Friday, May 8, 2015

...and it's been a long time...


The place was a lot nicer than I expected when my mom and I walked into the Sunrise Assisted Living Facility in Southern California to sign in at the front desk. The staff seemed refreshingly nice too…at least to a guy like me that’s become increasingly hardened by over 10 years living amidst the hustle-and-bustle of the east coast.

We were there to see my mom’s 91 year-old first cousin Mildred (my first cousin once removed) who’s been staying in the senior facility since falling in her Alhambra, California home last July. My mother only lives about 40 miles west of there near Santa Barbara, CA, but at 84 and with advancing macular degeneration, it’s increasingly tough for her to navigate her light blue 2004 Grand Marquis battleship on the Southern California roads. In light of that she’d only made one harrowing trip by herself, and my visit from Washington, DC provided the perfect opportunity for her to be chauffeured to her second visit.

At 53, I’m no virgin to these types of senior housing. Over the years I’ve visited a host of relatives staying in homes,  and for very short while I even made a bit of a habit of playing the guitar or piano at a couple of such facilities in Eastern North Dakota and Western Minnesota. Regardless of which one I visited, I usually left feeling like a rock star, but then again, I guess the entertainment bar was pretty low.
 
Compared to some I've seen, this was pretty nice. As we rounded the corner to greet my cousin, I was struck by the pleasant look on several resident’s faces as they sat napping and reading around the fireplace. They were seated on what at least appeared to be fairly comfortable couches arranged in a U-shape around the hearth, and I remember thinking it might have been the first such place where I’d witnessed such a scene. 

Mildred, now confined to a wheelchair after breaking her left leg when falling again 3 weeks ago while trying to move a chair on her patio (she has her own assisted living apartment), gave us an enthusiastic greeting when she spotted us. She looked remarkably well for 91 (to be honest…no worse than me) and she asked us if we wanted to move over to the recreation area to visit a bit. The den-like area, which included the aforementioned fireplace, sat just between the large dining area and the outdoor courtyard. We settled in at a table by the windowed double-door that gave way to the tree-covered patio, and after I grabbed coffee for the group ( it was free) from table adjacent to where we sat, we immediately began to chat about my cousin’s assisted living digs.
 
 

Mildred always had a great disposition, and she talked excitedly about the facility and pulled out a paper that listed all the “activities” going on in the place. I asked her if she participates in any of them, and she noted that she goes to most of the exercise classes and usually does the Thai Chi. I’m not making this up…and she even demonstrated some Thai Chi moves she’d learned to improve hearing and laughed as she slowly tugged down and outward on her earlobes. I asked her if it working, and she leaned forward and said “what?”

It wasn’t long at all before the conversation shifted to a nostalgic waxing of their childhood time growing up on the Red River farm in eastern North Dakota. They laughed as they reminisced about riding shovels down the riverbank in the winter, or building icehouses in the snow that piled along the riverbank. I asked if anyone ever worried that the caves they carved out of the snow would ever collapse…and they simultaneously said “no…nobody ever worried about us.” They talked about riding horses bareback to get the mail from the mailbox which was a half mile to the west down the dirt road, and flagging down the steam engine at the depot in Wolverton, MN. They even talked about sneaking through the woods in hopes of getting a glimpse of neighbor Jimmy Alm skinny dipping in the riverside gravel pit.

What’s the point of all this? Well, if you know you can use the comment section to tell me…but I think it could be this. When I was a kid we’d gather every Christmas Eve at my Aunt Nannie and Selma’s (they were my grandpa’s sisters) at the top of Mount Angelus drive in Highland Park, California.  When we sat down for a traditional Swedish dinner in their modest dining room, the group consisted of my aunts and hosts Nannie and Selma, Mildred and her husband Bob and their daughter (my second cousin) Pam, my cousin Alice and her husband Bill, my aunt Lucile and her boyfriend Tom, my mom and dad and me. It was always a festive time…and at least for me as a young boy…it seemed to me that group would be around forever.

Now…of that core group of 12, the only ones left are Mildred (91), my mother (84) and me (I look like I’m 39). That’s not sad…it’s just the way it works. Unless something changes dramatically, the script won’t likely end the same, but it will eventually end. So…when you look around at your loved ones and friends, don’t take them for granted. Try to avoid the petty crap that leads to fights and bad blood and think about the fact that those people around us won’t always be here. Neither will we…so as my boyhood pastor Don Shelby used to say, “life is a gift…and you better make it count for something.  

 Have a great weekend.

 BTW…I read last week where the website Grooveshark shut down so if this blog is resurrected fulltime,  I’ll have to find a different way to get you the music. For now, or at least until I figure out the new Grooveshark, it's a Youtube video. Hope you can make it work...it's a good song.


Girl Crush

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