The Home

It is pleasant as such places go. A smallish building, tan and white and yellow, "southwestern colors"…you go through the front entrance, sign in at the desk, talk to whichever receptionist is on duty (there are two, they alternate)…then you go through the doors behind the desk (closed, difficult to open if you are seated in a wheel chair, deliberately so, reduces "risk of elopement").

You find yourself inside a large central space. The nurse's station is on your right. Hallways lead off to the patients' rooms in various directions. If it is morning, then many of them…I mean, the patients…will be in this central space. They are pushed there in their wheel chairs and one of the aides reads them the morning paper. You must, then, navigate a crowd of chairs and impassive men and women.

You find your way to one of the seemingly identical hallways (it is all too easy to get confused, to pick the wrong one, and have to return and start over again) and head toward the individual room you want to visit. My mother's is on the immediate right hand side, which makes it a little easier.

It's funny. As I think about it, I realize that vision is not the dominant sense there. Things seem a little smooth, a little bland, a little hazy. The beige rugs, the earth tone walls, the subliminal blues which are almost gray, the uniformity of the furnishings, give the place a curiously unseeable quality. It is not invisible, you are not blinded, but you somehow cannot recall looking at anything in particular. Nothing specific. It is as though someone wrapped your face with gauze and you perceive the world indistinctly, as through a veil.

Which perhaps is fitting. Maybe that is the way the patients in their chairs also see the world. Veiled. Awaiting that moment in the ceremony when the music swells, union is achieved, the veil is lifted, and all things are made once more new and crystalline.

I like that. It is a comforting image. True or not, I shall choose to believe it. Forsaking all others.

Besides, there are moments when something like that truly seems to happen. Albeit on a smaller scale. When, say, you are picking your way carefully through the chairs, the old men and the old women, and one of them looks at you for just a moment, and you smile, and to your surprise one of them smiles back…

For a second, a split second, it is as if the sun reaches through shuttered windows.

All shadows are banished. Your sight is incalculably clear.