Elderly women find me charming, that’s a key takeaway from my first few days here. Some combination of my youth, my out-of-townness, my patience, and my boyish good looks seems to have found me a way into the hearts of even the most cantankerous old ladies. I have evidence of this: They ask me the question they were too afraid to ask the person in charge, pulling me in in hushed tones, “Do you think you could get me a flier about this?” They compare me to their grandchildren, some of whom are also named Sean and most of whom resemble at least some aspect of my being. They love that I am not from around here--I do not correct them when they talk approvingly to one another about my midwestern charm, ”He looks like he’s right off a farm.”
I discovered all this on accident the other night. I was just supposed to bring a box of literature over to the senior center down the block for a presentation on senior housing. When we got there, it was a madhouse--the correct room had not been booked, the speakers were unwilling to talk in anything other than hushed tones, the woman in charge of the whole thing was old enough to qualify herself and was not especially sympathetic of the concerns of the people she was there to serve. All this complicated the delivery job, meant that I spent two hours there, checking on these old women’s place in line to see a lawyer and arranging fliers and manning the check-in desk.
The other key takeaway was that I didn’t mind at all, and not just because, as I (in retrospect annoyingly modestly) said to my boss, “I don’t really have anything else to do.” I find them charming, too. The fact that they radiate affection towards me helps, but there is something more to it than that. I have only began to comprehend the extraordinary odds so many of them face. Their housing situation determines their entire livelihood. They are trapped by a fixed income, entirely dependent on their regulated rent. Landlords can exploit so many different tactics--some illegal and others simply slimy--to ruin them and capitalize on their downfall. The circumstances these women--and they are mostly, although by no means exclusively, women--find themselves in would make you want to tear your hair out. Landlords calling them at all hours of the night, telling them to leave or they’ll throw them out, turning their heat off in the middle of winter, refusing to cash their checks and then suing them for late payment. I am not ordinarily an angry person, and I won’t pretend that this has me seething or stomping around or yelling. But it is hard for me to conceptualize anything more profoundly unfair than the situation these women have been placed in.
Yet here they are, waiting, patiently or not so patiently, in line to see a lawyer who might just be able to help them, and complimenting my blond hair while they wait.
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