Service at Home

The beginning of the this week saw me and my ENGR 131 team frantically trying to get our project done so we could have an actual Thanksgiving break. Thus, I didn't make it to the Veterans' Home on Monday. (I let them know, so it's all ok.) Since I cannot just regurgitate what happened at the Home, I'm forced here to take a little different of a view on service. Specifically, a more broad and more organic view--service in the home.

This week was (as you all know) Thanksgiving. My mother's side of the family consists of some 15 or 16 people and usually comes to our house for 2 or 3 days to celebrate Thanksgiving. My mother is more than a little particular about keeping our house clean, and so the first several hours of my break were spent preparing the house for our guests. Seeing as how I am a boy and a teen-aged boy at that, I don't much like cleaning.

Throughout the four days between then and now, I've helped make, serve, and clean up meals. I've re-cleaned parts of the house for new, incoming parts of the family, and done other little things to help. But not till now when I sit down and think back did I realize how much I've served others through all those little things. Serving family should be fairly natural and for me it is. (My mom tells me if I need to do something). But shouldn't there be something reciprocal about this kind of service too?

What do we get back from serving our family? I know I got some great games and some great meal out of it, but what else? I think that love and a place to belong are some of the most important things that family can give us, and that all starts with serving one another. Service is more common and more important than I'd thought before. 

A Feast for the Veterans

This week has been crazy! You all probably don’t care about how buisy I’ve been, so I’ll get right to my service related stuff. Then again, you probably don’t care about that either, but that’s what I’m supposed to talk about, so you’ll have to survive.

This week at the Veterans’ Home was rather a special one. In recognition of their service to our country, Golden Chorale donates a meal for the entire Veterans’ Home once a year. They used to have all the residents come to the Chorale, but you can certainly imaging the logistical nightmare of taking 350 elderly people anywhere. Now, the food comes to the residents. Mostly.

This whole event was actually rather a surprise to me. I went up to the Alzheimer’s Unit like I usually do when I get there, and the one nurse in sight told me that all the residents from the unit were downstairs for lunch. After a few minutes, I found them. They weren’t in the dining court though, they were in the auditorium (a large, round room that gets used for everything imaginable).  In fact, I say that somewhere around 250 of the residents had made their way down or been brought down and were now sitting at the tables that had been set up. I quickly found out that everyone was waiting on the food to get there and it was a little late.

Soon the food did arrive though, and we served all those residents fried chicken, beef pot roast with veggies, mashed potatoes, macaroni salad, and green beans with banana pudding for desert. It turns out that old people cannot eat lettuce salad, but they can eat breaded, fried chicken with all the bones in… beats me. Oh, and it also turns out that they really like fried chick and banana pudding. 

For Love of Country and Sweethearts

I realized Monday that I’d totally forgotten to post on my blog for the week. I guess that was ok though, because my day at the Halloween party was pretty boring (except for a great conversation with a WW II vet who had been on an LST (Landing Ship, Tank) for 11 invasion in the Pacific Theater.)

Monday of this week, I took Charles from the Alzheimer’s Unit down to the Mitchel dining court for lunch. The Alzheimer’s unit is on the second floor of MacCarther and the residents are never allowed to leave that floor unless they are escorted by someone. Charles loves to get out just to see the world, but he especially loves going to the Mitchel dining court because that is where his wife eats lunch, at least that is what he told me. He hears an understands very well, but he speaks very softly. Try talking quietly, without moving you tongue or bottom jaw. Now you know what he sounds like.

Over lunch he told me a lot of things. How he’d been an infantry man and fought in World War II. His large, cowboy-esque hat displayed two patches. One patch indicated that he had served in the Pacific campaign meaning that this man had fought some of the toughest battles of this century in the jungles of tiny, coral islands. The other patch told that he had earned the Bronze Star for Heroism. This is the fourth highest combat award of the US Armed Forces. That puts it just above the Purple Heart!

Charles also told me repeatedly how he wanted to move back into the big rooms in Pyle because there he and his wife could live together in one big room, one big bedroom. I couldn’t believe how insistent this old gentleman was, but after being married for 49 years, I guess you’re pretty committed. Unfortunately we didn’t see his wife and he’ll not ever move back to Pyle, but he still had a smile on his face when I dropped him back off on Mitchel 2 and headed to crafts.