The Golden Age Bingo Party Trailer Park and Long-Life Emporium
The Golden Age Bingo Party Trailer Park and Long-Life Emporium
It’s like discovering the fountain of youth, except everyone is old.
A man emerges from the dark space between two oversized trailers and stumbles a few steps down the road. He spins, head titled skyward, as though looking for the stars to guide him. After a moment, he stops, his eyes lowering. His gaze falls upon me, then flicks to my mother, sitting just to my left. The man squints, takes a step closer.
“Canada?” he barks. His voice his high, nasal. In that one-word interrogation, his Quebec accent is clear. “Canada? That you?”
“Hi JC!” screams my mom, Gillian. French people call her Gillian; everyone else calls her Jill. Until today, I’ve never heard anyone call her “Canada.” She stands up and gives JC a hug, then a kind of ghost kiss on each cheek. The accents, the kissing—how vaguely European it all seems. “When did you get here?” she asks.
“Just now!” yells JC. He speaks only in shouts. “Can’t remember where anything is.”
“Where’s your wife?” my mom asks.
“Not coming! Sick!” JC replies. No further explanation seems necessary. She’s sick, so she’s not coming, alright? I wonder, sick with what? Not coming this week, at all this year, ever again?
“And how’s your health?” asks mom. Smalltalk is weird here.
“I just got my 12th stent!” yells JC. “Right here!” he adds, beating his chest with his fist. This man is a risk-taker.
“Oh, great. They’re cheaper by the dozen!” says mom, giggling at her own excellent joke. It’s lost on JC. Maybe a language barrier, maybe he’s a bit deaf. Maybe he’s offended? It seems unlikely. He’s moved on to the next topic, pointing at one of the trailers just across the street.
“Who lives there?” he demands. He wobbles over toward the trailer, trying to peer into the darkened windows. Unsatisfied, he waves goodbye like a man trying desperately to fly—turning and flapping both arms with his fingers pointed outward, but without coordination of any kind—and disappears back into a dark laneway.
Later in the week, while swimming laps with my sister, I see JP beside the pool. It’s about 10 in the morning, a glorious, sunny day. These are the kinds of days that make you understand why people spend the winter months here in Naples, Floria. JP is tanning, half asleep, and doesn’t notice us for the first 25 minutes we’re there. Then he stands up and marches toward the stairs of the pool, studying a huge thermometer stuck on a wall between a sign that says “Paradise Found” and another that says “Here we salt margaritas, not sidewalks.” Having examined the thermometer for a few seconds, he turns toward the pool and shouts, “There used to be a clock here!” and demands to know the time.
I tell this to my mom an hour later. “He’s right,” she says. “The clock used to be there.”
I had visited Florida once before. It was 2011, and my ex-wife’s family had a timeshare in Saint Augustine, along the Atlantic coast. It struck me as an awful place. The apartment my in-laws owned one-twelfth of was in a block of brick buildings very similar to the place they lived in Ottawa, although in fairness the shrubbery was pretty different. The whole city of Saint Augustine was built in long, straight, boring lines—highways intersecting highways, all box stores and strip malls and miniputt courses and chain restaurants repeating in a dull, comfortable pattern. You were never more than a mile from any of them, or the liquor store, or the beach, or the nearest gun range. Saint Augustine is meant to be the oldest settlement in the United States, so it seemed fitting that it was a mediocre grid filled with average things, as far from greatness as can be.
During the trip in 2011, I met very few Americans, and even less Floridians. The condo complex was filled with mostly grey-haired Canadians. They swarmed the pools in the hottest parts of the afternoon, pink-skinned and freckled, noses red and blistering. They drank beer and yelled about the hockey scores. They said “oops sorry” when they passed within 10 feet of you in the parking lot or along the beach, that uniquely Canadian greeting.
My ex-family filled their Florida home with the familiar objects of their Canada home. We drove down with a minivan full of canned goods, pots and pans, tablecloths, homemade wine, chair coverings, doilies, golf clubs, dried pasta, fresh pasta, and enough clothing to dress several families. They also filled their home with the rest of their family. The Florida Month was not so much a suggestion as a birthright. Each of my ex-wife’s siblings was expected to join the vacation for at least a week, and dutifully obliged. Some drove, others flew, but all arrived.
It seemed to me that this should have felt like a chore to all involved, but instead it was an elation. The time spent as a family somewhere warm, surrounded by golf courses and Sam’s Clubs and that seemingly infinite stretch of beach—this was a thing they lived for, cherished, shared. They had dinner together each night, something home-cooked and delicious from the stores of food slogged 3,000 kilometers, and they shared memories and laughed long into the night. Again, normal life transplanted. It was all so wholesome and, even though I resisted the feeling, kind of lovely. They tried to include me, of course, but I always felt like an outsider, a transplant from a more dysfunctional family into this outwardly perfect one.
Also on that trip, my ex and I escaped her family to go see mine. We rented a car and drove across the state to Naples, where my aunt and uncle have lived for 40 years. The drive showed Saint Augustine to be the rule and not the exception to Floridian urban planning. A bend in a road in Florida is a novelty. It can be seen coming for miles, for there are no hills, just flat stretches of pavement bisecting brown waterways presumably filled with deadly creatures. From Saint Augustine to Naples, you drive through orange groves and at one point bypass Orlando (another curve!). You see firework stands and gas stations and little else. And then you arrive in Naples, which is much the same as Saint Augustine, though facing west.
My uncle John and aunt Heather moved to Naples in the late 1980s from Guelph, Canada, where they had been living in the same suburban development as my uncle Scott and aunt Su. Scott and John are my mom’s older brothers—Scott is four years older and John six. In the late 80s, we were also living in Guelph, a cute university town then that was beginning to show the first signs of becoming what it is today, a commuter hub for Toronto. My parents craved a quieter place and bought the ridiculous hobby farm in Bancroft where I grew up, and Scott and his family followed a year and a half later to the same rural region. Heather, the only one of any of that generation of adults to have a single, stable career for her entire life, moved to Naples to continue her work as a nurse. She and John are two of the smartest and funniest people anyone could hope to meet, which, in addition to the perpetual good weather in Naples, I believe accounts for the gravitational pull that their move to the US had on the entire family. Scott and Su starting going most winters during school break, driving with their three kids in their wood-paneled minivan to spend Christmases or March Breaks in Naples. My cousins would return with tales of alligators in swimming pools, of holes-in-one at the ubiquitous miniputt courses, of sleeping outside in shorts on Christmas Eve. It drove my siblings and I wild with jealousy.
My own immediate family hesitated about (or were forced to avoid planning for) Florida, my parents citing financial difficulties, which was true and not true at once. I remember being given a choice when I was 10 or 11 years old about what to do with the money I had saved between my paper route, working with my dad during summers, and saving all the birthday money I’d received for years. I had a couple of hundred dollars in a Kawartha Credit Union My First Saving’s Account, and could either play hockey or go to Florida to visit the family for Christmas. I don’t remember what I chose (I think hockey?), but it’s immaterial. The family used the money to pay bills. Or my dad stole it to buy beer. I’ll never know.
Either way, my first trip to see the Naples family was delayed until 2011. (I also never learned to play hockey.) On that visit, Naples itself left no great impression on me—I vaguely remember visiting its only tourist destination, Tin City, and hearing that it had a zoo—but the trip was important for confirming a long-held suspicion: I didn’t really care for my in-laws. My own family was chaotic, but hilarious. They were deeply generous with their limited means. They ate badly and never exercised and drove everywhere, but it didn’t matter. They were the echo chamber in which my sense of humour and personality formed, but they were more than that too. They were, and remain, the safest space. You could express your views around them and expect to be either applauded or widely (though warmly) ridiculed, but never quietly judged or gossiped about.
The happiness that my in-laws wore was the thinnest of veneers. Each night, retiring to their separate rooms, the “Can you believe she said that” conversations would begin. Grudges would metastasize. The next morning around coffee, smiles would be faked, positions entrenched. This was a family in which homosexuality was scoffed at despite one of my ex’s cousins being married to and raising children with another woman. It was one in which mental health was a joke about a short bus despite another of the cousins having committed suicide as a teenager. There was real love in there somewhere, but so mingled with gossip and scorn as to become obscure.
I visited Naples at a time when I needed reminding that not all families were this way. I spent a few goofy days with my hilarious, big-hearted family, and driving back to Saint Augustine was able to easily conclude this trip that was one of the final nails in the coffin of an unworkable marriage. A few months later, I was gone.
It’s hard to say exactly when my mom became a snowbird. She and her partner bought their first place in Florida in 2012, but had been visiting for a few years before that. She had always been close with her brothers, yet my sense is that she needed to wait until she was free of her abusive marriage and that my dad was dead with his ashes kind of scattered to really embrace and enjoy her relationship with her own family. Or maybe she just needed to be retired with some free time and extra cash. Whatever set her free, the life she found waiting for her in Florida seems custom made for her.
The Naples Mobile Home Park, then:
Driving up Tamiami Trail, you’d never know it was there. There are motels on either side of the road that are beige and off-white, respectively, the kind of ignorable low-lying places called things like Garden Suites or Oceanside Bungalows despite a noted lack of garden and oceans—and, for that matter, bungalows. This section of Tamiami Trail seems comprised entirely of strip malls, some with stores selling lawn furniture or boating supplies, but most catering to South Florida’s aging/aged population: hearing aid centers, vision centers, pharmacies, mobility equipment shops, and a smattering of family-run restaurants with very cheap happy hours.
Naples Mobile Home Park sits behind one such strip mall (donut shop, hearing aids, eyeglasses, lawn furniture) and is accessed through the parking lot of the Garden Suites or through a side road I always miss the turn for. It is three longish streets abutted on one end with a pond that forms a natural divide between the park and a neighbourhood of what can only be described as real houses. Beside the pond sits the heated saltwater pool and the event center/community center, where every night some park member hosts social events—Euchre, bingo, beanbag baseball (more on this to come), live music, billiards tournaments. The center has long tables for all kinds of activities, and a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle is always being assembled on the table nearest the front door. There’s a fridge full of beer and wine and some bottles of water, but it’s mostly beer and wine. The center has huge windows covered in screens to keep the bugs out and let the breeze through, and is a pleasant temperature almost always.
Two of the three longish streets of the Naples Mobile Home Park are lined with tidy mobile homes, which are not at all what I thought mobile homes were. For one, they are immobile, held to the ground with giant clips and spikes to stop them blowing away in one of Florida’s frequent storms. Secondly, they don’t look as though they were ever mobile, except when a truck drove them here and dropped them in place. Many have decks built around them, making them further immobile, and almost all have a lanai attached, a kind of screened-in outdoor area where people spent most of their time in Florida, just watching people go by and waving and making knowing jokes and laughing. The third longish street has what I would classify as mobile homes: RVs and “fifth wheels” that are also anchored in place, but that sometimes drive away. These are all in row C of the park, and one of these bloated trailers is where my mom and her partner first lived when they moved in. She’s in row B now, a matter of no small pride. Her home looks out at the side road that I always miss the turn for, and at some of the trailers and fifth wheels. If she leans out her front door, she can see her old home, sitting there immobile, a little ways down the street.
There are no shortages of Adirondack chairs or American flags on these houses, both of which would lend the park a kind of backwoods menace were the natural surroundings not so beautiful. There are tall palm trees framing the streets, and wispy clouds that turn a harmless deep pink each evening, giving the place the look of an 80s album cover, a warm glow that seems like it will last forever.
From about 4 p.m. onwards, life is lived outdoors at the Naples Mobile Home Park. There’s a series of little rituals you could set your watch to. Around 4:15, a couple from northern Ontario in their late 60s or early 70s will ride past on a special tricycle for old people that has a giant basket on the back and sometimes another on the front. This couple put their dog in the front basket and ride around the park’s streets several times between 4 and 5 p.m., she stopping frequently to chat with anyone who says hello and he holding a can of beer in one hand and a smoldering Churchill cigar in the other. Other couples ride or walk past, everyone staying active in their own way as the heat of the afternoon begins to burn off. This is the time to squeeze in exercise, because dinners are early here and evening activities begin around 7 p.m.
I develop a few favourite passersby, of course.
There’s Denise, the youngest resident in the park, who at 50 looks 40, so by contrast with everyone else looks even younger. Denise is loud, funny, cheerful, and has always been somewhere that the other residents have only thought about going to. She’s full of energy and her husband is skiing in Quebec or something and her kids are at college maybe and they are either the makers of or heavy consumers of a blueberry wine. She certainly has a lot of it.
There’s Marilyn, a semi-retired schoolteacher from Queens. It takes about four seconds of conversation with Marilyn to know that she’s from New York and that she’s a teacher, as she mentions both facts frequently. Marilyn talks in a kind of uninterrupted stream of consciousness about what she’s been up to that day, and if something really important has happened she takes a seat and adopts an even more serious expression, leaning in to brush a shoulder or knee to emphasize when something really important happened. These qualities would be irritating in a less warm and less interesting person, but something about the way she speaks—it’s definitely the New York accent—and the way she makes fun of herself constantly makes her the most entertaining person in the park. She’s also the chief umpire of beanbag baseball, so you need to stay on her good side.
There’s Rick, mom’s deeply tanned and sarcastic neighbour. I think he’s almost 80, but he’s fit the way that some men always are, especially those who work outside or with their hands. Even at his age, he’ll ride down to Naples from his home in Pennsylvania on his motorbike in a single day (18 hours, minimal breaks, glad when his wife Marlene flies so he doesn’t need to stop so often). Rick has installed a full bar in his lanai, and Marlene is said to make a mean margarita. Every morning, Rick delivers his newspaper to mom’s front door wearing his bathrobe. He has a joke or a bad pun for every occasion. On the live music nights and also in every single inning of beanbag baseball, he does this joke where he stands up and starts to dance and then pretends to pull a muscle in his back and screams in pain and hobbles away, and he’s so good at it that every time he does it, I forget that he’s acting and worry that we need to call an ambulance or something. He and Marlene contract COVID while I’m there, so she never gets to prove that she makes a mean margarita. After beanbag baseball when I compliment her and tell her she’s the finest beanbag baseball scorekeeper I’d ever met, she grabs my arm and whispers, “Well I could just take you home and gobble you up.” I like her almost as much as I like Rick.
Then there’s George, one of the fifth-wheel residents. He’s from New Brunswick and is nearly 90 years old. He’s tall and broad-shouldered and strong in the special way people from New Brunswick seem to be even in their very old age. Every day around 5 p.m., when he’s done his exercise walk, he stops by for a chat in both French and English. He buys a 24-pack of beer every Friday and allows himself to drink that over the weekend, but refuses any offers of drinks from Monday to Thursday. He is always smiling, always curious and courteous, always happy. He needs to fly back to Canada in the middle of his stay in Naples to re-engage his insurance, a special kind of modern corporate cruelty that means Canadians over a certain age aren’t allowed to leave their home province for more than 30 days at a time, but this doesn’t phase George. This is just life for George, a quick inconvenience to endure in order to enjoy the things he loves: being warm, chatting with the neighbours, playing music. On music night, George plays guitar and fiddle with the dexterity of someone a quarter of his age. He is the absolute model for aging well.
There are obviously less incredible people, poorer role models. But it warms me and fills me with a filial pride to see that the good ones gravitate towards my mom. Good people finding good people, out here in the swamps.
Okay, let’s talk about beanbag baseball.
It’s kind of what it sounds like, but it’s also nothing like what it sounds like. If you have a concept of baseball in your mind, let it go. It’s no use to use here. But if you know what beanbags are, that’s a solid enough start.
Baseball is a sport typically played by teams of at least nine people. It’s typically played outdoors, in a space that’s basically green but also brown in places and with some white dots that indicate process. It’s usually played by large men with huge arms and a hankerin’ for tobacco. There are wooden sticks and balls involved.
Whereas baseball has beanbags.
It may not have been invented at the Naples Mobile Home Park, but it seems to have been perfected here. This normally pleasant place loses all sense of decorum and respect on Sunday nights, when we all gather in the community hall, an airy building beside the pool. Everyone arrives to the community center building as usual, which means carrying a bag filled with beer or wine or, best, both. (My sister and I arrive dual-equipped.) But instead of the usual layout of a sort of conference room enlivened only by the thrall of a jigsaw puzzle off to one side, the room is dynamically transformed. All the tables have been pushed to one side and there are two long lines of folding chairs leading to a board propped at a 60 degree angle with various holes cut in it, all labelled with things from baseball. There are three chairs arranged around the board. The holes on said board say stuff like “out” and “HR” and “1B” and it becomes clear that this is an object at which to pelt bean bags.
I keep wondering who moved everything around? Who ever does the physical labour here? It must be George.
There’s a long table that runs perpendicular to the chairs where the “umpires” sit, a term I use with extreme looseness here. The umpires are Marilyn and Marlene and a woman I don’t know and whose name I never catch, but she’s of the ilk of the others: mid-60s or -70s or -80s (these are a for-all-intents-and-purposes catchall here) and wrinkly and tanned and pleasant and flirtatious. Upon entering, we are obliged to choose a playing card from a deck sitting on the table. I choose a black card and so does my sister, so we are on a team. Others file in and choose cards, and before long both teams are more-than-full. There’s hilarious pre-game banter and trash talk that precedes a completely outrageous sport. That should be in quotes, really. “Sport.”
The sport (“sport”) works like this: the teams, arranged on rows of chairs, take turn throwing bean bags at the board labelled with baseball terminology. Each thrower, or I guess “batter,” gets three bags to hit any-old-hole, and wherever their bag lands first is their turn. If you throw a bag into a hold labelled “out,” you’re out. If you land on “1B,” that’s a base hit and you have to sit in the first chair that’s arranged beside the board. If someone is already in that chair, they move to the next one, like going around the bases. If you land on “HR,” you have to run around and touch all three chairs and then come back to a line of tape that has been temporarily affixed to the floor that is also the line from which you throw the beanbags. That’s a home run, baby. It’s kind of like baseball, but adjusted for geriatrics who have spent the day hydrating with Pabst Blue Ribbon. Like baseball, but easy.
Or it seems like so it seems for about 9 seconds. In truth, it’s a violently contested affair. These sweet old ladies, who make up 90% of the teams, are as vicious as they are well-practiced. Most of them can hit the “HR” spot with their eyes closed, as they quickly and happily demonstrate. Each time someone hits any spot on the board, the whole room erupts in extasy, and the person (old lady) who threw the beanbag dances and screams and runs around the room with such a vigor that belies their 60/70/80 years.
Things get aggressive rapidly. A homerun from the other team is met with jeers from our team, and the homerun hitter waltzes past our chairs giving everyone these annoying thumbs-down raspberries and actually jumping and dancing and where-the-hell-did-that-energy-come-froming and laughing right in our shocked faces. There’s something remarkable about the way people move after a great throw. They float across the floor. They lock eyes with you to taunt you while floating. My own mother, on the other team, runs—positively sprints—past her own children when she nails a HR, which happens frequently. I haven’t seen her move this quickly in about a decade. (I want to say two decades, but in truth can’t remember a time I saw my mom actually run.)
Our team tries to respond with likewise jeers, but we know we’re beaten as soon as the first inning has passed. There’s no respite. We play nine innings and lose by about 12,000 runs, which is both humiliating and so hilarious that it ceases to be humiliating.
Which is kind of the lesson here, really.
I guess I’m afraid of aging out of relevance. Not that I have any particular relevance in a broad sense; I’m far from a pillar of any society. Broadly, though, we all hope we matter somehow. We want to be important in little ways. We want someone to call us when they need help, or when they have something they need to get off their chests. I personally take tremendous pleasure being of some kind of use to the people I love, the people in my family, the gang of quirky weirdos I have collected and call my best friends, those I care about in some way. I worry that when I’m older no one will depend on me for anything, and I’ll just be some guy who likes video games and who no one calls or messages about the important stuff.
There’s something deeply reassuring about seeing the communities that my mom and her brothers have built here. A lot of my apprehension about her decision to retire to Florida comes from the world “Florida,” from all of the well-trod stereotypes about the place, but comes too from my ignorant supposition that it was a mediocre choice. What imagination resides within the decision to just, I don’t know, go to Florida for the winters? It felt inadequate for someone like her, who’s curious and fun and funny. It felt like settling. But another, probably bigger part, of what I worried about for her were my own fears of becoming useless. I needn’t have worried.
Her decision to live here was no mediocre choice. It was an active choice to surround herself with her people, with her own quirky weirdos. It’s a life with enough structure to feel constantly supported (Bingo nights, thrift-shopping ladies-only lunches, billiard tournaments, bake offs, big community dinners) and free enough to not feel overwhelmed. The community is big enough to ignore the people who aren’t that interesting, and small enough to form lasting and deep friendships with a special few.
And isn’t that kind of what we all need, at least eventually? I wrote the first part of this story from Florida, surrounded by that warmth. I’ve written the last parts from Barcelona, where I have lived for a couple of years, and where I have just this year started to realize that I still haven’t found that thing my mom has found. This is a too-big city with a too-small community, despite the ease with which it’s possible to meet new people here. It’s diverse and interesting, the weather is often perfect, the food is wonderful and cheap, alcohol is essentially free. There are often good, nice, smart people around. But the longer I stayed, the more I yearned for my people, a community of goofballs always with a quip ready and who are generous with their time and their emotions.
For a brief moment I considered forming a Barcelona Beanbag Baseball league, but the alliteration was too much so I had to abandon the idea.