Memorial Day, MAGA Men, and the Art of Living Together

 

In her ongoing chronicle of life inside a Continuum Care Community, Jean returns to Memorial Day with equal parts honesty, humor, and hard‑won perspective. What begins as a reluctant decision to attend a campus ceremony becomes a meditation on patriotism, personality clashes, and the strange intimacy of communal living. Along the way she encounters the usual cast of characters — the generous, the sentimental, the maddening, and the unforgettable — and finds herself, almost despite herself, grateful for the complicated little world she now calls home…. AI

Last year I skipped our Memorial Day event here at the Continuum Care Campus (which they hold four days before the holiday but that's the way they do things to give employees time off with their families). I had two reasons for skipping it, and I’ll quote myself from the post I wrote back then: "I couldn't bring myself to go because a guy from my building planned to read the entire Constitution, and I'd have a terrible time hearing it from the lips of a rabid Trump and MAGA supporter. And two, because I felt like a fraud last year singing along with all the patriotic songs when I wasn’t all that proud of our country. Asking God to bless our ‘Great Nation’ felt like pretending we were still the same beacon of freedom and hope we used to be.”

I’m not alone in avoiding this man. At our Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner event (more on that later), I learned that at least half a dozen residents have asked the dining staff never to seat them with or near him. He’s surly, swears at the servers, and tells anyone who asks about our Independent Living community, “Don’t come here. It’s awful.” His bad attitude started when management informed him that we are a gun‑free campus and his massive collection had to go home with his sons or they'd take legal action to evict him. He still warns people that we’ll be sorry if a mass shooter storms the building because he “could pick them off from his balcony.” A surly old man with a gun. What could go wrong?

This year I still didn’t want to sing God Bless America. Blessing America when our leader behaves like a spoiled child feels a bit like saying, “You’re doing great — here’s your reward.” But I decided I shouldn’t let one person keep me from honoring the other veterans who would be participating. We have roughly a dozen Vietnam vets here, all of them former commissioned officers. You can draw your own conclusions about why that is, but I suspect it has something to do with the upper‑middle‑class backgrounds that CCCs tend to draw from. During Vietnam, these men had families who kept them in college long enough to get deferments, then commissions. A couple have even admitted they enlisted after college so they could choose their military branch and job rather than wait to be drafted into the infantry.

This year our Life Enrichment Director took the lead instead of Mr. MAGA, and the difference was noticeable. She read a lovely two‑page essay which I later learned was written by Artificial Intelligence. When I complimented her, she said, “I put some ideas into ChatGPT and let it compose something much more eloquent than I could.” She also read three poignant poems and showed a nine‑minute video titled Flanders Field: Remembering Their Sacrifice. The YouTube description says it “serves as an orientation to the Great War, the cemetery, and the American Battle Monuments Commission.” Several of the clips from black‑and‑white newsreels shocked me — and I don’t shock easily. The image of hundreds flag-draped caskets waiting to be loaded onto ships took my breath away.

Near the end of the Memorial Day event, our LED invited anyone to share a story about their own service or that of a loved one. Five or six did. Mr. MAGA did not. And while I still refused to sing God Bless America with the others, I was glad I went.

The next day brought a very different kind of gathering: the 90th birthday party for our resident retired lawyer. He has two sons and a daughter and a gaggle of grandkids and great-grands and 17 of them flew in from all over the country. They have a charming tradition of a nightly 7:00 p.m. Zoom call — sometimes twenty people on the call,  other times just four or five but they’ve never missed a night in the four and a half years their dad has lived here. The party itself was first‑class and catered and everyone who lives or works here was invited. He and I both moved in the first week the CCC opened, and I can’t imagine this place without quirky him and his generosity. While I might donate ten or twenty dollars to various collections, he donates a hundred. Five hundred. A thousand. He calls himself the Mayor of our CCC and insists on sitting at the head of any dining table. He also has tender ears and will flee the room if anyone mentions menopause or female anatomy issues. He's also sentimental and cries easily and he didn't make it through the party without shedding tears. Yes, we have characters here.

Speaking of characters, I promised to circle back to our Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner event. Communities like this naturally form cliques — nothing malicious, just people gravitating toward others with similar interests. You often see the same four to six people eating together. But these cliques aren’t exclusive. Anyone could call any group and ask to join their reservation, and they’d make room. New residents are routinely invited to various tables as we get to know them. We even have unofficial ambassadors who make a point of introducing newcomers and connecting them with people who share a background or hobby.

A couple of high‑octane women decided to shake things up. They created a sign‑up sheet for anyone willing to sit with someone new, then they matched us into mystery dinner groups. We didn’t know who we’d be eating with until we arrived at the dining room. It was something like speed dating — not that I’ve ever done it, but I’ve seen it on TV — in that we all asked and answered the same questions: Where did you live before this? What was your career? Where did you go to college? Kids? Grandkids? Hobbies? Two people at my table found out they both taught in the same school district and knew some of the same people. 

This is the third year we’ve done a 'Guess Who' dinner, and I enjoyed it twice. The year I didn’t, I was seated with Mr. MAGA. This year he didn’t sign up, so the rest of us were free to enjoy the excitement of meeting people we knew by sight and name but had never had a real conversation with. And as the two lady organizers say, "If you don't click with your assigned tablemates, it's just ONE dinner." 

Community living isn’t always peaceful — it’s more like being adopted into a sitcom you never auditioned for. But weekends like this remind me why I keep showing up anyway. Between the veterans, the birthday party and the mystery dinner, I found myself oddly grateful for this cast of characters. Even the ones who make me mutter under my breath. Maybe especially them. After all, every good ensemble needs at least one antagonist to keep the plot moving — and to give me blog fodder. © 

  Flanders Field: Remembering their Sacrifice

 

All's Well that Ends Well

My Alice in Wonderland theme birthday party came and went and everyone seemed to have a great time. It started with the invitations up above, and on the day of the party as the guests came up the sidewalk to my door they were greeted by the White Rabbit playing in our rare April snow. 
  

After opening the door (above) guests found me wearing this silly headband, which I hope distracted from the fact that I hadn't been able to wash my hair for three days because I lost my hot water heater during the ice storm. It was so comfortable I forgot I was wearing it when later I took my dog outside for a potty break. God only knows what the neighbors thought!

One of the first things the ladies saw coming in the door was this floral arrangement that my niece sent me for my birthday. And after everyone got here we did a little Q & A involving the scrolls below.

In an email before party day I had sent the guests---my Gathering Girls group---a list of three questions with the instructions that they’d have to know the answer to one of them to get in the door. The questions were: 1) who made the tarts in the ‘Alice’ book; or 2) what was the key used for; or 3) what did the flamingos and hedgehogs do in the book? I had a method to my madness---no pun intended. Mad Hatter, get it? One lady found answers for all three questions and she didn't have to take a scroll. One forgot to look, another had an answer but it was wrong. Both had to take a scroll. The scrolls were just a fun way to assign tasks to do at the party: 1) to help carry the food from the refrigerator to the dining room; 2) to pour the drinks to toast 'friendship'; 3) to help plate the cake and ice cream; and 4) to help make and serve the tea with dessert.

Can you believe it, I totally forgot to take pictures of the food---well, of anything on party day! I had planned to do it when all the food was sitting on my Hoosier cabinet before it was passed around. My camera was sitting only two feet away, how could I forget! I served two kinds of tea sandwiches (tuna and a cream cheese with cucumber and spinach), potato salad, a cucumber salad and a marinated four bean salad plus trays of cheeses, olives, pickles, red tarts and one of my friends brought dill pickles rolled up with cream cheese and ham. The tray of olives was a joke for one of the ladies who says when she goes out with her family she steals all the black olives off their salads. I had tiny flags marking the black olives "Sue's" and the green ones "Everyone Else's." She got a kick out of it and wanted to take the flags home to show her family. There were a few other flags here and there proclaiming, "Eat Me!" as per the story-line in the 'Alice' book.

The photos below were taken the day before the party and in some cases they don't show the finished version. The first one is a place setting, for example, that is minus a key at the top of the plate. The dessert cups on the left were filled with the four bean salad, the ones on the right were for the water and champagne. I've loved my moss green thumbprint Fenton luncheon set since the '60s when I first started buying the pieces. But it's been so long since I've used them that they all had to be washed before the party as well as afterward. So worth the effort for sentimental me!

My centerpiece is not impressive in photos but in person where you could absorb the details and symbolism from Alice in Wonderland I think it worked nicely. (My friends seems to enjoy it.) It only cost me the price of a deck of cards, some glass bottles (both from Amazon, both cheap), tags from Hobby Lobby and the flamingos are from the dollar store. The rest I had around the house. 

 

I love these tiny bottles. In the book Alice drank a potion from bottles like these to make her grow smaller so she could fit through the small door the key unlocked to the garden. Mine just held pink lemonade.

I broke the minute hand on this pocket watch from my husband's collection trying to set it to rabbit time---2:30. (The rabbit's watch stopped but at different times in the Disney movie and the original book.) The rabbit is three inches tall, handmade and I bought him years ago at a teddy bear convention. Before my husband's stroke I was teaching myself how to make designer teddy bears. The smallest one I ever accomplished making was a six inch, jointed bear with a silly looking neck.

 

The little scrolls (in an upside down candle holder) contained seven life lessons that the 'Alice' book teaches. (I wrote about the lessons in any earlier blog.) I think/hope everyone enjoyed their positive messages and the bit of conversation they triggered. I was kind of shocked that some of the ladies had such expressive voices for reading out loud, no doubt honed over years of reading to grandchildren. I messed up my reading and I'd read all the lessons more than once while I was making them.

The one inch cake and the chair are from my dollhouse (and represent the time when Alice was big and the cake was too tiny to share). The Cheshire Cat card was not in my centerpiece but the branches with the ribbon you saw in the photo five up above represents the tree in Oxford where the cat was known to sit, a real cat and tree that Lewis Carroll wrote into the book. The Dodo in the story was based on the author himself who was a stutterer like Dodo. Another interesting fact: Alice in Wonderland has never gone out of print since it was written in 1865 and it's been translated into 176 languages.

The circle of playing cards grounds the other stuff and are copies of the vintage art work in the book. In the center of the cards is a cake plate to give height to the second tier of things.

The photo above shows the table without the water glasses and bean cups or the keys at each place setting. I wish I had remembered to take a photo of the table with all my Fenton on it. You'll have to take my word for it that the table sparkled in the sun coming through the windows. And I didn't get a single picture of my oak table in the kitchen where I had a red velvet cake, my mother's lily-of-valley tea cups and a small tray of cookies set up. (The cookies were just the king and queen cookies sorted out of two bags of Pepperidge Farm Chessman---lots of leftovers for me to eat.) The cups and saucers are in the dishwasher now but the photo below will give you an idea of the colors and dishes on the cake table. The dishes were supermarket premiums back when I was growing up and when I downsized my everyday dishes---heavy restaurant ware from the 40's---I went on e-Bay and China Replacement to fill out what was missing from Mom's lily-of-the-valley set to build a service for six. Seemed only right since my brother and I broke most of Mom's prized set. She had a thing for lily-of-the-valleys---wore the perfume, had the flowers in the yard and picked them in the spring. My brother, nieces and I have all transplanted some of Mom's lilies to where we currently live.

The party started at 12:00 and ended around 4:00. Toasting to friendship and my birthday, those us who could have alcohol with our medications polished off a bottle of champagne and those who couldn't, polished off a bottle of sparkling white grape juice. Hey, it just dawned on me that we didn't sing Happy Birthday! But we all laughed and shared a lot and no one person monopolized the conversation. The thing I looked forward to the most was letting the ladies wander through my house and see my collectables and art work and they seemed to enjoy that. I think it helps friends to bond and understand one another if we see each other in our natural habitat, so to speak---what we treasure and surround ourselves with. (And I often feel misunderstood.) I had a great time planning the party and it sure kept my mind focused on the here and now and not the six sadiversaries April usually brings.

And to my best friend since kindergarten who lives far away and answered my endless email questions about food and menus, these balloons are for you. You kept telling me I couldn't have a birthday party without balloons and one of my Gathering Girls pals must have heard you because she was the first to arrive and she was carrying these.....

"All's well that ends well" is a phrase that's been around since 1604 when Shakespeare wrote a play by that name. My party is a perfect example of how that sentiment is still as true today as it was when he gave those words to the world. ©