imagined-community

Hurrah Hurrah. Oh Happy New Year. Finally, I can breathe again; my annual holiday trip to Florida is over. As always, after a few days with my controlling mom I returned to the Northeast angry and frustrated, disappointed with myself, exhausted, depressed, and all too acutely aware of how my least favorite ways of interacting with people were born in my relationship with my mother. On the positive side, I often responded to my mother as I would to any other person (centered, kind and detached) rather than in one of my mom communication styles: the know it all or the withdrawn teen.

Florida itself was a trip. Mom lives in one of those planned retirement communities where everyone drives around in a golf cart. I think the minimum age to live in the golf cart community is 55. Whenever two people under the age of 55 pass each other on the street it is customary for both persons to gently nod their head and make some companionable “You too, huh” eye contact. The “you too,” signifying something like, “You’ve got relatives living here? Yeah, me too.” I personally think there is something fundamentally bizarre, like inbreeding, about any place that is defined by a single age group, be it high school or a retirement community (at least the university has graduate and non-traditional students). But I suppose these holding tanks, I mean communities, are easy and fun. Though every time a golf cart sped by I swear I heard the voice of Rod Sterling intone, “your moving into a land of both shadow and substance…you’ve just crossed over into the twilight zone.”

Mom