Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
-- Mary Oliver
Each week at an Assisted Living facility, I go to the
residents’ restaurant after I eat lunch in the staff room, a walled off part of
the garage that I call the dungeon. While the staff room where I eat is in a
drab corner of a parking garage, the residents’ restaurant has a high ceiling,
and even on cloudy days the windows let in clean light. There’s a gas fire in an
oversized fireplace, and crystal chandeliers shimmer. The residents use cloth napkins;
linen tablecloths cover tables that have fresh flower centerpieces; waiters and
waitresses ask residents what they’d like from the menu.
By the time I get to the restaurant, I have finished my
Tupperware lunch, and residents are eating their dessert. Sometimes residents
invite me to join them. I decline, telling them that I am full. They don’t know
about the dungeon.
I have never eaten in a dungeon before, though I suspect
that there were dungeons in the places where I worked before my brain tumors
and disabilities. When I taught high school, there were the faculty and student
lunchrooms. Where did the janitors eat? Probably a dungeon. It never occurred
to me then.
In my last decade in education, I worked in schools where
many students lived in poverty, and I went there to work for social justice, yet
I seldom noticed my own privilege. I worked for justice AND reinforced an
unjust system.
Though these elders live a privileged life in many ways—and probably
lived privileged lives before coming to this facility—their lives have also
become difficult in some ways. I simultaneously wonder about serving people who
live with such privilege and love being part of joy in this difficult time of
their lives.
Once a week, I lead a Poetry Club in which about twenty
people gather in the facility’s theatre to read poems around a theme. Almost
all elders at the facility have memory loss, some more advanced than for
others.
As soon as I arrive at the facility, I Xerox the next week’s
poetry (I now stay a week ahead, in case the machine goes down), and check
individually with a resident or two. At noon, I arrange the theatre for Poetry
Club, moving chairs so that participants can see and hear one another as well
as the big screen. Then I go to the dungeon for a quick lunch.
After lunch, I troll the restaurant, inviting residents to
Poetry Club. The residents always greet me warmly. (For about six months, one
said, “I can’t remember anything, so I don’t know who you are, but you’re
familiar, and I think you’re a nice person. Yes, I’m pretty sure I like you.”
Now she knows me.)
The residents often make me laugh. One woman eats lunch by
herself. When I walk towards her table, she looks up in a friendly way, though
I’m not sure whether or not she recognizes me. I introduce my name, as I do
with all residents, and she takes my hand, part shaking hands and part holding
hands. I tell her that I lead a poetry club at 1:30 (so she has plenty of time
to finish her ice-cream), and I would love for her to join us. She has blue
eyes that sparkle kindly with a bit of mischief, and she asks, “Do I go to
poetry club?”
I say, “You do.”
She says, “Maybe I don’t like it.”
I say, “You love it. And you love me.”
She laughs, and her eyes sparkle even brighter. “All right
then,” she says. “I’ll be there. Where is it?”
I tell her, and she says, “I hope I remember. I’ll try to
remember.”
For the first few months, I’m pretty sure she didn’t
recognize me or our ritual, but now I think she does. We repeat it each week
nonetheless, and we both enjoy the connection. Once we’re in poetry club, I
know that her insights into the poem will be so sharp that she will challenge
me to re-hear poems I’ve heard for years.
The club isn’t all unicorns and rainbows. There’s a good
amount of negotiating where people sit, and people with walkers and wheelchairs
seeking places that feel supportive to them. People who struggle to hear and
see need to sit closer to the front, though they’re likely to head to the back.
When I ask a resident to move up front, that person cups a hand around an ear,
cocks their head, and says, “What? I can’t hear you.” One or two people ask,
“Why am I here? What is this?” and the ones who remember say, “This is Poetry Club!
Be quiet.”
Most weeks, each participant receives a poetry packet, a
group of poems I’ve collected around a theme. On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day,
however, I hadn’t noticed until the day before poetry club that we would be
meeting on that actual day, so I had created a new collection the day before and
hadn’t printed the packets ahead of time. It was a good collection: before
MLK’s time there was Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s “We Wear the Mask” and several from
the Harlem Renaissance. Then after MLK, there was a poem written in 1982 to MLK
and Maya Angelou’s “Still I Rise.” We were to close listening to Stevie
Wonder’s “Happy Birthday,” a tribute to Martin Luther King, Jr. and a
celebration of the national holiday in his honor.
Because the Xerox machine was broken that morning when I
arrived, I planned to preview youtube videos of the poems so that participants could
see the poems performed. This seemed like a good back-up plan, but a person who
works there and “helped” me set up was so distracting that I couldn’t preview
the videos. As we began the club, I told the participants about the fact that
we’d be watching video performances of the poems because the Xerox machine was
broken.
I pulled up “We Wear the Mask” and chose the first match. A
hairy white man with a towel wrapped around his private parts walked out of a
shower and started talking about the poem and nakedness, the fact that we all
wear masks. One of the club’s most enthusiastic members hid her eyes and said,
“Oh dear God. Not this. You read it.”
So I did read the poems. We stopped to discuss each one, and
residents shared personal connections to the history. One resident had been in
Washington, D.C. on the day of the March for Jobs and Justice and remembered
watching out her window and on t.v. Three participants were sleeping. In the
middle of the session, in a moment’s silence, a woman who comes every week said
loudly “Why are we here?” This sleeping and this yelling out had never happened
before. When the hour was finally over, and they all began to shuffle out, a
woman with good memory stopped and looked me in the eye. She laughed. “Oh
well,” she said, shaking her head. “It wasn’t that bad. I still learned
something.”
So I give them my best, which is sometimes not very good,
and they give me kindness and forgiveness.
Am I working for justice, bringing some joyful moments to
people living with health and memory problems, or am I again part of a
privileged group, reinforcing that privilege? Or both?
And is this the best I can do with my one wild and precious
life? Maybe yes. Maybe no. But it is
fun.
