Huffington Magazine Issue 5 | Page 39

HUFFINGTON 07.15.12 TWILIGHT IN THE SUNSHINE STATE Retired submarine captain Don Hahnfeldt wouldn’t put it this way, but eight years ago he came to Florida to die. “We moved 30 times over my career and when I got here my wife said there wouldn’t be 31,” he says, gunning his Navy-themed golf cart around the Villages, the world’s largest retirement community. Hahnfeldt is hardly alone. Legions of seniors have joined him at the Villages and the development, which grew out of cow pastures about an hour’s north of Orlando, is basically a sleep-away camp for old people who want to chill out but not necessarily slow down. Covering 23,000 acres and home to 88,000 people, it features 513 holes of golf, 95 restaurants, 63 swimming pools, 14 medical centers and the largest softball league in the world. It is also a bit Twilight Zone: the development’s scale and isolation make it feel more like a colony than a community. Almost everyone is old, almost everyone drives a golf cart — they outnumber cabs in New York City by a factor of four — and almost everyone is white. But retirees of Hahnfeldt’s generation, who are reshaping notions of what it means to be old, say that it sure beats the life they left behind. “Wake up, eat breakfast, read the newspaper and it’s only 8 a.m. and you wonder what you are going to do the rest of the day,” Hahnfeldt, 68, says of retired life elsewhere. Here,