The Lawyer and the Ladies

I had my legal i’s and t’s dotted and crossed ten years ago. Right after my husband died I went to a lawyer to get a will and the powers of attorney for health care and finances drawn up then promptly put them in my filing cabinet and forgot about them until my dog died before moving into this continuum care complex. There were provisions in my will for Levi’s care that I crossed off the will, signed and dated the change, then back in the drawer the estate planning notebook went. But in recent weeks, it’s bothered me that the lawyer back then said my estate was too small for a trust and my heirs would be better off to let everything go through probate. With my brother’s recent move into the Memory Care unit here on campus I’ve watched my nieces dig into the weeds of their father’s trust and realized how much easier it would for them to “manage me” should my brain not keep up with my body’s longevity if I had a trust.

The lawyer they used practices elder law and has one hour free consultations. So in I go with my notebook for review and my list of assets and income and I let him school me on how trusts work. He used a white board to draw on and let me just say that the guy is so darn cute I had a hard time concentrating on what he was saying. He’s not just cute like a puppy dog cute. He could easily be a print model or movie star. Think Brad Pitt in his thirties. Mr Hottie Lawyer looked like he just came in from doing manly things like chopping wood or skiing down a sunny slope---anything that could put a healthy glow of sun kiss in his perfect skin. He was wearing a cream colored dress shirt under a melon colored, pull over sweater with a pair of sandalwood colored dress pants that matched the color of his prefect hair which was carefully styled to look like he just got out of bed. And when he smiles it's the genuine kind that engages his sparkling eyes and gives you a flash of perfect teeth. And if all that isn’t enough to kick start someone’s dried up ovaries, he was down to earth and has a friendly personality. When I got home I texted my youngest niece about the fact that I have a trust being drawn up and “Boy, is that guy cute.” She texted back that when she and her sister left his office recently, her sister asked what she thought of the guy and my youngest said the first words out of her mouth were, “Boy is that guy cute!” 

My new lawyer is on the board of directors of another continuum care complex here in town and he understands how they work and what people need in the way of assets to get into them, etc., etc. He surprised me when he said that I have an above average estate from what most others living in places like this have. So I guess I will quit my Blue Collar worrying about going over my monthly food allowance or buying something I could do without from a late night binge shopping on Amazon. My latest hot purchases were a third pair of compression stockings made out of bamboo and some tennis shoe cleaner. But you should see my ‘Wish List’ of stuff. When I finish this post I'm going to buy the Christmas sweater on the list. People here are really into holiday dressing. We have a Halloween party coming up on Monday with a special buffet and we’re supposed to wear a costume. I don’t like Halloween---never have as an adult---so I will not be wasting money or time trying to come up with something to wear. I might get a dollar store headband, if the mood suits me over the weekend.

When this post goes live on Saturday and you’re reading it over morning coffee I’ll be sitting out on our piazza where a bunch of kids in costumes from a near-by church school will be stopping by to trick-or-treat the various buildings on this campus. I hope they get my brother out on the deck to see them. The person in charge of his transition say he’s doing well adjusting, by the way. Still asks my youngest niece about going home, but that's to be expected this early on.

I was walking down by the lake a couple of days ago, in front of his building, and I ran into a woman who left our independent living building and was moved into the Memory Care building where my brother is at. She was with her daughter and she looked fabulous, like the move took all the worry out of her. She was constantly walking around our building with a sheet of paper, afraid she was going to miss something on our schedule of classes and she would get kicked out. She did it one too many times in the middle of the night, fell and that was the end of her independent living. When she came home from rehab for the injuries due to the fall she came home to a room in Memory Care. She seemed happy and contented and said to me, "I hear I live in the dementia unit now," and I replied, "I don't know about that but their memory care program has won state awards." I didn't want to use the 'D' word in case she was fishing for information they hadn't told her or maybe they don't use that word in that building? Her daughter looked like it wasn't the first time her mother had trolled that 'dementia line' out and she was getting ready to deliver a canned speech that went something like, "Remember Mom, you need to be where you have some supervision since your fall." 

We said our goodbyes and I'll be seeing you agains and I went back to daydreaming about my new lawyer and his two perfects kids and pretty wife. Yes, I internet stalked him when I thought about using his photo with this post. But I decided he and Brad Pitt really do look like they came from the same gene pool, so you get my celebrity crush instead. He's been my celebrity crush since he did the movie, A River Runs through it. It's still one of my top five movies of all-time. ©

 

The Fun and Games we Old People Play

One thing you need when you move into a continuum care complex is a box of sympathy cards. I’ve written four since moving in a year ago, for residents I know well who lost their spouses. Others living here stock more than just sympathy cards. A few people hand out birthday cards to all those celebrating them. We can’t avoid our birthdays here if we tried. They blast our birthday announcement in the daily e-mail of activities and on all the hallway TV screens. They have a monthly birthday party with great entertainment and people noticed if you don’t show up if it’s your month to celebrate. I got five cards on my birthday which surprised me. I got out of the habit of sending birthday cards out decades ago. And when I moved I donated most of the greeting cards in the house to Goodwill except for some special ones I kept for the pictures on the front. The first time I needed a sympathy card here on campus good old Amazon delivered me a box the next day. People can say what they want about the guy who started Amazon and got filthy rich doing it, but the company provides great service. Their delivery vans stops here two/three times a day. Fed-ex comes almost daily too but I think they usually are delivering legal papers, not home goods. At least that’s all I ever get from Fed-ex.

Another thing you need to bring with you when you move to an independent apartment building is patience. I’m sitting here waiting for the an annual sprinkler system inspection. We got sprinkler heads in every room, sometimes two and of course in the closets. We don’t have to be here but I’m not fond of letting three strangers walk all over my apartment when I’m not present. In addition to the two firemen, a woman will be with them---our Safety & Ssecurity Coordinator---and I’m betting she’ll be looking for broken rules like signs someone was burning candles, smoking or has an unregistered pet or lives like a hoarder. 

As long as I’m on a roll of what is helpful to have when you move into a place like this I’d be amiss if I didn’t say having a sense of humor is helpful if not essential. An hour ago the tension rod I added in my closet to hang a couple of dozen tops fell down and with my hand in a splint I don’t think it’s a good idea for me to try to put it back up. Can’t wait to see what the inspectors have to say about that. If I was young and flirty and at least one of them was male and flirt receptive I would go for that plan to get the rod put back up. I hate my closet. I need a closet make over. I need to replace that tension rod with a fixed kind. The tension rod seems to fall every time we have a drastic change in the temperature---it's like the walls are taking a deep breath and the rod and hangers drops to the floor.

Something else others have mentioned they didn’t bring when they moved in but had to buy over again is some Tupperware. We are always taking part of our meals back to our apartments and those paper (doggy) boxes don’t do well in the refrigerator. When they don’t use the wimpy paper boxes they have some god-awful, too-large-for-most-of-our-leftovers plastic boxes that no one can close or open without tools and determination. 

Being a life long dog owner I’ve always got zip-lock bags in my purse for an occasional tidbit of food but one time our resident foodie said that using a plastic bag made me look like a street urchin. “Wait for a box, please.” She’s also the lady who eats with her fork upside down and when she was served an Irish coffee in a tall martini glass she pitched a fit. “Irish coffee should be served in a mug!” It was a beautiful presentation with the coffee, whiskey and whipped cream holding their own in thin layers. I felt sorry for the bartender. I wish I was quick thinking in situations like that and more importantly had the guts to say something like, “With people dying of starvation, lack of water and war you are one lucky woman if the worst thing you have to endure today is getting a drink served in an unexpected container.”

I could not work in the food service here. (Well, maybe anywhere having come from a family where we were expected to eat what's on your plate.) We all have our quirks relating to food. You already know about my meltdown over uneven pie slices sizes. Another woman has ordered brussel spouts every darn day since she moved in and she wants them nearly burned and she sends them back if they aren't black little, crispy balls. Someone else asks for sour dough bread every day, knowing full well they never stock it. 

Another woman brings a miniature picnic basket with her to dinner and doctors up her meals with salsas and spices and takes everyone's left over condiments. (I don't blame her when it comes to mayonnaise, they make the best mayonnaise on the planet.) And then there’s the game we have to play to get salt and pepper. They have these crazy little shakers that no one on staff seems to know which one should be filled with pepper and which one should be filled with salt. One has one hole in the top and the other one has five. One time we collected and tested seven sets at lunch and found out that of the fourteen shakers, ten of them had pepper in them. Who said old people can’t have fun. The management probably thinks we really love our pepper because we are constantly testing a shaker in our hand and throw out the rejected batches that aren’t what we’d hoped to find. ©

The Move-in and my Personal Woe-is-me Day

I woke up at 4:30 and couldn’t fall back to sleep so at 5:30 I got up, had some cocoa and here I sit in front of the computer screen. I was not surprised. I went into my bedroom last night around 9:00, selected a Netflix movie and promptly fell into a deep sleep by 9:18 (according to my sleep app) until the ending credits when I woke up long enough to turn off the TV set. My usual pattern is to watch a movie until around 11:00 then take two Melatonin gummies and turn the TV off at midnight. It had been a long, busy couple of days for the mind and body. My two nieces were in town setting up their father’s room in the Memory Care building on campus and I was there for awhile and they were here for awhile. I also played Siamese Mahjong with my instructor, the first time we’d attempted it and we were both on our phones reading directions. How did we ever live without our palm sized libraries of knowledge at our fingertips? Two of our regular players were gone---one at her husband’s death bed in our hospice building and the other on a color tour, thus the need to learn to play Mahjong with just the two of us. I’m sure we both generated a bunch of new brain cells while we played a game that is complicated enough with four of us at the table. We were essentially each playing for two. I love that game. Mahjong is full of crazy rules, and is a combination of skill and luck to win.

At dinner I ate with four others and we made arrangements to make it a standing Wednesday night date. I’m dubbing us the Secret Society of Liberal Ladies. We talked freely about the upcoming midterms and who to vote for or not. We talked about the Proposals on the ballot including women’s reproductive issues. We cannot believe after 50 years of living under Roe vs Wade that we’ve come to this. Here in Michigan we even have a Trump backed state senate candidate who once started a think tank called the “Society for the Critique of Feminism” where he put forth the argument that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote or work outside the home, a real Handmaid’s Tale kind of guy’s utopia. Now he’s claiming it was satire but how can voters trust a guy who licks Trump’s boots down to the stitches and seams? 

I’ve never been inside our Memory Care building---been to several outdoor events---and my brother's room is very nice. It’s been newly remodeled with fresh paint, new fixtures in the bathroom, new carpeting and brand new furniture, all in a what I’d call a winter wheat color. But it’s a thirty year old building with narrow halls and a layout I can’t figure out yet. They are remodeling the whole place, including tearing down a wall between two lake view common rooms and that will be entertaining for my brother to watch. He’ll want to help. I told our maintenance man who was there doing last minute stuff in my brother’s room that he’d better keep an eye on his tools when Jerry is around. He likes to take things apart and can’t put them back together again---his latest was the furnace. 

It's both sad and otherwise, watching my brother get moved from living in a big house to a single room with a bath, bringing in just clothing, some wall decor, a candy dish, a few place mats and throw pillows. I couldn’t help thinking someday I could be moving in across the hall way and my life would boil down to a handful of possessions. What would I want on my walls, on my lounge chair? God, I’ve always been a long-range planner but do I really need to make a list in my head of what I want my nieces to grab from my current apartment when/if I get moved on down the road? Apparently I do/and did.

I’m having a ‘Be Sorry For Myself day’. Taking a shower one-handed was tougher this time compared to the first hand surgery because of the way my shower stall is set up and putting on my socks made me want to cry for all the times my husband struggled doing it one-handed over the twelve and half years after his stroke. When I had my other surgery it was summer time and I didn’t have to put on socks. I helped my husband if we were in a hurry or he got particularly frustrated but most of the time he did it himself and I’m going to break my computer screen if I don’t find a way to kill a pesky little gnat that seems to follow me around. He was hanging around my coffee pot earlier. Every where I go, there he is like he thinks we’re the Bobbsey Twins. When he gets around my face I’m afraid I’m going to snuff him up my nose or give myself a black eye trying to swat the devil gnat. The meme at the top is the second biggest question of the day. 

The first being how did my brother handle it when he was introduced into his new living quarters today and figured out he isn't going home from the Covid rehab where he's been gaining strength after a hospitalization with the virus. I'm on pins and needles waiting for a report. His kids are rallying around him in a show of unity for the decision they've made and I won't walk down there to visit until I know how things are going. I'm hoping maybe by the weekend but it could be longer. Their patient liaison told the kids it generally takes a month before patients settle into the fact that they aren't going home again. It was the right decision at the right time, but that doesn't make it an easy one. 

Now I'm off to the pharmacy to pick up a third prescription for an UTI that has resisted the first couple of antibiotics the doctor gave me the week before my surgery. I'm so sick of peeing sixty thousand times a day that I'm about ready to declare the UTI a winner and lay down and die. I'm allergic to that 'shotgun antibiotic' that kills everything possible growing in your urinary track so they had to grow a culture with my pee to come up with this last (hopefully) medication which should have me feeling better soon. But on the good side of life, I'm typing this is real time. The hand still has some swelling but so far so good on keeping infection out of the stitches. ©

Second Sugery and Second Writing Group Meeting

This post was written a few days before my second surgery for carpal tunnel and trigger thumb that took place on October 17th. I was thinking this one would be the easier of the two surgeries because I know what to expect. With my dominate hand done first I thought it would be a piece of cake but I just realized that holding a computer mouse with a splint on my hand will not be possible for the first week where with my other hand in a splint I could still type with a few fingers tips. Plus I'm going into this surgery with a great deal of pain from a frozen elbow and shoulder that I'll have to deal with as soon as possible. So expect shorter replies to comments made on this and the next pre-written and scheduled posts coming up which also means if anything exciting happens in my life between now and, say, October 26th you won't be hearing about it. (Like how much excitement could happened to an 80 year old?)

One of the things that will happen before I get back to real time posting is my brother is moving into the Memory Care building here on campus tomorrow. Exciting for me and his kids but, of course, it will be hard on him. When they told him he was moving, my youngest niece asked, "Do you remember when you visited Aunt Jean and you said you like her place...?" And my brother got upset and shouted, "I'm not living with my sister!" So I guess I'll have to let him get settled into his own building before I can walk down the road to visit. The family was told it takes new residents a month before they finally settle in and know the move is permanent. But I'm dying to see his freshly painted and carpeted room and his view.

Our Memory Care program has won state awards and his building has the same view overlooking the lake and the woods in full color now. It's a bit of a drive for his kids to visit but this CCComplex is in an area where they all come to shop the near-by malls and visit specialists. (The main reason I picked it in the first place.) He'll be living just one buildings away from me so I'm sure I'll get to see everyone more often than I do now. I'm excited for me but sad for him even though it truly is the right time for him to transition out of living alone. His kids have done a wonderful job of bringing in help to keep him safe at home for as long as they did, but those of us who've been in that situation knows how draining that can be.

And now on to the writing group: As I suspected would happen, Chatty Catty who took dictation from God for the songs she produced, didn't come back so we are down to four of us and we are all a good fit for getting along. Ms. Angel couldn't make this meeting because she had a last minute spiritual consultation but recently she's written and read publicly two poems---one at our anniversary party and one at our monthly Resident Dialogue in lieu of reading an opening prayer---so we know the quality of her work and she's excited about writing more. Mr. Graphic Artist brought six poems to read---five older one and one new one he just finished and he thinks this group is helping to get back into writing. When he moved here, like me, he thought he'd be spending all his time writing and doing art which didn't happen for him (or me)---just too many activities to get involved in.

Ms. Librarian blew us away by reading twenty pages of a novel she wrote since our last meeting. It's set in 1940 in a French Convent. It's good, it's really GOOD but far over the 1,000 word limit we'd set for our readings. We had that same issue in another writing group I was in and the facilitator didn't say anything about it, so neither did I. None of our Group's guidelines are set in stone and as long as we can get everyone's readings into our meetings I guess it won't matter.

I brought in a rather sad poem I wrote about our Memory Care building here on campus and copy of one of my favorite, funny blog posts from my caregiver days as a sample of what my past writing style was like. I ended the meeting with asking everyone their writing goals for the coming month and I reading from a the book, A Year of Writing Dangerously; 365 Days of Inspiration and Encouragement. All and all it went great. We had some interesting conversations generated from our readings and we are all committed to keeping creative writing on our front burners, so to speak. We also hoped to get one more person in the group and we thought we had her but the Activities Calendar overlapped our group with Line Dancing and she's really into that, so she had to choose. Hopefully, that won't happen next month. ©

Philosophy 001

“Sometimes life is a gentle ride in a canoe and other times it’s like riding on an overloaded ferry boat while holding our breath until we safely reach the other side of the river.” Have you ever written or said something then decided to google the phrase to make sure it originated in your own brain and isn’t something someone else wrote that your subconscious coughed up like a cat with a hairball? That’s what I did with the first sentence up above. I wrote it as reply to a comment on my blog then deleted it because I seemed too rich philosophically for me to have 'invented' it. Then that same evening one of my fellow residents called me ‘The Philosopher’ so I must have at least one person fooled. She’s the Art Professor, the one I fan-girl stalked until I finally got to meet her. I’m still a fan. Whenever she’s at a table the quality of the conversations are more playful yet deeper and better quality than, say, a conversation with my upstairs neighbor who never fails to report on a conversation she just had with a cousin down in Florida. Two bored old ladies, the last in their family to be alive and each morning they feel compelled to make sure the other made it through the night. 

Google came up with a quote they claimed was as close to mine as they could find and since it isn’t remotely similar to my ‘hairball’ I’m pretty sure I can claim that first sentence in this post as my own. This is what Google found: 

“Even though you and I are in different boats, you in your boat and we our canoe, we share the same river of life. What befalls me befalls you. And downstream our children will pay for our selfishness, for our greed, and for our lack of vision.” Oren Lyons

My quote and this one do have a few similarities, though. Both feature a boat, a canoe and the river of life but Mr. Lyons' words are a regurgitation of William Shakespeare’s “The sins of the father are to be laid upon the children” from The Merchant of Venice. Shakespeare, according to a lot of websites, is the most quoted writer in the English language. While Irish Times (whoever they are) claims the honor of being the most quoted belongs to Oscar Wilde with George Bernard Shaw coming in second. I just read through a bunch of Wilde and Shaw quotes but they seem obscure to me except for: “We don't stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing” which I'm pretty has been reproduced on coffee cups and book marks. Mr. Shaw makes it sound like we stop playing on purpose---as if we had a real choice. Life happens to us all and it’s really hard to play when we’re dealing with serious issues. In other words we can be playfully floating down a river in a canoe when we don’t have a care in the world but when we're on an overloaded ferry boat aka carrying a basket full of problems we’d darn well better pay attention because our very lives might depend on it.

Have you figure it out yet, that this is a post about nothing? I have a three foot shelf in my bookcase totally filled with philosophy books, some I’ve even read from cover to over, many others I just pick up and read a page or two at random. One book is titled Seinfeld and Philosophy by a professor of philosophy named William Irwin and I’ll bet his classes are popular. One of the blurbs on the back cover says the book “…nicely illustrates how the comic can illuminate the profound.” Yup, think about it; Jerry’s constant questioning of everything is very much like what Socrates did to teach. To quote a line from inside the book, “Both Socrates and Jerry Seinfeld manage to make something considerable out of seemingly obvious questions and trivial subject matter.” 

 

Kramer from the Seinfeld TV sitcom is portrayed in the book as being stuck in Soren Kierkegaard’s aesthetic stage of life. In case you’re rusty on your Danish philosophers, Soren (1813 to 1855) was the father of The Three Spheres of Existence: the aesthetic, the ethical and the religious stages. The first stage is marked by pleasure seeking. Kramer is in constant pursuit of whatever he finds interesting and what he finds interesting is always changing. He has no ability to commit to anything. If I believe in the three spheres of existence---and I certainly can name periods in my life when I was stuck in the aesthetic stage---then I can also pinpoint when my ethical stage started, when I began taking on more responsibility, living a more purposeful life, the way most of us do as we age. 

 

But Kierkegaard believed that it takes a leap of faith to enter the third stage of existence and that most people remain in the ethical stage, never taking that leap to actually commit to God. Think nuns and priests kind of commitment. You can be a steady church goer but still not be in the third stage of existence if you're not willing to give up your creature comforts for God.

 

Right about now, if anyone is still reading this, you’re asking yourself, what does it matter what some old Danish dude thought? To answer that I’ll share a quote from The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Philosophy: "Kierkegaard’s work gave rise to the major trend in twentieth century philosophy known as 'existentialism’ a philosophy that forces on the meaning of existence for the individual.” And I dare say that nearly everyone reading this has at least flirted with that branch of philosophy in the late '60, early '70s---marked by the counterculture---that had us all searching for meaning and purpose in our lives. And some of us are still searching...  © 

Embarrassing Meltdowns and Moles that can Kill You

Boy, did I have an embarrassing meltdown last week in the fine dining room. It’s so embarrassing I don’t even want to write about it and expose my childish behavior. But this issue has been doing a slow boil since I moved in to my continuum care complex and in Stephen King's non-fiction book on writing he says words to the effect if you're not willing to be brutally honest in your writing you're never going to be a good writer.

So, here's what happened when the new manager of our dining room came over to our table to ask us how our meal was and the filter in my brain stopped working. “Who cuts the pies around here?” I asked as I moved my piece over next a table mate's, lining up the outer crusts back to back. Her slice was over 2 1/2 inches wide while my mine was a scant 1 1/4 inches. Another person at the table spoke up and said uneven serving sizes has been an ongoing problem here since they opened. And before I knew it I jumped into my theory that "the waitresses always give me the smallest portions because I’m fat."

That night the lady who got the larger piece of pie was a tiny little thing who usually leaves part of her desserts behind because she eats like a bird. I’ve seen that happen so many times around here and it drives me nuts. Growing up I had to sit at the table until bedtime if I didn't clean my plate and even though I'm in charge of myself now, I still can't stand seeing food wasted. When people want to linger over dinner and there is still food on their plates I have the hardest time not asking them to taking napkins and covering up the uneaten food, an old Weight Watchers trick. Out of sight out of mind.

Aside from that, sweets are my drug of choice and the wanting equal serving sizes is an issue that also comes from my childhood when my brother and I used to fight over who got the biggest serving of our desserts. Finally my mom made us start a new thing of one of us cutting and the other being the first to choose. We kept a ruler in the kitchen for this nightly ritual and it cut down on the fighting but as long as we lived together the measuring and cutting was part of our sibling relationship.

That night when I announced that the waitresses were body shaming me with their decision on who gets the larger portions I realized that I was speaking loud enough that the people on both sides of us could hear me, I wanted to be teleported out of the place never to be seen again. The new manager has only been on the job two weeks and probably wears a size two dress but she knelt down next to our table and softly said, “I’ve got a pie cutter on my list of things to buy. I’ll get this resolved.” My biggest shame in this is that in my heart I know the waitresses aren’t doing it out of malice---or even necessarily on purpose if I were inclined to be fair minded. We have three college students from Ethiopia, all from the same family and they are super sweet and respectful, polite and well mannered thin little girls who are very religious. They come from a family of nine and one of our waitresses is studying to be a lawyer, another is going into bio-engineering and the third is just in her first year. 

Speaking of young people, I went to see the PA associated with my dermatologist who did the biopsy on my cancerous ankle mole last June. It’s not healing up and I’ve been sending photos of it each month to the doctor ever since but this time I insisted on going into the dermatologist’s complex. I could have waited six weeks for the doctor or take the PA right away. The PA turned out to be a kid who looked all of twelve years old and he was as petite as the Ethiopian sisters. I’m used to young doctors but this kid, truly had a baby face that he tried to age with big horn-rimmed glasses. It didn’t work. 

He suspected there was more going on than just a slow heal on a part of the body that, in general, is slow to heal because of circulation issues in our extremities. He gave me three choices and I went with door number one which involved a deeper biopsy to makes sure they got all the cancers cells the first time. He said that because the mole was in a slow healing place, they don’t generally go very deep. Not sure if he was just covering up for the doctor or what but it is what it is and the damn itches like crazy.

I just got this second biopsy report back and now I'm scheduled for a "live mole surgery" that could last one to five hours, depending on how deep they have to dig. And won’t that be fun. It's the surgery where they scrape a layer off, put it under a microscope, then keep repeating until they are sure they got all the cancerous cells. At least I'll be three weeks out from having my second carpel tunnel and trigger thumb surgeries on my right hand.That takes place October 17th. Trying to keep our bodies working gets more time consuming with each year, doesn't it. ©