Saturday, August 2

Over the last couple of days, Tommy has been talking more, and about more things that are going on in his life. In phone conversations with Steve and Janis, he now listens and responds to their questions for two or three minutes.
Yesterday evening after dinner, we made our way to the nursing facility's one outdoor porch, which is at the far end of the long-term nursing ward (which is quite large, with 60 "residents"). On the porch were three residents, a man and a woman in wheelchairs and one with a walker, all of them smoking. The man in the wheelchair ended up telling us his very tragic life story, with long pauses followed by, "my brain has lapses...it's very embarrassing." His body, too, was wracked, like a marionette with a half-dozen broken joints. A local boy, he'd been out joyriding with two buddies; they were 17, three months from graduation, drunk. When they hit a banked curve at 70 mph that was marked 35, the driver lost it and they went end over end. Six months later, after he woke up, he spent three months at Woodrow Wilson rehab in Staunton, Va. ("where the Nascar guys go," he added, which sent a chill up my spine). That was in 1971. He is now 54. The other two people on the porch also had been leading normal lives until car crashes changed everything forever. The woman had hit a deer. Life is so weird. Coming home from this place just the other evening, at the perilous left-hand turnoff from Rt. 113 onto the road into Dagsboro, I was stopped at the red light, and another car was stopped in the slow lane of the highway; and, to our amazement, a tractor-trailer truck barreled between us through the one unoccupied lane and then, after continuing on, weaving a little, it pulled up on the right-hand shoulder. The light was still red while all this happened. I looked at the couple in the other car and we just shook our heads. He must have dozed off. Close call. For us.
When Tommy and I got back to his wing after the porch visit, I asked him if he felt like he'd had a good day. Yes, he had, he told me. What was the high point?, I asked. "Listening to that boy down there," he said, pointing toward the residents' ward. "It really makes you think," I said. "Sure does," said Tommy.