My hair isn’t the same as it was, but I still laugh all the time. People used to ask me “Why do you laugh all the time?”…what in the world do you want me to say to that? I don’t know, why do you ask annoying questions?

Since moving into this independent retirement community, I have heard about two things constantly: my beautiful hair, and my cheerful laugh.

This has taken some getting used to, and really made me uncomfortable for a while.

It’s like, if you lived in a culture where everyone had small noses and laughed at your huge nose, and then moved to a country where everyone wants to have a big nose and talks about how pretty you are all the time. For a while, it feels like they’re making fun of you.

So, when a group of people start talking about how they always know where I am because they can hear my laugh down the hall and then they all start laughing, it’s sometimes hard not to say something like, “Yeah? Well, so is your face!”

I’ve found that the hardest part of this job, for me, is keeping secrets. What I mean is, sometimes a resident has an emergency-all the other residents see the ambulances and want to know if it’s their for their friends-and unless the person in question tells me I can, I can’t tell you if that’s your friend going away in the ambulance. This is for their privacy-and it’s something I find morally questionable, it’s not my place to tell you these things, and if I did, it would be a betrayal of confidence. People call me in some embarrassing and personal situations-and I believe in the reasons I keep my mouth shut.

The hard part is though saying no, I can’t tell you that, when I know you’re asking for the very best reasons. When I know that it physically hurts not knowing what happened to your friend, I feel terrible that I can’t tell you.

What’s funny about this, really, is that when I moved out of my parents house I made a conscious decision to live an honest life. No secrets, no lies-this ia  big part of my life. And yet, I chose a job where I’m frequently keeping things from about a hundred people who live all around me. Life is funny like that. Or, well, people are funny like that.