After a Christmas break, a teacher asked her young pupils how they spent their holidays.
One small girl wrote her “child’s view of retirement”:
We always used to spend Christmas with Grandpa and Grandma.
They used to live here in a big brick home but Grandpa got retarded and they moved to Florida. Now they live in a place with a lot of other retarded people. They all live in little tin boxes. They ride three-wheeled bicycles and they all wear name tags because they don’t know who they are.
They go to a big building called a wrecked hall but if it was wrecked, they got it fixed because it’s all right now.
They play games and do exercises there but they don’t do them very well.
There is a swimming pool there. They go in it and just stand there with their hats on. I guess they don’t know how to swim.
As you go into their park, there is a dollhouse with a little man sitting in it. He watches all day so they can’t get out without him seeing them. When they can sneak out, they go to the beach and pick up shells that they think are dollars. My grandma used to bake cookies and stuff but I guess she forgot how.
Nobody cooks. They just eat out. They eat the same thing every night – early birds. Some of the people are so retarded they don’t know how to cook at all, so my grandma and grandpa bring food into the wrecked hall and they call it “potluck”.
My grandma says Grandpa worked all his life and earned his retardment. I wish they would move back up here but I guess the little man in the dollhouse won’t let them out.
