A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Be Doing Over and Over Again

• The street on which my parents live. It is too new to come up when you search for iPhone directions. The iPhone instead sends you to a place that in the dark looks identical, seven miles away, still in the Villages.

The Villages retirement community in Florida has been described to me as the largest planned community in the nation. It is located one hour outside of Orlando and contains about 80,000 people over the age of 55 (or most of them are over the age of 55; there’s a small percentage allowed of those under 55, but they are invisible to the naked eye). The Villages is still not finished. Another Village, called Brownwood and with a West Texas theme, is under construction as we speak. We drove by it yesterday, on the way to the airport back to Seattle, after visiting my mother and stepfather, who’ve lived in the Villages—their village is called Bonita (of uncertain theme)—since November. There aren’t any houses in Brownwood yet; there’s just flat brown land where aggressively green lawns will go. But the roads and the golf cart paths and tunnels have already been built. Many people drive around mainly in golf carts.

Late Saturday night—meaning after the nightly live music stops in the Village squares, at 9 pm—I got lost in a golf cart. My under-55 boyfriend and I drove the golf cart about 7 miles in the wrong direction, only discovering this when we arrived where the iPhone said was home, which was called Columbia Place rather than Columbia Way. That was in Waverly village. The streets and golf cart lanes were so deserted that we blasted TV On the Radio and sang along loudly in the wind because we were afraid someone or something was going to jump out of the bushes and kill us in this eerily deserted place.

• A historical sign on Fort Sumter Landing square, which I gather is a real history but applies to a location many miles away. This was taken shortly before we got lost in the Villages on my parents golf cart.

In the square we had just left, Fort Sumter Landing, there are historical signs in front of the buildings describing their histories. These signs were put up by the Villages Historical Society, they say at the bottom. They tell stories about what originally happened in these buildings, back in 1877 or 1869 or 1910. But the buildings were built, like, two decades ago or less. I asked about this, and my parents told me that the signs are in fact true. They just tell stories that pertain to Key West. I did not get to the bottom of this, but if I’m understanding correctly, these histories are real but borrowed from another location and transplanted here.

Obviously, I’m completely fascinated by the Villages. It really does remind me of David Foster Wallace’s essay about his cruise experience (best read out loud, in bed, between lovers who intend never to go on a cruise). “I wish him ill,” I remember Wallace spitting silently at the cruise director. In the Villages, the cruise director is a very wealthy man who put up George W. Bush when Bush made his first book-tour stop in the Villages last, yup, November. I was in the Villages on that day, but my parents do not love Bush and did not want to go. They have two sets of friends: one, a pair of Bush lovers who went to the reading, and two, a pair of lesbians who have a pack of Maltese dogs. The two sets of friends do not get together.

I’m looking forward, I guess, to years of this place. My parents moved there after living for 40+ years in upstate New York, and they are slightly baffled by it but they love the weather. (They are not retired yet so not entirely entrenched yet, but they did take us with some excitement to see the Yacht Club Country Club, which has a conference room that was empty except for empty chairs where things like The Happiness Club meets—I’m not making this up. The room has a sign above its entrance that says Courageous Room. My stepfather joked about starting a Misery Club, but wondered what room he’d use.)

On Monday morning, after the announcement that Osama bin Laden was killed the night before, I went to the pool at 7:30 am, which is when it opens. A tan resident joined me in the pool after a few minutes. “Another day in paradise!” she said. This refrain is heard often at the Villages (seriously, I’m not making that up either). The Villages newspaper, my mother says, has the fastest growing circulation of any newspaper in the country. It included a blurb about bin Laden on Monday. In the early afternoon, the lesbians came over and noted with alarm that it was only a blurb. They were dressed in matching yellow shirts for their golf-cart club, looking about as adorable as two human beings can. One was in the Army.

This is a wild country we’re living in. When we returned to Capitol Hill last night, the first person I saw was a bearded hipster I swear was smoking a corncob pipe. Okay, he was smoking a cigarette. But I felt like I was watching a parade of American types. I slept very hard last night and did not dream of anything.