Read Online Composing a Further Life by Mary Catherine Bateson - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Mary Catherine Bateson
Ads: Link
but ‘Ooh, wouldn’t it be good to get away from all this?’ ”
Ruth majored in psychology and studied social work in graduate school. While she was away, urban renewal came to Baton Rouge, and her grandparents’ home fell victim to development. “When they were in their early seventies and I was nineteen,” she said, “their little neighborhood and their house all fell to eminent domain. They were retired by that time. My grandfather had had a heart condition for a very long time, but he was functioning pretty well. My grandmother, I guess she lived another year and died. So they died at seventy-four, seventy-five.”
“Not a good age to leave their home and have everything get jumbled up,” I said, remembering that often when older people are forced into a move too late for them to adapt to the new place, their lives seem to be cut short. “It did them in?”
“It did.”
“So then, in New York, did you feel like a country mouse in the big city?”
“I didn’t, you know. I didn’t stop to think about it. I was so busy doing things. I went to work right away for the City Department of Welfare. I worked in what they called foster care for older people, for adults. It was not what I wanted to do, not what I saw myself doing. However, it was just fascinating that—you know, things all come back in circles in their own fashion, and here we are thinking about growing old. I spent a year and a half finding board and care homes for elderly New Yorkers who were either receiving public assistance or the city was putting money into providing board and care for them. Or they could have been private folks who just needed referrals.”
“That’s a model that doesn’t exist any longer, does it?” I asked. “I’ve never heard anybody talk about foster care for seniors. It makes sense.”
“It does, but maybe in smaller places. In New York, this was a small unit, but it clearly was responsive to some of the people, like older men who lived in single rooms, SROs they call them now, and were in dire straits, so we would try to make sure that they were safe and well cared for and got what they needed to survive. It was a great way to learn the city. I rode the subways all over town, got to see stuff that I had never thought I’d see. Got to do a little bit of counseling, although that wasn’t really the point. The point was really to get these people in the right place and to maintain them in the right place.” Ruth’s move to New York, followed by her later moves, suggested to me the fairy tales in which a young hero—rarely a heroine—goes out into the world in search of adventure.
“I’ll tell you,” she went on, “one of the things that it did was to explode my sense of what the universe was. Here I was, having lived in a very segregated environment for twenty-one years. I knew who white people were, I knew who Jews were, but they weren’t a part of my everyday experience in the same way as they were when I went to New York. So I got a sense of this, of different ethnic styles of caregiving, different expectations, and of how we—Americans—collectively felt about older people.” Ruth was working out of an integrated office where they didn’t specialize her with black seniors, so she simply went where she was needed, becoming aware of different patterns of kinship and family structure and of the cultural differences in how people deal with pain or misfortune or even whether they grieve out loud. “That was during the day,” she said. “And during the evening there were jazz clubs and the theater and new friends, and all of that. So I became, in my own eyes, fairly sophisticated, fairly quickly.”
Ruth took some courses at NYU and a class or two at Columbia, not so much social work as what she called “just soap and little bit of suds.” Ultimately she moved to Massachusetts, to attend the Boston University School of Social Work. “A lot of my preoccupation was with how I was going to
Ruth majored in psychology and studied social work in graduate school. While she was away, urban renewal came to Baton Rouge, and her grandparents’ home fell victim to development. “When they were in their early seventies and I was nineteen,” she said, “their little neighborhood and their house all fell to eminent domain. They were retired by that time. My grandfather had had a heart condition for a very long time, but he was functioning pretty well. My grandmother, I guess she lived another year and died. So they died at seventy-four, seventy-five.”
“Not a good age to leave their home and have everything get jumbled up,” I said, remembering that often when older people are forced into a move too late for them to adapt to the new place, their lives seem to be cut short. “It did them in?”
“It did.”
“So then, in New York, did you feel like a country mouse in the big city?”
“I didn’t, you know. I didn’t stop to think about it. I was so busy doing things. I went to work right away for the City Department of Welfare. I worked in what they called foster care for older people, for adults. It was not what I wanted to do, not what I saw myself doing. However, it was just fascinating that—you know, things all come back in circles in their own fashion, and here we are thinking about growing old. I spent a year and a half finding board and care homes for elderly New Yorkers who were either receiving public assistance or the city was putting money into providing board and care for them. Or they could have been private folks who just needed referrals.”
“That’s a model that doesn’t exist any longer, does it?” I asked. “I’ve never heard anybody talk about foster care for seniors. It makes sense.”
“It does, but maybe in smaller places. In New York, this was a small unit, but it clearly was responsive to some of the people, like older men who lived in single rooms, SROs they call them now, and were in dire straits, so we would try to make sure that they were safe and well cared for and got what they needed to survive. It was a great way to learn the city. I rode the subways all over town, got to see stuff that I had never thought I’d see. Got to do a little bit of counseling, although that wasn’t really the point. The point was really to get these people in the right place and to maintain them in the right place.” Ruth’s move to New York, followed by her later moves, suggested to me the fairy tales in which a young hero—rarely a heroine—goes out into the world in search of adventure.
“I’ll tell you,” she went on, “one of the things that it did was to explode my sense of what the universe was. Here I was, having lived in a very segregated environment for twenty-one years. I knew who white people were, I knew who Jews were, but they weren’t a part of my everyday experience in the same way as they were when I went to New York. So I got a sense of this, of different ethnic styles of caregiving, different expectations, and of how we—Americans—collectively felt about older people.” Ruth was working out of an integrated office where they didn’t specialize her with black seniors, so she simply went where she was needed, becoming aware of different patterns of kinship and family structure and of the cultural differences in how people deal with pain or misfortune or even whether they grieve out loud. “That was during the day,” she said. “And during the evening there were jazz clubs and the theater and new friends, and all of that. So I became, in my own eyes, fairly sophisticated, fairly quickly.”
Ruth took some courses at NYU and a class or two at Columbia, not so much social work as what she called “just soap and little bit of suds.” Ultimately she moved to Massachusetts, to attend the Boston University School of Social Work. “A lot of my preoccupation was with how I was going to
Similar Books
