April Journal
Imagine the scene.
A woman is sitting on a plush couch in the lobby of a retirement home. She is delirious from medicine and ghosts of the past, confused and near hopeless. Like a little girl sitting in an overstuffed recliner, her body is almost swallowed up in the huge cushions. Beside her sits an equally confused friend, a friend visiting from Japan who speaks enough English to translate but not enough to fully understand the situation. She taps her pencil on the newspaper page, trying to fill in the numbers in a game of Sudoku. The previously penciled-in numbers are wrong, having been written by the sinking delirious woman next to her. She cannot do Sudoku at this point.
The marketing director of the retirement home walks out. “Ms. Gault?” she asks. The woman and her friend proceed to her office, where a painstaking conversation of who-what-when-where-why begins. The Japanese friend did not bargain for this when she came to visit. Papers are signed, keys are awarded, the move begins. The two women take the elevator to the third floor where a new home awaits. The Japanese friend fumbles with the apartment key while the delirious woman watches her new elderly neighbors ambling toward the dining hall, staring at the new resident. Their eyes seem to be asking, Why is there a young person moving in here? She must be moving her grandmother in.
The Japanese friend unpacks a box of dishes while the delirious woman lies on the floor for the first of many naps she will take in this apartment. It is January 2006.
End scene.
April 17, 2006 - Monday
I have been living here exactly three months. Wow, time has flown. Crazy Mabel in 210 brought me some more turkey tonight. I knew it was Mabel when she knocked, that familiar slipper-shuffling followed by her soft tap-tap-tap. I didn’t need to look through the peephole, but I did, and saw the sight that has become such a comfort to me these months, the magnified sight of a smiling little old lady staring up at me with both hands clutching a plate of leftovers from the dining hall. I told her I was turkeyed-out, which she seemed to think was simply hilarious, then thrust the plate at me anyway. “Eat it! You’re too damned skinny anyways,” she said in her Jewish yankee accent, and promptly slipper-shuffled back down the hall.
I ate it at my new thrift store desk, the first meal I’ve had here on actual furniture. The cats are wondering why I am not eating on the floor with them anymore. “Momma has furniture now,” I told them as I ate my retirement home turkey.
“Thank God”, they said in their little cat voices, “it only took you three months.”
February 2006 was not a good month.
Because the building is secured, I had very little company. I had no phone at the time, so no one could call to ask if I would open the door and let them in the building. I voluntarily isolated myself, justifying it by telling myself that that was how old people lived and if I truly wanted to understand the plight of the elderly I must become one of them. I had a good start into the minds of the old, I told myself, since I already had two cats and a wealth of physical maladies.
I’m not sure why I felt that way. I suppose I was just sick of having to start over. Again. I was resigned to being old. I was tired of not fitting in, tired of being so different from my friends, tired of sleeping on a scratchy sofa because no one would help me move the rest of my furniture. (Of course, I had no phone to call and ask anyone, nor could I answer a phone when friends were trying to call and offer to help me move. I didn’t say my theories were full-proof: remember, these are thoughts of a thirty-two year old living in a retirement home.) Did old people think this way? Did old people sit around with no phone and wonder why their lives sucked so bad? Did old people sleep on scratchy sofas and lament about how lonely they are, all the while choosing to be alone?
The first person who ever knocked on my door came on a Tuesday afternoon just after I’d popped in Star Wars. I was not in the mood for company. I was only in the mood for Luke Skywalker and his light saber gracing my crappy TV, even if all the lines on the TV distorted his ethereal presence.When I first moved in, they asked us to please keep our doors unlocked in case someone needed to come in and we couldn’t make it to the door. I did as they asked and kept it unlocked. I didn’t want to end up like that lady on the old infomercials, the “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!” lady. I bet she had her door locked.
After a few knocks she came on in. “Hello?” she said, a young woman around my age. “Is anyone home? Are you dressed?” She stopped dead in her tracks when she saw me on my couch watching Luke. I stared at her and didn’t say a word.“Oh, hi, I’m Jody, the physical therapist for this floor. Um… are you the only one home?” I nodded. I could see the wheels turning inside her perky little brain. Does this young chick live here? “Um, well, who lives here? You? Or your grandmother?” she asked. I pointed exaggeratedly at my chest.
“Oh! Well, um, welcome to Skylyn Place!” She looked at her clipboard. “I don’t have much information on you, except that you aren’t on the same plan as all the other residents. Mind if I sit down? I love Star Wars.”
We sat in silence for a while, until I finally let her off the hook by telling her my story and easing the tension. I could tell it was eating away at her, why this young woman about her age was sitting on a scratchy couch watching Star Wars on a Tuesday afternoon in a retirement home. She wanted to feel sorry for me, but I wouldn’t let her. “Go physical therapy someone else,” I mumbled. “I’m fine. The old people need you. I don’t.”
Jody would keep returning on a regular basis, and I would see her often in the hallways. Now I smile and speak to her. I never did apologize for being a bit rude that first meeting. I probably should have been nicer, seeing as how she was my first knocking guest and even liked Star Wars on top of that, but I rationalized it like this: Old people are cranky for a reason and no one ever asks them to explain why. Surely Jody could understand that.
April 27, 2006 - Thursday
Like every other morning, I walked out of my apartment at roughly 5:15. The world is still dark at that hour, and I like it that way. I take a stroll around the retirement home grounds, commune with the moon and stars, pick up any trash left by the shuffleboard court (though there rarely is any, as old people generally don’t make a habit of littering) and watch as one by one the early birds in my building turn their breakfast room lights on. I get up the earliest of anyone here and go to bed the latest. I envy old folks in that way, how they can sleep whenever they want. I often wonder, do old people lie awake in bed (or sofa) thinking about the rest of their lives? Do they constantly worry about how long they will live? Do they lose sleep thinking about their limited futures? Or do they fall asleep thinking about it?
This morning when I walked out the door, Myrtle was opening hers to get the paper. She was in her flimsy little nightgown and when she saw me she grasped at the opening in the front. “Oh, good morning, sweetie,” she said, a little embarrassed. “Oh, hell, I guess it doesn’t matter if I let it all hang out. We’ve all got the same thing, right? ‘Cept yours ain’t so wrinkly as mine.” She laughed her old lady laugh, the wavering giggle that reminded me of my grandma. “You have a good day now. I love you.” She shut her door before I could properly respond.
There was no trash by the shuffleboard court and no moon or stars to greet this morning. The only things of interest I saw as I walked around the complex were my cat JJ sitting in the window of my bedroom, and a single light on in the kitchen of my next door neighbor Myrtle. I saw her silhouette drinking a cup of tea on her porch. Unless it’s garbage day, the world is silent at that hour, but this morning I heard a faint sound. I heard Myrtle humming a little tune as she waved to me walking in the parking lot.
As the first hint of sun started to brighten the sky behind my building, I apologized to God. I spent all of January and February being pissed off, silent, and resentful that I couldn’t live the life I wanted, or be back in Japan with all my normal friends.
Now it is the end of April. I wouldn’t trade this place for anything.
It was right around Valentine’s Day when I took my first inventory of Stuff. Contents of retirement home apartment: Scratchy sofa, crappy TV, some unused dishes, two cats, a litter box, guitar, mandolin, box of medicine, a wooden crate of books and movies, some clothes, a kitty scratch post, a few plants, and a cane. The new plants were a house-warming gift from my friends. They each got me one, figuring it would surely perk up my apartment to which they rarely came, with the disclaimer that they can’t call me so I can open the door to let them in.
The plants started out nice. I put them in the sun by my sliding glass doors and even watered them. Jody the physical therapist even complimented them.
They all died within two weeks.
It seems like such a simple thing, maybe, but I was really mad at God. Not only was Valentine’s Day just a crappy holiday in general, but I was living in a retirement home starting my life over (again) with absolutely no money and no phone and I missed my Japan friends terribly and now my plants were dead. Whereas there were once eight living occupants of Skylyn Place #204, five of them were now deceased. Those were not good odds.
I had a dream that night that I was one of those plants. My arms and legs shriveled up and crumbled off onto the carpet. It came to an end only because the garbage trucks outside woke me up. Did old people have dreams like this?