[This is adapted from a chapter in a nonfiction book manuscript with the working title A Trampled Trustee. This was originally prepared in 2002.]
A description of my experience in VISTA isn't complete without an account—and an honoring—of Mrs. Margaret Conover, my housemate during that tenure. Living with this 90-year-old woman was one of the odder, and more poignant, features of that demanding VISTA experience. I know she died in 1988; it's strange to think that if she were alive today, she would be 116. (Her daughters, with whom I interacted in 1986-87, would now be close to her age at the time, if they're alive.)
Mrs. Conover, I felt in early 2002, probably wouldn't have wanted to be profiled in a book. Today, we are enough time removed from the people of that era, and their needs to have various things private for whatever legitimate reasons, that I think what little I have to say here is acceptable. I will limit my discussion to what seems important, and hence is (I think) important to her memory.
VISTA—or “Volunteers in Service to America”—was started in the early 1960s by the Kennedy Administration, as a sort of fellow service to the Peace Corps. The Peace Corps, the more prestigious of the two, has been for placing volunteers overseas to serve for two years, trying to set up an entity (an “office,” an organization, a sort of local service), to end up self-supporting after the volunteer is gone, that addresses some matter of poverty or other major shortcoming (e.g., lack of water facilities) that is amenable to such an intervention. VISTA did the same thing, with a year’s term, within the United States. Obviously, the requirements for becoming a VISTA volunteer were less stringent than those for the Peace Corps. Today VISTA is under the umbrella of the volunteer-oriented service set up by the Clinton Administration, AmeriCorps. As an incidental, it seems the same conclusion is reached by many a VISTA volunteer, as by many a Peace Corps volunteer, that your effort to set up some self-supporting human-services entity may not nearly be equal to the ocean of troubles it aims to help, but you the volunteer certainly come away with an important education that lasts a lifetime when you’re done.
How I was placed with Mrs. C
I was placed with Mrs. Conover as a housemate—in her own house—by a service that was provided in the lay-administered human-resources entity within which I worked as a VISTA volunteer, the PeopleCare Center, which was (and I believe still is) located in Bridgewater, N.J. The particular service that placed me in the home was the HomeSharing program, which was a separate nonprofit entity given office space and other “cover” by the nonprofit PeopleCare Center. I was referred to the HomeSharing service when my VISTA service was being set up. (By the way, the particular service I was to help get going as a self-supporting entity was the Handyman Project, a sort of home-repair agency for the elderly and handicapped who couldn’t afford a normal repair service; this is something about which I’ve written elsewhere at length and won’t do here.)
Ordinarily VISTA volunteers live in the community in which they serve. In PeopleCare's case, this arrangement was easily effected by the work of one of its own agencies, HomeSharing. This program was run by an enthusiastic sort named Shuey Horowitz. (“Shuey” was how her first name, or nickname, was pronounced; but I also saw her first name spelled as “Sheri.” There is the issue in such cases of a sort of Jewish pronunciation, whether related to a Hebrew or Yiddish correlate of the more normal given name, and I can’t explain that here, either generally or with respect to her own name, especially since I never knew her full first name. As another example of this sort of thing, a roommate of mine in 1985, whose name was Mark, was referred to by what sounded like “Mush” by one of his friends on the phone one time; don’t ask.)
Shuey’s agency—for which I actually wrote a short description for a grant proposal one time, at her request (she said a writing skill was a rare thing to have, hence she did me the favor, more or less, of having me do this)—was meant to pair up older adults who needed affordable living quarters and, often, could no longer live in a house on their own.
Here are items of copy that describe the service, which perhaps make it clearer:
* From a PeopleCare Center brochure: “The HomeSharing program is a service to residents of Somerset County who want or need to share their homes for economic, service or companionship reasons or who need help in finding affordable housing alternatives. The program seeks to match ‘home providers’ with ‘home seekers’ in such a way that the needs of both will be met.” Another version of this copy adds that it was “A United Way agency.”
* From the grant proposal I wrote (for which I obviously got specific guidance from Shuey, and which maybe is clunkier in this earlier version than it is in the later): “We match homeseekers (and their families) who need shelter they can afford with homeowners who can provide this same [I added to this sentence in the final version, I believe]. ...We keep information on homeseekers and providers and match these when we can. We investigate references of homeseekers and examine the living spaces provided and associated services, if [there are] any. We also arrange contractual agreements between the provider and seeker as to what rent will be charged and what services and such will be rendered—guiding them to understand the importance and extent of these."
Shuey—about whom, I emphasize, I have generally good memories, even 25 years after the fact—was actually a little too enthusiastic in running this service, I think, and I say this specifically with Mrs. Conover in mind. Mrs. Conover was a widow—her husband had died as long ago as 1971 or so, when he was in his seventies, I believe—and Mrs. Conover in late 1986 was rather frail at age 90. Although Mrs. Conover’s name was submitted to her agency by one of her daughters, Mrs. Conover herself, in her mild-mannered way, didn't entirely like the premise of the service.
Although Mrs. Conover didn't mind me personally, once I started living with her, she didn't feel herself in desperate need of a housemate to live in her house.
When the issue came up in conversation between me and Shuey, Shuey couldn't understand this; when I tried to explain it, she came away with the impression that Mrs. Conover was strange. I don't think it was Mrs. Conover who was strange in this connection; I think Shuey was blinded by her ideals, thinking that everyone ought to buy into them.
How was this? Shuey liked to say that, when people immigrated from Europe, they buddied up in living quarters to make living more economical. She seemed to think that, in people’s old age, such a notion of buddying up to live shouldn’t seem so foreign. I used to think, Yeah, that might have been fine for recent immigrants, who had little money, but when seniors have enough money, and they've lived most of their lives in their own homes, if they can physically still keep up with living in a home, wouldn’t they think it was a step down to have to buddy up, especially with a stranger, because of a claim that “immigrants used to do that all the time”?
This was especially true for some people who'd never had that experience, such as a white Anglo-Saxon Protestant whose family had been in this country for generations, as Mrs. Conover seemed to have been. Though Mrs. Conover would have been too mannerly to say this, she might have voiced umbrage at the general terms of the HomeSharing concept, almost as if you were asking those it was to serve to put lice in their hair and stinky boat clothes on their backs, as if they’d just come from Ellis Island. This is my own opinion, but even if you didn’t discredit the general concept of HomeSharing this strongly, the sheer awkwardness that the program could pose in some cases, such as mine and Mrs. Conover’s, was enough to raise rather urgent questions about its assumptions.
Family politics, of a gentle enough sort, enters the picture
Mrs. Conover and her husband had moved into the house on Cedar Street in South Bound Brook, N.J., in the late 1940s or early 1950s. They were already in their fifties or so at the time. They might have regarded this as a sort of pre-retirement home. Since her husband had died, Mrs. Conover had lived in her house, fulfilling her housewifely role as she had all along, with making meals, doing chores, etc. She apparently was not the sort of elderly person who, once her spouse had gone after many years of marriage, would go herself—from natural causes—as if she’d lost some essential spirit to live. But in a sense, she seemed to perpetually keep the home fires burning as if her husband might recognize an oversight and come back home after all. She did have a housekeeper at times, but fairly often, I think, she managed on her own. I'm sure she wouldn't have expected it to last until she was 90, in 1986-87, when I lived there.
She had two daughters, both in their sixties, one of them Mary, a nurse by profession and a hard-working, unpretentious type. The other was Jean, who dressed more fashionably (and I'm not sure if she worked or not). I met both, and I more often saw Mary, and generally liked her more. It was Mary who had inquired of HomeSharing to get a housemate for her mother.
Mary thought her mother did too much in her house for someone as frail as she. One of Mrs. Conover’s chores was to go down the split-level-type stairs from the kitchen to the cellar to do laundry. Mrs. Conover's legs were frail and she walked awkwardly. Mary seemed to have visions of Mrs. Conover taking a fall on those stairs and becoming seriously injured. Hence she saw the need for a housemate—who ended up being me, who from Mary’s viewpoint was “signed up” to live there to intervene in certain ways so that whatever Mrs. Conover needed to be done in the cellar, she would no longer do, reducing her risk of a fall.
The only problem was that Mrs. Conover, who herself never really asked for a housemate, secretly was apt to rebel against this arrangement in her gentle way. This led to some needless discomfort and some strange clashes of assumptions, the latter especially between me and the daughter Mary.
The living conditions—not bad, but…
Mrs. Conover’s house probably had been built before the 1950s, before she had moved there. It was on a corner in an old-suburban network of streets that structured South Bound Brook. The house had a separate garage building, which I think was mostly empty; I was allowed to keep my bicycle in it (this bike I discarded years ago; I had bought it when living in Arlington, Virginia). (In South Bound Brook, when I found that riding this bike to work, especially in the winter, was too arduous, the bike stayed in the garage most of the time, while I drove home the old van that was dedicated to the Handyman Project.)
The most-used entryway of the house was the back door, which fronted a walk that led to the driveway and garage in back of the house. The back door opened onto the split-level stairway, which half led to the cellar and half to the kitchen. The front door, through whose mail slot mail was regularly inserted, was rarely used by anyone for normal exiting and entering. The kitchen was a modest-to-medium-sized place with a linoleum floor; it led to a dining area, which adjoined a living room; beyond these was a little hall that led to two bedrooms (one of which I used and one of which was Mrs. Conover's), and a bathroom. Most of Mrs. Conover's life was spent between the kitchen, the dining room, the living room, her bedroom, and the bathroom. She rarely or never went outside (at least in the winter).
The house was furnished in what would have been considered a standard, middle-of-the-road middle class style of about the 1950s. The concept of making a Sunday dinner that was served in the dining room not only was something Mrs. Conover seemed to do to be gracious to me as a housemate, but I think was a tradition she had followed in her old family life. In 1987, with a guest in her house, she was (to her mind) allowed to seize the welcome opportunity to follow this Sunday dinner tradition.
Other meals were usually made by each of us and for each of us; she usually ate early in the day, before I was even out of bed, and she would have the radio blasting in the kitchen where she sat at a tiny table she used for dining there. (She had the radio up loud to hear it, because she was partially deaf, but it was so loud, it seemed rudely loud for a sleeping housemate; but I never complained about this.)
I recall Mrs. Conover, when it came to her interacting with me, as being surprisingly amenable to having me in the house (her issue with the “intervention” I posed she mainly took up, or expressed as being, with her daughters). This while we understood we would mostly “do our own thing” when we both were there. At some early point she patiently said she expected that I would (not her exact words) care for myself, and this I was perfectly prepared to do. Hence, as I had some store of food I bought myself to keep on hand there, I made some of my own meals. And of course I readily did my laundry, made my bed, and did other such housekeeping that was in my own living space. (In fact, I think she said I would make my own bed. I wouldn't have thought she would make it for me.) All this should seem pretty banal; it was basically the same as living in a dorm system in college, as I had done from 1980 through 1984; but the odd thing now was living with a nonagenarian I hadn’t known before living there.
To jump ahead a bit, I should note that I was in touch with her daughter Mary in about 1989, after I was gone from the VISTA project and my living quarters in South Bound Brook for about a year, and found that Mrs. Conover had died within a year after I was there, at age 91. Mary kindly said in a letter informing me of the death that Mrs. Conover had liked me. This was nice to hear, particularly as I had felt lonely and rather numb when in my living (and VISTA working) arrangement in Somerset County, N.J., in 1986-87, following a difficult year (1986) that represented a jarring transition from my years of college and post-college life in the Washington, D.C., area.
In fact, what at the time surprised me, or struck me in an attitude of wonder and relief (I think), and still surprises me today, is that in my depressed and put-upon state—practically put upon with Handyman, and dealing with other sources of increased melancholy—I never offended Mrs. Conover in any subtle way that would have led her to be uncomfortable with me, as would become common among sensitive coworkers in later years when I worked at publishing companies. I certainly would have wanted nothing but to be kindly enough to Mrs. Conover, but I was in an emotionally “ravaged” enough condition in late 1986 that my impressing her nicely came quite despite what I inwardly felt I was capable of. I was also in my mid-twenties then, when you tend to be more sensitive to emotional fine points in interacting than you might later in life.
There was one time that she uttered an expression of disappointment when seated with me at the dining room table, which seemed like disappointment that I didn't pursue a certain tack of conversation or the like. But it didn't seem in this instance that it was purely incumbent on me to do this, and I don't think she was hurt by my not speaking as it seemed to me she might have wanted me to. (This all sounds like the kind of fussy self-criticism you do in your twenties; I’m more slovenly in a way now, and otherwise am in my rights to talk more as I like.)
Part of the reason Mrs. C was easy to get along with, in a daily living-with way, may seem ungracious to look at as a blessing. Since she was deaf to a large extent—sometimes she tried to adjust her hearing aids, but this didn't always work—her senses were generally less finely acute than they would be for an eager young person, and she seemed content to dwell in an apparent sensory realm of hearing only what she could or wanted to, and occupying herself with her own modest activities and thoughts (occasionally watching TV, and looking at the newspaper). Thus, how I was on a subtle level, as another hungrily acute youth might pick up on, wasn't something Mrs. C was apt to pick up on. And in the way of an elderly person, she seemed to shape the happiness of her daily life around this limitation. I found it remarkable how she did not find me to be the least vexatious or odd, nor did I arouse her curiosity as to any sort of sullen, troubled, or other attitude that I might have suggested that someone might consider grounds for asking me what was up, or saying something less helpful to me. In short, as came almost because of a confluence of sometimes sad factors, she was a very easygoing housemate to live with.
Summing up the HomeSharing experience
With all the varieties of Mrs. C’s cordial, even generous nature in view, along with accidental factors like her deafness, her being put in a house-sharing situation by her daughters, and so on, it seems to have been all the more presumptuous that Shuey Horowitz—in conversation pointedly on the issue—thought of Mrs. C as an odd person to want to live by herself. Today, as much as I forget details of my life at that time, this view of Shuey's strikes me as all the more blatantly stupid, gaining a clarity of stupidity with time.
From her own simple perspective, trying to adhere to normality as much as she could, Mrs. Conover had a life she wanted to remain with—chores and all—as long as she physically could. And she was getting less physically able to pursue some of it, but her spirit was still willing. Why deny her this wish? There was no legal or property-maintenance-related reason she couldn't live in her house.
But the idea—on her daughter Mary's part—that she was in danger of falling on the stairs entered the situation, as did Shuey's more dogmatic concept that elderly folks needed housemates to recover the graces of buddied-up living in immigrant days: both ideas led me to be brought to live there, and as nice as I found Mrs. Conover, not only did I have misunderstandings on Mary's and Shuey's parts to deal with, but I had strange anxieties concerned with Mrs. Conover for a time. I wondered, what if she did fall? Would I be equal to the emergency? These were largely the strong-anxiety worries of a twenty-something; I would be much more equipped and ready to deal with such a thing today.
From her own perspective, Mrs. C once complained to me in general terms, probably only in reference to her daughter Mary, and in a relatively ingenuous and patient tone, that “people want to come in and take over!”
There was also flak from Mary to me one time. When Mary found that her mother was still making her jaunts down to the cellar, to do such things as laundry, she took me to task.
Mrs. C was of the age where she got large pots of water boiling on what looked like an old stove down there. There was also a wringer-type, top-loading washer down there, and a more normal washing machine of the type people use today. When I saw those pots of water boiling, I had no idea what she was doing, and it just seemed to me the proper thing not to tell Mrs. C what she could or couldn’t do in her own house.
But Mary--during a sudden visit--berated me at one point, as if I was falling down on my job, for not preventing her mother from going down to the cellar. I felt she assumed I had more “authority” to do anything about shaping Mrs. C’s life than I had any right to assume (or preferred to do). I think I even talked to Shuey about this, and Shuey agreed with me on this particular point. So, in the end, I was in an awkward “political” situation where I had Mary’s grumpy-toward-me view of what I was doing there (and mind you, if I found Mrs. C had fallen, I would have been as quick as anyone to get her appropriate help); I faced the relatively mild expression of Mrs. C’s own dissatisfaction with how some intervention (via me) had been made into her life; and I had my own lonely life as I was there just for habitation while I had my Handyman task that was my prime focus of being a VISTA volunteer.
As I said, VISTA volunteers, as do Peace Corps volunteers, find there is more to a given ingrained social situation than their own time-limited invention, intentions, and stratagems can alleviate, even with the aim to put some self-supporting “structure” in place to address the conditions in the future. You come away with an appreciation for the ongoing difficulty in others’ lives, and hopefully are a more open-spirited person within your own middle-class American life as a result.
