Around the Town: Who Loretta Wants to be Like When She Grows Up

By Loretta Humble/Around the Town

I had a birthday this last week. Birthdays get you to thinking. I am now 76 years old, closer to 80 than to 70. That’s pretty old. I don’t feel that old, especially since I got my knee fixed. I’m ever grateful to the people living with me here in senior living in Florida, because their jocundity is contagious and they never make me feel old.

I got a lot of nice things. I got some doors, and some tomato plants, and some flowers, and a watermelon, and some money. And three birthday parties, got sung to way too many times, and was wished happy birthday on Facebook about a hundred times. I also got a card from Angie Miller, saying she wants to be just like me when she grows up. I’m not sure either one of us will ever grow up, but I loved the sentiment. And actually I wouldn’t mind being more like Angie, who is a super person herself.

I had already been thinking for some time about who I want to be like. The latest one is Betty Pogue, one of my favorite residents at Cedar Lake Nursing Home. Betty is almost exactly 10 years older than me. Betty has some infirmities which HIPPA laws forbid me to talk about, but overall she is doing great. I want to be like Betty in 10 years. She is definitely still in charge of her own life. She nearly always has a smile on her face, unless she is mad, and then that doesn’t last long. She keeps busy every day making things which she gives away, and is always on the lookout for good she can do. But she doesn’t mind straightening us out here at the nursing home when she thinks we get on the wrong track. And she prays for us. Her kids love her, and come to see her because they want to, not because it is their duty. I admire her spirit so much I’ve asked Celene Terry to use her as a model for a spunky old lady in her series of paintings of women who live their lives well.

Speaking of Celene, I wouldn’t mind being like her, but there isn’t much chance of that. Celene has retired from a successful career as an educator, is a fine artist and lives an orderly life, where she enjoys a close family life in a beautiful home. She paints wonderful watercolors, and has time to create an environment where lots of birds and butterflies thrive, and then she takes time to appreciate them, as well as paint them. My excuse for never having lived a regular, orderly life is that I must be too creative. Celene knocks that excuse out the window.

Then there is Jo Ann Surls. She does not talk about age, and while I don’t seem to be able to follow that example, I do think that is a good idea. I just know she got in this world a few years before I did, and seems to have taken charge of her part of it a lot better than I have mine. She was married for many years to a man she was and still is deeply in love with, and lives very happily alone in the place they created together. If you don’t know about her place, you should. She has now, with the help of her world-famous step-son James, turned it into the James Surls Sculpture Garden: a Memorial to Joe Surls. I don’t know how to tell you how wonderful her acres of gardens are. They are full of every kind of plant you can imagine, and they might make you think maybe some of it just kind of happened, as she lets nature work with her, and if she loves a particular kind of wild thing it gets to stay. But believe me, it is wonderful because she gives her life to it, out there every day doing almost all the gardening herself. I don’t have room to tell you about the outstanding sculpture or the wonderful little buildings scattered through the place. I just want to paint a picture of a woman who knows what she loves, and has built a life where she can get up every morning and live it.

As has Celene. Now Betty Pogue would rather be a little healthier so she could live at home and do all the things she used to do. But given the circumstances she has to deal with, she is doing just fine with her life, still happy, still living fully, still giving back. So are a number of people here; Betty just happens to be a shining example.

This is not how I meant to wind up this column. I was going to write about some other people I would like to be like, but I just had this thought: If Jo Ann or Celene, or any of a dozen other women I admire as much ever showed up in our nursing home, they would be a lot like Betty Pogue. In the first place, they would still have a say in their environment: they would demand that we do our job right. They would be nice about it, but we wouldn’t hear the end of it till we listened. But then they would bring extra life into the place, and make it better because they were here. I guess what I’m seeing is that people who live fully, are just going to do it, whatever their circumstances.

I hope Jo Ann and Celene, or those other people I didn’t name don’t mind me imagining them in the nursing home. I’m really not trying to recruit them.

But of course if any of them ever do show up, we certainly won’t run them off.