Tales From The Tub

In our youth oriented culture, Currier asks us to venerate the very old. Merely surviving to old age doesn’t guarantee wisdom; it may just be good genes. But if we listen, she says, our elders gift us with pure truth. After twenty five years as a nurse in Assisted Living, Currier has collected a trove of stories, with souls gruff and funny, sometimes feeble and terrifying: • meet a ninety year old lady who wants to know about syphilis • discover why Santa’s pants fell to his ankles • learn how a love story ends on different floors • find out why the Currier’s paid for a cat to have a sex change operation • share in a dignified death with perfect timing Why venerate the very old? Because, as the author says, we will be them. “This is an affectionate and compelling account of how we live out our last days. There’s much here to be learned and savored from an insightful writer and the unforgettable characters who lived in her home.” Lary Bloom, founder of the former Northeast Sunday Magazine at the Hartford Courant, author and educator.

In our youth oriented culture, Currier asks us to venerate the very old. Merely surviving to old age doesn’t guarantee wisdom; it may just be good genes. But if we listen, she says, our elders gift us with pure truth. After twenty five years as a nurse in Assisted Living, Currier has collected a trove of stories, with souls gruff and funny, sometimes feeble and terrifying: • meet a ninety year old lady who wants to know about syphilis • discover why Santa’s pants fell to his ankles • learn how a love story ends on different floors • find out why the Currier’s paid for a cat to have a sex change operation • share in a dignified death with perfect timing Why venerate the very old? Because, as the author says, we will be them. “This is an affectionate and compelling account of how we live out our last days. There’s much here to be learned and savored from an insightful writer and the unforgettable characters who lived in her home.” Lary Bloom, founder of the former Northeast Sunday Magazine at the Hartford Courant, author and educator.

Deirdre Currier and her husband owned an Assisted Living home for twenty-one years. She has written Tales from the Tub: Growing Old is for the Brave, about those experiences from her nurse point of view. Currier has taken writing courses at the Institute for Lifelong Education at Dartmouth and works with a writers’ group. She belongs to the New Hampshire Writers Project and has written a weekly column called “Boomertalk” for The Compass newspaper in Claremont, N.H. As a reader and writer of poetry all of her life, she has handmade chapbooks of her poetry, Haiku, A Poetic Family Portrait, and Dogs, Cats and Other Loves. She is currently working on a murder mystery. The Curriers live in New Hampshire with their adopted stray cat, Oscar So-Low-Renta.