Déjà vu

The nursing home is now permitting friends and family to visit the residents with some restrictions: maximum of 2 people, visits take place outside under the canopy for drop-offs, 6-feet apart, masks, 20-minute limit.

Before everything changed, I visited 2 people in the nursing home on Sunday after church. One is a man, a member of the church. At first he was in the assisted living section, and then the Parkinson disease that put him there got worse and he was moved “upstairs” to the nursing home facility.

I met Louise by accident. I had gone to visit a woman who is the mother-in-law of the daughter of a woman at church (did I get that right? Yes). She was there short-term to recuperate from a problem. Louise was her roommate and was reading a book from a stack of books that the activities director had got for her from the library. So I stopped to visit with her a bit about the book she was reading.

The next week I went back to see the “mother-in-law,” but she had been discharged home. Louise was still there. I had won a drawing for a book give-away from the library and had finished reading those books. I wasn’t interested in keeping them, so I took them to Louise to read. And that was the beginning of what I see as a lovely friendship.

Then the pandemic hit. The nursing home locked down, and no visitors were allowed. The library closed, so there were no books coming to the nursing home from the library. Louise was climbing the walls with boredom.

So I collected books for Louise that I thought she might like from my own bookcases and dropped them off at the nursing home for the activities director to give to her to read. My friend Judy, who owned a used book store, also collected books from her storehouse to give her.

I made an appointment to see Louise, and they wheeled her out, with the aide carrying the last sack of books I had given her to read. I was so glad to see her.

We started to visit and to try to catch up, and about that time, a man on a tractor began roaring back and forth with mulch in the bucket that he was putting around the trees in the front of the nursing home. The noise made it a little hard to visit, but I did enjoy seeing her; 20 minutes was not long enough.

Then Saturday morning, I met Judy for coffee at the small plaza-park across from the pizza restaurant in downtown. The plaza is sandwiched between two 3-story buildings, and it is well shaded in the morning. And then whadda know: a man on a large lawn mower came roaring up to cut the grass of the park part. We had to suspend conversation while he did this…

As Yogi Berra said, “It's like déjà vu all over again.”