Now, if you don’t live in Morningside Heights, you might not know that in the last week of August, the area is teaming with newly arrived students and academics, with all kinds of residents bustling about as they return from summer vacations, and with shoppers. There’s the added commotion of boxes arriving at loading zones, and vehicles of all sorts stopping and starting or zooming along Broadway. Right splat in the middle of all this, I had a lovely sense of our village life.
It has been a little over a year now since Morningside Village has been happening, so it is no wonder that, today, while I was sitting on a bench in front of a frozen yogurt shop on Broadway chit-chatting with Sophie (one of our 92 year old friends), several people stopped to say hello. One was the husband of a 94 year old, whom we have been helping. One was one of our volunteers who’d met Sophie before. And, another was a neighbor of mine, who’d heard of Morningside Village and wanted to join in the fun of valuing our elders! At another time, Sophie probably would have sat on a bench to catch her breath feeling alone, lost, and invisible. Rather, together, Sophie and I felt the warm wave of village life, right in the middle of a megalopolis. As she took her cane up with her left hand and my arm with her right to finish the leisurely walk to her home with our prized bargains from the Rite Aide shop, we began the usual argument about who would carry the shopping bag. It ended up where she took one of the handles and I took the other, and thus linked we had a lovely stroll up her block at the end of a sweet afternoon. I might add…it takes about a year to thus feel “the village”.
Irene Zola
Tags: aging in place, eldercare, elderly, seniors, volunteerism, Volunteers
