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There comes a point in every parent's life when all the kids have finally moved out of the house and the house becomes full of unused rooms. Some parents downsize, and some parents repurpose and create a new office or workout room. Still others just leave everything just as is and freeze the room in time. Not my mother. She started an assisted living facility.
I can't even begin to imagine where to start when telling you all about this. So let's just start with the cars. In order to advertise, they put large decal stickers on my dad's minivan and also their extra car- a blue Camry.
Even better was when I visited LA and got to drive around in this blue Camry. I had been ignoring the stickers until I pulled up to pick up some friends and noticed the puzzled looks on their faces. Yeah... this is our ride. And they even got somebody trendy to name their different assisted living sites: The La Canada. The Glendora. Those were on the stickers too.
And strangely, the name of the facility was different almost everywhere it was written. On the cars: The Grandeur Residence for the Elderly. On the letterhead: The Grand Residence for the Elderly. On the website: The Grandeur Residence for Elders. It was a wonder that anybody could ever figure it out.
For the years that my parents were running this business, when I visited home, there would be a different random stranger in our large echoey living room, sitting on a strangely distant couch, watching Golden Girl reruns all day with the volume turned all the way up. She would ignore us, and I would generally ignore her except for the polite smile and nod- if she even glanced away from the TV when I walked in. But there she would be, day after day, as I came and went from the house. And then on another visit, another year, there would be nobody.
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