Circumstances led my father to St. John’s Nursing Home. His room overlooks Frederick Olmstead’s Highland Park. The glass conservatory is a stone’s throw from his window. I opened that window to let the bird sounds in but all I got was traffic so I found a website with loon and wood duck sound samples and played them for my dad. I left the window open all night in hopes the traffic would die down. It’s been so warm here that next year’s cherry blossoms are already in bloom.
The home is sort of open plan. People on hospice are next door to multi-year residents. Dementia patients wander the halls and some of them do so many laps of the halls each day they are bound to live forever. The staff leads groups of people to the tv room so one person can keep an eye on the lot. They call the floor a “neighborhood” and there are common areas for eating or playing cards. These photos are under a clear plexiglass clipboard in the game room. They were arranged just so one day, scattered on the table top the next, and then right back in place today. They creep me out and I plan to ask the staff about them.
2 Comments
I’m sorry to state the obvious but doesn’t anyone care that there is a picture of Charles Manson on display? That is beyond weird.
Nursing homes can be interesting places, as I learned when my stepfather came into the need to live there his last year-and-a-half (he passed December 2014, 2015). Not all grim. But Manson? WTF!