A humorous piece on nursing home life.

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The only true thing about the name of Shady Valley Rest Home was that it was shady and not because it was surrounded by Oaks, but because the owners billed the government enough so the budget was met, the high salary for the CEO-owner was paid, and there were bonuses in cash to elected officials who were board members. The place was mostly clean (unless one looked in corners or under furniture); it certainly smelled clean with all the Glade plug-ins. Truth be told, a plug-in wasn’t going to completely cover the urine, farts, or vomit. What it did was take the smell down a notch.

People rested at the home because tax dollars paid the jacked up pill prices to big pharmacy, several thousand percentage points higher than the Chinese production cost to manufacture them. The pills kept the retired folks in an alternate reality. Contrary to the assertions made in Soylent Green, modern civilization hadn’t quite reached the point where we could ethically allow our retirees to choose a method of euthanasia; we simply let them sit on the cliff, their legs dangling, until they toppled over on their own.

When Reg was younger, he loved Jack Nicholson in One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest; he never dreamed he’d lived it. A former educator of educators with a high and mighty Ed.D., he awoke early, dressed, and was in the hallways, spit-spot, as Mary Poppins would have said, before the 7am morning crew arrived. He checked behind the cleaning crew, but what he really enjoyed most about Shady Valley was the bulletin boards in the hallways, making sure the border was stapled and even more important, making sure the air currents from the HVAC hadn’t blown the thumbtacked motivational posters off the board. He even made certain the weekly activities (piano time, dominos, stretches to old Richard Simmons VHS tapes, nutritional lectures, etc.) were up to date and accurate. He greeted the few guests who stopped by, mostly a priest, preachers, or volunteer do-gooders who offered a comfort that was more recitation, and put his Education degrees to good use by lining up those who could make it to the cafeteria for breakfast. He walked the breakfast line of patients, smoothing wisps of hair and making sure collars on their pajamas were straight. Irene, the phlebotomist, who many of the male patients thought was a vampire, said to one of the nurses: “Son of a bitch was crazy at the college when I had him for education then and he’s even crazier now. He gave me a C, but it's that damned Algebra teacher down the hall that sent me to the technical college. She gave me a F.”

True, Thelma Lu, as her friends at Shady Valley referred to her, (to her, they were not friends, but colleagues, which caused eye rolls and shaking of heads from them) was quick to announce all things math spontaneously at any given time, as if she had some undiagnosed form of Tourette’s. If someone mumbled, singular, double, or triple phrases or sentences that struck her in a certain way, she might point and yell at her Shady Valley colleagues: “Monomial. Binomial. Polynomial.”

Sam, a retired Army veteran who’d been in South Korea, would announce to his table: “Who in the hell ever used Algebra after college? Useless, I tell you. Useless.” Sam might get a nod or two, but mostly the troops at breakfast were spooning runny eggs and focusing on getting them up to and inside their mouths before their trembling hands dropped them on the table, in their laps, or on the floor. Thelma Lu particularly liked the geometrical angles of the tile squares and was sure not to step on the lines. Whether this came from her Math background or was simply a childhood rhyme memory about breaking her mother’s back was unclear. Many days, Thelma Lu still had conversations with her mother. Before her partner had brought her to Shady Valley, she mostly sat in a recliner to ease feet and leg swelling and posted positive memes for her few hundred friends, or connections rather, on Facebook. The connections who knew her thought it was ironic and wondered if she posted them because she’d given up the positives of Algebra for memes or if she was trying to find something more positive at the end of her negative journey.

Sometimes, patients watched the television in the lobby after breakfast and before their mid-morning naps, lunch, and after nap activities in the afternoon. It seemed a lot of them enjoyed watching reruns of The Price is Right with Bob Barker. They didn’t know they were reruns, that the cars offered up as prizes were thirty, maybe forty years old, and that Bob Barker was older than them and had never gone to a rest home like Shady Valley because he had more money than all of them combined. Irene the vampire had read in a tabloid that he could afford the few pills and vitamins he needed to take and he didn’t need plug-ins either; he breathed salt air and watched waves of the Pacific Ocean. He didn’t even need a Neti-pot. Barker’s comment to Happy Gilmore in the film proved the philosophy of capitalism is accurate after all: the price is right, bitch.

By Niles Reddick

From: United States

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