Manager of First Impressions

Well, it was nothing like an army barracks.

I don’t know why it’s taken me over two months to write this entry, but I think it has to do with my ambivalence with blogs in general, which (I hope) will be the topic of a future post.

Lucille’s last home was a place called The Village. She lived in a two-bedroom apartment with a Heritage floor plan:

The building itself looked like so many apartment complexes built in the 1980s with its sandstone-colored stucco facade and drive-through portico. The apartments also had that era’s feel, with off-white carpeting, white walls, built-in drawers with oak veneers, balconies with painted steel railing (in this case, forest green), vertical blinds, etc.

The common areas, meanwhile, were decorated in the complementary scheme of a private hospital. The common areas had pink walls, wide hallways with brass railings, forest green carpeting with a repeating bland floral pattern, and watercolors of horses and seagulls. You entered through the automatic doors into a huge multiple-sided lobby with overstuffed side chairs upholstered in polyester pink and green vertical stripes and pots of dusty silk flowers with dull pink blossoms and faded green leaves.

The front desk was white like the floor tiles, tall enough that employees had to stand to be easily seen, and went from the wall to the right of the first hallway, angling somewhere in the middle and ending perhaps a foot and a half from the middle hallway (Lucille lived down the right hallway, FWIW). At the midpoint, a nameplate coupled to an 8 1/2 X 11″ dry erase board read: “Manager of First Impressions.”

I can’t remember what was written on the dry erase board, but it was green like the balcony railings and the hallway carpet. A woman in her 40s or maybe early 50s (she looked older than me, but it could have been the perm and the ultramarine blue suit) stood behind the sign, joking with two elderly male residents.

“I feel like I know you!” said the Manager of First Impressions to one or maybe both of them. I was sitting too far away to tell, the people sitting to the left of my mom, my aunt Judy, and me were discussing potassium and self-defense, the TV was on FOX News, and it had started to rain.

Tags: convalescent home, lucille hassen, manager of first impressions, memory, memory token, Robyn Weisman