I teach writing and printmaking classes at senior homes in Los Angeles. Over the years, I’ve kept a journal of the memorable things I’ve seen and heard. Once, while in the men’s room, an octogenarian approached as I stood over a urinal. He took off his shirt and pointed to an open sore on his back. He asked, “Does this look infected to you?”
At a home in Woodland Hills, a resident escaped from the memory care unit. Staff and local police searched a two-mile area around the facility. The 78-year-old woman was found in an oak tree, clinging to a thick branch over the 101 Freeway.
A woman in Hollywood was upset the hallway carpets were being replaced. The executive director told the woman she should be happy since the old carpets were stained from residents soiling themselves. The woman had vision problems due to macular degeneration and said she used the dirty carpets as a navigation tool. “I’m four stains from the elevator. Now I’ll never find my room.”
I encountered my 10th grade biology teacher Mr. Wasserman at a senior home in Burbank. He had Alzheimer’s and didn’t remember me. In his teaching days, he responded to dumb questions from students with his own dumb non-sequitur saying, “Why is a nail?” At the senior home I said to him, “Why is a nail, Mr. Wasserman?” He turned to me and said, “Were you one of my students?” I told him my name and he smiled through the rest of class.
A 78-year-old woman in one of my printmaking classes suffered a heart attack. She was rushed to the hospital and fortunately survived. That night, I looked at the block print she was carving. It was an image of a woman surrounded by angels. The text beneath the print read, “Time to go home.”
She was a movie star in the 1970s. When I lived in Laurel Canyon, I used to see her walking her dog on Mulholland Drive. We always waved to each other though we never had a conversation. Now she lived in a senior home and I was her art teacher. I asked her why she no longer lived at home. “I had several falls. Then I got lost one day and forgot where I lived. My daughter made me move here. She took over my house and now I’m living in Hotel California.”
“What do you mean,” I asked.
“You know, ‘you can check out any time you like but you can never leave.’”
I met a one-armed woman at a senior home in Encino. She said she’d been a ventriloquist in the 70s with her puppet Rudy. She appeared on television shows like Captain Kangaroo and Hobo Kelly. Her career slowed in the 1980s and she left show business. “I put Rudy in a wood box and stored him in the closet. At night I heard him screaming, ‘let me out.’ Then he started threatening me, saying things like, ‘you’ll be sorry,’ or ‘if you don’t let me out, I’ll hurt you.’ I cried every night and told him how sorry I was. But I never let him out.” In 1981, the woman felt pain in her right arm, her puppet arm. She was diagnosed with advanced bone cancer. She had emergency surgery and her arm was removed at the shoulder. She survived, but her performing career ended. “I killed Rudy,” she said. “He tried to kill me.”
I met a 100-year-old black woman with dementia at a Burbank senior home. She was born in Alabama in 1918 and became a cabaret singer. She knew Cab Calloway and Duke Ellington and performed at the Cotton Club in Harlem. Due to her cognitive state, she never spoke and barely moved. One day, I cued Alexa to play Billie Holiday tunes. The woman began rocking in her seat. When the song “Easy Living” came on, she stood up and put her hand in front of her mouth as if holding a microphone. She then began singing, remembering all the lyrics perfectly. When the song ended, she sat back down and resumed her quiet state.
I met a resident named Ray at a senior home in Santa Monica. In his working days he was a bus driver. He’d lost all his teeth but yearned for steak and Johnnie Walker scotch. One day, I came to my class to find the senior home in a flurry. Ray had disappeared. They called police to file a report then went searching for him outside the building. I looked up the location for the nearest steak house. I drove one mile to the restaurant, walked inside and found Ray seated at the bar drinking 12-year old scotch and gumming a Ribeye Steak. I paid his bill then we drove back to the senior home.