A sighting of the mysterious POIG
We recently traveled to the deep south where most of the people who claim to be southern still live. We were in Tennessee, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Georgia — looping from Nashville to Asheville to the Outer Banks to Charleston to Chattanooga and back to Nashville. I expected to meet people and things I’d never met or seen before. In Gatlinburg I ran into pockets of Confederate soldiers who didn’t know the war was over — just read their bumper stickers. I ran into more chicken restaurants, sit down and fast food, than I ever thought possible. Growing up in the Driftless Region of Southeast Minnesota I thought I’d seen green but nothing prepared me for how green and densely vegetated Tennessee is. We saw the Outer Banks and the precise place where the Wrights first flew at Kill Devil Hills near Kitty Hawk.
Did some beach time. Cape Hatteras Lighthouse. Saw a famous Lutheran Church in Charleston where the pastor was removed for making the dangerous claim that a child born of a mixed race couple, black and white, would simply be a human being and lovely in God’s sight. Saw Ft. Sumter and the Yorktown Aircraft Carrier. Saw Lookout Mountain. It was fun.
Their deer are woefully tiny and skinny, though.
Near Bolivia, NC we ran into a new exotic creature living in self-isolation in gated VRBO/ Retirement Communes that I came to call POIGs.
POIGs is an acronym for Pickled Octogenarians In Golfcarts. They come out around sundown when the air temperature drops from humid 93 degrees to a brisk and microscopically less humid 85 degrees.
These creatures start their day by putting something clear and lethal in their insulated cups and keep drinking all day. I call them pickled because it is like a state of stasis for them to be inebriated the entire waking hours. Like a pickle in your refrigerator tastes the same morning or night, today or next week, they are the same amount of drunken preservedness all day. Octogenarians are 80 year olds. At that magic moment of temperature drop in the evening these leathery tanned blue haired great grandchildren of Lee’s army decide to hop in their golf carts and go on patrol.
And in the most friendly way you can imagine they ram and weave around their compound nearly wiping you out. They’re patriotic, flying two or three flags, and they are free, no one is stopping them doing what they do, but it was a bit disconcerting and unrelaxing to have to have one’s head on a swivel. Gated communities, as I understand it, are supposed to keep its occupants in a well earned sanctuary, safe from the rest of the world. But it also works to keep the outside world safe and keep them contained.
I am told that a Walgreens in Green Valley, AZ, another retirement capitol of the world, does an unbelievably profitable business in liquor sales. Medicinal I am sure. Why? I realize that they really do not have anything else to do. I have noticed that there are people who retire away from work and those who retire to something. I think these self briners have nothing to do. They do not volunteer anywhere. They do not attend Bible studies or Elder Hostels. They retired to nothing and now spend their days numbing themselves until they can trade in their golfcart for Elijah’s Chariot.
I am deeply blessed to know so many retirees who are active and vital and useful and happy. I plan on being one of them. I hope to have enough health and security that I can be involved in life. Eternal life is not an alternative life — it is a continuation of life.
Many of God’s joys are available right now and we find them in love and good works and family and neighbor and laughter regardless of our age.
In Christ,
