Do Something Nice for Yourself
This year, we’ll be sharing a weekly column by Karla Theilen, our Neighborhood Storyteller. These stories will show what it means to live a life of intention, one where our small and ordinary, everyday actions contribute to building stronger communities. All images in this piece were provided by the author, unless otherwise indicated.
If you’ve been following the Neighborhood Storyteller column, it seems fair that I update you on my dad’s transition to assisted living last week, since I’ve already dragged you along to Caribou Coffee and Deerwood Furniture to set the stage for the move. I can say it went better than expected—at least, at the beginning.
After two days of pleasant, slightly tentative visits with my dad in his new home, it appeared he was reasonably content, if not just stoically resigned to the situation. My cautious optimism was shattered on day three, however, when he called to say, “Well, I’m ready to go home now, so someone needs to come pick me up.”
I am told this is normal.
Mitigation of this crisis required an afternoon of in-person reassurance, redirection, a couple of Snickers bars, and a few hours of work by the cable guy so my dad could get Andy Griffith on channel 52 in his new digs. After dinner, I finally exhaled when he settled into his chair in front of Everybody Loves Raymond like he has every night for the past 10 years. I said goodnight, and slipped out during the laugh track. Thank you, channel 52.
“Goodnight!” one of the nurses called out to me as I made my way across the lobby toward the exit. She knew it had been a challenging day. “Do something nice for yourself tomorrow, okay? Something fun.” She winked at me over the top of her blue surgical mask and waved me out the door.
I couldn’t think of something nice to do for myself, or what something fun would look like, so I gave my husband a call. “Go down to the record store and buy yourself a record, Karla,” he said matter-of-factly while I warmed my car up. “Your dad’s got that nice turntable at the house, and great speakers.” Chris is a musician, a record collector, and a true audiophile. He could not tell you what color the outside of our house is, but he does know each component of my dad’s home sound system.
Chris goes to the record store just about every Saturday, and since he’s one of the most consistently happy people I know, it seemed like sound advice.
The next day, I went into The Gallery, a record store in my hometown of Brainerd, Minnesota. The Gallery is the perennial epicenter of cool in what I often deemed a hopelessly uncool town. It sells not only records, tapes, and CDs, but all things edgy and exotic, which, during the time I was growing up, included waterbeds.
I beelined to the used record bins at the back of the store. The place was empty of customers except for me and a bearded guy who looked like he belonged there, a man who was probably the local version of my husband.
When flipping through The Oak Ridge Boys, The Kingston Trio, and all manner of 70s compilations, one must be prepared for the smells of other people’s damp basements and dusty garages. Hints of patchouli, moth balls, and occasionally the faintest whiff of cat urine may emerge as you breeze by Fleetwood Mac, Barbara Streisand, and Billy Joel, but it’s worth it to find the hidden gems.
My phone buzzed in my pocket, and I glanced down to see a new text message from my friend, Kate. While I’ve been here helping out with my dad in Minnesota, Kate has been back in Vermont shepherding her own parents down a similar path. The details are different, but the destination is ultimately the same.
Kate’s message detailed a visit with a realtor, who happened to be her sixth-grade teacher once upon a time. She said she almost broke into tears several times on a walk-through of her childhood home with the teacher-turned-realtor and her dad, while her mom sat alone at the dining room table.
Throughout the big transition with my father, I kept imagining it would be easier if he were coupled up, if he were growing old with a partner. Kate’s version of the aging parent story helps me see how even a united force like her mom and dad, married over fifty years, can have sharply contrasting attitudes toward change and loss, presenting an altogether different challenge.
Back in the record bins at the Gallery, a young woman with impossibly bright lipstick who seemed to be the store’s only employee, appeared out of nowhere to tell me they were closing.
“A record store closing at four-fifteen in the afternoon?” I asked, laughing.
“Um, we actually close at four,” she said, unamused, looking at her watch. I looked around and saw the bearded guy was already gone.
I dug back in for a speed round, determined not to leave the store without a record. I panicked, cruising through what appeared to be somebody’s entire Christian rock collection from the 80s, then finally, behind the last of Glen Campbell’s greatest hits, I unearthed my gem.
Phoebe Snow.
Twenty-five years ago, on the first road trip I ever took with Kate, she'd played this very album for me on the dusty tape deck in her 1992 Toyota pickup. It blew me away. I had been stunned into silence witnessing pure poetry spool from the speakers, delivered with the acrobatic agility of Phoebe Snow’s contralto. Riding shotgun, I was in charge of stopping the tape, rewinding, and playing over all of the parts we just had to hear again and again as we drove across the Arizona desert at sunset.
The young woman with the lipstick rang up the $5.99 record and slid it into a paper bag without so much as glancing at the cover. I realized this was not the time to tell her how good the record was, or about sunsets in the Arizona desert, or synchronicity, or the beauty of forever friendships. I had kept her late already, and she probably thought I was someone’s uncool mother buying an uncool record anyhow, so I kept it all to myself.
Back at my dad’s house, after checking for distressing voicemails, I slid the record out of its sleeve (pleasantly free of odors), pressed it gently onto the turntable, and dropped the needle down. I sat in the recliner near the stereo and put my feet up. By the first few bars of “Harpo’s Blues,” the record’s second track, I was transported back to the desert where the sunset had lit the sky on fire the very first time I heard it. Kate and I had listened-stopped-rewound-listened again to the part of the song where Phoebe sings, “But I’d hate to be a grown up, and have to try to bear my life in pain.” To think; back then we thought we understood what she meant.
I listened for over an hour, moving from my chair only to flip the record once, twice, three times. Before going to bed, I snapped a photo of the album cover with my phone and texted it to Kate. It was already late in Minnesota, and an hour later in Vermont, so chances are she wouldn’t see the picture until morning, but I sent it anyhow. I didn’t include a message with the photo. It didn’t seem necessary.
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