Old People are HOT!

We are also damned cool.

Ever see how a three-year-old reacts when another three year old comes into the room or gets on the bus? Like they’re mesmerized; they can’t look away until the other kid looks at them and then they get all shy.

That’s how I am when I see gray hair or a certain way of walking or, God help me, wrinkles. The first thought that comes to mind is: There goes a really interesting person!

Because of a certain fellowship I belong to I have friends, good friends, of all ages and from every conceivable background. But it’s the old people I’m drawn to the most, the ones with the most miles on the odometer. I do love my young friends but I find their energy, well, I find it a little exhausting. I have always walked slow, eaten slow, thought slow, reacted slow and created slow (the first day of kindergarten, Mom tells Mrs. Paisley, our teacher, that Tammy Lynn has two speeds: Slow and Stop).

Now I’m doing all of that even more slowly and I find that I really enjoy walking with those with whom I can keep pace.

However, long before I was an old people I felt a kinship with the old people in my life. In spite of doing all the things that are supposed to kill you early, people in my family live to be very old. This is how I got to have two great grandmothers and a great grandfather well into my teens. Both my Great Grandpa Nick and my Great Grandma Lu lived to be 104 years old. They were amazing people. Great Grandma Lena, divorced from Grandpa Nick for decades, was also a wild and wonderful woman who lived well into her late 80's.

Grandpa Nick was, among other things, a taxidermist, a wildlife painter, a grape grower for Welch’s, a horticulturist who planted an orchard to surround his home, and a binge alcoholic who had to be sent to our house in Ohio to dry out from time to time. He’d come to this country from Italy as a teenager and still spoke with a broad, almost cartoonish accent. I can still remember wanting the floor to open up and swallow me when he’d openly sample the grapes at Underwood’s Market and pronounce them not-a so good-a.

Grandma Lu was also often called Aunt Lu. This was because when her sister died and left six kids for her widower, Mr. Dibble, to raise on his own he opted to marry his dead wife’s sister, Lu, who was raising a son by herself. The mystery of Uncle Aidan remains unsolved. He never married and lived with his mother his entire life, being her sole care-taker when she got too old to get around much. She raised all those kids and sent them into the world. When she fell and broke her hip in her late 80’s the great diaspora of Dibbles reversed itself and converged on the hospital in Bradford, PA (home of the Zippo lighter) to say goodbye. She developed a high fever, lost all her hair and pulled through. When her hair grew back it was brown and never did turn gray.

Grandma Lena lived by herself in an enormous old house that had the railroad tracks running about fifty feet from the back porch. She was enormously fat and loved giving us bear hugs. The walker she used was her horse, Prince, and we were allowed to “ride” Prince when she was sitting in the kitchen with Mom and the other aunts and cousins. When trains rumbled by we’d dash out to the back porch to wave to the engineer who would always wave back. When Grandma Lena died my Mom was the one who got to clean out that huge house and every night we’d go through drawers of old curled up black and white photographs with everyone trying to identify who the people were. Not a few were torn in half.

With that as my background, I gravitated to working in nursing homes and assisted living facilities back before I put myself in debt going to college.

My first job cleaning in a nursing home was after I moved to the big, dirty city of Cleveland, Ohio where I worked at St. Augustine Manor. It was run by the Catholic diocese and every day at lunchtime one of the nuns would recite the Hail Mary over the public address system. I still know it by heart. I worked on the sixth floor and the big double room at the front of the building was where Lonny and Mattie lived. They were married but slept in separate hospital beds on opposite sides of the big room. The nuns were scandalized when Lonny would go get into bed with Mattie. The nurses were not and would simply close the door and nod to let everyone know to leave it closed.

Years later I was hired as the first cleaning person at the brand new Eliza Jennings Assisted Care Facility which had just been built across the street from the old Eliza Jennings Nursing Home. I actually started working before the first resident moved in and was there to greet each new person until I got fired a year and a half later. Yes. Fired.

As each new resident arrived I made a new friend.

I had my favorites, of course, and the lady who I connected with most was Maggie Mel (her actual last name was Russian, at least eight syllables, and unpronounceable). She’d been the first woman buyer hired by Higbee’s, Cleveland’s premier department store, in the 1930’s and she could be a real pain in the ass. She was opinionated, independent, and not happy to be living in our humble little assisted living community. But we got on great. Until we didn’t and we did have our spats but we’d always make up and I found myself spending a lot of time in her room, listening to stories of her buying trips to Europe and Northern Africa. It was a sad and awful day when she’d gone through her life’s savings and had to be transferred across the street to the nursing home.

Our lives are a constantly growing trove of stories and the older we get the more stories we add to that trove. As someone who’s been making shit up for decades (aka as a fiction writer), I revel in people’s stories. I revel in my own and have a cupboard full of journals to prove it.

So, even though I’ve always been drawn to the older ones wherever I’d be, now that I’m actually an older one I find myself wondering have I already told them this story? Twice or more times?

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