I hope it for myself, as well

Yesterday at work a couple came in to tour the community.  Yosanda and Norvin (seriously, those are their real names) were there quite awhile.  They're moving in after the holidays and they are both our first couple and only the second and third residents to make the decision to move in independently of their children. 

We've had nasty weather here and as they were leaving in order to beat the ice storm home, Yosanda started telling tales on her husband.  It seems Norvin had spent a good portion of the morning trying to thaw out their car even though Yosanda told him "you just wait for the sun to melt it off."  Norvin back-talked, telling his wife it wasn't the sun, it was his tricks and trials that got the doors opened.  And that was when I heard my favorite thing so far in my time there.  Yosanda turns toward us as she walks away, "Oh, this marriage will never last.  We'll be married 71 years in March but this marriage will just never last."  With an amused twinkle in her eye, she caught up with her husband and they walked out to their ice-free car.

My very best friend of 20 years recently got engaged to another good friend of mine.  I hope when they've been married 71 years, they too will have a marriage that will just never last.

Holy Accountability I've Grown Up

It seems like a lot of people spend their first few years after graduating from college mourning the loss of that beery freedom.  You know, the kind where you have no boss, no worries about healthcare coverage and essentially no responsibility beyond cleaning up your own puke and attending the occasional meeting for a group project.  This is definitely not the situation in which I find myself.

In a long, tangled chain of events my junior year of college, I found myself on the outs with my roommates, my friends, what felt like the whole city.  It's a story for another time, but suffice it to say, I was over college way before it ended.  I spent the summer post-college graduation doing next to nothing except going out to eat, having drinks now and again and applying for jobs whenever I could drag my eyes away from the late morning lineup of Touched by an Angel and 7th Heaven.  Don't worry, I want to punch myself in the face for watching those shows, too.

When it rains, it pours and I landed 2 job offers on the same day in early August.  I turned down the one that actually appealed to both my interests and experience because it was part-time.  I accepted a salaried marketing job for a computer software company.  This turned out to be an error in judgment the size of Mt. Everest.  I quit after 2 months.  Not a stellar start to my life post-academia but I still didn't want to return to college. 

I quit after going on several stealthy interviews with a brand new assisted living facility closer to my house.  I got the job but went to working part-time.  Karma?  The hours don't matter.  This job is awesome.  We have gourmet  (or what passes for it in small-town Midwest) for every lunch (for a whole $3) and it always includes dessert.  4 of our 11 residents (we have a census problem, thus my hiring) have dogs or cats and happy Christmas music plays all day.  Yesterday when I left work our residents were baking sugar cookies.  It's a good gig. 

I miss the intellectual stimulus of college.  Luckily, I have people in my life that offer me that without the bummer of papers, presentations and tests.  The past few weekends I've gone to visit friends, returning if even for a night to the college atmosphere.  I miss it for about a second when my former roommates talk about laying around and skipping class (I was a champion class-skipper) and I am quickly snapped back to reality when I hear them talking trash about the 3rd absent roommate for not buying her fair share of toilet paper. 

I may be currently living with my parents but I have no regrets for the growing up I've done.  And no one expects me to buy toilet paper.

Cody

My high school spanish teacher talked a lot about Catholic guilt and the influence it has over people's actions.  I weighed carefully my 5 years of half-hearted Catholic religion experience as a child (which stemmed as far as attending church with my mother but failed to encompass an actual baptism) against my spanish teacher's years living in a convent, doing whatever is included in the steps before donning the habit.  My spanish teacher won out as possibly slightly more informed than my own. 

Mrs. Burgin was describing a characteristic she had seen practiced by friends, family, co-workers and students for years, particularly in our small town Iowa community.  Maybe it ties into the idea of confession.  Maybe Catholics feel compelled to mark down and hold on to each trangression committed.  I know little about religion so I can't say for sure, but I do know that this sense of guilt is hereditary. 

I still cringe with shame when some memories surface.  Like the time I joined in with a group of bullies at day care to depants a younger boy.  On a regular basis.  I couldn't have been more than five years old, but still the hot, acidic bile rises to the back of my throat when I let my thoughts linger long enough on this without bouncing off to something else.  I wasn't a bad kid.  I'm still not a bad person.  And maybe that's what causes my shame.  Because I know better.  Because the worst thing in my mind, the thing that causes me to be physically ill just to observe, is when people tear each other down, pick, poke and dig at differences no more their fault than my inherited Catholic guilt or fat feet.  I don't know why I did it.

And so I routinely detour my thoughts when I think about one particular boy I knew the majority of my formative years.  Cody was a kind kid with glasses and a good degree of that pre-adolescent chub most of us were unlucky enough to experience.  Due to the school's insistence on making us live our school days in alphabetical order, Cody and I were often side by side in seating arrangements, locker assignments and anything else our teachers could think to line up, A-Z.  Fourth grade was a particularly hard year for our co-existence.   

I made this boy cry.  I don't know what compelled me other than sheep mentality.  Our desks were side by side, facing a girlfriend of mine--a bad influence through the years for sure--and another boy.  Mandy and I were constantly on Cody's case in one way or another.  Everything was harmless in the sense that we never physically hurt him.  Because it was the other boy we pinched until he cried and his face turned red.  There's that bile again.  I honestly don't even remember how we harassed Cody.  I do remember what Cody said to me the day I returned from a few days out of school after my grandma died. 

We were sitting at the lunch table.  Cody was an intelligent person and I never minded sitting next to him at lunch, he had interesting things to talk about in a way that others in our class lacked.  A favorite topic was octupuses and squid.  I've  mentioned I'm sarcastic but I haven't mentioned that it's only recently that I have somewhat learned how to keep the bite out of that sarcasm and sometimes temper what I say.  I have no idea what my comment was to him that day at lunch, but Cody turned to me.  "I thought you'd be nicer today because of your grandma."  If he meant to hit me where it hurt-as I had him so many times-he had succeeded. 

I don't know if I was nicer to Cody after that.  I don't remember.  I remember feeling embarassed several years later in high school choir when another one of my girlfriends mocked him behind his back for the jeans that had sagged far enough to reveal his Spongebob boxers.  I remember talking with him, showing him my music for All-State choir auditions in Pre-Calculus.  I remember learning about his Magic cards in Biology.  And I remember the morning in early June when I woke up to a brand new summer and a phone call from a friend.

Cody killed himself in his mother's basement in the early morning hours of June 5th 2002.  We went to the visitation and funeral as a class.  If anyone felt guilty, it showed only in tears that flowed freely on our faces.  After the funeral we went swimming.  Nothing really changed. 

I don't know for sure that anything I did directly caused Cody to make that decision.  He didn't leave a note.  But I can't help but think that my actions, or actions like mine, pushed him a little farther every year.  My guilt and a wish for Cody to somehow know he was a good person, know he is remembered, is what has motivated me to visit his grave more times than I have ever visited the grave of the grandmother whose death didn't leave me any nicer in 4th grade. 

Wheaten terrier: confused body guard

My dog’s favorite method of protection—and no I don’t mean condoms—is to ensure that my death would be fast should I ever come under attack. Marley is always very concerned about my safety. And her own, really. She’s 35 pounds of quiver, shuddering, drooling chicken if it thunders. And god forbid there be fireworks because she will claw.through.the.door. She’s also a little confused as to what actually constitutes a threat. School children walking by her house on the sidewalk? Well they’re probably concealing a 6 inch switch blade in those Dora and Diego backpacks. Skateboards? Definitely a threat to national security. In many ways, Marley is a crochety old woman has lost her tolerance for youth. I should try to get her an apartment at work.

Marley is torn when one of her people tries to threaten me. (Sidenote: is it normal for families to pretend to harm one another just to see how the dog will react?) She loses her shit, has no idea who she is supposed to side with and usually ends up frantically barking, eyes darting back and forth between us, jumping up on each person. She knows there is danger. She has no idea what the fuck to do about it. This usually results in my being half-attacked and half-saved. My hope is that, were there a true attacker she didn’t know in the mix, she would be resolutely on my side and something would click in her brain. Let’s hope this theory is never tested.

But really, this is all to say that I have an ill-mannered dog. And she’s probably not a genius.

Hopefully I've got like 1,490 pieces still to go

There is a resident at work who refers to my laptop as my "Jewish typewriter" and in the last few days, as he's grown more easily confused, tells us his "clutch is slipping."  He's in his 80s and for the majority of his life he owned and operated a welding shop here in town.  He doesn't remember my name--or the names of any of the other staff for that matter--he doesn't always remember what day it is, but he remembers being in love.

We were walking down the hall towards his apartment one day and we stopped to take a rest.  His lungs have a hard time keeping up.  Out of nowhere, Dick looks at me, breathing heavily.  "I was married to the love my life for 45 years before she died." Here he pauses, this time it's grief that hasn't dulled in nearly thirty years making it hard for him to breathe.  "It took me 12 years to get over that."  Dick was married to his second wife for many more years before he lost her, too.  To find a man in assisted living who has outlived one wife is rare enough.  Two makes my heart break.  Dick lost both of his loves to breast cancer and was married, mourning and married again almost 4 times the number of years I've been alive. 

Every day one of our residents says something that puts the little pieces of life more neatly into the bigger picture for me.