The Residents

I know almost all of them now. (At least the ones in the Rehab wing. The Long Term half of the building is a netherworld I can't take in just yet.)

I'll start introducing you.

Before I got to Indiana, my sister said "Candy, you have GOT to meet George." She described him as a very "colorful" old guy who lived in the room two doors down from Dad. He was, in fact, initially going to be Dad's roommate. But a friend of our family's who works at Shiny Meadows steered Dad's assignment to a different room. Because George likes to get into other people's stuff. All the time. He sits in his wheelchair and "walks" himself in and out of rooms and rearranges things and/or runs off with small treasures like combs and candies and anything not nailed down.

He weighs 80 pounds at most, with skinny little ankles the circumference of a boiled egg. He has no teeth, and used to like to scoot around Shiny Meadows with his harmonica in his pocket, occasionally serenading residents with religious songs. And always playing "Happy Birthday" when appropriate.

My sister said that every so often you could hear a resident or their visitor yelling "Get outta here, George!" It became the one comic relief for her and my mom during that first sickening day. George didn't seem to mind being yelled at. He just moved along to the next pilfering spot, like a wren looking for aluminum Doublemint wrappers.

So I was anxious to meet him, thinking about how I would lay bait out for him and delight in watching him take it. I packed some beanie babies to entice him with. I would buy a bag of marshmallows. I could fatten him up.

You know how life is fleeting? Wow. Way more fleeting in a nursing home. By the time I got to Indiana on Wednesday, George was too sick to get out of bed. He died yesterday.

As it turns out, his nephew, Steve, is a man who used to work for my dad in the sixties as a hired hand on the farm. I was fascinated with him because he ate frog legs for lunch every day. He told me that a few weeks ago, George's harmonica went missing, "as many things do here," and that had been George's "clutch." His meaning. He went downhill from there. Again, there it is. The small things.