Ten-Finger Exercises

E.O.M.

The last day of the month was always an exciting day when I was a little girl. We lived with my grandparents in Carmel, Indiana, and on those days we always went to Indianapolis to go shopping. "We can't miss the EOM Sale!" Then another department store began to have a FOM sale, First of the Month. That way, if you missed EOM you could always get to FOM; at least that was Mom's way of looking at it.

When I was a little older and my mother was the bookkeeper for my father's jewelry store, it meant having the accounts done. It was a tenser time.

Right now it means, to meet my goals, I have to have submitted something somewhere; given my procrasti-nature (how do you like my great new word!) that usually means it's THE last day possible to get it done. So today, after I came home from work early with a "hose-nose," as my husband refers to a drippy cold, I sent off one of my Small Talk stories to a publication that said it likes humor. Supposedly it likes things that are unusual, but they also used the word "edgy," and edgy I ain't.

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Recently I wrote about my hardness of heart when it comes to visiting in nursing homes. There are three patients who are particularly difficult for me to visit. One shows no response at all; another barely responds and has the war shows blaring on his tv and his music playing at the same time, attending to none of it. The third is the one I find most taxing, because she continually wants me to get her up or down. She speaks in a loud monotone with no inflection. She is the one I went to see yesterday, and we had a wonderful visit!

She is no longer able to get up, and although she started to ask me several times, evidently remembered her limitations. That's more than I thought possible for her. She did ask repeatedly for hugs, which I gave. More than that, she answered questions and seemed interested in them.

I asked her if she had indoor plumbing, or an outhouse when she was a girl growing up in Michigan. She said, "An outhouse." I asked what it was like in the winter, and she said, "Cold." Sometimes the snow was very deep, and somebody would, of course, have to shovel a path to get to the outhouse. In bad storms, they wouldn't even be able to see it, and had a clothesline hooked up to the house to guide them. She and her sister liked to ice skate too, "On the creek," and one time she fell through the ice. Not all the way, but enough to scare her.

Of course she didn't want me to leave, and she said she'd miss me. I promised to come back soon. Now, don't you think that was an answer to prayer?