At the cutting edge of the giant "boomer" retirement wave, recently divorced Jake Bronson joins a local continuing care retirement community (CCRC). He had always considered this community a place where "old elephants went to die", but quickly discovers it is much more than that.

Now, one of them himself, he grapples with adjusting to this totally new world. Trips to Martinique, Maine, Paris, Kenya, and Hawaii each pull him out of the community, but give him a new perspective on it when he returns. For one thing, Jake's plan to stay single fades when he falls in love with a beautiful Kenyan woman. For another, Jake belatedly realizes that his former wife of 40 years, like a majority of the women in his retirement community, never enjoyed the full pleasure of sex because of their husbands' selfishness and incompetence. He and another resident, a woman, decide to redress that sin by proving that the expression "old folks' sex school" is not an oxymoron. As happens with any good school, both the pupils and the teachers learn things that change their lives for the better, and this particular retirement community will never be the same.

Please note that while this book includes some scenes of older people engaging in gentle sex, these are not pornographic, or even very erotic, but are meant to make a general point about older women's bodies. They also supply the missing key that allows a romantic thread winding through the book to lead to a happy ending.

This book has no violence and no exploitation, but instead focuses sympathetically on the challenges that older people face in trying to maintain self-respect as their minds and bodies wind down.