I Looked Away, and I'm Not Proud

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
My son who's playing the drums. I'm gonna take him
across the street to meet a neighbor, probably this afternoon.
So I live in a little cul de SACI sort
of area, uh, and across the street. Had noticed many
times over the time that I've lived there an elderly
woman sitting in a big window. They got a big

(00:23):
like goes to the floor to the ceiling sort of
window in their house. And there was an elderly woman
sitting in a wheelchair there like all day long, every day.
Oh yeah, and uh. And I often thought, jeez, you know,
and I wouldn't even like want to look over there
because it was just, you know, it just seemed sad

(00:44):
and rough to think about or contemplate or whatever. I
didn't know what was going on there. So yes, and
this has been going on for many many months. Um, yesterday, Uh,
a woman comes up on my sidewalk and says, hey,
I wondered if you could come across the street. I
take care of the woman across the street, and she
sees you playing with your boys all the time and

(01:05):
walking your dogs, and she'd like to meet you. Okay,
that's interesting, And so I go across the street. And
she's right in the front door because it's a really
nice day. And um, she introduces herself and she is
I I had assumed it was somebody who was pretty
out of it, probably sitting in the window all day long.
Not the case at all. She was completely with it.
Physically in a wheelchair and seems to be pretty um

(01:28):
limited but mentally just completely with it. Been living in
that house since it was brand new fifty years ago.
And uh and and it was a school teacher and
blah blah blah. And we talked for quite a while
and she'd like to meet my kids. So I'm gonna
bring Henry over later today, which I'm sure will be
pretty awesome for her, be awesome for my kid too.
But yeah, yeah, what a beautiful thing. Yeah. If you're

(01:50):
familiar with the John Prime song Hello in There, it
is kind of one of those. It's the you know,
you pass the old person on the street and maybe
say hello to him and ask them a little bit
about their life, because there's a lot going on in
there when they get ignored a lot we just put
people reach a certain age. I'm uh. The therapist friend
of mine who's in his seventies, he said, you become invisible?
He said, did you become your in your seventies? Like
people don't even notice her look away or something, And

(02:12):
I literally just said I would look away from the
fact that she's sitting over there in the window, which
I'm not proud of. But yeah, boy, we could go
on and on about why that happens. Obviously a lot
of it is we don't want to accept that that's
our own future if we're lucky enough to live that long.
I guess I don't know. I assume that's what's going
on there. Yeah, yeah, you know. It's funny. I'm at
the age now we're generally speaking, my friends aren't passing away,

(02:35):
but some of like my older friends, or their their
spouses or whatever they might be um. And I've been
to a couple of memorial services lately, and for people
I barely knew or didn't know at all, but it
was a spouse or something. We're paying our respects, and
I came away thinking, oh my god, what an interesting person.
I wish i'd met them. Right, Yeah, some of you

(02:57):
who lives seventy nine years, they got seventy eighty nine.
There's here's the stories and experience of all kinds. Armstrong
and Jetty