When I step out into the hall, I know for certain where I am. I see people walking with canes, many with walkers. Some walking devices are fancy enough to be considered fashion accessories; they are equipped with gadgets and come in assorted colors. Then there are the wheelchairs: the automated, padded ones being top of the line. And if none of those do the trick, there are aides on hand to support the more fragile inmates. So much for “independent living.”
When I was a kid, my Uncle Mike used to take my sisters and me on Sunday-morning drives after church. He would drive us through the affluent neighborhoods of Akron, Ohio, where the rubber tycoons lived. He’d ask us to pick out a house we liked, then he’d stop the car, and in his thick Italian accent say, “I’ll go to the front door and offer $10,000 cash money.” For a house less grand: “$5,000 cash money. No more.” We would laugh to please him. He’d drive past the neighborhood home for the aged. “Call it what they want,” he’d say, “but it’s the poor house. Save your money or that’s where you’ll end up. Better you save, buy a nice house, put in a good bed and plan to die in it. That’s a good death.”
When I got out of the Army after WWII, finished school, got a job and saved a bit, I bought a modest house and put in a fine bed, just as Uncle Mike had instructed. One day a kitten turned up. I looked everywhere for her owner, posting signs and calling shelters. I quickly fell in love and was happy when no one claimed her. I called her Mary Fortune Pitts, after a nasty child in a Flannery O’Connor story, because within days she started exercising her will. She practically demanded her own door, through which she brought “gifts” of mice and baby rabbits, and she was satisfied only when I served her favorite dessert: coffee yogurt.
And then came the time to retire. Tired of mowing the lawn, raking leaves and shoveling snow, Mary Fortune and I decided to move to Florida. We looked for a house that would suit us both. I had a pet door installed and stocked up on yogurt. But as the years went by, Mary Fortune seemed to retire, too, and her forays outside became less frequent. When she died, I decided it was no longer necessary to struggle with escalating property taxes, expensive hurricane insurance and all the burdens of homeownership. Water intrusion–a nice euphemism for flooding–was the last straw. After a silent conversation with long-gone Uncle Mike about moving to an old-age home, I felt he gave me his blessing. “Try it,” I imagined him saying (though in truth, he still sounded skeptical).
Since moving, I have experienced the following problems in my Life-Care Senior Citizen Independent Living Classic Luxury Residence: noises in the bathroom, water spouts in the toilet bowl reminiscent of Old Faithful, no hot water (for a month, once) and, yet again, water intrusion. When I go into the hall to check the mail or make my way to the dining room I have to maneuver through an obstacle course of walkers and wheelchairs. (They should come equipped with horns, or perhaps I should carry a horn of my own.) Occasionally the dining room runs out of food for the late sitting, but that’s a minor problem. On those nights, I make one of the dishes Uncle Mike taught me.
Yet there are virtues to living here: the kids who wait on us in the dining room are great. They laugh and smile; they flirt and are full of hope. And the residents are a lively, entertaining bunch: a former university president full of good humor despite his constant pain, a woman who helped desegregate southern Florida, an astute former U.S. senator and a children’s book author, whose latest work is an account of an elephant conceived through artificial insemination–in rhyme, no less!
Still, at bedtime, I sometimes feel I have to justify my self-incarceration to Uncle Mike. “It’s time,” I tell him. “You live in cloud-cuckoo-land,” he says. “I hope you gave only $5,000 cash money. And how’s the bed, kid?” In truth, it’s a little lumpy. But it feels right.
