A Tourist in Mayberry

Part 6/1) Notes from My Diary Journal: Visiting the Retirement Center

As I told you earlier, growing up I spent a lot of time at Riverview Retirement Center where Magdalena and I kept the old and lonely from being lonesome and malcontent. My mom worked all the time, and if she needed us, she knew where to find us. As we got older, my mom had a conversation with the school guidance counselor who told her our volunteer hours would look good on college applications, so she encouraged us to drop by and help. My mom noticed little of what we did there each day. We kept a routine, especially in the summers before we discovered other teenage dramas to occupy our waking hours.

The summer before ninth grade this was our typical routine. Magdalena and I rode our bikes to the retirement center mid-morning because we were teenagers and slept late. We were not yet so teenagey that we slept until noon or two or three in the afternoon, but we did not get up and going until about 9 or 9:30 each morning. Once there, we checked in with mom at the nursing center and began our rounds. We started with Miss Lacey.

For most of that summer and the following year, Miss Lacey thought we were old friends from years back coming to visit. We were Sally Mae and Lucinda, I was Sally Mae and Magdalena was Lucinda. We chatted about our boyfriends, what we would wear to the dance, how boring and sometimes stupid our teachers were, and escaping this podunk town and living in New York City, or Paris, or in an Italian villa. In Miss Lacey's world, we did not care what mean girls thought about us. When someone slighted us, Miss Lacey would say, "We don't care what people think about us. We are practically perfect."

We enjoyed these visits because it made us feel like a part of a high school culture that we were far removed from at the time. Magdalena and I were tomboys, but we were in a transition phase where we noticed, not boys, but girls. We noticed they were doing things we weren't doing. In middle school, we thought they were silly and stupid, but that summer we began to wonder if something was wrong with us instead. We began to wonder if we were pretty enough, if we wore the right clothes or had the right hair.

Miss Lacey noticed us. Our moms were busy all the time, but Miss Lacey stopped and talked with us like young women on the verge of a great big new world we owned. Crazy as it sounds, Miss Lacey made us feel part of a world we did not belong to yet, and she had not belonged to in a long time. Lacey, and Sally Mae, and Lucinda were popular and happy, and the boys were crazy about us in this teenage world.

Both Mr. Jenkins and mom said it was ok to pretend we were Sally Mae and Lucinda because it made Miss Lacey so happy. It made us happy too. Not to mention, we gained a lot of valuable information on confidence, and flirting, and painting our nails, and other stuff you just need to know before you head off to high school. Miss Lacey was a lady who knew how to dress and what to wear, but she knew how to kick butt too. Miss Lacey taught us how to stand up for ourselves. Miss Lacey was feminine and delicate, but she did not "take any shit off no man", and we knew this because she said so.

Sometimes, Miss Lacey talked in riddles and secrets and conversations were difficult to follow because we did not know our parts as well as the teenager roles of Sally Mae and Lucinda. Miss Lacey talked in code words, such as: zero hour, rendezvous, missions, garrote, eliminating a target, and suspicious package. It's not that we did not understand these words, some of these words were self-explanatory, but not when your response to an already fragile mind might cause unrest or anguish. The visits on these days were brief, and Magdalena and I would excuse ourselves by "going to check" on the mission at hand.

After Miss Lacey's visit, we would check in with a few other residents and usually stop by the rec room and help with an on-going jigsaw puzzle kept on a round table in the center of the room. This puzzle changed out about every two or three days when it was complete. These puzzles were 1,000 piece puzzles made by Buffalo Games and were beautiful and complicated. I will admit here that Magdalena and I were as addicted to this activity as the residents. It was good, old-fashioned fun. It was as much fun as the marathon Monopoly and Life games we played with our friends in the rec room. The adults let us pick which game piece we wanted first. They were good that way - they just wanted to play. They would not let you win though because they were competitive. That summer, Aunt Bea was the reigning Monopoly champ and a retired naval officer we called Colonel was the Life champion.