Homes for the aged, ill, the memory impaired are often poignant and surreal. There is a great contradiction within these institutions – people at the edge of life, often ill or suffering from dementia, yet their lives are filled with movement, activities, interactions from heroic, almost desperately committed staffs fighting to keep the patients active and engaged. It is not possible to do that 24 hours a day, or even 12, no home has the staff for that. But they do their best, the staff is ingenuous, cheerful and enthusiastic at the Vermont Veteran’s Home.

You would think they were at Yankee Stadium for the World Series.

It is difficult, sometimes seemingly impossible work. How does one keep acutely ill and impaired people, many of them in wheelchairs and on medications, active and focused and as healthy as possible? The staff in the activity room is  ingenious, there is a different activity every time we come. Today it was bowling, two lanes marked off with yellow tubes and plastic pins. People approached the lanes in wheelchairs and pushed them down the lanes towards the pins. Whoever knocked their pin down first won.

Red and I made the circuit in this room, we walked on leash to each person and all but one was delighted to see him and reached down to touch him. The dementia patients told me about their dogs and asked me about Red. One man kept repeating the story of his Golden Retriever hit by a truck and killed, he remembered it as if it were yesterday, he could not tell me his name.

When we had made our rounds, I asked Red to stay still while I took of a photo of a scene that seemed bittersweet to me, a bowling alley in the middle of a veteran’s home, determination in the midst of challenge and loss.