Summer's slipping by, days are a bit cooler - and for once, I can’t complain. (Well, as you know. I can. But I won’t.)
Went out and about this morning, nothing exciting. So, I decided to be absolutely lazy, and delve into my story-writing years for your daily fix (assuming you need one.)
NOTE: These stories introduce some of the people who live in Silver Bay Retirement Home – where Rose seems to be the only one with all her senses. Rose is smart, and wise, and is a compilation of all the smart, wise older women I know..or knew. She jumped in my head a couple of years ago, when we were asked to do an assignment for an on-line writing class. She was by no means the main character we were asked to write about, but an innocent bystander who took up residence in my brain and refused to leave – not that I’d want her to!ROSE’S STORY- THE CANDLE
Someone took the candle away. I don’t know why – it’s not like I ever lit it; it just sat there squarely, snugly, in the corner of my little shelf, and now there’s just an empty spot, dust free and just waiting.
I remember birthdays, growing up, getting bigger every year with the number of candles on my cake getting bigger along with me. After mamma passed though, there were no candles at all; heck, there weren’t even any cakes then. Only chores, being 12 and acting 30, dreaming of leaving, and wishing nothing had changed.
But then things changed even more, and I did leave. Eighteen years old, no wiser than a matchstick, with him whom I had only known for a few weeks. It could have been a lot better than it was, but then again, at least it was different; but after 40 years and a family of my own, I realized that nothing had really changed at all.
When my daughter was eleven, she realized I never got a cake and a certain number of candles on it, so she would make me one, every year, until she grew up, and I guess dreamed of leaving too. But she never failed to show up on my birthday, with a store-bought cake, and there would be a forest of candles, each year growing bigger and hotter and more glorified. Until one year, when I turned sixty, she came home and said, “Ha, ha, mom, I didn’t want to burn down the house!” And look, there was one little lonely candle on the cake.
It seemed like only a few years passed by, years that were punctuated by one small candle, one tiny bit of the sun, glowing on top of the cake. Then came the day when she brought me here, to this place where a lot of old people sit and hope and drool and fart, and all of a sudden all I could do was dream of leaving, but I knew then that nothing would ever change.
Now I don’t have a birthday any more – I have a birthmonth, along with all of my ‘family’ that were born in September. We have a huge cake, a humungous cake, big enough for a village, with one candle, one big birthday candle, not even lit. We can’t blow it out – too many loose dentures, maybe, or too much spit.
Last week, I snuck that candle into my pocket after the party, and I took it to my room. I cleaned off the frosting and the cake crumbs, and I placed it on the back of the shelf. When my birthday came, I planned to celebrate the day, even if I had to light that candle while it sat on top of a whole wheat bun. I needed to celebrate my day, and the candle needed to bask in its little glow.
Well, maybe this year it will show up on someone else’s birthmonth cake. Maybe it will get lucky enough to get lit, to release the energy, the brightness, the warmth of the sun, and maybe we’ll get lucky enough to see that flicker, smell that fire, pick the melted wax off the frosting.
Maybe we’ll be lucky enough to feel young again, just for a few moments, just for as long as that candle shines.
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ELLA
At lunch today, I met a new friend. She’d been in here for a few months, and I often saw her sitting by herself, talking to nobody. So I figured it was time to make a first move. Her name was Ella, and she seemed so frail a gust of wind could knock her over. Her hair still kept a hint of the deep auburn it used to be, and her smile held a secret I was dying to explore.
At first, Ella ignored me when I sat by her, but when I burned my mouth on the hot potato and bacon cream soup, she looked up and asked if I was okay. I confirmed that yes, I was, but the soup was damn hot, and that made her laugh. Such a pretty laugh, like a tiny waterfall tumbling over shiny rocks! I wondered why she didn’t use it more often.
I asked her about her family, of course, that being the general form of discussion around here. She told me about her husband, who had died three years before, and how he always told her he would wait for her on the ‘other side’ no matter how long it took. He said he would never tire of waiting for his woman, as she was more precious to him than anything in this world or the next.
Then she went on to tell me about her boys. Blair, the oldest, left when he was twenty-three to marry a young girl he met on the Internet. That amazed me –what an adventure to meet someone you already knew for the first time, someone who had already stolen your heart, even though miles had separated your lives. She said he was doing well, with two kiddies and another on the way, but she didn’t see them very much at all because they lived so far away. Sometimes she thinks the next time he’ll come home it will be too late for her to explain to him how much she loves him. He was her first baby, and from him she learned a lot.
Then along came Keith. He was named for the younger of her two brothers, and even though they never met, they grew up very much alike, fun –loving and full of the devil. He met a girl who brought her a brand new seven-month old grandson, and from the first date Keith was determined to marry both of them, which he did two years ago.
Ben, I found out, was the tall young man who visited her regularly every Sunday, bringing his tiny wife and twin baby girls. Ella kept talking about Ben, about how much like his father he was, how he had loved to travel and seek adventure all over the world, until he settled down and made his own little world with his family. She named him after his father, she said, because she could see in his eyes the same kindness, the same warmth – even when he was only a few days old.
When we realized everyone else had left the dining room, Ella stood up and wandered off, to her room I supposed. I didn’t really want the suggested rest period, so I decided to go outdoors to the entry garden. Nick, the young man who does the lawns and gardens, is a joy to talk to, and I knew he would be working today, trimming the hedges and weeding the garden beds. I loved to hear about him and his family, and I like to think he enjoys his little visits with me, too.
While sitting there in the shade, I saw Ella’s youngest son walk up to the door. He greeted me, and I told him how much I enjoyed his mother’s company at lunch; he was surprised to hear she was actually reminiscing, as her long- term memory was becoming quite ‘patchy.
I told him how she talked about his dad, and how proud he must be to carry his father’s name. He looked puzzled at first, and then laughed quietly.
“That’s what I mean,” he said. “My dad’s name was Kurt, not Ben. It seems every time I see her, her memory gets a little worse.”
He went inside then, to spend some time with his loving mamma - and my gardener friend and I just exchanged a shrug. He went back to his weeding, and I decided I would have my afternoon rest after all, only here in this plastic lawn chair with a lovely young man keeping me company.
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JILLY
The whole place was in an uproar this morning; one of the ‘guests’ was missing. Well, the people in admin call us guests, but I prefer to think of us as inmates – just sounds a bit more adventuresome. Anyway, what we’re called doesn’t matter; one of us did escape this morning.
Jilly hadn’t been here very long, less than a year. Her whole family brought her, a bunch of daughters, sons and grandbabies. I’m surprised they didn’t have a few dogs and a cat with them; maybe they did, actually, hidden amongst the bags and boxes.
Jilly had raised 10 kids by herself after her husband had headed out west with the proverbial secretary. After a life of washing other people’s dishes and scrubbing other people’s toilets, she discovered her own kids had grown up, moved out, and made lives of their own. One day she just walked out of her house, wandered to a nearby park, and sat down on a park bench – for a weekend. When the police officer took her home, he pressed the redial on her phone and talked to her eldest son. Meanwhile, Jilly went to the kitchen and put a cup of water on the electric element of her stove to make him a cup of tea. Her son showed up just as the smoke alarm went off, and for a few minutes, the police officer and her son joined her in her happy state of confusion.
Well, the police officer went back to his beat, the son packed a bag for his mom, and she followed him to his SUV for a ride to his modest home, a two-bedroom rancher on the outskirts of town. After two weeks of sharing a room with her teenage grand-daughter, who was actually a huge breasted tart who wore only black clothes that were at least two sizes too small, Jilly was relieved to find herself in this ‘nice hospital for some tests, you see’ and was looking forward to going back home with a big bottle of pills that would make her better.
When we missed her at breakfast, one of the aides, Jenny, went to her room, and found it empty. A search began, all the washrooms and nooks and crannies on our floor, then in the upper and lower levels. Knowing her penchant for park benches, a few of the attendants rushed around the perimeter, checking the grounds, to no avail. So the family was called in, the police were called in, and all of us just hovered around generally getting in the way, offering advice on where to look, and suggesting maybe she left because the cafeteria food was pretty awful lately.
She had been missed for almost two hours, but no one knew for sure how long she had actually been gone. The last time she was seen had been after lights out the night before, at eleven o’clock. She was caught leaving the kitchen with a few packs of saltines and some cheese slices, and the aide had escorted her back to her room. Sometime between then and now, she had slipped away, probably still in her nightclothes and slippers, and no one had any idea of where she might have gone.
I suddenly came to realize that this was serious, and the best thing we could do was get out of the way and let the authorities do their job. I bribed my fellow inmates back to the common room with the promise of Jerry Springer and the advent of the eleven o’clock snack trolley, and then I decided to get some fresh air. I was actually a bit surprised when I was allowed to open the main entrance door and go outdoors – after all, one of us had just flown the coop, so to speak.
I was even more surprised when I saw Jilly walking up the path towards me. With an overcoat thrown over her jammies, and a fuzzy knitted hat drawn over her ears, she looked a bit like a homeless person, which I guess she was, really, just as we all are. In each hand, she held a plastic grocery bag, and each one was overflowing with empty bottles and cans - recyclable bottles and cans.
She looked at me, and smiled. “Well,” she said, “now I can buy milk for the baby. Is she still asleep?”
“I think so,” I said, and taking one of the bags, I took her free hand in mine. “Let’s go inside, there are some people here who are waiting to see you.”
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