Surreality

The man with the cowboy hat rode not a horse but a wheelchair, and he was wheeling it into Mom’s room at the convalescent center where she recuperates from a broken hip. I walked into to her room right behind him, carrying the morning newspaper. As he spotted me I smiled and asked him “How are you?” It’s a stupid question but he answered with a nod and a smile.  

“Do you know him?” I asked my mother.

“He’s from _________ __________,” she replied, naming a rural community nearby. That meant she knew him. And she seemed not at all perturbed that the man had wheeled himself right into her private room – an act that in many places would get a person shot, or at the very least, yelled at.

“Would you rather he left?” I asked. Mom waved off the question and began reading the front page of the newspaper, untouched by the surrealism of the event.

Here, surrealism is the antidote to boredom. It’s a place where names are forgotten, speech is fleeting and hearing is often a faraway memory, but where people form bonds all the same. A place where cowboy hats and tennis shoes go together, and you occasionally see a bob of flirty red curls in a sea of mostly white or gray heads. Where few people “walk,” but still take strolls in their wheeled transportation. Where nobody complains about really loud rock music in exercise class, and where people still look you right in the eyes.

A worker wheeled our cowboy out with a smile and an apology, but he was to come back two more times to sit in our midst as we read the morning paper. “Here he is again,” Mom said each time he returned.

Anyone longing for a world that makes sense should visit a place like this, where the residents have forgotten more rules than the rest of us will ever know. If tolerance isn’t rule number one, it’s pretty high on the list, right behind patience.