Keeping up With the Widows at the Senior Hall

Whenever I go on a day trip organized through the senior hall I text my nieces that I’ll be out of town and that Levi the Mighty Schnauzer will be home alone, should I not come back. Nervous Nellie? Yes but if you saw the retired guys who drive our center’s 25 passenger bus you might be inclined to worry, too, that an accident could happen while we’re off gallivanting around the state and I don’t want Levi to suffer because no one knows I’m dead. I stopped going on the 12 to 14 hour trips where they still use the rented 50 passenger buses with younger drivers and on-board bathrooms because they wore me out and required Levi to go to the kennel for two nights and a day. The shorter, 5-8 hour trips I’ve opted for instead use our smaller bus but they make the same trip 3 or 4 days in a row to accommodate everyone who wants to go. There is a plus side of having a senior citizen driver, though; one of them has a bladder as small as mine and has been known to make unscheduled stops to pee. I always worry about not having potty breaks when needed. What can I say, I worry about details. 

When I texted my youngest niece on Friday that I got back home safe and sounds, she asked me if I had fun and I texted back, “Yes, but not as much as I wanted. The trip should have been an hour shorter.” We went to a 105 acre botanical garden and nature preserve known as Fernwood and we had too much time to wander on own after the lunch and the tour ended. The place had some nice features like a curious structure made of weeping willow branches, and the birds singing everywhere were incredible, but compared to our local sculpture garden the place just wasn’t worth spending a total of four hours on a bus. 

I got a great seatmate, though, for the trip. She was a woman who I met in book club when I first joined the center and who loves art as much as I do. But the most compelling conversation of the day took place over lunch at a table of six, two who were Holocaust survivors---90 and 91 years old who didn’t know each other before sitting down. The topic came up because the next senior tour is going to a Holocaust Museum. Both ladies had lost their entire families to Auschwitz and one of them ended up marrying another survivor of Auschwitz who she met in the Netherlands after the war. What a lesson in dignity it was to listen to their stories. It was one of the serendipitous things that sounds like a downer but it was actually an uplifting reminder about the power of grace that fills so much of our lives. With all the silly things we find to worry about we often forget what real hardship is all about.

Saturday I went to recycling. What a busy place that is! I always look for blue wine bottles when I go but I didn’t have good luck finding any this month. Mondays are better for finding bottles. I need a few more for my bottle tree. When I got home the newsletter for the September and October senior hall events was in the mailbox, so I sat right down and filled out my RSVP page. If you wait even a week, too many things get filled up and you have to go on a waiting list. I signed up for two lectures (one on the history of our city and the other about the islands in the Great Lakes), two luncheons, two short afternoon trips with lunch (one to the water treatment plant in town, the other to explore two historical churches in town), an off Broadway production with the Mannheim Steamrollers and to round out my RSVPs I signed up for two travelogues---one on Cuba, the other on Italy. All that for a total of ninety-one dollars and most of that was for the theater production.

What I didn’t sign up for was: a color tour up north to Michigan's wine country, a Pippin off Broadway musical revival, an out-of-town trips to see a Brenda Lee concert and a Buddy Holly tribute, tours of our famous ArtPrize event downtown (too wall-to-wall people for my tastes), two trips across the state to go to Ikea and a historical landmark around Detroit plus six or seven smaller things. I’ve been trying to wean myself off from having the senior hall be the center of my social universe but it’s hard when they offer so many great things to do at such cheap prices. It makes it hard to stay focused on moving to another township, closer to my family but where their senior hall is mostly about bingo and other old people stuff I won't like. ©

Note: The photo at the top is the willow branches structure at Fernwood. Very cool! Each one is connected by a doorway to another and they have no roofs.