Daniel Rubin: Elder-care aide shares a beat from the street, words to cheer wards

The beats are rough, cribbed from 50 Cent's "In Da Club," but the words ring sweet:

I'm the cat with the foot truck

Coming down the hall

Standing tall

Through the good times

And bad, yo.

Omar Cain will be the first to say record companies haven't been pounding down his door to sign up a writer of nursing-home raps.

Four or five times he's pitched his sound to A&R reps, he says, only to hear, "It's too positive," "It won't sell," or "You're not making music for the right cause."

That last one gets to him.

"Not the right cause, yeah," he says, his voice light. He's 6-foot-4, 230 pounds, a hulking, handsome, ever-sunny certified nursing assistant at Golden LivingCenter-Stenton in East Mount Airy, where his act plays for 94 seniors in eight-hour shifts.

Only it's no act. I tried to follow the 35-year-old around for a few hours recently, and I should have worn running shoes.

Cuz Thelma's acting up.

Driving Bev up a wall.

I'm into helping out

I ain't into arguing

So call me if you need me

Even if you don't see me.

Down the stairs he flies, high-fiving Mitchell Thompson in his wheelchair, sugar-talking coworker Tiesha Hopkins, then back up to Eric Hanson's room, where Cain gently combs the man's thin white hair so he can greet the day.

"I can't walk by someone's room if they need something," he says.

All the while, Cain is chirping, rapping, talking about the way he was brought up, crediting those to whom he owes a debt.

If one person is responsible for where he is today, that's his aunt Patricia Curtis, a D.O.N., Cain says proudly. A director of nursing.

He was 27, working on cars, doing some barbering in North Philly, when he sought his aunt's counsel. Omar Jr. had just been born. The boy's mom was out of the picture.

And if Cain wasn't exactly lost, he wasn't exactly found.

"I was talking to my aunt about the problems I was going through, and my aunt suggested I try doing what she did," he says.

His aunt supervised nursing at what's now the Ivy Hill Nursing Home, and ran a five-week program to train assistants. She told her nephew he'd last about a day unless he took to the work, and then he might just make a life of it.

Washing people, cutting their food, changing sheets and bedpans - it was humbling work, and for the first weeks, Cain wasn't able.

"It was working with people up close, dealing with their feelings," he says. "I wasn't in touch with my own feelings. But she sat me down and told me I had to love myself before I could love someone else."

For nearly nine years now, he's been tending to those at the Stenton Avenue center. One resident, Juanita Sanders, 85, says, "I was weak as water when I arrived here," having lost a leg to diabetes, and Cain just picked her up "like a baby" and took care of her.

He calls her "Mama." Some of the men he calls "Pops."

"He is loyal and constant," Sanders says. "When you need him, he is there. He is ever so kind and exceedingly patient."

Cain thanks his own mother for his sensitive side, one that he didn't show so easily until he started caring for elders.

"I think your father gives you your rough ride," says Cain, who married the mother of his daughter, 3-year-old Tamar. "Your mother gives you your soft side. She told me, 'It's OK to cry. It's OK to show your love for someone else.' My mom taught me compassion."

He says there's much he can learn from those he helps. "A lot of them who get to 60, 70 wouldn't be alive if they didn't know what they were doing. If you can learn from them what mistakes not to make, that's worth more than a paycheck. Because the blessings will last forever. The money won't."

In June, Cain traveled by bus to Harrisburg to lobby for more funding for nursing homes. Stuart Shapiro, head of the Pennsylvania Health Care Association, saw Cain wearing headphones and asked what he was listening to.

When Shapiro heard Cain was moving to his own songs about nursing, he pulled him onto the stage, and Cain found himself leading a packed auditorium in "Be Proud."

Walk in their shoes

Put yourself in their position

If your body was aching

And you needed medication

But the state was holding out

What, they need to see some

documentation

Too positive for the record biz? Sounds pretty real to me.

As it did to the 600 patients and caregivers who sat in that auditorium, hands raised and swinging side to side as they sang his song.

Says Cain, "I will never forget that day."