Barry Friedman - The Old Folks At Home: Warehouse Them or Leave Them on the Ice Floe

  Old Folks at Home:

  Warehouse Them Or Leave Them On The Ice Floe

  Old Folks at Home:

  Warehouse Them Or Leave Them On The Ice Floe

  Copyright © 2010 by Barry Friedman

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews,

  ISBN 978-0-557-52181-4

  Also by Barry Friedman

  Novels

  Dead End

  Assignment: Bosnia

  Prescription for Death

  The Shroud

  Sleeper

  Hyde

  Max

  Fracture

  Non-Fiction

  The Short Life of a Valiant Ship

  That’s Life: It’s Sexually Transmitted and Terminal

  Acknowledgment

  I am indebted to Carol Bargar who suggested a vital portion of the plot. In addition, her critical review of the novel was of enormous help. Then again, she is indebted to me since I paid her education tuition. What kind of father would I be if I didn’t?

  Dedication

  I dedicate this novel to the talented, eccentric, neurotic and loveable people with whom I live.

  Also, to the woman who has endured me for so many years, my first (and only) wife, Sue

  Disclaimer

  This is a work of fiction. The names are fictitious and the places are fictitious. Any resemblance to places or people, living, dead or otherwise is a figment of your imagination. If you think there is a similarity between any part of this work and any one or any place, get in line and take it up with my battery of lawyers. Enjoy this fictional work of fiction. Can I make it any plainer?

  Asiak walks across the sea ice to drown herself in the open water. At the edge, a piece of ice breaks free under her weight and she floats along on this small ice floe briefly before drowning herself. It’s possible that a conflation of these two episodes led to the popular idea of old people being set adrift on ice floes.

  —Top of the World (1950) by Hans Ruesch.

  None of this is especially comforting when your kids start making noise about putting you in the Shady Rest and how much better it would be than an ice floe. I can only suggest pointing out the economic realities: Even the Eskimos didn’t do away with elders who were still providing free room and board.

  —The Staff of The Straight Dope Science Advisory Board

  Table of Contents

  Acknowledgment v

  Dedication. vi

  Chapter One. 1

  Chapter Two. 8

  Chapter Three. 12

  Chapter Four 13

  Chapter Five. 16

  Chapter Six. 19

  Chapter Seven. 23

  Chapter Eight 28

  Chapter Nine. 30

  Chapter Ten. 34

  Chapter Eleven. 36

  Chapter Twelve. 41

  Chapter Thirteen. 45

  Chapter Fourteen. 49

  Chapter Fifteen. 53

  Chapter Sixteen. 59

  Chapter Seventeen. 64

  Chapter Eighteen. 68

  Chapter Nineteen. 72

  Chapter Twenty. 77

  Chapter Twenty-One. 81

  Chapter Twenty-Two. 84

  Chapter Twenty-Three. 86

  Chapter Twenty-Four 90

  Chapter Twenty-Five. 93

  Chapter Twenty-Six. 102

  Chapter Twenty-Seven. 104

  Chapter Twenty-Eight 106

  Chapter Twenty-Nine. 111

  Chapter Thirty. 115

  Chapter Thirty-One. 120

  Chapter Thirty-Two. 125

  Chapter Thirty-Three. 128

  Chapter Thirty-Four 132

  Chapter Thirty-Five. 134

  About the Author 136

  Chapter One

  “This is an old folks home?” I said.

  Harriet shook her head and clucked. She has been shaking her head and clucking at me for the fifty-eight years of our marriage. “Retirement home, Henry.”

  She gazed up at the 20-story high rise while I drove the car through a circular drive to the porte co-chere where a young man in a blue-shirted uniform hurried from the podium where he’d been standing, and opened the passenger side door. The pin on his shirt read “Phillip, Valet.”

  I’m always wary of parking valets. They gun your car, the tires screeching as they careen off to the place where they back it in at 75 miles-an-hour, missing a back wall by a millimeter.

  Another valet emerged, opened the door on my side and handed me a ticket. Big smile. “Welcome to Restful Bowers. When you’re ready to leave, call down and we’ll have your car ready.”

  We were here to look over the place Harriet had found in a full page newspaper ad. The enticing spread showed a group of handsome, grinning silver-haired men and women, obviously models, sitting on deck chairs sipping drinks. “A place to spend your golden years in luxury and dignity!” Translation: Buy in and we’ll house you, feed you, and change your Depend® diapers until they box you.

  Golden years. Ha!

  I was eighty-one and Harriet was seventy-seven. Our “golden years” were a tarnished green. In the past ten years, several of my organs been surgically removed for a variety of reasons, and it now took me fifteen minutes to get out of bed each morning with some guy driving a harpoon into my lower back. I could read War and Peace while I stood at the toilet bowl each morning waiting for my diuretic to kick in.

  Harriet was healthy but had gotten to the point where she was losing her glasses every other day, and twice that I can recall, had put her car keys in the refrigerator.

  Golden years my ass.

  A seventy-ish man in plaid shorts, a bag of golf clubs slung over his shoulder, came through the ornate front door handing the golf bag to a valet who stashed it in the trunk of a Cadillac parked partway through the circular drive. The man waved at the valet saying “Thank you, Sam.” He then drove off.

  The guy was obviously a shill the management trotted out when the marketing department was expecting a prospective inmate/resident.

  I stood staring at the building. This was an old folks—pardon me— retirement home? Where was the wrap-around porch with a gaggle of toothless crocks, rocking in creaky chairs, humming tunelessly to themselves? Where were the hovering nurses holding drinking straws to the mouths of the wrinkled fossils? Where were the canes and walkers and wheelchairs parked against the wall? The old men playing checkers?

  Harriet and I entered the lobby where a concierge behind a marbled counter asked us to sign in as Visitors. We told her we had an appointment with Betty, a marketing person.

  “Have a seat,” she said, pointing to a pair of easy chairs on the other side of the lobby. “I’ll tell her you’re here.”

  Ten minutes later, a smiling young woman, probably in her thirties, bounced over to us, hand outstretched.

  “Hi, Mr. and Mrs. Callins. I’m Betty and I’ll be your marketing representative.”

  She was an attractive brunette wearing slacks and a flowered blouse.

  “I’ll give you a tour of our wonderful facilities. I’ve arranged for you to have a delicious lunch when we’re through with our business.”

  She kept up an endless chatter en route to the elevators. Most of her sentences included the words “wonderful” or �
�we’re excited by…” or “you’ll just love.”. Her sales pitch made your average car salesman sound like a killjoy.

  “Coming through!” The shout from behind us had me clinging to the side rail which ran the length of the corridor. A moment later, a woman hunched over the handlebars of a motorized wheelchair whizzed by at eighty miles per hour.

  “Hi Mrs. Parker.” yelled Betty.

  Mrs. Parker was well out of earshot by this time. Of course, “earshot” could have been inches from her ears stuffed with hearing aides.

  “And this is one of our card rooms,” said Betty as we went by a room with four or five card tables. At each table were white-haired or bald men and women, silently squinting over their cards. They could have been mannequins or even corpses in perpetual rigor mortis. Museum statues made more movements.

  Harriet’s eyes bulged in excitement. “Are there many bridge players here?” She wouldn’t miss her Thursday bridge club if she’d had to leave me lying comatose on the floor at home.

  “Practically everybody plays,” said Betty. “Bridge, mahjong, canasta, bingo, lotto, poker. You name it.”

  I gazed around looking for the roulette, crap tables and slot machines.

  We passed a ramp leading to a door. Betty pointed. “That leads into a separate building for Assisted Living and Care Center.”

  “What’s the difference?”

  “The apartments in Assisted Living are for residents who are not really sick, but require help dressing, eating, getting in and out of a wheelchair, and so on. The Care Center is for residents who are wholly or partially bed-ridden. They need nursing care. Many have been hospitalized and returned here to convalesce. When they are well enough, they return to their apartment in the Independent Living section. That’s where you’ll be.”

  “Do the ones in Assisted Living return to their apartments?” I said.

  She shook her head. “No. They’re in Assisted Living permanently. Many are memory-impaired.”

  I said, “If a husband needs to be in Assisted Living. does his wife remain in their apartment in—what did you call it —Independent Living?”

  “No. Even if only one of a couple needs assistance, they move in together.”

  We had reached the bank of elevators bringing a close to the discussion. Two of the three elevators were working. Our guide said, somewhat apologetically, “They’re doing some work on the other elevator.

  A man standing behind us, also waiting, muttered, “Damned elevators. They’re always doing some work on one. I think it’s an empty shaft.”

  Betty smiled ignoring the comment, but kept up her chatter telling us about the fabulous apartments we were about to see.

  The elevator finally came.

  The apartments she showed us were vacant and undergoing renovation. I assumed the previous occupants were en route to their Maker. You don’t leave one these places upright. You have too much invested in it.

  We stepped around paint cans and rolls of carpeting as we toured through the rooms. The freshly painted walls were tastefully decorated with pull cords attached to small red alarms. Betty explained. “If a person falls, he or she just has to pull the cord and someone will come to help.”

  Provided they were conscious and could crawl to the wall.

  It was hard for me to visualize what the rooms would looked like with furniture, but Harriet was busy framing with her hands making comments like, “Our breakfront would go here. Our knickknack cabinet would go there. This corner would be for your desk.” To me it was obvious that most of the furniture in our 2100 square foot condo would be finding a home in the Goodwill or Salvation Army warehouse. We had downsized before, moving from our big house in Decatur. Our kids weren’t interested in the overstuffed furniture and other relics, some of which had arrived on the Pinta. A few years later, we moved again to the condo we now call home, leaving some more furniture and assorted space hogs. Get ready Salvation Army, here we come again.

  We finished our tour of apartments and Betty said, “I’m sure you have questions. Would you like to go to lunch, or would—?”

  Before we had a chance to edge in a word she said, “Did you like the two-bedroom or the three? I’ve got samples so you can pick out the cabinet hardware and the color of carpet.”

  I’ve had car salesmen who pressured me less. “Whoa!” I said. “You are going to tell us about the cost and other minor details involved, aren’t you?”

  She looked at me as though I had asked her to undress.

  “I’ll get the cost sheets.”

  She went to a file cabinet and extracted a sheaf of papers.

  The buy-in cost had me gulping.

  Betty saw my face turn white. She was quick to point out that “The Bowers” was a luxury establishment. “You can probably find something cheaper but it won’t have the amenities we have. Incidentally, there’s no tipping.”

  “How about the valet who took my car?”

  “No tipping. Period.”

  “Gratuities?”

  “That’s the same as tipping.” Betty went on. “Of course residents can show that they value the services they get by voluntarily contributing to an Employee Appreciation Fund.”

  I said, “You mean like a giant tip jar?”

  Betty shook her finger at me. “There’s that ‘T’ word again.”

  This exchange of semantics could have gone on forever, but I got the idea—or did I.

  Betty glanced down at my scuffed shoes. “Luxury such as you’ll find here doesn’t come cheap.”

  I wasn’t looking for cheap, but the price of an apartment was about the same as the GNP of Ethiopia. And that wasn’t the end of it. There was also the monthly fee. I did some mental arithmetic while Harriet was more interested in the samples of hardware and carpeting.

  Before we came to Restful Bowers, we had decided that the time was right to move to a place where we could get care if we needed it. An umbrella. I was reaching the age where my birthday cake candles were setting off sprinklers. Harriet was no longer driving. The last few times she drove, she made so many wrong turns, the lady inside our GPS navigator sobbed, “Recalculating, you dummy.” And that was in our driveway.

  Previously, we had looked at three retirement homes, but the apartment rooms were either matchbox size or they looked out on a blank wall. One place was so isolated there were no stores or other signs of civilization for miles. You’d have thought it housed people with some dreaded contagious disease.

  In the end, we decided on Restful Bowers. Besides, as Betty pointed out in her sales pitch, we could be secure in the knowledge that it was owned and operated by a well-known hotel chain, Motel 7.

  Two weeks after our visit to The Bowers, I phoned our marketing rep, Betty.

  “Great! All you have to do is bring me your bank statement, your citizenship papers, copies of your last five income tax filings and the result of your blood test. We’ll also need reference letters from your minister or rabbi and your fifth grade teacher.”

  “I can understand why you need my financial and moral records,” I said. “But why the blood test?”

  She smiled showing me her tolerance and my stupidity. “We want to make sure you have blood. You’d be surprised at the number of people who try to sneak in here dead. We turn most of them away.”

  Chapter Two

  So we sold our condo and emptied our bank account to pay for the entry fee. We crammed some of our furniture into a two-bedroom apartment with a den.

  Betty greeted us with a thick sheaf of papers to sign. Most had to do with absolving the management from responsibility if anything happened to us because of their mismanagement. I thought that was a contradiction, but we had come this far, so I signed everything she put in front of us. Page after page of small print except places which were highlighted and marked with an “X.” The words “Signature” were half an inch tall. I guess the owners didn’t expect anyone to read the small print, or maybe hoped they didn’t.

  “Lawyers,” sa
id Betty apologetically. “

  I leaned back and massaged my right hand which suffered from writer’s cramp.

  “So now we’re official inmates of Restful Bowers, “

  “Residents. We prefer that term.”

  Semantics.

  We were still unpacking our shipping cases when we had our first visitor: Linda Goodbody the Welcome Lady.

  Linda told us the locations of the activities room, exercise room, library, and dining rooms. There were two. One was for “fine dining” where men were required to wear jackets. The other was more informal. I assumed, you could eat with your fingers and the dress code was more relaxed.