Behavior: The Old in the Country of the Young

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Many are glad to end their working days. For people with money, good health, careful plans and lively interests, retirement can be a welcome time to do the things they always dreamed of doing. But for too many others, the harvest of ''the golden years" is neglect, isolation, anomie and despair. One of every four Americans 65 or over lives at or below "the poverty line." Some of these 5,000,000 old people were poor to begin with, but most are bewildered and bitter nouveaux pauvres, their savings and fixed incomes devoured by spiraling property taxes and other forms of inflation. More than 2,000,000 of them subsist on Social Security alone.

Job discrimination against the aged, and increasingly against the middleaged, is already a fact of U.S. life. While nearly 40% of the long-term unemployed are over 45, only 10% of federal retraining programs are devoted to men of that age. It is often difficult for older people to get bank loans, home mortgages or automobile insurance. When the car of a 68-year-old Brooklyn grocer was stolen last winter, he was unable to rent a substitute. Though his driving record was faultless and he needed a car for work, he was told falsely by two companies that to rent him one was "against the law."

Youth is everywhere in place Age, like woman, requires fit surroundings.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Treated like outsiders, the aged have increasingly clustered together for mutual support or simply to enjoy themselves. A now familiar but still amazing phenomenon has sprung up in the past decade: dozens of good-sized new towns that exclude people under 65. Built on cheap, outlying land, such communities offer two-bedroom houses starting at $18,000, plus a refuge from urban violence, the black problem (and in fact blacks), as well as generational pressures. "I'm glad to see my children come and I'm glad to see the back of their heads," is a commonly expressed sentiment. Says Dr. James Birren of the University of Southern California: "The older you get the more you want to live with people like yourself. You want, to put it bluntly, to die with your own."

Most important, friendships are easy to make. One relative newcomer to Laguna Hills Leisure World, Calif., received more than 200 get-well cards from her new neighbors when she went to a hospital in Los Angeles. There is an emphasis on good times: dancing, shuffleboard, outings on oversized tricycles and bowling (the Keen Agers v. the Hits and Mrs.). Clubs abound, including Bell Ringing, Stitch and Knit, Lapidary and "tepees" of the International Order of Old Bastards. The I.O.O.B. motto: "Anything for fun." There is, in a sense, a chance for a new start. "It doesn't matter what you used to be; all that counts is what you do here," said a resident of Sun City, Ariz.

To some residents the communities seem too homogeneous and confining. A 74-year-old Californian found that life was flavorless at his retirement village; he was just waiting for "the little black wagon." Having begun to paint seascapes and landscapes at 68, he moved near an artists' colony, where he now sells his landscapes and lives happily with a lady friend of 77.

In silent synods, they play chess or cribbage . . .

W.H. Auden