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By Laura SimonInsecticide
I never expected to fight with my neighbor. But the insecticide had to be stopped. “I don’t want that insecticide around here,” I told her again. I called the office. The maintenance men came
and so did the firemen, deciding that my ceiling fan should be plastered up so that insecticide sprayed on the outside wall would not be drawn into my house. Screen door open, she came running in. “Put your fingers down,” I said. “Keep them away from my eyes. Or you can leave right now. And put your hand down before you talk to me. What is this, anyhow?”
She said, “Why in the hell don’t you in the hell move the hell out of here.”
I was surprised how calm I was. “I’m not suspecting you,” I said. “We have 500 people around here. It could be anybody. I didn’t think you would be that stupid to use so much spray to
give your hands and lungs cancer.” That is how I made a new friend and got rid of the insecticide at the same time.
Monologue
[A Friend in Need]
The other day a neighbor called, “Let’s go walking, Laura. I have so much that I want to say to you. You’re such a good friend. My daughter and her boyfriend went to buy hamburger. She made meatballs last night and forgot to put them in the refrigerator. My mother would turn over in her
grave. ‘$1.99 for hamburger meat? In our old neighborhood a peddler would come around.
‘Watermelon 10 cents.’ Now it’s $2.00, $3.00. Such a crazy world. They soak you. Electric $27.00, and now it’s $78.00. My daughter says, “Mother, the life before spoiled you, things were a lot cheaper then.”
New Friend
[Coffin Stay Away]
As usual, I am looking for a new friend. Ah, a neighbor. I’m passing by deliberately and she’s outside. Her puppy dog is jumping on me. Invited in I settle on the sofa.
“So nice to see you,” she said, going on to talk about her cousins. One was well dressed beautifully in her coffin, the other a stately queen at her own funeral. My newly acquired friend is staring at me through her thick glasses. Dressing me up for my coffin too? She already knows my age.
Kitty
I met Kitty about 17 years ago in a writing class at UCSD. She hung onto me, I thought, because I could bring her up to date on old history. That saved her from opening another book. She
was going for her degree. I am auditing. Age is a factor -- everybody always asking me how old I am.
But Kitty was very polite. She just said she was 55 and let it go at that. The young students in the writing class had their special tales of love affairs, sex, living together, their childhoods. I had a room full of friends and Kitty was taking on the job of driving me to class at UCSD and soon she was joining me in painting at Mesa College. I love those modest women who never know anything and then they surpass you. That was Kitty. Her paintings won prizes.
All the while I take the same classes -- Faulkner, Hemingway, Joyce, mountain religion, by now forgotten. Hispanic literature. When she took French, I bowed out and waited for her at the library. I’m not good in languages. I studied French at Roosevelt College, and at Niles High Schoolin a suburb of Chicago. A French teacher came to the house. A real Frenchman from the YMCA.
While Mannie was in the den watching TV or reading the newspaper, my Frenchman and I were in the dining room and one evening when he kept putting his hand on mine tenderly, I quit French.
Anyway I couldn’t say in French, no matter how he tried to teach me, that it was snowing outside.
One day, Kitty has news for me. She and her husband are moving. Taking their furniture too?
They really mean it? Now they were gone. Moved away. Soon, long distance, she is calling, inviting me to visit for a few days.
“Come, Laura,” she said. “Before it gets too hot.”
“I’ll see,” I said.
I miss going with Kitty to class. We never had enough time to talk about our mistakes when raising our kids, the problems we had in the supermarket, our art, the exhibits we had seen and were going to see. And, “Come on, Laura, we’re going to Nordstrom’s Rack to find some bargains.” I still have those $5.00 blouses. She said it’ll look good on me. What she doesn’t know is I wear them with short shorts and I go to bed and sleep at night. Who's to see me? What’s the difference what I am
wearing at bed time? When shopping she would bring me something. “These slacks from Target, I think you will like them, Laura. You have blouses to go with them.” Or, “Laura, look what I brought. I found the kind of rye bread that you like without seeds. Let’s slice it up,” she would say, “and have some tea.” And we would sit at my table sipping tea and eating bread.
Together I think we learned that the generations can meet, right in the center, and never think of age. After she graduated, I stayed on auditing “Fairy Tales, The Psychology Of,” remembering the first day I got into class. I’m thinking -- what are those young students doing here? Is this how they’re going to go out into the world? Earn a living with fairy tales? And they are looking at me. What’s she doing here with fairy tales, this old woman?
We are reading about the happy coyote. Preferring to dance and sing with the other animals in the forest rather than hurt them. Until a dark shadow that had been following him, had jumped inside him and changed him into a vicious coyote. Now, he was killing everything in sight.
Jung indicates in his writings that every human being has a dark shadow within him unexplainable that can on the spur of the moment bring up a darkness into his character to say and
do things unexpectedly, upsetting everyone around him.
Kitty called, she is coming to visit. She misses her blue glass bathroom and all that tile. Every morning when she opened her eyes from the bedroom, there was that beautiful bathroom.
I thought she missed me.
Kitty, always the good friend, had called me one day.
“I got time. I can take you for shoes.”
I just wasn’t dressed, ready that moment.
“Come on. I want to take you,” and I needed the shoes so badly. She was always quick, always happy to take me. Our feelings for one another were mutual -- a friend to me as I was to her.
Carrying my shoes coming out of the store, she’s helping me over the curb. I am with my white cane. She is saying to me, “How come, Laura, you never had a heart attack? You’re so healthy, you’re going to live longer than I am.”
I said, “Kitty, you know how lucky I am. I got myself a driver.”
“A driver?” Now, she was mad. “How come you don’t pay me instead?”
“Because,” I said, “he makes a living at it and we are friends. That’s different.”
Maybe I was showing too much strength. Kitty said to me, “And why don’t you have cancer?”
She struck me so hard she laid me out flat. I tried to hold myself together to reach some kind of higher understanding of her suffering, her own personal life. But I couldn’t do it. I decided to remove myself. Months later she called me again. You hurt me, Kitty, so many times. Now I must tell you. But I never said anything because Ialways remember all the wonderful things you have done for me.
My Bulgarian Friend
“I read my books from Bulgaria and I like to write poems,” my neighbor is saying. And so do I, I thought. She turned to the open door of my patio, toward her duplex across the way, then sat down at my table that separates kitchen from living room.
“I’m five years here. When was communists everything the same. Now I come to help you.”
Putting her hands to her eyes and with a deep sigh she said, “I cry because you live alone. Me, too, with son. Because I remember my mother. She was sewing for people on a machine – no electric. She turned a wheel – like this,” showing me how a wheel turns with her right hand, the left, busy with cloth and needle.
“All day and in the night, I see that machine so now,” hands over her eyes. “My mother buried in Bulgaria and I be here. It makes me cry because she’s not there anymore, and she was
good to me. She sleeps with my children and I go to work.” As she talked, she was writing a poem and didn’t know it. Am I like that, too?
“In the next town from my village, I was a teacher reading poems about my life. I never had a father and I was a principal. I was a principal for fifteen years. Before I come to America, one pupilsaid, “I appreciate you,” and kissed my hands.
“My son separate from his wife. I think about it all the time and now he goes to help his daughter so I am alone like you. No job. She graduated business and science so she takes pictures to
sell. ‘You want to buy this?’ Lorie, I like to talk to you. You understand my English. My feelings. And you’re my teacher when you talk to me. I kiss your hand, too. I appreciate and maybe you will move away too like my mother. Or maybe I feel your life like mine?”
I look away from her eyes that meet mine that can see right through me, and read my own memoir, my poems that seem exactly like hers.
“I don’t remember my father,” she continued. “He goes away from the village when I was five yours old and never in a letter a check. Nothing for me, my mother working, sewing, for my
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 university and he, my father was making buildings.” And my father was making cigars.
She stands up to bend over me. She cups my face. Her hands are smooth, caressing my face, her face to mine as if wanting to kiss me.
“Let me help you,” she said. “You live alone. I say to you again, smile.”
When she left, I was troubled by my own memories. Déjà vu. My mother rolling tobacco leaves into cigars at our kitchen table, my father, grumpy and cranky, would have given anything for me to say a word to him, never having the chance later for then he was gone. When he disappeared in a village, I didn’t see him until 25 years later.
The Clubhouse
I go to the coffee klatch at the clubhouse to find something to do.
“Why don’t you join our singing group, Laura? You remember me? I’m Louisa. I met you at the Seniors."
Another woman pipes in, “How can she sing? She’s blind.”
That’s how some sighted people think -- if you’re blind, you’re deaf and dumb too. I chose to listen to the men rave in the corner.
“What do you Democrats want -- we should all vote Democrat? There shouldn’t be any Republicans? Bush graduated Harvard and got straight A’s. Like hell.”
“Well, Gore graduated and he got straight A’s too and went to divinity school.”
“Well, Bush went to divinity school too.”
“He’ll take us into the war.”
“What do you want? We should keep quiet?”
Louisa is back just in time to break up the Bush and Gore argument.
“You know that they’re going to tear this place down? Get your vote in. Do you want assisted living or beauty shops three times a week?”
“Who wants beauty shops?” one man yells over. “And the women won’t have money for it either.”
“So far, in every depression, it's the Republicans.”
“Then the builders will be stuck and we won’t have to move.”
I get in a line with the coffee drinkers. Sweet rolls 75 cents. I carry my tray past the Democrats and Republicans and sit with the women and learn that the office is going to give us a breakfast party. Scrambled eggs, $3.50.
My new hearing aid is giving me trouble. I miss important conversation.
“My 5-year-old grandson says, ‘I want to be in bed with grandma and watch TV and ice cream.’ And my little granddaughter says, ‘I want to be in bed with grandma and play dolls.’”
The men are yelling, “Wilson in 1919 let us know that the Huns were coming.”
“You’re behind the times -- that’s when the Armistice was signed and we got Spanish Influenza.”
“And don’t remind us now about the Depression. We know all about it.”
“That scrip they gave us instead of money we could never spend. The grocers refused to take it.”
“If they elect Bush, we will have Hoover all over again. They’ll be a chicken in every pot.”
“We were lucky to find a potato.”
In the middle of all this, a strange question from a well-dressed, grey-haired lady: “Are you an Ashkenazi?"
I said, “I don’t know.”
“Where were your parents born? Your grandparents?”
“In Russia,” I say, feeling nervous. My hearing aid. My poor eyesight. I liked that woman. At first I thought she would be a nice new friend for me.
“I’m Sephardic,” she brags. “I was born in Egypt and my father was born in Alsace-Lorraine.”
Then that takes care of her. I have to look elsewhere for a friend.
Once at the seniors they were occupying our time with tablespoons and little drums. “Now beat your drum and say your name!” the hostess going to each and every one of us to make sure that we remember who we are.
*
In the clubhouse this morning, the men have taken over the meeting. One man up in front saying to his audience, “My mother was smart, she moved us all to a college town when I was a sophomore in high school. That’s how I became a lawyer.
Now we have the worry of the satellites. The eye in the sky. Do terrorists know about that, too? On the news all day they are finding anthrax in the mail, frightening people, if not on the surface, inwardly. They can spill that powdery stuff over
the animals, the agriculture. How can we worry about that?”
Another man, interrupting, shouted, “In audiology, I asked the girl if she’d mind if the pharmacist would deliver a package for me while I was there.”
“We don’t want any medicine in our office,” she said.
“I had to go and pick it up. We seniors talk about frozen foods – how do we know what’s in that package? Are we becoming a paranoid society? Last night on TV, I’m listening to a concert.
Opera stars at the Statue of Liberty. New Yorkers, we’ve got to get back to normal, enjoy ourselves.
Everyone is up with the news. Two of the biggest nuclear plants in the country not too far away from San Diego. What about the marine base at Miramar? The National Guard will soon be
everywhere. Soldiers on every corner giving us security, at the same time, taking away what we always felt was our freedom and no danger of enemy around the corner.”
I got up and left.
Elder Philosophy: Real Time
Once on Sunday when Mannie was watching baseball on TV, I got into my convertible and went over to the Jewish Home for the Aged to socialize with the elderly as a volunteer. An old man
came in and sat down next to me in the synagogue room. “I’m waiting for Mrs. Bromberg,” I said.“She doesn’t have anybody. Nobody comes to visit her.”
“Same with me,” he said. “I’m 90 years old. Everybody has forgotten us.”
“Tell me,” I said. “What have you learned in your lifetime? Give me a present to take back.”
“It’s just me and my violin,” he said. “In some way you have to reach up to a higher understanding to feel the essence of God, the spirit. And if you let good music into your ear, no bad
thoughts will ever come into your head.”
Soon after that experience, I met an old lady in the coffee shop at the Jewish Community Center while waiting for my painting class. “Have a piece of bagel,” she said, breaking one in half
from her shopping bag. I said, “What is your philosophy in life?”
“Philosophy,” she said. “Who need philosophy? Why does God make life so hard for us?”
Crying. Analyze her tears? I’m only 40 years old. She looks so old, so haggard. Women will say, “I’m putting on my face.” I wonder about that when the beauty is the kindness that shows through as in some elderly people. Something that doesn’t come through the mask of cosmetics.
Dipping her bagel into the coffee, she is looking at me. “You’re so young yet. You will have to live whatever age you are now over again and maybe more years on top of that to be as old as I am now. There is a reason why you sat down here so I’m telling you – and you will never forget it – it is only what you can do with your own strength that counts.”
Sweet Bird of Youth
I had a terrible time finding a handyman-driver. Finally a driver was recommended to me and came to my house for an interview. He spoke of a woman who accused him of stealing a diamond ring. She called the police but later found it. Other references spoke very highly of him. One woman said, “He took me to the airport. He was on time. But he can really tell you off if he feels like it. But we like him.”
He was on time. His speed was reasonable. And he stopped at the supermarket with me. And I had his arm when I walked. He took me to the doctor and waited. Not too anxious to vacuum
carpeting, he did it anyway.
I order a series of tickets through Braille Institute, $10.00 a piece, second row center. So that he doesn’t have to wait outside, I gave him a ticket too. He was delighted, insisting that he pay for his own, not having been in a theater for many years.
We enjoyed the plays until the last one of the season, Tennessee William’s Sweet Bird of Youth. By mistake, they seated us on the wrong side of the theater and we had to tolerate two people signing for the deaf right in front of our faces. Afterwards when we left, I had to ask him, “What was that play all about? Do you know?”
He was so angry he could hardly speak. “You mean, I gave up my Saturday to come see a play like that?” he said. “What were you afraid of, that I would steal your youth? That’s how you’re telling me you don’t trust me? Had me take you to this play? What do you think I am anyway?”
“I didn’t write it. I don’t know Tennessee Williams from Adam,” I said. “And he didn’t write the play just for you. There are hundreds of people there.”
Interrupting me and mad as all hell saying, “All homosexuals?”
I lost my friendly driver because of Tennessee Williams.
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Editor's Note: Today San Diego Jewish World continues the-weekly serialization of I'm Still Here by Laura Simon, a San Diego resident who is still going strong at 103. She wrote this book to mark her 100th birthday. 