Peggy and I spent a few days in Charleston, South Carolina this week for no particular reason: Our daughter was in Mexico, we had not been anywhere alone in over a year and neither of us had been to Charleston despite its relative proxmity to NY (an hour and change) and some personal connection on her part. Her father had lived there as a boy, and a famous ancestor of hers, Charles Pinckney, had called the city home when our nation was new.

Like a lot of colonial cities, Charleston has gone to great lengths to preserve and restore its historical houses and buildings, catering to the tourist trade. (We stayed, coincidentally, in the Charles Pinckney room at the John Rutledge Inn. Meaning if you do something as significant as represent your state at your nation’s first Constitutional Convention, someone may someday leave little mints on a pillow in a room named in your honor.)

A lot of people told us how much they loved Charleston — great food, they said and we did eat in a few good restaurants — the best of which was the Hominy Grill. It bills itself as beloved by locals and there was a lot of neighborhood trade in evidence, though our cab driver warned us, “Don’t let them stint you on the grits!” He told us of wandering the streets of Harlem, a white man in a suit, in search of grits only to have waitresses ask him to repeat the word, which he stretched in southern fashion into three syllables: “Grr-ee-yits.”

But my friend Jess Greenbaum had offered another opinion. “I hate Charleston,” she told me, with some passion. “Everything is so nice and friendly, as if slavery never happened.” The history of slavery in the south pretty much begins and ends in this city and true, there are monuments to the “flowers of Southern manhood” who died defending, well, people’s right to own other people. But most of the historical tours we took kept the issue front and center. I didn’t hear any of this “War of Northern Aggression” BS I had heard in Savannah, for instance — though I did blanch at the sight of a carriage tour guide in a confederate cap. Would the guides at Auschwitz wear swastikas, smile and say “Do we have any Bavarians here today?”

What creeped me out about Charleston was the vision of American retirement it presented: elderly couples shuffling about in golf clothes, looking at bad art, eating in good restaurants and generally acting as if they were just passing time until they died. I’m sure I’m being unfair (I usually am) but it was a bracing vision for a man in his fifties, a reminder to make a note to myself to find another way to live the rest of my days than wandering the earth as a semi-detached overfed spectator, poking at history until I become part of it myself.