My home town has no homeless population, so, strictly speaking, we have no bag ladies.
We do have a couple of dotty old characters who don’t look, sound, or smell very different from the real thing. Some of the medications given to geriatric patients, to treat chronic physical conditions like cardiovascular disease, affect their memory, perception, and personal habits in ways similar to the effects psychiatric medications have had on the mentally ill homeless population. Frequent outdoor exercise is a better treatment for cardiovascular disease than overmedicating the disease is, so these frequently confused elders seem to be encouraged to get out and walk, in nice safe places where they're not exposed from the weather, far away from bathrooms or from people who can help in an emergency, or in crowds...so almost every day they wander about in the shopping districts.
They do have homes. Perhaps able-bodied people come into their homes, or stay in their homes, to look after them. The clothes they wear often fit as if they’d been bought when the wearers were taller and heavier, or as if they were grabbed off a rack at a sidewalk sale. Sometimes they favor dreadful near-miss color combinations, especially burgundy with orange. Still, the clothes are laundered regularly, and the old people hobble from shop to shop, fingering much more than they buy but always seeming to have enough money to pay for what they take, and at the end of the day they usually do buy something, somewhere.
They are usually referred to, by courtesy, as ladies and gentlemen. Possibly they do belong to the landowning class. There’s nothing ladylike or gentlemanly about their manners. They neither speak clearly nor hear well, so it’s hard to talk to them, but often they take advantage of their obvious senility to insult people. It’s not clear whether their senses are even keen enough to give them any idea whom they’re insulting; sometimes their nasty remarks are about someone other than the person they are currently annoying.
They are not terribly clean. The fact is that the hygienic standards of older Anglo-Americans are much lower than those of most of the world, including younger Anglo-Americans. How often we see geriatric patients who really would be easier to be around if they used soap and water after every single visit to the bathroom, but they don’t believe they need even one bath a day. There are reasons for this behavior; their skin may be dry and itchy, their blood pressure medication may make them chill easily, their rheumatism may make getting in and out of the tub difficult. And also, even if they bathed before leaving the house, their shaky old hands tend to spill things and aren’t too good at cleaning up the mess. And on top of that, one of our specimens is a chain smoker. It doesn’t take them very long to become as dirty as the residents of homeless shelters—who are often required to take showers before entering and leaving the shelters, too.
They can be quite a blight on the atmosphere. Once during flu season I went into a store’s only restroom after one of our confused old men had left it, and found little puddles of diarrhea on the floor. Anything concave left within reach of the public is likely to attract these characters’ tissues, cigarette ends and ashes, gum wrappers, even globs of hacked-up phlegm. They do mean well; they wouldn’t be allowed out if they didn’t try to get their effluvia into toilets, ashtrays, or garbage bins. Sometimes their various disease conditions move faster than their shaky old feet do.
In cities the default assumption is that people like this are homeless and poor. In my home town we know better. They qualify for as much Social Security money as the healthier senior citizens who are still managing many of the businesses, running the churches and social clubs, even doing a considerable amount of the physical work in town. Some of them are in fact younger than the active and healthy people who express so much empathy for them. How often I’ve heard a disabled 60-year-old referred to as “that poor old dear, bless his/her heart” by some working person who is 75 or 80. How many of Grandma Bonnie Peters' last few patients, and those of my great-aunt who trained her, were younger than the nurses caring for them. The nuisance value of these old nuisances shows no correlation with their income, their "background," or even their literal age.
So what can you do? Mostly we try to be kind and patient. Living in one of the small towns that become de facto senior communities gives a person a lot of practice in being patient. And scrubbing down the disgusting restroom, because you’ve already had the flu, so better you should be exposed to the virus than that someone more vulnerable should be.
I don’t even try to communicate with the really confused ones. Some might call this a character defect, or at least a deficiency of communication skills. Some people who were not English majors in college do seem to communicate with them, after some fashion. I never have.
Often these almost-but-not-quite-senile seniors interfere with business. I was once mortified while waiting in a car outside a store with an 85-year-old relative, who was then heavily medicated for atherosclerosis. The formative trauma of this relative’s life was that, when they were teenagers, his (long dead) sister had been raped. A family with giggly children parked beside us. Suddenly the relative bounded out of the car and started yelling, in his feeble voice, that his sister was a good girl and they had no right to laugh at her. Such episodes can happen anywhere, but in small towns with large populations of active senior citizens they happen more often.
I was shopping in another store, in another decade, when an eighty-something woman who had been the official bad character of her town hobbled in, apparently thought she recognized me as a niece or granddaughter of hers, and said I ought to move in and work for her. Since local rumor had it that this woman had never worked at anything honest in her life, I made polite noncommittal noises and got out of the store fast. Later, after Old Mrs. Nogood had left, I went back into the store...where the 67-year-old storekeeper must by then have had it fixed in her mind that I was an accomplice in thievery, prostitution, drug smuggling, probably espionage and possibly high treason, plus neglect of my elders, and she refused to sell me the rare book that had caught my attention.
Some of the more colorful and embarrassing stories in the histories of small towns involve encounters between two or more senior citizens, many of whom died from strokes or heart attacks a few years after disgracing their families. I was in a grocery store on the day two hags approached each other and spoke quietly for a minute or two before one of them shrieked an obscene taunt and the other one smashed an oversized, overripe zucchini across her head. I was not in town, but I’ve heard several versions of the story, about the estate case in which a whole clan had assembled on the courthouse steps; a 70-year-old hag threatened her 85-year-old aunt with an act of unprintable violence, and one of the older woman’s children, about age 60, shoved this disorderly 70-year-old down the steps...Once while I was working in Gate City’s Friday Market, a geezer from another town came up and confessed having been one of a spontaneously formed posse who all cornered and shot a man they believed to be a child molester. I’ve not heard that story from any other source. It could have been a pseudomemory induced by medication. In any case it seems as if those who care for these old characters ought to know when to lock up the firearms...
Sometimes they really ought to do something about the car keys. I can count a half-dozen buildings that have been remodelled in unattractive ways after some senile senior citizen drove a car right through the display window. I was in one of the buildings; the window made a noise like a gunshot and some veterans dived, and/or shoved their families, under tables. I turned and saw the front end of a car where a table was supposed to be, the diners at the table having scrambled away in time not to be hurt, though a few people were taken to a hospital to have surface wounds checked out.
Sometimes, when globs of phlegm or tobacco juice splash up onto the merchandise in a store, or shoppers who were obviously born after 1970 are loudly accused of crimes that were committed in 1930, it’s tempting to say that the characters ought to be locked up. Permanently.
This is, however, a judgment call every family has to make. My “Aunt Dotty” may or may not actually have had cancer; around 1970 she found a lump and had a full course of cancer treatment, and became depressed, and was offered a medication that “they took off the market because it made some people nutso, but all it did to me was help me communicate with the spirits.” She was never technically insane, because she could always tell the difference between her hallucinatory “spirits” and real people, and she was able to rebuke “spirits” that seemed to say nasty things. She was just a bit dotty. She was always prowling charity stores and bazaars, trying to ask the “spirits” of people she knew, telepathically, what people would like as gifts, and happily sending everyone in the family whole boxes of the ugliest old clothes and bric-a-brac that ever came out of Hong Kong. And anyone who hadn’t called or written for a few days was likely to hear that our “spirits” had told Aunt Dotty we were having all kinds of absurd adventures—“Well, how was Timbuktu? Well, maybe it was Tampa, but what your spirit was telling me sounded like Timbuktu.”
Aunt Dotty didn’t seem to get dottier after age eighty, but she did discard some inhibitions, and it seemed to be hard for newcomers to the neighborhood to know how to take some of the things she felt free to say. “Where did you get this, again? Are you sure? Because this old lady who used to own it is telling me you stole it! Right out of her house—in Orlando, wasn’t it?—and she wants it back!” Family members started trying to stay nearby, in case of serious misunderstandings, after Aunt Dotty said on the phone—from the patio, where she could be heard by the new neighbor in his garden—“The plumber thinks it’s a tree growing into the sewer line, but old Mr. Smith who used to live next door says that young man who’s moved in now killed him and buried him down there.” And yet she understood and remembered what was going on in reality, and took care of her own house and affairs as well as ever.
That was, I need to mention, pretty dang well. My Aunt Dotty was a real oldfashioned "little woman" who grew up expecting that her mother was going to die, and caring for her mother, while normal little girls are still figuring out how to pull the shiny new clothes off their dolls. She basically reared my mother and most of the foster children the grandparents took in, while going to high school, going to college, getting a job in a factory and keeping it after marriage. She was a licensed teacher but she stayed in the factory, earning more money there, until we children started to covet luxuries, and then she took a job tutoring some rich brats she didn't like much so we could have all the luxuries they discarded so quickly. She'd helped her father round up cattle on a pony at ten, and helped keep the old Studebaker sputtering along, and helped cook for the temporary labor crews until Mother took over that job (at five, standing on a chair). After she grew up and moved to a nice suburban neighborhood with her husband, her hobby was building houses, some of which are still standing. She wasn't big or strong but she designed houses and hired help to get them built. She was the one you could ask how to maintain and refurbish things, all her life. She was neither crazy nor dangerous nor even stupid, and refused to be treated as if she were...and we let her wander, annoying people but not really doing any harm since her husband kept the peace, until the very last weeks between the crippling stroke and the killing one.
Which seems the only decent thing to do. Otherwise where could one draw the line? In Canada they've legalized euthanasia, and now the rumors are flying of young, healthy people being urged to choose euthanasia too. Oh my. In this crowded world, everybody has lost some friend or relative they'd prefer to keep, and everybody can think of a few hundred people who are less worthy of life than our dear departed were.
I would like to recommend euthanasia to every single member of the World Economic Forum, on the grounds of their being senile enough to fantasize about ruling the world, with a possible exception only for Greta Thunberg, only in the custody of people who will correct her miseducation. I would also like to recommend it for all members of CNN's panels of "news analysts" who sit around gushing pre-rehearsed approved emotions at people who are trying to find out the names of the wounded, the dead, and the survivors after a disaster, on the ground that the gushers make a career of demonstrating to the world that they're too stupid to survive. I would also like to recommend it for all people, including some of my own generation, who want to believe that people my age and older are either fooled or flattered when younger people call us names that suggest that we might ever consider sleeping with them, on the grounds that that certainly feels like sexual abuse to me. (I personally don't mind being mistaken for a stranger's aunt or grandmother--I just explain that the confusion is all theirs--but I feel violated by the idea that I'd ever touch such nasty creatures.) You can see where this kind of thing is likely to lead, and reportedly, in Canada, it is leading there--fast. I think they want to have some sort of law against euthanasia and make sure it's very selectively enforced, in such a way that people who really want euthanasia can have it, if they pay cash in advance, but nobody else has to pay for it.
The dotty old hags and the cranky old men do seem to enjoy being alive, most of the time. Some of them, like my Aunt Dotty, are dearly loved by those who know and understand them. In some cases those who know and understand them may be a small group, perhaps limited to one visiting nurse they've mistaken for a long-gone favorite cousin, one grandchild, and a half-dozen geriatric cats and dogs nobody else would want to look after...but the geriatric Chihuahuas are souls, too, at least according to the way King James' Authorized Version of the Bible uses the word. They matter. They will have enough time, and enough reason, to miss the people no one else misses, in due course.
One morning in 1996, a year when I didn’t have a “home” in Washington, I got off the overnight bus and headed for Metrorail. A gravelly voice behind me creaked, “Wait! Are you going to the Metro? Well, can’t you walk with me?” So I waited and walked beside an old hag from some Western state who’d come in on the same bus but was, thank goodness, going to a different hotel, and although I’d combed my hair a breeze must have blown through it, because the hag brayed, “You look like you’d just been thrown out of someone’s bed!” Annoying? Yes; just about anybody would probably have found that old hag annoying and I’m sure it was a great disappointment to her family if she made her way safely home. Then again, I find several "celebrities" very annoying. I suspect Mitch McConnell's grandchildren may be the ones urging him not to retire, I suspect only plastic surgeons will miss Caitlyn Jenner, and I also think Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez needs at least ten more years at a more effective school just to stop embarrassing those of us who merely look as if she might have been related to us, but does that make them senile?
So I try to remind myself: Even when I have no idea what they’re trying to say, and even when they look and smell and act as if whatever they’re trying to say ought not to be said, our confused characters are not just nuisances in my life. Maybe their lives used to be as adventurous as Aunt Dotty’s. Maybe they were caring for wheelchair-bound mothers and infant siblings at twelve; maybe they sponsored dozens of needy children; maybe they built houses that are standing, somewhere, even today. Maybe their relatives have learned to overlook the vagaries in their minds and appreciate the wisdom they may still actually have. I don’t know that anyone else thought my Aunt Dotty was brilliant, multitalented, and wise after she reached age seventy, but we knew she was. For all I know, the mad old bat I shoo away might be one of her family’s most admired elders too.
Confinement and even euthanasia do come to mind, especially when one has barely recovered from stomach flu and finds diarrhea on the floor...but if confinement and euthanasia stay in your mind, then you deserve to grow up just like the person you’re thinking about.
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