Category: Biographical

“So you are a widow, living at this retirement center—what happened to your husband?” My question spilled out with unexpected bluntness.

“Oh, he was a doctor—a pulmonologist. He died in a mine.”

“In a mine?” I puzzled. The irony of a pulmonologist dying in a mining accident was inescapable. Was he researching black lung disease?

Carol cackled. “No! He didn’t die in a MINE! He died in oh-nine! As in 2009!”

I scrambled for cover.

Fresh from a Netflix docudrama about Ann Boleyn, I decided to up the ante of our breakfast chitchat and impress upon her my fresh-from-TV insights. But she soon left me in the dust, rattling off 200 years of English monarchy melodrama.

Checkmate. Nothing to do but retreat to, “umm-hmm’s,” and “ah-ha’s.”

Eager for a change of subject, I inquired about her education. “Double major in history and art,” she replied.

No wonder. She wisely avoided pressing me about my own educational pedigree.

She had called Boise home, but after her son-in-law’s fatal heart attack, she moved to be closer to her daughter. “In warm weather when they visited me, he would literally run up the nearby ski slopes for exercise. His death—well, it was totally unexpected.”

I asked Carol about her current art interest. “Being an artist can be a very lonely life,” she explained. “It’s only you and your art. That’s not enough for me. I need other people.”

I have never seen Carol without a hat, or sunglasses, or both. This art major, in her element with pastels and a sketchpad, lives in a dimly-lit world. A medical condition has rendered her eyes so sensitive that light pains her. In her apartment, drapes are drawn, the light nearly non-existent. Artwork hangs on the walls about her, barely visible. These days, this aficionado of form and color craves near-total darkness.

Carol abruptly excused herself. “Gotta go! Today’s New York Times didn’t arrive before I left for breakfast. Time for my crossword puzzle!”

Of course. The New York Times crossword puzzle. She has worked them for decades.

Watch out, art and history categories—Carol’s on the loose.

Jan’s inaugural stewardess commission was on the World War II “Gooney Bird,” the twin-engine DC-3. They began flying in 1935. They are still in service to this day.

So is ninety-something, Jan. Over breakfast, she recalled her favorite flight crew.

“In those days, the unpressurized planes flew low. On long flights, our two mischievous pilots would open their cockpit windows and deploy long strands of chicken bones, all tied together with string. They let out enough line so the bones would hit and clatter against the windows of the unsuspecting passengers, provoking shock and dismay, while traveling at several thousand feet altitude.”

“I suppose turkey bones would have been too big and heavy for the fragile windows!”

Jan eventually graduated to DC-4’s, and to DC-6’s. The latter contained sleeping berths for upscale passengers, reminiscent of the era’s train transportation.

Based in Los Angeles, she served Hollywood royalty: Jerry Lewis and Dean Martin, Hedda Hopper, Walt Disney, John Wayne, Barbara Hutton.

Jan lived in a stewardess dormitory, where a visiting pilot ran into Jan quite by accident when he lost his way, arriving at the wrong dormitory; Jan was smitten.

One day, after making repairs under the hood of her Model A Ford, which she had purchased from another pilot for $125, Jan drove across town to visit him. He invited her to Tucson, where he was based. So she spent the next several weeks “visiting her grandmother” in Tucson. Two months after they met, she married her sweetheart pilot.

“Did that turn out to be a good thing?” I was incredulous. She curled her index finger to meet her thumb, forming an “O,” as in “perfect.” “We had an amazing life together. We traveled to every part of the world. Greece! We loved Greece!”

Later that afternoon, accompanying my father down the hall, we once again ran into Jan. “Didn’t we meet you yesterday?” asked my Dad. Good try. I suggested to him that it had been just that morning.

Jan’s son, John, who happened to be visiting her, accompanied her down the hall. We introduced ourselves, yet I felt I already knew John.

After all, we could both recite Jan’s fondest stories.

Chuck stared blankly after he placed his breakfast order. “No, I’ll take the cold cereal instead.”

Sometimes, Chuck’s esophagus blocks his food. It gets stuck—“right here.” It remains there until he eats again, when it may journey up into his mouth again. “And there’s not much that’s coming out the other end, either,” he explained.

“Do you still drive?” I asked the 98-year old, trying to change the subject. I could still imagine the taste of the food, the second time around.

“Yes, but I wouldn’t want to meet another driver of my caliber on the road!”

Chuck had fallen prior to his move into the retirement home, landing on his head. 30 stitches patched him up. The fall had reduced his short-term memory, and he now required the use of a cane. So, in his mid-nineties, he reluctantly gave up golf and tennis. “Tennis doubles is a wonderful thing. Don’t need to cover nearly as much court!” I guessed so; I had given up on tennis three decades ago.

Chuck was a patent lawyer. The precise details of every patent were still packed in the back of that cranium. Long-term memory was definitely not a problem.

“You know how a ship being attacked from an aircraft has to take three readings on the location of the plane and its angle of attack before you can aim, load and fire a 2.9-inch shell from the ship’s deck?”

Of course. Everyone knows that.

“You have time to take two readings. By the time you try to take the third reading, you’re toast! Up in smoke! No one could figure out how to take that third reading in time.”

Chuck’s client had figured out a way to accomplish this, using a sort of scrabble board contraption.

Another client developed an invention that produced weird electrical waves. Whenever Chuck inadvertently left his lunch near the gizmo, his lunch got hot. “You’ve got the descendent of this in your kitchen. It’s called a microwave.”

Just then, two men dressed in black suits made their way down the corridor, a black gurney between them. All they lacked was a body.

Chuck smiled. “What do you expect?” he asked rhetorically. “Just take a look at where we live.”

With that, cane in hand, he headed down the hall, as if he were hunting down a new tennis partner.

At 85, Art is a youngster compared with my 101-year old father. For breakfast, he’d have the waffles, Dad wanted oatmeal and poached eggs, all easy to chew.

Saturday at the retirement home means a two-hour drive each way for me. The breakfasts are routine, except for who is assigned to sit with us. Today, it was Art, a two-week resident newbie.

At the end of his Korean War service, Art’s home became the hospital for a full year. When he was released, he was still a teenager with no job skills.

He took a vocational skills test and discovered he possessed a hidden, latent talent: sorting.

Art could sort anything. He could detect the minutest differences. Sizes. Colors. Shapes. Anything. Think it’s tough to tell one leaf from another? Art doesn’t; he’s a born sorter.

His unique skill landed him a job as a trainee in a jewelry company where he was given plenty of stuff to sort: all of them diamonds. Thousands of them, and they all needed sorting by color, cut, size, quality.

His proficiency eventually made a way for him in the jewelry wholesale market. His skills had brought him into the limelight, into the big time, and into one of the most exclusive communities of Los Angeles.

He lived there all by himself. His wife had left him fifty years ago, though they have still never divorced.

Halfway through Art’s waffle breakfast, Edna, stopped by the table to greet us. She stood directly next to Art. But Art couldn’t see her. He only turned his head when he heard her voice.

Macular degeneration has stolen most of Art’s once-legendary gift of visual discernment. He feels lost in his new environment and misses his former neighborhood. He could have become a bitter man.

After breakfast, I fixed his television for him. A baseball fan, Art was suffering withdrawal. When I got it to work, he pumped his fists in victory, and we hugged triumphantly.

“It’s been a good day,” he explained, “for two reasons. First, you fixed my TV so I can watch The World Series! Second, because your dad called me an Old Geezer. Because that’s what I call myself! I love that! We Old Geezers gotta stick together!”

We met her today at the Ojai Coffee Roasting coffee shop. She’s 82, and just finished a month-long, $20,000 intensive live-in workshop (along with four other $20,000 per person attendees) with self-help guru Byron Katie. Nope, I’ve never heard of Ms. Katie before. But for that sort of money, I’m thinking I that I have a lot of self-help to give! Our coffee-drinking friend, a Brit, met her husband in South Africa. Living in England, she refused to move back to Apartheid South Africa, so after 20 years of marriage, they divorced. She departed with $1 million of his $10 million wealth. His subsequent two wives got the rest of it, upon his death. She’s still mad about that. And, nope, I never even learned our coffee-drinking friend’s name. But I will, when she attends my new self-help seminar, now on the drafting table.

Ellen (not her real name) was a long way from home, wherever home used to be. Since she exhausted her savings after being laid off her job in 2005, home becomes anywhere in Sacramento that she can find to lay her head.

On this wet and stormy night, she would lay her head near the river, where I found her playing a card game she invented herself. Since she was playing it alone, I presumed it to be a derivative of solitaire, seven piles of cards being flipped and arranged in an indecipherable sequence. She had two names for the game, neither of which would appear in an English language dictionary.

I settled in on the neighboring bench to listen to her. The narration that followed was at times difficult to follow. I learned that Ellen had studied computer software and knows five programming languages. After being illegally dismissed from her previous, final employment, she sued them for wrongful termination. A flurry of unsuccessful lawsuits depleted her resources. Ellen bounced from couch to couch until she wore her welcome threadbare. The streets alone welcomed her.

Ellen’s verbal articulation and expressive voice made the veracity of her claims hard to dismiss, yet the warm shimmer within her voice showed she was not tired of life. She possessed a vibrant glow, as if, despite being encrusted with grime and worn with wear, at any moment she would uncover the golden nugget to forever change her fortune.

If she appeared on the Homeless Elocutionist of the Year television game show, she would bring tears and a standing ovation from the crowd, and even the most berating, hardened judge would cave in and give her a compliant thumbs up. This, despite her caked-on street muck and the impressive odors that accompany those with limited accessibility to bathing.

I probed, “So how are you managing to eat, Ellen, with no income?”

Her answer was oblique. Apparently foragers makeshift from a variety of sources which are difficult to easily enumerate.

Suddenly she dug within the plastic bags that apparently housed all of her worldly belongings, extricating a battered teddy bear with two bug-like antennae inexplicably sprouting from its forehead. A faded pink ribbon hung around its neck.

“We’re bear-ly making it!” she confessed, the bright tone in her voice contagious. Her widened eyes were eloquently expressive, with the easy capacity to grab me by the throat.

I squirmed uncomfortably, increasingly cognizant that my own life was stacked unaccountably in my favor. 

One advantage of hearing a stranger’s story is that it leaves the option of our own opinions. Sure, Ellen’s story was gripping and persuasive. It challenged me. It bent my stereotypes of a homeless, down-on-her-luck woman.

If it were true.

With no way to establish the veracity of her story, it could all be fabrication. Aren’t the Homeless born manipulators, just waiting to hit up their audience with “The Ask” for a dollar or two? Sure, Ellen seemed accomplished and talented. But she might just as easily be delusional or conniving.

My mental arguments and counter-arguments were like the quick tides of water sloshing in a bathtub. I wanted to walk away, but I felt stuck.

Slowly and quietly, I pulled my wallet from my back pocket, realizing with a start that my choices were limited–I possessed only one dollar and a twenty dollar bills. I awaited a confirmation of which bill to choose, with no result.

But just in case those gripping eyes were telling the truth, I pulled out the twenty.

I thanked her for the time together. “Maybe this will help with your next few meals,” I nearly apologized.

I stepped into the dark and rain of this stormy night, and all the way back, I wondered whom I had really met–and what she had seen in me.

When we lose confidence in the direction our lives are navigating, we may look to the example of those in our family tree who achieve success or recognition. Uncle Henry invented a greenhouse tomato humidifier that would hydrate the dirt without the need for a drip sprinkling system. Forebear Grandmother Merva developed a chili recipe which she marketed so successfully that the revenues allowed her to invest her fortune in NASCAR championship racing cars, each one emblazoned with a logo promoting her very own “Mother’s Butt-Kickin’ Beans.”

Some of us who lack such a prominent and impressive family tree struggle through life’s mundane struggles, hoping to come up occasionally for air.

This describes Steven, a student in my classroom housed in the parole office. Having attended my class for over two years, he struggles to maintain his fifth-grade reading level, suffering from dyslexia and other learning disabilities.

Steven has difficulties making appropriate behavior choices. A few months ago, he arrived in class with one eye swollen shut and his face badly bruised. Believing himself to have been disrespected upon leaving a bar, he took up fisticuffs with two fellow revelers, who got the best of him. Fortunately for him, he survived, and the assault charge was eventually demoted to disorderly conduct.

Within weeks he was re-arrested for carrying an illegal switchblade. Again, the judge reduced the charges since the blade only fractionally exceeded the legal length. Saved again. He will do community service.

Last week he earned himself another court date by threatening the clerk in the general relief office for not providing him the benefits he was convinced that he deserved.

As many of us do during times of emotional distress, he fished through his family tree to validate his self-worth despite his recent incorrigible behavior.

“I’m not a great example to my daughter,“ he began. “My brother, though, he really made something of himself,” Steven boasted. “Did you know he earned certifications to do plumbing, carpentry and auto body repair?”

“That’s amazing!” I responded. “What a talented guy!”

“Not only that,” he continued. “He was an ordained minister.”

I was impressed. “Where was his church?”

“Oh, he didn’t have a church,” Steven explained. “He had lots of time to study, though. He earned his vocational certificates and his ordination while he was in prison.”

I sat in shocked silence.

“Yeah. He did 31 years for murder before he passed away from cancer in prison last week.”

He stared silently and blankly at me, like an actor who has forgotten his lines.

“I’m going to miss him,” he muttered. “He was the best brother you could ever want.”

When is Yogi Berra’s birthday? What date did the War of 1812 begin? Exactly how many days until July 4? How many years and days old is your friend? What day did Saigon fall to North Vietnam?

If you’re standing on the corner waiting for the bus with John (not his real name), as I do nearly every workday, he could instantly tell you the answers to these and a great variety of other odd, date-related trivia questions. John has an exceptional ability to recall and calculate dates.

He does not consider his abilities exceptional. In fact, John assumes that everyone should be able to perform these same mental gymnastics.

John is exceptional in another way—he speaks with perfect diction. Not just good diction—perfect diction. He eschews colloquialisms and possesses such a perfectly neutral dialect that, had he served as his speech coach, he could have made George W. Bush sound positively educated.

There’s one more unusual thing about John. He’s schizophrenic. He is so heavily medicated that all expression is permanently drained from his face. He struggles to stay awake, even when he’s standing at the bus stop.

John regularly lists all the old VHS tapes and DVD movies he has recently watched, listing all the actors’ names, the names the characters play in the movie, and of course, the year of each movie’s release.

John waits with me at the bus stop as he travels from the mental health facility to his group home. In one hand he always clasps a round red plastic container held together with scotch tape, white paper cutouts taped to the front to mimic a television screen and tuning knobs. The white paper at the top identifies his construction as “Mental Television.” In his other hand he holds a crude, hand-made semblance of a person’s face drawn on paper cup and attached to the end of a screw. It represents the face of a man who is watching the Mental Television.

I hope to see him at the bus stop again tomorrow, when I will again try to understand my friend, the Fabulous Calendar Man, and tune into the Mental Television that holds his view of the world.