Time Travel Tuesday

“You’re 21.
What’s going on in your life?
Who are you spending most of your time with?
What’s your favorite things to do? eat? hobby?"

The summer I turned 21 was a big transition for me. I changed colleges, leaving my first after two years and moving on to a state school. My aunt Suzy had invited me to spend the summer with her in Boca Raton, FL. My mom and I drove down in my Ford Escort and I got settled into my aunt's home. She had a really beautiful home with a pool, two dogs and five million birds. (she never had kids, but these birds and dogs were her children) I took a job working at an Eckerd drugstore where my uncle Chet had worked following his retirement (he died a few years earlier).

Boca Raton was a pretty hip place. As a girl from a trailer park, this was a pretty ritzy section of town. All the kids had brand-new cars with A/C, they did homework on the beach and partied at Club Boca on Friday nights with VIP passes. I made a few passing friends for the summer, the type of friendships that fade away quickly. For my 21st birthday, we went to a sports bar and I had a Long Island iced tea as my first official 21 drink. A friend took me to see Buffy the Vampire Slayer that week too. My aunt treated me to dinner at our favorite restaurant.

I spent a lot of time on the beach, relaxing, reading and tanning (bad, I know it!). I also swam in the pool each day and walked the dogs twice a day. I ended up losing about 15 pounds that summer without really trying or changing my diet much. I ate a lot of steak and seafood too.

My aunt was a bit of a card shark and liked to gamble in casinos (often making quite a bit of money). She would fly to Las Vegas while I house sat and animal sat. I'd give her 10 dollars and she would come back with a huge roll of money for me (that I ended up spending on her due to her strong guilt ethic) We played card games almost every night that summer. We played Skip-Bo most of the time, until I got on a winning streak. One day, I came home to Blackjack and she knew she would win easily due to my atrocious counting skills. She was a tough cookie-basically a her way or the highway type. She was never an easy person to get along with but she has a lot of interests and I think she enjoyed the company that summer. Unfortunately, I never saw her again after that summer. She moved to Las Vegas shortly afterward (I left a week before Hurricane Andrew hit, by the way) and wrote a few letters. However, she stopped contacting-she tended to get huffy and give the silent treatment if something didn't go her way and she rarely gave without expecting something in return-a point of contention between family members. I recall one letter was unhappy my not visiting again right away and that seems to lead to not writing to me anymore). My mom continued to send cards that were returned and we sent a wedding invitation too. I discovered recently that she died during the year that I was married.

That summer was really not a bad summer over all. There were low points and really fun times. I feel tremendously sad that my aunt decide to forgo contact to where we did not reconcile, not even enough to know that she had died. That is a sad commentary on my family and I actively tried to change that. But it is not a communicative group and we have to work hard to stay together, myself included.

And maybe that is what I learned from my 21st year.