“Children learn more from what is CAUGHT than what is TAUGHT”, or so they say. Teach your children constantly with your actions, not words. I’ve kept that in mind as I’ve raised my kids, on the lookout for opportunities as they arise. Surprisingly, I’ve gotten more out of it than the kids...
It’s another Sunday afternoon at the nursing home. My friend Dee is waiting for me at the entrance, bouncing her birdlike frame from foot to foot, impatient for the cigarettes I promised to bring. Newport 100s, as always. I got you a present, she says, handing me a trash bag as I slip her the contraband cigarettes. Inside is cafeteria booty: two sodas, a Nutrigrain bar and a plastic fruit cup. Her wizened, nearly toothless face looks at me with expectation. Will you use it? I hope you can use it.
In nearly 18 years of hanging around the nursing home, Allison and I have had a few opportunities to practice that first line of the serenity prayer: “God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change”. But ugh, how difficult sometimes! I told you a few months ago about the day my nursing home friend Dan disappeared, and nobody would even tell me if he was dead or alive...
Christmas is a time when many of us get together with family and celebrate. However, around this time of year we also experience some sadness, as we think about past Christmas’s with family and friends who are no longer with us. Today I am missing my good friend Bill Farris, who died last December.
Thursday, October 1st, 2015. I'm angry. I probably shouldn't write angry. I've lost my friend Dan. I don't know where he is. I don't even have a picture of Dan, or I'd put him on a milk carton. I first met Dan over 10 years ago, when he used to drive his giant 1970s car (more like a boat) over to the nursing home to visit his wife Nellie. He used to visit her daily, and would always stop to chat with me in the halls, and we became good friends.
One of my mom’s best stories tells of a time when she was in Grad School at the University of Florida. She lived in an apartment with two roommates who had nothing in common. One of them had made some pepper steak with noodles and left it in the refrigerator, intending to eat it the next day. But by the next day, all the pieces of pepper steak had vanished, and nothing was left but the noodles.
As I sit down to write this, I have just come from another funeral. Steve and I go to a lot of funerals—it sort of comes with the territory of volunteering at a nursing home. However, this particular funeral was not for someone we met through the nursing home, but rather for a former neighbor of ours—who later did spend some time in an assisted living facility. Her name was Else, and she was this tiny, sweet little German lady.
About 10 years ago, an article appeared in The Gainesville Sun focusing on Steve Blay and his work with Friends Across the Ages. A few days later, a lady named Ruth Hazen called. She was a member of another Gainesville area nursing home volunteer group called the Nursing Home Volunteer Auxiliary, and she was wondering if there was some way we could combine our efforts...
There is a resident named Marie that yells every obscenity in the book at me every time she sees me. She even knows my name. Whenever she sees me she starts out, “Steve, get your %^&$#@ @#% and furthermore #$%^#%^ $%^ $% #&$# % ^&$# %^&$@” and every other word cannot be repeated here due to standards of decency. I have no idea what I did to her to deserve that.
Gainesville lost a real treasure last week, a 94 year old man by the name of James Gainey. Mr. Gainey lived in east Gainesville for many many years, in a house across from Lincoln Middle School. He told me he built that house with his bare hands, right down to laying the concrete blocks one on top of the other.
