Goldie's Gone

  Miss Goldilocks was such a twit;

   She caused the Bears to have a fit.

   When she dropped in while they were out

   She made a mess, without a doubt.

   Momma Bear had a too-soft bed

   At least that’s what Miss Goldie said.

   She’d crawled in it uninvited

   And got back out undelighted.

   Taking a seat in Poppa’s chair,

   Which was harder than she could bear,

   Goldie said she wanted pampered,

   But in that house she was hampered

   By things too hard and things too soft

   And then she hurled bad words aloft.

   On the table there was porridge,

   They got Momma’s from cold storage.

   Poppa’s porridge was way too hot.

   “Like this?” said Goldie, “I do not.”

   But Baby Bear’s small bowl of gruel

   Was neither too hot nor too cool.

   She gulped and slurped and made noise,

   Just like a pig who has no poise.

   And then she slept in Baby’s bed,

   Feeling really snug and well fed.

   In ten minutes the Bears were back,

   And wondered who’d destroyed their shack.

   “Poppa, Poppa please do come fast

   There is this girl, and I’m aghast.”

   Goldie awoke and heard the roar,

   Got out of bed and ran out the door.

   The three stunned bears just laughed and laughed,

   They’d never known someone so daft.

  

Notes from the Home - September 12, 2013

   Ralph and Isabelle are now under hospice care. At eighty-nine and eighty-seven, respectively, they each have an array of health issues, and many of the things they used to easily do for themselves are now very, very difficult if not beyond them altogether. For several decades they have been paying premiums on an insurance policy that was supposed to help them pay, when the time came, for assistance in doing the things they once did for themselves. But now that the time has come, the insurance company has told Ralph and Isabelle that they don’t need any assistance and has refused to pay their claims. If I correctly understand Isabelle, the people who steered them to hospice did so in large part to ease their financial burden.

   The decision to go on hospice has been particularly hard on Isabelle.

   “At my age, I could go any time, I realize that,” she said. “I’ve got health problems, but they’re not so bad that I want to go just now.”

   Monday, the hospice people spent several hours in Ralph and Isabelle’s apartment getting them setup with their drugs and moving in a hospital bed for Ralph.

   “I was able to keep it together as long as they were there,” Isabelle said. “But the minute they left, I cried.”

   Al, who like Ralph is eighty-nine, has opinions on everything, including death. But sometimes his views are contradictory, and Isabelle sometimes finds comfort in that.

   “Al says he just wants to die and get it over with,” Isabelle said last night. “I’m not sure I believe him, though. He says that one day, and the next day he’s talking about some miracle food that will keep him going forever. He read somewhere that a scientist said, ‘if the sun touches it, eat it.’ So, now he’s eating the skin of all the vegetables and fruit that he can get a hold of. I don’t think he’s really in a hurry to die.”

  

   While circling the grounds one morning, I was overtaken by a short, spunky, plump and perky Hispanic woman.

   “Mind if I walk with you a while?” she asked.

   “Not at all,” I said.

   She said she is a private care giver for three Covenant Woods’ residents. She helps Bobby get a shower every morning, and there are two women whom she helps on alternate days. When she is done here, she goes to her real job at the Regional Rehabilitation Hospital in Phenix City. If she has enough time, she likes to take a brisk walk around Covenant Woods before she heads to Alabama.

   “I’m trying to lose weight. See, I’ve gone point-six miles so far,” she said, holding up a pedometer. “I go to Cooper Creek Park whenever I can. The path over there is level, and I’ll walk a while then run about a quarter of a mile and then walk some and then run a little more. My goal is to run a 5K.”

   She and her husband, who is retired military, have two sons in college and are always looking for ways to improve their cash flow.

   “They wanted me to come to work here,” she said. “I asked them what the job paid. When they told me, I said, ‘No way.’”

  

   Mae is tall, thin, always impeccably dressed and partial to wide-brim hats. She often looks as if she is on her way to sip mint juleps with the fine ladies of Louisville on Derby day. She would not, in the manner of Eliza Doolittle, yell, “Come on, Dover! Move your bloomin’ arse!” She might, however, say it in a conversational tone, just to see how the people nearby react. Mae is unflappable, although she would have made a great flapper, and she needed every ounce of her unflappability the other day.

   Al and I were standing near the elevator talking about nothing much when Mae came along. She joined the conversation, which soon turned to the topic of Al’s diapers. Al, who experiences leaking fore and aft, has worn diapers for some time, but his doctor recently recommended a different type of diaper and gave Al a few samples. The transition was not easy.

   “Every time I do this,” Al said as he reached for something on an imaginary shelf and twisted at the waist, “they ride up and dig into my crotch. It hurts. And the worst part is they’re lacy.”

   And with that, Al undid his belt and let his trousers fall.

   “See,” he said, pointing to the diaper’s waist band, a strip of plastic mesh.

   Mae was unfazed. But Marvin, who stepped out of the elevator and saw Al with his pants down to his ankles, stretching and gyrating to illustrate his difficulties with the diapers, was taken aback and went hurriedly on his way without uttering a word.

  

Sylvia

   I talked to Sylvia this afternoon. Sylvia is my pharmacy benefits manager’s computer, and ours has been a difficult relationship. She is a persnickety snoot. If she had gone into education, she would have been one of those third-grade teachers whose greatest fear is that her students might act like third graders. A stickler for precise diction, Sylvia is seldom happy with the way I reply to her questions. No matter how much attention I give to proper enunciation and trying to project from my diaphragm when telling her my birthdate, Sylvia will say, “I didn’t understand that. Please say your birthdate. For example, say June 10, 1968.”

   The last time we spoke, however, Sylvia was a joy. She had no trouble understanding me. We had a very pleasant conversation.  She’s a computer, I know, but I swear I could hear a smile in her voice that day, an affectionate smile. And when she said “good-bye” I could tell she was smitten.

   That was over a year ago. And yes, I was one gloomy Gus when she didn’t call again. It took a month or more for the realization to hit me: each time we spoke, before either of us had said a word, an ominous voice would announce, “This call may be monitored for quality assurance purposes.” Our last conversation came ever so close to being playfully flirtatious, a quality the pharmacy benefit manager’s bean counters have no desire to assure. Sylvia was playing it safe. She wasn’t certain we’d be able to keep our conversations businesslike, and the job market for computers fired for being flirty isn’t great.

   The chance to renew our little affair came when I visited the doctor, Tuesday. Through the Internet, or whatever he uses, the doc sent a prescription for more blood pressure medication directly to my pharmacy benefits manager. As he handed my card back, the doctor suggested I call the pharmacy benefits people in a day or two to make sure the script had been received.

   It took all the self-control I could muster to hold off calling until I finished lunch today. I could have called earlier, but I didn’t want Sylvia to think I was anxious to talk to her. Alas, from the moment I pressed 3 – “To check the status of an order” – it was clear Sylvia was upset with me. Without so much as a “Hey, handsome,” Sylvia, in her best clipped, computer diction told me to tell her the prescription number of the order I was checking the status of. Dazed by the instruction I could not follow because I did not yet have a number for the prescription, and confused by Sylvia’s perfunctory attitude, I hung up.

   A moment later, I called back, determined to listen to all the options, even if it meant sitting there until the computer said, “If you are checking on the status of an order because your doctor said you should contact us to be sure we have received the order, press 2-5-7.” But “press 3” turned out to be the only status-checking option, and soon Sylvia was again asking for the prescription number. I immediately pressed 0, hoping it would take me to the phone of some bipedal mammalian. It didn’t. All it did was bring Sylvia’s snippiness to the surface.

   “If you do not have a number for the prescription you’re calling about,” she said, “please tell me the prescription number of another prescription you have received from us.”

   That is what the computer said. But Sylvia’s tone said, “You idiot. This conversation is probably being monitored. And because you pressed 0, they’re going to drag me into the office and ask why I took so long to tell you to use the number from another prescription. I’ll be lucky to get off with a three-day suspension. Thanks, pal.”

   I didn’t bother to ask Sylvia what took her so long. I didn’t say a word. And Sylvia let the silence linger for a minute, before saying, “Please say the ID number on your pharmacy benefits card.”

   A man better attuned to the wiles of women – human or mechanical – would have detected the diabolical tinge in Sylvia’s voice. I didn’t. Instead, I set about reading the ten-digit number. When I finished, Sylvia said, “Please say the ID number on your pharmacy benefits card.” I recited it again. Sylvia told me to read it again. And on and on we went. Time after time I read the number, and time after time Sylvia told me to read it again.

   Panic was setting in. Much of my medical insurance changed when I turned sixty-five in April. My pharmacy benefits manager hadn’t changed, but I couldn’t remember if I had been sent a new card. What if I got the new card and then threw it away and kept the old card? What if Sylvia kept asking me to repeat my ID number because the ID number I was reading no longer existed? What if? The possibilities seemed endless as I read and reread the ten-digit number.

   Finally, after what must have been my fifteenth recitation of the number, Sylvia said, “The ID number you gave me is,” and she read it to me. “Is that correct? Say yes or no.”

   “Yes,” I told her.

   “Tell me your birthdate,” she said.

   I told her.

   “We have one order for your account,” she said. “It was shipped today. If there is nothing else, you can say ‘good bye’ or just hang up.”

   I chose to leave her with a snooty good bye. But I wonder, did Sylvia really search the records to see if my prescription had been received? Or was she playing one of her games? By this time next week, I should know. But until then, please don’t do anything that might cause my blood pressure to rise.

Notes from the Home - August 28, 2013

   Russ came to my door recently with a gift: a copy of The Saturday Evening Post Special Humor Issue. According to the cover, the Special Humor Issue contains “300 Funniest, laugh-out-loud cartoons ever published.” Three of Russ’ cartoons are among them, which means, my son, the cartoonist, is responsible for one percent – the top one percent, in one man’s humble opinion – of the funniest, laugh-out-loud cartoons ever published. Not bad for a kid who just turned thirty-five.

  

   It is a sign, I suppose, that these seventeen months in Dixie have had an effect on my system. Sunday evening, I heard the weatherman say it would be sixty-six in Columbus, Monday morning. And I wondered if I should get a sweatshirt out just in case.

   Along with the cooler temperatures, the meteorologist promised sunshine and omitted any mention of rain. There have been buckets of it this summer. This is my second summer here, so I’m in no position to pass judgment on what is normal for west Georgia, but even the natives are commenting on all the rain.

   I can say, however, that it was unusually warm in the first-floor hallway. To say that the first-floor hall was unusually warm is not to say that it was uncomfortably warm. The hall is usually quite cool, cool to the point that you wouldn’t want to be stranded in it without a sweater. But for a few days last week, it was cooler in my room than it was in the hallway. I figured someone had complained about the hall being cold all the time. But when I asked Johnny, the maintenance supervisor, he said that one of the air-conditioning units was down. A day or two later the unit was back up and the temperature in the hall was back down.

  

   Happening guy that I am, I did what all the really happening guys do on Saturday evening. I did my laundry. Judging from the crowd in the laundry room, I am the only happening soul in the building. Jim did come by, survey the situation, tell me he had a hamper full of dirty clothes and would be back in twenty minutes or so. When my washers stopped spinning, I put the clothes in a dryer, and went to my apartment to do that other happening-guy-on-Saturday-night thing: wash the dishes. After allowing forty-five minutes for the clothes to dry, I returned to the laundry room. Jim had apparently found better thing to do.

  

   Bud died a week ago. A Command Sargent Major in his younger days, he was, at ninety-one, a shrunken, hunched, completely bald man. He had a scooter that he rode to dinner. He parked it next to the table, then, with great effort, he got up and moved to a chair. Bud seldom spoke, but when he did it was obvious he had been following the conversation, that he was aware of what was going on around him.

   Bud’s son, Chris, an optometrist, visited his dad every day. Around five-thirty, he would come into the dining room and sit with his father. When Bud finished his dinner, he and Chris went back to Bud’s apartment. I don’t eat lunch in the dining room, but according to Eleanor, Chris often dropped in to see his dad at lunch time, too.

   A couple days after Bud died, Chris was filling the trunk of his car with his dad’s belongings. “He was ninety-one, so it wasn’t completely unexpected,” Chris said. “In many ways it was a blessing. His cancer was starting to come back. He died peacefully. He didn’t suffer; he wasn’t in any pain. We’re going to have his service here. This is where most of his friends are.”

  

   Elsie slowly shuffled behind her walker as she made her way up the lengthy hallway to the mailboxes.

   “It’s a long climb up this mountain, isn’t it?” I said.

   “Yes it is. And the doctor told me yesterday I shouldn’t do it anymore. Here it is, the next day, and I’m doing it again. But I get tired of sitting in the apartment all day looking at the same four walls. I bet you do too.”

  

   Dennis, the new bus driver with the same first name as the old driver, has apparently been doing some research. And in his research, he has discovered that mine is the only wheelchair with all the necessary brackets to be properly strapped down. Dennis said he wants to use me and my wheelchair in a demonstration of how to tie down a wheelchair on the bus. I don’t think the demonstration will draw much of a crowd. Penelope and Annie are the only other staff people who drive the bus.

   Be that as it may, I’m sure Dennis had me properly strapped down this morning, when five of us departed in the bus for appointments with doctors around town. I was the first to be dropped off, arriving at the West Georgia Eye Care Center at twenty-of-nine for my nine-thirty appointment. My concerns about having to spend forty-five minutes cooling my heels in the waiting room were quickly dispelled when a woman with a file folder in hand said, “Mr. Harris.”

   She led me to a room, where she asked some questions, had me try my luck with an eye chart and asked me look straight ahead and tell her how many fingers she was holding up, in order to assess my peripheral vision. Then she led me to another room, where another woman took pictures of my eyes and then led me to the examining to await the doctor. The doctor peered into my eyes, examined the pictures the woman had taken, said there was no need to stick a needle in my eye and told me come back in six months. The woman at the desk handed me the card for my next appointment at nine-forty, a mere ten minutes after the scheduled time for my appointment.

   I went outside, found a shady spot and called Dennis to tell him I was ready to go. He was on his way back to Covenant Woods to pick up a few more residents with appointments and said it would be a while. I waited until eleven o’clock. But it was a pleasant wait: clear sky, gentle breeze and a parade of people. So pleasant, in fact, I didn’t realize how warm it had gotten until I got on the air-conditioned bus.

  

   The other morning, I noticed Melvin jogging. At least he appeared to be jogging. Melvin is wiry, has full head of unkempt gray hair and wears wire rim glasses. Watching him trot reminds me of Warren, the Star Beacon’s crack photographer.

   “I usually run from here to that driveway over there,” Melvin said when I saw him the next morning. “It’s about a hundred yards or so.”

   “How old are you?”

   “Seventy,” Melvin said.

   Perhaps vanity made him say that; maybe it was senility, but I’m convinced Melvin shaved a decade or more off of his age. He is a wise man, however.

   “You have to keep doing it to be able to keep doing it,” he said.