As Coordinator of Morningside Village, I felt like the Mad Hatter the night before leaving New York City for a week’s vacation in paradise.\u00a0 I was worried about one the older of our seniors who depends on Morningside Village, and, for her, I am its incarnation.\u00a0 She uses a wheelchair and doesn’t feel comfortable making excursions outside, so several volunteers have formed relationships with her and visit her regularly, but we have a special friendship.\u00a0 Even though I’d told nearly 100-year old Marianne that I would stop by at 8pm for a last visit before leaving, I wanted to get over to the hospital to\u00a0 follow-up with Miguel, an 85 year old who had had heart failure. (We never use real names in my blog).\u00a0\u00a0 Even though I knew I had to delay my visit with Marianne, I had a nice visit with Miguel (looking so much improved from my last visit a few days earlier), chatting about current events and talking about his discharge from the hospital a week later.\u00a0 Next, I scurried down Amsterdam Avenue wondering if, while I was gone, Marianne would have enough distractions from the arthritic pain she often felt.<\/p>\n
When I arrived, Marianne was resting in bed, so I pushed the wheelchair aside and sat down in a comfortable side chair near her. \u00a0 I thought she might feel a tinge of jealousy if I told her I was visiting someone else instead of giving her the time she may have wanted with me.\u00a0 But, I decided to tell her the truth anyway.\u00a0 She began asking me questions, and –although we usually don’t give out information about our seniors– she guessed just who it was that I had been visiting in the hospital.\u00a0 “I know him for half a century!\u00a0 I used to talk him once in a while at Tom’s Restaurant.\u00a0 He reads a lot.”\u00a0 Then it struck me:\u00a0 I asked Marianne if she’d like to become a Morningside Village volunteer and visit Miguel in the hospital while I was gone.\u00a0\u00a0 Her eyes widened and her jaw fell open. \u00a0 Then, she quickly filched around the tabletop near her bed for a pen and pad.\u00a0 “Which building is he in?\u00a0 And the room number?”<\/p>\n
I’m up here in the mountains where the wild flowers abound, but I’m tossing a thought back to Morningside Village with beautiful surprises of its own.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
As Coordinator of Morningside Village, I felt like the Mad Hatter the night before leaving New York City for a week’s vacation in paradise.\u00a0 I was worried about one the older of our seniors who depends on Morningside Village, and, for her, I am its incarnation.\u00a0 She uses a wheelchair and doesn’t feel comfortable making […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":34,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[9,10,14,8,13],"class_list":["post-174","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-morningside-village-blog","tag-aging-in-place","tag-eldercare","tag-eldercare-village","tag-elderly","tag-volunteering"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lily-old.org\/LiLY-blogs\/Morningside-Village-Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lily-old.org\/LiLY-blogs\/Morningside-Village-Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lily-old.org\/LiLY-blogs\/Morningside-Village-Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lily-old.org\/LiLY-blogs\/Morningside-Village-Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/34"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lily-old.org\/LiLY-blogs\/Morningside-Village-Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=174"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/lily-old.org\/LiLY-blogs\/Morningside-Village-Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":555,"href":"https:\/\/lily-old.org\/LiLY-blogs\/Morningside-Village-Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/174\/revisions\/555"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lily-old.org\/LiLY-blogs\/Morningside-Village-Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=174"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lily-old.org\/LiLY-blogs\/Morningside-Village-Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=174"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lily-old.org\/LiLY-blogs\/Morningside-Village-Blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=174"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}