BINGO and Old People

I’ve played bingo before, but it’s been a while. I was with a bunch of old people the last time I played bingo. We were visiting an old lady we knew and visited at least weekly. She happened to be playing bingo one afternoon and they let me join in. I was about ten years old and I won!!! I chose a stuffed, white unicorn off the prize cart and decided that I liked bingo a lot. In the intervening eight years, I’d never played bingo.

Today, I played bingo again. There is a bingo at the Veterans’ Home every Sunday afternoon and usually one on holidays too.  Today happens to be a miniscule, but government recognized, holiday; I think it’s Columbus Day or something like that. Anyway, most of the staff have the day off and so they have a bingo because many of the residents will attend and enjoy it, but it doesn’t take many staff members to put one on.

I arrived and had some difficulty figuring out where to be and such, but was soon put to work going to get the weaker residents and pushing them down to the auditorium where the bingo would be. Once we were all ready for the bingo, I sat down next to Bruce* who has lost both of his legs and most of the movement in his arms to chronic sickness since arriving at the home over a decade ago.

I was happy to be able to work with Bruce throughout the bingo, but it was genuinely sad to see his lack of ability to control himself. I saw tears in his eyes multiple times because he couldn’t even lift his arm and push over the tab on a bingo card or muster up enough of a voice to tell me what floor of the building he lives on. One of the other volunteers told me that when she started there over a decade ago, his sons used to come take him for walks and to go fishing in the pond. Now he can’t even play bingo by himself. May you find grace and peace, sir.

*Please note that names have been deliberately changed to comply with HIPPA requirements.

Crafts, Hobbies, and Cats (108)

If you know me very well, or pretty much at all, you know I’m not very much of an artsy fartsy kind of a guy. In fact, I think it would be a stretch to say I’ve made anything pretty or cute this year, and the year is 85% gone. The fact I made 10 out of 12 months into a statistic, almost subconsciously is perhaps more revealing than anything else I could say.  All this to say, I’ll be going in a couple days to do my third Monday afternoon in the Crafts and Hobbies room at IVH.

The people who visit me seem to be a fairly religious group. Charlie, for example, has made dozens, perhaps a hundred false floral bouquets. He loves what he does and hoped they’d sell well at the sale they have at the annual state wide VFW reunion. That sale was today, so I’m sure I’ll hear how it went on Monday. The reason it’s important that their crafts sell well is because that is how the Crafts and Hobbies department justifies its extra programing costs, they sell the crafts made. 

One of the residents’ favorite parts of Crafts and Hobbies (besides Charlie and his flowers and Harold and his paintable clay figurines) are the cats. Rascal and Lucy keep everyone entertained.  Rascal is a slightly scrawny, male cat who loves attention. Rascal also loves the pillows some of the residents have on their wheel chairs. If one of them sits in a regular chair to work, he’s sure to crash out on their wheel chair. That is, he’ll take a nap there if he’s not too busy laying on my physics or chemistry book I’m trying to read between helping residents. Lucy is a little more timid and refined. She doesn’t like walkers, carts, or wheel chairs. She doesn’t even like being walked up to very much. But if she’s on a table, she’s happy to let you pet her, a lot.

If you couldn’t tell, I’m really enjoying it. It’s so peaceful and nice in that little, colorful room with the big windows.

Making New Friends: IVH and the Alzheimer Unit (108)

I’ve mostly made it through another week of school. It’s trying to kill me, but hasn’t succeeded just yet. My chemistry exam Monday and calculus one on Tuesday may though.

I spent my last 3+ hours reading the Indiana Veterans’ Home (IVH) volunteer information. I am tired of reading it, but hey, I’m done now and I learned quite a lot about the Home.

Basically, they take care of about 300 people. About 250 of those people are Hoosier men who have served in the military during time of war and the 30-50 women are primarily spouses of men in the home or widows of veterans with a few female veterans mixed in.  IVH is a large and State run institution, so it naturally has many inefficiencies, but it is readily apparent that they truly care for the residents and want what is best for them.

One other cool thing about the Veterans’ Home (especially applicable to me) is the way they use volunteers. They really work to put volunteers to work in a way that will use their skills, time, and motivation to bless and help care for the veterans. They do not ask you to do silly things or tell you there is nothing you can do. They encourage volunteers to work in dozens of roles all over the home, helping residents in every way from helping them get their meal trays to visiting with them to wheeling them all over creation to flower and garden work to who knows what else.

When I was there Thursday for orientation, we went on an extended and detailed walking tour of the campus. Carolyn (the Volunteer Coordinator) took us up to the Alzheimer unit because it was getting late (past 8 pm) and that’s the only place you’re sure to find people up. About eight very awake residents were sitting on couches and in various types of wheelchairs having ice-cream and sherbet. We got to spend about 10 minutes talking to them. Despite a few very sad comments from patients about wanting to go home and such impossible things, I had a blast with the residents and now I think I may do my service at least in part there in the Alzheimer unit. I never would have thought of doing that before.

Serving Those Who Served (108)

Over the summer between my junior and senior years of high school I completed the largest voluntary project of my life. By voluntary I mean two things; both that I chose to do it under no sort of requirement and that the point of the entire project was to volunteer and involve others in volunteering.

The project was in fulfillment of one of the requirements for my Eagle Scout rank. The requirement says “While a Life Scout, plan, develop, and give leadership to others in a service project helpful to any religious institution, any school, or your community.” Simple enough, right? All I have to do is to get a few people to do something nice and someone else to sign my book.  Not quite. I am a member of Boy Scout Troop 307 and we are over-achievers. One of our Scouts built a 200 foot board-walk, another got donations and built shelves to stock an entire new food pantry, and his brother did the same for the corresponding clothing closet. As you can see, I had a rather high bar set for me.

I asked some people for suggestions and ultimately came to the conclusion that I would like to do something for the Indiana Veterans Home. They are good and friendly people with an obviously good mission. They provide retirement community and nursing home type care for veterans who have seen active service and their spouses. I personally had benefitted from their benevolence because they have allowed the homeschool soccer team I play on to use a large field of theirs for soccer practices and games for some five or six years now.

Over the hundreds of times that I had come there for soccer practices and games I had noticed that the massive military graveyard adjacent to the Veterans Home receives relatively little care. It is not overgrown, but the stones are discolored and many were slanted. Because the Veterans Home’s budget is perpetually tight they do not spend any more time or money on the graveyard than is necessary to keep it decent. Therefore, I proposed to them that I might be able to serve them and honor the deceased veterans by cleaning the stones in the graveyard. There is a rather long story about what happened in the middle, but in the end, I was able to straighten the stones instead. I got many other individuals I knew - and a number I didn’t - to help me and we wound up putting in about 350 volunteer hours and straightening nearly a thousand stones.

When I was informed that I would need to spend time volunteering somewhere for English 108, the first place that popped into my mind was the Indiana Veterans Home. They have literally hundreds of volunteers that put in thousands of hours each year. Volunteers are such a vital part of their operation that I honestly think they would have difficulty staying open without volunteers.

I am very excited to get to work with Carolyn Johnson and all my friends at the Veterans Home again. But it makes me even more excited that a number of my class mates will be joining me there too, as the Veterans Home’s motto says, Serve Those Who Served. 

Purdue>or=Impending Doom

The estimable professors of Purdue University have now had one full week to attempt to kill me, and every other student on the campus. However, we have all survived (I believe).

I suddenly realized that it would not be surprising if one of my fellow 40,000 college students had managed to kill themselves this week, so I checked. To the best of my knowledge, it appears that none did at Purdue.

However, one student did fall 25 feet to his death from a building at Florida University this week. I do not believe that suicide is suspected, but I might jump too if I attended a school called F U. I mean, most schools will screw you over by charging you both arms and both legs, but not many will come out in the open like that and tell you.

I would say that the possibility of someone dying is probably a couple of orders of magnitude higher right now (approaching midnight, the first Friday of the school year) then they ever are in the labs and shops on campus. This leads to an interesting point: If the University is so worried about safety, then why do they spend so much time on teaching us how to be safe in a lab (where no one has been hurt, or had fun in years) and so little time teaching all these dumb kids how to make responsible decisions about drinking, drugs, and sex (all far more likely to kill you than lab).

You may have noticed that this is my first post. Big woop. I’ve been contemplating the idea of having a sarcastic vent to help me get through college and since I am required to make blog posts for my Engl 108 (composition class) I thought now would be the perfect time. So, here it is.

Insincerely your cynical collegiate commentator,

Luke A. Mishler

P.S. I really hope my instructor doesn’t hate me for having to wade through all my other blog posts to find the class related ones. Oh well, I’ll try to identify them somehow.