My small office was beside the door to the Senior Center Parlor, not far from the Dining Room. Close by, I’d added a bulletin board for upcoming event flyers, the month’s birthday list, reminders of services coming to the Center. Thanks to a local law office’s donation of their just-retired meeting room and reception area furniture, the Parlor no longer looked like the back corner of Goodwill.
There, daily, seniors worked on jigsaw puzzles. Played bridge and whist. Read our courtesy copy of the local newspaper or selected mysteries from the library of cast-off books. A much larger meeting room back of the Parlor served as an exercise, quilting, movie, and pinochle space. Of which pinochle was the most popular—counting 50 or so very competitive participants most Tuesday afternoons. Parquet covered one part of the Dining Room floor for line dancing.
The year Dave died and I turned 60, I retired from my last post at the Montana Historical Society. On the strength of respect for the good people who had attended my aging parents, I wanted to work with seniors. I’d taken a week-long course for senior living activity directors and volunteered at a Helena nursing home. So when a senior services position came up at our local human resources development agency, I applied. Over the next half-dozen years, I worked for several programs, but mostly as Senior Center coordinator. Responsible for managing long-favorite activities and planning new ones: trips, crafts, movies, speakers. And writing the newsletter that kept members notified of upcoming choices. A job for a middle-school playground monitor, counselor, cheerleader, event planner, writer.
What people really wanted in that newsletter was the month’s menus for the Dining Room. The midday meal, offered for a small, recommended donation, was the heart of Center participation.
As was true in senior centers across the country. There are thousands and they date primarily to the years after the 1965 Older Americans Act passed. That legislation reflected years of evidence that many seniors needed advocacy, good information, fellowship, transportation, and nutrition. Food and its attendant fellowship anchored the aging services programs that multiplied across the nation.
In many communities, including Helena, younger older adults–folks active in churches and clubs, seniors with strong family support–didn’t come as regularly to the Center. We were more often a home-away-from-home for older seniors, folks with disabilities, people who were frail, lonely, squeaking by on tiny Social Security payments.
Any given day at the Center brought a whirlwind of the improbable and impossible. The man who for the life of him couldn’t park his enormous, elderly Cadillac in anything less than three spaces. The several clients who’d abandoned bathing. And the many clients who thought it critical to complain about them. The preponderance of diners who refused to sit with anyone not of their choosing—effectively negating the whole idea of a welcoming place. The warring parties of Wednesday bingo: those for whom it was the last game they would be able to manage and those for whom it was a high-stakes, cutthroat, money-making activity. The bingo caller was either too fast or too slow depending on perspective. For that matter, the bridge players for whom dementia had eroded their skill AND their awareness. The pinochle set-up crew who arrived early—every week—before the quilters had dismantled their frames. And stood around impatiently making catty remarks.
Then, there was the musical ensemble comprised of Center members who might once have been skilled and enjoyable, but weren’t any longer—however heartbreakingly eager to perform. The jigsaw puzzlers who resented anyone who touched a puzzle they’d begun. The members who—despite clear signage—brought their castoff clothes and household goods to my doorway anonymously, rather than taking them to a thrift store.
One of our most faithful members wrestled with untreated schizophrenia that left her desperately anxious every day about the burglars who invaded her home. A true Rosie the Riveter who remembered her “good years” but lived in the shadow of permanent unease. Two clients who’d been raised, isolated, in Montana’s grim Deaf and Dumb Asylum—likely misdiagnosed or deliberately misunderstood by struggling families. Individuals who’d never learned the protocols of public life.
But among the struggling, so much strength: the power company employee who lost his entire pension to rapacious Wall Street decisions and didn’t complain but volunteered enthusiastically on our member council. The lady whose ferocious and nonstop knitting gave her a way to contribute to the world despite the world having served her nothing but abuse and neglect. Our Parlor hostess who wouldn’t miss her Thursday stint–ongoing chemo notwithstanding—up to the week before she died. The volunteer dance teachers. The shy gentleman who, out of the blue, offered to create a wood carving class. The man who’d lost his wife 40 years ago, but still cared for her mother and walked daily to the Center.
In other words, any given day brought a whirlwind of behaviors and patterns that were by turns funny, maddening, inspiring, and heartbreaking. The stuff of life for so many of us. Yes, us. I was more than old enough to be a Senior Center member when I started working there. And newly widowed. On the heels of a full time job and a full-on life, and seeing to Dave’s health, I felt younger than the clients I served. But every day that I reported to work, I also knew that I was looking in a mirror, if not at that moment, soon enough.
“Is Alma depressed?” a colleague who worked in our agency’s mental health services, asked about our Rosie the Riveter. “Most likely, sure,” I said, not wanting to blow her off, but perplexed. It seemed to me that every single person who came to the Center had begun that steep climb up the mountain of aging toward death’s summit. Their lives, our lives, in fact, consisted of the daily attrition of social, economic, physical, and professional substance. Though true to a degree from our birth on, not in the ways we now experienced. Our days were comprised of small, deliberate, often uncomfortable or unsuccessful strategies to make peace with the losses and find some ease, some satisfaction, some acceptance, some belief in our worth. And the seniors our Center served had a tougher go of it than most. Of course, depression to some degree seemed part of the mix.
My job, then, in addition to keeping our routine activities going, was to suss out ways that might enlarge our members’ worlds, grant them a sturdier sense of self and purpose. For me, that meant never patronizing them. Members could not be “dearie” or “honey”—labels that demeaned individuals with specific names and specific histories. Our bulletin board decorations could not mimic the bunnies or duckies that festooned Head Start windows. I needed to stop and listen, to look members in the eye. For those who crossed the line of tolerable behavior, I needed to provide straight talk—not belittling or sugar-coated. To gather a bit of the gumption that I’d lacked at Frances Scott Key High School 40 years before.
I looked for ways to use our small buses for small trips—when I realized how many members no longer had cars and no longer saw anything but the route to and from the Center. I found collegial help from our small museum of art—to plan one-shot classes that produced stunning take-home pieces. And tried to host lively speakers who understood a 10 minute attention span.
And in those efforts I was bolstered by our clients who had stayed curious, who liked the world, enjoyed friendships based on more than shared misery. Whose memories brought them comfort; who could see the silliness, the improbable ridiculousness of so much of life. Who could balance the losses that came with our territory, our time in this world, against the mysteries that we face, against the opportunities we’d had. The grateful people.
Given the location of my office and, at that point, my relatively keen hearing, I heard the running commentary of members as they went past my door to the Parlor or on into the Dining Room. Remarks often sparked by one or another of my neon green announcement posters. “Why is she planning that; no one will go.” “Not another noontime speaker.” “Oh I bet Elsie will attend and if she does, I’m not going to.” I eavesdropped and smiled – and once in a while couldn’t resist popping out and addressing the concern.
But more important, I couldn’t imagine carrying that burden, that gut full of negativity on into the rest of my old age. Into the years when I was no longer young-old. The stream of “no’s” and complaints that I heard were real and understandable. They were always more about the incontrovertible realities of growing old; about rebellion at the inconveniences; about the absence of reward or excitement or possibility. The futile flailing against every little loss that leads to our final one. (Although I did plan some program nonstarters!) But still, the Senior Center and my friends there gave me the opportunity to look ahead and make a conscious decision to stay curious and accepting. To avoid the deepest ugly pit of “no’s.”
Which is why, with my great friend and office mate Jean, I sought out one of Helena’s gnarliest tattoo artists and ask for a bracelet of words to be inscribed on my wrist: yes yes yes yes yes. ©
