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This is such a profound book on so many levels that everyone should read it. One astonishing fact is that the author is a male, writing about females with exquisite sensitivity and insight, and not just any females -- elderly females and a couple younger ones.
The book is written from the viewpoints of the 5 main characters: two aging women in a nursing home, their main caregiver, a hairdresser who works part time at the nursing home, and the daughter of the caregiver. No, this may not sound like exquisite reading but it is. Todd Johnson is a master of words. This story may change how you think about old age and other ages as well. It may change how you treat people and what you decide to do sometimes. The story is charming, funny, sad, upbeat, revealing, and profound. And it's oh so real.
A story about southern black American women focusing on two women who live in a nursing home, and their carers and relatives. My mother lives in a nursing home, so there was some direct relevance to me, but this (audiobook version) didn't really connect well with me. I thought it was quite well written and the characters and situations were very real, based on my experience. Perhaps the cultural contrast was too off-putting for me. Although it wasn't a great read, it certainly kept my interest enough to while away the time on my 2 and 3 hour nocturnal runs. ( )
Whether it’s the sentimentality of Mother’s Day coming up, or thoughts of my own aging, I don’t know, but this book really spoke to me, and then whispered in my thoughts, and swirled through my dreams.
The twining paths of five southern women, their stories told in alternating chapters in the voices of four of their number, the fifth no longer lucid. Lorraine is an aide at a nursing home where Margaret and Bernice now live. Rhonda is a beautician who comes once a week to the home, and April is Lorraine’s daughter. The chapters move quickly through time – the young grow up and have careers, the elderly pass on, the middle aged become elderly. Their hopes and dreams, their pasts and memories, what they’ve lived through, what they learn from one another, gently, gracefully told. Listen to me trying to explain about this story when I don’t have the words that this author does (who, by the way, did a remarkable job of giving voices to all these women). If this sounds like a story you’d be interested in, please read some of the quotes I’ve added to the Common Knowledge page. You won’t be disappointed. ( )
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
He who binds to himself a joy Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses the joy as it flies Lives in eternity’s sun rise. -William Blake, Eternity
Dedicatória
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
To Mabel Barnes Langdon and Mozelle Woodall Johnson, My Grandmothers
Primeiras palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
I barely have got in the door good and it’s already three thirty in the afternoon.
Citações
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
But as Mama always says, “I don’t care who you are, Sick and Old are comin to see you whether you invite em or not.”
One of her patients is dying. To call Margaret Clayton one of her patients is an understatement because she is Mama’s friend, close friend, and they have had intimacy forced upon their relationship by nature and age, yet rather than turn away from it, have walked through it, Mama supporting her all the way, younger in years but somehow older in days.
Mama continued at the nursing home. It had become for her a fertile ground in which she planted an entirely new life, yielding more than she could have ever known ahead of time. Every night, or the ones when she got to eat supper at home, she told stories from her day at work, a little thing that one of her patients had done or said, a private moment shared with her because she had become an intimate by effect, a role that, it must be said, she treated like a royal appointment. Her stories were not a breach of that privacy, rather they were an invitation for us to enter into a way of looking at life, standing in the present with a view into the distance. Her work with old people changed her, and by effect, me, and I found myself looking at my own grandmother differently, the woman who had rescued us in a beat-up station wagon from a monster that I now am able to see as more sad than horrible.
Help is a take it or leave it kind of thing, and if you can’t take it like it comes, might as well leave it cause it’s gon be more trouble than it’s worth. Or you’re gon lose a friend in the process.
Mother’s grief was a well that dried up so slowly that it eventually became useless to her, meaning that it had run its course and no longer had a purpose. . . . The end of her sadness came because she willed it. She had taken a part of her heart and boxed it up for storage, sealed against damage or further wear, like a cherished bridal gown. The contents were still there, still took up space, but she would never open it again.
When I glance down, I see the hands of an old woman, one getting old anyway. My hands tell the truth of how long I’ve been here. Today I’m holding a purse. Most days I’m holding the hand of someone who can’t stand up by herself, or someone who’s trying to get to the bathroom in time but can’t make it. Or I’m holding a fork to put in a mouth gaping wide-open with no teeth. I’m holding a toothbrush or a comb or a washcloth or a diaper or a pillow or a glass of water or toilet paper. And after I finish, I tie what’s left up in a plastic bag and carry it out with me to add to all the other trash bags from all the other rooms, and all the other nursing homes, hospital floors, and back bedrooms everywhere in the world where people need help to do the simplest things in life. We’ll all get there sometime.
I am grateful for this simple ritual. I want sameness. I want permanence. When I see Mama shuffle as she rises to her feet or dip slightly, favoring a weak knee as she steps out of my car, or the slight tremor of her hand as she raises a spoon, her lipstick unevenly applied, I am aware of change, the time for giving up what is. And I can’t bring myself to speak about it. I keep silent before that which scares me, the inevitability of a slowing march, then no march at all, a crawl, infant-like. She will need me more and more. I will hold this fact at bay for as long as I am able, if only because of the visible language of its fierce encroaching. And so next Wednesday I will pick her up again and compliment her on how pretty she looks. And it will not be patronizing; I will mean it, because I will be even more determined to keep her in my heart’s eye as she is, a gallery-worthy marble statue of my mother, teacher, my friend, the woman who was the first person to ever love me.
Últimas palavras
Informação do Conhecimento Comum em inglês.Edite para a localizar na sua língua.
We’ll sit around the table while the light changes outside and tell so many stories that none of us is gon remember what exactly really happened, but it won’t matter to us, we ain’t gon argue over details.
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The book is written from the viewpoints of the 5 main characters: two aging women in a nursing home, their main caregiver, a hairdresser who works part time at the nursing home, and the daughter of the caregiver. No, this may not sound like exquisite reading but it is. Todd Johnson is a master of words. This story may change how you think about old age and other ages as well. It may change how you treat people and what you decide to do sometimes. The story is charming, funny, sad, upbeat, revealing, and profound. And it's oh so real.
I hope this author writes many more books. (