Jonah and Ellie have celebrated every birthday they have ever had with Hoover. This means a lot of the same faces in their birthday photos. People move on. Yet they remain part of our Hoover community. Once a Hooverite always a Hooverite. And that's true for Jonah and Ellie too. They'll always be Hooverites.
Just the other day over breakfast, which really means between spills, because in our house breakfast is made up of a few minutes of feverishly fast eating bracketed by catastrophic spills, I was explaining to Ellie and Jonah the idea behind Benedict Anderson's Imagined Communities. That's not the guy who directed The Royal Tenenbaums. That's Wes Anderson. Benedict Anderson is a social scientist, like his brother Perry. In my head I see Jonah and Ellie following in their footsteps. Except instead of writing 600 page backpack busting books, they'll tweet.
The idea in Imagined Communities is that any community larger than a primordial village is an imagined community. Hoover isn't really larger than a primordial village. And we have some of the same problems our primordial ancestors did. Like surviving brutal winters and trying to find subsistence at Bartlett. But - and this is my point, although it took a characteristically long time to get here - once people move on and leave Hoover they become part of our imagined community. Preserved in our photos, but as importantly, in our thoughts. December third we'll reassemble for Jonah's birthday. He'll be four and it'll be the fourth birthday he's celebrated with Hoover. And in some sense, if you believe this stuff about Hoover being, in Anderson's words, "a deep, horizontal comradeship," that goes on and on and extends across time and through space, then every birthday Jonah and Ellie celebrate will be celebrated with their Hoover community. Jonah will be 40 on 12/3/45. That should be easy to remember. Let's meet in the lounge. I'll probably wear a blue shirt.
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