Tag Archives: Merrill Gardens

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Don’t Call It ‘An Old Folks Home’ (Continued)

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(Continued from April 3rd post)

by Bob Sparrow

    The show begins.  The entertainment was a husband-wife team in their 50s who had a Captain and Tennille sort of vibe, except he played the keyboard more like a deckhand than a captain and she, pardon the mixed metaphor, couldn’t carry Toni Tennille’s jock strap in a wet paper bag.  I have no idea what that means.  Their repertoire included mostly Snoop Dog and Lady Gaga stuff.  Oops, sorry, that was the music I had running through my iPod during their performance.  Just kidding, I don’t have any Snoop Dog.  Actually they weren’t bad, as they succeeded in keeping the audience awake, no small task, and on numerous occasions even had them ‘gumming’ the words to some old familiar songs.

      Several times during the course of their performance, mom would turn to ‘New Jack’ and start talking about various subjects, not in hush tones, but as if she had learned to whisper in a saw mill.  A woman sitting directly behind us, wanted of all things, to listen to the entertainment and not mom’s ‘whisperings’ of sweet nothings into New Jack’s hearing aid. After several room-filling, head-turning ‘shhhhes’, the woman realized that mom was either ignoring her or hard of hearing, or both, so tapped me on the shoulder and nodded over to mom, using the now-familiar, non-verbal, face-contorting, silent language of seniors, that screamed, “Can’t you shut that old stove up?”  I shrugged and tried to give a non-verbal look that said, ‘Welcome to my world.’

      The entertainment was really just the opening act for the main event – the crowning of the Merrill Gardens Valentines King and Queen.  The room quieted as the hostess from ‘god’s waiting room’ came before the group to announce this year’s king and queen.   In a very officious way she explained that the king and queen were voted on by the residents and that the results had been sealed since yesterday noon, probably in a prunes jar.  She paused dramatically and explained that this year’s voting had a little twist – she would explain later.  She announced the names of the king and queen.  The new queen hurried to the front to be crowned and explained that the king was in the restroom at the moment and would be out when he was good and ready.  The hostess then explained that the voting was so close this year that they decided to crown a runner-up king and queen, which was unprecedented.  She then called out, “Jack and Barbara” – New Jack and mom!  I leaned over and congratulated mom and whispered to her that as runner-up queen, should the 1st queen, for whatever reason, be unable to perform her queenly duties, that she would become queen!

      I must admit that soon after I heard my mom’s named announced I had to restrain myself from jumping up and running around the room shrieking, “I’m a Prince, I’m a Prince”. Or would I be a duke?  Whatever, I was inwardly thrilled with this brush with royalty.  My enthusiasm dimmed however as I realized that while my sister would become a royal princess, my older brother would be the first in line of succession and as the middle child, I’d be squeezed out again.  After this realization, to be completely honest, I became secretly happy that my mom was only runner-up and muttered under my breath, “Long live the queen.”

      After the show, mom, New Jack and I retired to mom’s room.  I knew my brother and sister were going to be asking a lot of questions about New Jack, so I needed to get some information out of this guy.  With the help of some light water-boarding and a flood light, the grilling began.  I learned that he was originally from West Virginia, but he seemed to have all his teeth and as far as I could tell did not play the banjo.  He was a dentist for 30 years before moving to San Diego and getting into real estate where he apparently found that he could make more money with his hands in people’s pocket than he could with his hands in their mouths.  He came to Sonoma because his only child, a daughter, lives there.  The daughter has three grown children, the most interesting of which is a son who lives in Taiwan and works for the US government.  New Jack thinks he’s a CIA spy of some kind; I think he’s a ping-pong table salesman.  All and all, at the end of the interrogation, he seemed worthy of my mom’s attention.

      This budding romance is the talk of Merrill Gardens, but will it last?  We don’t know whether to expect a call from ‘New Jack’ asking for our mother’s arthritic hand in marriage or a call from mom saying that the ‘Chicken Lady’ is now saving his seat.  Time will tell.

 Post Script: I have poked some fun at the elderly here, but I poke fun at everyone and I just didn’t want to discriminate.  Merrill Gardens does an excellent job of caring for their residents.

 

 

 

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Don’t Call It An Old Folks Home

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by Bob Sparrow

    Recently our mother moved into what was previously called an ‘old folks home’, but we have come to understand that that term is derogatory, insensitive and . . . well yes, politically incorrect.   So we have created an ever-growing number of euphemisms to cover this concept, but for simplicity reasons we’ll just call it a ‘senior facility’ – sometimes the word ‘living’ is put between ‘senior’ and ‘facility’ I suppose to differentiate it from those ‘non-living senior facilities’.  Our mom’s new facility is called Merrill Gardens and it’s located in the bucolic city of Sonoma – wine country, which often times comes in handy for those visiting our mother.

      It was her 93rd birthday and it was up to either one of my siblings or me to make the trip from Central California, Southern California or Scottsdale, Arizona to Sonoma to celebrate the occasion with her.  My brother had just had a hip replaced, I’m assuming with another hip, so he couldn’t make the trip; my sister’s pancreas was not doing whatever pancreases are supposed to do, so she was out, and thus the familial obligation fell upon me.  Road trip!  The visit would not only provide me an opportunity to see how mom got nearly 55 years of crap from the last house she lived in, into a one-bedroom apartment, but more importantly it would be an chance to meet the new male ‘friend’ in her life that she had been telling us all about for the last several months.  It was my job to ‘grill’ this guy and report back to my siblings regarding his intentions with our mother.  Yes, apparently love has no age limit; love does however have a good sense of irony – mom’s ‘boyfriend’, as she calls him, is named Jack, which, coincidently, was what our father and her husband for 63+ years was named.

      ‘New Jack’, as we have affectionately dubbed him, is 87, which I suppose makes my mother a ‘cougar’ of sorts, but to her credit I’ve not heard her refer to him once as ‘boy toy’.  We’re happy that mom has found someone; our father has been gone for over ten years now and mom was long-overdue as a hen in need of someone to peck.  Those who have a parent in a ‘senior facility’ know that men are at a premium there, so she feels very lucky – I’m not saying she’s getting lucky, I’m just saying she’s feeling lucky – to have latched on to one.

      I met ‘New Jack’ in the lobby of Merrill Gardens as preparations were being made for their big, annual Valentine’s Day concert which included the ceremonial coronation of the ‘Merrill Garden’s Valentines King and Queen’.  We arrived at the showroom (actually just some folding chairs set up in the lobby) early; as mom said it would get fairly crowded rather quickly.  It did indeed become ‘walker room only’ thirty minutes before show time.  Mom and I found three seats in the second to last row; we sat down and mom put her purse on the seat next to her, thus ‘saving’ the seat for ‘New Jack’ who had to go to the restroom . . . again. I suppose in some circumstances we still ‘save seats’, but I thought we stopped that practice after junior high, with the possible exception of calling ‘shotgun’ in high school, thus saving for oneself the most dangerous seat in the car.  After that we just seemed to accept whatever seat we had and whoever sat next to us.  But I’m here to tell you that we return to ‘seat saving’ in our golden years.  The seat next to ‘New Jack’s’ saved seat was also vacant and being saved by the person in the adjacent seat.  As the place was filling up, an elderly woman with a rather grumpy face, that we were to subsequently learn would match her personality, ambled down our row and tried to sit in ‘New Jack’s’ seat.  My mother looked at her purse on the seat and then back to the elderly woman as if to say, “Are you blind, can’t you see my purse on the seat means it’s saved?”  The fact that the elderly woman was indeed vision-impaired seemed not to matter, but watching this interaction, I learned something about getting older, and that is as we tend to rely more on communicating with a look rather than verbally, I assume this has something to do with the loss of hearing that typically accompanies old age.  I digress; the elderly woman looked at mom as if she was a leper and started to sit down in the next seat over, when the woman next to that seat told her it was also being saved.  The elderly ‘seat seeker’ then yelled for all to hear, “That’s ridiculous, they should outlaw seat saving!” and shuffled off in disgust.  Seat savers, don’t be alarmed; while our representatives in Congress have passed sillier legislation, I don’t think the seat saving initiative is getting much traction.

      As we sat waiting for the show to begin, my mother gave me a running commentary on several of the passers-by.  There was ‘Dog Lady’, thus labeled by my mother, not so much because she owned a dog, but because she looked like her dog, probably just in my mother’s eyes, as ‘Dog Lady’ had her eye on New Jack before “the new floozy (that’s mom) moved in’.  Then there’s the ‘Chicken Lady’; no, not because she has or looks like a chicken, but because the wing in which she lives overlooks a chicken farm.  Nothing too unusual there, except ‘Chicken Lady’ also had her eye on Jack (remember, I said men were a hot commodity in these facilities) and had a geographical advantage in that Jack lived in the same ‘chicken wing’.  And trust me on this, proximity to target becomes more and more critical the less ambulatory one gets.

     Finally the show begins . . .

Continued next post