Two happenings at the resthome, recently:

1) I had heard that this one woman with pretty bad memory and confusion and delusion due to dementia was a very good piano player, and she finally got her piano bench repaired, and so I could finally go hear her play like we had talked about a number of times and like had she been inviting me to.

She plays by ear, and so I asked her to play "God Bless America" and "We'll Meet Again" and "Blue Skies" for me, and she did, and then she was getting tired, so I asked for "Good Night Ladies," and she did that and segued into a brash version of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" before doing a joke-y close.

Very smart and very humorous, and very amazing.  I really really loved it, and so did the one (Mexican) (female) aide who came and joined us at the end.

The one resident kept asking me to bring my "fiddle," though, because I had once told her that I play double bass, and since I had told her that I didn't own one but I had borrowed them years ago from different ensembles that I had played with, she was saying that I should have rented one from the people who had come by recently (?), and then we could have played together.

"Next time you bring your fiddle and we'll play together," she was like.

2) This one (very old) man and I were in the elevator, and he's largely non-verbal and can be out of it a lot of the time, and he pointed down at my right shoe and how one loop of my shoelace was too big and lying on the floor.

"Be careful," he was like.

Later that night, too, he got done with dinner after everyone else had finished, and a few dining hall workers were vacuuming and cleaning up, one in her socks, and as I was escorting him out of the dining hall he noticed a pair of shoes under the table, where the one dining hall worker had taken them off and left them while she was vacuuming.

As soon as he saw that ,he stopped dead in his tracks and kept pointing over at them, and he wouldn't get moving again until she came over and put her shoes back on, even though she was saying, "[his first name], I took them off because my feet hurt!".

. . .

(People with dementia can be highly attuned to changes in texture and color and shape, so that's maybe how he noticed my [black] shoelace lying against the [fake brown wood] elevator floor, and her [white] shoes among the [brown] table legs on the [green] carpet.  People's brains can change differently, too, where they can still do some things very well, even as they can't do other things at all, it's all really fascinating.)