Will I Be Bored in a Home for the Elderly

It was a Tuesday, pile-on Tuesday for me here in the retirement home. The day the cleaning woman works on this hall. The day I have PT and my book club meets.  Normally I am slow in the mornings, just because I like it that way (I think), but if the cleaning woman is coming, I need to get breakfast out of the way and pick up all the little things that are out of place. Her job description says she can’t touch my “things:” the little treasures, the notes to myself, the open mail. I have to put things away.

It is common knowledge and a male joke how much a woman works to get ready for the maid to arrive. Of course, I wouldn’t know except that I learned this a long time ago from the funny papers. Both Dagwood and I were astonished when Blondie explained that she was so busy “because the maid is coming tomorrow.”

I did my chores before I showered and then dried my hair in a bit of a hurry, and put away the dryer and my cosmetics, so Nina could clean my bathroom, too.

And then, barely here, with me barely dressed, Nina asked if she was supposed to change the bed, and I said,” Yes, I left it so you would know,” and she said, “but you didn’t put out the sheets.”

“They are in the closet,” I told her, “in the bag like they came from the laundry,” and she told me what I was supposed to know—that she couldn’t go into my closet, and the instructions said that I must put the clean sheets at the foot of the bed.  So I got out from under this computer and rushed to the closet, noticing on the way that I had not put the brace on my arthritic knee and could hear bone scraping against bone, (because I actually had remembered to put my hearing aids where they belong).

While I went to my Physical Therapy appointment, Nina did a great job of everything and left me with a pristine kitchen and flawless floors and dirty sheets already in the bag that I must put out in the hall on the right evening so they will magically fly off to the laundry and back.

My therapist is wonderful. To be more specific she makes me do things I know I can’t do, and I have to admit that in a mere two weeks she has made my back stronger. However, when we finished our forty-five minute routine, I didn’t think I could walk down the hall to the next thing on my schedule, though from stubbornness I did. In fact, I had to because she walked with me, reminding me to hold my head up because it weighs ten pounds, and on the way she explained to me why my right knee is bending inward. (I didn’t tell her my suspicion that it is actually revenge for participating in the ridicule of that knock-kneed kid in my fourth grade class.)

While resting, I answered my email and revised two book recommendations that I thought I would need at a club meeting in the afternoon.  Then I unplugged my laptop so I could take it to the back of my closet where my printer sits on a filing cabinet, and I made copies of the letter and the book reports.

I also wrote down a few leading questions I might ask the chaplain, because I agreed to interview him and write a report about all the programs he offers the residents here. (The editor of the residents’ monthly newspaper has discovered my claim to have been a journalist.)

Like that the hours disappeared and it was suddenly lunch time, and I was hungry, so I made a hasty turkey sandwich and nibbled the remains of a red pepper and a half eaten nut bar.

I wanted to be downstairs when a generous friend of mine arrived, bringing me a box of the sweet little tomatoes that are bursting out all over her vines, and I made it just as she was walking through the front door, and we had five minutes, during which I apologized that I could not invite her up to my apartment, silently wondering how anybody could believe that people in retirement homes don’t have time to be civil. It crossed my mind then that when I was a lot younger, like maybe 87, I imagined that life in the retirement home would be endlessly boring.

Then, because I dreaded to walk all the way back to my room only to return immediately, I took the box of tomatoes with me to Bible study. I actually had demonstrated some ability at forethought by bringing my Bible and notebook. We sat in a big square and read the farewell section at the end of the book of Romans, and the subsequent conversation alternated between the encouragement and instructions to the church in Rome and the news that the FBI had raided Mar-a-Lago, and our country is broken and bewildered and maybe dangerous.  The others discussed all this and then prayed, dumping it all on God, while I scribbled notes about how to use all this in the story I had to write.

I had to hurry afterwards, down the long halls, past the room where four people were staring at their Mah Zongg game and the sound of chorus practice in the auditorium and into the elevator and back up to my apartment to leave my Bible and notebook and tomatoes and pick up the book I needed and those two recommendations for the reading group that was meeting in five minutes.

On the way I stopped for a few seconds to read the poster about that program on Alzheimer’s research scheduled for next week.

The book club meeting was a gathering of intellectual people who read to learn, and I just hoped I belonged there. As our leader talked about the kinds of books the group read last year, I wondered about the relationships between the books they had chosen and what the members had possibly done or not done when they were young, because my own proposal for this year is a book that has helped me to understand more completely a period of my own past.  That made me realize how really challenging it might be to learn from all these people, MDs and university professors, journalists and soldiers, engineers and administrators. All of them my neighbors.

After the meeting I had time to limp up to my room to leave my books and papers and use the bathroom and then hurry back down to the dining room where I had an appointment to eat with the editor who assigned me that article I am to write, along with his wife whose name I had momentarily forgotten and another woman who knows something about the subject we are assigned. Waiting, I stood a while before admitting that my feet were getting numb and sat down, but the other woman didn’t come, so just then we decided to go into the dining room without her and save a seat.

We had a hearty and delicious vegetable soup and our choice of two meats that I never cook for myself. As we ate, the dining room filled up with people, half of them still strangers, but the woman we were expecting didn’t come, and I was beginning to look forward to going upstairs and falling into my easy chair when I suddenly thought that I would miss Bingo if I did that, but Ed’s wife reminded me that Bingo is Thursday night. “This is movie night,” she said, “are you going?”

I said,” No,” and then, “I don’t remember what’s playing,” and she said, “Shirley Temple.”

So of course I went. It felt like loyalty to an old friend, since Shirley Temple and I were almost the same age once upon a time when we were young, and I envied her curls and loved the idea that she was a real person, just a little girl like me.

I was six in 1935. In small-town-Arkansas my mother let me go to the matinee all alone, and I remember how excited I was and that I had to reach up the length of my arm to put my dime on the ledge at the ticket window.

Here in this home for the aged, somebody with a bit of technological savvy put in the cassette and pushed a button and there she was, with dimples and curls as we all remembered. Parts of The Little Colonel seemed corny like most old movies, but that tap dance on the stairs with Bill Robinson was just as magical as all of us remembered. At the end there was this moment of quiet before somebody got up and turned on the lights, and then another peer of Shirley Temple said, “They don’t make anything good like that anymore.”

I made it to my apartment and managed to get out of my clothes and crawl into bed and then get up again to put my hearing aids in the charge box and plug them in, so I could hear tomorrow.

Fortunately the next day was my do-nothing Wednesday, except for worship with the chaplain in the evening, because now that I am 93 I can’t run all day for two days, back to back. So all day I just ignored the activities calendar and tried not to starve while writing about Tuesday.

With my feet propped up I was thinking. . .if Shirley Temple had lived to be so old . . .but before I could finish that thought, whatever it was, I remembered that she did become a real grown-up, an ambassador. And that is one of the things, along with having those cute curls and tap dancing, I once imagined that I would have liked to do. But anyway I’ll bet that in the evenings sometimes when she was tired, there in her ambassador’s mansion, Shirley Temple just leaned back and watched her old movies, admitted that the acting might be a little corny and knew she didn’t dare try to do that again. Not on the stairs.

I totally forgot to notice if I was bored.