Moomie Does Vegas!

By Stuart Feinhor, reprinted from Care Connections May/June 2006

Some people are hard to please. They want things "just so," and if things are not, they will complain loudly in the face of even the sincerest attempts to make them happy. People will say of such finicky folk, "So-and-so is so hard to please!" My Aunt Marilyn, who got nicknamed "Moomie" by my older sister when she was learning to talk, was not one of those people. It wasn't that she didn't like things a certain way (For example, she never ate cheese on a hamburger—kind of a Jewish thing, but then she loved bacon. Go figure!), or that she didn't have strong feelings about things (For example, if you dared touch her hair after a visit to the beauty shop—you know, just for fun—she would exclaim, "DON"T TOUCH MY HAIR!"). It was more a matter of truly appreciating the good things people did for her. Whenever I took her to the movies, I knew what her assessment of the picture would be: "Very good movie." It didn't matter what we had seen; it was always a "very good movie." She was, in so many wonderful and memorable ways, easy to please.

Marilyn was born mildly retarded, and regular readers of Care Connections will know that I was blessed to have been her caregiver for the last six and a half years of her life. Her tastes were simple, but her experience of life was profoundly gracious. More than any other activities, she loved going out to eat and to the beauty shop, preferably both on the same day (and which we always did). She loved to travel but didn't have great aspirations toward seeing the world, as such. New York, Miami, Los Angeles, San Francisco—the place was largely, though not exclusively, incidental; for her, travel was about visiting relatives who lived there. Except when it came to Las Vegas. Las Vegas was the one destination that really got her excited. She said she wanted "to see what [everybody] was talking about."

At one point, many years ago, a group that was composed of other mentally retarded people was scheduled to make a trip from Dayton, where she lived then, to Las Vegas. My mother, for some reason, decided, as Marilyn reported, that "it was too expensive," and so she didn't go. I never understood my mother's thinking, and can't imagine that it was really about the money. So, a few years ago, my two sisters, my brother-in-law, and I decided to take her for her sixty-fifth birthday to the city of neon lights. It was, to say the least, a hoot.

Marilyn was, in many ways, a very lucky woman. Before we went to Las Vegas, she had already tasted the thrill of the slot when she and I drove through Reno en route from San Francisco, where we were living, to Boulder, in 2001. And then, because we couldn't schedule our Vegas trip until a few months after her birthday, my local sister, her husband and I took her to Blackhawk for the day. In Reno she won eleven dollars and twenty-five cents. In Blackhawk, I think it was around thirty. Counting her quarters in our room at the once-lovely Tropicana in Las Vegas, she lamented the fact that her twenty-three dollars and seventy-five cent winnings fell short of her Blackhawk purse. But she took pride in telling me that she could count "when I want to." She loved the slots!

While we were in Vegas, counting her coins, I asked her what she thought, now that she had finally made it. "It's true, honey," she said. "What's true?" I asked. "Everything!" The hotels, the lights, the water fountain at the Bellagio, the restaurants, even the hair salon—it was all beautiful. Just like everybody had said. Marilyn was always much easier to please than I am. But nothing pleased me more than having been able to fulfill a dream of my favorite person in the whole entire world. Moomie always made me feel like the luckiest guy I know.

Stuart Feinhor was a loving caregiver to his Aunt through the end of her life, and is writing a book about his caregiving experiences.

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