The Oppenheimer Report - 9/2/13

Syd on left with his family

HAPPY LABOUR DAY!!

 

Here in the Veteran’s wing of Sunnybrook the inmates have it pretty good. I’ve been inside a few long term care facilities/ retirement homes/ nursing homes over the past ten years, and from my cursory observations, this one is near the top of the heap. What I like about this veteran’s facility is that there is always something going on to keep the residents occupied. Bingo is a big draw in Warrior’s Hall, the main assembly room for the resident veterans, and several times a week there is a full house for Bingo. One can always tell when another Bingo session is imminent, because the Bingo board and table come out, and the wheelchairs begin to assemble. The stakes are not particularly high – my mother-in-law won two bucks the other day – but that doesn’t seem to matter. I think the aids and companions get more excited about it than the codgers do. There is other entertainment as well. The other day, I watched a bit of a martial arts demonstration, there are old movies, storytelling sessions, and a lot of musical performances.

The first few “concerts” I sat through ranged from really bad to atrocious. I imagine some musicians volunteer their services, which is nice I suppose, but when I can honestly say I could do better, then those performances might be better left unheard. I found myself wondering what goes through the minds of some of those “C List” performers as they gaze out at the sparsely populated audience of wheelchair-bound listeners, half who are asleep, or slumped over in their wheelchairs unresponsive. Do they get discouraged when half of the audience wheels away before the gig is done? Do they think to themselves: “I’m only doing this until I get my big break?” Clearly, this is the foul underbelly of showbiz . The other day, as I was dropping Shauna and her mom off at the door, Shauna heard some music coming out of the hall and told me it sounded pretty good. Shauna is an excellent judge of music, so I parked the car and went in to hear half a set of a really good big band performance. I am quite sure those guys were getting paid. The thing that struck me funny about that gig was that their closing tune was My Way, which seemed a little grim for that crowd.

I suppose what is best about these gatherings is just that; they are social gatherings. However dysfunctional, demented, or damaged that aged population of attendees might be, they are in fact a little community, and in my opinion, any social life is better than none. For some reason, it reminds me of my boarding school days, and while that comparison may seem a little far-fetched, it’s really not. At my boarding school, there was a tight knit little community of sometimes dysfunctional inmates, who had limited freedom, who ate in a community dining room, and who attended many of the same events together – we all enjoyed our bus trips away from the school, as I am sure the elder veterans enjoy getting away from their facility – and we all tolerated each other to a greater or lesser degree. While the elder veterans suffer from varying degrees of senility, by comparison, some of my high school classmates evened out the playing field with their drug abuse (present company included). Some of us got along better than others, but we lived together, different as we were, with the same low base line of respect that is required of any community. The other day I walked in to the community dining room on the floor where my father-in-law now resides, to nuke my dinner, and one of the several women I call “the screamers” was in there, along with some other wheelchair-bound elders. These women made shrill, disturbing, blood-curdling horror film screams. And they scream a lot. As I was putting my congealed Mexican take-out from the supermarket into the microwave, she sucker punched me with a chandelier-shattering “GET OUT OF HEEEEEERE!!!” and it freaked me right out. I was so surprised I practically flung my fajita and rice at the wheelchair-bound gentleman closest to me. He just looked at me with a half-smile and shrugged, as if to say “whattyagonnado?” The people on that floor are so accustomed to her that they don’t even blink an eye. The nurses know she is not violent, which seems to be their benchmark for acceptable behavior. There is I think a tacit tolerance of dysfunction in any community. One of my girlfriends in college had gone to an experimental learning boarding school in Vermont for her high school years, and I’ll never forget one story she told me. All the students had daily chores, and one guy, we’ll call him Pete (not his name), was in charge of milking the cow. Early one morning, one of Pete’s classmates walked in on Pete as he was “having his way” with Elsie, and within an hour the whole school knew about it. The bizarre part about it: Pete lived down his scandalous behavior, and remained on campus. His nickname became “Pete the Cow-F-cker” for the rest of his high school career. Can you imagine living that down?! You have to have lived in a boarding school to know that infamy and scandal are embraced with the same kind of bizarre acceptance that your family accepts weird Uncle Bill at Thanksgiving dinner, the guy who has a collection of miniature medieval torture devices, and has an entire set of living room furniture upholstered in squirrel pelts.

 

You can pick your friends, but you can’t pick your family. Sometimes you can’t even pick the people with whom you reside.  

 

                                             -Written by Jamie Oppenheimer c2013 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED