Category: ageism

What makes us Remember?

 

Monday I had a hard time with myself. I say that because I am the only one who can cause me anguish while I hunker down by myself in my comfortable cabin in the woods where the pines and fruit trees blow their pollen with abandon. I wondered why I was so sad that my body ached. Was it the bad dream the night before where I was challenged with tasks I didn’t know how to do as I worked my way towards this new world we are making? Maybe. Then is hit me, what’s the date? Of course it’s about to be April 28th. the day my father died. Even if I don’t want to remember I always do. I used to think it was the brain that helps me remember but I’ve learned that my body holds all my stories.

 

765 people have died in Washington state due to Covid-19.  Very limited testing.

Sunday 04/05/20

I’m a janitor. Boy is it hard to say that out loud. I have been a janitor for over five years. I know I’m a janitor because when I got the job cleaning the yoga studio and office space that is what was written in the contract. It took me awhile to accept that being a janitor was what I did not who I was. 

I am still cleaning the yoga studio and office space and even though only two people are working there I have noticed that I get physically ill every Sat night before I have to go clean the next day. I also clean the radio station where I volunteer, I’m sure that place is full of cooties. Most of the volunteers are men and most of them just don’t enjoy a good disinfectant wipe they way a woman would. Statistics are now saying the virus kills more men then woman and that scientist think it has something to do with female hormones or some such nonsense. I don’t think so. Men do not pay attention. Men do not wash their hands like woman do. Men think they can “tough it out.’ Not this time boys.

There are 20 confirmed cases in our town but testing has been limited so we are told maybe more like 200.

My friend Bonnie

I feel the desire to write about my friend Bonnie who died a couple of days ago.  I have not seen Bonnie since around 1995 but up until a few years ago we kept in occasional contact. Her birthday, Christmas, maybe my birthday. Bonnie’s birthday was easy to remember as it is the same day we pay our taxes so those would be the two things on my mind April 15.

I have known Bonnie since I was 16 years old. I think my father Tom met her at some bar she was cocktail waitressing at. Bonnie liked to party and she was sweet and earnest and laughed at the right time.  At some points she lived in my father’s house and helped care for the younger kids. She knew my family and our friends and we shared memories from my teenage years.  When I left home we became roommates in Marin. We danced our way through San Francisco and ended up moving to Lahaina together in 1973. Lahaina Maui in the early 70’s was young and beautiful like we were and we embraced the island and the island loved us back. It was a time of laughter and love and sand.

Tuesday

I am working on getting rid of stuff that belonged to the queen mum today. It always makes me emotional and today angry. I believe what happened at the nursing home has traumatized me, and I still wear my grief like a second skin.  Today I am looking through the stuff that was in her desk. Everything we could never find so we bought another was in that  drawer. Now I have 4 staplers, 3 measuring tapes, 6 pairs of scissors and more pens that I want to count, and push pins and rubber bands and on and on it goes. I have had a couple of people give me suggestions on getting a  job. Like I don’t know to look in the newspaper, I hate it when someones suggests the obvious to me.  In my heart I know these suggestions come from a place of love and yet it makes me mad because neither one of them has worked a low paying job in forty years.  They have no idea what it is like being an itinerant worker these days. I was so surprised how  cruel women can be in the workplace. I still have no idea why they didn’t like me and  decided to make my working life miserable, no sisterhood working there. And don’t get me started about ageism in the workplace. I see another box to go through, it looks like kitchen stuff, oh good just want I need  another potato peeler.