Fragments From Floyd

I need to be thinking about the next book affair coming up soon on July 13, but it won't likely happen today. We'll leave the house around 11, and have lunch with some new friends just outside of town. By 1:30 we'll be winding up the mountain for the Wine Down the Music Trail gathering up at the FloydFest site. If we can last out in what for the mountains will be blistering heat, it will be after six when we head home by way of downtown Floyd, where we'll stop briefly at Cafe del Sol for the wine and cheese (oh please no more wine) reception for the featured artists whose works hang there on the walls. And by 8, we'll be back home to let the poor dog out for a quick walk and wee, and then to bed. So as I say, my thinking about this book event won't happen today.

The upcoming reading is an opportunity to speak among the ghosts of friends, in a familiar place among unfamiliar faces. It was perhaps the best therapy job I ever had. (And I guess I've taken paychecks from maybe 15 different outfits, full and part time over the years since becoming a physical therapist in 1989.) In this setting, I saw patients in their own apartments or condos, wearing their own clothes, surrounded by their family pictures, books and what little of their personal things they distilled from their larger, younger lives to assisted living, or the community of smallish condos at Warm Hearth Retirement Village in Blacksburg.

For 18 months, I made my own schedule, seeing a half dozen residents, plus or minus a few, three times a week, and they often became my friends. Visits would consist of 30 minutes of therapy and an equal period of just plain conversation, often accented by a look at the family album, or an explanation of or long story about some valued memento on their mantle and how it entered and influenced their lives long ago. I met family, who were often the reason why this person, who had spent most of their lives at a university in Sweden, were now living in the mountains of Virginia. Many of the residents had a son or daughter who were Virginia Tech faculty. Some of my patients even called me when their medical orders and insurance had expired for their original conditions and paid me privately to work with their mom or dad. The visiting was, I think, often as therapeutic as the therapy.

I went by a few weeks ago to arrange for the July afternoon Slow Road Home event, and sat in the office with the facility administrator and activities director, both of whom had been there when I left in May 2001. What I learned was that, in an assisted living facility, five years is a very long time. Almost all of the 100 residents and many of my friends were gone, replaced by a new of equally interesting but unfamiliar names on the doors. I walked the hallways, remembering.

There at the end of the hall, was NG's apartment. Every time I visited, I was someone different, usually a family member. Nancy was "pleasantly confused", a former faculty member somewhere north, and remained very structured and organized, even in her benignly demented state. And on my arrival at her door for a therapy visit, she quickly assigned duties to me--a presumed favorite nephew most of the time, I think--for the upcoming family reunion which she imagined herself to be in charge of.

And on the opposite side of the building and one floor up, was JC's apartment. A little crone of a man, comma shaped from ravages of osteoporosis, he wined and complained about the food, about the parking lot, the noise, the other residents and the administration. But sit him down to his electric organ, and he became a genius and a healer himself with the music he played. The last note echoed from the walls, and he became a bitter, bent gnome of a man again. We became good friends, and the music was our common ground.

If I'd been writing then, there would have been so many wonderful stories, personalities and character cameos. "And so what happened to . . ." I asked over and over on my recent visit. All gone, they told me. And so the people who will attend this 3:00 gathering on the 13th will be strangers who live behind the doors of those I knew and remember so well.

What should I say to them? How to I weave these memories of Warm Hearth into everything that has happened in my own life on Goose Creek while my elderly friends were spending their last years in those tiny apartments? What passages from the book, or beyond the book, should I share that will be meaningful to this gathering of wonderful folks in this special place? I'd best be getting my thoughts together. And hey--maybe that is already happening as I write these lines this morning before the sun comes up.