Chris Nicholson's Writing Weblog
September 25, 2005 • Sunday
A few days ago I was in a town just north of Tampa, Fla., population 50,000. The town consists entirely of gated communities populated by retired people. The town is designed for old people.
The restaurants are few and mostly budget-conscious. McDonald's, Denny's, Subway, Cracker Barrel. The other retail businesses consist mostly of pharmacies, musical instruments, medical supplies, hearing aids (entire stores devoted to hearing aids), walkers. There are also golf stores. The other businesses come in clusters, and they dominate the landscape of nearly every shopping strip; in some cases, they are all that's in the shopping strip: lawyers, physicians, eye doctors, emergency walk-in centers, nursing services, ....
Roads are flanked by golf-cart paths. Residents drive golf carts as if they were cars. They use them for laundry runs, grocery trips, going out to eat. The carts come in red, green, yellow, blue, striped, paisley ... ; they're, covered, uncovered, have vinyl seats, leather seats, upholstered seats. Some sport bumper stickers and mock-vanity license plates, American flags and fuzzy dice.
I'm unsure how to feel about all this. My first reaction is that I'm disturbed that life comes to this. Living in Florida, separated from your family, living in a town stamped with chain stores and cookie-cutter food, where you're always in sight of an office to cater to your myriad medical needs, waiting to die.
Then I wonder if I should be relieved. To know that one day I may come to accept that life does come to this, come to needing these services to be around the corner. And to know that there are places in this country where the whole town was built around making these necessities convenient.
Either way, however I feel it about it now is not as important as how I'll feel about it in 40 years.
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