NY Times: Where Budget Cuts Strike the Old and Vulnerable

[marmar]

Where Budget Cuts Strike the Old and Vulnerable
By SUSAN DOMINUS
Published: November 27, 2008


Six days a week, Alma Ortiz, a petite woman who worked for Con Ed for years, waits patiently in front of her home on West 97th Street for a private bus that picks her up and takes her across town to the C.V. Starr Adult Day Services center, a program for people living with Alzheimer’s disease or dementia.

Ms. Ortiz, 86, who suffers from dementia and lives alone, considers the center a second home. One day this summer, the bus that takes her there was a little late; so determined was Ms. Ortiz to get there, she decided to take the next bus she saw. Lost and disoriented, she eventually ended up at Metropolitan Hospital Center, where someone called her son, who picked her up and took her where she wanted so badly to go.

We all brace ourselves before we walk into any unknown senior center, emotionally preparing for the painful fluorescent light, the people dozing, heads tilting, in those overheated rooms. It was a pleasant surprise, then, to walk into the C. V. Starr center earlier this week, where aides were keeping the spirits high, despite recent news that the center would lose its grant from the Department for the Aging — half its financing — effective Dec. 31.

That morning, music was playing, just loud enough that you couldn’t help but take notice. At four tables around the room, about 16 people, from their 60s through their 80s, including Ms. Ortiz, were singing or at least listening, wagging fingers or tapping feet, as songs from their childhoods took them back: “Alexander’s Ragtime Band,” “Amazing Grace,” “For Me and My Gal.”

Things moved quickly at the center: After the music, the staff quickly cleared the tables away, and the clients lined up along the perimeter of the wall. Then the men and women took turns rolling a ball in the direction of some lightweight bowling pins. A tall, patrician man in an Oxford shirt and corduroys made a spare. A woman who’d been furiously applying coral crayon to a page of a coloring book put aside her work to waltz right up to the pins and knock each one down. The other guests and the aides hooted, hollered and cheered — they bowl there routinely, but it all had the feel of a lark, a birthday party where everyone was gamely playing along. ......(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/28/nyregion/28bigcity.html?_r=1

[Mojorabbit]

1. So sad nt