{"id":389,"date":"2013-06-01T16:37:05","date_gmt":"2013-06-01T21:37:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/?p=389"},"modified":"2013-06-01T16:37:05","modified_gmt":"2013-06-01T21:37:05","slug":"maida","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/maida\/","title":{"rendered":"Maida"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Maida-1\"<\/a>Maida is our local crazy.\u00a0 Every community has one.\u00a0 The guy with the the most loyal dog ever, the Austrian woman muttering on her Schwinn bicycle as she runs over things on the sidewalk, the camera-toting teenager, repeating every third word.\u00a0 Oh, those are real characters too.\u00a0 So is Maida.<\/p>\n

You find them often in literature: think Kafka, Dostoevsky, Dickens.\u00a0 One of my favorite local crazies is from the film “Cinema Paradiso”:\u00a0 the village idiot who takes over the plaza every night at midnight.\u00a0 He comes out of nowhere and cries, “it’s mine!\u00a0 it’s mine!\u00a0 the plaza is mine!” (or something like that).\u00a0 And the villagers accept this cry and go on home.<\/p>\n

There’s also a great song by Richard Shindell called “Balloon Man” in which he tells of Balloon Man’s antics and explains to his friend, “and you’re so far away \/ on the other side of the world \/ I thought you might like to know \/ that Balloon Man lives in it too.”\u00a0 This wistfulness, the details of the here and now with the colors of your neighborhood, ring so true.\u00a0 We don’t necessarily interact with our local crazies, but they are a part of our landscape.\u00a0 (John Gorka has a good tribute to one too, but I can’t find it.\u00a0 Let me know if you do.)<\/p>\n

\"Maida-2\"<\/a>Maida is our own local crazy.\u00a0 I interacted with her on a daily basis for several years.\u00a0 Like clockwork, she would be here just as I sat down for lunch, standing gloomily, holding court, asking absurd questions.\u00a0 Clinically, she probably falls under the category of paranoid schizophrenic, but she has no use for the label.\u00a0 Over time, there was change.\u00a0 For instance, she originally talked about her urgent need to get to Saskatchewan, but after I told her of my dream of going to Nova Scotia, she started talking about Nova Scotia.\u00a0 When I first got to know her, she talked incessantly about Josh Duhamel, then it was about her Wachovia\/government check, later about meeting Vincent.\u00a0 It was all gibberish to me.\u00a0 (I had to look up Josh Duhamel, who turns out to be a real actor.\u00a0 Who knows, maybe Maida did work with him back in her healthy New York days.\u00a0 But, Josh, if you ever read this, you weren’t very nice to her.)<\/p>\n

Maida once worked in publishing, you see, and she was an artist, too.\u00a0 She came from a good Cleveland family, not that I know anything about all that.\u00a0 But I do know she was not homeless: her family put her up in a nice apartment near Shaker Square.\u00a0 She spoke of a bad stint in Florida, where I gather she had been sent to some kind of psychiatric ward that she hated.\u00a0 Her family brought her back home to Cleveland, hoping she could just live out her days in her own crazy way, on her own terms.\u00a0 I saw her once on Thanksgiving Day, making her usual rounds.\u00a0 She said she spent the afternoon with her family and I asked if she had a good dinner.\u00a0 She replied, “oh no, I don’t eat with them.”\u00a0 I think she lived on corn flakes.\u00a0 And I honestly don’t know which is kinder treatment: the medical attention she obviously needed, or the independence she desperately craved.\u00a0 She could behave like a wild animal if threatened; I’ve seen it, and it’s hard not to think crazy and independent is a kinder choice.<\/p>\n

\"maida-3\"<\/a>Maida could respond lucidly to direct questions.\u00a0 She read the Wall Street Journal<\/em> and could comment on current events.\u00a0 She wrote letters to the editor and Terry Teachout.\u00a0 We developed a good rapport over the years, and I tried to carry on a real, if absurd, conversation with her to keep her from slipping into the monotonous drone of nonsense.\u00a0 She wore that black wool coat year-round, even in 100-degree weather, and she carried that (seemingly heavy) bag\/purse.\u00a0 And she walked down the middle of the street, “to keep from getting killed,” she told me.\u00a0 It’s no wonder the cops were all familiar with her, they told her repeatedly to keep out of the street, but it was no use.\u00a0 Her Loganberry visits changed from 2pm to 4pm to almost 6pm, and then I stopped seeing her altogether.\u00a0 I wondered if it was her internal clock gone awry, or if she’d been hit by a car.\u00a0 I knew times were rough for her, even if she didn’t know: her brother died in November (I think he was hit by a car), and her step-father is reportedly old and ill.\u00a0 So I started asking.<\/p>\n

Over the years, I had met a number of people familiar with her.\u00a0 There were customers, neighbors, mail carriers, old friends, legal guardians.\u00a0 They mostly treated me as her friend, because that’s what Maida called me.\u00a0 I finally heard back that the legal guardian, the guy who inherited the job after Maida’s brother was killed, had her institutionalized in a nursing home\/psych ward.\u00a0 I’m glad she didn’t get run over, but I fear I have failed in my job as friend.\u00a0 Being stripped for a bath, force-fed and drugged is definitely not something Maida will understand or tolerate.<\/p>\n

And that is my story of Maida.\u00a0 I’m sorry it doesn’t have a happy ending. \u00a0 And while I’m relieved not to be growled at on a daily basis, I miss her all the same.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Maida is our local crazy.\u00a0 Every community has one.\u00a0 The guy with the the most loyal dog ever, the Austrian woman muttering on her Schwinn bicycle as she runs over things on the sidewalk, the camera-toting teenager, repeating every third … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[34],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=389"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":418,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/389\/revisions\/418"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=389"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=389"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/w1.loganberrybooks.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=389"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}