Becoming Elderly in America

Becoming Elderly in America
part 1

Fiction
edward w pritchard

The lady didn't look like someone who would be rolling and stacking nickles, dimes and quarters, but she did however, look like a lady. An observant visitor might look around the apartment, sloughing off his first favorable impression of the lady based on her looks and then not be surprised that she sat on the floor also gladly rolling pennies with the other coins.

The two young grand-daughters sat on the couch and watched TV while their Grandmother sat on the floor and rolled the coins. Their Mother was dead and they were patient with their Grand Mother's work, which was taking a long time, and from time to time caused her to be between them and the TV show they were watching.

A windfall had occurred in the household. While cleaning under a chest of drawers, the grandmother had found a small duffel bag, full of coins, from wealthier times. Wealthier earlier days of the lady's husband working as a cab driver in America, but after her husband being an official in their town in Iran, and much after when he had first met his wife, the lady, and the girls grandmother, when she was a Graduate student in Art and he was a Graduate student in Economics. He was dead now too and she had sole care of her Grand-daughters and the bag of coins must have been tips from his customers that he hadn't got a chance to surprise her with before he died.

The family was very poor, as only people can be income poor in America in the midst of plenty and abundance, The Grandmother's skills and interests of listening to Classical Music, reading French Literature, studying Art and Philosophy, and sewing and needle work, were not marketable skills in America at this time, at least not for a woman over 50. She had sewn once, for a living, here, but she could no longer keep up with the hyper-motivated, newly arrived immigrants, who were like she had been once, young, attractive and in possession of a boundless will to succeed in their new Country. So, the once modest fortune, at least a fortune where they had come from, was gone with the fleeing to America, and the husband's insurance and savings were gone. Gone even though he had studied the America dream carefully of how to insure and protect one's wealth, gone and now she wasn't eligible for any public assistance because of her residency status. Although she was eligible for some sorts of job retraining, but; despite her diligence to bear the indignities of the public welfare system in America, which was where job training assistance was housed, and her diligence to try and get trained for another job, retraining came to nothing in dollars and cents. Her efforts to retrain herself never helped her granddaughters despite her herculean and long suffering efforts to modify her skills. And so she sat in the drab little second floor apartment, in a large American city and battled inflation and approaching old age. Since she was a person of quality, she worried about what would become of her grand-daughters. She worried about the two girls because the secure world she had known and loved in Iran as a girl herself, was gone for her and never available for the girls. The two girls were her only remaining family, and their security was gone before they were born with, the Lady and her husband choosing originally to come to America. If she had just herself now, and could somehow, she would return to Iran because she loved her Country dearly, above anywhere else she had been, but that wasn't reality anymore.

The woman sat with her legs stretched delicately on the floor and planned as she worked how far the $400 dollars or so in the bag and still on the floor in piles would go, that is last, before it, their last resource was gone. Thinking logically, like she learned from the study of philosophy and reading the Koran, she realized stoically that it was unlikely that there would be any more lucky breaks or windfalls beyond this one. The four hundred dollars was it, and to her, the $400 now was of course a windfall; but in an America City it was only about a modest weeks pay.

Finally, the Grandmother stretched and decided at the same time what to do. She would pay two months rent, fill the shelves with groceries, buy each of the girls a new outfit of clothes, new book bags, and school supplies for the new school year and try to be satisfied, as it said in the Koran, with what she had.

Much later, wearing her best dress and looking sadly acquiescent, she took the girls out for a sit down Chinese gourmet meal, which was their favorite. The dinner cost most of the last of the $30 of coins she had, but she allowed herself one small indulgence and stopped and bought herself a used philosophy text on the way back to the apartment.

End of part 1