Everything I Ate, Read, and Heard in Senior Living This Week
chicken fried steak, getting your grandchildren to respect you, and Elaine May
VEHICLE MILEAGE
About thirty miles on the bus (two trips to SF plus a few spins around the block training the director of Memory Care how to drive the bus). About fifty miles on the car.
Everyone keeps asking me when they’re going to sell the old bus, which seats twelve but requires a Class C license, which I haven’t got, and which hasn’t been used since I got the job last August. Man, I don’t know. They keep saying they’re going to sell it. If you need a twelve-seater passenger van and happen to live in Oakland, send me a DM or something.
A few days ago when I was driving out of the parking garage I saw a homeless man having a pretty bad day, crossing the street and cursing. There were at least fifteen feet between us and I was turning in the opposite direction, but nevertheless I had the feeling you sometimes get before someone decides to come yell at you in public: I knew that once he saw me he was going to come after me, no matter how calm I looked or how discreetly I tried to move away. When he saw me he lunged towards the driver’s-side door, making as if to get in; this was particularly startling because he had no arms below the elbow. Knowing that he would be unlikely to get the door open before I could drive away did not make me feel any more relaxed. Between the two of us he was clearly having the worse day, but I still felt pretty unhappy about the whole encounter.
WHAT THEY’RE SAYING
A few months ago I switched gyms. I used to go to a rock climbing gym down in the Oakland flats, but between my day job and the baby and writing I never made time to go. I found a place halfway between my house and work and started going there instead during my commute. I’ve never belonged to a smaller gym in my life. It’s terrific. You sign in with a pen and everything. Most of the clientele is 60+ and a number of them (I suspect mostly the older men, as a form of opsec, but you never know) sign in as “Elmer Fudd” or “Daffy Duck.”
Occasionally the free weights section is given over to personal training between men in their 70s. I try not to eavesdrop, but I don’t try very hard. Some highlights from this week included:
[Over bicep curls] “I don’t think being a biological father makes you a father.”
“It doesn’t. It’s showing up every day.”
“That’s right! You’re right.”
“My kids know I’m not the easiest guy in the world. But they know I’m there.”
“My grandson respects me because I’m patient with him. He’s a hyperactive kid. ADHD. But when you’re a kid you’re always hyperactive. [Son] was the same way.”
“I had two grandmothers. One Irish, who always wanted me to sit still and not do anything. My Italian grandmother would give me a chore to do, and I’d take off to do it. She trusted me. She understood me.”
“I go in on a half a cow with the kids, we drive up to Santa Rosa to pick it up, put it in the chest freezer, lasts us a year….Six dollars a pound for the whole thing. That’s porterhouses, T-bones, ribeyes….you know what they’re charging for ground meat at the supermarket right now? Nine, ten dollars a pound. And this is six dollars a pound for the whole thing.”
“Nine dollars for hamburger meat.”
“And this is six dollars a pound. That’s including T-bones.”
I’m still leading exercise class at work on Sundays and Mondays.
A few of the new residents have started standing in the back, which throws me off a little, because ordinarily everybody sits for the exercises. Now I have to think about how to modify the exercises for someone who’s standing up, which is no joke, because half the moves involve lifting both your feet off the ground at the same time. I’m going to have to reevaluate my system this weekend.
WHAT WE’RE EATING
The best meal at work this week by a country mile was Monday: Chicken-fried steak, sauteed zucchini, mashed potatoes, butterscotch pudding.
The zucchini was especially terrific. The mashed potatoes I suspected of coming from a box, but when you’re trying to feed 150 people at once using the instant flakes is an understandable choice. I love chicken-fried steak and could happily eat it once a week for the rest of my life. That’s hand-breaded! They bread the chicken-fried steak here, it’s not the frozen patties from Sodexo or anything, so I’m inclined to be pretty forgiving about the potatoes.
The gravy was fine, but I don’t ever want to get into a position of taking daily free gravy for granted, you know? Even just “fine” gravy is nothing to sneeze at, particularly when you don’t have to do the dishes afterwards.
Plus I recently found out where they keep the plastic knives, so my days of eating lunch with only a fork are over.
A resident told me that her husband and her brother both died at the age of 61: “They said they’d never live long, because they were in the Army. They said it was the food.”
WHAT WE’RE WATCHING
All movies are screened in the theater at 6:45pm. I get to schedule the movie calendar myself, as long as they’re available on streaming or I can successfully download something in advance.
Every once in a while residents will request something in particular. Most recently Jon and David asked for Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould, which I’ve added to the week of 6/20. May and Yae have both expressed interest in seeing Raise the Red Lantern again, but I haven’t been able to find it streaming anywhere. I haven’t seen it since high school and would love to figure out a way to make it happen.
Monday night: A New Leaf, 1971, by Elaine May. (You know how much I love this one.) I was shameless about promoting it this week. I was texting residents from the driver’s phone to be sure to come down. I thought about staying late at work just to watch it on a big screen, but there’s only thirteen chairs in the theater and I’d hate to take a spot away from someone who had never seen it.
Tuesday night I’m not sure yet. It was supposed to be Gosford Park but the front desk told me someone accidentally played that last week, so it’s being swapped out for something else.
Wednesday night: Interiors, 1978, Kristin Griffith and Marybeth Hurt.
Thursday night: The English Teacher, 2013, Julianne Moore and Greg Kinnear.
Friday night: Crazy Rich Asians, 2018, Constance Wu and Henry Golding.
Saturday: The Summer Book, 2025, Glenn Close, Emily Matthews. Based on the terrific Tove Jansson novel.
WHAT WE’RE READING
The short stories group that meets on Mondays just read Grace Paley’s “Friends,” which was a real hit. We’ve done a lot of New Yorker-in-the-seventies stuff, which is nothing to sneeze at, let me tell you; discussion for Jamaica Kincaid’s “Girl” took up the whole hour even though it only took about seven minutes to read through; Lydia Davis went down a treat, as did Donald Barthelme’s “Some Of Us Had Been Threatening Our Friend Colby.”
Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he’d gone too far, so we decided to hang him. Colby argued that just because he had gone too far (he did not deny that he had gone too far) did not mean that he should be subjected to hanging. Going too far, he said, was something everybody did sometimes. We didn’t pay much attention to this argument. We asked him what sort of music he would like played at the hanging. He said he’d think about it but it would take him a while to decide. I pointed out that we’d have to know soon, because Howard, who is a conductor, would have to hire and rehearse the musicians and he couldn’t begin until he knew what the music was going to be. Colby said he’d always been fond of Ives’s Fourth Symphony. Howard said that this was a “delaying tactic” and that everybody knew that the Ives was almost impossible to perform and would involve weeks of rehearsal, and that the size of the orchestra and chorus would put us way over the music budget. “Be reasonable,” he said to Colby. Colby said he’d try to think of something a little less exacting.
The group even liked Edna Ferber’s “Old Man Minick,” which I hadn’t been sure about. I’m crazy about Edna Ferber personally but Old Man Minick can shade into patronizing if you’re not careful about your tone while you read.1
Another resident sent me a link to a Washington Post article but I can’t read it because there’s a paywall. She thinks there’s a way to send it to me as a gift article. If it works out I’ll be sure to let you know once I’ve read it.
At the front desk they’re reading manga, coursework for a film degree, and a Christian devotional. I don’t know which manga Roberto’s reading right now. He most recently finished Chainsaw Man, I know that, but I can’t remember which series he’s on presently. He has a manga guy who usually gets him a pretty good deal when he buys in bulk, and I put him on to the new comic shop they opened next to the Dark Carnival in Berkeley.
I’m reading Robert Graves’ Good-Bye to All That after finishing Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory. It’s terrific, although unfortunately I picked up the edited 1950s version by mistake, and will eventually have to hunt down the original 1929 version that alienated all of his friends.
Next week there’s caper chicken on the menu (one of the best things they do here) and I’ll be screening the absolutely magnificent The Plot Against Harry, His Girl Friday, and Dave.
I’ll also be driving people to the Oakland Rose Garden for a picnic lunch. Pickup is at the lobby at 10:45am, but I’ll wait for you if you’re a few minutes late.
Frankly I was worried about being the one who read the stories aloud during the short story group meetings. I worried it would sound pushy, if you know what I mean, but people prefer listening. At least that’s what they tell me, and if they’re lying to me, I have no way of knowing.
Scarecrow Video in Seattle rents DVDs out around the country and it looks like they have 2 copies of Raise the Red Lantern, fwiw!
(Thank you for this delightful piece!)
While having a rough day recently when I was feeling low and my eyes hurt my husband finally read out loud to me and it was one of the highest pleasures of my entire life. I’m a real ham that’s always trying to get some captive audience to listen to /me/ read (with almost no success), but this was even better. Sadly, my experience is consistent with yours in that I haven’t found anyone else that wants to read out loud. Incidentally, one of the things I had him do was reread me your wonderful Mikey and Nicky piece since we just watched it!