW, starving to death is not the easy or peaceful process some may imagine it to be.

One of my male cousins committed suicide at 29, by shooting himself in a motel room in Florida. Twenty-one years later, one of his younger brothers, then 42, committed suicide in the same way. I was aware that both had been physically abused by their father when they were boys, and they led passively self-destructive lives as adults before they finally took the guns in their hands.

But be sure to buy chains for your car, if you want to drive south in the winter, because you may not be able to get over Mt. Ashland without them.

Another guy who is just posing and probably wouldn't now how to hit the ball. No one has played with that style racquet since before he was born. However, I would be happy to teach him.

Interesting that although both have hardly ever posted on this site, both showed up on the site within a few minutes of one another yesterday, but only one of them posted here. Sounds like some networking going on.

Winter in Chicago is summer in Australia and New Zealand.

This is the second ad I have been directed to recently that mentions availability in Hackensack, NJ, something I don't ever remember seeing before in an ad.

How would your photo identify you as not a cop? Besides, a real cop would probably send any photo that he thought would entice the provider to continue the interaction.

One of my closest gay friends left Center City Philadelphia and retired to a very small town on the Oregon coast, where he had more than a quarter century of wonderful retirement. It all depends on your personality and what you want out of life.

The one on the left looks just like my college roommate, who played lacrosse like the guy on the right.

I was really asking why Moscow and Warsaw. Should have been clearer. Because I had never been there, so why not? It was not long after the Wall had fallen, and the Soviet Union was an exciting place to be, because everyone there was debating what would come next (it turned out to be the dissolution of the Soviet Union itself).

The main advantage to living in Vancouver is that Washington has no income tax and Oregon has no sales tax, so the key is to live in the former and shop across the river in the latter.

I lucked out once in the 1970s in coach on a flight from Philadelphia to London: no one else in the four seats across the middle, so I could stretch out across them all and go to sleep. Nothing like that ever happened to me again.

I agree. I bought an around-the-world ticket once for a vacation in Japan, and then I just kept flying west, stopping in Moscow, Warsaw, and London before returning home.

Don't forget that a lot can change in fifteen years. After lots of research and lots of visits to potential retirement locations all over the US, we settled on Palm Springs as ideal. After fifteen years here, it no longer seems as ideal to us, due to growth and climate change, combined with slow degradation of the environment and unexpected allergies. I do think that your idea of trying a place out for a while before making a permanent commitment is a good one.

Bali is lovely any time of year, with or without sex.

Glad to see recommendations of Eugene, OR. I almost moved there myself, and I may still do so if the weather in Palm Springs keeps getting worse (it's that global warming thing). Portland is becoming a very big city, and Seattle is huge; both also have terrible traffic and housing is getting pretty expensive. Austin has no mountains, and the population is exploding. Santa Fe fits most of the criteria, but it can be fairly expensive. Olympia, WA, is not really a college town, but smaller state capitals often are like college towns, and it fits the other criteria. Flagstaff, AZ, is a bit isolated, but otherwise a possible candidate; likewise for Missoula. No one has mentioned Bellingham, WA, which at one time was rated the most desirable place in America to live by one of those retirement guides. The only place mentioned so far by other posters that I have never been to is Boulder, but I have heard good things about it. Finally, have you ever thought about Pittsburgh? It is not a really big city any longer (the population is only about one quarter of Austin's) but it still has big city amenities, a couple of important universities, good health care, mountains, relatively liberal, and a lower cost of living than many of the other places mentioned here.

Please write a review for Daddy's site.

The reason I have never belonged to Costco is because most food products there come in sizes that are too large for two people to use up. I only go there if we are throwing a big party, and then I go with a friend who is a member. Portions at most restaurants in the US are often too big to eat at one sitting. Our favorite restaurant for lunch serves sandwiches that are so big that we always eat only half, and take half of the meal home for lunch the next day.

I think you are misinterpreting my post. After that first conversation, we never discussed my sexual orientation any more than we discussed hers or anyone else's; my old-fashioned parents were rather prudish about talking about sex. She never expressed disapproval of my orientation or my lifestyle. That she would have preferred me to have been heterosexual is not unusual--how many parents would have chosen for their only child to be gay? Because of that initial coming out to them, they figured that the first man with whom I lived for four years was my partner, and the second one with whom I owned a home was definitely not just a friend. My parents always welcomed my partners and had good relationships with them. When my partner and I persuaded her to come to live with us when she was 89, her main worry was that she would be interrupting our normal lives. I think my parents' behavior, particularly my father's, was conditioned by past experience. My father's favorite cousin, Fred, was quietly gay at a time when such things were never openly discussed, and he had a "friend," Charles. Although they didn't live together (Fred lived with his widowed mother most of his adult life), the family seemed to accept that Fred and Charles were a couple, and usually included Charles in family get-togethers. Nothing was ever said to me about them, but when I was a teenager I put 2+2 together and figured out what was going on, especially at Fred's funeral, when a weeping Charles was consoled by other family members, including my father. I think that became the somewhat outdated model for my parents' response to me.

"Embrace" is an interesting metaphor. Upon reflection, it occurs to me that a physical embrace between adult members of my spouse's family was a rarely observed occurrence. My mother and I did embrace lightly after long separations, but I never saw my spouse or his brothers physically touch their mother or any other family member. That is probably more of a cultural thing than an emotional one.

I came out to my parents when I was 19, and we never discussed the subject again; it was something that was simply passively understood from then on. They accepted my friends and my partners, but never inquired about the nature of the relationships. The fact that I was gay never changed my loving relationship with my parents in any way that I was aware of. I occasionally picked up hints that my mother hoped I might change some day, so she could have grandchildren, but by the time she came to live with my partner and me after he and I had lived together for 25 years, she knew her role was mother-in-law. I was an only child, so I never had to navigate the subject with siblings. As for other relations, most of them probably understood, because I was never badgered with the "So, when are you going to get a girl friend?" kind of discussions. When I finally did marry my partner in 2013, the warmest congratulations I received were from an elderly female cousin. My partner was sexually repressed until his late 20s, when he finally left the family home. His domineering father died not long after that, and his quiet mother never inquired about his personal life, though she undoubtedly understood the nature of our domestic partnership. He had three younger brothers, and the next brother (6 years younger) also wasn't out until his late 20s; he has also been in an openly gay domestic relationship for many years, and he and his partner were much more actively engaged with the mother than we were. The two younger brothers were straight, but seemed to accept the model set by their two older brothers and their mother. One brother died in his 40s, and his wife was never comfortable with her gay brothers-in-law and their partners; her children have also been distant from us. The youngest brother and his wife, and their two adult children, are the family members we both are closest to now, and we are also close to a couple of my spouse's cousins. My straight brother-in-law is actually the executor of my will as well as my spouse's. It surely helps that everyone in my spouse's family is well educated and no one is religious, except the distant sister-in-law.