Eagle Nests and Old People Nests

Occasionally my senior hall offers tours of independent and assisted living facilities. Wednesday I hopped on the bus with twenty-four others and off we went to two new places on the other end of town. One fed us lunch and the other served us coffee and the best peanut butter cookies I’ve had since my mom used to make them. Both of these places are the type that steps you up to increased care when you reach a certain point and we learned a lot about those trigger points. One was when you require a two person assist to make transfers. I never would have thought to ask the 'triggers point' question but it’s an important one because the cost of your room about doubles when they step you up. I’ve toured five places like this, but this time we had a guy who came with us who owns a business that specializes in in-home care and assisted living placement. There are a lot of placement specialists around---even national chains that do it---but I never knew much about them. He says they get $2,500 for every client they place, paid for by the facilities and all facilities pay the exact same amount to all the placement specialists in town.

At first, one of these places seemed kind of creepy with all its high tech surveillance gadgets. Each resident wears a watch-like gadget that automatically unlocked AND locks your apartment door, tracks your every move by GPS and gives you a way to talk directly to the staff, and them to you. But the creepy part is they also have motion detectors in your apartments (the units were cute, by the way) and those motion detectors spend two weeks learning your habits---like how many times you pee and how long it takes you to do it, what time you get up and go to bed---then after that if you break your pattern someone will check on you. The staff all wears a red “tag” that electronically logs where they go and how long they stay with each resident and those logs can be reviewed by families. I jokingly asked them if the microwave in your unit is eavesdropping and we were assured that the only listening device is on your arm. Like that’s a big comfort! We talked about this ‘big brother’ kind of care on the bus afterward and at first glance it creeped most of us out but as we talked and compared it to other assisted living places where lights are flashing and call bells are going off in the halls, this place felt less institutional, more homey, and we soften our views on these high tech babysitters.

I am nowhere near needing or wanting to move to an independent or assisted living home but Mr. Specialist says that’s the best time to check them out and make decisions so families aren’t making decisions like that in an emergency situation. He also has resources to calculate if you have enough money to go to places like this compared to in-home care. That “resource calculation” service is free and I'm going to make an appointment with him for that. It will be helpful to know how long my assets would last if/when I need care. Can I afford to redecorate now? Take a trip? The assisted living places we saw this week cost $4,000 a month and doubles if they have to step you up. He said the lowest priced place in town is $1,500 a month and I know it to be a Medicaid dive. When you get through talking to him about your finances, he can tell you the price range you need to stay in and he gives you a list of places in that range. He’ll even drive you around to see them, if you want. I’m thinking whatever he has to say it will be fuel to keep me on my self-imposed, Spring of Getting Physically Fit program. Two person assist transfers? Heck, we all need to make sure we don't need a one person assist if we want to age in place!

This week I also went to a fascinating and funny senior hall lecture about bald eagles. It was delivered by a woman who lives on a pond where a couple of eagles nested for five years and raised fifteen baby eagles, many of which were banded as babies by researchers who climbed up to the nest to take blood samples and weigh the fuss balls and take the cutest baby pictures. The lecturer had wonderful photos and she made you fall in love with the personalities of the nesting mamma and poppa eagles. She wrote poems about the eagles, funny poems that where illustrated with slides. One was about ice fishermen who have their fish snatched by the eagles if they don’t hide them as soon as they reel them in. Others purposely threw their catches on top of the ice just to get a close up view of the eagles diving in for the steal. What a thrill that would be!

I had three options for celebrating St. Patrick’s Day, one with the Red Hat Society girls for lunch out in the boondocks for a traditional, boiled Irish dinner. I called to cancel that because of an impending storm that was supposed to include ice, snow and rain. Another was to go with the Movie and Lunch Club but I had no interest is seeing The Beauty and the Beast so I e-mailed my regrets. Then at the eagle lecturer some friends invited me to tag along with them to an Irish Pub close to where I live. I figured I could get in and out before the storm hit but this morning that got canceled, too. I am SO sick of winter and spring playing chase-and-flee tag with our lives! ©
 

Stock photos, our lecturer was not online.

Widow Marching Through March

My mind is a blank and it’s hard to know where to start writing a blog entry when that happens. It’s not that I haven’t been busy going here and there. I’ve had something going on every day for the past five days and that trend won’t end until Sunday.  It’s always that way the third week in the month but my “busy week” doesn’t necessarily translate into interesting. Take Friday, for example. I went to the annual Lent related fish fry. Big deal. I ate too much fish and brought home a piece of chocolate cake as a reward for being a big-girl widow who went all by myself.

Saturday my monthly house cleaner showed up, a nice college kid who is going to school to become an occupational therapist. I love it when I get the students. They know how to carry on a decent conversation. After she left I did my grocery shopping which is always a highlight in my boring widow’s life. If they had a camping department with tents on display---they have everything else---I’d probably stay overnight sometime. It would be easy to do, too, since they’re open 24/7 and if you got caught you could claim all sorts of things that would sound plausible.

The next day I got a surprise. (I was going to write, “…an unexpected surprise” but aren’t all surprises unexpected? That’s the minutia of my writing process; last week when I wanted to use that word---minutia---it took me a half hour for my dyslexic brain to figure out how to spell it so now I’ll probably use it in a dozen times before I wear it out.) Anyway, Sunday my older and only brother called to say he and his lady friend wanted to take me out to lunch. We hadn’t seen each other since Christmas---we don’t live close---and he hadn’t been to my house since last summer. We had a great visit as only people who’ve known each other since birth can do and teasing has something to do with that statement. He’s redecorating his living room and I gave him an oil painting that our mother painted which pleased us both. The redecorating project is kind of funny because all the women in his life---me included---want to influence his decisions and he’s not buying any of it. His lady friend wants him to remove some shelves he built with my dad and I’m suggesting anything but the chalk white walls he's leaning towards. One of his daughter’s tells him if he wants to paint the walls purple, do it. “It’s your house!” Of course she’s right but women love to build nests so we talk color and décor even if no one’s listening.

The guy in green in the photo at the top of this blog entry is someone who makes a lot of appearances around my part of the state because of his involvement in all things Irish. He came to our senior hall luncheon yesterday along with a bagpiper and the four Irish dancers in the photo. The two oldest, a boy and a girl, competed in the World Championships in Scotland last year and will go again this year. Needless to say, they were good! It was like having a mini River Dance troupe dance less than twenty feet away from where I was sitting. I had to take my hearing aids out, though. They apparently don’t like bagpipes and screeched with certain notes. As the monthly luncheons go, this one was great except the corn beef was on the tough side and I don't like cabbage. What made it good, besides the entertainment, was the conversation. I was invited to sit with a woman who I met briefly when I was a teenager but didn’t see again for forty years. Last year I walked past her and she said, “Aren’t you Jean blah, blah blah?” Can you believe that? How she was able to see the teenager she met so long ago in the old woman I’ve become is beyond me. I look in the mirror every day and I can’t find that girl in my reflection. And trust me, I’ve searched for her in earnest. 

Tomorrow is Red Hat Society tea day again and that means I get to help pack Easter candy in bags while the others talk about a bus trip planned to Wine Country this summer. The trip is taking place the same day as a senior hall quilt tour down in Amish counties in Indiana. What a tough choice that was. I have closer acquaintances in the Red Hats and I’d have a better time with them. But trips to Amish country don’t grow on trees so I signed up for that. I’ve always loved the mystique of poking around Amish towns and country sides with my husband every summer before his stroke. If I ever witness a mob crime and have to go into the Federal Witness Protection Program an Amish farm is one of the two places I want to be relocated. The Outer Banks of North Carolina being the other place. Yes, I’ve read one too many romance novels where the FWPP was a common theme. When I was a worn-out caregiver it was my fantasy get-away to be in the FWPP. 

I started this blog entry with no clear theme and I end it without having found one. But I already know what I'll probably write about next time. To finish out the week Thursday I have an appointment to get my taxes done, Friday my Movie and Lunch Club meets and Saturday I’m going to a baby shower where all the ladies and all five babies in my family will all be in one place. ©

Poems and St. Patrick's Day Parties

This morning while writing [bad] poetry just for the challenge of doing it, I almost made myself late for the St. Patrick’s Day luncheon at the senior hall. You can’t be late for those events if you want to sit at a table facing the entertainment. The luck of the Irish was with me and I scored a chair up front at a table that turned out to be The Catholic table. Of the eight people sitting there I was the only one who didn’t have a Catholic school girl tale to tell. Nationality, of course, came up as we enjoyed our corn beef and cabbage and when the others heard I’m half Italian one of them questioned how I escaped being Catholic.

I told them the story of a time when my dad was eight years old and a Catholic priest, while teaching Sunday school, thought my dad had thrown a spitball. So the priest opened the doors on a potbelly stove, picked my dad up by the seat of his pants and the collar of his shirt and pretended he was going to throw Dad in to teach him about the fires of hell where bad boys go. After that my dad refused to go back there and while his siblings continued growing up Catholic my dad was sent off to the only other church in town, a Methodist. One of the ladies at the table, in a deadly serious tone said, “Why, that wasn’t very Christian of the priest!” About the third time she said it and someone else agreed that "it wasn’t, indeed, very Christian of him" I was laughing so hard I could have peed my pants, but it's difficult to explain why it struck me funny. I guess you had to be there to hear the Captain Obvious quality of her shocked sensibilities. "What was the priest's name?" "Where was the church?" You would have thought the incident happened last Sunday.  Note to self: Don't tell stories about child abusing priests while sitting at a table full of Catholics.

The entertainment portion of the luncheon was surprisingly good and feathered a one-man band/Irish singer who played a guitar, harmonic and Celtic Bodhran (Irish drum). If Bono had walked in to join him, I wouldn’t have been surprised; he was that good. After an hour’s worth of drinking songs, protest songs, Irish ballets and a few rounds of “Oh, Danny Boy” I was in a great mood and wishing I didn’t have to go home to an empty house with only a dog of German decent to greet me. For a brief moment it crossed my mind to swing by the humane society to see if they had any Irish setters or wolfhounds to bring home to Levi, the schnauzer. He's been asking for a sibling.

My husband was proud of his Irish heritage and St. Patrick’s Day was always a special holiday for him. He’d put on his green tee-shirt, dig out the green, plastic beads and tell a few jokes using an Irish brogue. We’d find parties to go to when we could and he brought green flowers to his mother when she was alive. Every year we'd watch for shamrock plants to appear in the store so we could bring one home and in the spring we'd "turn it loose" outside. Monday at the grocery store I saw a display of shamrocks in the plant & garden center and for the first time in decades, I didn’t buy one. And I’m at peace with that. ©


My Dog Poem  (Inspired by a comment on my last blog entry)

Outside a rabbit sits still in the early light of day

The dog peeks through the mini blinds and bays.

It’s their way every day of waking up the widow

Before the sun smacks trees out of the shadows.

In the bathroom the widow answers nature’s call

As the dog curls himself back up into a sleepy ball

And the rabbit runs off across the lawns to trigger

The next four-legged alarm looking for adventure.

She makes her way across the dim, silent house
Past the empty chair that once held her spouse.
And in the murky kitchen light she stands wating
As hot, steaming liquid spits out a single serving.

Cup in hand the widow sits down at her keyboard

Hoping to wake up her thoughts that are moored

Just off shore in that dim, murky place in between

Awake and night dreams of being again eighteen.

One day the gray rabbit will sit, the dog will bay

And the worn-out widow will not wake up to play

Today, though, she will slid on down her driveway

And go bond with the others running out of days. © J.Riva 2014

Update: I saw a shamrock plant at the store this week and bought it. After DNA testing I learned I have more reason than I previously believed to celebrate this holiday.  2019