Topic: A Team

Author: Chris Dunn

I try to choke back the sobs as they come hard and heavy, one on top of the other. This fails to stop them, and simply results and adding that painful choking sound you often hear when kids cry too hard. Jim Wood seizes on the moment, “He’s having a baby! Everybody, get back.” To add to his gest, he leaps down in front of me on the bleachers, hands held out as if ready to receive the delivery. All around me on the members of my team burst out laughing. It stings, even worse because I really thought that Jim was my friend.

My first year playing SAY soccer was a whirlwind of emotions. Excitement, fear, and joy all had their part in my initial experience with this new sport. Things started out great, with the anticipation of a new endeavor joined with the nervousness brought on by new situations, new people. Who would be by coach? What kids from school would be on my team? Would we be any good? Would I? I, like most Americans in 1979, knew nothing of soccer, so I had no answers to any of these questions. Mainly, I was glad to simply be playing a sport where no one was throwing a rock at my head or driving it my way propelled at lethal velocity by an aluminum club. Catch it? Isn’t it enough to just avoid being killed by it?

Terry Cox was to be my first coach. I knew him as one of the life guards from the local pool, so he was already an authority figure I was used to listening to. “Don’t run! Cut the horse play! Sit!” His dread commands and fearful notice meant the cessation of summer fun for up to fifteen minutes at a stretch, but still I liked him. He seemed fair, and I rarely misbehaved. He kept the rough-housers off my back poolside, so I felt I could trust him to guard me against any sport-related peer bullying. Very little had changed. He wore a shirt now, but still punctuated his will with a shrill whistle’s scream. “Move up the field! Don’t bunch up! Shoot!”

I think there were maybe 6 teams in that first league, so I knew everyone on my team. They were mostly kids from school, with even a few I hadn’t seen since kindergarten. Billy, Jim, Ruben, Eddie, there were no real bullies, but with the exception of Daryl Gregory, they were all bigger than me. I was, until puberty, a small child - short in stature and tiny of build – a skinny, little kid far more suited to a library than a field. The only thing I had going for me, was I was low to the ground which gave me a tight turning radius. I lacked the size to box out on defense and the strength to kick very far, so Terry dropped both Daryl and I at center forward, pointed us toward the opposing goal with instructions to simply “go long”.

In retrospect, I don’t think Terry knew the first thing about soccer. He was probably just looking to supplement his non-Summer income and jumped at the opportunity presented by the Cincinnati Recreation Commission. Coach a few times and spend your Saturdays in the sun watching your kids run in circles for an hour… Easy money! I think he read a book on soccer, learned the positions and the basic strategy and set us loose. 

We were not good. We lost nearly every game. I never scored or came close to scoring, but it was fine. We had fun. Every game we gathered at our practice field and piled into Terry’s 70s era muscle car. We’d take a circuitous route to the field, a dozen boys stacked on top of each other and bursting out of the windows. We’d hoot and holler at everyone we’d pass. 

Our greatest game, Terry challenged us that if we won, he’d buy us all cokes at a local church festival happening next to the soccer field. We fought hard, scrapping with everything we had. At one point, Jim – not the goalie that day - swatted a ball out of the goal with his fist. I saw the obvious handball, but the ref didn’t. We managed a 2-2 tie, but Terry still bought us the sodas. 

1 – 12 – 1. Not the best record, but I was excited to come back. 

Next year, our team was largely the same, but the coach was different. This time George Snyder had taken over. His son, Cary, was on the team, and he, like everyone else, was huge. I had yet to hit a growth spurt of any kind, and my quick cuts no longer caught anyone by surprise. I was banished to alternate and spent most of my time riding the bench, which was fine by me. Everyone was so big now, stronger and faster, and so much more serious. One time a ball struck my arm in the penalty box and the resultant penalty shot left us tied. Cary punched me in the offending limb after the match. “Damn it! If it wasn’t for Dunn, we would’ve won!”

Our practices centered around our fitness. Coach would run us. We’d start and end every practice jogging a circle around the four backstops that ringed Becker field. Whoever came in last on the opening jog had to do 4 more rotations and essentially spent the entire practice running. Most times the ignominious honor fell to Billy Gustin. He was a heavyset kid, and while we worked at foot drills, he could typically be seen slow stepping it though his third rotation. “Pick it up, Billy!” 

I’ll be honest, I snickered at Billy’s fate more than once, all while trying to find a way to enjoy this new take on a pastime I had used to enjoy. Until the day Billy decided, he’d had enough and stopped showing. As the opening run began, and I lingered toward the rear with Darryl and no one else, it slowly dawned on me that I could very well be the one shuffling along the periphery for over an hour, my lungs burning and my legs aching. No fun, just work… All for a game, I no longer enjoyed. It kindled my competitive spirit, and I fought hard to shoulder Daryl aside, more than willing to have my friend endure torture in my stead. But try as I might, I was weak. I was small. In the last 20 yards, Daryl pulled away. As we crossed the line, I burst into tears. Coach Snyder couldn’t understand what I was crying about, and neither could my teammates. They stood around and joked at my misery while Coach Snyder just tried to get me to breathe normally.

In the end, I didn’t have to run the laps, and to their credit, no one on my team ever mentioned my breakdown again, but still it was clear, sports were not for me. I finished out the year, but I never went back.

Topic: A Scar

 A Scar

I have this shiny white scar on my left kneecap.  I got it over 30 years ago and it’s still there so I think they will bury me with it.  How I got that scar is not the story I want to tell today.  But I do want to talk about how the skin has kind of a rubbery feel to it and how if I were to sustain an injury again to my left knee in the same spot the flesh might not break open quite as easily as it did in 1988.  You see when your flesh scars the thick fibrous connective tissue makes your skin thicker, tougher. 

This morning I sustained a blow to the same spot where I had been struck only 2 years ago.  I found myself in my parents’ living room waiting for the hospice nurse to come out and confirm what I already knew, that my father had died.  It wasn’t the exact same hospital bed parked in front of the upright piano in the living room but it might as well have been.  It wasn’t my 74 year old mom’s lifeless body this time.  That time my father had sat on the opposite side of the bed from me as I told my mom it was okay for her to go, that she had done a good job, that she deserved to rest from her labors.  She had not fought death like he would.  As I told her to go dad had exclaimed, “No, no, don’t go.”  But she left quickly and the loss left me scarred.  

When my dad was diagnosed with metastatic prostate cancer in 2016 I thought it would progress quickly like mom’s cancer had done.  She had lived only 5 months post diagnosis.  Dad had held on for over 2 years.  She signed up for hospice care and died 2 days later.  

Dad fought death with a ferocity I have never witnessed in my 27 years as a nurse.  Thanksgiving morning it took two of us to help him walk the five or so steps from his bed to his lift chair.  But he ate a cheese danish from the North College Hill bakery and the first words out of his mouth when I woke him up were, “Sometimes life is so beautiful.”  

But while the turkey was still roasting his marked decline came on-he could no longer walk and I feed him his turkey and dressing.  When the hospice nurse told him he had started the dying process he refused to believe it, and asked if there wasn’t some physical therapy they could offer.  He couldn’t understand why he was so weak, why his legs had stopped working for him.  He stopped eating or drinking.  And then he stopped speaking or looking at us.  Dad clung to life with ragged breaths and long periods of no breaths at all.  We had at least half a dozen false alarms in his final week in which we gathered around the hospital bed in his living room and held his hand and said our goodbyes.  But in the end he waited until we had all gone to sleep to leave us.  He didn’t want to go.  

My voice broke a little when I called hospice to tell them he was gone.  Saying it out loud meant it was really happening again.  I had made sure the hospice nurse had brought me a syringe so I could remove his catheter.  I know they could have done that, but I wanted and needed something to do while we waited for the funeral home to come and take him.  

And now struggle with how I live without him.  I went to the grocery store yesterday night and cried in the bread aisle because I saw the loaves of Pepperidge Farm Hearty White, his favorite brand that I’d been bringing to his house once a week for the past two years since my mom died.  I tried to play Words with Friends and got weepy because he was at one time my best opponent in the game.  We usually had at least 25 games going at a time between us.  I’m not sure when I will be able to safely wear eye makeup again.  It took weeks after my mom died.  I never knew when some subtle thing would set me off and tears would flow washing all my makeup down my cheeks.  But I know life will go on.  I will go on.  I’ll wear mascara again.  I’ll shop for bread.  And I will kick ass in Words with Friends.  How do I know that I will heal?   Because I have the scars to prove it is possible.  

Scar

      Author: Aaron Collins

       

     Appendix 

      The latex gloved hand slowly presses into my side with unrestrained force and holds its position momentarily, only to release the pressure instantaneously, which ironically is when the real pain floods in, like the point of a knife driving into deeply embedded tissue under the skin. The doctor observes my yelp of despair and says, “Yep, it’s an Appendicitis.” This is probably the fifth time that little diagnostic test has been performed since getting admitted to the hospital five hours ago. I’m sitting in a small cubicle with a curtain as a door for privacy in the ER of Good Samaritan Hospital. Each time a new doctor or whoever comes in it seems like they do the same test and each time after I scream in pain they say the same thing, “Yep it’s probably an appendicitis”. After the longest day of my life, a doctor finally gives the green light and decides it’s time to do surgery. The procedure is called an Appendectomy and it’s pretty simple. If the appendix gets inflamed, you run the risk of it literally exploding inside of you and killing you which is why it’s a priority to get that shit out of there as soon as possible. I’m just now seeing a parallel to Ridley Scott’s Alien. I moan in pain as my ten year old self is rushed through the florescent lit hallways in a wheel chair. And for a moment I see myself. I feel like I’m watching the situation as an observer and I’m terrified but then the strangest feeling: I feel somewhat exhilarated in the fact that something is happening to me. All those movies I’d seen where people undergo medical procedures in a place like this; all the episode of ER my parents used to watch. I was one of those people now. I’d have to stay home from school. My parents would have to take care of me and show my tender, loving care and nurturing. I would have an excuse to lay on my butt and rest and watch movies all day long. I could say, “yeah they put me down and cut me open!” And to this day it still kind of excites me to tell the story and to show my scar on the bottom right portion of abdomen. 

Topic: A Scar

Author: Chris Dunn

“No, it was the Tower of London,” James insists. “Arms and armor.”

“You could not be more wrong,” I protest. “It was Artists of the Baroque period. Rubens and Caravaggio. Giant pictures of curvy women. I remember distinctly.”

“You were in the back seat of a VW Rabbit, and Christy hit a patch of ice-”

“You’re right about the car, but there was no ice. It had just started raining, and you told Christy – who was driving on her learner’s permit, as I recall – to go easy around that big turn up by the WPA wall. She took her foot of the gas and put it on the break, and that’s what caused the whole thing. Technically, it’s all your fault.”

This is not the first time James and I have had this argument. James is one of my oldest and dearest. He sat two seats behind me in our Freshman homerun at Roger Bacon High School, but the common denominator of our shared nerdom bypassed Dan Floyd’s superfluousness and we quickly became fast friends. I’ve got lots of stories with him in them. The time we bowled into Lake Michigan… Nervous parties with friends of friends… Drunken wanderings through the streets of Chicago… Cooking popcorn in the toaster… The list is endless, but this story concerns how I got this scar on my shin, and it starts like this…

I’m standing in a large gallery - you know, with those high, echoey ceilings you find only in museums – staring at a naked woman whose curvy buttocks are easily bigger than my head. All around me are similar works by various baroque artists, but I’m having a hard time enjoying it – even to the point I typically enjoy art, which isn’t much – because I’ve got a wad of paper towels stuffed inside my sock and blood oozing into my shoe. I flag for James’ attention and when he glances my way I mouth, “Can we go?” while tapping my calculator watch. No dice. We came all this way, and there are still another five or six galleries to see, which – thanks to the nature of artistic periods – all contain paintings that look relatively the same. With a melodramatic sigh, using my whole body so James can't claim he missed my frustration, I give up and go looking for a bench. This is all his fault!

I mean, technically his kid sister Christy was driving. That was part of the deal. We could take one of the Geers’ family cars, provided we let Christy use the opportunity to get some practice in for her driving test. We agreed, jokingly teasing at the great risk we were taking, putting our life in the hands of a ditzy girl. Then again, who was I to tease anyone? I wouldn’t get my driver’s license until many years later, and under shady circumstances at that. The teasing was largely familial for James and maybe a bit flirtatious on my part. No one really thought anything would happen.

And nothing did. Not for the first 93% of the journey anyway. I sat crammed in the back seat of the VW while James gave directions and suggestions which his sister mostly followed and occasionally mocked. Then, just as we were approaching the Cincinnati Art Museum which resides on one of Cincinnati seven hills, namely Mt. Adams, it started to rain. The road up the hill is as curvy as a baroque woman’s backside including one major curve of nearly 200 degrees. As Christy approached the dangerous stretch of road, and I was distracted looking for the WPA plaque which adorns the adjacent, retaining wall, James cautioned his charge, “Now be careful. This spot can be tricky when it’s slick like this.” Christy dutifully removed her foot from the gas and placed it lightly on the break, but at just that instant a man appeared in the road waving his arms. Two cars had already failed to navigate the turn and their conjoined front ends sat sprawled across the middle of the road. The waving man was trying to warn us, and Christy complied by slamming on the breaks. The wheels locked, and we slid right past the flailing man – thankfully – and straight into the two wrecked vehicles. 

I was thrown against James’ seat - since I never could be bothered to wear a seatbelt when seated in the back. The VW bug – like most VW Bugs even in the late 80s - was old, and a small lever under the seat was missing the little rubber covering which was meant to keep the metal end from turning into a sharp protuberance during a collision. This small, round post with the sharp edges ran up my shin and then punched through my pants, my sock and my skin at the moment of impact, leaving a perfect, circular puncture wound about a half centimeter in diameter behind in its wake. 

The bug was totaled, and my injury was deemed too minor to bother the cops with. A tow truck arrived for the vehicle while Christy cried herself out of a ticket, and forgoing all reason, we went to show. I played it tough, limping up the hill to stuff my sock with paper towels while assuring my friends it was only a scratch. But the scar remained, and the story was told for years as a cautionary tale about the dangers of young driving and the hazards of circumstance.

As I prepared to type this tale out for this week’s submission, I bared my leg before my sister.

“I can’t see anything,” she said.

Looking down, I couldn’t blame her. Other than an odd patch of slightly less hairy skin, there was nothing to see. Then, I messaged James to confirm that it was just us three in the car. He agreed we were a trio, but insisted there was a patch of ice and that the exhibit was of arms and armor and not the period where – as my art teacher had said – “Fat was where it was at!” But I remember the paintings, Christy’s scream, and the man’s flailing arms… The powerful impact as sudden deceleration pancaked me against the passenger seat... I see it all in my mind, as clear as the mark on my skin. Running my hand along the flesh, I can feel it. At least, I think that’s it…

Topic: A Show.

Topic: A Show

“We’re all born naked, and the rest is drag.”-RuPaul Charles

I attended my first drag show in the spring of 1986.  I was 21 years old and finishing up my junior year at Miami University.  My most serious boyfriend to date and I had broken up a couple months before and I was still struggling with the fallout and sense of failure from the breakup.  Ray, a guy I dated in high school, was living in Tampa, Florida with his boyfriend, Phillip.  We had stayed friends though the years, and he offered to let me stay at his place if we could make the 20+ hour drive to Florida.  Ray had come out to me tearfully on the phone a couple years prior.  He had composed a letter about his sexuality and I remember there was some phrasing in it indicating that he understood if I didn’t want to be his friend anymore now that his secret was out.  It made me sad that this was a very real fear for him, that he might be rejected simply for being himself.   And it still makes me sad that anyone has to face judgment, ridicule, and even discrimination today for the same reason.  

My friend Daryn agreed to ride down with me.  It was a sweet deal for him.  He got a spring break trip for free and I had someone fun to share the drive with.  Okay, and I had a crush on him too, but he wasn’t interested in anything more than friendship.  And that was okay.  Fresh from a bad breakup I thought what I needed most was a change in scenery.  

The second night at Ray and Phillip’s place they informed us we would be going to a club, a gay club.  I was entranced with the idea and felt pretty hip.  I had no idea what to wear and I can’t remember what I did end up wearing.  What I do remember was that there were very few women there, and the bartender said, “Sweetheart, are you lost?”  I told him I was there with my friends and motioned to the guys.  He nodded approvingly, as if in that case it was okay to be there.  It kind of reminded me of the way I felt many years later when I met my friend at a bar in which I was the only white person in the room.  I got a few stares that seemed to say, “What are you doing in here?” But once my friend came in and hugged me and made a joke about me being late, it seemed I was in and it was all good.   The bartender carded me before serving me a bottled wine cooler.  Yes, I’m embarrassed to say that was my drink of choice back then.  I also remember hundreds of men dancing. Together.  Men holding hands.  Men kissing.  I remember Whitney Houston’s “How Will I Know” the dance mix version blaring.  And I remember dancing till the sweat was rolling down my face.  Ray told me I should save some energy for the show.  The show?  What show?  “You’ll see,” he said.   

I don’t remember the drag queen’s name and I didn’t understand until halfway through the song that the performer was a man.  I just thought it was a beautiful woman in a glamorous gown lip syncing to a Tina Turner song.  I was so naive and midwestern they had to explain to me that this was a drag show and then they had to explain to me what it was.  There were about five performers total and each one did a couple numbers.  People went up and gave them tips.  I was too shy at the time to tip, but that was back then.  

And now I’m a 53 year old married lady with grown children, and I’ve been to dozens of drag shows.  Some are for charity-like The Rubi Girls-a troupe of amateur drag queens from Dayton, Ohio who have raised tens of thousands of dollars for AIDS research.  Some drag shows are just for fun at various clubs around where I live.  When I’m on vacation depending on the locale I look for a drag show.  I recently drove two hours to Columbus because my friend was having a Tupperware party hosted by a drag queen.  This week my husband and I went to Las Vegas for a medical conference for his work.  True to form I found a drag show, not just any drag show, but a review put on by stars from RuPaul’s Drag Race.  This was drag royalty, and we had purchased the VIP package which meant a photo-op with the cast after the show.  I was as excited as  I imagine as my sports-loving family and friends are when they get to meet their favorite player.  

Why do I love drag so much?  And I realize I don’t need to justify WHY.  No one says to my sister who’s a Reds fanatic, “Why do you love baseball so much?”  She just loves it cause she loves it.  But I was thinking about it last night after meeting the stars of RuPaul’s Drag Race.  I was so star struck and excited. Why do I love it? I think it’s an art form, an illusion.  And it’s fun.  The humor, the bawdiness, the banter between the emcee and the audience are all part of the draw.  And I always tip these days.  A drag queen will gladly take your money.  It doesn’t matter if you’re an old straight lady.  The tip is an endorsement, a way to show your appreciation for all the hard work it takes to complete the transformation.  It takes a lot of time and planning to dress up like a woman even when you were born a woman.  I appreciate drag even more in my older years because I have alopecia, medical hair loss, that has progressed over the years to the degree that I am totally bald on the top of my head.   If I go out in public without a wig I am sometimes referred to as “sir” even though I’m shorter than most men I know and my body type is decided round and female.  So I put my wigs and my makeup on every day because I want to look “like a girl”.  It makes me feel pretty.  When a drag queen loses her wig during a performance which sometimes happens accidentally but more often than not happens intentionally, I feel such a sense of solidarity with the performer.  I want to say, “Girl, I know.  I’m wearing my wig too and nobody knows.” I do a transformation every day of my life.  I’m getting ready for my own personal drag show when I leave my house.  And I guess we all do that to some extent.  Some transformations just take a little more effort.   

Topic: A show

Author: Chris Dunn

The lights are still up, and the crowd continues its slow, staggered entry, filing to their chairs or stopping to converse with discovered friends, already seated. Pre-show music rides above it all, setting the mood for the event to come. Others crowd the lobby area, checking the display for faces they know or have at least seen before. But me, I’m already seated. I have no need to chat with friends now. I’m busy, busy scanning the periphery of the house for telltale sign of trouble.

Unless you’ve worked a show, you won’t know what to look for. At a show, an emergency isn’t like a fire alarm. There aren’t bells and whistles, no screaming sirens, but you’ll know for certain that something has gone horribly awry, if you see someone dressed in black, wearing a headset, and walking fast. You don’t run. You never run. You stand bolt upright with a forced smile, and you do that quick, shuffly step. As soon as I see that, I know something isn’t right. A player has missed call or disappeared on a smoke break. A prop is out of place, or the curtain rope has snapped two feet from the ceiling. Look for it the next time you find yourself at the theater. The straighter the spine, the quicker the shuffle – the worse the issue at hand.

The first show my mother roped me into, I thought I’d get by just being the assistant director. You know, get my feet wet, test the waters see if showbiz was for me. But no, as tech week drew to a close, and I looked forward to returning to my normal gaming schedule, she came to me and asked, “Okay, so do you want to work sound or props?” She liked to lay traps like that. She was a lawyer in her previous life. Note how the questions seems to offer options, but they’re both options wherein – no matter what I decide – I’m doing something she wants. “Go home and play video games,” was not an option. And, to be honest, I was actually enjoying the production side of things. I wanted to see how the show ran after all our hard work.

First thing I learned about working the property, I was never actually going to get to see the show. Not like the audience would. I was viewing it from the side most of the time. That is when I wasn’t crawling behind the set to make the lightning effects or dealing with the sheer, amazing volume of liquid coming off the stage. It seemed like every scene they were drinking something. By the second show, I knew to have a lined trash can handy to dump everything into, in a vain effort at keeping my prop area as dry as possible.

Other than dealing with liquids and making sure every prop is where the actors expect it to be, I had about half dozen jobs during the performance. Now that doesn’t sound like a lot, but they were all very precise events. If the lightning doesn’t flash on the cue, then Abby, working the sound, can’t make the thunder. If you don’t cross the stage, before the inspector enters, you’ll be seen in your cross because the door to the manor is still standing open. When the actors flub a line or miss a cue, they always shake it off with a casual nonchalance, but when the crew messes up, it’s like you are part of a vast conspiracy to trip them up and embarrass them. Even the slightest slip, you’re going to hear about it.

And this show was cursed. We had a sick lead actress nearly passing out backstage. At one crucial point, I looked across the stage and noticed our soon-to-be, murdered, wealthy uncle was not standing in the wing awaiting his cue. After shuffling through the six-inch gap behind the back curtain (the door was open) and climbing into a spiral staircase from the very wrongest side (the set was built up against the staircase), I found him studying lines in the basement. He knew from the rod in my spine that he had fucked up! But the show’s. potential worst fuck up was mine.

Every night, the heroine of our tale was attacked offstage. A loud thump and a scream would proceed a flurry of action and concern on stage, and this effect was mine to create. “Just take the large suitcase, lift it up, and when Shannon screams, drop it.” Seemed easy enough and for the first two shows, it worked like a charm. The old suitcase was easily 9 cubic feet and filled with old clothes. It made a satisfying *whomp* every time it hit the ground. I have no idea how it played to the house, but backstage it was thunderous. Dropping the case, quickly became my favorite part, it was like I was in the show. It was my only line. Then, the third night, when the bag hit the stage, the old latches along the back gave out and lid separated completely, spilling a pile of unwanted, hand-me-downs all over the floor. Shannon’s scream was followed by a hopefully-silent, shocked inhalation, and – to its credit – my mind went immediately to work. “Okay,” I thought staring down at the shattered prop. “When does that thing need to be back on stage?”

Five minutes. Or less. At Shannon’s next entrance, she has to march out on stage WITH HER LUGGAGE and declare that she’s leaving the manor. Lucky for me, we were offstage, so no silent running was required, but it was still a mad dash of a sort, as I dropped to my knees with a tape gun and tried desperately to restore the shattered suitcase to some semblance of its former function. I got it sealed and taped shut, but when I looked around for the tape gun to add a second layer of security to my shaky, slapdash effort, the tape gun was missing! “Where is it?! I just had it! It has to be here!” All this panicked screaming was internal, of course, but in my head, I’m going mad. Shannon put a hand on my shoulder, “It’s fine. I’ll go easy with it. Relax. It’s going to be fine.” Then she hefted the flimsy repair job and marched out to face the audience.

I could do nothing but clench my teeth and stare, just waiting for the single strip of tape holding the massive case together to fail and flood the stage with my failure, but it holds. The scene concludes. No one’s the wiser. No one knows the razor’s edge a show runs along though its production. Not if the crew is doing its job. So, I watch them looking for signs of trouble, applauding thunderously in my mind when they succeed. Mustn’t disturb the show.

BTW, the tape gun was inside the suitcase.

Topic: Music

Topic: Music

I’ve spent over 25 years of my life working in nursing homes. My first nursing job was working nights as a floor nurse in a secured Alzheimer’s unit in 1991.  From there I moved into management and with my current work as a nursing home surveyor I spend a good chunk of my waking hours in a setting that a lot of people see as depressing.  But it’s not all bad.  

In 2014 I was working as the Director of Nursing for a skilled nursing facility in Cincinnati.  That fall a documentary called “Alive Inside” came out.  I went to opening night at the Mariemont Theater and had to share the space with about a dozen others.  It was just as well, cause I cried like a baby throughout the film, which shares the story of the “Music and Memory” movement in America’s nursing homes.  A social worker in New York got this idea that if you took an iPod Shuffle and loaded it with music from a nursing home resident’s past and you introduced that music back into that person’s life you could effect a dramatic change.  I left the theater inspired.  We had to try that at my nursing home.  

I convinced my boss to let me buy a few iPods.  Initially he felt that it was something the activity department should do, but they weren’t jazzed about it like I was.  I finally told him that if the facility didn’t want to pay for them, I’d buy them myself.  He relented.  

Our first “test subject” was a 86 year old lady named Shirley with end stage dementia.  She hadn’t spoken in years.  She was incontinent and had to be fed and dressed and bathed. After breakfast the aides would wheel her Geri chair, which is basically a big recliner on wheels into the lounge by the window.  She would people watch, at least that’s what it looked she was doing.  She seemed to follow passers-by with her eyes.  We had called her daughters to find out what her favorite genre of music was when she was young.  Gospel music was their answer given without hesitation.  “What’s her favorite song?” I asked.  I learned from the movie that this was a very important question, because the personalized playlist on the iPod had to be meaningful to that person.  You couldn’t just pick some popular songs that were age appropriate, because maybe that wasn’t that person’s jam.  Shirley’s favorite song according to her daughter was “The Old Rugged Cross.”  The night before I loaded Shirley’s iPod with gospel tunes from my music library.  We used cushioned headphones instead of ear buds, because most seniors seemed to be more comfortable and familiar with them.  Putting anything INTO the ears of a dementia resident could frighten the person.  There was something to the notion of playing the music through headphones as opposed to just setting the person next to a boom box and playing it for them.  When you listen to music through headphones it blocks out everything and it’s as if the music is coming from someplace inside of you.  

My assistant Director of Nursing was skeptical about the whole thing.  I made the nursing management team watch the movie.  In morning meeting I laid Shirley’s shiny new iPod on the conference room table.  “Who wants to go with me and see how she likes this?”  A few of them joined me.  My assistant told me not to feel bad if we didn’t get a strong reaction from her like they did with the people in “Alive Inside.”   We went upstairs to the lounge about 10:00 A.M., and Shirley was up and dressed.  I decided to start with Whitney Houston’s version of “I Go to the Rock”, a gospel standard, which features the lyrics, “Where do I go when there’s nobody left to turn to and who do I talk to when no one wants to listen?  I go to the Rock of my salvation. . . When the earth all around me is sinking sand on Christ the solid rock I stand.  When I need a shelter, when I need a friend, I go to the Rock.”  The pink cushioned headphones matched Shirley’s floral night gown.  I placed them over her short grey afro and pressed play.  Her eyes flew open, and I feared at first that we had frightened her, but then she began to bob her head in time.  She started to vocalize.  You couldn’t really call it singing, and she didn’t make intelligible words.  I’d call it making a joyful noise.  And then tears ran down her face.  And I realized that I was crying too.  My assistant said, “Oh my God,  you were right.”  

I couldn’t wait to try one on my next “subject”, Joe, a man in his fifties who had suffered a traumatic brain injury about five years prior that had rendered him paralyzed.  I thought it was from an accident but some of the long term staff told me he had been in a bar fight, and that he  had lived a hard fast party life before ending up at the nursing home for his final years.  I heard he died of pneumonia in 2016, and when I got the news, I was glad that we had given him back “his music” for the final years of his life.  His girlfriend said Joe liked classic rock and that his favorite song was “Don’t Fear the Reaper” by Blue Oyster Cult.  

More people joined us when we played the earphones on Joe.  After seeing Shirley’s response to the music staff started making lists of people we thought we could draw out with an iPod and the right playlist.   Joe didn’t sing when we started playing his song, but he did start banging his hand on the armrests of his wheelchair.  And instead of his eyes flying open he closed them tightly shut as if to block us out.  One of the aides came up beside him and touched his shoulder, “What do you think, JoJo?  How do you like that music?”  Joe put up his hand as if to say, “I’m here inside my music, and I do not wish to be disturbed.”  

In the movie they said the part of the brain that interprets music is the most enduring even in the face of dementing illnesses and brain injuries.   I have my iPod loaded and when I’m a 98 year old demented old lady in a nursing home I want them to play “I Melt With You” by Modern English or anything by The Cure or Depeche Mode.  I think they’d be able to reach me, no matter how far into myself I may have retreated by that time.  

Working in nursing homes isn’t so depressing after all.  Some days you get to reach inside and make a connection.  Some days you get to touch someone’s very soul.