Three Totally Unrelated Topics

Topic #1: Happy Punctuation Day! ¡Feliz Día de la Punctuación! What is punctuation day? Well, it's a day to honor all sorts of wonderful things: ampersands, commas, umlauts and diéreses (which are actually the same thing...just in different languages), tildes, colons, semi-colons, dashes, and those wonderful accent marks. When you see a punctuation mark today, please thank it for all it does for the written word!

Note that I put a comma after "dashes" and before "and". That was hard to do. I was taught that there was never a comma before the "and" in a list. In recent years, however, an English teacher colleague informed me that the sacred rule had been changed. It hurts, but I now insert that comma!

Topic #2: I Can't Zumba! Zumba is a somewhat new form of exercise involving relatively simple dance/exercise set to Latin Music. There is even a "Zumba Gold" for seniors or people desiring an easier workout. For the obvious reason---I don't have a dance bone in my body--I've never attended a Zumba class. So now, in their great wisdom, the exercise gurus have come up with a Zumba-Aqua class. I love the day and time of the class, but I simply cannot dance...not on land and especially not in the water! She has us "shimmy" our shoulders. We're supposed to stick out our hips with a push. She expects us to do one rhythm with our hands and another with our feet.

I feel like a complete idiot and have completely given up. While she has the group shimmying and shaking, I just do my jumping jacks and cross-country skiing and hope that no one notices. Unfortunately, I know they DO notice.

Topic #3: Mort died yesterday. Mort was one of the people that I have gotten to know at Rosewood. He was one of the few ambulatory residents and moved quickly just using the walker for balance. He looked a bit like the old guy who did the fast dance commercial for Six Flags. My mom called him "the penguin" because he wore a white cap with a black jacket and sweat pants that bunched up around his ankles. One of the first memories I have of Mort was watching him dance with another ambulatory resident at a Halloween party last year. The joy on both their faces was palpable, as were the expressions on all those unable to dance but remembering their dancing days.

Watching Mort dance was his "girlfriend" Frances who used a wheelchair. Mort and Frances were always together, deep in conversation. Mort was very solicitous of Frances. Then Frances developed dementia of some sort and very rapidly lost her conversational and social ability. Soon she was moved to the "assisted" dining room. Mort often sat with her there as she became less and less able to communicate with him. Frances died about a month ago. Even a casual glance showed that Mort was desolate. It was sad to see him wandering the halls alone. Mort had a heart attack yesterday morning and died quickly.

Today's death notice mentions his dear wife to whom he was married for "56 wonderful years." Just as Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O'Connor has publicly supported her Alzheimer's stricken husband's romantic relationship at his nursing home, I hope that Mort's wife was able to support her husband's need for an important friendship with a woman at his nursing home. Confusing morality here....but I just can't see this as a simple black or white morality issue.

In spite of living in a group situation, life is so lonely for nursing home residents and there is so little affectionate touch. How lovely that Mort and Frances could benefit from a warm, caring relationship while living in the nursing home.