Art meets Bingo.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
Boy, I really needed Bingo tonight. It’s been a relentlessly stressful week of unnecessary preholiday in-law drama, and I am wiped out. At least, I was. And then I walked into Bingo. Immediately, Wesley cheered, loudly: “Yay!” On the far side of the room, Dorothy was doing something like The Wave, only sweeter, and she was yelling, too: “Sandy! We need you! We need you, Sandy!”
Thank you, God. And right backatcha, Bingo buddies.
I checked quickly on Mike. He is not feeling well at all. “Double pneumonia,” he told me; “whatever that means.” It means the nursing staff called Mike’s son, and it means high alert on the heels of Mike’s recent hospitalization.
I left Mike to rest and medicate and headed back to Bingo. A lot of residents had ridden a bus to an Elks dinner off-campus, so Bingo was kind of empty. I counted 10 players, and even my math-challenged little noggin quickly calculated that with 10 prizes for every round of Bingo, everyone was a winner tonight.
Still, things moved slowly. More people drifted in as the night wore on. When I wheeled the prize cart over to a man I don’t know, I noticed two pencils on the table and a sketch in progress. My little noggin is slightly art-challenged, too, but again it put things together pretty quickly. “Are you drawing that?” I asked. He was.
After a slight Bingo-board glitch and a little confusion over whether we’d moved on to a new game, people started filing out. It was a long night of Bingo, and it was getting late. As he left, the resident/artist whispered to me, “I left you that drawing, in case you want it.” I did.
When I had glimpsed it earlier, the drawing was merely a scrubby tree with hints of branches, but now, for some reason, it actually took my breath away. I’m not sure, but to me the sketch looks like a person kneeling in front of a gravestone—and it’s all in moody shades of brown and black, because those were the pencils on his table.
Even more haunting: He wrote an artist’s note next to the drawing, in all caps: “A BLACK AND BROWN NOV. 11 2010 AD,” above his name and, I’m guessing, his room number, or possibly some sort of service number (I’m not printing either, since I don’t have his permission).
I'm guessing, and hoping, it's a Veterans Day tribute. And I plan to thank him for it, and tell him how sincerely touched I am by it, when we meet again at Bingo.
Boy, I really needed Bingo tonight. It’s been a relentlessly stressful week of unnecessary preholiday in-law drama, and I am wiped out. At least, I was. And then I walked into Bingo. Immediately, Wesley cheered, loudly: “Yay!” On the far side of the room, Dorothy was doing something like The Wave, only sweeter, and she was yelling, too: “Sandy! We need you! We need you, Sandy!”
Thank you, God. And right backatcha, Bingo buddies.
I checked quickly on Mike. He is not feeling well at all. “Double pneumonia,” he told me; “whatever that means.” It means the nursing staff called Mike’s son, and it means high alert on the heels of Mike’s recent hospitalization.
I left Mike to rest and medicate and headed back to Bingo. A lot of residents had ridden a bus to an Elks dinner off-campus, so Bingo was kind of empty. I counted 10 players, and even my math-challenged little noggin quickly calculated that with 10 prizes for every round of Bingo, everyone was a winner tonight.
Still, things moved slowly. More people drifted in as the night wore on. When I wheeled the prize cart over to a man I don’t know, I noticed two pencils on the table and a sketch in progress. My little noggin is slightly art-challenged, too, but again it put things together pretty quickly. “Are you drawing that?” I asked. He was.
After a slight Bingo-board glitch and a little confusion over whether we’d moved on to a new game, people started filing out. It was a long night of Bingo, and it was getting late. As he left, the resident/artist whispered to me, “I left you that drawing, in case you want it.” I did.
When I had glimpsed it earlier, the drawing was merely a scrubby tree with hints of branches, but now, for some reason, it actually took my breath away. I’m not sure, but to me the sketch looks like a person kneeling in front of a gravestone—and it’s all in moody shades of brown and black, because those were the pencils on his table.
Even more haunting: He wrote an artist’s note next to the drawing, in all caps: “A BLACK AND BROWN NOV. 11 2010 AD,” above his name and, I’m guessing, his room number, or possibly some sort of service number (I’m not printing either, since I don’t have his permission).
I'm guessing, and hoping, it's a Veterans Day tribute. And I plan to thank him for it, and tell him how sincerely touched I am by it, when we meet again at Bingo.
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