Busy Little Bee!

 

Correction. I’m not ‘little’ but I’ve been a busy bee lately and it’s mostly my own fault that I had a million questions come at me where ever I went this week. 1) I’m being credited for saving my upstairs neighbor’s life---not my words. Her daughter started that rumor and gave me a purple orchid for doing what anyone else would have done in my situation. But more on that later. 2) I had the bright idea of co-teaching a How To Play Mahjong, three-part clinic and the announcement went live on our communication app and and within six hours enough people signed up that we now have a waiting list. My co-teacher and I are over-whelmed with how popular it’s going to be and surprised at who signed up. A few of the people who signed up will never be able to learn to play it but we didn’t want to show favorites and have the clinic by invitation only which someone suggested we should have done. That would look and be too clicky in our opinions so we have to expect a high drop-out rate. 

I’ve written four pages of hand-outs for the classes in addition to check-off sheets for teaching the three sessions with my co-teacher acting as my editor. She has a dyslexic son so she understands my first draft crazy spelling without judgement. She also has Lewy Body Dementia and it’s important to her to pass on her thirty years of loving Mahjong before she can’t. She taught all our current players including me but now she occasionally asks me for clarification on rules and procedures. Being One-Tracked obsessed with the game, I have played over 3,000 games online against computer bots and I never miss our weekly Mahjong days here on campus. 

And last but not least I was extra busy because the above two things all happened the same time frame as my Creative Writing Group was working on a new project that had us text messaging back and forth before our meeting. Then out of the blue a person not in group sent me the first and last chapters of a book he’s been writing and wanted to know if our group would read and edit the full book. Again, text messages and emails had to be read and written. I personal thought it was a big ask of someone who isn’t even in our group so we ended up inviting him to come to a meeting and read his first chapter in person, which he did and he said he’s coming back 25 times to read addition chapters. (Lord, what have I gotten myself into?) His wife just got moved from our independent living building to a room on my brother’s hallway in the Memory Care building. That first chapter was all black and white facts with not even a hint of emotional content and when he was asked about that he said that he never writes about his feelings. The rest of our writing group spills our emotions all over our pages, then sweeps them up into a pile for the rest of us to jump into.

The project we started is we each wrote some Ten Word Stories on slips of pair and folded the papers up. The plan is to draw one a month to use as a writing prompt---a little ‘side hustle’ to whatever else we might be working on. For March we’ll all be using the follow Ten Word Story: “His kiss was more of a dismissal than a sign of affection.” The rule is we can write between 50 to 3,000 words and the ten word sentence can be the first or last sentence or in a random scene in between. It will be fun to see the different directions the little game takes us.

In our group of would-be writers we’re not experts and we don’t pretend to be but we’re constantly being asked to write stuff. For example also this week one of our favorite servers got fired (or quit) and I was asked to write a petition to bring her back. I did not want to get involved in that tale of woes, especially since rumors are flying around that tell diametrically opposite versions of what happened. I said I’d sign it but someone else will have to write it. The person who ended up writing it, slid a copy under my door with a note attached asking me to collect signatures on the sly. You’ve got to be kidding, I thought. I never agreed to do more than sign it, which I did, then I slid the petition under HER door. The audacity of that ‘ask’ made my head hurt.

Okay, now the story of why I’m being credited with saving my upstairs neighbor’s life. She’s in her nineties and weighs about the same yet she sounds like an elephant as she stumps around in her apartment with no carpeting under foot. She’s always dropping (on purpose) heavy boxes of photos and genealogy albums on the floor, tipping over chairs (not purposely), dragging a vacuum around every single day and she has fallen 3-4 times. She doesn’t like me to check on her when I hear loud noises so I’ve gotten in the habit of looking at the time when I hear what I think is a fall with the plan that if I don’t hear her moving around in five minutes then I'd check on her. 

This time she fell and didn’t get back up nor did she answer her phone. So I went up and rang her doorbell. She didn’t call out but by the time I got back down to my apartment to call the security guard she had remembered me teasing her that if she falls and can’t get up she can pound on the floor and I’d hear her. The guard and I let ourselves in, then called the ambulance. I waited with her, called her daughter and the rest is history. 

God, I hope I never break a hip! She was in so much pain that they couldn’t even move her until some pain meds took effect. I’ve never seen anyone shake that badly while trying unsuccessfully not to cry. I’m not the only person in continuum care campus who has helped a neighbor---it’s the nature of a CCC like this. Anyway, I needed something to bring to our creative writing group so I dashed off the poem below. It still needs some work but the bones of my thought process after the experience are there for later refinement.  

 Misguided Gratitude

Three sets of open arms

greeted me at the door

reaching out to hug me for

so-called saving their mother

and all I could think about is

have they all been vaccinated?

 

How could I not let them do

what they came here to do

with their smiling faces all lit up

while I envisioned hospital germs

crawling happily up their arms

and pole jumping over to my shirt.

 

They handed me a purple orchid

that doesn’t fit with my decor and

with my background with plants

it could out live me since I don’t

have the will to kill a living thing

even those I don’t want nor deserve.

 

They also gave me a delightful box

of heart-shaped chocolate cookies

to follow up the month I just spent

detoxing the sugar out of my system

and I’m worried my monsters will

eat them all in one day-long sitting.

 

The next time I hear a giant thud

coming from up above I shall call the

ambulance anonymously and keep

it under the minute needed for tracing

because I’m no life saving heroine,

I’m just a person with a handy phone.

                 by Jean at The Misadventures of Widowhood ©

 

 Until Next Wednesday! ©

 

* Photo Credit:Ranger Rick Magazine