Story Time at the Old Folk's Home

Now Gertrude the Grizzled had had a life of high adventure not the least because she chose it but more that it chose her and she had lived in squalor and in splendour and in places far and wide. She had loved a few men here and there but she would always have to leave because adventure chose her or perhaps it was because she could not make breakfast even one more time without wanting to throw the eggs onto the tile floors. Or she could not bear grand stupidity about Pericles’ influence during the Golden Age of Athens or how milk is good for cucumbers. Sometimes these men, they understood this about her. Sometimes they didn’t.

But she loved her children wisely and madly and loyally and she loved the little animals she fed when she would wander across the street from the Old Folks Home to the empty lot to sit on the rock there. She dragged out her tobacco and her rollies to reminisce. She did all three things, feeding, smoking and remembering in synchronicity with the wind that ruffled the tops of the sky-scratching trees.

She had read Dostoyevsky and preferred him to Flaubert but often thought it was because the Russians bled their humanness better than the French. They knew how to suffer like no other, with drama and distain and despondency to near death. They knew how to lament and wallow in humility and hubris and how to eat a stewed potato if no vodka was to be found. If she was anything she might have been Russian in her spirit and French in her love of sauces and of life. 

And so it was, after many terrible years of living and dying and reviving she grew old with the seasons passing and they put her there. In that place. Across the street from where the animals were fed. A little too far indeed from the library where the books waited anxiously for her and where there was silence in the huffled ruffled air conditioning.

And so it was she was invited to Story Time at the Old Folks Home.

She was newly there still. She was trying to be civil knowing it was becoming more difficult every day but even still she tried. Well a little bit. A wretched effort to “fit in” where fit to be tied was not to be entertained. Ever. Even when they put up plastic plants in the lobby and painted everything grey, she held her tongue and curled her eyebrows into a nest of thorns. But still she tried. And off she went, to Story Time to meet her fellow inmates. She even remembered not to wear her polka-dot Panama pants and put on her well-travelled blue jeans instead.

She settled into the circle of the old sitting on the chairs like plums in a market stall, all plump and thin and purple tinged and dressed in pastels. They sat there without a word waiting. All those wrinkles in a row, all those memories in tow, all those stories to bestow. 

And in walked the neutral woman of a neutral age wearing neutral colours and driving her face in neutral which unsurprisingly spouted some sort of gooey neutral words. Well… not exactly. It was worse than that. It was the contrived sweetness of neutrality that smudged the assembled with a kind of banal conformity demanded and they all smiled sweetly. Gertrude thought it was probably the drugs they were on. It just had to be.

“Welcome to Story Time. I’ve a story to tell. But first,” Neutral simpered loudly for the hard-of-hearing, “let’s all go to our Happy Place. What do you remember that made you happy in the last few days?” And Gertrude wondered what the fuck that had to do with anything. Nobody here could possibly have done a damn thing worth remembering in the last few days. Not here. With the grey walls and plastic plants, but perhaps she was wrong, she chastised herself. Then she wondered who could possibly have a happy place when world war three was about to start.

“I went to the hardware store and found the exact lightbulb I was looking for. And they’re not easy to find!” piped up the man at the end. He was beaming more than a lightbulb as he sat there. The one next to him was deeply uncomfortable. She couldn’t think of anything to say so she said she loved the sunset last night and everyone ooh’ed and ahh’ed and smiled and the relief she felt was profound because really, she had nothing. She knew it. She just went with the poster on the wall across the room. 

Neutral loved the sunset story. She chortled even. And so it went. They got to Filbert. He said he finally told his son he was a freaking drug addict and he never wanted to see him again. Neutral told him this wasn’t the place for stories like that! Gertrude however smiled. She unfortunately opened her mouth… “That’s a story!” 

Neutral frowned. “Not here it isn’t. Now Gertrude,” she tittered, “what made you happy?”

And Gertrude said finally, after a very long thought and in a desperate attempt to be civil said, “I was happy to see Julian Assange free.” That’s when Gertrude discovered that not one single soul in the group knew who Julian Assange was. Not a one. 

“Well that’s nice Gertrude,” said Neutral. “Now let me tell my story. It’s about a rock in a pot and how if everyone puts something in the pot it makes a lovely stew of stories to feed the whole room.” And Gertrude apparently said something which had her politely dismissed from the room. If you asked her, she’d tell you that she doesn’t remember what she said. She spent the next day apologizing. That didn’t work either.

Sometimes Gertrude remembers that some people want to be treated like little children because it is the only happy place they have. Sometimes she remembers that. Mostly though, she doesn’t give a rats hairy neutral ass and wonders if they still make spittoons. For the next Story Time at the Old Folks home. That would make her happy. And if only she could tell that story about Paris and the Spaniard and the Black Diamond Cafe. Now that was a story! Better than Filbert’s even. But then she remembers the humiliation of apologizing for that last thing and so the story would never be told.