“After one candidate, the only one in a suit, described the many virtues of community involvement, a heckler shouted, “Frank, what clubs are you part of in the community?” leading the candidate to admit that he hadn’t gotten the opportunity to join any clubs…yet. The other candidate ended up winning her seat, returning to work with the Board members who had deposed her over the issue of her pickleball involvement” (page 99).

There are the things you study and then there are the things you realize your work is actually about. My dissertation, titled The Ends of the American Dream, studied retirement in the Southwest, but it is also about many other things: it is about families that we originate and that we make; it is about aging and confronting sickness and death; and it is about the way certain landscapes are used for leisure at the expense of future environmental sustainability.

Page 99 of my dissertation is the final section before the conclusion of Chapter 2 and includes the last bit of an ethnographic anecdote about a contentious Homeowner’s Board election cycle. It includes a brief description of the way that two of the candidates fit into (or don’t) the acceptable personae in the neighborhood. That chapter is all about what it is like to age in a housing development that was built especially for older bodies…It is also about aging in the 21^st century, in a youth-oriented culture that often reviles the aging. The community where I did my research has worked hard to combat the assumption that it is “just for old people.” It has done this, in part, by creating an ideal-type retiree who fits into its unofficial tagline: “if you’re bored here, you’ll be bored anywhere.”

If my research and dissertation had turned out the way I thought it would when I planned it out, this point in this Chapter would have fulfilled Ford Madox Ford’s proposal. Instead, this moment acts as a jumping off point for some of the other concerns of the dissertation: namely, the historical, political-economic, and ecological backstories that provide some of the foundations—for some people—inhabiting a post-Covid, and (maybe) post-liberal world. Further in the dissertation, I ask who gets to belong in the U.S. and how and why that answer came to be. So I suppose that one thing Page 99 shows is that, without those who are willing to enact the boundaries and erasures of belongingness, even in one relatively small community, that answer could look very different.