Fitting in With the South Florida Scene

Blog # 9

My life as a Floridian started on July 15, 2020. That’s when I fully moved into my new villa home in Tuscany Bay, a gated community in Boynton Beach that is restricted to age 55-plus. I had just turned 57 the month before. So I was definitely on the young side for this place. And as I’ve often been taken for someone younger than I am, I figured that many residents of this “active adult” community would not think I was old enough to live there.

I was 57 but on a good day could pass for 47. Coloring my hair has helped with that.

But for my new life in a community of older folks, I had decided to let my gray roots grow in unabated. I wanted to make friends with my new neighbors, and I didn’t want them to think I was a young whippersnapper moving in where I wasn’t supposed to. Or they might think I was the daughter of current residents or maybe someone visiting the community or renting a vacation home from a homeowner.

As a solo transplant to Florida, I hoped to fit in with my new neighborhood. I wanted the other residents of Tuscany Bay to know that I had bought a house there and was a member of the community just like them. It was a little scary being the new person in the neighborhood when I didn’t know anybody around the area. Other than the friendly realtor who had sold me my house and lived in the community herself (and invited me to play pickleball), I was without friends or even acquaintances in the Palm Beach County area.

So when I arrived in July, my gray hairs were starting to appear all over my head. I had stopped the temptation to apply root cover-up to my hair, at least for now. Later, when I had a chance to meet neighbors, join in with activities, and feel like part of the community, I could start dyeing my hair again.

But it is really hard to move into a new community during a pandemic. Everybody was closed up inside their homes — due to the coronavirus as well as to the mid-summer Florida heat. And while this would be difficult for anybody moving to a brand-new part of the country, it is a little tougher when you are alone. It was just me and my dog, Lex.

The community happy hours and poolside cookouts, the various clubs and clubhouse activities — everything that I had read about and looked forward to in my new community — it was all canceled due to the COVID lockdowns. So my opportunities for making new friends were substantially curtailed.

I had to improvise and come up with other ways. Other than someone from the “welcome committee” calling me and stopping by to leave a bag of Tuscany Bay items at my doorstep, I did not have much of a chance to meet new people. Another woman who lived in the community called me to welcome me to the neighborhood and then she sent an e-card. But nobody was coming out to meet in person.

So, while I was busy during my first month in Florida shopping for additional furniture, rugs, pictures, and other furnishings, and fixing up my new home, I also needed to formulate a plan to meet people — whether online or in person.

Eventually then, here are the things I did:

• Called the handyman my realtor recommended, so that I could get some things fixed in the house and receive advice on other things I could do myself — making a new friend in the process

• Inquired about joining the outdoor activities allowed at Tuscany Bay, so that I could exercise and meet people

• Started going to the community pool in the afternoons and trying to make friends there (from a safe distance)

• Signed up for the local NextDoor site, an online neighborhood forum, so I could find doggie playdates for Lex, learn about local businesses and doctors’ practices, and, eventually, meet other Democrats as topics increasingly turned to politics in the months leading up to the presidential election

• Added a posting to Tuscany Bay’s online bulletin board as another way to find playdates for Lex, who missed his puppy friends in Virginia

• Signed up for Meetup.com, inputting into the online form my political advocacy and social interests, so I could find ways to (hopefully) safely do local activities and meet like-minded people

• Followed local Democratic and liberal groups on Facebook

• Joined a regional group, Broward for Progress, which held all its meetings by Zoom at the current time

• Began attending Biden-Harris events in the area.

And with that, I was off and running. Things slowly started to happen for me, and soon Lex and I weren’t alone anymore.

It started at the community pool. While I was on the wait-list for the water aerobics classes, I was able to go to the pool as long as I walked through the gate with a mask on, signed in with the guard there, and ensured there were fewer than 20 people already in the pool.

My first afternoon walking down the steps into the pool alone, I was feeling nervous. But I was determined to smile and say “Hi” to people. It was a sunny day, so I wore a baseball-style cap on my head and sunglasses. Nobody could see my gray roots, and that first day nobody talked to me.

I went another day, and it was basically the same thing. Most of the women had pool noodles and were clustered in groups, six feet apart but facing each other in semicircles, conversing with each other and basically ignoring me. If someone came into the pool after me, I greeted them and they usually responded, but not much more than that.

I was beginning to feel that my preconceived notions of looking too young were actually accurate, and that nobody was interested in meeting someone who could potentially just be a visitor (although no visitors were allowed at any of the community amenities under pandemic guidelines). Or, maybe they were just cliquey people. Though I hoped not.

On my third visit to the pool I was finally fortunate to meet someone friendly. Jeanette, a lovely woman I believed to be in her early 80s, was warm and welcoming, and I was so relieved when she started talking to me right away. She did not join the semicircles of women bobbing noodles below them in the water and chattering away. Instead, as I did slow walking laps back and forth across the shallow end of the pool, she floated across the pool as well and conversed with me.

After talking for a while with Jeanette, I learned that there was a pandemic-style doubles tennis group every weekday at the community’s tennis courts. She told me that the men and women played together on the courts each morning starting at 8:30, and it was socially distanced and followed all county protocols. She encouraged me to come out and join them. I needed to bring my ID the first time there, to show that I was on the list of residents. Nobody outside of Tuscany Bay was allowed to play on the tennis or pickleball courts during the pandemic. I also needed to bring my own chair.

So, the next week I joined the tennis players on the courts and placed my soccer-mom chair against one of the fence posts that were conveniently located six feet apart. Everyone was friendly and welcoming, which was a nice change. They let me know that they organized in groups of four people for four games a set, with each person serving once. When there were extra people sitting out during sets, we would sit in our chair along the fence on the shady side of the first court. Nobody sat out for more than one set of four games. And everybody stayed apart during play so that we didn’t come close to each other. Tennis is nice that way.

The other tennis players were older than me, and they liked my “youth” — aha!! They thought I was great because I could run for the ball and knew what I was doing on the court. Suddenly I was in demand and they wanted me to play with them every morning. This is hilarious to me, because for the first 40-some years of my life, I was not an athlete and actually disliked sports. I was usually picked last for kickball in elementary school, I hated gym class, and I was the only one of four sisters to not ever play softball, which I was not a fan of. I did not watch any professional sports for most of my life and only went to soccer, baseball, and basketball games if my kids were playing in them.

But during my 40s, while taking my kids to our swim-and-racquet club for their tennis lessons, I got recruited to learn tennis with the other moms and instantly got hooked on it. I soon was immersed in beginner tennis lessons, fun play with friends, cardio tennis, a variety of clinics, club teams and then league teams, and a steady calendar full of tennis socials. It became a huge part of my life, and I celebrated my 50th and 55th birthdays on the courts with my close friends, the people I had met at the club playing tennis over the years.

So here I was starting all over again with a new group of tennis people, and although I really missed my friends back in Virginia, I was happy to fit in somewhere in my strange new life in Florida. The tennis courts were a familiar place for me, and the rules were basically the same down here, miles away from the courts I had learned on in northern Virginia. I soon made tennis part of my regular routine at Tuscany Bay and gained new friendships. The tennis women were also a great source of information that I needed about my new home and community (not to mention fun for a little local gossip!).

So I joined a tennis group — check. I tried pickleball — check. I eventually got off the wait-list and joined a water aerobics class — check. When I first started going to the morning class at the pool, once we took off our masks as we were entering the water, I began to recognize some people who I had seen around the community, and I met some new ladies as well. One fit, friendly woman was doing both tennis and water aerobics, and she was on the younger side. We became friends. I also learned that if I hung around in the pool after the class was over, there was an opportunity to chat with some of the people. The adjacent hot tub was a great place to do this, although we were limited in numbers allowed for that.

Even one of the women who used to ignore me in the pool in my first month at the community was now talking to me during water aerobics. So that was progress.

Surprisingly, though, one of my most successful connections so far came after I had posted a “Looking for a playdate for my dog” notice on Tuscany Bay’s online bulletin board. A woman named Sue eventually called me, and we met up one Sunday morning on the green lawn behind my villa. She had an 18-month-old dog named Jasper, who was just a little bigger than my 2-year-old Lex, and just as energetic. And Sue was a young’un in the community, like me! She was 56, and had moved to Florida to be close to her father, who was in the beginning stages of dementia (though I wouldn’t have known it, as I had been playing tennis with him and he seemed fine). She had bought one of the single-family houses in the community and moved in a month after I had; her dad and his second wife lived across the street from her.

While Sue and I watched “the boys” romp together on the grass and tried to make sure they didn’t run off toward a nearby pond (we unleashed them despite community rules, because they both were good about staying with us and needed to wrestle unhindered), we chatted and got to know each other. I learned that she was also divorced, though for a lot longer, and had three kids in their early 20s, close in age to my three. They also lived in a different state from her, like mine. She worked full-time in Boca Raton, which is about 25 minutes away, so she could only get together on weekends. But we ended up having regular playdates with our dogs on Sundays, including going to Jupiter Beach’s canine area, where dogs could run free on a stretch of the beach.

So it was a good thing for both me and Lex to have Sue and Jasper in our new life in Tuscany Bay.

The final piece of the puzzle for making me feel like a part of my new community was getting involved with other progressives. I did that through the Meetup, NextDoor, and Facebook sites. They all had options for finding local people online who had the same views and interests as me. From Meetup I learned about a local Democrats group, which used to meet in person but now met online during the pandemic. I began to attend their virtual meetings and subsequently do volunteer work for the upcoming presidential election. I helped with text-banking and postcard writing, among other things.

Through NextDoor, I virtually made a lot of liberal friends quite by accident. Although I had first signed up for the local neighborhood site to learn about the area, get localized recommendations, and find playdates for my dog, I soon got sucked into heated discussions on the message boards about politics and current events. There were some strident Trump supporters online who fell into the cult mentality of worshipping Trump and refusing to believe that the COVID crisis was a real thing. I discovered anti-maskers and people who hated Biden, Harris, and everything considered “Socialist.” I couldn’t stay quiet for these discussions, and soon found myself becoming allies with other Biden supporters who argued alongside me with the Trumpists. We began to send each other private messages, and I was happy to find like-minded people in this piece of Florida that I had chosen. With a few of them, I made plans to eventually meet up in person.

Through a Facebook group I had joined (“Palm Beach For Biden”), I perused the online announcements for local rallies and sign-waving events. I started attending them when I saw how careful the local Democrats were about COVID. In a “red” state run by a Republican governor who was trying to cover up the true coronavirus data, who opened up bars and restaurants and refused to endorse mask-wearing, I was happy to find out that the Democrats in Palm Beach County were much better and smarter about the reality of the pandemic.

In nearby Delray Beach, I began to find my people. Biden-Harris supporters gathered in the late afternoon every Thursday before the election to wave their signs and flags at all four corners and on the medians of a busy intersection in town. Once I was able to adjust my (remote) work schedule so that I could join them, I looked forward to meeting up with them every week. They all wore masks, despite the heat. They were socially distanced and of course they were outside. They didn’t do any of the things that we saw at Trump rallies.

With a boom box blaring songs on one of the corners, it was so energizing there in Delray. I enjoyed getting the passing cars to honk and cheer for us (though with an occasional thumbs down from passing Trumpers). I was grateful to be a part of a group that I could identify with in Florida and with whom I could safely and happily rally. We all were there because we wanted change — we wanted Donald Trump out. I started meeting people, the weekly attendees at this event, and soon I had a bunch of Delray Democratic friends, including the two people who organized the whole thing.

As a result of meeting these local organizers, I soon became involved with something I’d never done before — going into the poor and disenfranchised neighborhoods of Delray Beach and neighboring towns and helping their citizens figure out their mail-in ballots, get registered to vote, or just navigate the complicated voting process. Many Haitians lived in the area — South Florida has the highest Haitian immigration population in the country — and some of them did not speak English well or had trouble deciphering their ballots. Fascinating for me, we partnered with Haitian Americans who speak both English and Kreole, and they helped the local immigrants with translating the election language. I assisted where I could, and I found the Haitians very nice and earnest people, who just wanted an opportunity to vote. We did have to be careful not to appear to be filling out any ballots for them; we kept everything above-board and just answered questions, providing hand sanitizer, masks, and pens and helping the process along.

In addition to reaching out to this immigrant population (which the Republicans would never go near), I also became involved with the movement to help former felons be able to vote in Florida — a controversial and heartbreaking situation in which many minority “returning citizens” had been stripped of their right to vote unless they could pay off all their past court fees and fines. In most cases they didn’t know how to find out how much they owed or could not afford to pay it once they did know. There was an organization, the Florida Rights Restoration Coalition (FRRC), that was dedicated to raising money and reaching these former felons, helping them pay off their court bills so they could register to vote (something Mike Bloomberg ended up donating lots of money to). Many of the felony charges seemed manufactured to get people of color into prisons, I learned, and this was another example of voter suppression to not let these Florida citizens vote even after they had served their time.

I volunteered for this great cause for a couple of weeks, going into neighborhood bodegas, laundromats, dollar stores, and small churches with other community volunteers, where we talked to the local people (always with masks on) and passed out or taped up flyers with information that could help them and lead them to the FRRC and its coffers. We had some Spanish-language flyers for those who needed them. I was very pleasantly surprised to see “60 Minutes” dedicate a segment of its show to this issue soon after I got involved advocating for it. It was very rewarding being part of something like this for the first time in my life.

So I was really jumping into the deep end with advocacy work before the big November election, but it helped me meet like-minded people and make friends, explore the various towns and neighborhoods of my new county and state, and learn about the different kinds of people who made up the new world around me.

I had told myself earlier in the year, after I divorced a Trump-supporting Republican and was in the process of moving down to Florida alone, that I would look for the kind of people who felt the same way as me, and I would not get close to any far-right types ever again. I had been on a mission to find my people and surround myself with them, and by golly, I think I was doing it! As I sat on the ground in Delray Beach one late October afternoon blowing up blue balloons with other Biden fans before our last local rally, I realized it was happening. It was so nice to find myself fitting into the new life I had carved out in this corner of the country.

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Jenny and Lex

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