Old Friends by Tracy Kidder

Author:Tracy Kidder [Kidder, Tracy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780795337697
Publisher: RosettaBooks
Published: 2014-05-20T07:00:00+00:00

12

“Dad? How’s Earl Duncan doing?” Ruth asked Lou upstairs in the room.

“Well, I went down to see him the other day, and he was doing fine. Then I went down yesterday and the nurse said he wasn’t feeling well, so I didn’t go in.”

“Oh,” said Ruth.

Joe changed the subject. The subject was the weight that Joe couldn’t lose, in spite of diet Jell-O and long rides on the bike.

Lou, from his seat by the window, said, “The best exercise, Joe, is—”

Joe sat up and said, “Pushing yourself away from the table. Jesus Christ, my grandfather said that.”

Lou made a pantomime of shrinking back in his chair and swallowing his last words. Then he smiled and said, “I’m quoting your grandfather.”

“And his grandfather told him!”

Lou’s thoughts were already elsewhere. He had heard that three oranges cost a dollar.

“Jesus Christ! Three oranges for a dollar?” said Joe.

“I can’t believe what Dave was telling me about coffee,” said Lou. “Three dollars a pound.” He shook his head.

“Well,” said Joe, “we don’t know what real life is. We’re in a nursing home.”

The price of things was one of Lou and Joe’s continuing subjects. They agreed—vehemently sometimes, as if they were arguing—that the price of things nowadays proved they were superannuated. In the real world a pound of coffee cost almost as much as Lou had once earned in a week. There was no point in trying to keep track of such a crazy world. In agreement with Joe on that point, Lou got his cane and headed downstairs for Current Events. “See ya late-ah, Joe.”

In the activity room every Friday, for about half an hour, the activities aide Rita read aloud articles from the regional newspapers. The turnout was usually thin. It would have been thinner if the Forest View staff hadn’t routinely rounded up four or five demented residents and sent them down to hear the news. This was a way for the staff to get some respite, and was perhaps a silent protest against the general lack of activities designed for Linda Manor’s demented. Zita, the gray-haired woman who paced the halls and tried to pluck flowers from the carpet, had already fallen asleep in her chair. The former inner-city schoolteacher was trying to read a newspaper upside down. The tiny Fleur, the woman who was always wanting to call her mother on the phone, asked the room in general, “We havin’ a party or somethin’?” A couple of able-minded women were there. They were regulars. Lou and Joe’s neighbor Hazel asked the aide to read all of the local obituaries. “The Irish comics,” Hazel called them. Being Irish herself, she was entitled. She smiled sadly, hearing a couple of familiar names. To outlive one’s contemporaries is, after all, a species of accomplishment. Lou was the only man there, as usual, and once the obituaries were read and the demented residents had fallen into attentive but puzzled-looking silences, he and the aide carried on, the aide reading the news and Lou offering commentary.

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