 |
| There's an in-house salon |
 |
| Computer mouse in the library |
 |
| Ambling through the halls, looking at the various front door decor |
 |
| Weekly menu plan posted on the community board |
Around CLV
Dinnertime chats 1: Jim and Maxine Kaler
At 5PM sharp every evening, the dining room begins to fill with a slow procession of walkers and wheelchairs. Tonight I suggested to a stranger in passing that there should be a parking lot for all of them. He gave me a tired nod, as if this was some longstanding political conflict that had been discussed already. Or as if he was just tired.
We were all shuffling to the host's podium to queue up to get our names written down on a list from which the host assigns random seating for us. Meanwhile, we waited in the cushy couch-filled lounge until our names were called. The lounge is called Hughey Lounge, which I have decided will be my stage name.
Grandma and I were grouped with a couple, Jim and Maxine Kaler. Jim was in an electric wheelchair and approached the table with a deadpan look on his face. Mouth open a bit, sarcastic eyes. While gazing out at some faraway spot above his steel rim glasses, he operated the joystick on his armrest, moving forward and then back and then a little forward again and then yielded and swiveled. Buzzing noises from the machinery.
I soon learned that he is a performer in other ways. Before we were served water, it rolled off his tongue: Jim Kaler, emeritus professor of Astronomy at U of I, taught for over 30 years, loved by all his students. Always considered teaching a performance. Theatre. Great love of theatre. Also the arts. Music. Also, he sings. Still takes voice lessons. Prepping for a recital soon.
It was a long, self-aggrandizing monologue, sure, but I curbed my judgement. Oversharing may be an expression of his delight at the world, at his long eventful life. Things might look pretty good from the lofty perch of the late 70s. He is also wheelchair ridden, that helped, for it spurred me to think: who am I to criticize the wheelchair-ridden? Or the old-at-large, or the anyone-at-larger?
I learn later that he has Parkinson's, although I wouldn't have guessed it as his constant fidgeting is subtle, just a little Elvis-like, a loose full-body wobble that perfectly matches the tone of his goofy one-liners that tumble out one after the next.
So he carried on in front of a willing audience. "I owe my career to the Russians," he said, and I smelled a recycled, trademark line there. Or maybe that was my soup du jour. His childhood fascination with the stars was encouraged by being in the right place at the right time. When college came around, the space race was cranking at full speed and the country crazy about people crazy about anything astro-related. Jim was crazy about everything astro-related, and was mentored by an equally crazy if not crazier astro guy who allegedly had a outback log cabin-type upbringing and autodidacted himself to Harvard. This mentor's eccentric intelligence helped Jim commit himself to academia. "I was swimming in job offers," he said. To be swimming in university jobs: this is the kind of luck that should under normal circumstances incite envy, but now that such luck is rendered so improbable, it instead hits the ear like some cute retro relic-concept; think Troll dolls, or burning autumn leaves on your front lawn.
LATER ADDITION (Jan 19, 2020): he has a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_B._Kaler
If at this point you were like me, you'd be wondering what Maxine was about. She was calm by contrast, also walking by contrast, and didn't appear to have any qualms about her husband's self-image, although she didn't seem too reverential, either. She was his confidante, interjecting with interesting anecdotes to his limelight soliloquies. Their relationship felt like a longstanding dynamic: the actor and supporting actor, the writer and editor, the funny guy and the straight guy. I asked Maxine what she did.
Jim was first past the post. "Oh her? She didn't do anything," he joked. Har har all around the table. She said she had an early love of mathematics, studied that for a while, but then got married and lost touch, then tried accounting, and then ultimately ended up working at the University, "...but not to do math or accounting!" she and Jim said in almost-unison. Hee hee, har har. As if her switching careers was an inevitable symptom of being a woman, or a wife. That's at least how I took it, because Jim didn't let us linger on her bio for too long. soon we were back to him somehow.
Somewhere in the conversation about their long careers at the University they told me about the famed Morrow Plots, the small cornfield that as an ongoing university experiment has remained untouched by pesticides or any other unnatural influence since its establishment in the 1870s. We planned to make a visit together on Monday afternoon.
Our server came around with the dessert options. The servers are young here, many recruited from the nearby high school and community college. He nervously recited at least six different options. The dessert options are extensive here, and change everyday, and have long trademarked-sounding names, i.e. "Birthday Dream Party Supreme" ice cream, or "Chocolate Monkey Chunk" cookies. My trademark dessert of choice was the Snack Pack chocolate pudding topped with Cool Whip. Jim ordered two oatmeal raisin cookies and without words his wife pulled out a Ziploc bag from her purse and handed it to him. "Ordering the portable dessert item, clever," I said. And ordering double the offered quantity, bold. Turns out this is his nightly routine, the Maxine-with-Ziploc part included. this may do as good a job of conveying their relationship dynamic as anything.
We were all shuffling to the host's podium to queue up to get our names written down on a list from which the host assigns random seating for us. Meanwhile, we waited in the cushy couch-filled lounge until our names were called. The lounge is called Hughey Lounge, which I have decided will be my stage name.
Grandma and I were grouped with a couple, Jim and Maxine Kaler. Jim was in an electric wheelchair and approached the table with a deadpan look on his face. Mouth open a bit, sarcastic eyes. While gazing out at some faraway spot above his steel rim glasses, he operated the joystick on his armrest, moving forward and then back and then a little forward again and then yielded and swiveled. Buzzing noises from the machinery.
I soon learned that he is a performer in other ways. Before we were served water, it rolled off his tongue: Jim Kaler, emeritus professor of Astronomy at U of I, taught for over 30 years, loved by all his students. Always considered teaching a performance. Theatre. Great love of theatre. Also the arts. Music. Also, he sings. Still takes voice lessons. Prepping for a recital soon.
It was a long, self-aggrandizing monologue, sure, but I curbed my judgement. Oversharing may be an expression of his delight at the world, at his long eventful life. Things might look pretty good from the lofty perch of the late 70s. He is also wheelchair ridden, that helped, for it spurred me to think: who am I to criticize the wheelchair-ridden? Or the old-at-large, or the anyone-at-larger?
I learn later that he has Parkinson's, although I wouldn't have guessed it as his constant fidgeting is subtle, just a little Elvis-like, a loose full-body wobble that perfectly matches the tone of his goofy one-liners that tumble out one after the next.
So he carried on in front of a willing audience. "I owe my career to the Russians," he said, and I smelled a recycled, trademark line there. Or maybe that was my soup du jour. His childhood fascination with the stars was encouraged by being in the right place at the right time. When college came around, the space race was cranking at full speed and the country crazy about people crazy about anything astro-related. Jim was crazy about everything astro-related, and was mentored by an equally crazy if not crazier astro guy who allegedly had a outback log cabin-type upbringing and autodidacted himself to Harvard. This mentor's eccentric intelligence helped Jim commit himself to academia. "I was swimming in job offers," he said. To be swimming in university jobs: this is the kind of luck that should under normal circumstances incite envy, but now that such luck is rendered so improbable, it instead hits the ear like some cute retro relic-concept; think Troll dolls, or burning autumn leaves on your front lawn.
LATER ADDITION (Jan 19, 2020): he has a Wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_B._Kaler
If at this point you were like me, you'd be wondering what Maxine was about. She was calm by contrast, also walking by contrast, and didn't appear to have any qualms about her husband's self-image, although she didn't seem too reverential, either. She was his confidante, interjecting with interesting anecdotes to his limelight soliloquies. Their relationship felt like a longstanding dynamic: the actor and supporting actor, the writer and editor, the funny guy and the straight guy. I asked Maxine what she did.
Jim was first past the post. "Oh her? She didn't do anything," he joked. Har har all around the table. She said she had an early love of mathematics, studied that for a while, but then got married and lost touch, then tried accounting, and then ultimately ended up working at the University, "...but not to do math or accounting!" she and Jim said in almost-unison. Hee hee, har har. As if her switching careers was an inevitable symptom of being a woman, or a wife. That's at least how I took it, because Jim didn't let us linger on her bio for too long. soon we were back to him somehow.
Somewhere in the conversation about their long careers at the University they told me about the famed Morrow Plots, the small cornfield that as an ongoing university experiment has remained untouched by pesticides or any other unnatural influence since its establishment in the 1870s. We planned to make a visit together on Monday afternoon.
Our server came around with the dessert options. The servers are young here, many recruited from the nearby high school and community college. He nervously recited at least six different options. The dessert options are extensive here, and change everyday, and have long trademarked-sounding names, i.e. "Birthday Dream Party Supreme" ice cream, or "Chocolate Monkey Chunk" cookies. My trademark dessert of choice was the Snack Pack chocolate pudding topped with Cool Whip. Jim ordered two oatmeal raisin cookies and without words his wife pulled out a Ziploc bag from her purse and handed it to him. "Ordering the portable dessert item, clever," I said. And ordering double the offered quantity, bold. Turns out this is his nightly routine, the Maxine-with-Ziploc part included. this may do as good a job of conveying their relationship dynamic as anything.
On Ralph
Grandma's energy dips and wavers through the day like a kite, but her awareness of the reality around Grandpa feels constant. She is never confused as to why she is alone, and recognizes that the photographs of Grandpa throughout the apartment are just that. There is one portrait of him in particular that she remembers to catch as she walks down the hallway to her bedroom-- it's a large print out of him taped on a file cabinet in his old office, taken in about 2012. One of Grandpa's many perfect book jacket portraits.
 She says, "There he is," rationally yet warmly. Sometimes she says Goodnight to it and gives it a kiss, even this rational yet warm.  |
We walk bast this painting every evening, and each time she tells me that it was Grandpa's favorite, as the scene depicts Trouville, where he visited while traveling in France as a teenager.
|
Meadowbrook
Clark-Lindsey Village. As its hyphenated name suggests, this is a sophisticated place. There are Macs. There is a swimming pool. A daily-rotating selection of sliced fruits in the ice water dispenser in the lobby.
If you are drawn to dark undercurrents, you'd end up at the swinging doors of Meadbowbrook. Meadowbrook is the other wing of CLV, where residents are taken to peter out their very last days, although I've heard some have persisted here for years; Grandpa himself was at Meadowbrook for three. Meadowbrook doesn't hide what it is because it can't. It is essentially a hospital, with an emergency unit close at hand and the only place in the whole complex where it feels there are more staff than there are patients. No more wood panelling and plush floral patterned chairs. No sprawling dining room-- instead, residents sit in a small canteen filled with plastic tables and chairs. I recall the ice cream Grandpa and I ate from styrofoam cups. No longer "independent living," most of the doors to each unit are wide open. As I walked down the halls, my steady pace panning from one room to the next, I saw variations on a theme: grey humans like deflated balloons, crumpled and wasted, some trapped in some kind of hospital harness, others in wide-mouthed sleep. The sounds of ignored television and mild beeping and defibrillators. Hospital curtains around each bed. Large bouquets of flowers on tables, which looked garish--almost mocking--in their bursting celebration of freshness and color.
 |
| Channel 2 is an endless slideshow of the day's events, set to big band jazz |
Though one can find wine and/or roses here, it is not all wine and roses here. There is an apartment close to Grandma's from which I often hear the sounds of an old man violently vomiting. I recall hearing this from all my previous visits and a chill came over me when I imagined that it was possibly the same guy. And then there is the man with long disheveled hair made all the more disheveled by an ill-fitting visor who remains seated at the dining table long after dining hours, looking not asleep but distinctly dead. In fact with his long hair he happens to look like a bit of a Deadhead. I don't know if this coincidence makes my description of him any less offensive.
 |
Notebook of the recently deceased in the lobby
|
If you are drawn to dark undercurrents, you'd end up at the swinging doors of Meadbowbrook. Meadowbrook is the other wing of CLV, where residents are taken to peter out their very last days, although I've heard some have persisted here for years; Grandpa himself was at Meadowbrook for three. Meadowbrook doesn't hide what it is because it can't. It is essentially a hospital, with an emergency unit close at hand and the only place in the whole complex where it feels there are more staff than there are patients. No more wood panelling and plush floral patterned chairs. No sprawling dining room-- instead, residents sit in a small canteen filled with plastic tables and chairs. I recall the ice cream Grandpa and I ate from styrofoam cups. No longer "independent living," most of the doors to each unit are wide open. As I walked down the halls, my steady pace panning from one room to the next, I saw variations on a theme: grey humans like deflated balloons, crumpled and wasted, some trapped in some kind of hospital harness, others in wide-mouthed sleep. The sounds of ignored television and mild beeping and defibrillators. Hospital curtains around each bed. Large bouquets of flowers on tables, which looked garish--almost mocking--in their bursting celebration of freshness and color.
 |
| From my Meadowbrook visit in 2014 |
I kept walking with unwilling acceleration and found myself pushing through the swinging doors back to Clark Lindsey, past the plushy chairs and hot cocoa and pots of poinsettia, past a hunched old lady checking her mail, out the main entrance and onto the sidewalk, and kept walking and it was a while until a thought entered my head, and it was that I could go on walking forever. Just me and the cows. I felt boosted by all that was behind me but not particularly pulled towards what was ahead, which was just the same long, insistently straight road, which in bright clear sunshine revealed my unchanging fate in the distance. I broke into a run.
On reading
Grandma is the same solid, sensible Ruth. This is apparent enough by the contents of her refrigerator: soy milk, cottage cheese, orange juice, walnuts. She still gives affirmative MMMs! and little nods to her Raisin Bran, paying the old respects to a square meal. She still wears a necklace over her turtleneck (and when it's time for bed, takes it off, neatly coils the string around the pendant and puts it on her dressing table). Eucerin is still her only lotion of choice. She still leans forward in a way that suggests there is something to do, even when there really isn't. Maybe this is residual momentum from the previous nine decades, her body frozen in action like a bristlecone pine. It was while she was reading out a two-line Christmas card she'd already read the day before that I realized I've never seen her sitting and staring into space or giving up.
Any scrap of paper will catch her attention so long as it has words on it, especially if it's on the dining table. Large and cluttered and directly under the main light in the room, the dining table seems to represent the Present, the Pressing, which for a while can jolt some new kind of energy into her. I haven't seen her engage with any other part of the house in this way. I don't think she's even noticed the walls at the far end of the room, with the Californian paintings and last year's calendar and the dusty bookshelves and the windowsill with its drooping plants. These plants are pretty far gone dead but I'm trying to bring them back to life, in some clumsy struggle against death.
Most of the stuff on the table is junk, so I started clearing a lot, assuming that the irrelevant notes may make her distracted and confused. Especially those irrelevant notes that are guised as relevant to the utmost ("LIMITED TIME ONLY- BUY TWO GET ONE FREE PIZZAS AT LITTLE CAESARS!"); wicked rhetorical bait for the elderly. But it also felt wrong to reduce the opportunity for her to engage herself in this way, to read words for the sake of words. If she's attracted to text, she should have plenty of it, let curiosity and engagement lead her to her own discovery of the truth. Even if it amounts to an endless cycle of hold-ups before bed. And what's this urge to streamline, anyway? In conclusion I've left everything in its time-worn pile, only making sure that she first reads the most recent stuff.
Any scrap of paper will catch her attention so long as it has words on it, especially if it's on the dining table. Large and cluttered and directly under the main light in the room, the dining table seems to represent the Present, the Pressing, which for a while can jolt some new kind of energy into her. I haven't seen her engage with any other part of the house in this way. I don't think she's even noticed the walls at the far end of the room, with the Californian paintings and last year's calendar and the dusty bookshelves and the windowsill with its drooping plants. These plants are pretty far gone dead but I'm trying to bring them back to life, in some clumsy struggle against death.
Most of the stuff on the table is junk, so I started clearing a lot, assuming that the irrelevant notes may make her distracted and confused. Especially those irrelevant notes that are guised as relevant to the utmost ("LIMITED TIME ONLY- BUY TWO GET ONE FREE PIZZAS AT LITTLE CAESARS!"); wicked rhetorical bait for the elderly. But it also felt wrong to reduce the opportunity for her to engage herself in this way, to read words for the sake of words. If she's attracted to text, she should have plenty of it, let curiosity and engagement lead her to her own discovery of the truth. Even if it amounts to an endless cycle of hold-ups before bed. And what's this urge to streamline, anyway? In conclusion I've left everything in its time-worn pile, only making sure that she first reads the most recent stuff.
Arrival
Not really, although maybe that would have been a more honest method of entrance than the sneaky skeleton key he used, because Grandma remained blissfully unaware of my existence. I found her sitting about a foot away from the television, fully engaged. A panel of speakers was discussing impeachment, all interrupting each other as if the first one to allow a moment's silence would fall through some trap door underneath them and lose whatever game they were playing.
During the chatter and newsy urgent trumpet kind of soundbites I snuck behind her and kissed her on the top of her head, which proved that even in fright she is polite. She flinched under my touch but said little more than a muffled "Oh!" (the kind of Oh! you would say after hearing a mildly interesting fact).
 |
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)