Hijinks Over the Hill

Going back a couple of weeks, remembering encounters with various people—elderly people. I wrote in a post called “Club Dead” on January 8 that life along my stretch of beach has been in large part taken over by winter visitors, ‘snowbirds’ here from colder climes. As it happens, things were just getting started and were a pale preview of the action (or is it inaction?) around here now. The weeks since arrival have allowed a long list of activities to blossom. Bingo was the start, but now there is poker, shuffleboard, game night, cookouts, mahjong, cocktail parties, three-hole golf and shopping lunches. The calendar and sign up sheet on the clubhouse bulletin board is so elaborate it must have been created by a professional.

As for cocktail parties, one of my friends from Cleveland was here and thought it might be fun. The designated starting time was 4:30 p.m. around the pool. Everything of course was BYO, so about ten before five we walked out to the pool with a bottle of wine and a platter of cheese and crackers. The crowd looked a little thin when we got there, and a couple of ladies in cocktail leisure suits were busy wrapping snacks in Saran wrap. One of the two looked up at us standing stupidly there with wine and crackers and explained, “We’re just picking things up now, about to go in. Most folks wanna get to the dinner table soon.” Lisa and I waited to get back inside before laughing about a thirty-minute drinks party.

An encounter this morning…

Two old guys were sitting out on the oceanfront deck, cane and walker parked nearby. They watched me coming up from the beach, and before I could shake a foot free of sand they began a conversation.

CODGER A: “Now, I hear you were over in Japan for some years. What’s the exchange rate now? When I was there back in 1948 it was 360 yen to the dollar. Has it dropped any?”

ME: “Uh…”

CODGER B: “I was there in 1945 myself. Has Tokyo changed much to speak of?”

CODGER A: “Somebody told me a cup of coffee costs $10.00. Bet you’re glad to be outta such an expensive place, huh?”

CODGER B: “Did you like it over there? How’d you talk or understand anything? Why hell, I wouldn’t be able to so much as buy a bottle of milk.”

In a change of scene, one of the posts from mid-January was about an elderly woman I had some bad vibes from while visiting my friend Angela in the nursing home. The bad vibes came from an eighty-five year-old who told me to get the hell out and take the crap I was reading with me. This happened when I asked her to turn the volume down on The Wheel of Fortune. She later got moved out of Angela’s room for continued orneriness and bad language. Visiting Angela again yesterday I got the latest news. The former roommate—call her Jezebel—was apparently none too happy in her new room, because inside of two days she smashed the television, threw a chair through the window glass, and somehow managed to climb out and hobble off down the street in her open-at-the-back hospital gown. The nursing home aides tackled her two blocks later and wrestled her kicking and screaming back to base. Word from Angela is that they sent her straight to Halifax House for Incorrigible Seniors. Bars on the windows, straps on the beds and ankle bracelets of the kind Martha Stewart made famous.

Life is lively around here.

Delia

“Delia! Put that down. It don’t belong to you.”

“Why?”

“It’s not yours, Delia. Go on back yonder by the window…I’m gonna call Baby Clyde. Now go on.”

Mumbling to herself, half English, half Spanish, Delia rolled her chair over to her side of the room, leaving behind the pink sweater that was halfway out of the drawer when Jewel called out.

Delia had been at the Rose of Sharon retirement home for almost a year, but by now unable to recall how long it had been. Time, despite the tick of clocks and calendar squares was a forgotten concept, just another undefined confusion among the names and unnamed objects that swirled in the fog of her days and brought nighttime dreams she swore were real. Delia was eighty-seven years old and the mother of four sons, none of them nearby. It was the eldest who arranged and paid for his mother’s care at Rose of Sharon. Too far away to visit more than two or three times a year, he left that part of it to the youngest, who lived at least within an hour’s drive of the nursing home. Of the other two sons, one lived in Miami and had a new address and telephone number every month. The other son had never left Cuba.

Delia was unwilling to leave the little house in Edgewater after her husband’s death, wouldn’t agree to move away, to leave behind the reminders of Jorge, the rooms still colored by the lingering shades and smells of her husband. She had shaken her head, lips compressed into a straight line, refusing to go and live with Enrique in New York.

But living alone became increasingly difficult and little by little Delia lost her way, lost the will or desire to take care of herself. It was finally the neighbor who called Enrique in New York.

She wasn’t sure when that happened, but one day Enrique arrived, and now she couldn’t find the house in Edgewater, though she looked for it every day. Her son Amado came from Orlando to visit and took her in his car to see the house, but people she didn’t know could be seen through the windows and this upset her. She sat in the car twisting a tissue into shreds, cried and wouldn’t let go of Amado when he held her.

So now, Delia roamed the hallways of the Rose of Sharon nursing home in her wheelchair, her still thick mane of white hair falling in tangles around her face and shoulders. On more than one occasion she entered someone’s room and startled them, ask that they comb her hair or rub her feet. It was usually Baby Clyde, the nurse’s aide who came and collected her. A mention of his name was usually enough to stop Delia, he being the only one in the nursing home who had found some small clear window into her confusion. She responded to none of the other aides.

Last week she returned to the room with a bottle of medicine she had found on a table in another room. Delia was unscrewing the top when Jewel called out.

“Don’t you drink that Delia! That’s somebody’s medicine, not for you.”

“I know it’s my husband’s medicine and he had to take it every day.”

Jewel got herself over to Delia and put a hand over the bottle. “Delia, come on now and give me that medicine so Baby Clyde can take it back. It’s got somebody’s name on it there.”

“It’s probably my husband’s name.”

“Stop now. You want some Graham Crackers and peanut butter?” Jewel knew that her roommate liked the crackers, because just last week she’d stolen a plate full of them off Jewel’s table.

“Well, I might try one. They sound good. Would you rub my feet?”

Jewel slipped the bottle of medicine out of Delia’s hand and said, “I’ll ask the nurse about that when she comes.”

“Why?”

“She’ll be coming to get this medicine after I push the button. Now you sit here while I go over there and get you one or two of my crackers and peanut butter.” She brought the crackers over to Delia on a paper towel. Putting it down in her lap, she said. “You ain’t seen my Bible, have you? I know I had it in that drawer by my bed last night.”

Delia looked at Jewel with eyes that made no connection to Bible or peanut butter crackers. She was quiet again, lost somewhere among the shifting bits of memory that held the house in Edgewater and her husband Jorge, the man who rubbed her feet and combed her hair for all those years. She was sure it was all still there in her house if she could just find it.