The Lotos-Eaters
As the baby boom generation ages, there are few ethnographies that capture the dynamics of aging. This new book is based on years of participant observation in the Sands, a beautiful ocean community of well-off individuals and couples seeking the easy life. Yet the community members contend with deep uncertainties about health as they learn to face the realities of death. Identity, sexuality, gender, and conflict play into a sense of who belongs where, who is counted a friend or stranger in the struggles of old age. Warren shows how the vicissitudes of the aging body center the present and become anchors for the past and future. Expressed in beautiful literary prose, this book moves beyond wealth to explore the realities of aging in poignant new ways that will enliven discussion in courses on Gerontology, Medical Sociology, Inequality, and many others.
Carol A. B. Warren is Professor Emerita of Sociology at the University of Kansas, USA.
The Lotos-Eaters
Aging and Identity in a Yacht Club Community
Carol A. B. Warren
First published 2017
by Routledge
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Warren, Carol A. B., 1944 author.
Title: The lotos-eaters : aging and identity in a yacht club community / Carol A. B. Warren.
Description: New York, NY : Routledge, 2016.
Identifiers: LCCN 2016012236 | ISBN 9781138193673 (hardback) | ISBN 9781138193680 (pbk.) | ISBN 9781315639208 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: RetireesCaliforniaCase studies. | RetirementCaliforniaCase studies. | Older peopleCaliforniaSocial life and customsCase studies. | Yacht clubsCaliforniaCase studies. | Community lifeCaliforniaCase studies. | AgingSocial aspectsCase studies. | Identity (Psychology)Case studies.
Classification: LCC HQ1064.U6 C393 2016 | DDC 305.2609794dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016012236
ISBN: 978-1-138-19367-3 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-1-138-19368-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-1-31563-920-8 (ebk)
Typeset in Bembo
by Apex CoVantage, LLC
Contents
Part I
The Sands
Part II
The Yacht Club
Part III
Aging in Place
Thanks to those who read various drafts and versions of this manuscript: Bob Emerson, Shirley Hill, Maggie Kusenbach, and the anonymous reviewers. Thanks to Kathi Kirigin for the cover photo, for helping me with the manuscript at every step of the way, and for being my Muse. I am very grateful to Dean Birkenkamp and Amanda Yee, whose faith in the project kept me going, and to Jennifer Bonnar, project manager with the patience of a saint.
This ethnography would not have been possible without those residents and yacht club members who have shared their lives with me for more than a decade. I raise a glass to those of us who are still here, and in memory of those who have crossed the bar.
The Lotos-Eaters
In 2003, I retired from academia and moved to Southern California with my partner, a fellow academic retiree (the we of this book). We had bought a townhome in the 1990s in a marina community of about 1,200 homes that I call the Sands, renting it out until we moved. I had lived in Kansas for 13 years without making many friends, and with only a few friendly acquaintances. I expected nothing different from the Sands. But I was wrong. Within 10 days, we had been taken to the Sands Yacht Club (SYC) for drinks and dancing and to a nearby nightclub to hear a local singer. We had made dinner for a neighbor on her sixtieth birthday, given a party at our townhome, and joined a sailing team. We had found not only a home to live in, but a community to live within. This communityand this ethnography of itis a fusion of geographies and relationships in the Sands and in the Yacht Club.
The Sands Yacht Club is much like yacht clubs all over the state and the nation, located on harbors, rivers, and lakes. The community of the Sands, however, is distinctive: a marina and waterways set within endless summer. The Southern California weather, the miles of waterways and docks, the parks and fields, the closeness of the homes, and the affiliativeness of those who would want to live in such homes give it a mood, a feeling, an atmosphere: the haze of the Lotos.
Tennysons poem The Lotos-Eaters tells of wandering mariners, who
came into a land
In which it seemed always afternoon.
All round the coast the languid air did swoon
Breathing like one that hath a weary dream.
The mariners grow old in the peaceful and otherworldly island of the Lotos. As they consume the fruit, the years pass:
All things rest, and ripen toward the grave
In silenceripen, fall and cease:
Give us long rest or death, dark death, or dreamful ease.
The Lotos-Eaters is one of the poems within which this ethnography is set; the others are Dylan Thomass Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night, Jimmy Buffetts The Coconut Telegraph, and Tennysons Crossing the Bar. The Lotos-Eaters evokes an afternoon on a patioin the Sands or the Yacht Clubsipping an icy gin and tonic, watching the sparkling water and hazy sun. Jimmy Buffetts song The Coconut Telegraph celebrates the drum-beat web of connection within the Sands and in the Yacht Club. Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night captures the burn and rave at close of day in the Yacht Club. The explorations of aging in the Sands and in the Yacht Club ends with Tennysons Crossing the Barour dying days.
The poems of Tennyson, Buffett, and Thomas evoke the mood of the Sands, while several sets of sociological concepts frame its structure. This ethnography is not designed to develop a specific body of sociological literature, but, rather, to use literature and literatures to guide this exploration of aging and identity in a particular time and place: the Lotos world of a marina community. Since I am writing about everyday life, the insights of Simmel and Goffman are useful in framing the Sands and the Yacht Club, including sociability, affiliation, competition, communication, and presentation of self. I also turn to social scientists and others interested in aspects of community and belonging (Kusenbach and Paulsen, 2013), organizations and relationships (Devere, 2014), wealth (Brooks, 2000; Frank, 2007; Prince and Schiff, 2008), aging (Loe, 2011; Williams and Warren, 2009), and the confluence of gender, body, and heteronormativity (Warren, 1972).
