The Personal Property Distribution Document

Do you ever get obsessed over things that don’t really matter in the grand scheme of life? My latest obsession has been to figure out what the tiny orange light is for on my laptop’s touchpad. It would have been an easy quest for information if I had remembered what that area on my keyboard is called. I don’t use the touchpad because I’ve added the dong so I can use an external mouse. So first I tried to google keyboard schematics to find one that labeled the various keyboard areas, but in order to do that I had to figure out how to spell ‘schematics’ and Alexa was having a PMS day and wouldn't help out my dyslexic brain. Finally, I figured out that googling ‘laptop configurations’ would get me the word I was looking for and from there I learned that I’m not the only person who got obsessed over why the tiny orange light appeared out of no where to drive us all nuts. I was in a large club and some techies took great delight in explaining that sometime in our tiptoeing around the keyboards we must had accidentally tapped twice on the upper left corner of the touchpad to turn the silly little light on and to turn it off we had to tap it twice again. That’s twenty minutes of my life I won’t get back.

I allowed myself to get distracted from what I actually sat down at my computer to do because I have been putting off creating the document I’ve needed to write for over month now. Remember back when I had a Trust drawn up? Everything that had to be done regarding my estate planning book has been done except for a ‘Personal Property Distribution’ sheet of things I want to go to whoever like jewelry, art, family artifacts and my car. You should see the Personal Property Distribution document I had the last time I did my estate planning back after my husband died and before I did a major downsizing to move to this continuum care complex.  It was three pages long and most of that stuff I sold or gave away in recent years. Now, I’m down to twenty-five items on my draft and they’d all fit in a average size suitcase except for my car which may or may not get sold long before I die if my ability to drive safety goes first. 

If you followed my blog during the epic downsizing project that literally took me two years you’ll know my husband and I were materialistic by nature. Don had a T-shirt once that said, “The one who dies with the most toys wins” and, boy, did he try to win that contest. His favorite thing to do on a Saturday morning was to get up before dawn and get to the flea market while the sellers were still unpacking their goods. His family had lost most of their worldly possessions in two tornadoes that hit their farm ten years a part and and I think he was trying to buy back his childhood. He never passed up a collectible toy, hand tool or advertising piece made before 1950. And Barbie Dolls. In his lifetime he undressed more Barbie Dolls at flea markets and garage sales than a whole gaggle of little girls could do in their dreams. He never did find the elusive 1959 Barbie worth today around $8,000 to $10,000 but he did find 6 or 7 that we resold for $100 each which was good price back in the last century when we were buying and selling antiques. Don had the ability to read a book on a certain type of collectible and remember the key dates and the markings to look for.

Now, I look at my list of twenty-five items and think, “What does it really matter what happens to, say, a trench lighter from WWI that my dad had acquired? The youngest members of my family didn’t know my dad and as far as I know none of the middle aged one are into wartime history or collectibles or collecting Tobacciana even if that lighter does looks does like a Rube Goldberg contraption. What do you do as elderly person trying to find homes for stuff? Do you try to explain what something old and useless is and why you like it? Do your best to make them like it too, or do you sell it to stranger who doesn’t have to be talked into anything? Or do you keep it until someone hauls your stuff off to Goodwill where a collector like Don likes to shop to find their hidden-in-plain-sight treasures?

I’m seriously thinking of making a twenty-five page picture book of my favorite old things with their histories included. I know exactly where this longing to keep generations connected to family objects comes from. I didn’t have grandparents growing up but my best friend since kindergarten had two sets, one living within walking distant and her grandparents all told such wonderful stories about all their treasured antiques brought over from the old country. I was still in my teens when I started buying antiques and they spoke to me as clearly as the elderly people in my friend’s family. I could imagine, for example, all the places an old whale oil lamp had traveled before it landed in my hands. My old lamps are still some of my favorite possessions and young people don’t even recognize them as a lighting source today. 

The bottom line is that when I downsized I was happy to sell and give stuff away to people I thought really appreciate the stuff I had. For example, one time we went to an estate sale and many of the things the old man had, had notes attached that gave the history of those pieces. I bought the first pair old long pants the guy had as a child in 1902---a beautifully tailored, tiny wool pair of nickers---and I left his note in the pocket with one of my own when I sold those pants on e-Bay in 2020. The woman who got them was thrilled with the notes and said when she was ready to part with them she’d add her own note. If I were King that’s what would happen to all the interesting objects in the world. They would come with pedigrees. ©

* The pants at the top are actually nickers---knee length---that the old man had labeled "my first pair of long pants." Note the tailored hole in the crotch for little boys to use when they needed to pee. 

Trench lighter were flameless and were used during WW1 so the enemy couldn't see where the soldiers were hiding in dug-out trenches.

 

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. ©