“We agree we have too many things, too many clothes, too many books, too much furniture,” Pam says.
“And we agree that our house in New Smyrna is a better living space for us than this cottage,” I say.
“That’s right,” Pam says, “but it’s not about the house or the stuff or the things or the space. It’s about our life together, and our life has been better in Palm Beach.”
“For whatever reasons,” I say, “what is outside our house in Palm Beach is more important to us than what is inside our house in New Smyrna.”
“So, we’ll be okay if we sell the house?” Pam says.
“Better than okay.”
“Gee, what a struggle to figure this out,” Pam says. “Want to e-mail the landlords?”
“Yes, I do,” I say. “And then I want to take the day off, eat lunch out, and walk around our town.”
I e-mail the landlords and tell them we would love to stay for another year, then Pam and I spend the day wandering around Palm Beach. We have a quiet dinner by the pool with Jamie Cullum, and for the first night in close to a week, we both sleep.
Thursday, August 26
No answer from our landlords. Pam assures me there’s nothing to worry about.
Friday, August 27
No answer from our landlords again today. I assure Pam there is absolutely nothing to worry about.
Saturday, August 28
We are having tea and grapefruit juice with the birds in the yellow room. We all go to the office. Pam checks her e-mail and says, “Good, our landlords answered.” She pauses. “No, not good.”
“What?”
Pam reads, “‘Sorry, do not wish to extend lease as requested. Will call Monday to explain.’”
I slump down on the couch. “What the hell does that mean?”
“I don’t know. I don’t get it,” Pam says. “They said we could have the cottage forever. They practically begged us to stay. They said they weren’t going to rent it to anyone else. What could have changed that?”
“It could be anything. Sickness, divorce, something to do with their kids,” I say. “But the wording is weird. What does ‘do not wish to extend lease as requested’ mean?”
“I don’t know,” Pam says, “but it’s going to be a long forty-eight hours before we talk to them and find out.”
Tuesday, August 31
It has been three days since our landlords’ baffling e-mail, and about twenty-four hours since we had a very long conversation with them and found out what their e-mail meant.
This is our last night of our “year in Palm Beach,” night 365. Pam and I want to end our year the way it began: A drink at Taboo, dinner at Renato’s, and a dance at The Chesterfield.
Taboo is so quiet you can almost hear the fish. We watch our favorites as they cavort around the tank. We have a drink and chat quietly for a while. The Yankees are up six to three in the eighth. We finish and walk slowly down to Renato’s. Dinner at Renato’s is as sophisticated and special as always. Uncharacteristically, we are the last to leave. Only an hour and a half left before our year in this alternate universe is over.
After a glass of champagne, a toast, and a few dances at The Chesterfield, it’s time to head home. As we did three hundred and sixty-five nights ago, Pam and I do not head to the elevator. Instead, we walk through the lobby and the courtyard and out onto the street.
Our year in Palm Beach, the one-year lease on our cottage, will end in twenty minutes or so—and then our new three-year lease will begin.
EPILOGUE
Our landlords’ e-mail “sorry, do not wish to extend lease as requested” turned out to be a misunderstanding about the terms of the lease. Pam and I had asked for a one-year extension. They wanted three years. Three was fine with us.
We hope to sign another lease and another and another. Perhaps some day in the distant future, Pam and I can both be laid to rest in Via Mizner next to “Johnnie Brown the Human Monkey.”
Despite all of our initial uncertainty and our fears about the rather rash decision to leave our house and move down to Palm Beach for a year, it turned out to be the right decision at the right time.
For us, Palm Beach is a wonderful two-sided coin. One side is a beautifully maintained small town with quiet, safe streets, plus the ocean, and the lake. The living is easy, and the people are friendly. Life is simple.
The other side of the coin is the civilized and sophisticated opportunities usually found in a big city, the parks and galleries and museums, the dining and dancing and cabaret. We love both sides.
Our year here taught us that our dream house, the house we renovated and refined to fit our life, was just a house. It was a great house on two beautiful acres, but that house, those acres, were on the wrong island for us at this time in our lives.
Do we miss that house? Yes. Do we miss the custom kitchen? The two-person tub and shower? The pool table? The space? Yes. But it’s okay, because if we moved back to that house, we would miss living in Palm Beach much more.
I don’t know about the acorn and the oak thing or if the teacher always arrives when the student is ready, but our year in Palm Beach has been a great learning experience. Pam and I learned we are definitely not as smart or as wise as we thought. We knew we could never live here. We knew we couldn’t afford to live here. We knew that the magic of Palm Beach would fade. We were wrong on all counts.
Before our move, we were very happy with our life on two secluded acres that backed up to hundreds of acres of wetlands. We were happy in a large house we owned, filled with books and art and fine china. We were happy having two offices, a pool-room, a great swimming pool, a bocce court, and driving thousands of miles a year.
In Palm Beach we are still bruising our elbows on doorways and having the occasional space crisis, but we are even happier now on our not-so-secluded fraction of an acre, in a small cottage we rent, slowly shedding our possessions and walking hundreds of miles a year. We are also enjoying the process of downsizing and simplifying.
And it is not like we’ve taken a vow of poverty. Our cottage is not a tent, and we’re not subsisting on canned soup and crackers. Our life is very comfortable. It’s just getting a little simpler than it was. A little less cluttered.
Pam and I know we’re only dancing on this earth for a short time, and our year here, from The Invisible Man, to Pam’s knee, to my visit from the EMT people, to the addition of another birthday each, reminded us our time for dancing is getting even shorter. So we’re trying to focus more on the moment, the moments, we have left together, trying to do what we really want to be doing on any specific day or night.
Pam is painting more than ever and loving the process. I have returned to work on a novel I abandoned a decade ago. When we have a choice, when the decision is ours, we want to be sure we’re actually doing what we want to be doing.
We know we are very lucky to have had a chance to live in Palm Beach. And we take some perverse pleasure that, while living in what some consider the Mecca of Excess where too much is never enough, we are learning the pleasures of living with a little bit less. Our cottage may be getting emptier in Palm Beach, but our life is fuller here.
And Life Goes On …
The Worth Avenue renovation has been completed and it is magnificent. Everyone in the town is still nice. We now have two foxes that visit often, and our birds don’t seem to mind.
We’ve had no further visits from the firemen, the EMTs, the police, or the iguana. We have not seen Jimmy Buffett again (we don’t think).
Mike, the man of few words, and Maggie, the woman of many, have gone their separate ways. Henry and Michele visit regularly, as do many of our other friends. Ron has never gone shopping again. Theo is still doing the chicken-walk.
Duckie and Blanco have a new companion, Fluffy. Pam and I are selling a car if we can ever decide which one. Pam recently sold her first painting. Samantha and Jason have set up housekeeping in Manhattan and are very happy. Pam’s sister Sophie has sent
us another collapsible vase. Lou still thinks he’s Henny Youngman.
We’re still walking and still finding new houses to name. Pam’s knee isn’t perfect, but it’s pretty close. We’re back to traveling to revise some of our other books and taking an occasional road trip. We still haven’t hooked up our television.
“And the truth is we’re not getting any younger,
And the years are getting hard to pursue,
In our youth we are driven by a hunger,
For the big important things we will do,
But today I’m not dreaming of tomorrow
Cause the future is so clearly in view,
All I see is one more moment with you.”
–from “One More Moment”
lyrics by Johnny Rodgers and Lina Koutrakos
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to Carmen, who, on a weekly basis, helped us reclaim our cottage from the chaos of paper.
Thanks to Jon (Jon Corhern of Imagecraft) for immediate and professional help with various technical and software computer emergencies.
Thanks to Arlene and Terry, who put us on another road.
Thanks to Sophie for the lovely box of little notepaper we used up writing down middle-of-the-night thoughts.
And, as always, thanks to Samantha—from North Street to Bourbon Street to Wall Street to South Baptist Street—still the best kid ever.
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
The husband and wife writing team of Pamela Acheson and Richard Myers escaped from Manhattan over two decades ago and headed south. Since then, they have contributed to many editions of Fodor’s Caribbean, Fodor’s Virgin Islands, and Fodor’s Florida, and dozens of national and international magazines, including Caribbean Travel + Life and Travel + Leisure.
They have coauthored a number of books together, including The Best Romantic Escapes in Florida, Volume One; The Best Romantic Escapes in Florida, Volume Two; The Best of St.Thomas and St. John, U.S. Virgin Islands; and The Best of the British Virgin Islands.
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