Karen Grosz remembers a man in the Phoenix neighborhood where she and Paul, her husband, once spent a winter as snowbirds: two and a half hours a day in his garage, television humming, just watching people walk past. Any longer upset the homeowners' association. "And that was his purpose every day," Grosz says. "Just to sit and watch people go by." She's careful not to turn the man in the garage into a cautionary tale. Maybe that really was his contentment, and for some peopl
