Creative Elders

Evergreen class ‘makes you think'

SANDPOINT - Ruby purses her lips and reaches up to angle her glasses toward a small, folded watercolor perched like a sandwich board on the table in front of her. She peers for a long moment at the artwork she has created - a dancing bear in hues of orange, green and blue.

Her eyebrows fold down to meet the bridge of her nose as she glances to the right, where Erma is busy daubing sparkles around the border of her painting. A small fish, set in the color of backlit sapphires, is suspended in a wash of sky blue background. The sparkles add a watery shimmer to the whole image.

“See?” Ruby says, tapping a finger on the newspaper-strewn tabletop. “She can do all that. I feel like I'm in first grade when I try to do this.”

She sits back in her chair and tips her head, as if listening to an echo of what she has just said. It is, as we well know, indiscrete to discuss the number of birthdays belonging to “a woman of a certain age,” but let's just say Ruby is right around 90. And the idea of making art in grade school suddenly appeals to her. She scoots up to the front of her chair, smiles that big smile of hers and winks.

“I feel like I'm in first grade,” she repeats as she snatches the tube of glitter from Erma's spot and starts to giggle.

It is a few minutes after 4 p.m. at Evergreen Assisted Living. Dinner, served punctually as always, is still three quarters of an hour away. A group of residents sits on either side of a pair of tables pushed together for art class. A few more have pulled up around the periphery, watching the brush strokes as intently as if they were attending a Wimbledon tennis match.

Around them, friends in wheelchairs roll up now and then to make a lazy circuit from one painter to the next, moving like slow planets in orbit until they spin off down the hall.

Erma lays down her paintbrush and massages the cramp out of her right hand. The work, she seems to have decided, is done. Now for a name.

“If you had a fish, what would you name it?” she asks the visitor looking over her shoulder.

“Um, well Š.,” the visitor stammers. “I don't know, I guess I would name it after the King of the Deep. You know, what's-his-name.”

“Neptune,” Ruby announces, not looking up from the outline of sparkles she is placing around the dancing bear's legs and feet. “His name is Neptune.”

Such moments of clarity flow out and blend together and descend like blessings to counter all the moments of forgetfulness that mark the rest of the day.

Betty and Frankie are huddled together over their paintings, finishing one another's sentences the way only good friends can do.

Some of the stories trail off, moving out of reach and memory.

At those times, one of women just shakes her head and shrugs. The other nods.

They understand there is nothing to be gained from chasing after a thought once it disappears down the rabbit hole.

But the art - something happens when the art classes are going on. Frankie looks up from the piece of paper she is painting and says something about Erma's pretty fish.

Betty looks outside, where rain clouds have dragged the afternoon into near darkness. But mostly, she reflects, the days are getting longer. Fish. Early dark. Long days. A brush stroke flows across Frankie's paper as a story flows freely from her past.

“When we moved to Alaska, I tried to put my son down to bed that first night and the sun was still shining,” she says. “He folded his arms and said, ‘I'm not supposed to go to bed until it gets dark!'”

The women laughed - in response to a cute family tale and in celebration of a story that made it from start to finish unscathed.

The poetry sessions are that way, too. Josie walks by the artists at work and then over to activities director Jane Fritz. Forgot all about art class, she says without apology and with a smile. Would love to have been here. Just forgot.

“I drew a picture once,” she says. “Or maybe it was a painting. I don't remember.

“But I helped to write some of these poems,” she adds, steering the visitor by an elbow to a bulletin board nearby. “There's my name.”

Josie scans several of the pages on the board, looking for ones where her name is first on the list of writers whose lines were woven together to create a group prose poem. She stops in front of one titled “Motherhood” and clears her throat. She leans in close and reads each line as if discovering it for the first time.

Mama is sleeping content,

With all the babies,

In the beautiful homeland of Idaho.

A watchful mother,

Protecting her baby,

Is a fierce, protective mother.

As for me,

I hope I don't have any more.

Mama is sleeping.

“That's pretty good,” Josie says, stepping back from the display of poems. “There's my name, so I helped write that one. I don't remember it, though.”

She lays a hand on the visitor's shoulder and laughs.

“But I don't remember what I had for breakfast, either,” she says over her shoulder as she waves goodbye and walks off to her room.

Art and poetry classes started small this past March, with about six or eight residents showing up at first. The size has doubled since then. For some reason, the most regular participants have been those who experience either mild or severe dementia - something the staff prefers to refer to as “forgetfulness.” But the residents are familiar with the clinical term.

“I have dementia,” one of them says after a point she is trying to make loses direction and drifts into silence. She says it matter-of-factly, as if talking about a troublesome relative the family has long ago learned to live with.

Jane Fritz calls the people she works with The Elders - a title of respect that borrows a chapter from the many years she spent teaching in Native American schools and working with tribal elders to chronicle their stories. A writer herself, she also edited a highly regarded arts journal, where she developed friendships with poets, visual and performing artists around the Northwest.

As activities director, she now manages to put all of that experience to use.

“I've seen what a difference storytelling, poetry and art therapy can make in other people's lives,” Fritz says. “It's interesting - the residents who are most attracted to the arts are the ones who are cognitively challenged.”

Fritz lines up a series of sticky notes on a desk, tacking each one down with a thumb as she goes. The yellow squares, she explains, all bear a single line from what became a larger poem.

The theme for this poem arose when an 18-piece orchestra, which added a stop at the assisted living facility when it was in town for the Festival at Sandpoint outreach program in local schools, performed at Evergreen for one of the weekly concerts presented there.

A little more than half of the 40 tenants attended that show, a tribute to Beethoven and his music. Spokane musician, conductor and public radio announcer Vern Windham played the part of Herr Ludwig, with Judy Heraper acting in the role of his landlady who was demanding a reason he should be allowed to keep his apartment.

Through bits of music and dialog, the actors and musicians brought Beethoven's world to life. So much so, that a couple of the concert goers were able to suspend all disbelief and happily accept that they were watching the master himself at work.

One sticky note, written in a spidery hand, describes the music as “like climbing the stairs.” Others have longer sentences or expressions of appreciation, including one that reads “Your music is fine, Mr. Beethoven, and thanks for coming.”

That salutation inspired the name of the poem.

Mr. Beethoven

Dancing and swaying in the countryside,

He was a man that could find things in the people

and write them down.

Some of the people came forward

and played music they never imagined.

The music rises like climbing the stairs.

This music is very inspiring.

It's something that a person who has very little

or no interest in music could listen to for days on end.

Your music is fine, Mr. Beethoven,

and thank you for coming.

“Days are pretty routine here,” Fritz says. “By necessity, things are planned out and kind of happen on the hour. But when they are involved in art and music and poetry, things happen right in the moment and people are expressing themselves.”

“Most of us are alone - quite a lot,” Josie confided earlier at the poetry board. “This is something different, these activities.”

“It makes you think,” Frankie says.

“I'm learning things,” says Betty. “And that surprises me.”

“It lets our feelings out,” Ruby says. “I wouldn't be doing anything if I wasn't doing this.”

She adjusts the dancing bear painting on the table and decides that it looks like “it's about to give somebody heck.” She likes that. And she likes her work.

“I guess it's art, then,” she says. “If you made it and you like it, I guess that makes it art.”

After centuries of struggle to craft a definition for art, Ruby, who thinks feeling like you're in first grade is not such a bad thing, gets it down in a single sentence.