Skip to main content

Remnants



The daytime nurse reminds me that tonight is the all-male choir program in the dining room.  Do I want to wear something special for the occasion?
I show her my comfy gym outfit.  I have chair yoga at ten and a Scrabble rematch with Mr. García after lunch.  Any singing Romeo who spots me in the audience tonight and is hot for my phone number can just take me the way I am dressed, walker and all.
The evening nurse works our wing because we are ambulatory.  We can bathe ourselves and change our own diapers.  He’s afraid to touch us, afraid we are contagious.  In a way he is right.  Everyone ages; everyone dies.
When it is time for the evening program, I shuffle back to the dining room on my own.  A creature of habit, I head for the one spot where I sit for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  It is my lucky chair.  This is where I beat Mr. García at Scrabble for the fifth time earlier in the day.  I lean my walker against it before I make my rounds.
“Hola, Gloria.” In her late sixties, my friend once danced with Patrick Swayze in the movie Dirty Dancing, but now she is confined to a wheelchair.  She lost her left foot to diabetes two years ago and is scheduled for vascular surgery on her right calf next week.
“Que tal, Ricardo.”  Our resident playboy is in his nineties and silenced by a stroke, yet his wheelchair is surrounded by a covey of elderly women in walkers and wheelchairs, all vying for his attention.  He waves at me with his good hand, but I just keep on walking. 
I wave at the Colonel but he only has eyes for his wife.  He scoots his chair closer to her wheelchair and takes her hand.  He lives in my wing and she lives at the other end of the complex.  Once her Alzheimer’s got so bad he could not take care of her any longer, he moved her here.  He followed soon after to be close to her.
She doesn’t understand his gesture and looks at his hand. Her memories of him have slowly dissolved into the corners of her mind, but from the way he looks at her his haven’t faded in sixty-five years.  I think of my husband and make my way back to my seat. 
The choir files in and I notice the male nurse standing by the door.  He scans the room and I do too. He frowns. He sees remnants, the one facet that exists of us now. He would be surprised to know the full fabric we conceal under these remnants.  When we were his age we lived full, loud lives.  We danced and loved and laughed.  We have stories to tell. 
He sees me looking at him and I frown.  I feel sorry for him.  
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Dating Challenged

I stink at dating – always have.   I sputter.   I hyperventilate.   I fail miserably every time. I blame a pathetically underdeveloped gene that got little use before I married in my early twenties, then atrophied, gathering dust and rust, until I became single again in my fifties.   I decided to use this defect to my advantage when I needed to do some investigative reporting a few years back.   While on a newspaper writing assignment on Boomer-aged dating, I sacrificed my dignity and my vanity for the sake of the story (and I got several). Thank goodness, HoneyBunch saved me from all this when we married.  (He comes up with the best dates.) I’ve decided I will “show you mine if you show me yours.”   I will swap dating horror stories with you, but you have to promise to play along. The trick here is to tell about your worst date in 25 words or less.   You must keep it clean and you cannot name names. Our little contest will run only this week and before my next blogger posting.   Me
8 comments
Read more

Twelve Female Hero Authors Who Influenced Me to be an Author

In honor of Women’s History Month, I decided to share twelve female authors who changed my life forever and who influenced me to try my hand at writing. Some are not widely popular so you might want to try them out. 1.    Charlotte Bront é – English – Her plotting and characters - Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester – are immortal.  2.    Louisa May Alcott – American – I loved how she created a family of Little Women that reminded me of my sisters.  3.    Jane Austen – English – Another author who knew how to build immortal characters. Two words:  Mr. Darcy. Two more words:  hubba hubba. 4.    Emily Dickinson – American - What a poet! Her innovation was pooh-poohed at first, but now we owe her for breaking all those punctuation barriers. 5.    Beverly Cleary – American – She created a little girl in Ramona that reminded me of me when I was a little girl.  I wish I had met Ms. Cleary’s books sooner instead of when I was in my 30’s. 6.    Judy Blume – American - He
4 comments
Read more

Happy Breastday to Me!

I gave myself a very special birthday present this year – I had surgery. Before you think it was to increase, decrease, or “lift” something, let me tell you it was not cosmetic (though I could probably use a few nips and tucks at my age; the infinite number of creams I buy OTC are not working their promised magic). About four or five months ago, I discovered a hard lump about the size of a large marble in my left armpit.  I had been feeling small pangs of pain in my left chest for several months, but I figured it was just my turn to dance with heart disease.  Everyone in my immediate family is diabetic and suffers from strokes or heart attacks, so I thought – here we go; my turn. I was going to tell my internist about the pangs during my next visit, so imagine my surprise when I discovered the lump. The Drama Queen in me immediately manifested herself – cancer, I thought.  I have cancer. I searched some more and found that the texture on the left side of my left breast felt diffe
9 comments
Read more