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.

The Renegade Alzheimer (Episode I of Adventures in Arts and Alzheimer’s)

I think I’ve mentioned here before that I intended to spend my extra hour or so a week with members of the Alzheimer’s ward. Well, I made it up there for the first time Monday. It’s an interesting place. Every exit is secure. Even the nurses’ station has gates on it to keep the residents out. Compared to most of the nursing units, the Alzheimer’s unit is pretty nice, but if you consider the fact that these residents are never allowed to leave, the little extra sunshine and decorations seem kind of feeble.

As I mentioned, I successfully made time to get up there last Monday and asked the nurses if anyone might want to go out for a walk or downstairs for lunch in the normal cafeteria. They informed me that there was one gentleman who was about to have lunch but loved going outside so much that he’d probably rather have lunch later. It turns out that she was right. So, he and I took a spin into the sunshiny and brisk day. We were both enjoying ourselves, but it wasn’t long before I was chilled and he was freezing so we returned to the buildings to warm up and get my coat for him.

We ventured out once again the 15 minuets I had left before I need to be in crafts. This time we ventured out a back door. There turned out to be a small step to bus he insisted we should try it. We navigated that and as I turned around I saw three more full sized steps in from of us. Let’s just say that I found out wheel chairs work relatively well on steep grassy slopes… just take it backward.

Join us next time for more Adventures in Arts and Alzheimer’s.

Dead Fish and Fishy Students

The fish died. This was a sad and shocking event in crafts this week. Crafts and hobbies had 3 fish swimming in a tank large enough to handle 3 or 4 more. So, not surprisingly, the gold fish that had been in there for about 6 years had grown to around 10 inches long. This average goldfish of extraordinary size died last Monday. This caused several distraught residents and a little more work for Joe, the regular staffer from crafts and hobbies. I wonder if they’ll get any new fish now…

Honestly, that was the most exciting thing that has happened in the last two weeks in crafts and hobbies. Otherwise, there has just been a lot of working on projects like clothes for a teddy bear, false floral bouquets (as always), antique toys, and bracelets and necklaces.  The distinct advantage of my situation is that I can be helpful to all the residents, but if they are all happily working on project, I can study. This is especially useful since I volunteer on Mondays and have exams two Monday nights per month throughout the semester.

I’m a little frustrated with the fact that no one seems to find it necessary to work in this class. I mean, seriously. Sure, it’s easier than most other classes and it may not “directly” apply to each person’s  major, but if you commit to something, you owe it your best. When the teacher assigns 11 pages of reading and less than a quarter of the class reads it, then they are wasting their time and his. Sure, we all have to learn fairly independently in this class, that’s kind of the point. It’s accelerated composition because we don’t discuss the “how” in class, but we should all still read the “how” in the book and learn what we can.

ENGR 131 Flow Chart

The estimable Greg Reifke created this beast. Well done sir.

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.