Rose died for awhile.

I just found out from one of the older residents that the limestone that the old Montgomery County court house, downtown, is built of came from the quarry under ‘my’ lake back in the 1800’s.

Rose is in the hospital and everybody has a story.  I’m confining my information to what I know is true.  She lives around the corner from me in 206 and borrowed a postage stamp from me a couple weeks ago.

She has been depressed since her sister died in the spring.  She recently was diagnosed with some kind of cancer and won’t take her medicine because it makes her sick.  She wants to die. She has had some less lucid moments in the past week where she believes that she and her family were going to be burned at the stake on December 30^th.  She has also taken to strolling behind her walker in the snow, in the median of Wilmington Avenue which is a large arterial thoroughfare.

Yesterday at 5.30 pm Rose jumped into the path of a moving car around the corner on Patterson Road and was killed.  She was clinically dead when the medics arrived.  They brought her back in some fashion after she was loaded and she’s now in Miami Valley Hospital with three serious fractures of something or other, head trauma, two severe concussions and extensive everything else..  When she is conscious she vows that she will do it right the next time.  She likely will.

The woman driving the car, who was not cited, has been left with nights of terrifying dreams and some kind of early meltdown from all this.  So would I.  Rose can have visitors if we lie about being family and then only for 5 minutes at a time.  She is 72 years old and a tall girl.

Tomorrow is New Year’s Eve and I am going to try to pry a trashy 20-year-old free for an evening of fudge and hors d’ oeuvres with the old ladies and gentlemen here.  Maybe the music will drown out the shriek of brakes.  Ta!

Smell That ??

It’s a couple days after Christmas and they tell me it’s going to warm up for New Years.  These are the same weather people who told me that Christmas was coming in on the heels of a gigantic winter storm.  New York was fooled right?  We will see. 

There are prints of human shoes on the lake ice, walking and skidding.  I think that’s ok if you trust the ice over 80 feet of water.  That’s an old quarry pit down there.  If  somebody dives in, I will have a front row seat to watch Emergency Services roar in and haul them out.  I will take pictures, my right knee limits my ability to rescue people these days.

I watched the nightly news this evening while I was eating supper.  I only watch it for something to do while I’m scarfing down the dish of the day.  It’s on a tray on my lap and I can’t really do a good book and eat at the same time.  But I think I am going to get a music stand to put the book on anyway.  The commercial news features lots of video and talking heads which are supremely useless to me because I can still remember how to make up my own mind about things.  The PBS news stations seem to grind down a 10-year rut of apologizing for Islamic people and their culture and religion.  I probably could get more intelligent programming watching The Simpsons. 

Payday is soon and I will be stocking up on some Estleman books and some Arnaldur Indridasson – fine bloody murder items and excellent reading for a good night’s sleep.  Also a bottle of Tabac by Maurer and Wirtz of Germany because the current bottle is just fumes, and fumes don’t create pheremones, don’t you know.  Prada would be better but that will have to wait until I win the lottery.  And some of the girls I run around with now and then still respond to diesel oil so there.  They are cheap dates too and live in trailers.  Ta!

Competition

On Monday mornings a truck from the Kroger Company delivers several trays of day-old specialty breads, rolls, English muffins and a large box of donuts and pastries to this place where I live.  The driver puts all this on the big table in the library and leaves.  And the fighting spirits from eleven floors of humanity gouge their way to their fair share.  There is one woman from the seventh floor who looks like a butchy prison guard and wears her muscular fatness behind a wide black leather belt.  We call her The Prison Guard.  And there is a guy who is the head of the Lakewoods Senior Citizens Club who is bipolar and doesn’t like to take his medicine on donut days.. 

There are several other fighting spirits and they all go for the donut box at once without a word, elbowing each other in the ribs and the nose and left breasts.  If you look at the remains of the donut box after they’re gone you see fragments of icing and broken corners of Long Johns and you know that forty people at once have been digging for their favorite sweeties.  One morning at 7 a.m. when I was going out, I met a grossly obese woman from Texas sagging over the sides of her electric go cart and asked her if she were waiting that early for the donut delivery.  “Yes,” she said, “I sure as hell don’t want any of those other bitches getting my donuts.”

Fortunately my sole interest is specialty breads which are ignored and mostly untouched and  I get a couple loaves of multi-grain Home and Hearth, or a couple dainty batards full of sunflower seeds each week and I haven’t bought any bread since I’ve been here.  I was remarking to a friend that many older people have refined their tolerance of others to a great degree as they’ve aged.  I don’t think any of them are at the big table in the Library on Monday mornings. Two friends and I are attending with cameras next week.  Ta!