PART ONE…..

His name is Arthur.  

I say IS because he just can’t be dead.  

He’s too weird to be dead.  

When he left here, he immediately showed up on another planet…I’m sure of it.

I saw Arthur the first day of my new job on the Monterey Peninsula in Pacific Grove; an enchanting little Hamlet on the California  Coast.

My place of employment had once been a grand hotel where the wealthy ones from San Francisco and Hollywood came to get-away.

Imagine needing to get-away and actually doing it, and THERE of all places.

If you close your eyes, I’ll give you a peek inside the main lobby…..  

The carpet was a thick, deep-burgundy-and-black pattern covering the floor like in big-deal downtown movie theaters. 

Mahogany wood was everywhere with square-paneled columns going up to the tall, tall ceiling and beautiful, huge hanging crystal chandeliers shining down.

 

The desk which was once for reservations, stood just inside the huge, double-entrance doors.  

The sun shining through the beveled and ornate glass and a view of the Blue Pacific, made it a magical entrance.

Covering the wall behind the desk were all those lovely little glass with gold-trimmed mailboxes.

You know, those little mailboxes where important guests always asked the clerk if there were any messages.

(Did you ever get one? Me neither.)

The ghosts of those guests, the San Francisco and Hollywood elites could be felt throughout the facility; gathering in the lobby, walking up and down the grand staircase, sitting, chatting and listening to the piano music coming from the fireside room, or strolling the beautifully manicured grounds.

It was an elegant time.  

The building was still impressive looking both inside and out but had been converted into a Residential Care Facility For The Elderly; permanent housing for men and women who were independent or required assisted living or skilled nursing.  

I was passing through that lobby the first time I saw him.

He was sitting on an overstuffed chair kinda in a corner, just sitting.  

I felt his vibrations.  

I mean, maybe someone else wouldn’t have seen it just by looking at him, but I did.

I smiled at him when I walked by and gave him a HI.

I think the smile surprised him, but I got a HI back.

The next day he was sitting in the same spot.  

I stopped and we introduced ourselves. 

I pulled a chair close and spent a few minutes doing that very polite, social chit-chat thing that new friends do. 

I say friends because I’d already made up my mind, we would be friends.  

He was cordial and later in our friendship, confessed he was confused wondering why the director of nursing would stop and give him time and attention.

I didn’t tell him (right then anyways) that I stopped because I felt the weird vibrations he was emitting and….. weirdo’s are my favorite people. 

I asked a few other nurses and aides about him.

Nobody knew much.

All said pretty much the same thing; he wasn’t social, kept to himself, sat alone, ate alone and he was a writer.

A writer?

That sealed the deal. 

I pursued and each day when I saw him sitting in the lobby, I pushed the conversations a bit further.

I had 80 residents to learn names and who they belonged to.

That’s back when I had lots of room left on the CD in my brain, lots of unused gigabytes.

I did it alphabetically, one resident at a time.  

I invited some to come to my office and some I visited in their apartments.

It was a wonderful time for me, getting to know each one of those amazing people, listening to their stories.  

I fell in love with most all of my residents.

I say most because there was one who was just too crabby and mean and I never did win her over.  

(I know you know who I’m tellin’ about, Karen!) 

Soon I had so many wonderful new friends.  

Their average age was 83.  

I called them my wisdom ones because they were.

What I learned about these 80+ year-old wonderful people is that inside of them, the men were still boys and the women were still girls.  

The men liked to talk about their travels and conquests of any kind and the woman still liked their hair and nails to look nice and were always dressed as if they were on their way to someplace special. 

They were mostly from Pebble Beach and Very wealthy by the way…that’s Very with a capitol V!

Many of them were college educated and most of them lived privileged lives; you know, big houses on Pebble Beach, country clubs and two or three other houses elsewhere in this country and in Europe.

They never had to worry about money, never! Think about that.

Those are the people I’m talkin’ about.

But as I mentioned, these were people who’d lived most of their lives and gained wisdom and knew pretty much what it was all about.

If they ever flaunted, that was long gone. 

They were pure delight.

There was lots for me to learn and do but I made sure one of the things I did everyday was mingle with my wisdom ones.

With Arthur, I don’t remember exactly when we crossed over from being nurse and resident to good friends, but the years I worked there brought us closer and closer.  

His time in years on this planet was in the 80’s but he was young-thinking and however strange his mind was…..it worked.  

Intelligence flowed and weaved in and out of his words when he spoke. Oftentimes I had to stop him and ask for a definition of a word he was using.

He was my living dictionary. 

The more we chatted, the more interested in him I became.

He was slow to share but eventually I learned quite a bit about this Arthur friend of mine.

Let me try to describe him for you.  

He was thin….no, he was skinny, real skinny.

Unlike most of us, an addition of 20 pounds to his bean-pole frame would have been a good thing.

He had a hump on his cervical spine, called kyphosis. 

It was obvious but not huge.

It prevented him from being able to stand up straight but in his earlier years I think he’d be just a couple inches short of six feet tall.  

He had to kind of lift his head up when he wanted to converse.  

His hairline was receding, nevertheless he had hair and brown besides!

He had a short-trimmed brown mustache barely touching his top lip and  going not quite the width of his mouth and ears? kinda large ears but hey…..”the better to hear you with, my dear.”

His eyes were brown and they did a great twinkle when we talked, especially when he was teasing, then they came to life.

He had a smile that looked like it wanted to burst into something bigger but he kept it to a controlled smile.

His voice was a little raspy deep.

It was obvious that he didn’t give a crap about his appearance.  

Oh, he was neat and clean but his clothes, let me say this…..

His pants were all big enough for two of him and a couple friends if he had any, to fit into.

Baggy? Arthur invented baggy pants way before today’s youth thought it was a cool style that they introduced…..well, all but the exposed underwear part, Arthur wore a belt.

There WAS a dress code and I think Arthur was the bottom rung of it.

This was the most un-materialistic person I’d ever had the pleasure of knowing.

That’s Arthur on the outside.  

He was amazing on the inside, his brain was fascinating.

He was born in Chicago, served in World War II, Masters Degree college educated and taught mathematics in southern California.  

If you’ve ever been fortunate enough to drive along The Big Sur you know that the Pacific Ocean is on one side of Highway One. 

Not much else on that side other than huge cliffs dropping down to the Pacific.  

Most houses, few that there are, are back off the other side of Highway One either up in the hills or down in the trees.

Arthur owned and lived in one of the very few houses on the Ocean side of Highway One. 

It was a small house extended out on a cliff and beyond the word picturesque. 

He lived there alone. 

Never married.

He was in love once and it fell apart.

He told me he locked his heart away after that and…..he wrote.

He was a true loner.

I’d even go so far as to call him a recluse because he was!

He didn’t require or even desire to be involved with people.

He just wrote.

Sometime during the 60’s he moved into Pacific Grove and bought a small house which was named The Doll House by the city because it belonged to a historical group of houses and…..he wrote.

In the 90’s, Arthur sold his Doll House and moved into Forest Hill Manor as an independent resident.

And early the next century, I began working there.

I’d never heard of him as an author but that may be because of the kind of stories he wrote.

They were short stories only and he sold hundreds of them; mysteries, fantasies, science fiction.

He was published in lots of different magazines; Alfred Hitchcock, Ellery Queen and the New York Post to mention just a couple that I’m familiar with.

And he didn’t always use his own name, sometimes he used a pseudonym.

Why?

I don’t know. 

Just ‘cause he was Arthur I guess.

After we became close friends, he’d show me when he’d written me into one of his stories, usually as Dr Fone.

I was grateful at the time that he hadn’t turned me into one of those disgusting people-looking but lizard-tongued things that he wrote about.  

I still can’t get that story out of my mind.  

Why EVER did I read it?…..

The lizard-tongued people were all sitting around a big table having dinner and out came those long, thin, whip-like, lightning fast tongues snatching stuff off of people’s plates….why did I have to read that?

I know he wrote a couple children’s books too.  

I can’t even imagine.

He probably traumatized them for life writing about some horrid monsters. 

When we’d talk, I was never quite sure if he was telling me true.  

He was a great tease with an almost-serious face.   

His imagination was WAY out there.  I mean WAY! 

He was mostly known to people for his amazing writing skills.

But, I got to know the man because I was his nurse and he was my friend.

He has a fan club.  

He does!

And just like how I feel, Arthur is still alive for them.  

Often, at least once maybe twice a week there’d be a note wedged in my office door when I’d arrive to work in the morning.  

He called me “Smokey” because I cried the time a scared, confused baby bear climbed up a tree in Carmel and had to get tranquilized to get him down and the TV news showed that sweet, furry bear falling out of the tree on to the damn pavement.  It broke my heart.

I called him, “A.A.” because he always signed his notes, “Affectionately, Art.”

There’s more, the fun stuff.

Stay tuned.