Mercy Retirement and Care Center is a large, imposing building that takes up an entire city block on Foothill Boulevard between 34th and 35th avenues.
I have chosen to visit this facility for a few reasons. Firstly, it is right in the middle of my neighborhood, and second, I was (and this is a severe understatement), reluctant to ask if I could visit a children’s day care facility “just to observe,” for reasons that should be obvious. I cannot imagine that scenario working out well for anyone.
I call in advance and am directed to Sister Patty. Sister Patty suggests I visit during dinner time, when all the residents are in one place, and I might more easily find some willing to speak to me. Sister Patty says she is about to leave for the day and so she instructs me to ask for her assistant, Stephanie Manyo, upon my arrival.
I arrive in the middle of dinner. I know it’s the middle of dinner, because as I walk up the long, curved front entrance (easy on walkers and wheelchair-pushers), I see all the residents eating through the glass to my right. They are all in a large dining room, mostly paired up, but with some groups of three, and some tables with only one diner.
I find Stephanie. She is a friendly blonde woman whom I guess is in her mid-forties. She smiles and shakes my hand, saying that she thought I would have arrived earlier. I apologize for my delay, and she brushes it off, bustling me into the dining room with a muted sense of excitement.
She wants more details about my assignment, but I am almost as in the dark as she is, and I explain that to her.
“I’d like to talk to some residents who go outside and have some level of interaction with the community,” I say. “But I’m also happy to just observe them and take notes.”
She brightens, and suggests a resident named Gus, who she says takes BART to El Cerrito three times a week. She points him out to me—he is wearing a green short-sleeved button-up shirt, and is sharing a table with a female dinner companion.
I try to tell Stephanie that I don’t want to interrupt his dinner, that I can wait off to the side until he is finished. She waves off my concerns. “Gus will be more than happy to talk to you,” she says. “Come, I’ll introduce you now.”
She’s right, of course. She knows her flock better than I, and sure enough, Gus invites me to sit down, which I do at the moment his dinner plate arrives. Despite his invitation, the moment the plate is placed in front of him I feel even more like I’m intruding.
I ask him if he minds me recording the conversation, so that I may quote him accurately. He politely declines, saying that in the past he’s said things he shouldn’t have when he was being recorded. I do not ask him what he said that he shouldn’t have, but I want to.
Gus is 81-years old, and has lived in Mercy since April 2008, when he moved here with his wife. She died within a month, and he has been alone ever since. He lived in El Cerrito ever since leaving the Navy years ago, and has friends there with whom he plays bridge a few times a week.
Fruitvale is an “average American neighborhood,” he says. “It’s inundated with blacks and Latinos-who are nice people,” he adds. I get the feeling that he simply wanted to state a fact, but then realized that it came out wrong, and then felt the need to show that he was not racist.
I don’t think he is, but I don’t want to interrupt, so I let him continue. He tells me how much he enjoyed his first visit to a local Mexican bakery, and how much he loves tamales. He mentions that he once had a pineapple tamale, and his dinner companion, Mary Jane, gasps lightly, indicating that she doesn’t think such a thing sounds tasty at all.
Mary Jane is originally from Connecticut, and moved to California with her family at a young age. She lived near Mercy for many years, and one of her two twin daughters still does. She says her two daughters used to stop in and work at Mercy in the mornings, before going to school at Cal, telling her “they make great breakfasts.”
Gus tells me two stories that he feels sum up the people in the neighborhood. In the first one, he is late for BART, and doesn’t want to wait for the bus, so be begins walking. Halfway down the block a bus pulls up alongside him and the doors open.
“What are you doing walking, Gus?” The driver enquired. “Come on in, I’ll get you where you’re going.”
Gus says that passengers on the buses he took always made space for him on the seats at the front of the bus. In his second story he is on BART.
On that day he had passed his normal stop, El Cerrito Plaza, and the BART driver came up to him. “Gus, you missed your stop, why don’t you get off here and take the next train back?” The driver said.
Gus replied that he was getting off at a different stop that day, but thanked the driver for asking.
Gus sums up his thoughts. “Awful people,” he says. “Why don’t they mind their own business?” Then he laughs, and I join him.
