Midnight Mutterings | David and me

||| MIDNIGHT MUTTERINGS BY JACKIE BATES |||

David Sedaris.

I don’t have a much in common with David Sedaris, but we do share a couple of things. Notably, while Sedaris was born in New York state, he and I both grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina and both our fathers lived their last years at Springmoor.

I didn’t know of David’s relationship with Springmoor until I read his memoir piece in the August 9, 2021, New Yorker. He recalled a visit to his father who was living at Springmoor, a posh retirement community in Raleigh. It was the last time David saw his father alive.

I am intimately acquainted with Springmoor, which opened in 1984, when all new things in Raleigh became quaintly English countryside-like. For example, not long after Springmoor opened, one could, alternatively, retire at Stonehenge, a similar, new retirement village a few miles away.

My parents were voluntarily incarcerated in Springmoor shortly after it opened. ‘Life Long Learning’ could have been born there, with its plethora of cultural experiences: films, live theatre, book talks, travel, visiting professors, even exercise clubs and senior yoga. Things were very progressive at Springmoor. My father died there a couple of decades ago.

He called it Finishing School.

At Springmoor, you might begin by moving into in a separate house and gradually make your way to more restricted, and helpful, accommodations in one of several large buildings. Finally, if you lived long enough, you moved to a building that offered complete medical care and, on to, if it became your need, to a ‘memory care’ section, where they ‘didn’t care if you had a memory,’ according to my father.

When my parents moved to Springmoor, they started in a two bedroom apartment with a full kitchen and bath. And a cat. In the same building there was a large dining room, a theater for movies and live productions, a swimming pool, a garden with raised beds for your vegetable growing pleasure (bed raised high so you could work from a wheelchair), a well-stocked library, with librarian, and many common rooms: dens, reading and game rooms, glass sunrooms of various temperatures, outside patios, and a maze of sidewalks to other buildings and areas. My parents’ building was gorgeously furnished with valuable antiques, the acquisition of which was partial payment for admission to the community.

My mother died a while they still lived in their original Springmoor apartment, at the age I am now, but my father made his way through the various progressive levels of assistance, though, as he said, he never ‘qualified’ for the rubber room. When he died at 96, he had been living for several years in the ‘Infirmary,’ where he was a favorite of the staff, partly because he had never learned how to complain.

My father, apparently, had a wonderful time at Springmoor, even though he was fiercely independent, and might have felt confined. We weren’t surprised because he had a wonderful time all his life. My father didn’t ‘fret,’ as southerners say. He
also didn’t drink, smoke or brood. He was an engineer, one who looked at solutions rather than problems. Often practical solutions. For example, he moved the cow closer to the house for more convenient milking when I was a child. Our English
born mother knew cows and their milking were best out of sight as well as out of mind, reach and smell. Our father moved the cow back to her original, proper place without comment.

About this and all things, he had an even temperament, which suited a quiet person with a rich inner life, a solid sense of humor, and a generally generous nature.

My siblings and I turned out more like our mother.