great wall 2

My mother used to live in The Bethany, a retirement home about a mile north of the Ten Cat.  It was a pretty nice place, and I was wondering if that is the kind of place Old Dog was moving into.  She had a kitchen, and she had kind of taken pride in her cooking, but she never used it.  Cooking was work and she wanted no more to do with it, which was fine because along with room came board, and they had a big dining room, and I think the chow was pretty good.

From what Old Dog is saying I am guessing board does not come with the room, and I am thinking maybe there is a difference between senior living and retirement homes. The Bethany also used to have things like bingo nights and they brought in entertainment sometimes, I remember an Elvis impersonator and they had a nice little Christmas/Hanukahs/something vaguely Buddhist celebration.  I wonder if the folks at the Ravenswood have something like that.  Are there any common areas?  I know Old Dog likes to spin a yarn, and you can't do that properly without an audience, of course then you have to listen to their yarns, but that can be pretty entertaining too.

At 700 sq ft is about the same size as my condo.  I remember when I moved here I was surprised at all the room I had.  Plenty of room to put all my stuff neatly into their own place, but sloth and clutter took up the slack pretty quickly.

I do almost all my cooking by microwave.  The only thing I use my burners for is making hard-boiled eggs, and I had a cooking spree a few years back and made my favorite food of my youth Rice-a-Roni which was as good as I remembered it, and broccoli and cheddar soup which was also excellent, but after that not so much.  

I was hoping to get some comment on Beacon, but failing that I will provide my own.  See I was thinking the reader would be transported to a high school auditorium (how much time have we spent in those?) and then this whole outrageous Are you from Beacon thing would play out, and tucked into the middle of it was his slipping his arm around Mary O'Connor's waist, the love interest.  And then it goes on a bit until the whole stupid auditorium is blasting it out.

And later he is summing things up,  He never had a chance with Mary, well don't we all have lost loves in our pasts, and now that is in the past, and all he has to remember is that stupid song.  Well so goes life huh?  Kind of a funny story with that extravaganza, but with a little sadness tucked in.  

That's my take but if you have a different one, that is fine too.

And here is the second installment of The Great Wall:

And in between the scotch and the food and the wine and even the cigars, were the cigarettes, the maggots in the remains of the good time, bent and stained, nestled into the gristle, floating bloated in half empty glasses, squashed on the bare wood of the bar at the end of a smear of ash.

I felt a little sick looking at it and sat down on a stool facing away from the bar, into the side room.

The sound system was back there.  Mostly nobody bothered, but Dawn, the new girl, the Heroine Who Led the Way, looked through the tapes and set aside the Tony Bennett and Johnny Mathis to play one of the mysterious cassettes with Chinese characters ball-pointed onto the scotch-taped labels and the restaurant rang with the sound of Chinese Opera.

Which seemed to suit her just fine as she bustled about to the music, getting that steam thing under control, filling the mustards and the sweet and sours, setting out the fortune cookies on their little plates.  She was wreathed with the remnants of the steam cloud like streamers and she was dancing like a character from The Red Detachment of Women.

Elbow on the bar, head aching, I watched her.  I had a job where I really didn’t have to do much and it paid the rent and I could get drunk every night.  I had it made.  But she was so happy.  Maybe I was missing something.