A Night at the Armory

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Been awhile since I posted and I almost deleted the Blogger app on my iPhone yesterday. Kinda glad I didn't. Yesterday hurricane Sandy blew through NYC, displaced thousands, and a few hundred of them, nursing home residents, from the Rockaways., arrived in my neighborhood, Park Slope, Brooklyn. We have an armory here (did they used to pass out guns to minute men in such a place?) that is now used as a really swank indoor track. This week those nursing home residents are lying on cots in the track infield.

Quite a scene.

Lots of things to note, but of note is my time spent escorting Lottie around. As a volunteer, my job is to be a watcher. I watch one row if residents and if they get up to smoke or pee I make sure they get there and back. Some you learn you don't need to follow like Murray who went to the deli for a sandwich.

But Lottie thinks a school bus is coming for her. So every 45 minutes or so she gets up to get on a school bus. I just walk along side her. There are school buses but they are just steadily dropping off residents not taking any away. I can't really explain this to her because she's not really that lucid. And I can't definitively say when she going home because no one knows.

While I type we've been standing out here for 30 minutes or so. Kinda cold.

I get really worried though if Lottie (or Rudolph, or Nicholas, or Yakov who were also wandering around disoriented) were to walk away they'd be lost. And trust me no ones watching them.

So I'm back outside with Lottie watching the buses (the line stretches down the block farther than the eye can see). It's also the smoking area.

Also of note is that publicly housed nursing card residents smoke brown cigarillos (standard issue I guess) kind of like a cowboy or, as I recall, my mom for a little while when I was a kid. Except for Lottie. She eats them.