Sunset At Springhouse

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.