Friday, September 05, 2008

The Nursing Home

At the nursing home I met a ninety-six-year-old woman who is still sharp-witted but more or less bound to a wheelchair. Like so many others who live at the facility, she propels herself with her legs, taking little steps and rolling along that way, steering with her hands. I met her by the entrance to the dining room. She was waiting for dinner. “All it is around here is wait,” she said, smiling wanly. “Wait for this, and wait for that. I’m getting tired of waiting.” She could be my guide to the underworld.

The woman is very much alone. She keeps to herself, avoiding conflicts with other residents. She doesn’t watch TV. Her husband died half a century ago. She never had children, never remarried. She always speaks despairingly, but in a cheerful tone and with a smile, so that I can’t be sure of her actual mood. She’s happy to share the story of her life, but she doesn’t speak compulsively. She answers my questions but seems resigned to her abandonment.

For me, she is an island of sense in the vast sea of the place where my father-in-law is also marooned. He is more thoroughly lost, having recently suffered a head injury in the midst of fine health. Before the accident he had jogged daily, practiced yoga, and worked at his office. Although retired from teaching, he was completing a book project. Now his speech is incoherent. In his best moments, he believes that the nursing home is a professional conference facility where, to his frustration, nothing ever goes according to plan. The meetings never quite convene. What discussions there are fizzle out in indecision. Nevertheless he soldiers on. He waits. We visit regularly to interact with him, but that still leaves him mostly alone, unengaged, confused.

Around him, the nurses and attendants pursue their cyclical chores. Although pleasant and competent, they are the machinery of a waiting pen to which many of us are destined. Some residents are able to participate in birthday parties and Bingo. Others sleep in their chairs, move about at a snail’s pace, chatter, babble, or mumble. Shells of their former selves, they suffer from Alzheimer’s, senility, or catastrophic injuries. Among these people, the more alert constantly try to escape and have to be pulled back from the doors periodically.

Nothing had prepared me for this unsettling vision of the future. This ever-expanding realm of modern health care had been unfamiliar to me. I had lived as if the stretch of life between the end of personal independence and physical death – that battered, broken shore – existed on another planet populated by alien life forms. And now I feel helpless in the face of the neglect that characterizes that realm. Long-term care facilities are immensely expensive, which means that the staffs are necessarily small and the care minimal. Even as this system drains away the life savings of middle class parents and grandparents, it does little to care for their minds and emotional lives. I don’t want to call them “the elderly.” I’ve begun to feel that the term is a step in our dehumanization of them, a way of feeling okay about all of this because it doesn’t involve people like us.

The fact is that it takes a village to care for an aging relative, and our villages are extinct. Our extended families are over-extended. As a society, we haven’t faced the healthcare crisis in general, let alone the challenge of caring humanely for an aging population. America long ago turned its back on the truth of death and dying. That is a truth that we’ll all one day live. Can we find a way to guarantee for our loved ones and for ourselves a certain level of dignity and human belonging?

Broadcast by Joe Chaney on September 05, 2008
Community • Family & Friends • Health • Permalink • Printer Friendly

Friday, August 29, 2008

Eat it Over the Sink

Thank goodness – it’s finally juicy-luscious harvest time, when, without apology, even grownups can get down and get messy.  Whether you’ve got a sunset-colored peach exploding nectar down your chin, or thick slices of a homegrown tomato spurting slippery seeds out the sides of your BLT, now is the time for my favorite piece of wisdom: “If it’s messy, eat it over the sink.” It has the ring of grandmotherly truth, but I heard it first from the witty contemporary novelist Tom Robbins.  Let me say it again: “If it’s messy, eat it over the sink.” Think how it reverberates!  I mean, it’s practical advice when you’re slurping watermelon in a shirt you hope to still wear after your snack, but think how it applies to all those Real Life situations that we’d do well to admit can never be mopped up with a napkin. So, why try?

We may know in our hearts that the world is smeary shades of gray – and yet we seem to long for simple clarity.  Isn’t that one of the appeals of the Olympics? On the one hand, there’s the playground-nostalgia for winners and losers – the blunt simplicity of gold, silver and bronze.  But of course we know it’s messier than that – whether it’s Michael Phelps’s hundredth of a second finger-touch win, or the fairy-sized Chinese girls’ gymnasts, or suspicions of doping souring the air—we know better than to think there’s absolute purity in any decision.

And after a week of the Democratic convention, can we think of anything sloppier than electioneering politics?  There’s no use bemoaning the loss of simpler times; from powdered-wigs onward, Americans have always needed hip-waders for this mucky business.  But we’re fools, I’d argue, for wishing our candidates would offer clean, simple solutions for truly sticky problems. Better to embrace the “just eat it over the sink” attitude for issues from reproductive rights to the use of military force that deserve to be explored in all their messy complexity. We’re more likely to find common ground, shared purpose and strength, somewhere in those mingling juices than in cut-and-dried side-taking.  Maybe that’s why Hillary Clinton wore a suit the color of ripe oranges for the speech she hoped would remind Democrats of past struggles that yielded the taste of victory.

Our ancestors knew quite a lot about the goodness that can come from juicy messes, as I was reminded in an heirloom tomato tasting event last week in a South Bend community garden.  Golly, some of those old varieties are ugly as the hind end of a baboon, but the taste – omilord – my eyes were rolling back in my head while juice ran down my arms.  We slurped mottled Green Moldovans with a surprise kick of lime. We savored Japanese Black Trifele tomatoes, compared in one catalogue to a “mahogany-colored Bartlett pear with greenish shoulders”—but get this – they taste of chocolate – no joke!  For a heavenly hour, we rolled the multi-colored tomato flesh on our tongues, trying to name the many notes with the linguistic panache of wine connoisseurs.  We licked the juices off our fingers, laughing as we crooked forward to keep the drips off our clothes.  What sad madness that Americans have come to accept as normal the genetic freak tomatoes piled in grocery store pyramids like dry, red tennis balls.  No mess, it’s true. And no sweetness, no juice, no operatic range of complex flavors.  At the evening’s end, in the jungle of that late-summer garden, we smeared the seeds of our favorites onto strips of paper towels, with their eccentric names penciled on the top, to air-dry and preserve for next summer’s bounty.

What better time of year than these still-sun-rich-but-fading-to-gold harvest days to remind ourselves that what yields the most juice, the most flavor, the most promise, may also require us to get dirty and not mind.  You want politics that reflect our complexity as Americans?  Then be willing to have messy conversations with people who have different taste than you.  Go on – be inspired by the abundance of the harvest. Sure, it’s messy, but there’s room at the sink for all of us.

Broadcast by April Lidinsky on August 29, 2008
Community • Customs & Rituals • Food • Home & Garden • News & Editorial • Sports & Recreation • Permalink • Printer Friendly

Friday, August 22, 2008

Looking at Dinosaurs

Everyone loves dinosaurs.  You show me a four year old, a middle-aged crank, and even an old fogey and the one thing they have in common is a love of dinosaurs.  Now, why?  As explanations go, the best I’ve heard is that dinosaurs are big, scary, and dead.  The dinosaurs at the Field Museum in Chicago are particularly astonishing, and I’ve happily given in to my little boy’s endless fascination with these beasts.  We’ve gone many times this summer to look at Sue, the T-Rex that greets you at the door, and her many cousins.  One of the things I find most endearing about the Field Museum is its absolute, take-no-prisoners approach to the subject of evolution.  Every single item in this vast museum screams it.  Whether I’m looking at some tiny fragment of an immense skeleton or some stuffed bird, you can hear the entire museum saying to you, “this thing existed because of natural selection.  Here in the Field Museum, we deal in the world of science and the ancient paw or eye socket or absolutely bizarre snout you’re looking at right now developed over millions of years because of this thing called evolution, and it is the reason why they look that way and, further, why we now exist in the shape we do.  Now go look at the next thing.” I am reminded here of that great quotation by Henry David Thoreau, who once observed, “Some circumstantial evidence is very strong, as when you find a trout in the milk.” Oh, one more thing about the Field Museum: they have a Corner Bakery with decent coffee.  The whole day is a perfect staycation.

I also saw some dinosaurs the other day, but of a very different sort.  A friend and I went to the RV Hall of Fame in Elkhart—that’s “recreational vehicles” for you neophytes—neatly located at the intersection of Executive Parkway and Reagan Court.  Here I wandered around the historic and brand new RVs that millions of Americans have driven across this great land of ours.  There was a 1916 “telescoping apartment” built onto a Model T that gives new meaning to the phrase sleeping snugly, a super-mod one from the 1960s that had an Etch-a-Sketch on its couch, and a new state of the art RV that had not one but two flat screen tvs and very comfy chairs to watch them in.  Now, I freely confess that I am not one of those Americans who yearns to have one of these babies.  In fact, the idea of living in an oversized tin can while it is stinking hot or freezing cold outside strikes me as positively mad, but to each their own.

Despite their charms, given the price of gas these days, the whole RV thing isn’t doing too well.  Simply driving to the museum one passes dozens of businesses that are tied to the RV industry and I imagine these places are hurting right now.  And these industries employ thousands of people.  To give you but one small example, I have a friend who is a film maker and he was recently laid-off from a company that makes promotional videos for the RV industry.  They aren’t making too many movies these days on the glories of RV’ing, so his services just weren’t needed anymore.  And so here we are in 2008, and our local economy is hitched to an industry that is making something we simply don’t need.  We don’t need more slow-moving behemoths that get 5 miles to the gallon and clog our roads.  We don’t need movable houses that have microwave ovens and granite counter tops in them.  What we need is the exact opposite: we need to be at the forefront of creating green technologies.  We need to be working with Detroit in making an electric car.  We need more businesses like the bank on Edison Road that generates its own electricity by a windmill.  And so we have a choice: with each passing year we can pretend the world around us isn’t changing or we can adapt.  We can act like dim-witted dinosaurs or we can marshal our energies and evolve with the new world that is going to greet our children and grandchildren.  What’s it gonna be?

Broadcast by Jonathan Nashel on August 22, 2008
Customs & Rituals • News & Editorial • Sports & Recreation • Travel • Permalink • Printer Friendly
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A random selection from more than 300 Michiana Chronicles -- refresh the browser to see another set:

Joe Chaney -- Day Hiking for the Michiana Soul / Questions about Terrorism / Dreaming of Jeannie / The Most Important Job / The Real America / Renewal in Our Nation’s Capital / The Blackout of 2003 / Jump Ball at the Hoosier Primary / Sneezes and Oopses / Greetings, Earthlings / Reality Television / More essays by Joe

Louise Collins -- The Scent of the Holidays / I Love A Parade / Anatomical Correctness / Considering South Dakota / Of Minds and Machines / Ice-Carving in St. Joseph / A Trip to the Chocolate Factory / Remembering the Prairies / In Search of the American Cowboy / Spring Makeovers / A is for Alphabet Books / More essays by Louise

April Lidinsky -- Grace on the Journey / Carrying the Sun / The Witching Hour / Measuring Up / Relative Time / The Allure of Youth Culture / Eat it Over the Sink / Microclimates of the Self / In Defense of a Bad Lawn / Digging Dirt / Surviving Kids’ Birthday Parties / More essays by April

Jonathan Nashel -- Why Morphine is Overrated / The Love that Dare Not Speak Its Name / Women’s Football Comes to Michiana / Why Thinking about Movies is a Bad Thing to Do / Stray Gloves / Taking Stock / A Hoosier Returns from New York / Baby, It’s Cold Inside / Eating Out With Job Candidates / Elvis is in the House / On the Joys of Flying / More essays by Jonathan

Jeff Nixa -- Dancing with Trains / A Hospital Epiphany / Daddy Daughter Dance / Humor in the Hospital / Ice Cream Man / Inner City Bike Repair / Black Ice / Gettysburg / Valentine’s Night / Bad Neighborhood / Alley Walks / More essays by Jeff

Ken Smith -- Bad News by Phone / The Golden Compass / Turning Fifty / Studebaker Stories / Doris Day’s Advice for the Long Winter Ahead / A Talent for Happiness / At the Blood Bank / Letters from the War / Biking Around Michiana / Calling to Complain / The Fourth Grade Robotics Team / More essays by Ken

Jeanette Saddler Taylor -- Getting Together / Patrick Henry in the Marching Band / True to Type / Celebrating Magna Charta Day / Chronicling Michiana / More essays by Jeanette