Nursing Home Halloween

Once upon a time, not so long ago in my family’s history, my parents were already separated, and Mum was working three part-time jobs to support us. We already knew quite a few of the patients, we went there after school and played with the patients until Mum was finished with work and all four of us walked home together. 

 

Often we would stop at the house and get our silver-and-black Alsatian (German Shepherd), Tina and take her to the nursing home, where she would make the rounds, visiting with every patient that responded to her presence.  I still remember her sitting by the side of someone confined to a wheelchair and resting her head on their lap, they would beam and stroke her gently.

 

I think the supervisors turned a blind eye to our visits and our dog’s because the visits became something for the patients to look forward to.  When we would arrive in the dayroom, there would standing room only of the folks that came to called Grandma or Grandpa, play with ‘grandkids’, and pet the dog instead of sitting in their rooms waiting to pass over.

 

One of my personal favourites was Grandma Buddha, with her crown of silver braids that wrapped around her head twice, she would chatter blissfully away in Hungarian and I would sit next her nodding and smiling.

 

I learned my first word in Hungarian when our cat Toulouse followed us all the way to nursing home, and in as well.  Grandma Buddha took one look at Toulouse’s handsome steel blue and silvery white markings and his wide bright golden yellow eyes, and began calling, “Macska!”

 

Toulouse found visiting the nursing home to be delightful, He, too, like Tina, would go from patient to patient, and be petted and called by the names of cats long-since gone on to be rosebushes and memories.

 

Halloween came and we needed costumes for school, as well as for trick-or-treating.  We didn’t have the money to buy the costumes so Mum got creative. I was Holly Hobbie, replete with the bonnet that Holly wore, brim stiffened with a paper grocery bag.

 

My brother Matt became a small, slender Frankenstein, who wheezed his way through school and trick-or-treating, before going to the hospital to get injected with Adrenaline, and then Susferin, before he and I stayed up all night, watching spooky movies and laughing at them.

 

Jim had the costume of the year, at the nursing home, at school and trick-or-treating.  Mum had gone through the nursing home’s bedding, and torn the poorest of the sheets into strips, she used these to wrap Jim, who was clad in pink long johns, left over from the year he went as a baby.

 

When Mum finished wrapping Jim he started walking down the hall in the Nursing Home, known as “Bare-A## Manor”, one of our favourite patients, Leila, took one look at Jim and pointed a long, slender chocolate coloured finger at him while going, “Oohh!  Oohh!  Oohh!  Oohh!!!  Babybabybaby…” 

 

Jim went over close to our friend and Leila patted his wrappings and murmured wordless distress for almost five minutes before she lost interest, and began trying to free herself to wander the halls in the altogether.