I don't remember a lot about my childhood, just bits and snippets. I know that every summer we went to Florida- June, July, and August. Each time, my parents were determined to buy a condo and we spent a great part of our summer condo hunting. Some days we would go to the hotel pool or the beach and when the rain came in the late afternoon, we would go to the mall. Other days we would look at condos and houses. I remember the Florida heat, sitting in the back seat of the rental car and the times I didn't want to go in another house or condo and chose instead to wait in the car. The heat never bothered me. I remember getting so hot that I got goosebumps and thinking that you could get so hot that you got cold.
At night, we would drive around expensive neighborhoods, to catch a glimpse of well lit living rooms and manicured lawns. My mother would ogle over the large chandeliers in the foyers and I would chime in and say "Look at that one." I would feel good when my mom agreed. My father would say things like "Look at that, she's a beaut. Do you think we would be happy if we lived there?" and when he saw a kids on bicycles or playing ball, he would say "look, you could be friends with them if we lived here." It was a constant world of make believe and what ifs and fantasy as we tried to picture ourselves living in those neighborhoods, walking those streets and befriending those people.
I was a quiet and apparently neurotic only child with a great ability to amuse myself. As we tromped from real estate office to real estate office, I would collect the business cards, much in the same way that I collected stickers. Each office we would walk into, I would discreetly go from desk to desk and take a card. I had a huge pile of them, at least 100 or 150. I would alphabetize them, first by last name within each brokerage office and then by the brokerage office name itself. At first the cards were in a coffee tin, that I had decorated with stickers, but eventually they made it into a burgundy red photo album with gold trim, similar to the one I had my sticker collection in. I spent hours organizing the cards on the gold-trimmed sticky pages.
When I look back, I see the organization of the cards as a way to gain some control of the chaos all around me. Looking back, I realize how bizarre my parents behavior was- all that condo hunting and they never even bought anything. It doesn't make sense. They had the money. The hotel costs alone would have justified buying- 12 weeks of hotel fees plus all the meals out. I don't understand it. Was it fear of commitment? Or more likely that my dad was more content with the distraction it all created, the excitement of it all, the possibility, like playing make believe.
