On the Bright Side

by Hendrik Groen

  Some years ago the inmates of an old-age home in Zeeland, I believe, were the recipients of an enormous cash prize. As it turned out, most of the lucky winners were deeply distressed by all that money and the attendant fuss.

  ‘Could they make one that’s suitable for old people, I wonder?’ asked Graeme, tongue-in-cheek, in reaction to a piece in the paper that said that they are working on developing a sex robot.

  ‘Preferably a sexy female robot that likes to take it easy,’ Geert grunted.

  ‘Yes, a geriatric sex robot that’s got a headache six days a week,’ said Graeme.

  Of course there was quite a bit of indignant head-shaking at this exchange, but there are plenty of oldies who enjoy the odd dirty joke or nudge-nudge wink-wink served with their coffee or tea. I have noticed that a surprising number of the ladies don’t seem to mind a bit of naughty innuendo.

  Tuesday, 13 October

  ‘Do you mean the nurse with the moustache?’ Graeme asked me. The nurse with the moustache was standing right behind him. I blushed, Graeme looked over his shoulder and blushed even more deeply, and it wasn’t hard for the nurse with the moustache to guess who we’d been talking about.

  ‘I don’t mean to be rude, you are a lovely nurse,’ Graeme said in an attempt to save himself.

  ‘A lovely nurse with a moustache,’ she said, summing up Graeme’s verdict.

  ‘Just think, a beard would be worse,’ Evert put in his two cents.

  Luckily it drew a little smile.

  Next Evert let out a toot like a blast from a tuba. By accident. He used to do it on purpose, but nowadays he can’t help it. But he still adopts the same indignant expression, and yells over his shoulder, ‘Beat it, Rover, I haven’t got any cookies!’

  Over a game of chess yesterday Evert told me he had heard talk on the radio about an unorthodox approach to the problem of the skyrocketing cost of care. Someone had come up with the idea that insurers ought to offer patients in need of terminal care a choice: they could either have the expensive medical intervention or no care at all but a big pile of money, to be spent on whatever they liked.

  ‘Then you’d have got your money’s worth out of me even when I was gone, with a tidy sum for the Club’s coffers,’ my ailing friend said, ‘but alas, there’s no time left to arrange it.’

  ‘No.’

  We were quiet for a moment.

  ‘It’s your move.’

  Wednesday, 14 October

  The Dutch were eliminated from the European Championship yesterday in the qualifying round. We lost to the Czechs. This summer the streets of Amsterdam will not, alas, be draped in orange. The manufacturers of orange gimcrackery are in sackcloth and ashes. They may even be considering suing the team for loss of income due to epic fail. I have heard a number of different explanations for why we didn’t even make it to third place in our group. I find it strange that almost none of them concluded that our players may just not be good enough.

  ‘We’ve been cast back into the Dark Ages of football,’ Leonie said with a beautifully feigned sob in her voice. ‘And I fear we won’t make our way out again in my lifetime.’ Only to add, after yet another sob, that it will be nice and quiet for a change, a summer without all that hysterical football hoo-ha.

  I think I’ll become a follower of Albania for this championship. Or should I swallow my pride and throw my support to the Belgians?

  On a visit to Grietje, I watched a man dunking an entire pack of biscuits into his big mug of tea one by one. He’d take one out, slowly dip it in and out a few times, then stuff it into his mouth. His cup had a thick scum of biscuit dregs floating on top. The nurse saw him doing it, but did not interfere. Maybe because he looked so blissfully content. Or maybe she had too much to do to get into a skirmish over a pack of biscuits. Strangely enough, the man was as skinny as a rake.

  Thursday, 15 October

  I had another think about old people and computers, and have come to the unsurprising conclusion that people over eighty, with the odd exception, are too old for new technology. Resistance to anything that did not exist in the past partly accounts for it, and partly the simple fact that it’s too complicated for an old brain to understand. There are a few residents who have computers, but they employ only a smattering of the computer’s infinite possibilities. I, for instance, use it as a typewriter, and I know how to look things up on the Internet. But I don’t dare to click on most of the icons on the screen because I have no idea what will happen if I do. Then there are the residents who Skype with their children or grandchildren: there’s always a handwritten note next to the computer with instructions for each of the steps, in the right order. If they lost that note, they might as well throw away the computer. Young people claim it’s so simple, those modern media thingamabobs, but that doesn’t apply to everybody. We don’t understand the basic principles, and we can’t remember anything in the first place. A person is said to have around 100 billion brain cells, but in the over-eighty age group to which I belong, a great number of those cells are not running on all cylinders, especially in the memory department.

  Friday, 16 October

  Yesterday I had my half-yearly appointment with my geriatrician, Dr Van Vlaanderen. She again insisted on being called Emma, but I refused. I may be old-fashioned, but doctors don’t have first names.

  She palpated me and peered at me, took my blood pressure and listened to my heart, and then made me do ten deep knee bends. Which was eight too many: while doing the third one, I got stuck and couldn’t stand up again. I only just managed not to land on my backside. The doctor had to help me up from my stranded position.

  ‘I must tell you that I don’t often do knee bends any more. It does happen sometimes that I have to pick something up from the floor, but never ten times in a row.’

  She pretended not to have heard me.

  ‘For a man of eighty-five, there’s no reason for complaint, Mr Groen.’

  ‘I do try to complain as little as possible, actually, doctor.’

  All in all, it was a rather pointless visit, and those tend to be the best ones. I must have said this before, but from, say, age eighty, stasis is progress. The really serious collapse hasn’t yet begun. I read somewhere that, statistically speaking, men spend the last fifteen years of their lives in poor health. So I have no reason to complain, for now: I’ll either live to be 100, or I’ll end up with having had fewer bad years than most people. The average lifespan for men today is 79.87 years. So you could say I already have a head start of a good five reasonably healthy years. Count your blessings, Groen. Although it is also true that once the fly tumbles into the ointment, it never comes out again. Our lifespan keeps getting longer, but you can’t choose to squeeze in those extra ages between twenty and forty, the more’s the pity. The extra years always come at the end, attended by ailments and infirmities. People therefore spend an unreasonable proportion of their healthcare costs in the last few years of their lives, when they – let’s not mince words – already have one foot out the door anyway. Imagine the scandal if Prorail, to name just one example, spent the biggest part of its budget on the maintenance of obsolete railway equipment.

  Hmm, not a very respectful comparison, Hendrik. But who cares; as a superannuated steam engine, I think I have a right to say what’s on my mind.

  Saturday, 17 October

  I have been a seeker of good fortune all my life. Who hasn’t? And now ‘fortune seeker’ has suddenly become a dirty word.

  ‘Fortune seekers get out!’ is the battle cry. If you were to take that literally, the Netherlands would become a very quiet place to live. Here in our home, the only ones left would be a few notorious malcontents, or misfortune seekers.

  The witch-hunt against fortune seekers began when thousands of refugees found their way to the Netherlands. A refugee can certainly use a bit of good fortune, especially when his home and hearth have been reduced to rubble and his family members are dead. So I say: go seek your fortune where the chance of fi
nding it is greatest, which is not at this time Syria or Somalia. I don’t mind helping you in your search. In the meantime I will go on seeking good fortune for myself every single day.

  There are quite a few residents in our home who gradually become bent over. And once it’s bent, you can never get it straight again. The spinal column compresses, bone crumbles faster than it can regenerate, and there’s nothing that can be done about it. What I never realized before is that if you walk around in a stooped position and don’t fancy looking down at the ground all day, trying to stand straight actually feels as if you’re straining to look up at the ceiling all day. From now on I shall treat hunched old people with even more respect than before.

  There are modern parents who name their kids Storm or Butterfly or Innocence, but you can always take it too far.

  ‘It was something to do with a Cavia in the Xenos,’ was all Graeme could recall about the baby of footballer Wesley Sneijder and his actress wife Yolanthe Cabeau-something.

  ‘The child is called Xess Xava,’ Mrs Slothouwer said tartly.

  ‘Is that a boy’s name or a girl’s name?’ someone inquired.

  Poor kid, it’s not given a very easy start, having to go through life as Xess Xava Sneijder. His (or her) initials are XXS, extra-extra small. Which is more applicable to the dad, actually.

  ‘If I had another child, I’d name it Whisky-Cola,’ said Evert.

  Sunday, 18 October

  This morning I pinned the outcome of the annual daytrip vote on the noticeboard: the Christmas market in Aachen won it by a hair. We can go ahead and book the coach. I can see it now: six hours in the coach, and two hours of sausage and glühwein. The tour of the harbour came in at number two. Old people have a thing about boats, although in this case it wasn’t enough to swing the vote. The attraction of boat trips lies in the peaceful tempo at which the landscape drifts by. It’s the tempo that suits us. The musical Billy Elliot came in last. The extra cost must have scared many people off. They are quick to decide something is too much money.

  ‘Left home before the war,’ Evert will say whenever someone complains that the price of a cup of coffee is now €2½, or rather, 5 guilders and 50 cents.

  There are always people who’ll immediately tell you how much dearer something is now than in the old days. Which old days they’re referring to isn’t always very clear. And how much more money they currently have in their pockets isn’t something the grumblers seem to take into account either.

  The choice of the Christmas market gave rise to contented smirks on the one hand and long faces on the other. Can’t be helped. The Residents’ Committee did, however, add a Christmas bingo with extra big prizes to the schedule, as a sop to those who were left disappointed.

  As the icing on the cake, we were able to announce that ‘THE COST OF A BINGO CARD WILL REMAIN 50 CENTS’. That has boosted our popularity enormously. It was made possible by the generosity of two anonymous benefactors. Their names are Antoine and Evert. Each dropped €100 into the prize kitty. Gigantic liverwursts for the winners! We are even thinking of having a stealth round in which it turns out at the end that ‘everyone wins’. I can already see the long faces, and hear the grumbles of inmates who were playing with one stingy bingo card: ‘If I’d have known, I’d have bought a lot more cards.’

  It promises to be a spectacular afternoon.

  Friday, 23 October

  It isn’t easy to press Ctrl-Alt-Del with one hand. Luckily one doesn’t have to do it too often. But if you have only one hand, just writing a capital letter slows things down considerably.

  I broke my arm last Sunday afternoon. A combination of an unanticipated step and a moment of inattention. I may have been distracted, I think maybe there was a dog nearby, and I missed the step, twisted an ankle, fell and heard something snap. I didn’t even manage the usual instinctive reflex of people taking a pratfall: bounding back to their feet again and acting as if there’s nothing wrong. My arm was twisted into a strange angle and hurt like hell.

  I used to wonder what the siren sounds like from inside the ambulance. I finally had a chance to find out, but I forgot to pay attention. Before lifting me into the ambulance the paramedic gave me ‘a little shot for the pain’. Splendid stuff. My memory of the rest of the afternoon is rather hazy. It was Sunday afternoon, and the A&E was crammed with injured sportsmen, but they let me go first. The nurse said later that I’d muttered, approvingly, about ‘positive age discrimination’.

  ‘We are going to invite you to spend the night here, Mr Groen,’ I do remember the sister saying.

  ‘I can’t, I have someone who needs looking after.’

  At my request the sister phoned Antoine, who arrived an hour later with my pyjamas and toothbrush, and reassured me that the Old-But-Not-Dead would look after Evert. He had wanted to come along, but Antoine had told him he couldn’t.

  I woke up in the middle of the night. My arm hurt a lot, my ankle too.

  I am of the generation of ‘no whining, and no bothering other people with your problems’. It took me a while to overcome that admonition, but then I pushed the bell for help.

  ‘So sorry to bother you,’ I couldn’t help apologizing when the night sister arrived.

  ‘That’s what we went to college for,’ she said, ‘and we’re paid for it too, so don’t be embarrassed.’

  She gave me two cheerfully coloured pills and if I hadn’t had a fractured arm, I’d have awoken some hours later rested and refreshed.

  I was home again by Monday afternoon.

  Saturday, 24 October

  I have been an object of pity for some five days now, and I don’t like it. Some people will ask me at least three times a day, ‘How are you feeling now?’ It’s well meant but these solicitous inquiries into my condition occur at least 100 times a day. Which has begun to annoy me so much that I’m avoiding the conversation lounge for the time being, which in turn will lead to a concerned resident knocking on my door every so often to see if I’m still alive. If I happen not to answer, since I’m spending most of the time hiding out at Evert’s, they’ll panic and fetch the nurse, who will establish that I am not answering the door because I’m not in.

  Evert and I are keeping our spirits up with the help of board games and, as soon as the cocktail hour rolls around, the best libations money can buy. Evert has to keep drinking in order to flush down the multitude of pills he pops out of the big automatic pill dispenser at his elbow.

  I was given a box of twenty-five board games by the Old-But-Not-Dead gang, and Evert and I are systematically working our way through them. We waste a lot of time repositioning the pieces, pawns and tokens, which I tend to knock over with my clumsy left hand. Fortunately we are not in a hurry.

  I am a rather handicapped caregiver with one arm in a cast, but I am starting to get the hang of it and between the two of us, we manage. Showering is the only thing we both need help with.

  ‘It creates a bond,’ Evert said.

  I suggested taking a shower together.

  ‘Perish the thought!’ he said vehemently. ‘I’m not going under the shower with a dirty old man like you.’

  ‘Just kidding, the revulsion is mutual,’ I reassured him.

  In the meantime, typing journal entries is getting a little easier. The first day after I got home from hospital it took me two hours to write half a piece. I was so frustrated that I did not go near the computer for several days. But I am happy to report that my left hand is doing a yeoman’s job, and is allowing me to type a bit faster now.

  Sunday, 25 October

  Many old folk are afraid of using ATMs. They are worried about getting robbed. They don’t have much faith in Internet banking either, if they own a computer, that is. They’ve been put off by stories in the paper about all the things that can go wrong with computers.

  It must be said there’s no lack of worrisome examples. Take the following item, for instance: the German Bundestag’s computers all went on a rampage one day, of their own
accord. It led to considerable panic. Who knows what they’d been up to? Every single one of the 20,000 computers had to be replaced. The question is: who was responsible? My first suspect would be whoever is supplying the new computers. Next in the order of suspects are of course the Russians. Although the Americans’ hands aren’t exactly clean either. A computer security firm sold the secret keys to its own system for $10 million to the American intelligence agency NSA, which in turn used them in its pursuit of terrorist organizations such as UNICEF and Doctors Without Borders.

  And yesterday ING Bank’s website was once again down for several hours. So all things considered, it’s no surprise, really, that we’d rather hide our pennies in an old shoebox in the bottom of the linen cupboard. A lady on the fourth floor has been bragging that she sleeps with her purse tucked between her knees. I think that’s definitely a safe place for it. He who dares venture thither deserves to be richly rewarded. Evert could not rule out the possibility that the reason the woman is giving away her purse’s hiding place is to invite thieves to come and check it out. Although that did sound a bit far-fetched to me.

  Twenty thousand computers at the Bundestag seems a bit far-fetched too. But that’s what it said in the paper.

  Also in the paper: Johan Cruyff has cancer. Lung cancer, to be precise. The news landed in here like a bomb. Especially because always, through thick and thin, ‘El Salvador’ has remained just an ordinary boy. Or, as he says himself, just your ordinary ‘saviour’.