Touch

I love the way old people don’t have a touch barrier.  Obviously that’s a generalization, but my experience in nursing homes and assisted living facilities has been largely one of physical contact.  Old ladies hold your arm as you sit next to them, or reach over to stroke your cheek.  Old men kiss your hand (or pat you on the backside, as the case may be).  Today, my first time in West Wind Village, a woman I’d never seen before reached for my hand and just held it while I passed out snacks at her table.

I should have volunteered at West Wind when I was a freshman and about to shrivel up and die from lack of human contact.  A handshake or clutsy stumble into a passer-by became a big deal, sometimes marking the first time I’d touched another person weeks.  I talked to people–in class, at dinner, at Sigma Tau Delta–but no one was close enough to offer a hug or high five.  Suddenly I was forced to think about something I had taken for granted all my life.  I tend to express affection through touch, so hugs, backrubs, and goodnight kisses were an everyday occurrence when I lived with my family.  My best friends and I, too,  piled up like three lazy kittens when we got together to watch a movie or chat.  Across the distance I could still hear people telling me they loved me but I couldn’t feel their comfort, and that made me particularly sad.

Why are old people so willing to make contact, when peers and adults in their prime restrict themselves to touching only those closest to them?  Is it a function of the age gap?  After all, most people aren’t shy about pinching a baby’s cheek or holding its little hands.  Maybe we’re just so much younger than the elderly that we don’t count as people with whom there ought to be a touch barrier.  Or it’s just a way to grab someone’s attention in a crowded facility.   Or, perhaps, life in a nursing home is lonely just like life in a freshman dorm can be lonely.  Whatever the reason, I know that a main attraction to my upcoming Friday afternoon visits is that I know there will be someone who wants to hold my hand.  I may be a happy and successful senior now, but still I go days at a time without touching anyone and I’m not about to take it for granted again.

In fact, I’m going to make my roommate hug me as soon as she gets home.

BWCA’09 Top 9

This is a bit on the tardy side–the last three days of work (yay!) needed getting through before I could breath properly–but here are the 9 top moments from my trip to the Boundary Waters with Kathleeny and our respective daddies:

9. Reading Dylan Thomas on the rocks with my feet in the water and the dappled sunlight falling warmly through the leaves on my arms and face.

8. Ooy-gooy perfection s’mores, dried fruit, GORP, and “hearts” (aka beef sausage…said to contain beef hearts)

7. Singing songs in the canoe with Kathleen while racing the “obese couple” (only one of whom was obese–and good for her for going to the BW anyway!) for a campsite and being misguided by the “naked lady” (who was in fact wearing a swimming suit).  It turned out that there were no available campsites on that lake anyway, but it was a fun adventure while it lasted.

6. Kathleeny in the tent in her white long-underwear bottoms and mock-turtleneck top saying “Beam me up, Scottie.”

5. Listening to the universal squealing as Kathleen, her dad, and I plunged into the chilly water.  The wind and the clouds didn’t help.  My stoic father, of course, would never squeal regardless of the nip in the air or the shiver in the water.  His only comment was, “It’s not Lake Superior cold.”  Show-off!

4. Nabbing the premier camp site from its amateur captors.  It was situated on a high, rocky island with great views and an excellent breeze.  The lame-o folks before us had built a table out of logs and stripped birch bark from living trees to make a table-top (seriously, who brings screws to the BWCA?) but we did our best to clean up the site.

3. Seeing baby beavers and hearing the warning tail-slap of their parent or guardian beaver as we approached them in canoes.  Clearly, the babies didn’t really  have the evacuation plan down yet, or they would have been safe in their lodge and we would never have seen them.

2. Climbing Raspberry Hill, a burn area dense with waist-to-shoulder high vegetation comprised mostly of heavily-laden wild raspberry bushes.  We bushwhacked and munched our way to the bald, rocky crown, where we looked out over the lakes and forests below us.  ‘Leeners and I fell off the path of righteousness on the way back (aka the path that our father’s were trampling down for us) and there was a little stumbling and a lot of raspberry consumption, but we made it in the end.

1. Lying on my back on a log beside the embers of our fire, watching the two biggest shooting stars in our group’s collective memory trail their glowing tails across the star-speckled void of the unpolluted night sky.

New vocabulary from the trip includes “wonky,” meaning off, strange, or iffy and “meesen,” meaning an extremely large group of moose (because “meese” is one way of pluralizeing “moose,” and “moosen” is another, and thus a word with two plurals must inlcude a vast number of animals!).  These can be added to “wootang” (any sort of powdered drink like Crystal Light or Kool-ade) as BWCA vocabulary staples.

Finally, one of the best things about the trip was not so much a moment as a general feeling of closeness to my daddy that I feel like we had sort of been losing.  I’ve been a rough house-mate to deal with this summer, and we’ve had our disagreements, and I just felt like everything was sort of strained between us.  During the trip, though, there was time to talk and work together and just spend time in a peaceful setting, and, at least from my perspective, I feel like things are more right between us than they were previously.