The Home of the Future
For feeling good while getting around, it’s pretty hard to beat the mild glide of a golf cart.
But the residents of Sleepy Hollow Mobile Estates wake each day determined to try.
“Good morning!”
“It’s a great one, isn’t it?”
“It’s a great one.”
Every soul Larry Myott encounters on a scoot around Lazy Loop, the narrow main drag of the 154-home trailer park, has a hand raised in welcome and a hello as warm and clear as the sky overhead. On the January morning I rode shotgun, the chipper well-wishers included the guy who, the night before, lost the election for the park’s highest elected office . . . and lost it to Myott. It is as if the entire enclave—the pool, the smooth black pathways, the clubhouse, all devoted to the exclusive use of residents at least 55 years of age—glides on a thin film of some invisible and frictionless fluid. Maybe cooking oil. Possibly BS.
“Oh, it’s bullsh-t,” says Myott, who at 73 has given the matter some thought. Resolute good cheer is a conscious choice, he believes, grounded in the reality that physically looms in front of the residents: a miniature lighthouse at the park entrance, its base paved with bricks bearing the names of neighbors who have died (11 last year). Forget it’s there and the road outside takes you past a hospital, a nursing home (“with memory care”), a hospice and, off First Avenue, a cemetery.
Life, in other words, is to be embraced while it still hugs back. Not everything has to be absolutely perfect.
“Nobody says, ‘I’m going to retire to Florida and live in a trailer park,’” says Bill Gorman, who manages business affairs
