Presidents, Red Hats and Apartments

On President’s Day the senior citizen hall sponsored a program described as: “A two-character play that brings history alive. This one-act play chronicles the true love story of the lives of John and Abigail Adams.” What a treat that was to watch this play and this is coming from a woman who has never been big on going to live theater productions. I guess I need to give them another try, broaden my horizons as they say. The actors---well-known in area Civic and Heritage theater groups---spoke in character for an entire hour, never once missing a line or stumbling on a word of the fast-paced dialogue. The acting was extraordinary and it didn’t hurt that they brought up one of my Revolutionary Era ancestors who had a well-documented connection with the Adams family and the revolution. I left the building uplifted and smiling just as a snowstorm was moving in that dumped another eight inches of drifting snow overnight, bringing our seasonal total up to 101.1 inches!

The cost of these life appreciation lectures are unwritten by area businesses and the President’s Day play was paid for by a senior living apartment complex. (You have to be 55 or older to live there.) Since I keep going back and forth about moving to a condo or senior complex or staying put I asked a lot of questions of the representative who was manning their table full of handouts. It’s a nice place with some bells and whistles I want but I was shocked to learn that the rent for one person in a 780 square feet apartment is $3,180 per month. It doesn’t cost me anywhere near that much to live in my 1,600 square feet house, not to mention I would hate going down the hall to do laundry, not having a garage for my car, and I would be exchanging snow shoveling for walking my dog in the winter, since here I can just turn him loose in his dog pen. Maybe I'm just out of touch with rental costs?  If I sold my house I'd end up spending all that money in five or six short years on rent! Then what? No wonder people end up living in their cars.

I did learn one important fact to tuck in back of my mind in case I ever reach bag lady status. These kinds of senior living places will let you try out their guest apartments for a weekend for free, if you’re interested in sampling their social life. I’ve never counted but I’ll bet there’s enough senior places like this around town that you could stay in a different one every weekend for a year, and then start all over again using a different name. Always have a backup plan, that’s my motto. Last year I toured another place like the one mentioned above only it was more upscale and downright spooky. Why spooky? Because you buy your apartment for upwards of $300,000 plus paid a high monthly fee but if you live there longer than one year, then died or move out, you or your heirs won’t get a penny of that money back when it’s resold. The money goes back to the complex. I wrote about this Stepfordville for old people HERE if you’re interested in how these places work. Apparently their business model is pretty common. There are at least three that I know of in town that are set up in a similar way.

Our bad weather last week caused my Red Hat Society chapter to cancel their Valentine’s Day party at the nursing home and it was reschedule for this week. Why did I have to join a do-gooder chapter who does these little cheer-up-the-inmates events from time-to-time? I did my thing with nursing homes twice a week for seven years when my husband’s mother was in one. I share-cared my dad for five years through his early Alzheimer’s and cancer. I was my disabled husband’s caregiver for twelve years. I don’t want any more reminders in my life that many of us get helpless and needy as we age, thank you very much. I’m perfectly content to bury my head in the sand on that score. But I’ve ran out of excuses for Red Hat nursing home duty and so Wednesday I played nice with a bunch of their residents---many of whom aren’t that much older than me. I came home determined to take better care of myself lest I be the next recipient of a do-gooder group handing out punch, sugary treats and holiday trinkets, and playing bingo in slow-motion with cards the size of Texas. It wasn’t such a bad experience---I made myself useful---but you know what a drama queen I can be.

Transitions in life are often scary and I’m finding this one---attempting to age with grace---the hardest of all. Yes, you caught that---I’m at a point where I’ve separated the transition caused by grief from the transition of aging which makes it easier. Divide and conquer. But it’s a little like having the horse that was pulling my cart run off leaving me to decide whether to push the cart or abandon it. I accept that my horse isn’t coming back but now what? Do I sell the house and move on or do I stay as long as I can still keep it up? If I move, where to? If I go to a senior complex will I be happy living so close with others my own age? Or will I hate the loss of real privacy? What will I gain, what will I lose if I move? Will I run out of money and end up roaming the streets? People in transition can drive themselves crazy with questions!  ©

Break From Winter

 

This has been a good week here in the land of too much snow. Saturday the gods of goodness shined down on Michigan and made the 82 miles of roads I had to travel to my great, great niece’s baby shower easy to drive. My niece was putting a lot of pressure on me to come out to the boondocks and even offered to send her husband to pick me up and deliver me back home if the roads were bad. And if the roads were really, really bad, she wanted me to stay at her house for a few days, “We’ll have a slumber party of shower guests,” she said. But Levi, my schnauzer, nixed that idea since his kennel is out in the County of Unplowed Roads and who would feed his rabbits if I wasn’t home to do it? He torments my niece’s cat so he couldn't have gone with me. What can I say, it’s in his genes to chase small ‘varmint’ and that instinct is making me nervous these days because the snow is so deep---and the rabbits so plentiful in my yard---it wouldn’t take much effort for him to crawl right out of his dog pen. Only 14 inches of his 3 foot tall fence is showing above the snow pack. My only saving grace is that he’s an agility course drop-out. When the jump bar gets set over five inches high, he chickens out.

It was bright and sunny when I arrived at the golf course where the shower was being held and the minute I pulled into the overcrowded parking lot I got excited. There were easily 100 snowmobiles in various states---some parked, some coming and going from the state trail, some circling the parking lot and others taking part in a vintage snowmobile show. The annual winter-fest was on and its sounds and sunshine was like taking a tonic! I was quite early for the shower and even though I felt half-dressed walking about in the sea of helmeted people wearing one-piece, playtime snowsuits I looked over the vintage machines, enjoying all the great memories they conjured up. I’d been on that trail, to that course golf, on machines like those in the vintage parking area many times. I was almost sad when I got inside and realized the shower was booked in a private room, and we wouldn’t be mixing it up with all the exhilarated snowmobilers in the main dining room.

The shower was a big one—55 of us---and my great-great niece got a mountain of gifts but mine was the only one that included handmade items. I guess knitting has gone out of style. This winter I’ve knitted up a pile of stuff---mostly hats, scarfs, cowls and baby car seat blankets. Most winters I usually knit just one or two things. I blame that darn cable upgrade I got 5-6 weeks ago and the unending snow because I’m spending more time in front of the TV set than usual. Is this how it starts? Pretty soon will the table next to my chair in the living room have that “old person” look? You know, an unruly pile containing things like a magnifier glass, a box of tissues, toenail clippers, paper and pen, maybe a crossword puzzle book, a bottle of liniment, and a few back issues of the TV guide---all overflowing and tempting the dog to steal stray candy wrappers and used Kleen-x. Will my next addition to the room be a TV tray where I can eat or do small jigsaw puzzles?

Thursday I went to a lecture at the senior hall titled, Warm Winter Reads. The librarian who puts on the program is so energetic and enthusiastic about the books she recommends that it’s hard not to get intrigued by some of those she features. I used to belong to the book club at the hall before my husband died and I never really got back into reading with the same pleasure and intensity. But when I got home from the lecture I downloaded one of her recommendations to my Kindle and so far I’m enjoying The Humans by Matt Haig. It’s probably the lightest read on her handout but I couldn’t resist the premise of an extraterrestrial who comes to earth to assume a man’s identity in order to carry out an important mission but he ends up falling in love with the man’s family and their dog. The book has some intriguing passages like the one below where the extraterrestrial is describing love to those on his home planet: "Two mirrors, opposite and facing each other at perfectly parallel angles, viewing themselves through the other, the view as deep as infinity. Yes, that is what love was for. Love was a way to live forever in a single moment, and it was also a way to see yourself as you had never actually seen yourself, and made you realize---having done so---that this view was a more meaningful one than any of your previous self-perceptions and self-deceptions.”

After Monday's storm, we are supposed to have a week of thawing here and with it will come fog and flooding but it’s a necessary evil in order for us to get rid of some of our massive snow piles. I can’t wait! I just hope my sump pump can keep up!  Our hundred year flood, last year, found my basement and I don’t need another disaster like that again.  ©

Valentine's Day on Widowhood Lane

There was a Ralph Lauren perfume commercial on TV during The Grammy Salute to the Beatles last Sunday night. It showed a couple on horseback with the guy’s arm curled around the girl’s neck as he stole a kiss. That arm/neck cradling brought back a memory of the first time Don applied that gesture of affection to me. We were riding pink elephants in the park early on in our relationship---the kind on giant springs made for children. It was a gesture he repeated a thousand times over our years together. Don wasn’t the hand-holding-in-public type but on occasion he did do the arm/neck cradling, heads touching thing for public consumption. If I was Barbara Streisand this is where I’d break out singing, “Memories, misty water-colored memories of the way we were….”

Before our big downsizing after Don’s stroke, I collected greeting cards. Fifty years’ worth of collecting went up for auction along with more than half of our possessions and I never started collecting cards again even though the inclination to do so pops its head up from time to time. Of my card collection, I only saved a few things including an 8” x 10” Valentine's Day card in its own, custom box and an old leather suitcase full of Valentines from the 1800’s that came down through Don’s family and had to be thrown out when my basement got flooded last year.

I found the card recently while cleaning closets. It was from Don and opening that card, made me smile warm and wide. I had forgotten his habit of rarely signing his name on the greeting cards he gave to me. Instead, he’d put a few words and his name on Post-it notes so he wouldn’t lower the collector value of the cards. That was Don. He could spend money with abandonment on silliness and flowery, over-sized cards but his practical side always showed up as well. It was very cool to re-discover that card so close to Valentine’s Day and it came with the Hallmark message of, “Loving you, sweetheart, the way that I do means finding contentment in being with you…finding such joy in just knowing that you care and real inspiration in the dreams we share.” Don never, ever calling me ‘sweetheart’ unless he was holding a pretend Groucho Marx cigar in his hand while making a smart-ass remark. His endearment for me was a made-up word and as much as I’d like to remember what it was, right now I can’t. The tiny details that made up our relationship are fading with time and leaving behind broad strokes we might label love, loyalty and friendship. Finding that forgotten card brought some of the details back and that was a good Valentine’s Day gift to get this year.

This will be my third February 14th living on Widowhood Lane and this week I went to the annual Valentine’s Day luncheon at the senior hall. The first year I went---less than a month after Don’s passing---I had to leave shortly after the entertainment started because I couldn’t keep my tears in check. Bands that are entertaining a bunch of mostly widows shouldn’t sing sad songs like Duke Ellington’s, “Missed the Saturday dance. Heard they crowded the floor. Couldn't bear it without you. Don't get around much anymore.”

In my second year of widowhood I stayed for the whole Valentine’s Day program at the senior hall and I didn’t cry when the entertainment played an assortment of longing-for-love songs but a recent widow sitting near-by did and I whispered understanding words in her ear. This year something astonishing happened. While the entertainer was singing Fats Domino’s, I Left My Heart on Blueberry Hill the lady sitting next to me burst out laughing. Then she explained that the song reminded her of a time when her sister was in high school and a guy came to pick her up for a date. Without asking for permission, he sat down at the family piano and started playing that song. The sister was so put off by his boldness that she made up an excuse not to go on the date. That piano was for Sunday morning hymns, after all, not for singing about ill-gotten thrills found on top of a hill.

“That was my husband’s favorite song,” I told her, “and”---I drew out my words so their full weight could sink in---“in the entire 42 years that I knew him he never passed by a piano without taking the opportunity to sit down and play Blueberry Hill.”

“It couldn’t have been your husband,” she said a couple of times. “This took place in---. “ Then she named a tiny town north of here. By then I was laughing so hard I could hardly tell her that Don grew up just a few miles from where she and her sister lived. Yup, it turned out it was my husband who got judged too bold and brazen to date.

“Tell your sister thanks for passing him by,” I told her. “I got him and he was a keeper.”

What are the odds in a city of over 600,000 people that two strangers would sit next to one another and find a bizarre, half-century old connection like that? Needless to say, I had a great time this year at the Valentine’s Day luncheon. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is what we call progress here on Widowhood Lane. Or was this latest coincidence just another example of ‘ghost games’ at work?  I don’t know, doctor, but give me two chocolate covered caramels and I'll call you in the morning when I figure it out. ©

P.S. I remembered Don’s made-up endearment, but I can’t figure out how to spell it. It would start with 'sm' and end with 'ring'. LOL