Notes from the Home - March 17, 2013

   Joe, who as a transit dispatcher kept track of the busses in New York City, is having difficulty keeping track of his car these days. A few weeks ago, Joe locked his car but neglected to take the keys out of the lock. James spotted them the next morning as he was taking the trash out.

   One day last week, as I was making my morning rounds, Joe was walking through the parking lot and said, “I can’t find my car.” He was looking in the row of cars along the sidewalk. I pointed to a car he had just past in the row by the woods and said, “Isn’t that it?”

   “Oh, yeah,” Joe said. “I always park there so I won’t forget where I left the car.”

    Wednesday, I took an early evening juant. In the parking lot behind the C building, Joe’s car sat right where he always parks it. The problem was the four-way flashers were flashing. I went back inside, found Joe’s number and gave him a call.

   Thursday afternoon Joe called me.

   “Tom, what’s up?” he said.

   “I don’t know. You called me.”

   “My machine says you called me.”

   “Well, I called you last night,” I said, “and told you your flashers were on.”

   “Oh, yeah. I really appreciate that. I just bought a new battery last week.”

   I’ve mentioned that conversation to a few people, who said they’ve had the same experience with Joe. He is very diligent about checking his caller ID and returning all the calls he missed. And sometimes he returns calls he didn’t miss but has since forgotten.

  

   Coach sat with us at dinner the other night. Coach was a darn good high school football coach.

   “I coached here in Columbus and in Savannah for a few years and won a state championship there,” he said.

   That got my attention. The football part interested me, but it was Savannah that made me sit up and listen. I told Coach all I knew about Savannah I had learned from John Berendt’s book Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil and the movie it spawned.

   “Well, I started coaching at Savannah in 1964,” Coach said. “When I interviewed for the job, the principal said, ‘There are three things you need to know about this city: It’s owned by the Jews, controlled by the Irish and enjoyed the most by the Negroes.’ I was there four years, and from what I could tell, he was right on all three counts.”

   In the course of conversation, we discovered that we had moved into Covenant Woods within a week of each other. “Do you like it here,” he asked.

   I gave him my standard answer. “There’s no doubt the body is ready for a place like this. But the mind isn’t. It’s taking some getting used to. Adjusting has been harder than I thought it would be, but I think I’m getting there.”

   He looked at me as though he understood. Then I asked him if he liked it at Covenant Woods.

   “I don’t have to stay here,” he said.

   I have no idea what he meant by that, but I wonder if he’s about to exercise his option to live elsewhere.

   When I got back to the room, I poked around on the web to see what I could find out about Coach. I knew he played college football at Auburn and he was interested in antiques, but not much else – opelikapepperellhistory.com to the rescue. In an article on the site dated December 31, 2005, I learned Coach was the Auburn captain in 1949 when the Tigers beat Alabama, 14-13, at Legion Field. Big stuff in this part of the country. Coach graduated in 1950, and that fall, his brother Jim matriculated at Auburn and went on to have an outstanding college football career.

   “There was a Pyburn at Auburn for eight years and people thought he was stupid,” Coach said in the article.

   At the time the article was written, Coach had a small shop in Salem, Alabama, where he restored and sold antiques. He was also involved, the article said, in the restoration of the Springer Opera House in Columbus.

   “I like to take nothing and make something out of it,” he said in the article. “That’s what coaches do all the time.”

  

   After finishing my dinner last night, I stopped at the table where Al, Isabel and Ralph were sitting. Isabel enjoys silliness and irony far more than the average Covenant Woods resident, and she’s got such a quick sense of humor, much quicker than the average eighty-seven-year-old. She enjoys listening to Al’s stories and keeps up a running commentary on them.

   Al was talking about the pleasures of marijuana.

   “Are you able to get good stuff?” Isabel asked.

   “It’s hard. Sometimes they put chemicals in it, and you don’t know where it will take you.”

   The more Al talked, however, the more convinced he became that a trip to the unknown wouldn’t be a bad thing.

   “The doctors keep giving me pills,” he said. “I’ve got marinol, hydrocodone, Vicoden; I’ve got about twelve different types of pills. I’ve got pills for everything. Maybe I should put them all in some water, brew up a concoction and see where it takes me.”

   “What if it doesn’t bring you back?” Isabel asked.

   “So what?” Al said. “We all have to go sometime. Besides, no one cares about us old codgers.”

   Isabel was visibly stung by the last part. At eighty-seven, she’s nearly as old a codger as Al. Then Sharnell, one of the servers, appeared. She’s barely out of her teens, but she has a ready smile and infinite patience with the codgers, geezers and fogeys of Covenant Woods.

   “Sharnell,” I said, “do you care for these old codgers?”

   “Of course,” she said, leaning over the back of Al’s chair to give him a hug. Then she went over to Isabel and hugged her.

   “Do you really care about us old codgers?” Isabel asked.

   “I care about all the residents,” Sharnell said and hugged Isabel again. Then she gave Ralph and me a hug, and our little group adjourned with smiles all around.

  

   My Covenant Woods experience was enhanced this morning. I listened to a little of Morning Edition on WKSU, the Kent State radio station, via the web. “We can expect highs in the thirties, lows in the twenties, and rain or snow through Wednesday,” the WKSU announcer said. According to the Weather Channel, we can expect highs in the sixties or low seventies in Columbus.

Notes from the Home - March 10, 2013

   Memories of things Ashtabula were popping up daily this week. It started Thursday evening when we went to the Springer Opera House to see Yesterday and Today: The Interactive Beatles Experience. It was an interesting evening all around. The Springer, built in the 1870s, is the oldest theater in Georgia and the sixth oldest in the United States. When you look up at the private boxes near the stage at the Springer, you expect to see Abe and Mary Lincoln in one of them.

   The show featured three very enthusiastic brothers – Billy, Matthew and Ryan McGuigan – whose father, Bill, was a huge Beatles fan. Bill died from leukemia in 1996, and the show is a tribute to both their father and the Beatles. During intermission I talked to one of the ushers, Audrey, who, like me, was in awe of the McGuigans’ energy. She said she had to be back in the morning, when Yesterday and Today would be put on for an audience of school students. If the McGuigans were even half as energetic Friday morning as they were Thursday evening, we decided she should find out what they were on and how to get some.

   Then Audrey talked about the restoration projects that have been completed at the Springer, and the ones currently underway or planned. I admitted my ignorance of the Springers’s history and told her I had been in the area less than a year.

   “Where did you move from?” she asked.

   “Ashtabula, Ohio,” I said hesitantly, expecting a puzzled look and a mumbled, “Where the hell is that?” in return.

   “Oh, I’m familiar with Ashtabula,” she said. “My former in-laws lived there for a few years.”

   It’s not the reaction I expect from people here when I say “Ashtabula.”

  

   Friday afternoon, I found myself thinking about Dave King, one of Nancy’s bicycling friends. Annie and I were talking in the hallway when Polly and Margaret came by. Polly, a resident here, is blind. Margaret is a friend of hers who visits her regularly and helps Polly do things she wouldn’t otherwise be able to do. Friday, a wonderfully warm and sunny day, she took Polly outside for a walk.

   “Hey, Polly,” Annie said.

   “Somebody is talking to you,” Margaret told Polly.

   “Who is it?” Polly asked.

   “You know who I am, Ms. Polly,” Annie said.

   “Annie. I know your voice. How are you?”

   “She’s better with names than I am,” Margaret said. “I was in an accident years ago, and I have a terrible time remembering names. It got to the point where I called everybody sweetheart or darling. I used to work in the PX at Fort Benning, and one day I gave this guy his change and said, ‘Thank you, sweetheart.’ The woman who was with him said, ‘I’d appreciate it if you didn’t call my husband sweetheart.’ I said, ‘I’ll try to remember that, darling.’ It didn’t go over too well.”

   Which brings me back to Dave: Nothing spoils his dining experience as quickly and as thoroughly as a waitress calling him hon.

  

   Saturday morning, I gathered some dirty clothes and a copy of Roy Blount’s Alphabetter Juice: The Joy of Text and headed for the laundry room. As the washers ca-chunked, ca-chunked through the rinse cycle, Mr. Blount discussed the word “adverb.” He asked the reader to consider the adverb in “An Old Joke,” a poem by Sarah Lindsay:

                  They buried the husk of her

                   in the front room,

                   tiredly crying.

     

      “Not a common word, tiredly, and not euphonious – wearily would have been more conventionally poetic,” Blount wrote. “But tiredly is inspired, somehow. I wonder if Lindsay remembered it from the short story, ‘The Best of Everything’ by Richard Yates.”

      The title and author didn’t ring a bell until Blount told the story of Grace in her negligee, offering herself to Ralph on the night before their wedding. Ralph declined. He’d been drinking with the boys and wanted to rejoin them, but first he had to use the “terlet.” On his way out, Ralph reminded Grace to show up for their wedding the next day.

      “She smiled tiredly and opened the door for him. ‘Don’t worry, Ralph,’ she said, ‘I’ll be there.’”

      It was a story Suzanne had recommended to us a couple years ago, and being an occasionally dutiful student, I read it – and enjoyed it. And for a few minutes Saturday morning, as I sat in the laundry room, I enjoyed memories of our Thursday morning writing class at the Conneaut Community Center for the Arts.

A Few Minutes with Marie

Marie was sitting in the lobby when I went to pay my rent.

   “Paying your rent?” she asked. “You better pay it, or they’ll throw you out on the sidewalk. They used to do that, you know. I grew up in Chicago during the Depression, and I saw families huddled on the sidewalk with all their possessions. The landlord had thrown them out. It was so sad.

   “The family of a girl I knew got thrown out of their apartment. I told my mother, ‘We’ve got to help them.’ They lived with us for a couple months. The father was a concrete finisher. You know what a concrete finisher is? They work on sidewalks and things like that. It’s hard work. But it was winter, and there wasn’t any work. Soon as the weather got better, he worked night and day. He didn’t have to, but once he started working he paid my parents for letting them stay with us. He didn’t have to do that.

   “That girl was my best friend. But, eventually we lost track of each other. I suppose she got old, too, just like me.

   “My grandmother didn’t have to worry about being evicted. She owned a farm. She didn’t believe in banks, and she kept all her money in a mattress. She didn’t trust the banks. Sometimes people would come to her door and ask for something to eat. She always let them in, and they ate with the family. The only thing was, she told them they had to say grace before they could eat. One time, she told a guy that, and he said, ‘I’m Jewish.’ My grandmother told him, ‘That’s alright. You have your own prayers. Say them.’ He did.

   “I married our landlord’s son. There wasn’t much choice. We were Catholic, and my parents and grandmother always said I had to marry within the faith. Other than the landlord, most of the people in the neighborhood were Jewish. He was older than me. People said I was too young and didn’t know what I wanted. They said the marriage would never last. We were married fifty-two years. I guess we proved them wrong.”

Notes from the Home - March 2, 2013

   Monday, I awoke to the sound of the falling rain; an all too familiar sound, lately. I suppose the rain was the price we paid for Sunday’s sunshine, which was our reward for Saturday’s torrential rain. Until Sunday, I hadn’t realized there is a creek in the woods along the entry road to the plaza across the street. And even then, I had a hard time seeing it through the trees and undergrowth. But I could hear it, as the runoff from Saturday’s rain rushed toward the Chattahoochee River a few miles to the west.

   I shouldn’t complain about the rain. There hasn’t been much of it until the last month or so. Apparently, this region has been in a ten-year drought, and it will take several more months like February to get the water table back to where it should be. But the damp air makes me stiff, and the rain keeps me indoors, so complain I will.

   For those who are saying, “I wish he’d stop his whining,” I do have something to whine about. According to an article in the February 26th edition of the Ledger-Enquirer, 10.5 inches of rain had fallen on Columbus in February. So, with two days left in the month, the old February record – 9.4 inches – was under more than an inch of water. December 2009, when 13.4 inches of rain fell, is the wettest month in Columbus history.

  

   From the Department of Isn’t That a Co-inky-dink: Last Monday, I sent a few humorous poems – humorous in my opinion, anyway – to Spider, a magazine that targets six-to-nine-year-olds. Wednesday, Russ took me to Target. Along the way, in our discussion of what we were doing to stay busy, Russ said he was trying to drum up some work as an illustrator. One of publications he is sending some samples to is Spider.

  

   I spent some time Tuesday at the West Georgia Eye Care Center, where the doctor looked into my eyes to check on the state of my macular degeneration. (Note: I have Multiple Sclerosis, which is a degenerative disease, and macular degeneration. Apparently, I’m on my way to becoming a complete degenerate, the fate Mom predicted if I didn’t straighten up.) My macular hasn’t degenerated since my last visit, and the doctor said it wouldn’t be necessary to stick a needle in my eye. Always a good thing.

   After a few visits to both the West Georgia Eye Care Center and the Emory Clinic, I’m beginning to think that Southern hospitality, at least as it applies to the medical community, is vastly overrated. I suppose I was just a number to the folks at the Cleveland Clinic and Vitreo-Retinal Consultants in Mentor, but at least they made me feel like more than a digit, and they smiled from time to time.

   The waiting room at the Eye Care Center is full of chairs, so full of chairs it’s almost impossible to navigate in a wheelchair. A couple – they looked to be in their seventies – helped me by moving some of the chairs. No one from the staff did.

  

   Al stopped in this morning.

   “Annie gave me this,” he said, handing me a small plastic dish containing some hard candy, a small package of peanuts and a package of trail mix; the standard birthday gift pack Covenant Woods gives its residents. “She said it’s because my birthday is in February. Look at all those nuts. I can’t eat the goddamn things.”

   Then something in the bowl caught his eye. He pulled it out, looked it over and said, “What the hell is this?”

   It was a five-dollar Walmart gift card.

   “Oh hell, you can have that, too,” he said.

   “I never go to Walmart.”

   “Well, I suppose I could take it and buy something.”

   The bowl of goodies was only an excuse to come see me. Al came to talk. Al is different: he is an agnostic in the Bible belt, and his sexual orientation is ambiguous – “Don’t worry, Tom, I haven’t had an erection in twenty years.”

   He doesn’t have many regrets. “I never hurt anyone,” he said. “All my life all I ever wanted to do is help people.” And he doesn’t feel that he was lead down the primrose path by some evil force. “It’s natural. It’s what I am.”

   But why is he different? That’s what he’s trying so hard to figure out. For him, I think, it is an intellectual exercise. Is it genetics? Is it birth order? Is it nature? Is it nurture?

   “You think I’m crazy, don’t you?” he asks.

   No, I don’t. In fact, in a community where certainty and smug self-satisfaction is rampant, those who, like Guy Noir, are still looking for the answers to life’s persistent questions are as refreshing as an oasis in the Sahara.

  

  

   Wednesday night, I stood up and started to pull the bed covers down and lost my balance. Even as I was falling, I was confident I would land in the wheelchair. When there is nothing for me to hang on to when I stand, I try to stay directly in front of the wheelchair, so if I fall backward, I fall into the seat. And I did. But, I was farther from the wheelchair than I thought, and only a very small portion of my ample posterior hit the chair. I was able to hold on to the chair’s arms and keep myself from falling. But I couldn’t generate enough oomph to get my entire butt on the chair. And with my arms busy holding me up, I couldn’t use them to maneuver my legs in order to get some leverage.

   After a short struggle, I eased myself, butt and all, on to the floor. Squeezed between the wheelchair and the bed, I was unable to get up. I called the desk, and two aides were dispatched to slide me from beneath the bed and sling me into the sack. It was embarrassing, but, in the eleven months I’ve been here, it was the first time I’ve had to call for help.