When my parents retired to Florida I thought they had become a cliche. Little old people vegetating by the pool, complaining of their arthritis, driving 35 mph in the fast lane down Interstate 95 with heads barely reaching above the steering wheel—or as Richard Dreyfuss so aptly put it in a recent film: they had become “the pre-dead.”

I was determined not to become a member of that tribe. First, I was never going to retire. Second, I was never going further south than Washington, D.C. Well, I made good on number one. I did not, nor will I ever, voluntarily retire. I just changed jobs, reinventing myself all along the way. Number two is another story altogether. When we inherited the dreaded Florida apartment, our first thought was, “Yikes, if we go down there, we’ll be the ‘pre-dead’ too!”