Wild Ducks, Wild Man and Wild Conversations on Campus

 I went down to visit the swans today after lunch but they were on the other side of the lake, which is a mile walk to get there and back. So I sat on a bench 15 feet from the water’s edge and not more than a minute later four Brown-Teal Ducks waddled by me and dove into the lake right in front of me. Seconds later a mother Mallard and her six babies came marching by and the babies got herded into a stone-lined creek that meanders through the campus and ends up by the underground parking garage entrance. The stream was cast in dark shadows and the babies seemed to be taking a bath. It was Saturday so why not.

As I tracked the swans as they moved ever so slowly closer I was thinking, “Why would someone put a pole right in the perfect viewing spot for lake gazing?” Then I noticed a 7-8 inch pulley with a chain attached to the pole and my eyes followed the chain upward. It ended with a 16 unit Purple Martin condo. I’d been to that bench before but I’ve been so busy watching for goose poop I don’t want to step in that I hadn’t bothered to see any higher up than the cattails along the shore.

Speaking of water foul poop, the maintenance man put on quite the show this week. He is tasked with scraping goose poop off the sidewalks every day and he was using a golf cart to get around when he encountered a group of 35+ geese in our parking lot which isn’t far from the lake the way the crow flies (or in this case a goose flies) but it's quite a long away from the lake if you walk around the building to get there. Our poor maintenance man was chasing on foot and by golf cart all the geese, trying to round them up so they’d all go in one direction---back towards the lake. Those of us who were on our decks were having a good time watching and worrying at one point he’d tip the golf cart over or run it into a tree. But the harder he worked the more the birds tried to scatter in all directions. Of course we had to heckle him and he shouted back, “As soon as those babies can fly there’s going to be an all out war!” 

I’m from the camp that enjoys seeing and hearing the ducks, geese and the bullfrogs but there is another camp that would love to see them all shot or poisoned which is against the law. Some hate them because of the poop and others because their honking, quacking and bullfrogging around interferes with their sleep. I keep reminding them they chose to live on a lake. Lakes come with wildlife. And ohmygod, this lake comes with tons of dragonflies which probably explains why we don’t have the mosquitoes that everyone feared we get. As I sat on the bench I easily saw several dozen dragonflies playing tag in the cattails. By the way, did you know that dragonflies can literally die of fright at the sight of fish, according to an article I just read? Everything is relative, isn't it. If a pride of lions was stalking me I would hope I'd die of fright before they started eating me for dinner.

Speaking of dinner, recently four people spent the entire time talking about their dissertations in great detail while I and another woman without an advanced degree sat stone quiet. At one point I wondered how something that happened so long ago could be so important to them now when the world around us seems to be falling apart. Mass shootings, the January Sixth Hearings, supply chain issues in the stores. Covid. Current events are rarely ever discussed here, except in book club as it relates to something we’ve read. (I love that group.) I miss talking about current events. Admittedly my husband and I used to be news junkies, but here those kinds of conversations get shut done quickly when certain people are in the mix. They want to pretend we’re living in Never-Never Land where the illusion is that everything is fun and beautiful. But ignorance is not bliss when there’s a darkness waiting to destroy Never-Never Land aka the world as we know it.

At that dinner it came out that I was taking art classes on the same campus at the same time as one of the women talking about their dissertations and she was naming professors trying to figure out if we’d been in any of the same classes. I could no more name the professors I had back in the ‘60s than I can name the countries in the old Soviet Union or the members of the Backstreet Boys, for that matter. I’ve always known my mind tends to focus on the broader context and not the details but here that foible smacks in the face every time my peers talk about this kind of stuff. My peers can even name their grade school teachers. Not me, but I could describe what my grade school teachers wore to work---their sensible black shoes with the chunky heels, their dark colored cotton dresses with their padded shoulders and broad, white lace or matching collars. I can remember the kindness of one teacher and the pure evil of another who smacked me and the other left-handers daily with a ruler.

At the end of our last book club we talked about getting our Life Enrichment Director to start a monthly discussion group for those of us who want to talk about current events. She’s usually very responsive to our ideas so fingers crossed I might find a place where those of us who want to compare our reactions to the world outside our campus can go and not get the Never-Never Land treatment. ©

 

Photo at the top is one I snatched off the internet of a martin house located in the Iroquois National Wildlife Refuse. Ours is below and was built by the residents in the assisted living building. I can't take good photos anymore but I tried with my phone. (below).

This is our bird condo with the bench I sit on to the right. In the distance on the right is the Memory Care building, on the left are our town houses.

Hard to see but it's a swan chasing a goose as seen from the bench in the photo up above. Also hard to see through the trees is the independent living apartments where I live.

One of the swans, photo taken from the bridge in between the town houses and the Memory Care building.

This is the creek where the baby ducks played and that's an assisted living building on campus. Being on a continuum care campus it's comforting to know where exactly I'd get down graded to if something drastic happens to my health. There are 7-8 couples here where one of them lives in our independent living apartments but their spouses are a short walk away in one of these other buildings on the lake.

Old Women Having Fun

 

It’s easier to write when I’m all fired up mad or annoyed by something than when I’m mellowed out due to having a good time at one of the ‘laugh fests’ we have around the continuum care complex. Laugh fests can happen over the silliest things and silly things do not translate easily to the written word---at least at my keyboard. Like last night at dinner in the fine dining restaurant when I got seated with three others I know well but rarely get paired up with by the hostess. And maybe that’s because we tend to laugh a lot which grabs everyone’s attention as opposed to when conversations are strained because I’m at a table with Ms. Manners and her canary soft voice that barely makes it across that table.

Last night we ran through the usual opening question of “What did you do today” and as a reply one of the ladies was telling about how tired she was from working on a cottage that she’s putting up for sale soon and she said, “When I finally crawled into bed I yelled out “Yes! Yes! Yes! Then I worried that my neighbors heard me through the wall and they’d think I was you-know-whating.” 

“You know whating?” Lady Two asked with a confused look on her face and Lady Three answered, “Having sex, dear.” Ladies Two’s confusion slowly got replaced with a huge grin, “That’s what we used to say, isn’t it. It’s been twenty-five years.” “And we can gather you haven’t seen a x-rated movie or porn in twenty-five years either?” I added to the conversation. Lady One burst out laughing and said, “Fifteen years for me" and Lady Three shared, “Ten for me. I might be 93 but I used to have fun!” By then I was laughing so hard I was afraid I’d fall off my chair. For the rest of the night one or the other of us would say, “Yes! Yes, yes!” and we’d all burst out laugh. “Oh, this pork roast is really good,” and a chorus of ‘yeses’ answered. “Are you having dessert? “Yes, yes, yes!” “Are you going to the movie after dinner?” “Yes, yes, yes!” That’s a laugh fest at its finest.

Another night, another dinner and eight of us were around a table each taking a turn at trying to get the top on a take-out container that looked like it would fit but didn’t. I got up to get myself a cup of coffee and as usual they didn’t have the right size tops to fit the cups and I came back to the table complaining about that. “We have free coffee now but we can’t carry it anywhere because the tops never fit.” Someone else piped in with, “that’s because they buy them from the same company where they buy the take-out containers.” I kid you not these two things have been on-going problems here---not life threatening but mildly annoying and that night this issue turned into a comedy act.

If you manage to get the tops on a take-out box then when you go to take it back off it’s like trying to break into an cast-iron safe. One time I thought I’d end up in Urgent Care trying to pry one open with every conceivable tool in my kitchen drawer. Another woman ended up with the food on the floor. We swapped so many stories and laughs so hard around that table about miss-matched lids that the cafe’ manager came out and took all the coffee lids off the rack. And of course whenever the topic of coffee comes up the woman who single-handedly talked our CEO into making the coffee available all day long and for free has to re-tell the story. Big game hunters bragging couldn’t story-tell that accomplishment any better. 

Also this week at a social hour outside on our piazza the guys got started on a topic that had all us ladies scratching our heads when Guy One says, “I couldn’t decide between having pie tonight or having an affair behind my wife’s back.” Did I hear that right? Yes, I did. And Wife One was sitting right beside him and heard it too. Then Guy Two stepped into that pile of dung and said, “I’d always pick an affair over dessert.” There were 8-10 of us ladies around our outdoor fire pit and someone said, “We all know who to stay away from now on, don’t we, ladies.” And one of the women from my dinner table the night before yells out: “Yes, yes, yes!” I still don’t get in what universe a guy gets to pick between pie or an affair but three times this week my belly actually hurt from laughing too. So I knew I had to try to write about these little episodes that happen routinely around here at the CCC. I've written---probably too often---about the gossip train that goes through this place so hopefully this post gives a proper balance to what life is like around this place. ©

The Air Force Pilot

We’ve been getting some outstanding speakers here at the continuum care complex as part of our Life Enrichment Program. Our latest was a pilot of an F-105 Thunderchief during the Vietnam War. Lieutenant James DeVoss’s plane was shot down during a bombing-run over Laos in 1969 and he was rescued by a group of para-rescue jumpers who found him on his back in a bamboo patch with bamboo shoots impaling him so he couldn’t move and he suffered numerous injuries caused by being ejected from the plane. “His left arm shattered, both hips were dislocated and his knees were separated. In the right knee, every tendon, every piece of cartilage, every ligament was completely torn apart. One nerve; one blood vessel with some skin around it, was all that remained to keep his lower leg alive. Another 8th of an inch, it would have ripped apart, and he would have bled to death." (Quote from a USA Today article.) We had a genuine purple heart recipient and highly decorated pilot in front of us.

For first half hour of his talk he described in great detail the training that Air Force pilots go through, not only on how to fly and how to eject from an aircraft that’s malfunctioning but he also described the training pilots get on how to survive behind enemy lines and how survive being a POW. Up until this point we didn't know about him getting shot out of the sky and my cynical side was thinking, This old guy is here to relive his glory days. But then he switched from talking about training to showing a film of his plane getting shot down and the rescue that followed and it started sinking in---how much this man had suffered through and survived. 

The para-rescue jumpers had done many missions like that one before but for some reason the Air Force decided to make a documentary of one of them and his rescue was the one that got filmed. It was that footage that the lieutenant was able to show us. I’ve never been a gun-ho supporter of the military but watching and listening to this man I gained a real appreciation for the sacrifice, courage and training pilots in the Air Force go through to serve our country.

My Mahjong teacher and her husband both served in the Air Force and sat next to me at the lecture. There were five or six others in the room who’d also been in the Air Force so you can image the quality of the questions that were asked during the Q & A part of the lecture. I asked if he’s flown planes after his years-long recovery and he did---not in the Air Force but he got certificated in some civilian crafts and taught for awhile. Afterward some of us where talking in the lobby and one woman said she wanted to ask if he had any mental therapy to deal with PTSD but she didn’t dare, felt it was too personal, and I remarked that I’ll bet doing talks like this probably helps with that and the chronic pain his wife said he still has to this day. 

But I was probably wrong. After finding him online I discovered that in 2017 he was inducted into the Michigan Aviation Hall of Fame and because of the “enshrined results” of that honor (research done) he became a Motivational Speaker. His presentation wasn’t born out of a need to tell his story but rather out of a renewed sense of wonder that he survived at all. Somewhere on his website he says he’s sharing his story to say “thanks for my everything” to the men who saved him.

Given all the crazy stuff going on in our country I don’t feel very proud of the U.S.A. right now so this was the perfect lecture to see the week of the Fourth of July. It gave me a little of that pride back again....if only temporarily. ©