At the rehab center

When I arrived at the rehabilitation center mid morning, Grandpa was in his bathroom standing at the sink slicking down his hair with water. He’d just finished shaving. He sat down in his wheelchair and rolled into the room.

He soon launched into his favorite topic, the food at the center. “This place here is for the birds,” he said. His eyes were fierce. “They’ve got all these….”—he struggled for the term—“they go on a round thing in a shelf?”

“Spices?” I suggested.

“Yeah,” he agreed, waving his hand towards me in affirmation. “All these spices, more than you could ever need. Or more than I need.” The latter qualification seemed a result of being told numerous times by Rosemary that the food was good just not his sort. “This outfit here,” he said, “they just have to mess around with everything.” At breakfast he hadn’t been happy with the meat selection. “I said, can I just get a nice piece of ham”—he made an oval with his fingers—“but no, they didn’t have that.” He shook his head but laughed too, as if it was just too absurd. What kind of world was it where a person couldn't get a plain, honest meal.

Soon after, his lunch arrived. He can eat in the dining room, but Rosemary had told them to bring his tray to the room since we were visiting. After a look at the pesto chicken and penne pasta, he said, “See here, this is what I was saying.” He objected to the pesto coating on the piece of chicken. But he ended up eating most of the meal, afterwards admitting, “Well, that wasn’t too bad.” 

The silverware, though, that was another issue. He held up the knife and fork, waved it around, trying to gather the words he wanted... Finally he said, “They packed about five hundred pounds into each of these.” He prefers lighter implements. Several times he joked, “I don’t want to drop these, I’ll put a hole in the floor, or break my leg, and I have enough trouble as it is.”

After lunch we helped him put on a new pair of black shoes, with velcro straps. He thought they were too small but after a time said they might do.

Rosemary had him sign a couple checks for deposit into his account, and we talked about the lawn at the house and what should be done about it.... He changed subjects abruptly and told me that the door of the refrigerator in the garage was broken and wouldn’t stay shut, and to make sure that battery charger remains up against the door to keep it closed. I asked about the age of the ancient frig, and this led to a story….

“Well, you remember, we brought that machine up from California when I retired?” I did remember. It had taken three days to pack the moving truck. Grandpa had been maddeningly methodical, determined not to leave one square inch of space unoccupied. At the time, 1984, I’d thought the refrigerator was too old to take along. Speaking of that move, Grandpa briefly digressed: “I should’ve drove that truck into the river”—he was bemoaning his basement full of what he called “crap” (but which to be honest he has for decades considered valuable and probably still does). Anyway, the frig.... 

In 1956 he had gone to work at a new J.C. Penney’s store in Long Beach, after moving down to California from Idaho. “What’s it called,” he said, “where all the workers get together?” I guessed “lunch room.”  “Yes, lunch room. Anyway, there was a refrigerator in the lunch room for the employees, but they decided it wasn’t big enough, and so they got another one…. I said, well, I’ll take that old one off your hands, how much do you want for it?.... They said ten dollars, and I said, sold…. We got it home to the new house…. Later when we got a new one we moved it out to the garage.” So it’s 56, 57 years old and still going; he uses it mostly for beverages…. 

I said to Rosemary, "So that frig has been around nearly your whole life?" She said she couldn't remember a time without it.

In the evening I returned to the rehab center to bring Grandpa some things he’d asked for: a couple shirts, his mail, instant coffee, a board he uses for writing on his lap; I stopped at a grocery store and got some ham steaks to put in his mini-fridge. He wasn’t in his room when I arrived, but I found him in the dining room, at a table with two other elderly men. He told me to pull up a chair and I did.

He was telling one of the men about how he came to work at Penney’s back in the 1950s. His dinner was mostly untouched, a philly steak sandwich, fries, a small bowl of ice cream. I don’t know that he objected to the food, but he couldn’t talk and eat both. The man he was talking to hadn’t eaten much either, though his ice cream bowl was empty. The third man, who seemed the most frail, had nearly cleaned his plate.

The man who had eaten his ice cream was named Rich. He was tall and his head was large and bald. He and grandpa had similar forearms, loose skin, thick white hair, various large purple splotches.... Grandpa told about being at a dance over in Caldwell--this would've been about sixty years ago--when the general manager fella from the Penney's pulled him off the dance floor and said, look here, you need to come back to work at the store. Grandpa had been flirting with the Bureau of Reclamation ("See, I wanted to work outside"). Soon after, Grandpa gave in, and stayed with Penney's till his retirement thirty years later....

When Grandpa finished his story, Rich said he had been born in Canon City, Colorado. Grandpa repeated the words, “Canon City,” and we all three thought about that spot for a moment…. Rich said, “The high school was right on Main Street in the middle of town, and the state penitentiary was on one end of town, the state poorhouse on the other. When you got out of school, you didn’t know which one you were going to end up at.” He chuckled and I sensed he’d told this joke more than once over the decades. But then he got more serious: “That was Depression times. Not much in the way of jobs.”

After a pause, Grandpa said, “What was your lifetime work?”

Rich said, “Highway engineer.” Grandpa and I both nodded, thinking about this information….

I left soon after and went back to the house to watch game six of the NBA Eastern Conference Finals. The Heat defeated the Celtics, which is what I wanted to happen.