Back on the Bench in Old Peopleville

Jean returned to her favorite lakeside bench this week, armed with a notebook, a healing foot, and good intentions. Along the way she found swans, a suspiciously friendly chipmunk, proof that autumn has arrived, and another reminder that organizing people is far more complicated than stacking Mahjong tiles. What began as a search for inspiration turned into a meditation on recovery, community, and the surprising amount of material available for yet another episode from Old Peopleville…. AI

It was a beautiful day in the neighborhood, to steal a line from the theme song written by Fred Rogers for his TV show, which needs no introduction among my demographic of readers. The sun was shining. The temperature was in the high 60s, and the distant landscape was filled with soft corals, bright reds, oranges, and lemon yellow, dotted here and there with the dark greens of conifers.

I was sitting down by our lake, watching a single swan on the still surface as it dined on weeds pulled from the bottom of the shallow water along the shore. I don't know where the six other swans were that made up the bevy the last time I sat on the same bench. That was back in the first week of September when I started going to the Wound Center and was told to cut back on my walking because of the open wounds at the base of my toes.

This past Tuesday I got some good news on that front. They scheduled me for two weeks out, instead of one, and said they think my toe woes will be healed by then. They also gave me the green light to start walking again, which was helping with my stalled mission to lose weight. I hope I can get a few weeks of outdoor walking in before the temperatures dip. I'm always cold, even in the summer, but fellow residents who walk the halls here in our Independent Living facility say I can rack up 7,000 steps if I include the underground parking level. As boring as that sounds, I'll be doing it.

As I sat by the lake writing in my notebook, I heard a rustling in the dried leaves at my feet. When I looked down, a chipmunk had one paw on my shoe and was looking right at me.

We both froze.

The spell was broken when I said, "Hi, Chippy," a nickname my mom used for these little guys who came to her ground feeder. My voice had the chipmunk hightailing it to the nearby cattails. I was glad he ran that way instead of up my leg, which at first I thought he was poised to do... or maybe he could smell the therapeutic honey on the wound dressing on my toes and was about to chew his way through my shoe. My second thought was that someone else must sit on that bench and feed those little guys. Why else would he get so close?

What was I writing when the chippy interrupted me?

I was looking for inspiration for this blog post, but all I could come up with was how busy my week had been, a sharp contrast to the tranquil view in front of me. One reason it was a busy week is that the facility threw a huge and lavish party for us to celebrate its fifth anniversary. The bar was open and free, and a lot of residents took full advantage of that. Not me. Nor did I indulge in the large chocolate bars made in the shape of letters that spelled out the name of the place. And I'm proud to say I didn't even look at the desserts. I stuck to the veggie station, the cheese station, and the kebabs.

The usual suspects got up and made speeches that had them choking back tears. All of them mentioned what a lovely family we've created here. We also had a Frank Sinatra impersonator for entertainment. It was fun watching everyone in their fancy clothes. A few people got a little tipsy and sang along with Fake Frank.

But the main thing that kept me busy this week was the Mahjong Mixer I've been planning for next week between our campus and our sister campus across town. We've got twenty-three players signed up, five of them from the Newbie class I've been teaching for the past month and a half.

This will be our third joint Mahjong event, and it was my brainchild from the very beginning. But this is the first year I've allowed others to help. I would have preferred to do it alone again, but I'm not going to live forever, and the best chance of having the event continue after I'm gone is not being the only one who knows what to do and when to do it. So I formed a committee of four, outlined the tasks that needed doing, and let them take their pick.

I could have done everything easier and faster by myself than by holding meetings and checking back to track progress. For example, one woman who was tasked with buying part of the prizes bought items and then changed her mind several times. She'd ask my opinion about what she'd purchased and I'd try to be positive, saying, "If you like it, so will others." But one prize was a potted plant that might be awkward if the winner has to take it home on the campus bus. I didn't tell her that. Another prize was a tea towel, which I dearly hope doesn't end up going to one of the guys.

The last time I took this walk down by the lake it was very much still summer. In addition to the color in the distant landscape, now the walnuts have fallen from the trees, as have the pine cones, The cattails have busted out their brown cases and are balls of fluff and squirrels were busy burying their winter dinners. The Canada geese are gone off the lake and walking trail. I missed seeing their swaddling butts in front of me as they try to get out of my way. It always makes me feel like I am herding stock. "Git along, little dogies! Whoopie Ti Yi Yo." Can you tell I grew up watching Spaghetti westerns?

And sadly all the stone carins I built on a large boulder were gone. Here I thought I was one of several people who maintained them after the wind, the pull of gravity, or little boys knocked them over. I built two more and am anxious to see whether anyone adds to them before the next time I walk what I call the lake route.

At the end of my walk, I sat on the bench by the water long enough with my notebook that the whole swan family of seven appeared from who knows where they were hiding which was my clue to get back to my apartment while I could still read my own handwriting to feed this blog post to my computer. 

Come back next Wednesday for another fill-in-the-blank episode from Old Peopleville. © 

The Year the World Tilted

Some weeks the past taps you on the shoulder, and other weeks it drags you straight down the Rabbit Hole — the deep, winding kind that only long‑time bloggers know. Jean’s been keeping this blog for over a decade, which became her archive and a time capsule that she didn’t realize she was curating. And every so often, an old post rises to the surface and reminds her of who she was, what the world was doing, and how much life has shifted since then. But the year the world tilted isn’t just about Jean’s experience, it was everyone's, too...AI

Sometimes I go through the Rabbit Hole of reading my past posts. This blog goes back to 2012, so that rabbit hole is pretty deep — and with my failing memory, I end up reading about a lot of things I’d forgotten. That happened this week when a post titled Going Rogue popped up in my sidebar. It was written in April of 2020 during the height of the global COVID‑19 pandemic, when there was a toilet paper shortage and non‑essential shopping was forbidden by law.

I ended up reading all my pandemic posts and was reminded of things like going to my first Zoom meeting — a funeral for a close relative — and my brother spending weeks on end in a COVID hospital miles away from his family, not that the miles mattered because visitors were not allowed. I wrote about the refrigerated 18‑wheelers parked outside hospitals to hold the bodies the funeral industry couldn’t keep up with. At least those people didn’t end up in mass graves the way they did during the Flu Epidemic of 1918. My grandmother was among them, along with an estimated one‑third of the globe’s population.

We all went through a lot of hardships in our nationwide effort to prevent the spread of COVID‑19. Even with all the mask‑wearing, social distancing, limited places we could go, and businesses that shut down, the accumulated deaths due to the virus are recorded at 1,219,487 nationwide. It was the third leading cause of death in 2020 and 2021 behind heart disease and cancer, according to AI. And it would have been worse if not for Dr. Fauci standing firm against Trump pushing back against the precautions we were mandated to take. Remember Trump suggesting we should “drink bleach to kill the virus?”

I still find it hard to believe that some people would trust a president with no background in healthcare over a man who headed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases for nearly 40 years. A man who saw us through HIV/AIDS, SARS, the Swine Flu, MERS, and Ebola. A man who served under six presidents as the government’s leading expert on infectious diseases. To this day, Dr. Fauci says if we had started “mitigation" earlier, more lives could have been saved. But MAGA Republicans are still trying to discredit him because paranoid Trump thought Fauci was working for the Democrats to make him look bad. He seemed to think if no one mentioned the pandemic, we wouldn’t notice people in our communities dying like flying insects on a bug zapper. It saddens me that the administration is still trying to punish a man who gave most of his life to public service.

I didn’t want to just rehash day‑old news, so I Googled the phrase “good things that came out of the pandemic” and found these:

1. Remote working from home, which allows more flexibility for working moms.

2. The expansion of telehealth opportunities.

3. Curbside grocery pickup and online ordering for home delivery.

4. Expanded use of Zoom for public hearings, business meetings, and court proceedings.

5. A surge of new businesses and entrepreneurship that created new jobs.

6. Rapid funding to accelerate vaccine technology and research across the globe.

7. And last but not least, the pandemic allowed many people to reconnect with hobbies and family time. For example, people took up baking bread in such large numbers that flour and yeast were in short supply. Pet adoptions soared, and YouTube channels were born to teach us all kinds of things and keep us entertained.

Revisiting those old pandemic posts may seem self‑indulgent, but doing so reminded me — and anyone who cares to go down that rabbit hole — how fragile “normal life” really is. Those posts and their reader comments give us a peek into the lives and thought processes of ordinary people adapting to changes during extraordinary times.

Little by little, life filled itself in again. We went back to restaurants, back to concerts, back to hugging people without thinking twice. We learned how to live with the memory of what happened without letting it swallow us whole. We discovered how resilient we are. But the pandemic, hopefully, also taught us that public health isn’t a one‑and‑done chapter. The recent measles outbreaks — a disease we once had nearly eliminated — proves that the debate over vaccines, science, and community responsibility is still very much alive. ©

The Five‑Trick Pony Rides Down Memory Lane

Some stories don’t begin with inspiration; they begin with an itch. A tug. A little internal nudge that says, Hey, remember who you used to be? Today Jean follows that tug back to her art‑soaked past—marble dust, William Blake, big dreams, and the long undertow that pulled them out to sea. Along the way she picks up a few modern irritations, a MAGA fruit fly, and a reminder that kindness is sometimes a very slow weapon. It’s a walk down Memory Lane with a few sharp turns, a little humor, and the unmistakable voice of someone who’s lived enough life to tell it straight….AI

Some ponies are one‑trick ponies. Some are two‑trick ponies. If the topics I write about were a pony, I’d be a five‑trick pony. My subjects range from fellow residents in my independent living facility, my Mahjong obsession, my health‑care woes, politics, and—probably too often—I wander down Memory Lane.

Today I feel like wandering back to the days when I was obsessed with art, both making it and studying it. But like many people, dreams of greatness give way to life’s everyday struggles: making a living, building a life with a significant other, supporting parents as they need more and more help, and grieving when one of them dies. The heydays of my self‑indulgent art period drifted far out to sea, pulled down by an undertow so strong even Jacques Cousteau couldn’t have rescued it.

Etching print pulled from a metal plate

The print and poem above were created in the ’80s, shortly after my mom died suddenly, done in a printmaking class during my William Blake phase. For those who might not know Blake (1757–1827), Wikipedia describes him as “an English poet, painter, and printmaker…now considered a seminal figure in the history of the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age.” He was obviously a prolific saver of his work, because you can’t study printmaking or poetry without tripping over him. At least you couldn’t during my era of being a sponge in the world of art history. I admired him. I wanted to be him…or Michelangelo…or John Singer Sargent.

Etching done by William Blake

During my Michelangelo period, I actually tried marble carving in a sculpture class and I got an A for my efforts. If I had a photo of that unfinished sculpture of a woman’s breasts, I’d post it—but I don’t. I was in my twenties and I quickly learned I wasn’t physically equipped to haul slabs of marble around. I hadn’t met Don yet, and maybe that was a good thing. He was fascinated by my untested talents and would have gladly aided and abetted me continuing to carve marble. For a farm boy with no formal art training, he had a good eye, and in our early years together we went to a lot of art shows and galleries. But life has a way of changing, and we had to grow up and do adulting like everyone else.

If I could dig deep into my past and pull up one dream I still wish had happened, I’d choose to be John Singer Sargent. (That's a painting of his at the top.) But I never had the raw talent for that, nor do I have time left to develop the craftsmanship it would take to achieve even a tenth of his greatness. So I content myself with the occasional art class our Life Enrichment Director puts on our schedule. Last week she offered a video‑taught class on painting the Northern Lights, and it was very Mickey Mouse. Not even Disney‑quality Mickey Mouse — more like the knockoff version you’d find on a bootleg T‑shirt at a flea market. But I sign up for every art class she offers, just to support having an arts‑and‑crafts element on campus. The first painting below was done in my prime; the last one—of the Northern Lights—was done last week in whatever you’d call the opposite of my prime. My sub‑prime? 

One of my dogs sat for a formal portrait

 

The Northern Lights

A fellow resident bugs the heck out of me to start teaching a painting class here, and whenever our LED has a class, she always sits next to me. “So I can copy what you’re doing,” she says. Every time she brings up the idea of me teaching, I’m not wishy‑washy in saying no way will that ever happen. I don’t have the desire or the time to plan lessons on long‑forgotten techniques. But she is relentless. She tells people I’m shy (news to me) and she says, “I'm blowing Jean's horn because she's too shy to blow it herself.” She’s as annoying as fruit flies on a bunch of bananas. And she’s a die‑hard MAGA and Trump supporter to boot. She knows I’m part of the Liberal Ladies group here, and when Trump was reelected she said, “You just wait, you’re going to be really happy with how he’s going to turn this country around.”

Those words burn in my thoughts every so often when I’m sitting near her at our Monday Night farmhouse dinner table, biting my tongue at something she says. One of these days I’m going to buy a shirt I’ve had my eye on that says: “Killing them with kindness is taking longer than I expected.” If I wore that, I’d love to see how long it takes her to realize I’m not as nice as she thinks I am—that I’m a phony. That I don’t want to be her friend. That I’m not shy; I just don’t like her enough to teach her what I learned in over thirty years of being art‑obsessed. That if she wants a pedestrian teacher, she can hire Bob Ross’s ghost.

 Sometimes I get tired of holding back my words in the name of keeping peace in the community. I imagine most of us do it, no matter which side of the whatever fence we’re on, because we value a peaceful, harmonious environment. I worry, though, that someday the filter in my brain—the one they say gives out in elderly people—will fail and I’ll start saying whatever I’m thinking. Please take me out behind the barn and shoot me if it does. I’ve gotten along 84 years without purposely offending anyone, and I don’t want to wreck that record now. 

Boy, did I take a detour on my walk down Memory Lane. But I guess there’s only so much a person can say to explain away the lost dreams and hopes of our youth—and without that detour, I wouldn’t have written enough to call it a blog post. Besides at my age, detours are half the fun. You start out talking about one thing and end up with a tale worthy of a confession booth. But somehow it’s all connected—our youthful dreams, the people we tolerate who we wish came with a mute button, our fears for the future, and trying to hold on to the version of ourselves we show the world. ©

 

Post-script because I can't seem to let go of this topic: Below is a custom, paint-by-number I did last winter of my great-great niece. I plan to do two more this coming winter. As a kid I started with paint-by-numbers and I thought going back to them might help me re-learn to control the paints. When I found out you could send the company a photo to turn into a custom, paint-by-number I was sold.