The Power of the Written Word

My poem about the contentious meeting between the residents and the new food service here at the continuum care campus has earned me my very own nickname. Isn’t that ironic considering I’ve spent the last ten months giving my fellow residents nicknames to give them a layer of privacy should my blog ever become public knowledge. For several days I heard “Here comes our Poet Laureate” when ever I’d approach a gathering of people. I’ll have to admit it feels good to not have to hide one of my main passions in life…writing. And I think I started something. I was talking to man here who said he thought he’d be writing a lot when he retired and he wants to try his hand at poetry but he hasn’t written a single word since moving here, so the next thing I know I’m suggesting we start a creative writing group on campus. We’ll only need five or six people and we’ve heard a rumor there is another man here who is hold up in his apartment working on a book. The Enrichment Director has given us a time slot on the monthly calendar and we'll have our first 'cattle call' in September.

Also as a result of the poem I got asked to be a part of a new “Residents Council” a committee that the ‘in crowd’ is forming that wants to plan parties, help new residents fit in and connect us all through a residents’ newsletter. They wanted me to be in charge of writing the newsletter and taking notes at committee meetings. I turned them down and three of them spent the next two days trying to badger me into changing my mind. Finally I found them a guy who does a family newsletter once a month and he agreed to do the newsletter. I told the new editor I’d submit an article from time to time if he decides to have club reporters. He lite up at the ideal of having a string of reporters under his control.

I can’t tell you on how many levels I’d hate being part of this Residents Council. One: I’m trying to be more true myself here and party planning and putting myself out there with new people is not something I’ve enjoyed doing. In fact I'd hate it. Two: I can’t take notes in committee meetings. My mild dyslexia and poor spelling gets me stuck too often and doing that in public brings up childhood feelings of being called stupid. When I’m alone I can just ask Alexa and move on with no baggage to drag me down. 

And three: Several of the key members on the committee are Trump supporters. You should have heard the conversation here last night around our fire pit when the CDC announced changed in the Covid protocol. One woman (and two others agreed) that the announcement was proof that Trump was right all along when he said there was no pandemic and all the people who died of Covid died of something else. She thinks the hospitals and coroners across the country are getting a kick back for every Covid death they record and Covid is nothing more than the common flu that comes around every year. I couldn't work with people who parrot Fox News. My tongue would be raw from biting it all the time to keep myself from going all Incredible Hulk and spewing CCN back at them. And there it is, people, what is wrong with out country. We no longer value documented facts and ethics to the point we have two sets of  'truths' coming at us, making us more and more tribal. And dumber and dumber as a nation where half our people don't see anything wrong with an ex-president illegally keeping boxes of highly classified documents about our nuclear program in the basement of a club just feet away from where people from around the world go to play golf and cozy up to him. Puts a new light on that Chinese woman who was arrested by the FBI a year or two ago at Mar-a-Lago with a bunch of thumb drives in her possession, doesn't it.

Okay, my Incredible Hulk persona is back in the box and I have one more side note on the poem. I put it up Sunday at noon and by Tuesday morning it was gone. The management took it down along with a letter someone else wrote supporting the sentiments in my poem. They said the bulletin board in our mail room is only for notices. The board is probably six by six foot and only has three sheets of paper on it. I was planing on taking the poem down by Wednesday anyway and at first I thought it as funny they felt threaten by it. But the longer I thought about it the more annoyed I got at the idea we residents can’t have a bulletin board to post whatever on.

And that became reason number four for not getting involved in a resident council and their newsletter. The committee is going to ask the management to pay for paper, printing and to use their e-mail list, etc., and in exchange the management---in my opinion---is going to want control over what goes into that newsletter. I don’t want to be a performer in that circus but it’s going to be fun watching it from the sidelines.  ©

End of Summer Trouble Making

I joined the Coral Club today, not to be confused with a choral club. Ten of us came down to lunch in our cafe` and seven of us were wearing coral colored shirts. What are the odds of that happening? I suppose pretty high considering it was a new color offered in the fashion industry this past spring---or was it in 2021? Either way, we had lots of silly ass fun over our little club as we ate our pizzas and hamburgers. Well, most of us were eating. Two or three were there for the conversation and to learn the latest gossip about who went off in an ambulance, who tested positive for Covid and which foolish old man drove himself to the hospital when he thought he was having a heart attack. Because of the hipaa privacy law about revealing health issues the management isn’t allowed to tell us anything, but we did get an email telling the 35 of us who were at our monthly dialogue meeting that we need to get tested for Covid on Monday. Oh happy days. I don’t want to see the return of masks but it’s probably coming to a place near all of us by fall.

Remember all the bellyaching I’ve done about the fashion standards here and how my wardrobe is hopeless out of sync with everyone else’s? It’s still a thorn in my side that I often feel like Cinderella with wicked stepsisters who look like fashion plates for Mature Living Magazine. My fault, not theirs and I try to remember that. (My shopping gene is broken.) When in the fine dining room, the bling will blind a person and you can tell how who had unlimited resources in their clothes and jewelry piggy banks. The only jewelry I wear is my $35 watch, a medical bracelet, stud earrings to match my tops---or not if I'm too lazy to swap them out---and a sterling silver ring made in Siam before that 800 year old country was renamed ‘Thailand’ in 1939. I bought the ring in an antique store in the mid 1950s when I was crushing on bald-headed Yul Brynner back when he was in The King and I. It was ignored for decades but I found when I was downsizing last year and haven’t taken if off since. Its got two fish on the front which, of course, I researched because that’s what I do for fun and I found out the fish symbolizes wealth, prosperity, strength and bravery.

I’ve never worn my wedding rings on a daily basis, even when Don as still alive. I didn’t want to get the diamonds all cruded up with soap, pizza sauce or caregiver fluids. Here, I’ve worn them twice---Christmas and Easter. But, here every night when we eat in the fine dining restaurant the room is filled with more chunky gold pieces than most jewelry stores have on display. I’d rather have a bunch of flea market finds lined up on my windowsills in an effort to flaunt my passions in life. Different stroke for different folks, as they say. The most valuable thing I have in the way of jewelry is a sweet memory of my husband after his stroke when he was trying to get me to understand that he wanted me to wear my wedding rings to a party we were going to. We made some great memories after my husband could no longer walk or talk. It wasn’t all dome and gloom; there was plenty of laughter and sweet-as-pie or silly moments even if there were a few times when I felt more like a mom than a wife.

You’re not going to believe what I did after lunch today with the Coral Club. I decided not to hide my writing under a bushel anymore---at least in one genre of the craft. I’ve been working on a set of poems about this place with the intend to do some illustrations to go with them and to publish them in a booklet. Doing the small batch, self-publishing thing is nothing new. I’ve done nine books so far from 300 pages to 20. But up until today no one here has ever read a word I’ve written except for two ‘test women' who I showed a poem to recently. It was well received so when I finished a poem about a contentious meeting we had with the CEO and people from a new food service taking over our meals I triple-dog dared myself to post the poem on the bulletin board in the mail room. To be clear about why I jumped into the fire, the new food service people didn’t get why all of us are up in arms about their doing away with our cafe` community table and making us all sit in stuffy groups of two and four. They were talking restaurant management and we were talking in Klingon or so it seemed to them. They just didn’t get it, that their change took away our sense of community and fun. 

My poem is sarcastic and funny and to the point and when I got back from posting it I got a call from someone on the food committee who wants a copy to take to their next meeting with these same people. She praised my ‘talent’ and said she and her husband (who are both in my book club) admire me for having the guts to post that poem. She said they both stood there laughing for longest time. Then I got an email from a guy high up on the social chain here---we call him the Mayor---who praised my poem and said he went down to the office and told the CEO and others to go read it. Over the next day I was getting hailed all over the place for representing our grievance in a funny way. By the second morning it was gone off the board, taken down when no one was looking. Please think of me in my version of The Hunger Wars and help me hope “the odds are in my favor” that my little poem won't cause me to get banned from making future reservations to eat on campus. But if you see me panhandling on the corner for food, you'll know why.... ©

Oscar Meyer Weinermobile, Great Books and Family Parties

Book Club: We read The Death and Life of the Great Lakes by Dan Egan and all twelve of us were all on the same page in our opinions of this well-written and well-researched non-fiction book about the largest mass of freshwater on the planet. (20% of the fresh water in the world is in these five, giant lakes.) The history, science and threats to the water’s safety and sustainability reads like a novel and at the end suggests what we need to do to protect the Great Lakes and the 40 million people who depend on them for our water supplies. Each invasive species is explained in detail--how they got here, what damage they are doing and how species like the quagga mussels have spread across the country on the bottoms of boats. They are a serious problem to the pipelines that bring water to our cities’ taps. The book made me want to go out and buy a  bunch of bottled water because a water crisis in a major city is just a matter of time and then our water processing plants will all fall like lines of dominoes, if we don't take action soon. And that is just one of several complex problems facing the Great Lakes.

Oh, in case you’re wondering, the woman who rattled me to the point I couldn’t express myself the last time our book club met didn’t come back and we were back to our harmonious selves.

The Oscar Meyer Wienermobile: It was in our town last weekend. I know this because one of the my neighbor’s here at the CCC left a message on my phone while I was at my niece’s cottage saying she and a couple of other women where going downtown to see it and did I want to go along. The next day I saw her and explained that I didn’t get her message until late and I thanked her for the invitation. She said, “I was trying to think of who would be up for a spur of the moment adventure and I knew you would be.” Boy, does she have me pegged wrong. I’m not usual ready to just pick up and go because I have a bad habit of not doing a shower or sponge bath first thing in the morning...I wait until a couple of hours before I’m supposed to be some place. But when I thought about her experiences with inviting me to a half dozen places like the movie theater, a impromptu party or out for ice cream I just happened to have been dressed for the day. She’s very social and she's the reason I keep a wine bottle, a cheese ball and crackers on standby. Not long ago she invited 15 nuns to dinner to help her use up her food allowance rather than loss it at the end of the month. She’s one of “The Catholic Kids” who goes to church every day of the week and, boy, was it delightfully weird watching ladies in brown habits go by my window. I almost wished I'd had dinner reservations that night so I could eavesdrop on their conversations.

I missed Oscar because I was at a birthday party for a great-great niece, a five year old whose widowed mom is moving out of state soon. My brother was there and the child’s other set of great-great grandparents. The great-great grandmother asked me if I remembered the first time we met many decades ago. I didn’t. So she told me at a similar family party she walked up to me and said, “Hi Aunt Jean! I’ve been wanting to met you.” And apparently I didn’t waste any time telling her I wasn’t HER aunt Jean and I walked away. I thought I'd learned a few manners since then but when her husband started calling me "Aunt Jean" at this week's party I couldn't help myself from asking, "What did you just call me?" What can I say, I treasure my 'aunt' title and I don't want someone nearly a decade older than me wearing it out.

At 80 I was the youngest of the older generation there and we sat under a sun tent at the water’s edge, pampered by my nephew who ran up and down the hill to get us drinks, helped us in and out of beach chairs and he brought me a pillow for my back while his wife and daughter fixed us all plates of food like they'd just done for the children. That hadn't happened to me before, and it felt like I'd officially graduated into The Golden Years and I wasn't sure I if I liked it, or not. In the past I would have mingled more with the generation below me. But hasn’t it always been that way, where the oldest generation are grouped together by choice or design? 

I remember being as young as the seven kids at the party and seeing a line of elderly aunts in flowered print dresses, straw hats and clunky black shoes. I probably gave them the same weary eye and a wide berth the little kids at this party were giving me. But we all commented on how well my niece interacted with the youngest generation. At one point she had them all playing Ring-Around-the-Rosie. 

The game is based on an English nursery rhyme that’s been around since the 1790s and a widely spread rumor claims its about the plague while scholars dispute that. Wikipedia says, “English versions have given would-be origin finders the opportunity to say that the rhyme dates back to the Great Plague. A rosy rash, they allege, was a symptom of the plague, and posies of herbs were carried as protection and to ward off the smell of the disease. Sneezing or coughing was a final fatal symptom ‘and they’d all fall down’…The line ‘ashes, ashes’ in the colonial versions of the rhyme is claimed to refer to cremation of the  bodies.” 

The more things change the more they stay the same. Children still learn the games their mothers and grandmothers teach them. And conspiracy theories are still around and are believed above the careful research of scholars. ©