Almost Travelled Down a Road and Back Again
Let’s play ‘Name that Theme Song.’ This is a recreation therapy blog after all. Whoever guesses correctly, wins the opportunity to read the rest of the blog post.
“Thank you for being a friend
Travelled down a road and back again
Your heart is true, you’re a pal and a confidant”
Ding Ding! It’s The Golden Girls! If you guessed Full House, great answer, but not the one we were looking for. (How to speak to participants 101).
There is no denying that classic sitcoms are well, classic – Friends, Home Improvement, Cheers, Family Matters, Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, The Cosby Show (pre-jail sentence), Wonder Years and The Golden Girls.
These shows had laugh out loud humour, relatable content, touching moments, weekly appearances and commercials.
I’m currently re-watching The Golden Girls and nothing compares to their crisp, perfect timing, sarcastic humour. Actually, some may argue this blog is comparable.
I can’t decide which character I relate to more. Dorothy and her sarcastic humour. Sophia and her wise cracks. Rose and her simple mind. Blanche and her appetite for men or Sophia’s wicker purse that is always there.
My only critique of The Golden Girls is the age discrepancy. In the first season, Dorothy, Blanche and Rose claim they are in their 50s. If they’re 55 years old then I’m 12.
All of these years I thought I had been laughing at women in their late seventies. Now I feel bad for laughing at women in their fifties who work, but need roommates, struggle with dating, rarely see their children and never leave the house. That’s not funny – that’s just sad.
Above all, I would pump The Golden Girls tires any day before I would pump my own…
In Don’t Ask Me For Directions, I didn’t have any sense of direction. Today, I didn’t have any common sense.
Our facility finally purchased a Duet Wheelchair Bicycle Tandem. This was going to be our Summer to develop an impactful biking program for our residents, but the government interrupted our regularly scheduled programming with some breaking news – COVID-19.
But to our excitement, at the end of the Summer we were given the go ahead to begin riding the bike with residents as long we had masks, hand sanitizer and strong lungs.
We decided to have a few practice runs before strapping in a resident and had only begun when the other recreation therapist stopped pedalling stating it felt like the bike’s brakes were on (or that I had one too many Halloween mini chocolate bars at lunch). We examined the bike, but everything looked in order so we continued on our way.
We travelled down the block when she discovered all three tires were completely flat to the ground. So she parked the bike in the residential area so we could fill the tires with air. That was a gracious “we”.
Thankfully, the bicycle has a travel-sized hand pump. Unfortunately, neither of us could figure out how to use it, but never fear YouTube was there. After a quick 2 minute video for dummies, I pumped and pumped and pumped and pumped some more.
I almost forgot to mention that the temperature that afternoon was approximately 27 degree celsius so I had sweat dripping in areas I’d rather not discuss.
Eventually we did get back on the road, so I guess you could say we kind of travelled down the road and back again with a pal, but there was no confidant here.
