This year has seen a total falling off for me, personally: It has seen my legs shrink beneath me like the tiny appendages of a barnyard chicken; it has seen the cloying for jobs not noble by the standard of cockroaches; it has seen heart palpitations and anxiety and dread; it has seen the consumption of five thousand beers, and the tedium of languid, mediocre conversation. It has seen bad haircuts and rankle and failing. And countless follies untold.
I don’t know if it’s this same list of character traits which has endeared me to the elderly population, convincing them that I’m a really cool dude, but somehow, inexplicably, I have landed a job delivering food to senior citizens five days a week. They can see me coming through the window of the senior center and perk up a notch on my arrival. Eleanor Spizak, a bespectacled wearer of gigantic red Sally Jesse Raphael glasses and colorful headbands, practically jogs to the doorway when I show up, ambling across the way in slow motion, to open the door for me.
“Heyy,” I say to her, “How’s it going?” She seems over it and out-of-commission when I see her today. I ask her if she’s been staying up late again, watching WWE wrestling, but she waves this away. “Oh, no,” she motions with her hand. “Wrestling is on Monday nights.” I rejoin and ask her if she’s got any good plans for the weekend, hoping to stir up the goings-on of this particularly zany-seeming elderly person, but she doesn’t have anything planned. “I don’t feel good,” she tells me. The way she says this, definitively and without pause, I can tell she doesn’t mean she’s experiencing some temporary ailment, but rather that this is an all-spanning ill feeling which does not go.
From what I can deduce, being old in here is comparatively akin to being in college minus the age factor and possibility gamut run. Most of these people just hang out all day and stir up acrimonious debates with the other tenants over the television program being watched. A couple of weeks ago, I witnessed a police officer show by to mediate some building scuffle. And often on my way in or out, I see a mirthful resident wielding an 18-pack of beer for the day. Which seems like a pretty carefree existence, from my vantage point.
But OK: most of these people are not going to live much longer, and the food I am dropping off for them only registers the lowly gustatory reaction which might make you spit. ES’s health does not bode well because she fell and hit her head a number of years ago and she cannot hear you when you talk. She squints when you address her, straining to determine what you have said, and misses out on all of your awesome jokes. And these things have their limitations. But that does not mean you can’t have a totally rad time? Maybe, from a certain perspective, it could amount to an even better time had, because your time is limited.
I meet up with Eleanor on the way out and prod her some more about her clean slate weekend. “There’s always that pub right across the road,” I say, as a last ditch. She waves this away, too, and I can’t help but admit that the place looks every bit the dinge. “I don’t go out,” she tells me, and what with the bad weather and grim surroundings, who would blame her?
