Old Folks & Remote Control Cars

Every Monday through Thursday, about 10 – 15 senior citizens eat lunch in our building. It’s part of The Commission on Aging’s Senior Meals program. According to the COA website – “Everyone is welcome to attend the congregate meal sites. For people age 60 and older, there is a suggested donation of $2.00 per meal; however, no one will be refused a meal for inability to donate.” That’s pretty cool. For some of these folks, getting an affordable meal makes a real difference in their lives and helps them avoid going hungry. For others, it is about the only “social time” they get in their day. For me, Senior Meals traditionally meant something very different…

Up until very recently, half of my job here at TrueNorth was as the Facilities Manager, so Senior Meals was just one more “thing I had to deal with”. Making sure their tables and chairs were set up; finding their missing coffee pot that someone moved over the weekend; moving them to the Youth Center when we needed the multi-purpose room for some other large agency event, and then trying to get staff to remember to leave the parking spots closest to that door open for the seniors. It was always something. Some of the seniors are really sweet, and some are kind of cranky. I have a sinking suspicion that I’ll end up as the crankiest of cranky old men – yelling at neighborhood kids to “get off my lawn” while waving my cane at them. I hope not, but I worry that I will.

Some people are really good with little kids, and some are really good with the elderly. Me? I’m good with dogs. Although, I will say this – since I am a crank myself, I tend to do pretty well with cranky seniors. They’ll complain about something and I find myself complaining right along with them, and there’s nothing a crank likes better than someone who will be cranky with them. Poor Kay – the woman they’ve hired to run the Senior Meals program that uses our building, herself a senior… It seems that at least a couple times a month someone uses and misplaces one of her pots, or uses up all her paper cups, or forgets to tell her that we’re moving her into the Youth Center for the week. She’d come to me to help her and before long, the two of us would be deep into a crank session. “Kids today!” “Tell me about it.” “My bursitis is acting up” “I know – my ankle’s been killing me… must be it’s gonna rain soon.” She still brings me extra garlic bread on spaghetti days, so we’ve got that.

Anyway – the other day, someone stopped by my office and asked me if I could come to the multi-purpose room to shoot some photos and/or video of the seniors running the remote control cars. You just re-read that, didn’t you? I did a double-take myself. Turns out, one of our off-site staff, Dan Postema, who is the Project FOCUS Site Coordinator at Hesperia Middle School, had decided it would be cool to bring the remote control cars in for the seniors to “play with.” I walked in there with my cameras, completely unsure of what to expect. What I found was a handful of senior citizens playing with remote control cars – and seeming to have a blast doing so. The cars were the large kinds that really get going fast, and it’s a big room, so they were flying and smashing into each other, and into chairs, and table legs. It was awesome.

What was and is so cool about this is that I get to work at a place where this kind of thing can happen, and I work with some very cool people, like Dan, who just decided to do something nice for some people – not even people that are part of any of our programs, just people who happen to be in our building. It’s cool that his boss let him do this. It’s cool that his program (Project FOCUS) even has these cars – they use them to teach kids all kinds of interesting things about radio frequencies, and electronics, and other stuff I don’t even understand. It’s just plain cool. There’s one gentleman that always comes to Senior Meals – I don’t know what happened, if he had a stroke or what, but he uses a walker and shuffles along with tiny little baby-steps, obviously compensating for some very serious balance impairments. Watching him run the R.C. cars, sitting in his chair, with a little smile on his face... well, that just made my day.  

And that’s what happened in a day in the life of TrueNorth.