Photo by Robert Burroughs

Pete Filacio

Six o’clock in the morning. “Help me! Help me!”

"Hi, Miss Bue. Let me wipe your chin. What do you want?

"I want to go home!”

"You are home, dear."

"No! I want to go home! Norway! My mother is waiting. She’s on the hill”

Ron

Photo by Robert Burroughs

“Well, let’s go see, shall we?” The nurse wheels little Miss Bue to the Horizon Room with its big windows casting over the freeway, toward the ocean.

Downstairs, here at the Golden Palms Health Care and Rehabilitation Center on 34th Street, Myron the cook looks a little bleary-eyed. He checks his list of 99 breakfasts — that’s how many residents are here — including Ms. Crossley’s card loaded with “not to eat”s: “Not zucchini, not green salad, not sardines, not stuffing, mashed potatoes, corned beef, cabbage, fish, pork, liver, meat loaf, enchiladas, mixed veggies, ham, eggs, cheese....

Clyde

Photo by Robert Burroughs

“She’s almost down to Ensure,” says Myron. Myron’s a big African-American ex-Navy cook who’s been here for eight years. His main problem with Ms. Crossley, who used to live for his daily visits, is that she’s suddenly turned against him. She thinks he’s poisoning her.

“He wants me to die,” she says.

Reverend Gary conducts Sunday service at Golden Palms

Photo by Robert Burroughs

“No, no, Miss Crossley. You and I used to be friends. I want you to have something nice today.”

“Help! He’s poisoning me. Nurse, taste this first.”

A nurse takes a taste while Ms. Crossley waits, unblinking, to see if she drops down dead.

"Waaaaaaaahh! Waaaahhhhh!”

Clyde on a field trip

Photo by Robert Burroughs

“Take it easy, Mr. Jones, take it easy. We’re just about through here.” Dixie leans over an elderly gent with no legs who cries like a baby every time she sends the electric cutters around his ring of hair. You can hear his howls way down the hall. This room, near the back nursing station, is the “beauty shop.” Dixie comes in to cut hair and to do makeup for the women.

She gives Mr. Jones one more swipe around his neck, brushes off the flecks of hair, pulls off the white paper necklace, and wheels him out the door.

“For me it’s a pleasure. I get attached to these people," Dixie says as she brings up Mr. McFadden in his wheelchair. “But I’m only here twice, three times a week. The real people, the nurses, the nursing assistants, they’re the heroes.”

Mr. McFadden has a fixed stare and only a couple of teeth left. But he’s chewing like heck on both of them. He flinches as Dixie puts the white collar around his neck and struggles when she tries to fling the smock over him. “You think I’m nervous, don’t you, Mr. McFadden. Got to watch Mr. McFadden here. He spits at you if he has a mind to. That’s the only time you see a big grin on him, when he scores a hit.”

“Waaaahhh!” Mr. Jones’s cries still echo from the corridor. He’s not particularly miserable; he has simply reverted, literally, to childhood.

“I think attitude is the whole thing,” Dixie says. “People are truly interested here. If residents lose the zest for life, that’s when they start to go downhill. I enjoy people and the people who work here. If there isn’t that feeling, then things can slide real quick.”

She cuts around Mr. McFadden’s ears and the back of his neck and finally says, “There you go, Mr. McFadden.” She whips off the smock, wheels him out. And while Gladys, who’s 95, waits her turn, smelling faintly of Yardley’s lavender water and smiling sweetly in anticipation of a hairdo and makeup, Dixie grabs a broom and sweeps up the mixture of Mr. Jones’s white wisps and Mr. McFadden’s tight, gray African-American curls from the linoleum floor.

Frank, a CNA (Certified Nursing Assistant, the workhorses of the nursing home system), approaches Mr. Jones, who’s blocking the entrance with his wheelchair. “Hey, you look great now, Mr. Jones,” he says and wheels him away. “Waaahh!” says Mr. Jones, looking straight at him.

“Anyone that works here,” says Dixie, “should be the first to go to heaven.”

Outside — that is, on the enclosed, bright green AstroTurf patio formed by the four wings of the home, where people can exercise without the danger of becoming lost — the pigeons don’t move as residents come out to catch some morning sun and the chance to smoke. The pigeons are confident enough to nestle down on their bellies as the wheelchair parade emerges through the French doors.

Curtis Grant comes out on a geri-bed, a long, green mattress affair on wheels, which can support his large, paralyzed body. Frank leaves him in the shade of a white gazebo.

“Got a light?” Curtis says, sort of automatically. I light up his Marlboro.

“Had this a year ago,” he says, pointing to his body and legs. “Stroke. I’m an appliance technician. I was in the military. Guess if I can adapt to that, I can adapt to this.” He takes a puff. He’s a big man. A big man with a big body he can’t do anything with.

“Lot of people want to boss you here,” he says. “Want to control you. They go too darned far. Nurses tell you to go to sleep. They expect you to. If you don’t, they make it hard for you. They make trouble. I’ve seen this in the military too. But it’s reasonably okay. Food’s okay. Breakfast’s my favorite. No taste to the dinner.”

He tries to shift. His body doesn’t obey. “Got another light?” He has a fresh Marlboro out and waiting. “I was on the flight deck. Navy. Launch and recovery specialist. Lexington, Enterprise, Saratoga.

Put in 20 years. I’ve seen guys get washed off in storms. You’ve got to know how to stay out of the way. Got to be alert. Your life could snap at any moment. I’ve seen buddies get killed. Chopped up by props....”

Suddenly great tears flow down Curtis’s impassive face. The stroke, if excuses were needed, makes emotions harder to bottle up. I ask him where he liked going most. “Oh, I loved going different places,” he says through the tears. “Olympics in Melbourne, Australia; Hong Kong....” His eyes reach up to catch a plane coasting in on its flight path to Lindbergh.

“That Hong Kong liberty launch. That launch would take you to shore, among the junks. You’d start off at the USO. It was my mom wanted me to go into the Navy. ‘Got to have brains to get into that,’ she said. One thing, it taught a man to get along with people. I’ve never been seasick, not like Lord Nelson. The great Lord Nelson. Heard he used to get seasick, every time, even in battles.”

Again the tears flow. He wipes his face. Takes another cigarette. “I’m 59. I’m paralyzed by the stroke. But I tell you, I’m going to walk out of here. I will.”

It’s the damning present the residents always have to come back to here. I light one more cigarette for Curtis.

“OOD OORRNING!” Ron waves from one of the white plastic tables in the patio. He is relatively young but has to yell like mad just to get a word out. He has Huntington’s disease. His vocal cords and other muscles aren’t doing what he tells them to do. He has all his thoughts together but no way to express them. His muscles jerk, sometimes wildly, so he can’t write. His friends have learned to ask him yes/no questions. He’s become part of the audio scenery here. He spent 13 years in the Air Force. Was one of the missile crew for Titan rockets, the guys with fingers near the button of buttons. He sits now with friends, smoking a cigarette and wheeling back when a muscle spasm comes on.

Jo is at the point of old age where she seems to be a smoldering child again. Her big, dark eyes look straight through you, like the stern eagle in the Muppets. She became famous here one day by grabbing a bunch of mail and ripping it into little pieces, including an $80,000 government check for the nursing home.

She and a lot of the people, all in wheelchairs, some with green restraining cushions under their armrests so they can’t fall out or climb out of the chairs, walk them along with their feet. But once they arrive, they’ll suck their little milk drink the CNAs bring, then kind of slump over. No one to talk to — at least no one who hasn’t heard all the stories a zillion times.

“My daddy couldn’t say no to nobody,” says Rose Monari. “We had cousins who’d come, and they’d wreck the farm. We had three cows and lots of chickens. Mom would yell at the kids in Czech. I was a miner’s daughter. Pennsylvania. Daddy would just run down the hill to the coal mine and work there. We never paid for coal. We’d take a bucket and pick up the coal that bounced off the cars. I think my mommy and daddy are dead now. Least my daddy was. He was taking a trip."

“I’d like to die,” says Gladys, with a well-rehearsed line. “But God don’t need me, and the devil won’t have me.” She is 96.

She lights a More cigarette. “My first husband died. So I married someone else. My son got a serious illness and died. But he had a lot of money when he died. Here. How much have I got in this purse?”

She empties a little leather purse. Lois Boden, the activities director, a smiling, briskly efficient woman, who often as not has her sylph-like daughter Dawn at her side, counts out the bills.

“Forty-two dollars,” she yells in Gladys’s ear.

“I just want to go shopping," says Gladys. She won’t go, of course, unless she gets on one of the special monthly trips. But each Friday she can place orders with the girl who shops for items for the residents. Mostly cigarettes, chocolates, little things from the world outside.

Lois sets up the month’s activities. Each day has something communal, something to encourage the residents to get out of bed, which is their choice. “Wednesday, 9:30 Coffee, 10:00 Arts and Crafts, 2:00 Men’s Group, 3:00 Exercises, 6:30 Movie. Thursday, 9:00 Coffee, 9:30 Reminiscing, 2:00 Music Class, 4:00 Oprah — TV, 6:00 Bingo.” On the month’s schedule, every Wednesday is arts and crafts, every Thursday is reminisce day. “People like to develop habits, expectations,” says Lois.

These people are the lucky ones. The ones who have made it through one, maybe two world wars, a depression. They haven’t been killed by a car, a felon, a disease. These are the survivors, enjoying the part of life we all want to reach: old age.

10:30 a.m. Everyone seems to be smoking. Sitting on the AstroTurfed patio, the square around which the dove gray building revolves, is like going back into an old Technicolor movie. This is the ’50s, and these are its smoking children.

“This tattoo?” says Pete Filacio. He stops his strumming on the mandolin and looks down at the dull green shape on his forearm.

“It’s a kewpie doll. Joe Pulio, Pat Casali, and me, all three of us were 13 years old.” Pete’s now 86. “We were hanging round College Square, Boston, 1922. So we decided to get a tattoo. In them days it was 25 cents for a tattoo. It was a pain in the ass, literally, when my father found it. Uh, got a light?”

Pete has something of a hearing problem, but it doesn’t interfere with his music. His fingers, once they get going, are remarkably nimble. The mandolin's twin-string sonority dings out brilliantly across the patio.

“I’m back with the mandolin — after 50 years,” he says. “Back in the ’20s, I learned it pretty good when I was a teenager. My life has been music, right from the very start. In Boston, of course. Not in this godforsaken musical desert. I only came here because my wife was lonely for her relatives. Why, when I was 17, I was chosen for the Boston Symphony. The youngest man ever to be chosen. I’d played everything from the banjo to guitar, ukulele, mandolin. Then my brother told me that the banjo wasn’t cool anymore, not in the late ’20s. It was on the way out. Wind, brass was the sound of the future. So I took up the trombone. It paid off. I’ve played with the greats like Tommy Dorsey — you name them.”

Boston was where Pete gave Duke Ellington a helping hand. “We’re at the Metropolitan,” says Pete, “on a gig, 1932 this is.” His heavy glasses scrunch up against his heavy eyebrows. His voice is musician-gruff. Sometimes he and his voice fade a bit out of focus. But mostly he’s sharp and garrulous and in charge, as much as you can be here.

“So after the gig, around 2:30 a.m., we all go to the Alcove Lunch, at Keane and Washington. Open all night. That’s where all the musicians meet. And there was the Duke. Ellington.”

He takes a deep drag on his cigarette. It’s close enough to his wiry, overhanging eyebrows to set them alight. “Duke says, ‘We’re stranded. Broke. We need to get outta here.’ So our band, lack Sullivan and the Royal Americans — remember the band? — we had a gig in Salem, Massachusetts, Eagles Ballroom. I said, ‘If we get you the gas, you want to take that gig?’ He said, ‘Course we’ll do it. We’re bust! And we’ve got this great new song. But where we gonna sleep?’

“So I call up my brother, who’s a cop, and say, ‘How’s your cells tonight?’ He said, ‘Empty.’ So I said, ‘Would you take some very special guests?’ And that’s how Duke Ellington and his band — 13, 14 of them — spent that night. And we all put in for some gas for them, and next day they went to Salem, and he got to play his new song. And you know what it was? ‘Sophisticated Lady.’ And that’s when he introduced the ninth triad into his chording — like, a high D in a C chord? And down beat magazine, the bible for musicians, picked it up and nobody believed it, and that song was a sensation. Took them right to the top. And that’s where it began. And one year after that, and every year after that, $1000 turned up in the police fund in Salem, Massachusetts. And when the Duke died, his son took over sending that $1000, all because of that one night.”

He feels around for another cigarette. None. “Come to my room. I’ve got more there.” He wheels toward room 129, with its sliding glass doors opening onto the patio.

“I’m sorry the day I came over here,” he says, hunting through his top drawer for another pack of Marlboros. He means San Diego. It was his wife who wanted to come back to family, in 1955. “This was a cultural desert,” he says. “End of the line. I’d graduated from the New England Conservatory. They wouldn’t let me teach here. Ended up playing with a trio at the Gourmet Room. I played bass. Terrific tips. Nice big jar.

But then work slowed, so I spent the last 13, 14 years at General Dynamics. I just wanted to go back East, but my wife wouldn’t. She had her mother, her sister. And now I’m in this place. I swear, my greatest dream is to escape from here, from this....”

A man in a wheelchair is trying to come in through the French doors. He’s stuck. At the same time there’s a voice in the hallway, “Uh, Mr. Filacio?”

It’s Diya, the social worker. “There’s a cigarette lighter lost. The gentlemen at Ron’s table say you borrowed it. Do you have it? They want it back.”

“No! I don’t have their damned lighter. They’re just trying to cause trouble.”

“Well, they say you’ve definitely got it.”

“Well, I haven’t. God! That’s what happens around here. People start saying you’re pinching their lighters. I don’t do that sort of thing.”

“C-C-Could someone help me through the door? I’m stuck.” This is Mr. Clark, Pete’s roommate. Diya wheels him in, then retreats onto the patio to face Pete’s friends. Just as in prison, little things like lighters take on great importance.

Mr. Clark rests after the adventure of getting into his room, while Pete sets to tuning his beautiful, golden-wood mandolin, matching notes with the double strings. “Broke my thumb,” he says. “Can’t play the guitar. Now this is about all I got left.”

Lois Boden pops her head in. “Pete. The Men’s Club’s meeting started, and they’ve run out of things to talk about. They want you to come and play something for them.”

“God!” says Pete. “I don’t want to play to them. They wouldn’t know a bum note from a blue note.”

But he rolls doggedly out the door, rattling off a riff as he goes.

2:30 p.m. The men’s club. They have gathered in the meeting room next to the Fine Dining Room — a new idea — linen-covered tables, nameplates, bone china, lead-crystal glasses. No more plastic trays. Another incentive for people to get out of bed and dress and make something of their day, the same goal of all the home’s activities, from cooking classes to documentary discussions to a residents’ council to bingo to the men’s club.

About half a dozen men in their wheelchairs are gathered. “Don’t expect too much,” says Spiro Danos, president of the residents’ council. “We’re just a bunch of derelicts sitting together.”

At first it doesn’t look too promising. They sit staring at each other, with Curtis in the background, laid out on his geri-bed and fingering a cigarette he’s desperate to light. A youthful-looking, pixie-faced man with a fine, creamy Stetson hat and cherry red cheeks smiles and tries to get something going about the “roundup at Billing, Montana,” but it fades for lack of pickup. Maybe everyone’s heard it before.

Lois comes in. “Hey, now, gentlemen, what’s happening? Usually you’re singing or talking about the news. What’s holding you back?”

Pete has already come and gone with his mandolin. Couldn’t get the top two strings in tune. Said the audience looked so dozy that he gave up.

“Come on, Spiro,” says Lois. “You can get people mad easy. Get some controversy going.”

“Easy for her to say,” says Spiro, with a sly laugh.

The men’s club starts slumping into sleep, when an old gent wearing a Navy baseball cap says, “Ten, 15 minutes to get off. I was in damage control. Central part of the vessel. Vincennes. The old one. Finest ship. ‘Won’t be here long, captain. Three torpedoes, two shells. Estimate 10 or 15 minutes to get off, sir.’ ’Course the cap’n authorized abandon ship. Went down. Joined the nine others in Ironbottom Bay. Was in the water for the night. Spotted two, three sharks. And I could see the Japanese admiral from the water, on his bridge. Then suddenly he fell. Shot. One of our planes, I think. We got picked up next day. Destroyers came looking for us. Took us down to Noumea.”

Commander Harold H. Stewart, USN, sinks back, exhausted. But somehow he has lit the torch. The war. The point in all their lives around which there was a “before” and an “after.”

“I was building PBYs,” says Spiro. He has a classic, straight-nosed, Greek profile, with pride and pain in his blue eyes, and useless legs and left arm, casualties of a stroke. “Flying boats. Catalinas. PB2Y3s. Four-engined. I’m an engineer. I kept saying I was more useful doing that than killing people. But they didn’t believe me. So they shipped me off to Europe. And when that cleaned up, we thought we were coming home. I was even thinking of going to the University of Heidelberg. When we got down to the transport ship that was to take us home, they’d strung a banner between the smokestacks, ‘From ETO to TOKYO.’ They were sending us to the Pacific. I could have killed them.”

Now everyone’s listening — well, everyone who’s awake.

There’s Spiro, a first sergeant, at an airfield outside Manila. U.S. soldiers are withdrawing. The place is a wreckage of smoldering villages and smashed landing fields and giant compounds of Japanese prisoners. “I’m taking off,” says Spiro’s only officer. The guy was finagling a way back to the States. Their airfield was needed because Clark Base was so badly pocked.

“I had my own private Jeep,” says Spiro, “but after he went, I was the only guy who spoke English. None of the Filipinos did. ‘You’ll figure out something,’ this officer said. And I did. I saw this young Imperial Army Japanese officer ordering his POW troops around inside the wire. So I tried to talk to him. He spoke English. We looked at each other through the wire. At that moment I had to decide whether to trust him. There were 300 of them and only me. But I decided to take a chance on him. I hauled him out, and together we ran that airfield. We became bosom buddies. I never forgot him.”

Tears suddenly spring to Spiro’s eyes. “Can you imagine? Joe, that was his name. A little while back I get a call here from LAX. Los Angeles. It was Joe. He’d worked for McDonnell all these years. So he came down here to see me. ’Course, I’m like this...” He lifts his left arm with his right. “I wouldn’t wish this on my worst enemy.”

Spiro stares blankly. The wonder and feeling of “too late....”

“Uh, I remember a guy used to stand on his head and play banjo,” says the nattily dressed man in the wide Stetson hat, perhaps to fill in the gap. “Up in Billings, Montana. That’s where I’m from.”

Somebody wants to see his hat. He takes it off, shows it around. “That’s a $200 hat,” he says. “A 5X Stetson. Beaver fur. The more Xs, the better. They don’t come much better than that. My daddy had a ranch up there in Montana. He was famous because he was the first man in the world to put a cow in a truck. True! A Model T truck. What was it — 1905? And he drove that thing to market.”

Burgess Cantrell settles into his stride. He has the bright, eager smile of a man who’s lived on optimism all his life. All his many lives. And now perhaps that’s what helps him adjust to his present circumstance.

“Many’s the time I slept on the ground with a saddle for a pillow. I’d be on a cattle roundup. Black Angus, Herefords. Had a place for a while. My brother’s spent his whole life buying and selling cattle. Fifty-two years. Never did anything else. He’s a rich man. Me, I did a little bit of everything. But what I enjoyed most was trading with the reservation Indians. I'd buy hand-tooled purses, mostly. I knew the codes they used at the trading posts, so I could tell what price would be reasonable for them and for me. I bought and sold Navajo rugs too. Used to be you couldn’t go into a California house but that it had a Navajo rug on the floor. Also pre-Colombian art and Hopi baskets.

“I did it because when I was young nobody wanted to hire me, I was so damned little. So I made some money. Had some property up there; 700 acres. Seven thousand dollars it cost me. Let it out to folks. One bad winter I had people snowed in so good I had to hire a Piper Cub to fly them out supplies. Seventy-five miles, S25 roundtrip those days. Actually, that was a while ago. I’m 83. Been here in San Diego 42 years. Lost $35,000 in the commodity market. For a while I got the purses made in Tijuana. It was little kids did most of the work lacing them up. I must have handled thousands. I’d spend two weeks on the road. Used the Greyhound bus. Sometimes even go up to Montana to sell them.”

Bob Harrison, a tall man with a kind of prime-ministerial face, nods. He left his daddy’s greenhouses in Long Island and came here to La Jolla to grow carnations, gardenias, and orchids.

Larry Lamb says he spent most of his life living between three junkyards. “Illinois. I stole from one of them and sold to the other. Good living.”

“I was an Okie," says Earl Knott. “I worked 34 years for the Santa Fe. Drove bulldozers, Internationals, 14-foot-wide blades. That and a bit of gold mining in the desert. But you know what I remember most when I think back? I was in the Army Air Corps. Now it’s the Air Force or something. I worked with air ships. Holding the mooring lines. Catch-ropes. Up to your knees in weeds, running like hell. Then one day they needed a bit more weight in an artillery observation balloon, so they asked me. I made a four-hour flight. It was kind of scary, because one of them had made a flight not long before, and the valve at the top had frozen at 8000 feet. Couldn’t let the gas out to come down. The danged balloon kept going up. Up, up, up, till it burst. Luckily the guys had parachutes. That’s when they used hydrogen gas.”

He looks around, perhaps pleased that people are listening. “But the thing I always remember — up there, way up, floating along in the air — is you can hear chickens crowing and people talking on the ground. You can holler down. I’ll never forget that eerie feeling. I dream about that a lot.”

“Would somebody wheel me out of here,” barks Curtis from his geri-bed. “I want a smoke.”

That kind of does it for the men’s club this week. Everyone rolls back to the here and now.

Fiesta! It’s Saturday afternoon, 2:30. A musician at an electric keyboard plays “La Bamba.” Sitting beside him, shaking a pair of maracas and looking kind of Caribbean and pretty in a big hat is Jo. She stares straight ahead and doesn’t smile. But she shakes those maracas and catches the rhythm well. Between songs she falls asleep, maracas in hand, her head flung back and her mouth wide-open, restoring energies for the next song. When it starts up (“Cielito Lindo”), she slowly arches forward and works her way into the rhythm.

Suddenly around her, a string of little kids in summer dresses, three and four years old, comes dancing to the music, attracted by her maracas. Some relative has brought them to visit. They run in circles, giggling and shouting. Everyone is transfixed by the energy. Jo stares at them for a long time as her hands go on auto on the rhythm. A smile creeps over her face. Life comes into her eyes. Then she returns to the serious business of the rhythm.

Lois and Dawn Boden have spent the morning putting up Mexican bullfight decorations. “I need this sort of thing to freshen me up,” Lois says, “just as much as the residents.”

Everyone seems to have come out for this event. The sun is shining, and the smell of Sherrie Schmitz’s cheese enchiladas, now serving under the pergola, spreads the feeling that something special is taking place.

“I don’t like it,” says Mr. Lloyd Finlay. “I don’t like this food.” Lois gives him some anyway. Helps him with his bib (everyone wears one) and sets him up at a table. Next to him, ignoring his own enchilada, Curtis happily smokes his Marlboros.

“Erry ice, err-rry ice!” booms Ron. He’s talking to Patti, the banker, who holds on to everyone’s spending money (controlled by conservators if a resident’s family can’t or thinks it’s necessary). Patti is Ron’s special friend here. She has devised ways of communicating when others are set back by his hard-to-understand roaring. Ron’s children even stay with Patti when they come to town to see their dad. She helps them work through the emotional weight of the situation. She loves Ron very much. It’s mutual.

At the next table, in full sunlight, a woman feeds a pasty-faced man. She is Natalie Rader. She and her husband, Cliff, were married 11 years ago. But after only two active years, he was hit with Parkinson’s disease. “The irony is, Cliff is in perfect health apart from the Parkinson’s. But he needs a lot of help. I’m seven hours here every single day, so I do see quite a bit. Everyone here wants to be home. Everyone. It’s hard. But this place is the most flexible.”

“I ain’t going to lie,” says a guy named Ray, who looks like Mickey Rooney. “I was eight months at my last place. It was no good. The people that ran it were crude. I wouldn’t wish that home on nobody.”

“I guess I’m one of those happy-go-lucky people,” says Tess Allman, taking a big drag on her cigarette, then breathing cautiously to cope with the inhale. Her green eyes return to a smile. “It’s so much easier to smile than frown.” She likes the company here. Once upon a time, she managed 32 cabins up in Idyllwild, back in the ’40s, and before that she built B-27s here in San Diego. “I was the third woman ever hired. And after the war, I was the only, person left who knew how to build the B-27’s aileron. The museum came and asked me to do it for them, for a flying model, so it had to be right.”

Tess recently was pronounced dead on arrival at a hospital. Somehow they revived her. Now she soaks up her new lease on life.

“Hey,” says Spiro, wheeling up. “Somebody I want you to meet.” He rolls away, past the musician (now playing a Herb Alpert tune), to a corner table in the shade. A beautiful woman sits there, smoking and drinking coffee. Mary MacDonald looks too healthy and youthful to be a resident. “I’ve been here one and a half years. The biggest adjustment is living in such close quarters with so many people. I stay pretty much to myself. Spiro’s the exception. He’s my salvation.”

Mary’s husband was a Navy flier. A captain. She was leading the high-energy life as president of the naval officers’ wives’ club for the 11th Naval District, organizing “once-a-month specials,” like this event, when everything started unraveling.

Her husband died, and then she learned she had diabetes and probably had for a long time. She has lost both legs from the hips down, a fact concealed by the table. “I was never tested for diabetes,” she says. “To stay sane, I don’t think about that aspect at all.”

She gets up each day about 11:00 a.m. for lunch at the Fine Dining Room, then goes back to bed till about 4:00. She can’t sit upright too long. She gets up again to eat and watch TV till about 6:30, and then, like most of the others here, she goes to bed. “Mystery books and crossword puzzles keep me going,” she says. “And Spiro.”

There’s a thud on the window behind Al Hargis’s desk. The Golden Palms’ director doesn’t jump. “Just one of those dumb pigeons again," he says. “The residents always feed them, and they fly around like they’re pet parakeets. Either that or a resident’s trying to make a complaint.”

Al’s a nice man. A collegiate man, not a tyrant. He thinks up things like competitions between the front and the back nurses’ stations for the one with the fewest patient falls each month. Residents claim he’s often out in the corridors seeing what’s really going on, so patient abuse would be hard to hide. He’s also known in the local industry for paying the hard-working nursing assistants more than the average $6.50 an hour they get in so many other nursing homes. That’s appreciated in this job, with all its lifting and washing and shaving and dealing with incontinence and dementia that make nursing home assistants more prone to injury than coal miners or construction workers, according to industry observers.

But it seems an unlikely fit. Al’s life was aerospace physics. He’s been in charge of the antenna systems on the Magellan spacecraft that Martin-Marietta launched in April 1989 to map Venus. “The data from that exceeded all data of all previous space missions combined,” he says. “It was a hard act to follow.”

Al was laid off and spent a year looking for more work. (During that year he wrote a book about a Hillary Clinton-like character wheedling her way into the presidency in 2004.) Finally his brother, who has been in the nursing home business for two decades, asked him if he wanted to take over this facility. “I haven’t totally solved the culture-shock adjustment thing,” Al says, “nor has my wife. She’s working here too, instead of teaching biology in Denver public schools.”

To Al, this is a little like running a school. “Some residents literally act like kids who haven’t had discipline for years. So, for instance, you have to discipline them like you would a small child to prevent them from touching a hot radiator — except you can’t, because of the law. But you can’t let them do it either, or they’ll hurt themselves. So you have to do things like distract them, or sometimes, if the doctor and the family or conservators agree, use chemical or physical restraints. The old guy who spits, for example. Every time I hear him laugh, I know he’s hit his target. So we’ve tried pills to reduce saliva, because it’s also a health hazard. But this is not physics. There’s no single right answer. There’s just kindness, hanging in there, and not letting it get to you.”

“One fact to consider: the cost of Medicaid to state and federal taxpayers has gone up six-fold in the last 15 years. If there is no reform, it’s expected to double again in the next 7 years.” (NBC Nightly News, 10/6/95)

“Quality of Care: D. Staffing: C. Enforcement: D. Industry Accountability: F. Industry profits: A.... In 1994, California taxpayers gave over $1.9 billion to nursing homes in MediCal funds alone, with few strings attached. In 1994, California’s for-profit nursing homes posted record revenue and profits, with no public accountability as to how the funds were spent.” (“1994 Report Card: California Nursing Homes,” CANHR, California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform)

Chuck Hargis, Al’s brother and the owner of Golden Palms and two other facilities, disagrees. “MediCal gives us about $80 per day per patient. That’s less than a decent hotel, and yet we have to provide three meals; nurses to provide 3.2 hours of service to each resident each day, to turn them and clean them and exercise them; a beauty shop; entertainment; physical therapy. If it wasn’t for some of the sub-acute patients that hospitals send us, which MediCal pays around $280 per day for, we couldn’t keep these operations going.”

“Plus, the California Department of Health Services inspectors can strike at any time,” says Al. “And they do. So there’s no way we can prepare for one of them. Which is fine. They come, they look at our papers, they talk to our residents, they inspect their rooms, their charts, they smell for urine. They look for soiled beds. They look for bedsores. They have hair-trigger fingers ready to point.”

“Patient 2-A,” reads a citation from DHS’s last (07/13/95) Special Incident investigation of Golden Palms, “was a 92-year-old female admitted to the facility on 2/9/93. Her diagnosis included the following: history of syncope; arthritis right knee; first-degree heart block; disequilibrium; head trauma; hypertension; degenerative joint disease...narrative notes accompanying the assessment stated patient 2-A was at risk for 'falls due to unsteady gait and poor safety awareness....’ On 6/12/95 at 11:00 a.m. a passing CNA ‘thought she heard a fall as she walked by the closed door of room...’ (but) there was no documentation on the medical record to show that the cause of resident 2-A’s fall had been discussed by nursing staff.

“Four days later, 6/16/95 at 9:30 a.m., the resident was wheeling herself in the hallway. She stopped her chair, stood up, attempted to walk, and fell.... She was transferred to a general acute-care hospital where she underwent surgery for repair to her fractured hip.... The facility [had] failed to reassess her for prevention of further falls.... Class B Citation. Penalty Assessment, $600.”

Class AA citations are the worst. They are given for events that kill a patient, such as the 1994 incident at San Diego’s Alvarado Convalescent Home, in which a resident “fell 19 times in less than a year and finally died after the last fall.” Class A citations are given for incidents that contribute to a resident’s death.

Actually, Patricia McGinnis of California Advocates for Nursing Home Reform thinks Golden Palms is up there with the better homes.

“It’s a 99-bed facility. They’ve got a sub-acute unit and actually not too bad a record. They had one citation in 1992. That was Class A. Nothing since then. Complaints have been pretty average, about four a year. Deficiencies, below average, they had 15 last year. They had only 1 deficiency in 1993, but that is probably because they weren’t surveyed that year.”

But McGinnis believes the current state of affairs (in which nursing homes’ average occupancy is 85 percent) is about to change for the worse for those in need of long-term care. Congress is considering returning to the states the responsibility of supervising nursing homes. But most significant, McGinnis believes, are Governor Wilson’s budget amendments for 1996. These will encourage the “premature discharges [of patients] from acute-care hospitals and dumping them into nursing homes. Very sick people who should be in hospitals with trained medical personnel will now be dumped into nursing homes,” according to the 1994 CANHR report.

“They’re going to be turning these nursing facilities into mini-hospitals,” adds McGinnis. “There’ll be no room for ordinary old folks, because they don’t bring in enough money.” She claims (and the industry doesn’t deny) that this was a nursing home industry proposal.

Says McGinnis, “Every year the nursing home industry gives the governor a number of proposals on how he can cut medical costs in other places, so that they make sure they don’t get their budget cut. So this was one of the proposals that the nursing home industry gave the governor. ‘Hey, look, if you get these [MediCal] people out of acute-care hospitals and give them to us [soon after surgery], instead of paying 500 bucks a day, [the state will] only have to pay $250 or $280. And you can save $30 million a year.’ So this was incorporated into the Wilson administration’s budget. It passed. It was signed. It’s in effect January 1, ’96.”

“Yes, we’ve been pushing for the use of nursing homes for sub-acute care,” says Kathy Daigle, speaking for the industry’s California Association of Health Facilities. “It could save the state $9 billion a year. That has to be good.”

McGinnis says the Service Employees International Union has been very concerned, as has the California Nurses’ Association, that sub-acute patients will run real dangers of being shunted to places without the personnel and facilities to treat them properly.

“But [the bill] was a train that was on the track. You couldn’t stop it. The governor was certainly not interested and certainly not worried about what’s going to happen to the patients. Never has done. He’s cut [MediCal]’s budget 18 percent, I think, since he’s been governor, so he’s certainly not one that’s going to worry about the patient outcome. He just said, ‘This is it. We’re going to put it in here.’ It passes, he signs it, and then he tells the people at the Department of Health Services, ‘Write up some regulations so that we can get this.’ So in the regulatory process, you get in there and try to get in as much as you can, but it’s real hard [once legislation is already going in this direction].”

This new pressure on nursing homes’ services, McGinnis says, will exacerbate a situation that’s already bad for current residents.

According to CANHR, in 1994, “California nursing homes received 32,216 deficiencies [from DHS] for failing to meet the minimum standards of care. In addition, 1422 citations [more serious than deficiencies] and $3.3 million in fines were assessed, 17 of which resulted in the deaths of residents. The inappropriate use of chemical and physical restraints increased significantly, with 34 percent of the facilities cited for inappropriate physical restraint use and many facilities reporting 50 to 90 percent of their residents on chemical and/or physical restraints.”

“CANHR is self-serving and their credibility is damaged,” says Daigle. “Federal and state requirements are so strict and so closely watched, residents can only be restrained if required by their doctor for their own well-being.” Daigle says each case has to be charted for inspection by DHS inspectors.

Part of the problem, McGinnis says, is the DHS itself. Although it issues plenty of citations, 75 percent of fines appear never to be collected by the state. It’s too soft on nursing homes.

“If you just had the leadership in Sacramento saying, ‘We’re not going to tolerate abuse and neglect in nursing homes, by God. We’re going to sponsor some legislative reforms that clean up this whole citation system mess. We’re going to issue fines, and we’re going to damned well collect them,’ I think if you had that mentality, it would make a difference. And we don’t. San Diego has for several years now been a terrible district office.”

But Daigle says CANHR’s picture of the nursing homes as cynical moneymaking machines is wrong. “There are 1200 facilities in California. A typical profit margin would be $50,000 a year. That’s about 50 cents per patient per day.”

“I can tell you,” says Al Hargis, “this place is not making money. We have 14, 15 of our 99 beds in sub-acute right now, and they’re what keep us above water. And we spend one heck of a lot of time reporting every little action we take. I don’t think you’re going to find we can budge from the care plan that has been approved by each resident’s doctor or our own doctor, as well as the federal and state law.”

“Come on, ladies. I want you to squeeze that ball. Remember, just squeeze it.”

Shulammith Shapiro walks around the room waving orange and yellow sponge-rubber balls in the air. Ragtime music pounds in competition with the O.J. trial in the day room. “Wave the balls above your heads. Okay. Just try bringing up to the shoulders. Now squeeze them. Squeeze it in and out. It’s good for your hands. Mr. Owens, wake up. You can sleep later. And up, down, side to side. Carrie!”

Carrie Benn is busy eating her orange. Well, it looks like an orange, it feels like an orange. She’s taken a bite. She’s chewing. She swallows the sponge rubber.

Shulammith lunges toward her and tries to take the orange. Carrie pulls it away like a kid in a school yard. “Wait a minute! Give it here,” Carrie says. She’s holding on to it as if it were her last dime. “I’m going to give it to him.”

She looks defiantly at one of the men.

“It has to be a male,” says Shulammith. Gradually she eases the rest of the sponge-rubber orange from Carrie’s hands and goes to get a nurse to check on Carrie’s digestion. The nurse opens Carrie’s mouth, puts in her index finger, and feels around. Can’t find anything. “I guess you swallowed it, Carrie,” the nurse says, as though this has happened before.

Meantime, Shulammith, who volunteers each week to lead the exercise class, returns to the group, squeezing away at their sponge-rubber oranges.

From the minutes of the residential council meeting. “The meeting was called to order by Lois Boden, as President Spiro Danos was not feeling well. Chaplain Clyde Henderson led the council in the Lord’s Prayer and the pledge of allegiance. He introduced his friend Mindy, his social worker, who thanked the council for inviting her.... Old Business: Dawn Boden reported that Monica and Stacey have acquired Price Club cards, and residents may now benefit from shopping at the Price Club.... Re: Fine Dining, Sherrie Schmitz reported that this new dining program had begun on May 17. It was very well received except that some residents complained that the crystal glassware was too heavy. Rose Monari expressed her approval of the menu stating, ‘It’s all very good.’ Douglas Friesendahl said he hoped fish would not be eliminated from the menu.

“New Business: Monica Small has arranged for a beauty makeup consultant and artist named Roxy to come to the facility and volunteer three hours each week. Monica also reported that the Safety Committee is looking into developing a new smoking policy using asbestos aprons for residents smoking on the patio for their safety.... Lois stated that she has never been so impressed by a dietary supervisor. Applause given by everyone in attendance honoring Sherrie Schmitz, dietary supervisor. Spiro said he plans on writing a letter commending the staff at Golden Palms. New admission, Tess Almann, said that she needs light bulbs in lamp above her bed. She also thanked everyone for being so wonderful to her since her admission.... Lois informed the council members who may not have heard of the passing of Mr. Shima and Leroy Jones.... Secondhand clothing sale scheduled on the 21st all day on the patio. Give us the items you no longer wear.”

“I’m always concerned about three things,” says Carol Fumes, “dress, smell, fingernails. You can tell how good a nursing facility like this is if you watch out for those three things. If there’s a pervasive smell of urine or residents are slovenly in appearance, you know it’s losing standards.”

Ms. Fumes is an ombudsman, come here to let patients and relatives know their rights and to hear any problems.

“I have a son in here, with a massive stroke and two seizures,” says one lady. “I don’t want to put him on heroic life-saving measures. Someone will have to play God then.”

“Have you asked him what he wants?” asks Ms. Fumes.

“He’s deaf in one ear. I’ve never asked him,” says the mother.

“I brought a Father’s Day present to my father here,” says a middle-aged son. “We haven’t seen it since.”

“Why do some nursing facilities,” says another woman, “like the one across from Sharp Memorial, demand you put up $60,000 before they’ll even talk about admitting your relative on MediCal?”

Fumes doesn’t have all the answers but distributes ombudsman pamphlets with her number on them. She also hands out durable power of attorney forms, for residents to declare whether they want “heroic measures” taken for life support. John takes one. “My wife’s here,” he says. “She had a little stroke, and then a big depression. I tried looking after her for a year and a half. It got too much. She got too much. I had to put her in here. She doesn’t seem to want to get better.”

We walk into room 14. A little lady lies there like a broken petal. Not so old. “Honey, I thought you were never coming,” she says, looking straight ahead.

“Been listening to the ombudsman.”

“The what? All my behind is burning, burning, burning. They didn’t wash me. Frenchie took me to the bathroom. Burning, burning, burning. But please don’t complain. If you complain, they’ll make it tougher for me. That Frenchie, he’s impossible. I want to be clean, but not at the expense of being hurt. I’m more scared than ever.”

“Well, honey,” says John, “don’t worry too much. They can kill you but not eat you. That’s against FDA rules.”

John squats beside Eloise. The joke didn’t penetrate. Eloise lies in a fetal position, turned away from him. “Do you remember the night we met?" he says finally. His voice is unexpectedly choking. “At the Paris Bar, or was it the College Green? March 2, 1956. I’d been sitting at the bar, and you were sitting at a table with your girlfriends. I decided you were the one. So I made my move. I came over, got down on my knees right there. ‘Oh, Juliet; oh, Juliet, wilt thou have me?’ It took a while for you to get used to the idea. But you came through. You were real pretty then.”

John wipes his eyes as he holds his wife’s little hand.

“I don’t see how that man can do it,” says Eloise. “He was so rough! I want to be clean, but....”

“This is a real welcome. I’m excited to Almighty God for bringing our sister back,” says the Reverend Jeffrey Roy Gary from the House of the Lord church. They come here every Sunday. We’re in the day room. Mostly women, mostly African-American, though Bob Harrison is there, and Clyde, wearing one of the bright ties that he’s famous for, and little Lilly Bue of Norway, saying, “Help me, please,” every now and then. Soon the reverend breaks into a clapping song. “This little light of mine, I’m gonna let it shine. This little light of mine. I’m gonna let it shine.” The reverend’s wife, Angela, harmonizes, and so do Rose Monari and Evelyn Preston and Tess Almann, their eyes wide and sparkling like children’s. Jo sits, impassive as usual, with a saucy white beret on her head, clapping in time.

“Let everything that have breath praise the Lord,” says Reverend Gary. “You have been better to us than we have been to ourselves. Hallelujah!”

“Hallelujah,” echo some of the residents. The reverend sings, “I’m going home to live with Jesus, since I laid my burdens down.” Lilly Bue’s doing little claps, and a tiny voice comes out. And when Clyde gets up and sings, with all his shakes, “Amaa-zing Grace, how sweet the sound,” his quavering perfectly tuned to his voice, and he hits that line — “That saved a wretch like me; I once was lost * but now am found” — a tear seems to pearl onto Bob Harrison’s cheek.

“Fear not!” calls Annie McMullen, the evangelist here today with the reverend. The gold chain on her ankle seems to rattle when she thunders out the words. She’s talking about the miracle of the fishes. “I like to think the name of the boat was Faith. And Jesus spoke to the wind, ‘Quiet down!’ And the sea got calm. And he says to us, ‘I’ll always be with you, even unto the end’ ” She looks around the room. The old eyes of people twice, three times her age, look back. “God has brought you all from a mighty long way,” she says.

Jo’s asleep again. Her head is back, her old throat stretched long and beautiful. “Every time you overcome doubt and fear, you become stronger. Just say, ‘If they kill me, they did me a favor. Absent from the body, present with the Lord.’ ’Cause if you take this — this puff of smoke, this vapor we call life, you’re doing me a favor. So don’t hold onto life. We will reap if we faint not!” Reverend Gary paces up and down, holds onto his arms, and touches his hands together as he expostulates.

“Yes,” mutters Robert Harrison. “Amen,” says Margaret Bullock. Annie McMullen sings, “Come to Jesus, He will save you. Only trust Him.” And as she puts her hand on 88-year-old Margaret Bullock, Margaret bursts into song, with a croaky voice* that sounds as if it were once clear as a bell. Suddenly she’s singing out, leading the room with gusto and conviction. “Only trust Him.” And Annie McMullen, overcome by this awakening, retreats to gain control of her emotions. Everyone, in mostly little voices, is singing, led by Margaret Bullock. Tears roll down preacher Gary’s face as he takes up the song. “Only trust Him, just now.”

There’s a moment of breath-less silence, except for Ruth Joseph, who hums on, and Lilly Bue saying, “Help me. Help me, please.” Even Robert Harrison is flushed with emotion.

“We have truly heard from Heaven this day,” Reverend Gary says, bringing out his handkerchief to wipe his tears. “Daddy’s home. We don’t have to worry about a thing. God is good. Let’s thank Sister McMullen for that mighty word. My heart is just bubbling. God is well pleased. It’s going to rain. When praises go up, blessings come down.”

“I made a recording once,” says Margaret Bullock. “ ‘Oh Holy Night.’ But then my tonsils bursted in my throat. I haven’t sung since. I come from Richmond, Texas. We had a cotton field in the front and a corn field in the back.” She resumes “Only trust Him,” and Reverend Gary joins in. “Let no one leave here to live the same way, oh Lord!”

Down the hallway, Isabella Smith watches the soaps in her room. But she’s thinking about home, a long, long time ago. “I’ll never forget,” she says. “It was Mr. Tinkle. Where I was born. Little Rock, Arkansas. My mother worked for him for years. And every Monday he’d go out and take $100 with him, and we never knew where. So one Monday we decided to follow. He went to a stadium there, with bleachers. Well, we hid under the bleachers, and when we saw Mr. Tinkle and other men put on the white robes, we got so scared you can’t believe. We buried ourselves in the sawdust to hide. Mama wouldn’t believe us. Not nice Mr. Tinkle! Then one night he told my mother, ‘Turn the water on in your church. They’re going to bum it down. Don’t say anything. Just turn on the hoses and go home. Go inside and pull your curtains and turn out the light. I’ll telephone you when I come back from Hot Springs.’ And sure enough, they fired the church that night.

“Another time they killed a black man and drug him through the streets, pointing guns at him. We left that place. We couldn’t believe nice Mr. Tinkle. So we lived in San Diego. Commercial Street. Children, grandchildren. I flew to England to see my son a while back. He took me to Buckingham Palace. He was in the Air Force. They let us in behind the gates to see the changing of the guard. And now I’m here, and I’m the vice president of the residents’ council. And my children don’t have no Ku Klux Klan to worry about. Say, can you do something for me? Go down and find the nurse? I want to go to bed. Real bad.”

Frank is a nursing assistant. Like each of them, he is responsible for ten patients. Dressing, feeding, rolling, putting to bed. Day in, day out. But he’s happy. “My father said, ‘Either do something for money, or do what you really want to do. They usually aren’t the same thing.’ So I decided to do what I like doing. With people. Old people especially. You learn so much. And they depend on you. I’ll never make a lot of money like this, but I feel good, every day.”

In the other sun room, the Horizon Room, which looks over a freeway and houses in the National City area, Marie Driscoll sits in her wheelchair, her forehead against the table edge, waiting to turn 100. Today’s the day. “Mama!” she cries in her tiny bird voice. “Oh, Mama! How long, Mama? So sore.” Her two tiny hands grip the table edge as she rocks back and forth. “How long. Mama?”

A bank of echoey voices approaches. A huge, square birthday cake thrusts through the doors. A CNA brings it in. There is one candle in the middle and “Happy Birthday Marie!” swirled across its top. The other residents look out the windows or down at their toes or are sleeping or picking their blankets or yelling at one another and then falling back into silence.

“Come on, everybody!” Lois Boden wheels in an elderly man. Behind her, white-uniformed nurses and more residents troop in.

Marie is hooped over like a little caterpillar that’s just curled to someone’s touch. Her gray-white hair is combed and pulled back into a little pigtail, making her ears look big. She seems oblivious to the suddenly busy world around her.

“Marie. Marie!” Lois’s smiley, smiley face comes in close. “Guess who’s here for your birthday? It’s Bill. Your son Bill. He’s here. We brought him over from the hospital.”

Marie’s blotchy sparrow’s face looks up from the table for a moment. Her blue eyes cast around to a long-faced old man in a wheelchair that’s been rolled up next to hers.

“Hi, Mom.” Bill Driscoll, 71 years old, recovering from a fractured hip. He leans in as best he can. “Happy birthday, Mom. You made it.” Marie’s eyes brighten.

“Take me home, Bill.”

“Can’t, Mom. They want to have a party. A birthday party for you.”

“Happy birthday to you, happy birthday to you,” the residents sing.

One of the nurses holds up Marie’s head to encourage her to watch what’s happening. One hundred years — from the little farm girl in Iowa in 1895 to now. She must have heard about President Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders when she was a kid, about the Great War in Europe, about this guy Henry Ford who’d made a $500 motor car “for the people.”

Sometimes now her senses awaken for a moment, then the lamps in her eyes fade and she’s thinking about her sore insides again.

“She’s so thin. It’s the bones in her buttocks,” says Frenchie the CNA. “Those bones stick into the chair. She hasn’t got enough cushioning. They hurt her. That’s why we keep her lying in bed most of the time.”

“You and me,” Bill says to his mom. Bill’s a big, shambling, rangy man who looks pretty devastated by his operation. “Men in our family usually crap out around 45, 47,” he says. “I’m the exception. But the women, they last quite a while.”

Lois adds her voice to the shaky throng. “He-yappy birthday to you, He-yappy birthday to you, happy birthday, dear Marie, ha-yappy birthday to you.”

There’s a polite cheer among the nurses. Most of the wheelchair brigade looks on, trying to figure out what the deal is here, apart from the birthday cake, which is what they really want.

Then the presents arrive. "More slippers,” says Bill as he opens another box.

One hundred years. One hundred years. Wars, depressions, cars, flight, rockets to the moon, civil rights, farm America becoming city America. And all the time little Marie Driscoll busied herself at her sink, raising son Bill with a firm hand, moving from Massachusetts to California.

“She was a strong swimmer,” says Bill. “Twenty years ago she was swimming out to the buoy at Santa Monica. Eighty years ago she and Rose Kennedy used to swim out to the boats in the bay at Martha’s Vineyard. They’d give them a drink and send them back. Yeah, the Rose Kennedy. They were friends. She’s quite a lady.”

“You miss her, Bill?” someone asks.

“Miss her?” He looks across at his mom. Tears well up. “Very much.” He reaches out his big old gnarled hand and takes her little old gnarled hand. She gives him that knowing, blue-eyed look again. “I love you. I SAY I LOVE YOU, MOM! As soon as I get on my feet. I’ll get you and me the hell out of here. Teeth or no teeth.”

The relatives are homing in, bringing pale blue nightgowns, more slippers. One granddaughter brings a gold heart on a silver chain.

At that, Mrs. Driscoll lights up. They put it around her neck. Family and nurses cluster around her for a photo. One of the nurses holds her head up. “Smile, Mrs. Driscoll! You’re 100.”

“You and me, Mom,” says Bill. He leans over. You can’t be intimate here. Not now that she’s deaf. “YOU AND ME, MOM!” he yells, leaning into her left ear. Then again, quietly, “You and me.” For a moment she looks at him with an intimate look she must have given him ever since he was gurgling in her arms. Her blue eyes linger, then fade, and she curls up again, that caterpillar. “Oh, Mama!” she says. “When’s it going to end?”

Somewhere down the echoing passageway, lost in the eternal river of old folks pushing their wheelchairs around and around the passages, Carrie Benn, who ate the sponge-rubber orange, doesn’t seem the worse for wear. You can hear her clear girl’s voice singing out. “lust Molly and me, and baby makes three, I’m happy in my...blue...heaven.”