It was Meemee's idea that her daughter and son-in-law move in with her; it makes sense for everyone. Since Jesse died, her house has seemed so big. There are rooms she only goes into to clean.
So last week the cable company came to wire up her house. Her son-in-law replaced the heavy old Trinitron with a big flatscreen. Her daughter cleared out the front room where she did her scrapbooking and where Jesse, when he was alive, played with his computers.
This will be Meemee's new bedroom. She's going to donate the king-size bed to the Jimmy Carter charity and get herself a queen, or maybe even a double, mattress set and frame. She'll try to sell her dining table.
Her daughter and son-in-law will move into the master suite. The cable guy wired up a second flatscreen in there. They say she should still use the big bathroom, and maybe she will, but she probably won't. Or maybe she will when they aren't there, but there's nothing wrong with the other bathroom. It's hardly been used; Meemee thinks the shower has been turned on two or three times in the decade since she built the house.
They're moving in with her to help her out. Meemee is nearly 80, though she still works five days a week. (She goes home early on Fridays and they let her take off as much time as she likes, but most weeks she's there every day.) She doesn't know what she'd do if she didn't have the law office to go into, if she didn't have the phones to answer. Tell the truth, she likes to hear the courthouse gossip, to feel tuned into the world beyond her tidy little suburb. Why shouldn't she work as long as she wants, as long as she's able?
Her daughter and son-in-law come over all the time anyway. Cutting her grass, making little household repairs, doing for her. They eat supper with her a couple of times a week. Still, Meemee sometimes gets lonely despite the great-grandkids and her neighbors, especially the nice black couple across the street, the police officer and his wife who works at the Home Depot.
When Meemee was a little girl she never would have imagined that she'd end up living in a nice neighborhood with black and Middle Eastern folks for neighbors. But the world has changed a lot. She's buried two husbands and lived all over the country. She was an engineer. She drove a Cadillac for 10 years and took a cruise up the coast of Alaska. She carries her iPad with her everywhere and knows how to get on the wi-fi.
She knows there are still mean folks who wouldn't like living in a mixed neighborhood, but Meemee thinks anyone who can afford a house ought to be able to buy one. Then, if they fail to keep up their lawn, the residents' association can send them a letter.
It's a good neighborhood but sometimes the world intrudes. Last year a young man got knee-walking drunk at one of the sports bars across the parkway from where Meemee lives. Somehow he ended up in her backyard--he broke the handle off her back door trying to get into her sunroom. When he didn't, he staggered down the block and got sick on a neighbor's Corvette. The police arrested him and he had to pay Meemee $600 restitution for her door and write her a letter of apology to avoid going to jail.
She keeps that letter, its words scrawled in loopy childish cursive, and from time to time she takes it out and looks at it. She feels sorry for the poor kid, with his stunted syntax and shaky grammar. He describes himself as a "fool," and talks about his problems with addiction, but he doesn't use it as an excuse. He was only 19, so Meemee thinks he's got plenty of time to turn his life around, to make something of himself.
But Meemee knows the chances of that happening aren't so great.
She's seen people she loves go through great trouble, and sometimes they get out from under it but usually they don't. Mostly they succumb to gravity--like Chuck Jones' Wile E. Coyote, they look down and plummet. From a distant perspective, they seem to land in a soft pfft.
But Meemee's been close to ground zero, she has seen how awkward and hard some folks can come down. It was her idea they move in with her.
pmartin@arkansasonline.com
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Editorial on 11/29/2015