The cliché is that
the new year is a time of renewal, but an ending is on my mind this week. A few
months ago I concluded a 12-year run visiting residents of Springhouse of Westwood,
an assisted living facility about a five-minute drive from my house.
One of the
questions on last month’s Abbott-Ries holiday quiz noted the end of this particular
era, and I chronicled in a previous blog post how I came to start spending an
hour or two at Springhouse most Mondays nights for more than a decade. Briefly,
I’d been looking for a volunteering opportunity. I proposed watching Jeopardy! with whoever was in the TV area
at 7:30 and jawing with those “night owls” until 9 pm or so. I ended up forming
some nice friendships. I outlasted a few waves of very old women (and a couple
of guys). Then, finally, I stopped when the last wave ebbed to permanent
high tide.
It was time for me
to go, anyway. When I started visiting Springhouse in 2000, assisted living
was, as the term suggests, a place for relatively healthy but frail seniors to
live somewhat independently, albeit it with the assistance of trained onsite care
staff. By the time I left, however, the living was muddled and circumscribed, the
assistance intensive. Many if not most residents now are somewhere in the
throes of dementia or Alzheimer’s and require the watchful eyes and helpful
hands of private aides employed by their families. With the last of my friends now
gone, were I to show up at 7:30 on a future Monday night, there might be at most two
or three residents snoozing in their wheelchairs in front of the TV. Were they even
to wake and exchange greetings with me, back-and-forth conversation would not follow,
and they would not remember me the next week.
But, enough
background. What I want to do today is devote a paragraph or so to each of my
most memorable lost Springhouse friends. I wish you could’ve met them, because
they all were enriching in some way. I don’t know what any of them were like in
their prime of life. By the time I knew them, their health, memories, and, in
most cases, spirits all were on a downward slope. Still, we enjoyed each
other’s company, shared some laughs, staved off mortality with banter. That may
not be much in the wide scheme of things. But it’s not nothing.
Marianthe Mellonas,
who wore her heritage like a queen’s raiment, called herself the Greek
Ambassador. She and her late husband had owned a restaurant near Georgetown. (Guess
which cuisine.) She was eulogized at St Sophia, the sprawling Greek Orthodox
church on Embassy Row, for her tireless fundraising decades earlier that literally
had helped get that structure off the ground. She was big-hearted, but she loathed
at least two people in the world: then-president George W Bush, who she dismissed
as a “big dummy,” and Springhouse’s other alpha female of her era, the
sometimes-imperious Augusta Hixon.
Augusta, for her
part, generally referred to Mrs Mellonas—it would have bucked diplomatic
protocol to have addressed the Greek Ambassador by her first name –as “that
woman.” As in, “I don’t understand what that woman’s problem is! I’m always
sociable with her!” Well, she wasn’t really. But it’s also true that civility
toward Augusta did seem Greek to Mrs
Mellonas. Those two were like oil and vinegar. Augusta was a piece of work. She
was interesting, opinionated, meticulous about her appearance, loved her
family, and seemed determined never to fall into disrepair. Indeed, when her
end ultimately came, well into her 90s,
it was fast. There was no slide. Just a quick plummet.
Phyllis Lynn and
her late husband had raised their three boys in an attractive but not showy
house off Massachusetts Avenue, near the District line, and had educated them
all at the exclusive St Albans School on the National Cathedral grounds. There
was nothing patrician about the woman I knew, though. She told me her friends
always had called her “Philly.” Somehow I always could make her laugh, and her
laughter was full-throated and joyous. After her memorial service at the St
Albans Chapel, one of her middle-aged “boys” told me she’d said more than once,
“If I had another son, I’d want him to be just like Eric.” He frankly sounded
more threatened than complimentary when he told me, as if he feared I’d be named
sole beneficiary in her will. But the tribute warms me to this day, even if though
I feel I did little to earn it. Philly didn’t know the half of me. But I’m glad
the part she did know pleased her so much.
Jeanne Davis had
served as Rachel Carson’s executive assistant when the latter was researching
and writing Silent Spring, the 1962
book that is credited by many with having kick-started the modern environmental
movement. Jeanne loved poetry and literature and flowers and the vacation home
on the St Lawrence River where her family gathered annually. She even invited
me there once, but as it turned out she’d made her own last visit by then. Her
beloved son Burnie later moved her to a nice facility in Charlottesville after
he got a job in administration at the University of Virginia. I visited her there
a couple of times. On both occasions she greeted me warmly and treated me as a
friend, even though by then she had no recollection I’d actually been one.
Ruth Monk was that
rare Springhouser who would join me in talking back to the TV during Jeopardy! “Ruthie is smart!” Mrs
Mellonas often exclaimed. And she was. But she scoffed at that notion,
characterizing herself as a simple housewife from “Missoura.” Her daughter had
been a prominent US Attorney during the Clinton administration whose name often was
the news. But when I met her for the first time in a funeral home chapel in
northern Virginia, she seemed exactly her unassuming mother’s child. Ruth was
91 when she died, having lived at Springhouse an astounding 13 years and having
never, seemingly, had a bad day or complaint in the world.
Ralph Patton was in
a wheelchair and greatly debilitated by Parkinson’s disease by the time I met
him. Still, he always enjoyed showing me scrapbooks of articles and clipping
related to his evasion of German forces during World War II with the help of
the French resistance after his Air Force plane was shot down. Ralph gave me a
video titled Evade, in which he and
other men who had survived similar perils discuss their wartime experiences
against a backdrop of historical footage. In the video, Ralph appears as a coal
company executive of perhaps 60. I’d asked him once about a rival coal company
whose shoddy safety record had provoked a recent mine tragedy. “They always
were the worst,” he said, in the same tone I imagined he'd once spit out the word
“Nazis.”
I no longer remember
Richard’s last name, and I wouldn’t share it here anyway, for a reason that’s about to
become obvious. Richard, in a word, was a drunk. A charming drunk—a raconteur
and ladies man—but a drunk nonetheless. I heard stories of run-ins with staff and confiscated flasks, but somehow
his breath remained the same throughout our acquaintance. Inebriation seemed to
agree with him, until his liver, inevitably, gave out. Richard always was in a
good mood. I met his daughter during his final hospital stay, at Sibley in DC.
She spoke of him in a shrugging, “What’re ya gonna do?” way as he lay there
sleeping. She said he’d been a good dad on balance. Even if his balance often
was unsteady.
I knew two Goldes
at Springhouse. Both were Jewish, as the name suggests, but Golde Mullen had
been married to an Irish-American who’d played in the National Basketball
Association way back when it was as white as it is black today. She missed San
Francisco, her longtime home where she’d feasted on a steady diet of adult
education at a school to which I later would send a memorial donation. She was
determined to keep her mind active, but she bemoaned all the New Yorker articles she’d just read and
already couldn’t recount. Golde Kaufman, meanwhile, loved recalling her married
life in rural Pennsylvania. She was warmed by visits from her husband, Morris,
who lived independently nearby and still drove. I ran into him a few times at
Golde’s last residence, a nursing home where I also got to know one of her neighbors—a very
chatty legless woman.
My triumvirate of
friends in the final Springhouse years were Sylvia Friedman, Mildred Levin and
Helen Shaffer. Sylvia was quite feeble and could barely see or hear, but her hearty
appetite impressed even the dyspeptic Mildred, who wasn’t impressed by much. Strangely,
the near-blind Sylvia always knew when I was picking the scab on my leg, and
told me to knock it off. Besides food, she loved hearing about our pets. Her son
Frank used to call her from Philadelphia every evening, and her daughter
Esther, who lived locally, doted on her. Like Phyllis Lynn, Sylvia really liked
to laugh, and the cornier my jokes, the better. Lynn and I very much enjoyed talking
with Esther at Springhouse holiday gatherings. I never met Frank, but he
sounded like a very kind man when I occasionally picked up his mother’s ringing
telephone.
Mildred and Helen
were best buddies, perhaps because they complemented each other in their utter dissimilarity.
Helen was as sunny as Mildred was cloudy. Helen’s eyes lit up when she ate
chocolate, reminisced about learning to dance at Arthur Murray with her late
husband, or so much as thought about corn on the cob. As a young,
not-yet-married woman, she’d played country music on local radio in her
family’s band. Seventy years later, she still spoke with pride and awe about
the fact that she’d once signed autographs for bona fide fans.
While Helen might at
some point have sung the tune “Keep on the Sunny Side,” Mildred’s outlook was
antithetical to that sentiment. In Mildred’s world, most everything about today
stunk. Yesterday always had looked better. Except, of course, that if you’d
have caught her yesterday, that
would’ve been the offending day (week, year, decade). She’d never married and seemed
to have no friends besides Helen and Helen’s daughter Carolyn. The farthest Mildred
ever had traveled was to California, but she hadn’t liked it much. Ditto
Florida. She’d had an office job in Philadelphia that was OK, but everything
since retirement had been pretty awful. Springhouse was the worst. Her doctors
were useless. I couldn’t even start to talk about our cats without Mildred blurting,
“I don’t like cats.” Her sister had lived up the hall at Springhouse, but
predeceased her. Mildred couldn’t for the life of her understand why her niece
wasn’t getting Springhouse shut down for a litany of alleged infractions.
In the early days
of our friendship, I made the mistake of trying to cheer up Mildred, which was
useless, and sometimes defending her targets, which was pointless. But once I
realized that my optimal role was simply to commiserate—to tsk, sigh and resignedly
shake my head at all the right times—my value to Mildred soared. She
never exactly seemed glad to see me when I first arrived in the evening, but by the time we
parted each Monday night she unfailingly thanked me for coming, wished me a good week, and
asked to give Lynn her regards. Sometimes the greatest kindness you can pay
someone, Mildred taught me, is to be his or her ally in bleakness. For some
people, it turns out that, misery genuinely does
love company.
The last time I saw
Mildred was the millionth time she’d complained
bitterly, “This place is going downhill.” I nodded grimly, dutifully. Maybe
so, but as it happened, Mildred went downhill, and bottomed out, even faster.
I’ve left out a few
noteworthy bit players in my Springhouse saga—such as the one-time beauty queen
who often danced on roller skates back in the '40s and had a photo to prove it, and the dementia-afflicted widow who directed
me to transform a smattering of old newspaper clipping into a detailed biography
of her late husband. But the individuals I’ve written about today were the Springhousers
I'l remember most. I called them
“enriching” at the outset of this post. That might seem an overstatement in
some cases, but it’s not. Trust me, it’s not.
