I sit on a hard wooden bench is in front of an assisted living facility facing a mild winter California sun. Behind me, inside the building, are elderly people who require varying degrees of help to carry-on with the day-to-day aspects of their lives. Some of the more capable residents sit nearby in motorized wheelchairs warming themselves with me. Others who cannot make their way alone are wheeled slowly along the sidewalk by staff wearing sneakers and brightly colored scrubs. It is late in the afternoon and the sun will melt into the nearby Pacific in an hour or so.
There is another part of the facility, behind the main portion where I am now sitting, where people who are truly declining stay. These are the people who require near-constant supervision and care. Many, for example, have difficulty feeding themselves, or more sadly, have reached a time in their lives where they cannot remember they should eat.
Each of these residents has a small but comfortable room. Many of these rooms are filled with medical equipment and others have little more than simple beds and the kinds of furniture one might expect in a dorm room at summer school. In some rooms maybe there is a favorite recliner, or a chest of drawers brought from home. The quarters are all tidy and clean, but space is at a premium.
Almost all the rooms have pictures in them. Memories of smiling people populate the flat spaces on the small bookshelves and tables tucked into corners. There are framed grandchildren and wedding photographs. Proof of lives lived. Memories of memories. Perhaps the people in those photographs still come to visit their loved ones. Maybe they live too far away and can’t. Or maybe the wives and husbands smiling up from those moments are already gone. Either way, the size of the rooms and their inhabitants’ diminishing time compress the space for memories down to only the truly essential.
At the entry to one of these little rooms was a painting of an airplane. It was out-of-place which is why it caught my eye.
It appeared to be an oil painting, or maybe a watercolor, of a gray Navy A-4 Skyhawk against a speckled deep blue background. It was small, no bigger than a sheet of notebook paper, and elaborately framed like a museum piece with a broad gold border. The picture was impressionistic, almost blurred, as if the painter hurriedly captured the Skyhawk and its pilot amid a fight or perhaps racing toward one. The airplane’s underside is in shadow, but there is ordinance on the pylons and fuel tanks are visible. Smeared white wisps behind the red-and-white flashing on the rudder and the intentionally blurred lines of the fuselage convey intent. And speed. This is a bird of prey. This is a picture of a predator on the hunt.
And if you look closely, you can see the tiny white helmeted pilot in the cockpit, his blackened visor down, as though he was looking off his starboard wing at the painter as he raced past.
The man in whose room this picture hung obviously flew this humpbacked little warbird. The A-4 was a Vietnam-era plane, and ball-parking his age, there’s a good chance he flew it in combat. It is a beautiful painting and doubtless meant something very special to him. It probably hung in his office on shore when his flying days ended, or in a place of honor in his study at home when his career in the Navy finished.
I have never met the man, I know nothing at all about him, but I do know this portrait of his A-4 reminded him of flying the airplane into Harm’s Way. I know this man could visualize himself strapped in, visor down, screaming across the deck at the speed of heat, ready to cut a bridge with an expertly placed bomb, or calculating the angle needed to strafe a tree line so his rounds landed just far enough away from the colored smoke marking the friendlies’ position. He probably thought about guys he flew with in the Navy. The ports he visited. The battles he fought. He looked at this picture and remembered all the near misses he was lucky to survive.
Of all the things and memories in his little room in an elder care facility, this picture is the first thing any visitor sees. His airplane. It is the first thing he, or his family, want anyone who visits him or passes his room to know. This man, now in the last glimmer of his twilight, cared for by others and diminished, was once a fighter pilot.
