Old People's Home

All are limitory, but each has her own nuance of damage. The elite can dress and decent themselves, are ambulant with a single stick, adroit to read a book all through, or play the slow movements of easy sonatas. (Yet, perhaps their very carnal freedom is their spirit's bane: intelligent of what has happened and why, they are obnoxious to a glum beyond tears.) Then come those on wheels, the average majority, who endure T.V. and, led by lenient therapists, do community-singing, then the loners, muttering in Limbo, and last the terminally incompetent, as improvident, unspeakable, impeccable as the plants they parody. (Plants may sweat profusely but never sully themselves.) One tie, though, unites them: all appeared when the world, though much was awry there, was more spacious, more comely to look at, it's Old Ones with an audience and secular station. Then a child, in dismay with Mamma, could refuge with Gran to be revalued and told a story. As of now, we all know what to expect, but their generation is the first to fade like this, not at home but assigned to a numbered frequent ward, stowed out of conscience as unpopular luggage. As I ride the subway to spend half-an-hour with one, I revisage who she was in the pomp and sumpture of her hey-day, when week-end visits were a presumptive joy, not a good work. Am I cold to wish for a speedy painless dormition, pray, as I know she prays, that God or Nature will abrupt her earthly function?