Damn Yankee, George S Geisinger [my reading book txt] 📗

so stupid they don't make me any money. And there are people here with memory disorders, who don't remember their own children's names, who can remember who the guy is in the dining room, who makes his own hats, including the old lady under our current discussion.
One night, when I was wandering around late in the evening with my walker, downstairs, while I was still recovering from hip replacement, that old lady was in the lobby crying like a lost child. There wasn't anyone else in sight, and she was frightened.
She took hold of my walker as I walked into the lobby, and took off at a great rate, dragging me along, thinking apparently that I was her salvation, till I thought she'd cause me to fall. She was walking too fast for me. I wasn't too steady on my feet, yet, though it had been several months since surgery, but a supervisor came along in the nick of time. She rescued me from rescuing the old lady, and I got control of my walker returned to me safely.

Chapter 19

There are a few people here at the senior apartments that come from the place that I call home. I lived my entire adolescent, as well as adult life, in the Baltimore area, except for the times I was in university in North Carolina, and then near the District of Columbia in Maryland, either visiting or living in an apartment.
I was born and raised in the Pittsburgh area until I was 13, and my memories of that time are generally unpleasant, more or less. My dad was a Methodist minister, and a very troubled man. We moved to Maryland after he left us in the lurch and moved to Florida, leaving a family of five behind, with four teenagers in the house, and no visible means of support. That's how we got to Maryland. We went home to Grandma, where Mom could get a job at the army base. Dad couldn't help it; he was not well. I decided to stop hating him. He was my dad, after all.
I moved around in Maryland over the years, living in the city some, and in the surrounding counties quite a bit, but it was only a short period of time that I was in places around the District of Columbia and in Boone, North Carolina, in school. I've scarcely ever been anywhere else. I know enough about both places, that I can get around there without a map, more or less.
I'm fast getting to know the place around the dam here well enough that I'm getting an idea of how to get places here, too. I've only been here several months, and haven't driven here at all. I don't have a license anymore. It's the delivery driver in me that's keeping up with the roads, whenever I go places. It's part of the habit of my professional life, lingering like an old, familiar habit.
One Baltimore native who is here with us at the Brighton Dam, is the professional driver who drives the bus and car for residents. Another is the Mouth of the South. There's a third Baltimore area resident who lives here at the assisted living now, also, but she suffered a broken bone during the great evacuation during the hurricane, and she's still in rehab some place, absent from our presence at the moment. I think she'll be coming back later, though, once she recovers.
The driver here has a familiar style of driving, since no Marylander has any idea what driving a safe distance between them and the car in front of them really means. They have the notion that, if you tailgate someone, they'll go faster, and you'll get where you're going quicker. I finally rode with someone up home who verbalized it that way. It sounds like the Marylander way to drive, alright.
I hale from Pittsburgh, so I have a different take on what a safe distance between cars is. I've also been in enough rear-enders to know what a safe distance is. Pay enough deductible for tagging someone from behind, and you learn, alright. Tar-heels have a better idea about safe driving distance than Marylanders do, too. I've driven a car down there, as well, when I was young.
Another thing about Marylanders is they don't seem to have a very good sense about how to drive on snow and ice. I can do that pretty well, like being a skater behind the wheel.
I don't drive around here at the dam, as I've said. I allow the professional to do the driving. Her style is her call. It saves me money, and living in assisted living is costly enough, without trying to keep up a car going at the same time.
The other thing about living in assisted living is that I need the services of a med tech to keep me medicated properly. What brought me to this area in the first place was that I'd gotten confused about how to take my medicine when I was on my own. I accidentally overdosed myself, and I need to get my medicine safely. The overdose that I took in my confusion was just too close for comfort. I'm lucky to be alive at all. My brother and his wife have taken me under their wing, living close by now.

Chapter 20

One of my buddies I've known for several years. We have a really good time together, often enough. I know his wife, and have met his two adult kids. Now they're grandparents. They've had me over for supper parties and whatnot, from time to time, and the nice things they've done for me out of friendship are countless. Sometimes, I do things like give them hats and scarves when I get together with them.
We used to be hippies, way back before we met, and gave it all up, which is sort of how we met, but there are some stories to tell about all that. He used to hike, fish, and camp around the Brighton Dam. He didn't realize that I knew anything about the place. Now I live in the senior living apartments there.
He and his wife, (or is it just his wife?), are from someplace up North, up in New England or Upstate New York, or someplace like that, and he used to drive on up through New Jersey to see her, getting wasted in his Mustang on the way up and back, tripping his brains out on mescaline and whatnot, back in the day, and there was this one cop who would always haul him over on the interstate. The cop would bust him for weed, or whatever he was holding at the time. He'd spend a night in jail, now and then, over it, back when he was young.
But he couldn't stay away from that girl, so he married her. Makes sense to me. She's a real nice girl, too.
They'd known each other all their lives, anyway, and she has a whole gaggle of sisters, who are always teasing him, whenever they're around. They chime his name in flirtatious chorus. He just says, “Uh, Ohhhh,” and laughs quietly.
He was just like our entire generation. He partied and did his tripping and whatnot. He did Vietnam in the army, too. Not me, I stayed stateside, flipped out for your sins, and all that. He worked with addictions in Saigon, away from the worst of the trouble, talking to the GI's about drugs, made it home safe and sound. The irony of the situation is that he partied as much as any of the guys he counseled. But he was more concerned with heavy addictions than simple partying, on his job over there.
I realize there some question in uninitiated minds about what I mean, so I'll spell it out. There were a lot of heroin addicts in the service in Vietnam. My friend would smoke reefer, and trip on acid or mescaline, but he never got hooked on heroin. The way you keep from getting hooked on heroin is never use it in the first place. You use, you loose.
When he got home, he and his wife got loaded a while, like so many Baby Boomers, but when one of them decided to sober up, the other one made the same decision. They are that much of one flesh.
I've just known them in recent times, since we've all been sober, and he's done a lot of different stuff for me, like a little technical help with my computer, stuff to help me out here and there, getting together for fun. He's a regular, stand-up kind of guy, in my opinion.
He told me one time that he and one of his buddies were driving on the Capital Beltway at high speed, back in the day when the speed limit was 70mph. They were smoking a bowl and tripping. His buddy was driving his classic Mustang for him, the one that kept getting him pulled over by the cops up in Jersey, but this was down by DC.
They were just cruising along the Beltway, and the guy says, “Hey, man, I need a hit off that pipe.”
But my friend had been an addictions counselor, and he said, out of habit, “You don't need it,” and handed the driver the bowl.
He said it a second time, “You don't need it,” and the driver threw the guy's bowl out the window of the Mustang at 70mph in dense traffic.
It wasn't like he could say something like, “Hey, what do you think you're doing, pal?” or anything like that, at that moment. They were both tripping on mescaline at the time, and one could never tell what that driver might do. He didn't want to cause an accident.
Another one of the nice things he did for me was help me move once. We talk on the phone, and exchange email. It's a heck of a nice friendship for a guy like me, who can relate to his stories and visa-verse. We can all use a friend, somehow or another.

Chapter 21

I go to the public areas of the senior living environment here at the Brighton Dam Apartments where I live, to any activity in the place, which I really don't like to do in the first place, only to be treated like the newest Ken doll in the biggest real-time, live Barbies Playhouse game you've ever seen since junior high school. We have it going on around here, by so many of the endless number of geriatric women in the place, so constantly. I feel like I'm back in junior high, up the creek without a paddle and sinking fast. There's nowhere to hide. Occasionally, they even come to my apartment.
I'm having to play hard to get in so many ways, just to keep from blowing my stack, or being bowled over by some dried up old lady, or getting kicked out of the place for some kind of inappropriate behavior, like screaming obscenities in the public of the place, I'm so overwhelmed at the moment. I'm trying to avoid saying obvious things like, “Don't you realize you're way too old for me, lady?” to an interminably long list of daydreaming old ladies, who never gave up