A senior arts colony - brilliant!

Not just for career artists, but for anyone who wants to pursue the arts as a second career or interest - 55 and up!

"The philosophy is simple: You're never too old to become the person you want to be. And there's a wonderful side benefit, according to recent studies: Artful self-expression can lead to a longer, healthier life.

The Colony, which targets people 55 and older, opened in 2005 in an attractive five-story building a block from downtown Burbank. A sign outside says, "Get Active, Be Creative, Be Inspired." The words aren't just window dressing: On any given day, residents might be involved in an inter-generational writing workshop, a watercolor class, a sculpture seminar or a tai chi class. Or, they might be making a movie.

Evenings contain a wealth of creative opportunities, too: There might be a gathering in the Colony's 45-seat theater for a play, poetry readings, karaoke or open-mike sessions. Or residents might be found at a wine-and-cheese party in the lounge.

"This building has been a godsend to so many people," Schklair says. "People come here and they come alive!"

Link:
http://www.latimes.com/features/home/la-hm-relative-senior-arts-20101023,0,6531852.story

Wheelchair hiking in Southern California

(Photo courtesy of Wikimedia, CC license)


I was looking for ways to share a bit of nature-hiking with Mom - and here's what I found!


Link:

http://tinyurl.com/LA-WheelHikes

I'll post pictures when we go...!

Getting around LA with a disability

One of things I had to learn about caretaking someone was how to get Mom around in her wheelchair on a budget. I could not afford a specially-equipped van, and after a certain point, getting Mom in and out of my car for an outing became impossible. She was dead weight, and far too heavy for me to lift or manoeuver.

If your charge can't leave their wheelchair, your transport options become very limited. Even though it's illegal, very few taxi companies comply with the law and provide wheelchair-accessible vehicles. As one driver bluntly told me, "Taxi drivers just don't want to deal with wheelchairs, it's too much trouble for the money."

For awhile that left me with medi-vans and buses. Medi-vans would take us to Mina's doctor appointments for free, but sometimes the nursing home would screw up, or forget the reservation; we'd be stranded, missing Mom's appointment. And any non-medical destinations meant riding the bus, which usually worked out, but often meant long commutes and waiting for connecting buses on exhaust-filled sidewalks in the sun or rain.

After looking around online, I found LA's Access Services. They're a bit bureaucratic, but if you're organized, you can get much more out of LA by using their service. They'll take you anywhere you need to go, at most times of the day or night, within the LA Metro Bus system's general territory. They'll even pick you up if you're stranded somewhere, depending on the situation.

GETTING STARTED
To sign up: call their customer service number (800-827-0829), and make an appointment to be interviewed. It may take week or so to get scheduled. They'll send a free van to take you to the interview and back. Once there, an aide interviews the candidate to see whether they really need disabled-compliant transportation. An ID photo is taken, and if approved, you'll receive your photo ID in the mail a few weeks later.

The interview and ID are free.

DAILY USE
The ID card allows for free transportation on all LA and other metro area buses and subways. Door-to-door, custom rides range from $2.25 to about $3.00. Access Paratransit only accepts reservations the day before traveling, and will penalize the rider for too many late-cancellations or no-shows.

When scheduling the return ride, allow extra time for yourself to get to the pick-up area.

Disabled riders may bring an assistant for free. The reservation number is: 800-883-1295.

I use this service along with the Metro bus and subway to take Mina to all sorts of cultural events, as well as to most doctor's appointments. It freed us from relying on the nursing home's sometimes negligent staff to reserve the medi-van, and it raised the quality of Mina's life tremendously, allowing us to go to museums, parks, ball games, and other attractions.

Disabled groups can also reserve a larger Access Service van for group outings, though all the disabled riders may need to have gone through the interview/ card process. Call customer service for details.

VISITORS AND TOURISTS
If you are visiting from out of town, call well ahead, and ask Access Services if they can accommodate you. What may make this easier is to qualify for similar services in your own area first. Otherwise, they may need a doctor's note, or other documents to support your need to use them.

In any case, do look for similar services in your own area. Being mobile returns some of the fun and color to your life. Get out of the house - and especially the nursing home!

Access Services website: http://www.asila.org/home/

Here is a photo my cousin Tricia calls "Senorita Mina." It was taken in the 1940's; I would estimate Mom is in her mid- to late-20's here, during her operatic singing career as "Mina Brien." There was still prejudice against the Irish back then, so she couldn't use her actual maiden name of O'Brien.

It's too bad the photo's in black and white - I would like to see the bright red color of the rose nestled into her black mantilla...

This was long before I met her... lately I wish I'd known her during these early chapters, with all her bright potential, blooming before her...

On Saturday, I took Mom to the beauty parlor, where she saw herself in the mirror for the first time in months. She smiled shyly as the nice Philippino man styled her hair. He chatted both of us up as he liberated her natural waves from the weight of her too-long, draggy, senior-home hair. Small, jade roses hung from her earlobes on silver wires - I had just had them re-pierced last Thanksgiving.

Then on Sunday I kidnapped her again, this time for our tiny Easter brunch, just the two of us, at my place. Canadian cartoons kept her attention better than the pre-recorded Vatican service on TV. The cartoons had a certain irony to them - she being from Nova Scotia so long ago, from the small, busy fishing village of Dingwall, Cape Breton, now the annual site for Celtic music festivals. Had she stayed, we might have been considerably stronger hockey fans. As it is, at age 89, she is practically a living heirloom.

Owing to the idiosyncracies of her current eating style, I added a banana smoothie to her lamb-and-eggs plate. And we had a spot of tea in old china cups (not her own unfortunately, since those had been nipped and jettisoned years earlier by my stepmother, a long, sad story...) I liked seeing her smile at the sight of the cups.


As a lifelong ADD'er, maybe borderline Asperger's, Mina exasperated a lot of people in her life, who had little-to-no idea how to relate to or manage her. As a result, she was alternately ignored or badly disrespected most of her life, and lost almost everything, piece by piece. Unable to decipher many social cues, people's reactions and her isolation confused and frustrated her... and stunted her potential.

She found a refuge in music, and for a long while it suited her. She was even bound for Europe as part of a light-opera trio, an early, fairer-sexed version of the Three Tenors; then she met my father on a golf course. She wanted to be a mother badly, and cancelled her trip when she got engaged.

That is the woman I want to know and celebrate - the woman who sacrificed so much of her identity to experience motherhood. At 32, she used to pray that, if she were unable to have children of her own, that maybe she would marry someone who already had children, so she could at least experience motherhood that way.

She was a lovely, smart and talented woman who would eventually be terribly betrayed by both her husband and her son, and then abandoned, when she was most vulnerable.

Oh how I wish she could have wed the man she really wanted, someone I only know as Jack, a flier who was killed in the war. I remember when my brother first put her in the nursing home, and I would call her every day from California... she told me, "I'm not afraid to die; I'll see Jack again."

I sure hope so, Mom.

But we're not done here yet, so you'll need to stick around a bit longer.

Exactly what happened to my Mom

This UK article described the widespread abuse of strong anti-psychotic drugs on elderly dementia patients, correctly framing the issue as an abuse of human rights.

That's the exact situation that happened to my Mom, Mina, under my brother's watch, during her first year in a nursing home. In six weeks, she went from singing, dancing, laughing, writing, self-grooming, feeding herself, etc., to: daily seizures, lying comatose 23 hours a day, losing her ability to walk or even swallow, and nearly dying of dehydration. After halting the Haldol, the seizures stopped, but she is now brain-damaged, in a wheelchair.

I've been rehabilitating her ever since... six years and counting...


Here's the link:
http://dprogram.net/2009/10/07/msm-scandalous-abuse-of-the-elderly-prescribed-antipsychotics-in-hospital-exposed/

Theory of Mina

A couple of weeks ago, I was surfing around on www.aldaily.com, and ran across Salon.com's article on how to win the New Yorker's cartoon captioning contest.

It turned out to be one of those sleeper aHA! moments...

Among other things, one of the points the author made was: the New Yorker editors love humor involving Theory of Mind. Put simply, Theory of Mind (ToM) describes imagining someone's else's point of view, especially when it's different from yours. Walking a mile in their shoes. Being empathetic is closely related, but to be empathetic, you still need to imagine life as the person you want to empathize with.

Feeling impatient with someone? Try getting into their head. Doctors dismissing patients' complaints? ToM is what they're most likely missing.

Most able people find it hard, or at least scary and off-putting, to imagine how it might be live with dementia. Not me. Well to be honest, it's still scary, but fairly easy, for me to imagine my Mom's state: her dementia experience is a long term version of what a bad migraine does to me: I can't think, I can't see clearly, I can't make sense of my thoughts, and I can't read. My motor coordination is off, things sound strange.

Come to think of it, a lot of these same conditions tend to happen to users of psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin - but that's another story...

I had not heard of ToM before the Salon article - but since then, I notice it everywhere, online, in advertising... it can make it much easier to understand and sympathize with people who do not think like ourselves.

Such a potentially powerful tool would seem like catnip - and people do seem happy to wield it when there's a benefit to be had for themselves... but not so much when empathy and sacrifice might be called for.

Mina's last crusade was for what she called "more civility" in society, a call for kinder treatment to each other. ToM seems key to that end. It's ironic, when it seems that people are increasingly socializing in like-minded cliques, thinking in more and more extreme and opposing ways.

Theory of Mind... Theory of Mina.

I can see this is what I have been doing for some time, to stay focused and engaged in my Mom's help. I imagine her early life, I google social culture in her time, imagine living in her skin, imagine what it's like to age as she did, alone for 25 years, almost totally abandoned. That's something that happens a lot to women, in this country and elsewhere.

Something worth practicing - Theory of Mind...

Mina and daughter Julie, 2005