Monopoly and the Widow on the Move

This week started out super busy. Monday morning I took stuff to the auction house out in the boondocks, then the dog had an appointment at the doggie foo-foo beauty parlor but not before I took him and my Fitbid for a long, hard walk. Heck, if I was going to spend the afternoon alternating between a cage, a bathtub and a grooming table I’d want someone to run me ragged so I’d be too tired to object to whatever they wanted to do. You’re going to shave my what!? Go for it, man. Just don't wake me up. I only wish that I looked as good after my haircuts as he does. I’m even jealous of his Schnauzer-gray color. It’s a deep and rich shade, my hair is more flat-white than gray.

After dropping Levi off, I grabbed a quick lunch at Wendy’s and by 1:00 I was at the senior hall ready and more than willing to part in a pilot program for people who like to play Monopoly. Growing up, I played Monopoly (or poker) every single night in the summers and just looking at the board game gives me warm-fuzzy feelings---so much so that I have five board and two electronic versions of the game. That’s one less than I had last month. I sold a vintage version based on the businesses in my hometown at the auction house before I heard about the pilot program. Isn’t that the way of it, you get rid of something and shortly afterward, you find a use for it. I hate when that happens! Last week I also threw away an object I couldn’t identify and two days later---after the trash was picked up---I found an 1881 folding tin cup and I knew right away the unidentified object was its cap. Oops! I kicked myself up one side and down the other for breaking the Cardinal Rule for sorting a dead husband’s stuff: Thou should never throw out something if you don’t know what it is. I looked it up and a similar cup sold recently for $32. That’s sixteen Wendy’s Junior Bacon Cheeseburgers I can’t have now!

Tuesday I had to get a blood draw before breakfast, then I hurried home to wait for a guy to come do a fall check-up on the furnace. He was here not long ago because my air conditioner fried itself during the heat wave we had last month. Its fourteen years old so I was happy he could fix it and give it a three year warranty. He said a new one would cost $3,000! No wonder a newish condo I looked at recently didn’t have center air which is uncommon these days with new construction. My furnace now sports a new $230 thing-a-ma-jig and I have a warranty that it will not break down anytime soon. And if it does, parts and labor to fix it are free for the next three years.

Wednesday I had an auction lot closing while the Republican primary debates where on so I was busy doing two things at one time. You’d think by now I’d be used to the scary closings but it doesn’t get any easier. I’d be biting my fingernails if that was my habit. Instead, I’m a ‘refresh’ clicking monster as I track the bidding. My friend who also uses the auction house says he’s over the worry stage and he doesn’t watch the closings anymore. I’m not sure I’ll ever get to that point. If things go wrong, I want to see how and why. Was there an isolated power outrage, did my items’ pictures disappear off the site in the final hour? Did aliens land in Michigan and no one was bidding on anything but the guns, knives and power saws? By the way, my husband’s box of Winchester Cartridges from the mid-1800s sold high enough to keep me supplied with Wendy’s hamburgers for a while. 

Regrets? I’ve had a few. I regret having sold off the city version of Monopoly. It would have been the perfect donation to the senior hall’s newly created board game day. There have been many versions of the game since it was first published by the Parker brothers in the 1930s and I will not downsize my “hoard” again. In fact, it’s tempting to buy even more. Tempting though I hope I don’t give in. But if the creme-de-la-crème in the collectors’ world ever comes up for auction---and it won’t---I would bid. It’s a version that was given to WWII prisoners of war. It contained a secret map, a compass and real money.

The woman’s history bluff in me won’t let me write about Monopoly without mentioning that it was based on a game invented by a woman in 1903. Elizabeth Phillips hoped her Landlord’s Game would teach people about the concept of the single tax theory. The Parker brothers decided their version didn’t need to teach or be moral as long as it was fun to play. It is, boys, it is.

 

Over the years I’ve often thought that life is like playing Monopoly. We roll the dice and as we move forward in life we fall into opportunities and hardships. We get greedy acquiring assets, then we find out how easy it is to lose it all with another roll of the dice. Some people play ruthlessly to win, others just play to go along with the group and they have no strategies for winning or losing. Still others play to have fun, while trying to stay in the game as long as possible to enjoy the fellowship. Those in the latter group are the richest of them all---even if by the time the game ends someone else (like ruthless presidential candidate Donald Trump) owns Park Place and all the hotels. ©

Taxes, Texas and Mourning Doves

Every dawn and dusk my deck rail is the gathering spot for three Mourning Doves to roost. Sometimes if I get up early enough I’ll even find them sleeping in my heated birdbath. Whether they are the same doves day in and day out, I don’t know but a trio of doves has been showing up for over a decade. Given the fact that the oldest known Mourning Dove was over 31 when it died, my doves could very well be long-time residents of my rail. I love the rhythm of life they represent, the sameness of having habits you can depend on and look forward to seeing. They are monogamous birds and I’ve often speculated about their couple plus one status. Maybe one bird is an off spring? Maybe one birds is a widow or widower or maiden aunt who never found a mate? Or maybe they’re all swingers living an unconventional Mourning Dove life-style. It doesn’t matter if we’re looking at people, birds or animals we all like to assign a back-story to what we see before our eyes.

Someone from Lubbock, Texas has been coming to my blog a lot lately. (My FeedJit tracks when visitors come and go and their city of origins.) You would not believe the back-stories I’ve been composing in my head to explain his or her interest in my blog. But mostly seeing Lubbock, Texas, show up on my FeedJit brings back great memories of a vacation Don and I took to San Antonio in 1990. Traveling around Texas the summer was a John Steinbeck kind of vacation. We hit all the back roads, going to out-of-the-way, tiny towns and we met many colorful and memorable people. We got a lot of mileage out of retelling the highlights of that trip including meeting our all-time favorite street person who took a liking to us and who shared her Rule for Living. “Never, ever buy food,” she said. “People throw out enough to feed an army!”  That ‘never, ever buy food’ would get repeated for years to come as Don and I would be walking into a grocery store.

I’d like to ask my anonymous visitor if she/he knows the name of a place not far from Lubbock that was no more than place along a country road that had a post office, a huge barn full of Willie Nelson souvenirs and a replica saloon from the Old West (not open for business) where Willie Nelson supposedly parked his tour bus when he was playing around Lubbock. My husband was a huge Willie Nelson fan and the people at the barn said it was okay to walk around the Nelson encampment if no bus was parked out front, which we did. Over the years I’ve wondered if the saloon wasn’t just tourist trap and Nelson never set foot on the place, but in my husband’s imagination he had walked the same porch as Willie Nelson and that somehow was like going to church.

Change of topic: People who’ve never lost a spouse wonder sometimes why it’s so hard to move forward. They don’t know that the reminders of our loss come at us when we least expect it. Like yesterday I went to our my CPA to get my taxes done. Well, guess what. Filing my taxes for 2013 is my first year of filling as a single person post Don's death which meant my taxes went up and I now owe $1,100. In the past we’ve always gotten money back filing jointly. My CPA set things up to have more taxes taken out of various income sources so that I don’t have to pay in the future, but at 26 months after Don’s passing I didn’t expect there to still be ‘widow’s work’ to wrap up. Duh, I should have known---yadda, yadda, yadda---but I didn't.

I've often compared my financial life to playing a game of Monopoly. One trip around the board you may get to buy Boardwalk and built a hotel. But always hanging over your head is the very real possibility that hard times or the tax man will come along and take all your houses and hotels. The moral of that little analogy is never, ever attach your self-worth to the things or money you accumulate while living. It's the people you've known and the people who you've touched that makes you wealthy. ©

P.S  Thanks to my visitor from Lubbock the mystery was solved! (See comments.) The photo above is of the place I was trying so hard to remember...Luckenboch, Texas. Thank you for, BTexas!