Golden Girls

I’m afraid I’m losing some of my faculties from being cooped up for so long. I’m on the third floor of an all-concrete building. It’s quiet and cold.  The silence is creepy and I never see another soul. Not in the hallway and not in the elevator. Sometimes I think everyone in my building moved away and no one told me to get on the bus.

I got my hair cut this week. It was my first haircut since I broke my leg. I chattered like a crazed squirrel with the Uber driver and my hairdresser. Before he dropped me off, I wanted to ask the Uber guy if I could just ride around with him all day ~ looking for other passengers to talk to.

On the other hand conversations with my neighbors, when I can find them, often sound like an episode from Golden Girls. Two weeks ago I was hanging out in the lobby when I spotted our building representative. 

“How are you?” I asked.

“Not good,” she answered.

“Oh, I’m sorry. What happened?”

“There were fishies in the washing machine this morning.”

“How did that happen,” I wanted to know.

“Diapers,” she said.

“Really? Adult or baby?”

“Adult. We don’t have any babies here.”

That’s true, I thought to myself. Then I realized we weren’t talking about the same thing. 

I was talking about goldfish. She was talking about feces. Sometimes four-letter words are less confusing.

The same afternoon I met a very nice young man. Well, not really young but certainly not as old as the rest of us.

“How are you?” I asked.

“Not good,” Ron answered. Here we go again, I thought.

“What happened?”

“I lost my dog.”

“How did that happen?” 

You see the pattern here. I was ready to offer compassionate advice about how he might find his lost dog, when his eyes started to water.

“I mean, my dog died.”

We had a good conversation about how much his dog meant to him. Ron recently moved into the building. He walked his dog often and it was his way of meeting people.

“Do you think you can ever get another dog?” I asked, still trying to be helpful. Actually I wasn’t being helpful. I was being stupid but didn’t know what else to say.

“Oh, I don’t think so. It’s much too soon.”

Then… last week, when I was doing my laundry during my Saturday morning 8:00 a.m. appointment time, another very nice young man opened his storage unit and took out a small puppy carrier. I noticed that he shared the storage unit, and presumably his life, with Ron.

“Do you have a new dog?” I asked.

“Yes. We got a puppy yesterday from the animal shelter. It’s a Peek-A-Poo.”

I was elated. Ron was getting a new puppy, after all. 

Yesterday it was obvious that someone’s dog peed in the elevator. Maybe it was a cat? Maybe an incontinent old lady? Maybe it was Ron’s new puppy? I wasn’t upset. I was excited to know that at least one other person still lives here.