Today as I taught my last class at the old folks’ home, I was struck by how deep the friendships had grown among us, without our even having noticed.
Our elders, some areyoung enough to be my grandmother, others are old enough to be my father, unlike the one I never had. But in this room, age has dissolved, and we are all one age between us.
Li says we are all like family sitting around this table. I know so much about each of you. We have traveled beyond the shore where student and teacher are forever divided. This is not casual garden-variety friendship. We have deepened with each other.
Sometimes I feel strange teaching my elders, but the young students I teach must think a vast gulf divides us as well, yet, we too are one. Friendship with 10-year-olds or with 90-year-olds is one thing. Unintentionally or proximity, it doesn’t matter in the end.
3/24/2007
Li says we are all like family sitting around this table. I know so much about each of you. We have traveled beyond the shore where student and teacher are forever divided. This is not casual garden-variety friendship. We have deepened with each other.
Sometimes I feel strange teaching my elders, but the young students I teach must think a vast gulf divides us as well, yet, we too are one. Friendship with 10-year-olds or with 90-year-olds is one thing. Unintentionally or proximity, it doesn’t matter in the end.
3/24/2007
Addendum, I took dictation and tried to keep true to participants speech and sentence structure, correcting very little, other than punctuation. I gave them a printed copy and they made further changes on their own, which I recorded.
I posted the stories and poems I could find on my hard drive, but I waited far too long to make this blog, and now many of the files are corrupt. One is just lines. As in lines. Literally. I think I got all of Madeline Bedal's stories, though one file was horribly corrupted. I posted the memoirs under client's names, rather than by the date written. You can tell from some of them that though the bulk of the work was published in April of 2005, it really spanned six months or more: including Christmas and New Years. The residency spanned from 2004 (when?) to March 24, 2007. I met with the elders once a week.
Westlake was sold. The man who hired me, Alex Chan left. The new company, Merrill Gardens began to forget to issue my paychecks, as they didn't want to pay me $75 a session. They tried to talk me down to $25 a session. But they sure charged the elders plenty per month. They didn't see the value in enrichment. Since I took dictation, and typed everything up, I was already giving Merrill Gardens loads of donated time as it was. Not to mention the long commute! It was a lot of work. So we parted company. —Maureen Hurley 10/11/23
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