Emeritus Sky

The view at 4:25 p.m. today from the parking lot of Emeritus in Yorba Linda, which, the last time I visited, was called Brighton Gardens, an assisted living community where I take communion to a friend. That means that this company just sold the place to this one. Happens a lot in this business, I understand. Sunset looks the same regardless.

The Happy Kathy and John Plan

At the LA Times, columnist Sandy Banks touched a nerve when she wrote about "senior living communities." She summarizes the contents of her mailbag here. A sample:

A few readers bristled at the very concept of shuffling seniors off to live separately. "Warehousing is warehousing under any name or at any price," wrote Harold Shapiro. "As a culture we perpetuate this practice whether for the poor or the well-to-do. We essentially relegate the elder in our society to the sidelines."

Others championed their own senior living communities. I was invited to Claremont to visit Pilgrim Place, to Walnut Village in Anaheim, to Glendale's Windsor Manor and to Laguna Woods Village (nee Leisure World) by 88-year-old Walt Wood, who warned me: "you'll have trouble getting a word in edgewise."

The variety and passion of the messages Banks received are obviously signs of our unresolved feelings about old age and how best to care for our aging relatives. Having done some research about nursing homes (not the ideal generic rubric, either) and performed my share of visiting ministry in them, I've resolved never to judge families who decide to place someone in one. First, we can never know all the factors that came into play for those involved. Second, a third party's judgment does no one who's directly involved any good.

And third, I've come to the conclusion that each of us is in training, or should be, to be an old person and that a contented, active, socially engaged old Kathy and John living down the hall or in the granny-grandpa shack out back would also be a reasonably happy Kathy and John at Golden Acres. That's our plan, at least.

Kindle Sight

Yet another pretentious (sorry! I vowed to avoid name-calling) article about whether reading a book on the Kindle (it used to be reading a book on tape or CD) is really reading. Typical of the genre is this:

Ellen Feldman, who writes literary fiction, worries about what will happen to the ineffable kinship among book lovers if the Kindle becomes ubiquitous. She was having lunch in an Upper East Side restaurant when she saw the man at the next table reading “The Collected Poems of Emily Dickinson.”

“I started speculating about him,” said Ms. Feldman, whose novels include “Scottsboro” and “The Boy Who Loved Anne Frank.” “I had all these fantasies going — I was trying to think if there was a college nearby and if maybe he was a professor.”

Could it be that he was trying to impress someone? Was he whistling "The Yellow Rose Of Texas" as he read? Meanwhile, how about the ineffable joy that those with failing eyesight will experience when they realize that the Kindle, with its adjustable font sizes, makes every one of the quarter million titles available on Amazon for the device a large-print book? Try telling a nursing home resident who can now enjoy what was once denied to her that it isn't really reading.