Notes from the Home - July 13, 2013

   Perhaps it’s the weather. As I was heading up the long hallway to get my mail this afternoon, Elsie was coming toward me.

   “Where are you headed?” she asked.

   “To get my mail.”

   “Isn’t anyone here today? I was sitting on that bench for forty-five minutes, and only one guy came by, and he didn’t say anything.”

   “It does seem awfully quiet,” I said.

   “Do you have family here in town?”

   “My son lives here.”

   “My kids are in Texas,” she said. “Do you ever get tired of sitting in your room?”

   “Sometimes.”

   “Me too,” Elsie said. “I like to sit here in the hallway and look at the sun. But there hasn’t been much sun to look at this summer.”

   Betty wasn’t feeling chipper either. She was sitting in the laundry room, thumbing through a magazine and listening to her clothes tumble in a dryer. Betty said she moved to Covenant Woods about a month ago.

   “I didn’t have any trouble selling my house,” she said. “My kids and grandkids are here in Columbus, but they’re awfully busy.”

   “How do you like it here?”

   “I don’t know. The people are nice. And I still have my car. It takes some getting used to; I’m still trying to adjust to living here. I’d rather be living at home.”

  

   I was talking with Annie as she worked on one of the bulletin boards when Pat, a personal care aide, came by.

   “Hello, Mr. Harris,” Pat said with enthusiasm. A few seconds later, she said hello to another resident in a much more perfunctory fashion.

   “The staff really likes you, Tom,” Annie said.

   “Oh.”

   “Didn’t you notice the difference between the way Pat said hello to you and the way she said hello Henry? The thing is, Tom, you’re not crazy.”

   Before I had a chance to thank Annie for her high opinion of my sanity, Bob and Grace came along. We exchanged pleasantries, they went on their way and I told Annie about Grace at dinner the night before. The server taken our orders, and while we waited for our meals to be delivered, Grace turned to Bob three times and asked, “Did she take our orders yet?”

   “See,” Annie said, “she’s crazy.”

   Alas, if that’s the definition of crazy, I’m not there yet, but there are days when I get real close.

  

   In his cinematic manifestation, the evil genius is easily recognized. He sports a great shock of unruly gray hair that he occasionally combs with his fingers, and a mustache that he trims once a year. He speaks with a sinister Eastern European or Middle Eastern accent. He stuffs pens, pencils, small tablets, receipts from Disasters-R-Us and the remnants of a jelly donut into his breast pocket. His career goal is world-wide devastation, misery for millions,

   Russ, who isn’t evil but might be a genius, took me shopping the other day. Our first stop was Target, where I bought two pairs of shorts to replace the shorts that came out of winter with less girth than I. From there we went to Publix, where, on a whim, I reached for a jar of peanut butter. That jar, however, had the words “Low Fat” emblazoned on the label. Granted, a man whose wardrobe is in need of expansion ought to consider the low-fat option, but I didn’t and instead picked up a jar on which there was no mention of “low fat.” Unfortunately, I didn’t pay attention to what it did say.

   That afternoon, I went to the cupboard, pulled out a box of crackers and the as yet unopened jar of peanut butter. Moments later I came face to face with the modern day evil genius. The jar had a clear plastic band around the lid. You know, the clear plastic band that you can’t see and don’t realize is there until you try to open the jar but can’t. I couldn’t and fetched a paring knife to cut the darn thing. How is it that the plastic band was so lose and so smooth that when I tried to turn the lid the band went round and round, and the lid didn’t?  Yet, when I tried to insert the knife between the band and the lid, the blade slid over the band and into my other hand. After stabbing myself three times, I was finally able to cut the band and remove it. The impediment gone, I picked up the jar, gave the lid a mighty twist and unleashed an oil spill all over my lap.

   And in some large corporation’s research and development laboratory a modern evil genius laughed an evil laugh of delight. He doesn’t look like an evil genius, he doesn’t talk like an evil genius, he doesn’t even have an assistant named Igor. He lives in the suburbs, drives an SUV, has a wife and a couple of kids and commutes daily to the R-and-D lab, where he invents ever more frustrating modern inconveniences.

   How did he know that I would unknowingly grab a jar of “all natural” peanut butter? I don’t know, but he did.

   How did he know I wouldn’t bother to read the label and what it said about “natural oils may settle on top of the product?” I don’t know, but he did.

   And how did he know that I’d have so much difficulty with the plastic band that when I finally was able to remove it I’d twist the lid off if a fit of anger and frustration, causing the natural oils to spill out all over my lap? Because he invented the damn plastic band with people like me in mind. That’s how.

  

Notes from the Home - July 2, 2013

  “My first two years in the Army, I was a private,” Al said at dinner tonight. “I was a private the whole time. I didn’t even make private first class. After basic, they sent me to West Point, New York. I was supposed to be watching for enemy planes. It was beautiful up there, and we had a wonderful view of the Hudson River. But I kept telling people I wanted to get to Europe before the war ended.

   “Finally, they sent me to Newport News. I had done some drafting, so they had me draw different views of ships and what was in them. Then, if the Germans sunk a ship, we’d know exactly what was on it and how the stuff was stowed, and we could send another ship in its place. After four or five months, I got bored with the job. I told a colonel I wanted to do something that would get me into the war. He pointed his finger at me. And I pointed my finger right back at him and told him I wanted to get to Europe. A couple days later, he told me I was going to infantry school at Fort Benning.

   “They put me on a train in Newport News. In those days, the conductor put a tag on your seat so he’d know where you were supposed to get off, or change trains, or whatever. Well, this conductor forgot about me, and the next think I knew I was on a train to Cincinnati. I was supposed to have changed trains in Richmond. They put me off the train at some tiny station and told me if I’d follow the dirt road about a mile, it would take me to the main road and I could hitchhike back to Richmond. I did what they said. Back then if you were in the service, you never had a problem thumbing a ride. The guy who picked me up was about half drunk, but he said he could get me back to Richmond in time to catch the train. And he did.

   “It was Friday afternoon when the train got to Columbus. I grew up here, in the Rose Hill area, and I went to see some of my buddies. We spent the weekend drinking moonshine whiskey and going over to Phenix City, to the nice houses they had over there, the ones with the red lights. Then Monday morning I reported to Fort Benning. They told me I’d been AWOL for two days.

   “A couple of weeks later, we were scheduled to have a map-reading test on Monday. That Saturday, I went downtown to see a movie at the Bradley Theatre; it was new then and quite a beautiful place. I was sitting there enjoying the movie when somebody tapped me on the shoulder. It was a colonel. ‘You’re supposed to be studying for the map test,’ he said. I told him I’d studied for four hours that morning. I hadn’t studied at all, but I wasn’t going to tell him that. Then he told me if I didn’t pass the test I was done. Well, I passed it.”

   After dinner, I went out to breathe some non-air-conditioned air and to enjoy the sunshine, which has been a rarity here for the last week. Beverly was on the way in from her evening walk.

   “Hey, Bev, how are you?”

   “I’m going to my room to mope.”

   “Mope? Why?”

   “I was talking to my son this afternoon. He said I had to stop spending so much on the dentist. I don’t want to let my teeth just rot away. I told him that, but he said Elizabeth, my daughter-in-law, told him they’ve been buying all sorts of stuff for me, and I owe them over a thousand dollars. I told him I bought him several thousand dollars’ worth of stuff when he was younger. Now he probably won’t speak to me for a while. So I’m going to go to my room and mope.”

   I went on my way, and as I was going through the parking lot behind the C Building I heard music. I couldn’t tell if it was coming from one of the cars or from the shopping plaza on the other side of the trees. I decided it must be coming from the plaza and went on. The next time around, about twenty minutes later, I heard the music again, and went to check it out. The source was a pickup truck. I looked in the passenger-side window. A man sat in the driver’s seat, his head down, his chin resting on his chest. I knocked on the window. It startled him. “Oh hey,” he said. I asked if he was OK. He said he was. He seemed alert and oriented, and I continued my jaunt. By the time I got around to the front entrance, I realized I should have talked with him a while longer, just to be sure he was OK. Instead, I told Aleasha, who was working at the front desk, about the man. She went back to see what was up. Apparently, the guy’s mom is in the process of moving in, and he was waiting for the rest of the family to get there with the truck.

  

Out on a Limerick Again

  Pound Foolish

  

   He said if she would lose a pound

   She’d look better when ungowned.

   That was an error

   And made her a terror,

   Unleashing her inner hellhound.

  

  

   Say Amen

  

   The TV preacher would expound

   With great vehemence to dumbfound

   With rantings hideous

   The dumb and piteous.

   Telling them they were all hell bound.

Notes from the Home - June 20, 2013

   Blaine was an Ash/Craft client, an older fellow. That is to say, he was much older than I was then, but not necessarily much older than I am now. Blaine was six-feet tall, give or take an inch, and lanky. He stood erect and strode purposefully everywhere he walked. A cantankerous coot, Blaine called me Tom Harrison, a name he spat out in the tone of an exasperated third-grade teacher reprimanding the class clown for the seventh time in the last five minutes.

   Blaine’s hair gave him an air of authority. It was thick, wavy and gloriously white. It was the hair of a highly respected retired judge, an elder statesman or a beloved English professor emeritus.  Then one day, Blaine came to work as bald as a cue ball.

   “What happened?”

   “I shaved my head.”

   “Why?”

   “Because I wanted to.”

   Blaine’s supervisor got in touch with the people at the group home where he lived. “He insisted on shaving his head,” they told her. Why Blaine wanted to shave his head remains a mystery.

   Gloria got me thinking about Blaine. At dinner one evening, she said she liked my hair. She particularly likes a spot on the back of my head where the hair is practically white.

   “I wish my hair was like that,” she said. “Look, my hair is all gray, but it’s so drab. Your gray is really gray, and that white spot really stands out.”

   Gloria is in her early nineties, nearly thirty years older than I, and she is jealous because my hair is grayer and whiter than hers. Maybe I should shave my head.

  

   I had just stepped out of the shower Thursday afternoon, when someone came knocking at my door.

   “Who’s there?”

   “Ken from Convalescent Care.”

   “I’m going to need a few minutes to get dressed,” I said.

   And as I dressed, a profanity laced tirade echoed in the empty chamber that is my mind. “That (lengthy list of deleted expletives) idiot. Why in the hell didn’t he call and let me know he was coming? How (expletive deleted) inconsiderate is that?  Does he think I’ve nothing better to do than sit in this (expletive deleted) room all day in case some (expletive deleted) jerk happens to drop by?”

   Fifteen minutes later, I was, if not nattily attired, at least appropriately clad for receiving company, and Ken knocked again. I refrained from telling him the things I’d been saying about him, because he had come about my wheelchair. The wheelchair’s brains are in its joystick unit, and it has been malfunctioning from time to time. The last time Ken was here, I gave him my insurance information and Dr. McKee’s name and phone number at the Cleveland Clinic – it was Dr. McKee who prescribed the wheelchair in the first place. Ken said Dr. McKee had sent them a prescription for a new joy stick unit.

   “The problem is,” he said, “it’s going to cost you nine hundred dollars out of pocket. According to the insurance company, you haven’t used your insurance this year, so your cost will include all your deductible.”

   “Au contraire,” I said, or words to that effect. “I went to the Emery Clinic in January to refill my baclofen tank, and it cost me over a grand because of the deductible. Let me see. Here it is, eleven hundred sixteen dollars; the check to the hospital is dated the first of March.”

   Ken said he’d get in touch with the insurance company and ask them to take another look.

   “And can you give me your phone number again?” he asked. “I know I had it, but I must have lost it. Otherwise, I would have let you know I was coming out here today.”

   I recited my phone number with all the politeness I could muster while thoughts of “You (expletive deleted) incompetent fool. You lost my (expletive deleted) phone number. That’s (expletive deleted). They ought to fire your sorry ass.”

   Ken and I traded niceties as he left. Then I resumed lambasting him with all the profane and obscene words in my vocabulary. When I was done, I felt better. But only for a moment. It came to me in a flash: in January, my medical insurer was Medical Mutual, but on April 1, when I went on Medicare, OPERS switched my medical insurance to Humana. And, no, I hadn’t used it yet. Who is the (expletive deleted) idiot now? And I had to call him and admit it.

   Damn.