Damn Yankee by George S Geisinger (most read books of all time txt) 📖

your ass,” she said.
I didn't say anything. I just refused to move. Then there came two Care Managers, out of nowhere, and backed her up, about how she'd been sitting there already, that afternoon, and had only been away from the table for a few minutes. You couldn't prove it by me. I'd just come down from upstairs. I'd been working.
I thought about it, and reluctantly conceded to authority, not to threats, and got up abruptly, swearing audibly, but briefly. If there were two people in authority saying it was her seat, then it was her seat. She can rot in that seat, for all I care. I know where my friend's apartment is.
And I don't like it worth a darn. I'd like to know where my seat is. I'd get up and go to the john anytime I liked, without fear of being deprived of my chair in the dining room. That's her game, and she'll play that game with multiple seats in the dining room, just to prove she's got the power and control to do it. Let's all fight in the Confederacy or something.
Ever since that day, I've watched that woman come and go from “her seat” so much at every meal, one would think she had proved something to herself about her power and control royally. One would think she owns the place.
Well, that's her point, isn't it?
The other thing about this is, that woman threaten another human being in another assisted living environment. She carries a walking cane, and invoked an image of a strong, brutal, bully of a son, who would attack me, or anyone – over a simple chair in the dining room.
If I said anything like that to anyone, anywhere in this place, and been overheard by any of the authorities around here, I'd be walking out of here in handcuffs, escorted by the Police, under arrest.
What's more is, this woman is reputed to have attacked someone in the other place we all had to go to for the evacuation for the hurricane, and gave that person a broken collarbone over power and control.
What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
What is that woman doing in assisted living?
This is supposed to be a place to be a safe haven for seniors, a harmless, safe place for everyone who comes here. If someone is known to be dangerous, they are not accepted as a resident, a visitor, or an employee, right? It is said that everyone who comes here is given a background check before they are accepted, to make certain of our safety.
What is that woman doing here?

Chapter 16

Then there's the Vietnam War hero here. He is a man of few words, though they are normally vulgar words if he says anything, and he mostly stays to himself, but I have a profound respect for the man. Some of the people here are afraid of him, and I would certainly never consciously provoke him, but he's accomplished something I could never do. He survived a war in a combat zone, like the King of the Queen's table.
***
I graduated from high school at the high point of the Vietnam War, and might have been drafted to go, but I got a student deferment from the draft, getting accepted to go to university full time, directly after graduation, planning to become a high school band director.
That war was given a lot of graphic press in those days. It was always on the news, and the news footage was gory. I've seen all the movies about Vietnam that came out over the years, read some of the books about it, went to gatherings about it in DC, smelled the tear gas in my sister's dorm at College Park, from the riots at University of Maryland. I've known some of the veterans of that fiasco over the years. One of my veteran friends was riding around with me getting drunk in my car one night, and went back to combat in his mind, in my car one night. I had to find the VA Hospital at Perry Point, drunk in the middle of the night. He was having a flashback and needed help. I'm glad I wasn't thought to be Charlie.
I used to play WWII when I was little, with a stick in my hands for a gun, and I was usually the victor in those battles in those days. There was little danger in the woods of Pennsylvania in the 1950's, but the danger that was there befell me one day in those woods, and that is an entirely other story. One that I won't get into here. Let's just say I learned that I was not going to win all my battles in life, and I learned it in Penn's Woods in the early 1960's.
But watching the news when I was in high school, and being exposed to so much of that war in those days, I sort of feel like Vietnam was my war. It was personal. I was frightened by that war in those days. I'm grateful that I didn't have to go.
The Vietnam Veteran walks around the great Brighton Dam slowly, noiselessly, as though he were patrolling the jungle, pushing his rollator like he's carrying his weapon, and witnesses the things around him here, aware of things here in the way he's been taught to be aware.
He was a Sargent, doing a Sargent's job in a war zone.
One day, he was in a battle, in that other country half way around the world. He was operating a machine gun on a tripod, firing at the enemy, when the machine gun suffered a direct hit of a mortar shell. The weapon exploded in his hands. The man caught fire. His hands, arms, face and torso were badly burned. It's become a part of him, so's you'd hardly notice.
Somehow, he wound up here, with us. He tells me he's looking for his car, which he doesn't have anymore. He doesn't like to be here. The Brighton Dam feels like a prison to him. He wants to leave. He's cussed me out over nothing, too, like he's done to others. I leave him alone, too.

Chapter 17

There's a guy here, one of the many old salts in the area, a retired sailor who looks the picture of health to most any eye. I noticed that whenever he sits down to a meal, he cleans his plate, every time. Sometimes, he orders quite a bit of food, for his healthy appetite, an apparently healthy gentleman, and he never leaves any of it for the dog, after he's done. He eats all that he's served.
He was brought up to the tune of “waste naught, want naught,” Upstate somewhere, as the saying goes, with his only sibling in a family of four, a brother, whose name is somewhat familiar to me, you might say.
The guy has an old fashioned, regular name, the kind that people like desk clerks think is a gag. It's a name that doesn't sound at all like the real article, like John Doe, or something. He and one of the other guys at the men's table were talking about the common nature of their names one day, and his buddy was heard to say, “The desk clerk says, 'If that's the way you want it, buddy,'” like it was that unbelievable. Knowing what his name is, it's not surprising he has that problem now and then. His name sounds like an alias, there's little argument in my mind about that, but I'm pretty sure it's not.
The old salt himself, is a quiet kind of guy, who pretty much keeps his own counsel, but finds some wit in his environment from time to time.
His wife and daughter saw to it that he came to our little home in the woods, though he can't imagine why. He has no clue.
“The Mouth of the South” is one of this gentleman's expressions, not my own, I'll admit, and when I made a comment about The Mouth having to have his “alcohol at supper,” when the sailor was at my table one time, the old guy defended the idea by arguing that he would not call beer, “alcohol,” he would only call it a beer. I used to talk like that to my mother, who looked askance at my own drinking, cigarette smoking, and the lot, while I still did that sort of thing.
Then, one night at supper the man orders a beer in the dining room for himself, which is not necessarily a false move around here, but “the truth will out,” as they say.
Never suspecting why his wife and daughter put him in senior living as good as he feels, the man was informed that he cannot be served alcohol here without a doctor's note, as arranged on authority of his family, to which he replied in a loud and vulgar fashion, and left the dining room without eating.
I wonder what his problem is?

Chapter 18

There's a very elderly woman here, who whimpers to the waitresses, whining like a child, “Can you get me a little glass of juice, honey?” about half a dozen times, while we're all waiting to be served our food and drinks in the dining room. You'd think she was dying of thirst, when in actuality, we're all well fed and watered, morning, noon and night, handsomely and right on schedule, everyday.
The girls have learned to keep score on her. She'll guzzle orange juice and coffee by the gallons, if they'll give it to her, and if they don't. She'll get up out of her seat, and go to where they keep the juices and the coffee, even though they're always asking her not to, encouraging her to go sit down. They'll bring it to her in a moment. It makes no difference.
Then, though taking food out of the dining room is frowned upon, the old gal is likely to stuff a piece of cake or pie into her purse, unwrapped, so that one can imagine how gross the inside of her purse gets. She's been known to consume the contraband, too.
Then, she'll get a cup of coffee, fill it the whole way up. She'll leave it by her usual chair in the lobby, on the table next to her chair, where she camps out all day. She'll leave the coffee there, go get a magazine and come back, sit down, and fall sound asleep, only drinking a quarter inch off the top of the coffee, and she won't have anymore than that little taste of it until the next meal. Then, she wants her food in the lobby. She doesn't want to go to the dining room. It's all a ritual she performs.
Now, since one of my crafts is crocheting, and I've got a couple of patterns I made up myself for making hats, I'm in the habit of wearing either a beret or a stocking cap when I go about the Brighton Dam Apartments, and particularly when I go to the dining room for a meal.
This same old lady is just as likely as not, to say, right out loud to me, when I walk past her chair, “Why don't you pull off that stupid hat?” But my hats aren't