If it’s Sunday,
Bobbie must be itching to sue someone. A week ago she was set to bring legal
action against Covenant Woods for not serving an evening meal in the dining
room. I don’t know how long Bobbi has lived here, but she was here when I
arrived fourteen months ago, and Covenant Woods wasn’t serving evening meals in
the dining room on Sundays then.
If a resident acts before noon on Sunday, he can order
a box lunch to be delivered to his room around four o’clock. This, as it turned
out, is what Bobbie had done. When I entered the lobby at two forty-five,
however, Bobbie was filling the air with litigious threats.
“In the handbook they gave me, it says they
serve three meals a day,” Bobbie said. “But that’s a lie. They serve breakfast
and lunch on Sundays, and that’s it. I’m not going to let them get away with
that anymore. I’m suing them. I already have five attorneys working on it, and
I’m an attorney, too. We’re going to shut this place down.”
An aide came out of the dining room and
handed Bobbi a Styrofoam box. Bobbi peeked inside it and wasn’t impressed. But
she got up, put the box on her walker and trudged into the empty dining room,
where she ate the box lunch.
This Sunday, Bobbie’s problem was the
Ledger-Enquirer. In truth, Frances had the problem with the newspaper.
“That’s an outright lie,” Bobbie was telling
Frances.
The “lie” was the note Frances and a number
of other residents received instead of their Sunday paper. According to the
note, an inadequate number of papers had been printed, and the delivery guy
would be back in the evening with more.
“He wasn’t shorted,” Bobbie said. “The guy
can’t count and didn’t get enough papers. He’s just trying to cover his butt.
You ought to call the paper and raise hell. And if the Ledger-Enquirer can’t
print enough copies, you can sue them.”
Having received a paper rather than a note
Sunday morning, I excused myself and scurried to my room, grabbed the paper and
took it to Frances.
“In the spirit of full disclosure,” I told
Frances, who was still talking to Bobbie, “I kept the section with the
crossword puzzle.”
“That’s OK,” she said. “The woman next door
to me doesn’t buy the paper, and I give her mine. But sometimes I keep parts of
it, too.”
One evening, as I was about to leave the
dining room, I noticed Eleanor sitting at a table by herself, surrounded by
menus. So I went to see what was going on.
“They’re really shorthanded,” she said, “and
I volunteered to help with the menus.”
She was taking that day’s dinner menu out of
the plastic folder and replacing it with the next day’s lunch menu. It looked
like a job I could handle, and I asked if she wanted some help. She did. The
reason for the shorthandedness is servers finding better jobs elsewhere.
“I wouldn’t want their job,” Eleanor said.
“Me either, too many mean-spirited old
people.”
“It’s not just that,” Eleanor said. “I hate
to say it, but I think a lot of it is racial.”
That might be. All the servers are black,
and, except for perhaps a half-dozen exceptions, all the resident are white.
But many of the residents here are equal-opportunity crabs. Brenda, a white
woman, worked as a server part time for a few months. Then one evening, she came
by the table almost in tears and apologized, saying she was upset because there
were some really demanding people at one of her tables. I’ve never heard if
that is the reason she quit, but Brenda hasn’t been back since that night.
One evening as we stuffed menus, Eleanor
mentioned that she’d graduated from high school in 1949. I told her I was a
year old when she got her diploma. Then she explained why I was only a year old
at the time.
“I was in the eleventh grade when I
graduated,” she said. “At the time, the high schools in Georgia only went to
the eleventh grade. It wasn’t until the next year, 1950, that they added
another year of high school down here.”
At eighty-one, Eleanor is hardly old by the
standards of Covenant Woods, but she would have been in her early thirties when
Martin Luther King, Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech and the nation finally
got around to dismantling the Jim Crow laws. So, I wonder if Eleanor might be
right about the racial attitudes of some of the residents. Many of them lived
in segregated communities until they were well into middle age.
I had to put Dennis in his place the other
night. Dennis, with his Mayberry accent and penchant for gossip, is the bus
driver. Sometime in the fall, he decided he needed to be at the controls of my
wheelchair when I got on the bus in order get it properly positioned to be
strapped down. This was a little more than slightly demeaning, especially since
neither Penelope nor Annie needed to say more than, “Back up a few inches,” to
get me in the right spot. I kept my mouth shut, however, and the longer I
stayed silent, the more vigorous Dennis got with the controls.
About a month ago, the day after some soiree
that Dennis drove us to, the wheelchair started to act up. The problem, Ken
from Convalescent Care told me, is in the unit with joy stick. The cause could
be any of a zillion things, he said. I don’t have much of problem with the
chair if I go outside in the morning or evening. In the late morning and
afternoon, however, with the sun high in the sky, the unit quickly overheats
and does funny things. It hasn’t left me stranded, but it does worry me.
Ken has a replacement unit in stock, but it
costs a thousand dollars. So, he’s gone through the Cleveland Clinic, where I
got the prescription for the chair, to get a prescription for a new unit, and
is fighting with Humana and Medicare to pay for it.
In the meantime, I’ve been nursing the buggy
along, going shorter distances, not making mad dashes across Woodruff Farm Road
and heading for the air-conditioned innards of Covenant Woods the minute the
joy stick unit starts heating up. And I had managed to avoid Dennis on the bus
until last Tuesday, when I threw caution to the wind and went to dinner with a
group.
As
Dennis was getting ready to strap the chair down for the trip back from the
restaurant, he reached for the joy stick.
“I’ve got it,” I said.
He looked at me and smiled a smile that
seemed to say, “You poor, demented old fart. I’m the professional here, and I
will do it.” Then he grabbed the joy stick, or would have if my hand hadn’t
already been on it.
“I said, I’ll do this,” I told him.
“Well, you’re going to have back up a
little.”
So, I backed up a little.
“Not there. Over here,” he said, as though
the wheelchair had to be spotted with the precision of Air Force One.
“Over where? No one else has a problem
strapping me in. You’re the only one.”
And after I told him that, he didn’t have a
problem either.
Russ and Karen came over this evening,
bringing traditional Memorial Day fare – hamburgers and hot dogs – with them.
And I got to play the excessively proud, darn near intolerable grandpa, showing
them all the video clips that Beth has sent of Hayden and MaKenna. I loved it.
