The Vacationing 98-year-old, the CNA, and the Well-Meaning Friend

The Certified Nursing Assistant arrived punctually at the comfy bed-and breakfast where the 98-year old mother has been taken--against the advice of her assisted living home, her other friends, and her daughter, me, that is--for a vacation. Of course we're just the Greek chorus here: if I were 98, I'd ignore the chorus too, and insist on doing any fool thing I wanted to do. The four broken ribs of last winter,  the broken hip, the tendency to insist she can walk on her own without a cane or walker . . . those are the things that get to the Greek chorus. Hence the need for the CNA. Who has been hired to be near her at all times.

The comfy bed-and-breakfast has been patronized by the 98-year-old since long before she was a 98-year-old. Long before the island was a place where Main street shops had no price tags--if you need to know the price of anything, you don't belong there. Once upon a time in the 1960s, real estate was cheap, beaches were uncrowded, Portuguese bread was inexpensive and delicious, the island movie screen was too small to show The Sound of Music, and people had laundry spinners in their back yards. There was a homemade donuts place and you could buy hot dogs, postcards. Even a "Dexter's Shell Shoppe" selling tinted tropical shells out of somebody's garage.

That was then. Tommy Hilfiger bought and decorated a mansion there, which, last I heard, his ex-wife was trying to sell for 27 million. Then 19.5 million. He wasn't the only Richie Rich. The billionaires crawl around everywhere. The A&P disappeared. Lyme disease got worse. 

People changed. Would it have been possible, in the sixties, for the owner of a bed-and-breakfast patronized for years by an elderly person to tell the elderly person's friend she was "not comfortable with the CNA out in the reception area or patio, or using the hall bathroom, since the CNA was not a guest here?"

The owner of the B&B is very comfortable telling the CNA to sit in the airless bedroom of the mom's companion, and only use her personal bathroom. The mom's companion thinks she should put up with the owner telling her this. She says she has "smoothed things over." The owner is a nice lady, she thinks, who has been nice in other summers, so that complaining about the treatment of the CNA would be mean. She thinks I should pay the owner something to tolerate the nurse.

I think the owner should act like a decent human being.

My attempts, via email, to get the 98-year-old mother's pal to tell the owner of the B&B to let the CNA use the reception area, the patio, the hall bathroom--by Yelping the place if necessary--have been rebuffed.

The hired help come to the back. They look different. They talk different. Maybe they are people of color. Maybe they weigh more. Maybe they have another accent. Maybe they have a uniform? Maybe the wrong brand of jeans? Maybe anything that gives away they're not Tommy's crowd.

Don't places like this charming little vacationing spot have chambers of commerce that set policy for oldsters and their entourage? You'd think they would.