MOVIE MOVIE WEEKEND: SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD & CRAIGSLIST JOE

Gentle Readers . . . and Maxwell,

I am happy to present two movies to you for possible viewing this weekend. Both are available on DVD, and they share my beloved theme of the interconnectedness of humankind.

The first is Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World. I can't remember if Favorite Young Man recommended this movie to me, or if I saw it mentioned on someone's blog. Anyway, if you suggested that I see this movie, I thank you.

An asteroid is going to collide with Earth, destroying everything and killing everyone. As Dodge (Steve Carell) enters the true final days (not the Mayan apocalypse), his wife jumps out of their car and runs. She simply disappears, leaving Dodge to try to cope with the end by continuing his work at an insurance company and by hanging out with friends who have gone wild.

Then Dodge meets his long-time neighbor, Penny (Keira Knightley). They've never spoken before, but they set out on a journey together as the city in which they live erupts in violence.

Although this plot certainly isn't happy go lucky carefree comedy, I like it. Dodge and Penny connect, and in turn, they connect with some other people who want to spend their last days of life in peace and harmony.

I also love Steve Carell's performance in this movie. He's not crazed and ridiculous. This Steve Carrel is calm and thoughtful -- more like his role in Little Miss Sunshine, the film that first brought Carrel to my attention. After I saw Sunshine, I started watching The Office. I loved the way the character of Michael Scott developed and changed and improved as a human being.

Keira Knightley is fine, and beautiful, of course, but it was Carell who really caught my eye.

Seeking A Friend For The End Of The World has The Janie Junebug Seal of Approval. However, if you're depressed, this movie might not be right for you. How you feel about it may depend on the mood you're in. I felt good at the beginning of the movie. The plot made me a little sad, but the lovely moments transcended the sadness.

The second film I present for your consideration is a documentary called craigslist joe.

Filmmaker Joe Garner sets off on a 31-day journey with a cameraman, a cell phone, a laptop, no food nor money, and little clothing. His goal is to see if he can use craigslist to find a community that will allow him to survive his journey.

I don't want to reveal too much about what happens to Joe, but I will tell you that this is a quiet movie with tender moments. Joe Garner seems truly touched when he encounters kindness.

craigslist joe also earns The Janie Junebug Seal of Approval.

I hope you have a lovely weekend.

Infinities of love,

Janie Junebug

LITTLE SHACK BY THE RAILROAD TRACK *title sorta stolen from Melynda, who got it from fishducky

Gentle Readers . . . and Maxwell,

Recently, Melynda entertained us with stories about her lack of water because of frozen pipes in Little Trailer On The Prairie. I nearly cried for poor dear Melynda as she shoveled snow into pans so she could melt it on the stove and use it to flush her toilet.

Well, guess whose toilet couldn't be flushed next?

The fun began -- let's see -- was it Monday night? Hot Young Anthony knocked on my door. Sadly, he was wearing a shirt. He pointed out to me that the pipe taking water into my house was spraying said water out into the yard. I don't want you to end up with a huge water bill, he said.

Favorite Young Man was due to stop by, which he did, and he dutifully crawled under the house to see what was wrong. He said that the metal pipe in front of the house had rusted through. Only a small portion of it needed to be replaced up to the point where it joined the PVC pipe under the house.

FYM insisted it was a simple repair, said he could do it himself, but he didn't have time.

Waaaaaa! He told me to hurry up and take my shower because he was going to turn off the water to the house. I also filled pots, pitchers, and cups with water.

The next morning I called a guy who had worked on my house before who had said he could take care of minor plumbing problems. Number out of service.

More waaaaa! I called my friend, Bethie, the nice realtor who sold the house to me. She said, Call my dad.

Bethie's dad is a real sweetheart. He's done some work on my house, too.

But he didn't call me back. Finally, I called him again. He answered and said he had a doctor's appointment and he was getting ready to go out of town and he said, Would you please call somebody else?

I called Bethie again. She gave me the number of another guy to call. I called and left a message on his voice mail.

As I waited to hear from him, I started to worry a bit. The toilets needed to be flushed and I was running low on water. I had used some to fill the doggies' water dish, to brush my teeth, to wash my face, etc.

I decided I had better turn into a pioneer girl like Melynda and melt some snow to flush the toilet.

So I went out with a shovel and a pan to get some snow.

No snow in sight.

Would snow fall soon?

Not according to the weather report on my phone. It was 80 degrees.

So much for that idea.

But speaking of pioneer girls, if you ever read Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books (which I loved and still do), did you ever notice that Laura described, in meticulous detail, Pa building their little houses, but she never wrote "And then Pa dug a nice deep hole and built the privy over it so we no longer had to take a crap in the grass"? Nope. Laura never wrote a word about takin' a shit.

But then Dan the plumbing man called me back and said he would come out and take a look at the pipe. Dan showed up, and he didn't look like any plumber I'd ever seen. Elvis Aaron Schwarz, are you reading this?

No response.

I'm whistling and singing.

Elvis?

Nope. He's not reading.

Dan the plumbing man was hot. I've never seen such a hot plumber. But he also wasn't dressed to work. He was wearing nice pants and a white shirt and a necklace. And hot. He was wearing hot.

Dan the plumbing man looked at the pipe and said, Well, I can't do it today, but I'll call a friend of mine who lives near here. If he can do it, he'll come over.

Dan the plumbing man, I begged, would you please turn on the water long enough for me to flush and refill my pots? He kindly did, and then the water was gone again.

Then I waited.

Nobody called. Nobody showed up.

Elvis Aaron Schwarz called this morning and asked how I was. I don't have water, I growled.

WHAT? You can't get anybody to fix that? What's the matter with people who don't want to work? Elvis Aaron Schwarz hollered.

Then while he had me on his cell phone, he picked up the land line where he works and called the city of Jacksonville's water department. I could hear him talking to them as he said, My name is Elvis Aaron Schwarz and my fiancee hasn't had water for two days . . . and then the phone conversation faded away, and I said, Re-roll the tape, and I heard Elvis Aaron Schwarz definitely referring to me not as his girlfriend or his main squeeze, but his fiancee.

I thought, I have been upgraded from coach to first class.

Hi! Remember me?
My name is Elvis Aaron Schwarz.
Yup, it's true. I told the guy at the water
department that my baby doll
is my fiancee.

Of course, I can't marry Elvis Aaron Schwarz because I would lose my maintenance from Dr.
X, which I need. But, gosh, it's nice to be called "my fiancee."

Anyway, the city couldn't recommend anyone to help me. It's against the law for them to suggest a particular plumber, the guy said.

I told Elvis Aaron Schwarz that I would call Dan the plumbing man again, and when I did, he said he had a job that had taken longer than expected and as soon as they finished he would come to my house.

Dan and crew arrived early this afternoon. The pipe has been replaced, the water is back on, and I flushed the toilets and took a shower.

I did not invite Dan the plumbing man to join me in the shower because I am the fiancee of Elvis Aaron Schwarz.

Infinities of love and water,

Janie Junebug

P.S. Did any of you notice that the Academy Award nominations were announced this morning? You may recall my review of Beasts Of The Southern Wild. This film was nominated for Best Movie, Best Director, and as predicted by yours truly, Quvenzhané Wallis, who plays Hushpuppy, was nominated for Best Actress. She is the youngest Best Actress nominee in history, at the ripe old age of nine. I believe she was five when she made the movie.

THOSE WHO COULD NOT SPEAK: VADA

Before the nursing home occupied the fairly attractive and modern facility in which I worked, it was in an old house. Donna, the night supervisor, said she missed the house -- that she felt they were more of a family there. A couple of GNAs who had worked for the nursing home for years agreed with her. The house was more homey, they said, which, of  course, made sense.

A few of the patients had been in the nursing home long enough that they had also lived in the house. One of them was Vada. Donna told me that when they were in the house, Vada walked and used the toilet. She lived in the home because she was indigent, had no family of which we were aware, and was incapable of living on her own. I surmised she was developmentally disabled and had long been institutionalized by state authorities. Donna told me that Vada's abilities had always been limited to simple sentences, coloring with crayons, and joining in on games such as bingo. When I knew Vada, though, she was in a wheelchair and she didn't talk at all. The only sound she made was a strange chortling noise that we thought was laughter.

Gradually, however, a couple of the other GNAs and I figured out she made the noise when she was afraid. We learned this when Faith tipped Zelda's wheelchair backwards a bit and discovered she made the sound. We laughed, thinking we laughed with her because she enjoyed the surprise.

But then we realized from her expression that Vada wasn't happy and enjoying the experience. She was just plain scared. After that, I heard Vada make the noise at the flash of a camera or when we transferred her from her wheelchair to her bed and sometimes didn't make it. Occasionally, patients struggled while we moved them. If we couldn't get them on the bed or the toilet because they clung to us wildly or wiggled like toddlers, we lowered them to the floor as gently as possible and sought reinforcements to pick up the patient from the floor and get her where she needed to go.

Vada frequently ended up being lowered to the floor because of her struggling and because she was 200 pounds of dead weight. She couldn't support herself at all.

Vada, like Ronnie, shocked me one Saturday night. I got off the elevator on the third floor to start my shift. Vada sat directly in front of the elevator.

"Girl, will you put me to bed?" she shouted.

All the staff members within hearing distance were amazed to hear Vada speak, and in a complete sentence. We figured Vada REALLY wanted to go to bed.

I hugged her and said, "Of course I'll put you to bed. Just let me take off my jacket."

And I kept my promise.

Vada's condition gradually deteriorated during the months I knew her. She went from using the toilet (with our help, of course) to total incontinence. She lost the ability to swallow food and was put on a diet of pureed mush with "drinks" that had corn starch added to thicken them so she wouldn't suck liquids into her lungs and get pneumonia.

And her sometimes frustrating, but amusing, antics came to an end. One night she had taken the toothbrushes from every bathroom on South Hall and put them in a vase to create a multi-colored bouquet. On another occasion, she took a woman's glasses and dentures -- just before the patient's family appeared for a visit. They were quite irate when they found Mom without glasses and teeth. We scoured the third floor for the specs and the choppers and were very relieved to find them in the drawer of Vada's bedside table.

Angry family members were no fun. Although they often had good reasons to be angry, sometimes the incident that upset them was beyond our control. For example, almost all the patients wanted to go to bed right after supper. We could not put 65 or 70 patients to bed at the same time. When families came in and saw that Dad had fallen on the floor trying to put himself to bed because we ignored him (they thought), they became very angry.

As Vada's health deteriorated, she became one of the patients who really needed to go to bed as soon as possible after dinner. Many evenings, Vada's head drooped and she dozed in her wheelchair while she waited for bed.

One night, she cried, apparently from exhaustion. Zelda, who usually insisted on being put to bed right after dinner -- and got her way -- demanded that I "put that poor soul to bed right now." It was the first glimmer I had of Zelda's capacity to empathize with others.

Then one night when I came to work early -- before dinner -- I found Vada in bed, sound asleep. The day staff had put her there for a nap because she had fallen asleep in her wheelchair. I couldn't wake her by saying her name. I pinched her hand gently and she made absolutely no movement or sound. The Director of Nursing, Lynn, was assisting with patient care. Frightened, I asked her to check Vada.

She did and said she was sure Vada would be all right. "Vada had some medicine today that made her sleepy," Lynn explained. "She should sleep it off and be all right in the morning."

I didn't know what the medicine was for, but it didn't seem to help. Vada slept more and more and was quite obviously moving toward the end of her life.

Then early one morning I went to change Vada's diaper before I left for the day. I found Vada awake and waiting for me with eager eyes.

"I NEED TO SHIT!" she shouted.

"I'll get you a bedpan," I told her.

I rolled Vada onto her side, put her on the pink plastic bedpan, raised the head of the  bed some, and Vada let out a mighty groan as she released a large solid ball of poop. It must have been a while since the poor woman had pooped, and I bet it was painful.

It turned out to be Vada's final poop and last words.

I went home after cleaning her bottom. I had the next two days off.

When I returned to work, Vada was gone. She had died in her sleep. Every trace of her had disappeared, as if she never existed.

THOSE WHO COULD NOT SPEAK: RONNIE

The nursing home had its share of patients whose ability to speak was quite limited or even non-existent. Patients in a vegetative state usually made no sound at all. When one of these ladies moaned very early in the morning, we discovered she had a swollen ankle. An x-ray the next day revealed the bone was broken.

Ronnie had Huntington's Chorea. About every thirty minutes during the evening -- our busiest time because we needed to put the residents to bed -- he would hoist himself up and out of his bed, wobble to the doorway of his room, and in a voice as a shaky as his legs cry out, "I need to pee!"

Invariably we replied, "If you can walk to the door, then you can walk in the bathroom. Go in there and pee."

"Okay," Ronnie would mumble, and walk like a drunken sailor into the bathroom.

I never heard him say anything other than "I need to pee," with the exception of two occasions.

I almost always worked on the third floor, as did most of the nurses and the assistants. The third floor had 85 - 90 patients, and they were the more serious cases. The second floor had 15 - 20 patients, and some of them could perform quite a bit of their own care.

Thus, the second floor never had more than one nurse and rarely had more than one assistant.

At one point, I was assigned to the second floor for about three months.

When I returned to duty on the third floor, back on my South Hall, I headed to Ronnie's room to help him into his pajamas.

He looked shocked to see me. "Where the heck ya been?" he hollered.

I hugged him and explained I'd been working on the second floor. He didn't say anything else, other than his regularly scheduled need- to-pee speech.

About three months after I quit working at the nursing home because my husband and I moved to another state, I returned for a visit.

I got off the elevator on the third floor. The only person in sight was Ronnie. He sat in his special padded chair directly outside the door to his room.

I headed down South Hall, thinking I would pass him and he wouldn't know who I was, but he surprised me.

"Janie! Where ya been?" he shouted.

You could have knocked me over with a feather.

I told him I had moved to another state and didn't work at the nursing home anymore.

I kissed his forehead, said farewell, and sought out one of the nurses I knew. When I told her about Ronnie, she said, "I didn't think he even knew any of our names."

Sometimes patients absorbed more information than we thought they were capable of doing.

BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD

Gentle Readers . . . and Maxwell,

We present for your consideration 2012's Beasts Of The Southern Wild, recently released on DVD.

This movie won awards at Cannes and Sundance for first-time feature film director Benh Zeitlin.

I find myself at a loss for words -- yes, yes, I know, very unusual. How does one take abject poverty and misery and violence and turn it into a thing of beauty?

Somehow it is accomplished in this movie about six-year-old Hushpuppy, who lives in the Mississippi Delta with her daddy, Wink. You may find Wink abusive, but perhaps he is preparing Hushpuppy to go on living when he dies.

I cannot tell you to watch this movie. You must decide for yourself if you can bear the destitution, the desecration. You must see for yourself if you can find the love and beauty in the empowerment of a child.

I have decided I will use the following words to describe Beasts Of The Southern Wild: 

Magical.

Mysterious.

Mythological.

Archetypal.

I predict an Academy Award nomination of some sort for Quvenzhané Wallis, who plays Hushpuppy. It should be a Best Actress nomination, but she might end up shuffled over to Best Supporting Actress.

Hushpuppy: I see that I am a little piece of a big, big universe, and that makes it right.

In this film I see the interconnectedness of humankind, the theme -- the belief -- I love above all others.

Watch if you will. Watch at your own risk. Watch if you dare.

Are you brave enough? It's okay if you aren't. I almost turned off the TV after the first ten minutes, but I made myself stick it out to see if I could find anything redeeming in this film.

And I did.

Infinities of love,

Janie Junebug

P.S. I sponsor two children through charities that organize that kind of support. The first child is a little girl in Syria; the second child is a boy who lives in the Mississippi Delta. If his life is anything like Hushpuppy's, then my help is a mere drop in his bucket of misery. Don't comfort me. Don't tell me it's enough that I help, because nothing is enough. 

ZELDA PART THREE

To read part one of Zelda's story, click HERE. To read part two, click HERE.


I knew that the best way to change my behavior toward Zelda was to follow the teachings of Christ. Most important in this case, to love my neighbor as myself.

If Zelda wasn't my neighbor, then who was? I put her on the bedpan. I wiped the woman's butt when she pooped. She farted in my face. That kind of relationship is about as close as one can come to neighborly. Maybe closer.

I needed to love my neighbor. I needed to love my Zelda.

And I didn't.

So I decided to pretend. I've always heard that if you don't feel like smiling, then smile anyway and before you know it, the smile will be natural.

The next time I put Zelda to bed, I kissed her forehead and said, "I love you."

"I love you, too," she answered.

I don't think Zelda was pretending. I think she had the love of Christ in her all along, and it was up to me to release it.

I moved on from "I love you," to smiling every time I went in Zelda's room. I moved her body as gently as possible. I didn't rush her care. I asked her questions about herself and learned she didn't hear well, which must have increased her feelings of isolation.

She never went to the dining room. She had meals in her room. She didn't attend sing-alongs or movies or bingo or any other gathering provided by the activity staff. I think she was afraid that if she left her room that no one would take her back and return her to the safe haven of her bed.

Her fear was realistic. I had come across other residents who waited for hours to be put in bed and receive a clean diaper.

When Christmas arrived, the nursing home held a party for the residents, complete with a Santa Claus.

But the party was on the first floor. Many of the third-floor residents were virtually immobile and couldn't attend. I found the director of the home and begged her to bring Santa to the third floor for a visit. She complied with my request.

When Santa arrived on the third floor, electricity crackled in the air. Santa had come upstairs just to see the residents. When he walked past Zelda's room, she saw him and called out to me, "Tell Santa to come in here."

I corralled Santa and led him to Zelda. She sang to him -- a song she had written years before. She remembered every word and every note. Santa and the nursing home director and I applauded, and Santa asked Zelda how she had written such a beautiful song.

"The Lord gave it to me," she answered, humbly.

Soon after, I was well into my 12-hour night shift when I had a Zelda breakthrough. I went to answer her call light. After she had used the bedpan, she gestured toward the recliner she no longer used and said, "Sit down, honey. You must be tired."

She was the only person who had ever made such an offer to me while I was on the job. Everyone wanted something; it was my job to provide it.

But Zelda didn't want a snack or fresh water in her pitcher.

She desired only my comfort.

I knew that our relationship had changed, that we had a relationship.

My love for Zelda burst forth from my heart at last. This love was no longer a pretense.

My joy in caring for Zelda increased seventy times seven.

One night another GNA and I were the only two nursing assistants on the floor for the entire night. It was a nightmare. We couldn't answer call lights. We could only go from one room to the next, changing diapers non-stop. When the day staff arrived at 7 a.m., the complaints began immediately:

The floor was a mess.
Everyone needed to be changed.
No one had been washed.

As soon as I saw the day supervisor, I said, "It's just been the two of us all night, and I don't want to hear one word about what a mess everything is."

I then went into Zelda's room for my last duty of my shift. As I changed her diaper, my tears began to fall. "Honey, you're worn out," she said. "You have to go home and get some rest."

"I will, Zelda. I promise."

I understood then that Zelda was fussy because along with her loneliness, she needed to be needed. In me, I think she saw someone who was imperfect, but trying. When she invited me to sit down and relax, when she told me to go home and rest, she was doing all she could to provide me with the comfort she had once given her children and the members of her husband's congregation. Through my efforts and my imperfections, I inadvertently gave Zelda a renewed purpose in life.

When she developed a bad cough from a cold, I sat with her and held her hand. She said she didn't feel well, which I reported to Evelyn, who rolled her eyes.

I returned to Zelda. Suddenly she had a coughing fit and her face turned blue.

I ran for Evelyn and told her what I'd seen, demanding that she check Zelda. This time, Evelyn listened to me. She hurried to Zelda's room to check her oxygen levels and listen to her breathing.

Soon the paramedics arrived to take Zelda to the hospital, where she stayed for several days because she had pneumonia.

I missed her while she was gone. I also knew I had saved her life by refusing to ignore her.

Zelda also gave me a purpose in my badly damaged life.

Soon after Zelda returned from the hospital, I arrived on the third floor one evening to find the Director of Nursing, Sherrie, looking as if she were ready to pull her hair out.

"Do you know how to put Zelda to bed?" she asked me.

"Sure," I said.

"Oh, thank God," Sherrie said. "She wants to go to bed, but she wouldn't let any of us do it because she said we wouldn't do it right."

Sherrie and I hurried to Zelda's room so I could teach my boss the correct procedure for putting Zelda to bed. As soon as I walked in the room, Zelda's face broke into a smile. I threw my arms around her and said, "I'm so happy to see you."

After Zelda was safely in bed, we left the room and Sherrie said, "You almost had me fooled there. I actually started to think you liked her."

I didn't know how to respond.

Later that night, Michael and I went together to care for Zelda. Before we left the room, as I always did now, I kissed her and told her I loved her.

In the hallway Michael said, "How can you say that? You can't love her."

This time, I knew how to answer.

"What kind of a Christian would I be if I didn't love Zelda?" I asked.

Rest in peace on the wings of angels, my Zelda, my friend, my neighbor.

ZELDA PART TWO

To read the first part of ZELDA, please click HERE.


Now that I understood Zelda was lonely, I needed to find out more about her life.

I sought details from the charge nurses.

"Her next of kin is her son," Donna, the night supervisor, told me. "He's a pastor at a church not too far from here."

Zelda had a son who was a pastor? I had never seen him.

I asked other staff members about him. No one knew what he looked like because no one had ever seen him.

Evelyn, the charge nurse who was usually on South Hall on Saturday nights, said that two of Zelda's four daughters lived nearby. "The two agreed to take turns spending the day with her so that one of them would be with her part of every day," Evelyn said, "but only one kept her part of the bargain. The other one never comes in anymore."

I'd had contact with the daughter who kept the deal. When I was still a hospitality aide, I'd helped a GNA move Zelda from her recliner to her bed. Zelda was in isolation at the time because she had a staph infection. Because of the infection, she had diarrhea, which we accidentally got on her chair during the move. We wiped the smear of feces off the chair as best we could, but it left a stain.

"I'll watch for her daughter tomorrow," I told the GNA. "I"ll explain what happened to the chair."

I did indeed see the daughter the next day. She was very pleasant and friendly and told me how nice I looked. I thanked her and told her what had happened to the chair.

"I"ll have it cleaned," she said. "No problem."

So, this daughter was nice. She spent every other afternoon with her mom, but when her mom got angry and screamed, her daughter's words to her were "shut up." Not "You need to be quieter, Mom." Not "That's enough of that, Mama. I'll solve the problem."

No. Zelda's daughter told the family matriarch to shut up. I felt confused by the daughter's devotion to her mother, that seemed mixed with hostility. Could it be that the daughter's self-imposed devotion led to her anger? She probably didn't want to spend most of every other day with her mom. And I wouldn't be surprised if she were pretty pissed off at her sister and brother, who somehow couldn't find the time to visit their mother in the nursing home.

As I gathered information about Zelda, I continued to care for her most of the nights that I was on duty. And I continued to see her as my "problem child." I still couldn't satisfy her, and she still pushed the button on her call light every five minutes, except for the rare occasions when she she slept for an hour or two.

Then one night I was working with my good friends, Carol and Michael. As we strolled down South Hall to check on a patient, Zelda's call light lit up and buzzed.

"Stay here," Michael told Carol and me.

Michael then put a sheet over his head and slipped quietly into Zelda's room.

"Who are you?" she demanded.

"I am a ghost," Michael hissed. "Stop turning on your call light all the time. The people who work here don't have time for you."

"Get out of here," Zelda said wearily.

I'm surprised she didn't scream.

As Michael left the room, Carol and I began to giggle. When Michael joined us, we moved away from Zelda's room and practically rolled on the floor, laughing.

Yes, God help me, I laughed. I knew this woman was lonely and in pain and miserable, yet I dared to laugh. Yet another person had told Zelda that no one had time for her.

I vowed that night that if I couldn't change Zelda's behavior, I had to change my own.



More of Zelda's story coming soon, I hope.