Search Results for: Madeline

At The Mansion, inspired by the writing of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a half-dozen other writers, we sat in the Activity Room of The Mansion for my weekly story reading to the Mansion residents.

It was pouring outside, the room was warm, the rain beating on the windows, the sky back with thunder clouds, the residents still excited by the appearance of an otter in the creek behind the building.

I decided to take them to different places today, we went to the little village of Macondo in Marquez’s magical One Hundred Years Of Solitude,  a book I never imagined reading to these good people on the edge of life, most of them raised on the farms or small villages of upstate New York.

In todays, chapter, Ursula lost her patience with her feckless husband Jose Arcadio Buendia, who kept spending all their money on the inventions brought to town by the mysterious  aging gypsy Melquidiades who was Buendia’s age, but who aged mysteriously.

“It was,” wrote Marquez – the residents were transfixed – “in reality, the result of multiple and rare diseases contracted on his innumerable trips around the world. He was a fugitive from all the plagues and catastrophes that had ever lashed mankind. he had survived pellagra in Persia, scurvy in the Malayan archipelago, leprosy in Alexandra, beriberi in Japan, bubonic plague in Madagascar, an earthquake in Sicily, an a disastrous shipwreck in the Strait of Magellan.

Ursala was sick of the gypsy’s annual appearances in Macondo. Every year, her husband gave him all of their food money for the new inventions he brought, thinking they would bring wealth, but they only brought more poverty.

After we left Macondo, I read an inventive animal story, The Someone New,  by Jill Twiss and Eg Keller about how otters and ducks and butterflies accepted a newcomer, a snail named Pudding, after rejecting him out of fear things would change.

The residents related to that story, as Heather from the Battenkill bookstore knew they might. When I came into the bookstore for my weekly pre-reading visit,  she usually has a new book for me to read to the residents.

We talked about the fear of something new, in terms of coming to a place like the Mansion, or welcoming new people.

We went with Maisie the border collie puppy to Moonrise Farm, where she yearned to have a job and studied patiently under the watchful eye of Laddie, the older sheep dog.

The book – by John and Jennifer Churchman –  has the most wonderful pictures of the dogs and farm animals, the residents oohed and aaahed and smiled as I walked the book around to them as I read it so they could see the photos.

I read a great favorite, the Wonky Donkey by Craig Smith, they laugh at me and the wonky donkey fun plays on words. They always clap and laugh when they hear it. The residents love the ridiculous and the absurd.

I read some of Shel Silverstein’s oddball poems (Where The Sidewalk Ends)  – Madeline observed that he had a Jewish name, she knew that from living in New York. When I left, Madeline thanked me and asked me what my name was.

She will not remember it for a minute. She always tells me that Red’s collar is too tight, I always loosen it so she can see.

And I read a Native American story, The Girl and the Wolf  by Katherena Vermette, about a nameless girl who wanders off from her mother and gets lost in the woods. She is wandering frightened in the dark when a big silver wolf appears and asks her if she is lost.

We all tensed up – I could feel the anxiety in the room – but it turned out the wolf always guided lost children home when he found them, and encouraged them to use their instincts to make their way.

The girl trusted him from the beginning.

It was in a sense, the perfect Mansion story, the residents all expect one kind of ending, and are relieved and surprised to find another.

We talked about wolves, and they said they have never heard a happy story about a wolf and a child. Happy endings are important to them.

I am always a bit anxious when I read to the residents, I worry that I am boring, or am picking the wrong books. and several people always fall asleep. Some, confused, talk over me. Others comment on the stories. A few are rapt, they never take their eyes off of me.

I bring a new story every week, I am learning what to choose.

But here’s my happy ending.

When I got up to pack up my books – I feel like one of those traveling story tellers in medieval times  – there was applause! They were clapping for me, and thanking me, they loved the stories they heard today, the mix, the twists and turns, the journeys to other places.

Marquez, as it turns out, is the perfect author for the Mansion residents, his stories are full of magic and mysticism, things they love to hear about but have usually never experienced.

So are the farm and animal stories, especially those with beautiful pictures and drawings.

I love this work, we go to different places every week. It’s like taking a magical trip, we all step ourselves to other places. I’ve got to read more slowly and with more feeling, I think.

This is a kind of acting.

I’ve done scores of reading and public appearances, and heard lots of applause. But I don’t think I ever got applause that was as sweet as the applause I got today at the Mansion.

Please consider supporting this work with the elderly. You can contribute via Paypal, [email protected] or by check and small donations: Jon Katz, Mansion Work, P.O.Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816.

It was warm in the activity room at the Mansion today, there is a stillness to the place when the weather warms up. I think the residents feel the heat acutely, several of the people in the room fell asleep.

I’m pleased at the number of people who are eager to be read too.

I read a short piece (non -fiction) by Gabriel Garcia Marquez about a barber shaving the beard and throat of Latin American dictator, and the residents are intrigued by the symbols and images Marquez uses in his fantastical writing.

“What a good idea!” said Madeline, who seems to love Marquez’s writing, “I would never have thought about a presidential barber.” I read a Native American tale about a mouse who heads out to find the Faraway Land, an important final destination for Native-Americans.

I don’t think the residents are really following the story as well as Madeline, but they are intrigued with his language and mysticism.

I read the story of the “Lomax: by Dr, Seuss and we had a brief discussion about the environment and climate change. I asked the residents if they believed climate change real, several said yes, the others said they weren’t sure. They all agreed that builders and developers can be too greedy sometimes and should not be allowed to gobble up all the farmland and forests.

I’m mixing up my reading – Marquez, Robert Frost poems, my own writing, and some children’s books with striking images. The residents love beautiful photos of animals more than anything else. They still want me to read the Wonky Donky.

Red goes from one person to another and says hello, gets petted, then comes and lies down next to me.

Thursday, I’m going back for my meditation class. When I am not at the Mansion for a couple of days, I miss them all.

If you wish to send letters to the Mansion residents, here is a list of those who wish to accept them. Please know that many of the residents are not able to respond or acknowledge the letters, they do love getting them.

The names, all at The Mansion, 11 S. Union Avenue, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816, are Ellen, Matt, Mary, Sylvie, Jean, Madeline, Helen, Alanna, Annette, Peggie, Dotty, Timothy, Art, Wayne, Ruth, Burt, Carol.

I’ve started teaching meditation to the elderly, it is a powerful experience to be teaching something I always thought I had to be taught. That feels good.

Every Thursday, at 10:30 a.m., I teach a meditation class for between six and eight residents of the Mansion. Most Thursdays, three or four of the residents are at the doctors. Or some forget, or are not feeling well.

I’ve come to feel that this is among the most important work I do at the Mansion. I am surprised by the people who come and how much it means to them. Yesterday, I began conducting the guided meditations myself. Breath in through the nose, out through the mouth.

Let your mind go where it wants to go. If you don’t like where it’s going, pay attention to your breathing. There is no right or wrong, no way to feel. Growing older is challenging and stressful, every single day. Here may be a way for you to calm and steady yourself when you need to. Meditation, I tell them each week, is an ancient practice, it promotes health and peace of mind.

I know they forget things, so I go back to the beginning each time. I bring a bag of meditation beads, because they lose theirs, or forget what they are for.

I bring my own Tibetan bells, my own meditation beads. I wear four colors on my rope wrist bracelets.

I ring to start, I ring to stop. There is a lot of background noise when we meditate, people and staffing coming into the dining room, people talking loudly a few feet away, people asking what we are doing.

I confess to being a little surprised when the residents tell me that this has helped them.  I’m not secure about it. That’s good, I think, being arrogant turns them off.

Ruth was unhappy, thinking of a loved one who died. Alice returned from a short hospital stay.

Wayne comes faithfully, but doesn’t talk about why. Katherine says it helps her to feel steady. Tim thinks of his creative projects. Madeline talks about seeing her father murdered by her brother when she was eight years old and her subsequent life in an orphanage in the Bronx. Carol and Jean are always silent, but I see them close their eyes and sit up straight.

After the 10 to 15 minute meditation, we all talk about how we are feeling, what meditation did for them. Madeline says it makes  her feel safe, that is her mantra. After all, she says, it’s not every day you see your father murdered. We all nod at this.

Madeline is the most vocal and articulate about her meditation. “I say the same thing every time, I am safe here, no one will hurt me.” I said that is a mantra, and I tell her about mantras.

Alice speaks this time, she says she goes to a soft and quiet place it is restful. Ruth says it makes her feel a little  better, “but not so much.” Several said it is important to stop sometimes and just think, somehow, they never get to do it.

I have learned a lot in my Mansion work about the complexity of being old, of dealing with never-ending health problems, of worrying about family, sickness, death, loss, memory.

I see that meditation helps. I see that is something I can teach, when I always thought it was something I had to be taught, even after doing it for 20 years.

Reading to the Mansion residents can be a test of the ego, some drift off and nod, some are off in another space. Some are wide-eyed, focused and eager.

It’s never personal. I want to cry sometimes when one of them comes up to me and grabs my hand or gives me a hug, and says, “oh, thank you for reading to us.”

Another full house, I love SRO readings, I don’t care how old the audience is.

There are peaks and valleys in my readings, often interrupted by snores or odd observations far off the mark. And sweet moments that run deep. These readings are not like the ones I was used to in my book life, most everyone in the audience was awake for an hour or so.

“Are you a doctor?,” Linda asked me on the way out, “because you should be.” No, I said, I am not a doctor, I am just me. And I should not be.

There were three beautiful moments I wanted to share with you. One was when I was reading from Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s wonderful novel One Hundred Years Of Solitude. I wasn’t sure about reading this book, my favorite novel, but it is a hit at the Mansion. They love mystical and spiritual images.

I read  how the gypsy Melquiades’ came to the village of Macondo, a twenty-abode- hut town,  every year with a different miraculous new invention.

This year it was the telescope, and the gypsy let them look through it at a parrot at the end of the main road. He promised the villagers that one day, man would be able to see what is happening in any place in the world without leaving his old house.

Jose Arcadio Buendia gave Melquiades’ all of his money to buy the telescope (the previous year, he bought the magnet ingots for all of his money to prospect for gold). He had purchased the magnets thinking the new invention would make him wealthy.

Buendia perceived the telescope as a possible weapon of war, at the right angle and in the sun, it could set fire to hay hundreds of feet away. Melquiades” showed him.

Buenida’s long suffering wife Ursula wept at the certainty of another year in poverty.

The Mansion residents were wide-eyed and worried about Buendia. They were worried about him, several just shook their heads. I said he was a man of hope. “Stupidity, more like it,’ mumbled Madeline.

“Oh-oh,” said Madeline, “they should have run this guy when he first showed up.”  She was from the Bronx, she said, and she would have known better.

We’re almost through Chapter one, and I love reading it, and they love the mysticism and magic of Marquez, his narrative is very accessible to them. And to me.

The second sweet moment was when I read them  Robert Frost’s Stopping by Woods On A Snowy Evening, a poem I read almost every week. In June, we are sponsoring an outing to the Robert Frost home in North Bennington, Vt. The Army Of Good is buying tickets and lunch.

The residents who are ambulatory and going were stunned to hear my speculation that Frost might have written this poem in that house, I read it to them every week. (He wrote it in New Hampshire in 1922 and won a Pulitzer Prize for it. I will tell the truth at some point.)

They want to hear more poems, and I’m bringing more next week. It is rare that something I can read to them ties so closely to something they can go out and see. Many people in the group had heard of Frost, he is thought of as a local, a Vermonter around her, some had heard the poem.

The third connection was the most surprising and the most magical. I scour Battenkill Books and used bookstores for simple but meaningful stories I can read to the residents each week. I found one such story in a children’s book called My Heart, by Corinna Luyken, who lives and writes in Olympia, Washington. I read it quietly to the residents, holding up each illustration as we went. It touched my heart, it touched theirs.

The story is a poem about the heart narrated by a young unnamed girl. The illustrations are haunting and beautiful:

“My heart is a window, my heart is a slide.

My heart can be closed, or opened up wide,

Some days it’s a puddle, some days it’s a stain.

Some days it is cloudy, and heavy with rain.

Some days it is tiny…

But tiny can grow…

and grow…

and grow. 

There are days it’s a fence between me and the world,

day’s it’s a whisper than can barely be heard.

There are days it is broken,

but broken can mend,

and a heart that is closed can still open again.

My heart is a shadow, a light, and a guide.

Closed or open…

I get to decide.”

There was not a sound to be heard in the room, except for one resident snoring. Those awake and alert – almost all – especially loved the ending.

They  wanted me to read it again, and next week. There was a lot of feeling in the room, much of it unspoken. “What an amazing young girl to have written that,” said Madeline quietly. I explained the story was about a young girl, but the woman who wrote it was older, and had two cats.

We are used to some snoring in the reading hour.

Then I read about Maud,the 88-year-old murderer from Sweden, who removes bad people from the world, and feeds the detectives dinner as they investigate. They never can accept her as a suspect.

One of her victims was lying in a pool of blood beneath her dining room table while she explained to the police that she had been away on vacation, and was surprised to come back and find him there.

Must be awful for you to have seen that, Maud, said the police inspector, sipping some tea. There, there.

I also read them a story about a baby-sitter from out of space, and this sparked a lively discussion about whether aliens from another planet, should they land, be greeted warmly or with guns drawn.

Madeline seemed to win the day suggesting they be greeted warmly, but with guns nearby if needed. I told her they called it Trust But Verify.

We didn’t get to Shel Silverstein’s poems, which they love to hear, but I did read the Wonky Donky, a favorite. Next Thursday I’ll be reading again.

(If you wish to support my work at the Mansion, please consider contributing to this work via Paypal, [email protected] or by check, Jon Katz, Mansion Fund, P.O. Box 205, Cambridge, N.Y., 12816. Thank you.)

I read to the Mansion residents every Thursday for an hour or so, and I love doing it, and I think they do also. I always draw a full house. The residents love to be read to.

I always try to bring a new book and challenge them, and generally I get books I think they will love. This week, I decided to do something different. In addition to bringing books (every week, Connie Brooks at Battenkill Books and I pick out some new titles) that they like, I decided to bring a book that I love very much and see what happens.

I get reliable responses. If they don’t like a book, they go to sleep. If they like it, they stay awake. I always know how I’m doing.

This time, they all stayed awake.

Today brought my favorite book of all time, Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years Of Solitude. I asked if any of the residents had ever heard of Marquez and/or the book, and none of them had.

I also brought a book they love called The Wonky Donky by Craig Smith, a book I read to them every week and that I know they love.

I wasn’t sure what to expect and Julie the Activities Director (thanks for emptying out the Mansion Amazon Wist List gave me a funny look when I took the book out.

They were all quiet when I read his quite famous opening line, one I know by heart: “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendia was to remember that distance afternoon when his father took him to discover ice. At that time Macondo was a village of twenty adobe houses, built on polished stones, which were white and enormous, like prehistoric eggs.”

From the moment I read this I knew it was the right move.

They were mesmerized by Marquez’s brilliant imagery in the town of Macondo: parrots, gypsies, lizards, corrupt generals, strutting politicians, all kinds of colors, ghosts and devils, downpours and swamps, hustlers and golddiggers.

They peppered me with questions. He must have been “homosexual” to write like that, said one residents, and I wasn’t sure if it was a compliment or not (she said it was.)

They loved the birds and the intrigue and love that so characterized Marquez’s work.

They especially loved the gypsy who called himself Melquiades, a heavy man with an “untamed beard and sparrow hands.”

Meiquiades brought the wonder of magnets to the astonished villagers, two heavy metal ingots from house to house, “everybody was amazed to see pots, pans, tongs, and braziers tumble down from their places and beams creak from the desperation of nails and screws trying to emerge, and even objects that had been lost for a long time appeared out of nowhere…”

Madeline wanted to know if there was a book I could bring a book about Melquidades, she wanted to know more about him. I said there was no book like that, but perhaps he might re-appear in this one (I don’t think he does.)

We had a great time talking about Nobel Laureate Marquez and what a literary giant he was, and how he wrote his books. They all  wanted to know if he was alive, where was he born?  They wanted to know more about Latin America.

I was amazed that this writing touched them like that, and we all agreed I would read some pages from the book every week. Of course it touched him, Marquez was a genius and his imagery and story-telling was so vivid almost anyone would love it.

They had never heard of the Nobel prize either, and I got to tell them about that. I would have thought, shame on me, that this was beyond them, it wasn’t. I reminded myself not to project my own limitations onto them.

Right after that, I read Craig Smith’s The Wonky Donky, a play on words that makes them laugh every time, the more they hear it, the more they love to hear it. I thought what a wonderful thing it was to do a reading that began with Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s most famous novel and ended with the Wonky Donkey.

How strange to be reading one of the great novels of all time and then, a few minutes later, a funny book writing for elementary school children. But it worked, it really did.

Sometime, I see, they love what is familiar, and sometimes, I see, they love what is new and challenging. Marquez writes a lot about love, and I think the residents remember love and still yearn for it in their lives. I think sometimes that no one fully turns themselves over to aging, even when they learn to accept it.

Reading One Hundred Years Of Solitude makes me love the class all the more, I think it’s good for me to bring writing that I love along with writing that they love. It makes the whole hour richer and more connected, it’s an hour about us, not just me or them.