Another Day in the Country
Summer learning
© Another Day in the Country
The summer after I graduated from high school back in 1955, I got a job at a rest home for the elderly. I had been around so few elderly people that I hadn’t a clue as to what I would be up against.
My own grandparents lived in Kansas. I grew up in Colorado. It seemed a world away. They might have been a thousand miles away instead of a few hundred. The distance was not one we traveled often. Mostly, we would go back for funerals, sometimes for graduations or weddings.
One of my jobs at this small facility was to sit at the supper table and eat with those who were mobile.
I’d spent the last several years in a boarding academy, eating with teenagers, and when I was home it was just my parents and preschool sister at the table. This was a very different atmosphere and a completely foreign menu.
Liver was on the menu the night I arrived, as I recall. While I’d eaten meat growing up, our diet had been mostly vegetarian in the last few years.
I had never eaten liver and onions. I learned later that lots of people don’t like that dish; but oddly, I came to like it. I just couldn’t contemplate its origin story while I sat at the table.
Part of my job at the evening meal was to get residents something if they needed it — salt, an extra napkin, more water. I also was to be the conversation starter, the listener, and the one who mopped up spills and retrieved silverware or whatever dropped on the floor.
After supper, my real job began.
“Pat, will you take Betty upstairs and help her brush her teeth?” my supervisor suggested.
Relieved to be done with table work, I thought, “This I can do!”
I just had to find her toothpaste, help her put it on the brush, and maybe demonstrate if she was hesitant.
When we got to her room, Betty took my hand and promptly spit her teeth into it.
I’d grown up with grandmothers who had false teeth, so I wasn’t completely in the dark.
My cousins and I used to sit on Grandma Ehrhardt’s lap when we were little and beg her to pop her top denture out at us. When she’d finally make her teeth pop out on her tongue, we’d squeal with laughter, but this occasion, with someone’s dirty dentures on my 17-year-old palm, did not call for squealing or laughter.
Maybe I blinked and drew back a tad to find Betty’s teeth in my hand, but I soldiered on, acting as if I’d done this all the time.
Over the summer, I got good at cleaning dentures, and Betty and I became friends of a sort. I was somewhat like a favorite grandchild.
I’ll never forget her and Reverend Pickett, who under my breath I called P.P. Pickett because he’d sit reading romance novels and forget that he needed to go to the bathroom. When he finally launched himself up, I had to clean up the trail he left behind. This was in the days before Depends.
My grandson just graduated from high school, but instead of getting a job for the summer, he came to Kansas to be with me for a month. His parents then sent him off with a cousin to experience England and France for a couple of weeks before he headed to college.
I had to learn about WhatsApp to get news from him. There always is some new experience awaiting discovery, and I have found myself checking the app over and over for news of their trek.
His parents, along with me and my sister, are on particular threads of information.
“Send pictures,” his mother says.
“Get some sleep,” his father admonishes.
“What have you seen?” I want to know.
“Today we visited Portobello Market, bought sandwiches, and took them to Kensington Park for lunch,” he writes. “We visited the National Portrait Gallery and had fish and chips for dinner.”
There are photographs of crowded streets, big buildings, fancy facades. Some of them we recognize. Some are new to us.
What do I have to offer in exchange? What am I doing by comparison?
I sent him a picture of the latest building art in downtown Salina and some photos of grandly refurbished old cars on parade.
Yesterday, I included a short video clip of my ducks splashing around in their little pond.
“This video clip taken at Wickshire Park in Ramona,” I joked, as if this were a grand estate.
He wrote back as if he were reading a guidebook: “Attractions: Idyllic ducks, well-tended flowers, lawn setting, and country atmosphere. Highly recommended.”
What a grand learning curve this young man has embarked upon. But then again, aren’t we all on a grand curve of our own, while spending another day in the country?