Notes from my new life at the Avant independent living community. Still coping with piles of stuff moved from my old house and distributed more or less randomly over a completely different arrangement of rooms and built-in furnishings (or, in a startling number of cases, a lack of those built-in furnishings — or defective installations requiring repair and reworking). It’s been a long hard slog, still painfully unfolding.
With some triumphs on Opal Armstrong Zwicky’s part; I was stunned and delighted to discover that changing my address with the DMV, for my senior ID card, allows automatic transfer of my voter registration — this is the way things should work, but oh so rarely do they. But also was reminded of how truly awful Merrill Lynch’s website is.
Gradually re-instituting daily routines. Applying healing coconut oil to my legs, feet, arms, and hands. And Sacred Harp singing, which I’m supposed to do (using some wonderful YouTube videos of SH conventions in Ireland) every day as lung therapy and also do, via Zoom, with the Palo Alto singers twice a month, for two hours each session. I have in fact been free of DOE — shortness of breath on exertion — for months now, which is indescribably pleasurable. Meanwhile, the experiences are often so moving they bring me to weeping in delight.
Which brings me to my thoroughly satisfying Sunday, with an hour of morning Irish warm-up at home, working up to powerful notes at top volume, then after lunch two hours with the Palo Alto singers (who very thoughtfully sometimes chose my favorite songs before I got my turn to pick them).
Now, top volume here really means piercingly loud. I have developed a truly remarkable powerful tone (in the baritone-to-tenor range) that cuts through practically anything except the Sacred Harp altos (famed for the power of their voices; I have an alto friend who once shattered a window — entirely unintentionally — with her singing). In addition, I am, at the moment, at the top of my form. Get close to me when I’m singing and I can probably make parts of you vibrate.
Now, you say, whoa, wait, aren’t you doing this in your living room in what amounts to an apartment house? How do your neighbors bear it?
The Avant is something of a miracle of sound insulation. Everywhere. In the hallways, it seems always calm and utterly quiet, whatever is going on behind those very thick (and consequently heavy — tricky for someone using a walker to negotiate) doors.
I now know that nothing of my singing makes it through my walls and doors. Other residents have no idea that I making a loud and very joyful noise.
(This does mean that I can’t leave the front door unlocked and call out for people to come in, but have to get up and wheel to the door to open it myself.)
July 15, 2026 at 6:21 pm |
Pity about the acrophobia; I can imagine, were you less afraid of heights, that you might regale the entire neighborhood with song from your balcony. 😊
July 16, 2026 at 4:16 am |
A lovely idea, though SH singing works best in an indoor environment with reflective surfaces (especially the ceiling); it floats away in the open air. Meanwhile, the neighborhood is commercial city streets with hotels and condo developments interspersed, so there’s no natural audience. (Also, very pointedly, SH singing is done with and for the other singers, not meant as performance for an audience — though we love the music so much we are happy to have others listen in on our singing. It is exquisitely egalitarian, communitarian, amateur, rural working class music — and devoutly plain-Christian, though explicitly open to all who would sing, regardless of what they do or do not believe and who they are outside of the hollow square of our singings.)
July 16, 2026 at 4:26 am |
Not quite a year ago I moved — or *was moved* — to an Independent Living community, with the help of a personal assistant and a relocation company. They did not lose any of my four cats, which is the baseline for my calling the process a success :-).
But I did experience that business of having everything put away according to somebody else’s idea of logical access. Rather than trying to create my own system (and not able to reproduce the arrangements from the old location), I went wild with a label maker device, and now have labels stuck on every kitchen cabinet and drawer, and bathroom drawer, and non-book shelf in the bookshelves. The desk drawer (dis-)organization was one thing that was preserved, as the drawers had to be removed and the desk disassembled anyway to get it out the door and down the stairs.
Seriously, I would recommend the labelling strategy, no matter that some will say it spoils the decor.
July 16, 2026 at 9:05 am |
To each his own. The labels would drive me crazy, especially since what things are and where they are and how they are used is fluid, and has to change in a new environment. Eventually, you internalize new routines, but smooth functioning depends on a lot of this becoming automatic, not having to be thought through step by step each time (though always available for alteration).
And there are any number of surprises, so that my life involves an almost constant inflow of new furnishings — some of which I’d never even heard of before — and a nearly unceasing series of visits from repair people, some doing major renovations. It’s a hell of a way to live (though the repair people are both good at their jobs and good-natured).
But about people putting things away where they think they belong: I am fiercely insistent that everything goes back to where it was, for a variety of reasons, some having to do with needing to get around everywhere in a walker (so no obstacles), some with not being able to reach up very far (so nothing stored on upper shelves), most just with the need to find things so that I can (mostly) care for myself (so things that I regularly need are arranged to hand in fixed visible places on waist-level surfaces).
July 16, 2026 at 6:36 am |
The apartments at our place are also very well sound-proofed – I don’t hear anything from other apartments unless some kind of renovation work is going on, and I assume that my singing doesn’t bother the nearby residents. (I sometimes wonder if the residents immediately below can hear the piano, but I never got around to asking them.) The doors are somewhat less soundproof; in some parts of the apartment I hear people chatting while waiting for the elevator (which is right opposite our door).