Bathrobes and Property Taxes

Do you know what I dread the most about the time when I (may) have to leave my Independent Living apartment and move down to the Memory Care or Assisted Living building? Aside from the fact that I'd be losing either my mental or physical agility? That's a universal dread here in the land of continuum care living. But the fact that I'd have to get dressed in the mornings on someone else's time schedule is not and I will hate that. (Here I go again, borrowing trouble from the future.) I've never been one to start out my day by popping out of bed and getting into a shower, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, as my mom used to say. She was not a morning person either. 

Not surprising I got my love of bathrobe living from my mom. It made Christmas shopping easy for my dad because he caught on to her favorite gift to get year after year. Can you believe it, my mom's all-time favorite bathrobe is still in existence? It's a long, chenille robe with a peacock on the back, circa late 1940's (photo above). It now resides on a mannequin in my youngest niece's bedroom. When I gave it to her eight years ago she promised not to fry bacon in it, but I'm pretty sure my mother did that too many times to count. Just because she liked living in robes doesn't mean she lounged around in them. I'm the same way. I like to be comfortable when I do housework. And if I need to defend myself even farther, when I was younger I used to break out into pressure hives from my clothing so I had to change out of what ever I was wearing a couple of times a day. After months of experimenting we ruled out laundry products and fabric content. Even today, I'll get out of my day clothes as early as I can in the evenings and stay in my robe as late as I can in the mornings. Neither of which is allowed in the MC or AL buildings.

Still on topic, back when I had a dog I once took him to the veterinary because he had a bright purple nose. I was really worried. The diagnosis was “it’s a fungus” and the cure, he said, “was worse than the disease.” What a quack he turned out to be! The next week our dog groomer picked all the crusty, purple stuff off the dog’s nose and showed it to me and a light bulb went off in my head. It was exactly that same color as my new, purple chenille bathrobe. Turned out the cure for the “fungus” was a good vacuuming. I just googled how to prevent chenille from shedding and I got an answer that was labeled "AI Overview." It said: "Vacuum your chenille item regularly to prevent future shedding." Artificial Intelligence really is better than my own, self-made intelligence. I was vacuuming the floors in the entire house when I could have been just vacuuming my bathrobe. 

That winter I was so sick brightly colored dust bunnies around the house that I’d taken to wearing my chenille bathrobe inside out hoping that would contain the little fuzz balls from jumping ship. I'd washed that robe a zillion times and it still created those pretty purple dust bunnies. I'd even find them on my keyboard! But I wouldn't dare wear my bathrobes inside out now that I'm old because it could be used against me in a sanity hearing, if my nieces caught me doing it. “Yes, sir, Mr. Judge. My aunt can’t even dress herself without getting her garments on wrong side out.” The older I get the more I want to write notes about why I do this or that and leave them all over house and in the pockets of the things I wear. My nieces would find pocket notes, I think, because I'm pretty sure they were aware that after my mom died we found ten and twenty dollar bills hidden in the pockets of her out-of-season clothing. 

There is no clever transition from writing about bathrobes to property taxes. So I'll just jump in here by announcing a new topic. For the last four months our tenacious Residents Council here at the continuum care complex has been trying to get to the bottom of why our property taxes went up 19% this past year and also why we even have to pay property taxes at all, given the fact that we're a non-profit and we don't even own our apartments. Some other states don't tax non-profit care facilities and some counties here in Michigan don't either. It's a topic of conversation you're likely to hear discussed around here on a weekly basis and there's even a bill stuck in the State Senate that addresses this very issue. The Residents Council has been over to our State Capital prepared to testify and they've paraded a bunch of speakers past us for meet-and grills---I mean meet-and-greets. Our tax assessor and city mayor, our state representative, a non-profit lobbyist and our CEO have all been been brave enough to stand in front of a bunch of angry, elderly people to talk about taxes.

Anyway: If you are looking into CCCs as a living option be sure to ask them about property taxes. We were all caught off guard by how much that adds to our yearly expenses. This past year it was $3,000 to $6,000 depending on the size of our apartments. Our sister campus is in another city and they pay half that amount. Our meet-and-greets have been well attended with over-flowing crowds and a common complaint is that our Benevolent Fund, that is contractually obligated to take care of us even if we run out of money, might not be able to handle us all if the tax rates keeping going up. (I'm not the only one who borrows trouble from the future.) They have nine million dollars in the Benevolent Trust Fund but supposedly they can only spend the interest. No one can beat me at the game of borrowing trouble from the future. Already, if you run out of money while living here you are subject to sharing a room but I worry that if there too many of us who runs out of money the CCC could revert back to their humble beginnings a 100 years ago and turn a few buildings into a poor farm for the elderly where we'd sleep in bunk rooms lined up a dozen to a room and we'd have to work in the community garden, kitchen or laundry if we'd want to eat. On the bright side, even that would be better than what I used to worry about before moving here and that was I'd end up living in a refrigerate box under a bridge. ©

Until Next Wednesday! 

 

This is my mom wearing the robe pictured above the Christmas my dad gave it to her. That's me with my eyes shut. I didn't take good photos even as a kid. My mom made the matching drapes and slipper covers on the couch. I just bought a clothe laptop case with the same pattern and colors. What goes around comes around.

 

Living the Bohemian Life and Misbehaving Kids

It occurs to me that I do more thinking about life, than actually living my life. I plan. I plot. I dream of different scenarios of what my future could look like. That’s nothing new. I’ve been doing it as far back as I can remember. Even when I’m busy doing a boring or repetitious job I’ll be transported in my head to another place, another time and that sometimes gets me in trouble, especially when I’m driving on the expressway because it causes me to miss my off ramps. In the meantime, how much of real life is passing me by? Once in a while I’ll get on a kick where I feel I need the discipline and practice of living in the moment. You know the drill: if you’re slicing tomatoes you pay attention to the way the knife cuts through the red skin, the subtle smell that drifts up and how you do your next slices so they’re all even and beautifully fanned out on the cutting board. I can only do the living-in-the-moment exercise for so long---a week tops---before something in my brain calls up images of things like spending the summer on Nantucket, playing the role of a Bohemian artist and before you know it, all my tomato slices or clean socks are mismatched. 

Have you ever looked up the word “Bohemian?” I just had Alexa define it for me and she came up with six different meanings. Picking out the one I like the best, she said a Bohemian is, “A person, as an artist or writer, who lives and acts free of regard for conventional rules and practices.” I know what’s keeping me from spending the summer as a Bohemian artist on Nantucket---it would cost a bundle of money and I look gad-awful in floppy sunhats---but there is nothing but my own inhibitions keeping me from being a Michigan Bohemian. That and I truly am a conventional kind of person when it comes to following the rules of society. So what does being a Bohemian really mean to me? I ask myself for better clarification. 

And all I can come up with for an answer is a wish to be a really, really good artist that has people admiring the crap out of my work and telling me I’m the reincarnated John Singer Sargent minus the scandal of Madame X. My childhood dreams are still my childhood dreams. (It's all my mom's fault for letting me sleep with my first big box of Crayolas.) But have I lived the life where my art comes first above everything else? For over a decade, yes, I did but for the past 35 years art has come to rest at the bottom of the to-do list. You can’t (or a least I can't) achieve perfection at anything without a total devotion and the selfishness that's seems to be its Siamese twin. The most artistic thing I give my time to now is trying to write a shopping list I can actually read when I get to the grocery store.

I was thinking and writing about all this while having lunch at the Guy-land Cafeteria but I got distracted by my apparent low tolerance for children in a place that is normally filled with older people. Every single one of the five kids near me were annoying including the two who were well behaved and looked like they belonged on a Norman Rockwell Life Magazine cover. At another table another pair of whinny kids were making their mother look like a slug with no ears. The little girl---about four or five---had never been introduced to a comb or brush and I expected cooties to escape her head and come over to my table. Her older brother kept standing up in the booth to get a better view of the other diners. Across the aisle from me another mother was telling her son to put his shoes back on or she was going to pull his pants down and whoop him in front of everyone. He no more than got his shoes on when Stand-Up Boy kicked his shoes off and in the direction of the mom who threatens bare-butt spankings. Stand-Up Boy’s sister decided that was a good time to push her whining up to a higher decimal point and demanded that her French fries be cut in half. Who does that?

I had gotten a chocolate brownie to go with my grilled cheese sandwich which was a good thing because I needed all the comfort foods I could get, but I was wishing my mom had been there with me. Her kids or not, she would have gone into drill-sergeant mode and told Whinny Girl to straighten up or she’d give her something to whine about and she’d have told the shoeless boys she was taking their shoes away for a week. “Don’t want to wear shoes? Let’s see how you like walking on those hot sidewalks outside without them.” It’s at times like that when I know the Universe knew what it was doing when it didn’t give me the power to propagate babies. Back in the day, my mom might have been praised for her methods of controlling children but in today’s world I would have ended up in Social Services Prison where being a Bohemian in mind, body and/or spirit would not be tolerated. ©


Note: The Painting at the top is one of John Singer Sargent's. Madame X is at the bottom. It was originally painted with the one of the dress straps falling off her shoulder which shocked the art world and was labeled "titillating" and "indecent." Yes, slut shaming in 1884, at a time when the art salons were filled with classical paintings of nudes. Figure that one out. He repainted the strap after the painting's debut but her reputation never recovered. In 1916 when he sold the painting to the Metropolitan Museum of Art Mr. Sargent renamed it to Madame X, not wanting to cause the socialite more grief by having her name forever associated with the work.

Cooking With Mom and other Curious Memories

My life is so boring! How boring you ask? Boring enough that the most exciting thing that happened all weekend is I got a new memory foam and mattress pad for my bed. New sheets, too. Wow, aren’t I living high on the hog! And that brings up a little known fact—at least to city dwellers like me: When a mother pig is laying down and her piglets are suckling from the top row of teats they fare better than the piglets who suckle from the bottom row, and there are scientific reasons for that but they all boil down to the piglets on the top are getting more milk. I found that out while trying to research where the expression, ‘living high on the hog’ came from. (Not to be confused with ‘riding high on the hog’ which is an entirely different idiom if you own a HOG aka a Harley Davidson motorcycle.)

Living high on the hog is an expression my mom used when I was growing up and you’d think it was one of those phrases---like so many others we use---that comes from Shakespearean times, but it’s not. The earliest reference that’s been found in print appeared in the New York Times, in March of 1920: “Southern laborers who are ‘eating too high up on the hog’ (pork chops and ham) and American housewives who ‘eat too far back on the beef’ (porterhouse and round steak) are to blame for the continued high cost of living, the American Institute of Meat Packers announced today.” The idiom had its heyday in media the ‘40s and that makes sense that my mom, a young mother and housewife in that time frame, would incorporate the saying into her language bank.

Growing up, my mom had a strange quirk when talking about meat that to this day I can’t ferret out a reason why she did it. When someone asked her what she was cooking or serving for dinner, she’d always say it was an “old dead” chicken or cow or pig. I remember going into a supermarket in my early twenties and standing in front of a meat case, with no idea what the various cuts of meat were called. I knew how to make roast beef if the slab of meat was sitting in front of me but I didn’t know its name to ask the man at the meat counter to give me what I needed. Back in those days meat didn’t come shrink wrapped on Styrofoam trays with convenient labels stating its cut. 

Now, it doesn’t matter. My full repertoire of cooking meat is (and has always been) limited to roast beef, grilled steaks, baked chicken, salmon or bacon done in the microwave, thick pork chops cooked in a crock pot, fried hamburger for chili and thin sliced steak or chicken in a stir-fry pan. I’m actually quite surprised my list is as long as I just stated, having spent my entire adult life claiming I can’t cook. More accurately I suppose I should have been saying, “I’m too insecure in the kitchen to trust my cooking enough to invite anyone over.” It didn’t help that back in the day when I actually tried to learn how to cook from my mom, she didn’t make it easy. For example, I loved tapioca pudding growing up and her tapioca always tasted so much richer than mine. One day I went to her house and asked her to make it while I watched. “You just follow the directions on the box!” she insisted. But the problem was, she didn’t. Her tablespoons were heaping, not leveled off like I’d learned to do in high school home-ec class. She also added extra egg whites and more vanilla than the side panel recipe on the box called for and she didn’t even realize she was doing it. (I just remembered something---my mother called ‘tapioca’ fish eyes when I was a kid too young to know better.)

Mom made a lot of soups---good soup---and never used a recipe and I did the watch-and-learn a couple of times trying to root out her secrets. But she never measured the spices or other ingredients she used and she always incorporated left-overs into soups so I never got a single recipe out of my once serious attempt to write down Mom’s recipes. And to this day there was one spice she used in just about everything that I still can’t identify. It looked like baby spiders floating on top when she’d first put it in and growing up that’s the only name I knew it by. "But Mom I've got spiders in my soup!" "Just eat them, they're dead!" I do make a pot of soup every once in a while but I don’t puree or consult recipe books, just like my mother didn’t do. Sometimes my soup is actually pretty good. Other times I know if I could just figure out how to buy those “baby spiders” my soup would be much improved. 

My only real claim to fame in the kitchen is at one point in time---the ‘70s and then again in the first decade of this century---I baked a lot of breads. I wanted it to be my signature claim to kitchen fame. There is nothing better than eating homemade sourdough bread with homemade bean and bacon soup and having fish eyes pudding for dessert. Now, that’s living high on the hog in my book. ©

Photo: That's Mom at the cottage, circa mid to late '70s?

Friends who Read Blogs and the Mom I Still Miss

I have a curious friend who knows I have a blog but she isn’t very computer literate which translates to she can’t find it and she’s tried. Several times when the topic has come up I’ve jokingly said, “If I told you how to find it, I’d have to kill you.” I debate in my head whether or not I should just give her the web address. I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of people in my off-line life who read my blog and I like it that way because it frees me to write without the temptation to white wash my words to square with the filtered person I frequently show to the world away from my keyboard. I trust these five people to still like me even after reading my deepest thoughts. And more importantly, I trust them not to tattle on me if I write about someone we both know.

The year that Don died, I did put the web address in my Christmas letter but to my knowledge only three out of all the people on my mailing list ever stopped by. I get that. I really do. Mostly, it’s other widows who are interested in how newbie widows are handling that first year. And by the time I turned into a seasoned widow who was no longer fluctuating between crying in my beer and being the brave little trooper I came to appreciate the advantages of keeping my online and offline lives separate. That probably explains why my petty inner child is not keen on inviting my curious friend to my blog. My inner child can be quite bullheaded, a word my mother used often to describe me when I was growing up. Bullheadedness in childhood can turn into a useful tool in adulthood. If Mom were here now I’d point out that being bullheaded/persistent, if channeled in the right direction, gets things done. Sticks and stones can hurt your bones but words can never hurt you---unless it’s your mom drilling them into your head.

I don’t write about my mother often. She was a complicated person and I’m afraid I won’t be able to do her justice. She could be a tough disciplinarian and if I lingered too long on that point you’d get the impression she was a hard woman. For example, if I didn’t do the dishes before rushing out to have fun I’d find them piled in my bed to do before I could go to sleep at night. But if I told you she was affectionate with her family and compassionate with others in bad situations, you’d rightly get the impression she had a warm and loving nature. Case in point: whenever my uncle drank too much and gambled away his paycheck my mom slipped her sister money to help feed their kids. At Mom’s funeral I heard similar stories of her quietly helping others. But if I told you my mother was always squirreling money away for rainy days you’d get the impression she was a miser. When she died we had to check the pockets in all her clothes before donating them.

To understand my mom it helps to know that her own mother died after giving birth to my mom’s sixth sibling. She was ten years old and after that all the kids got shuffled off to live with other families across several counties. Mom, being the second born and deemed old enough to work, was sent off to earn her keep at her grandmother’s boarding house. She would tell a story about how all the tablespoons in the house would disappear when meals were made because her grandmother would taste something on the stove, then drop the spoon into the pot. She’d repeat that over and over again and all the spoons would come clinking out when the food was plated. By her early teens Mom had dropped out of school and was working first as a live-in housekeeper, then as a waitress living on her own in a rented room. Her dad would stop by the restaurant regularly to ask her for money. He drank away his widower’s grief until he drank so much he turned into an alcoholic. 

Mom married my dad when she was twenty-six years old and she didn’t talk much about those years when she was out on her own. But I do know that all that time working as a waitress turned her militantly against the system of tipping in restaurants. She thought if we did away with tipping the restaurants would have to pay fair wages. A woman could work her fingers to the bones taking care of a lot of customers, she said, but it was the flirty waitresses with big breasts who made the most money. A couple of times I saw Mom sneak part of the tip money off the table that my dad would leave behind. Bad service? Flirty waitresses? Rainy day fund running low? Your guess is as good as mine.

Mothers and daughters have unique relationships and I leave it to others who knew us both to decide if I’m anything like my mom. One thing I know for sure is she did her best to see that my brother and I had the opportunity to pursue whatever after school activity that we showed an interest in. She was the leader of my Blue Birds, Camp Fire and Horizon Clubs, she volunteered to help on school field trips and was determined I would get a college education. My mom also knitted and crocheted beautifully and played records when she was home alone. The only “mother thing” she didn’t accomplish was to teach me how to cook and that we can chalk that up to me being too bullheaded to learn. She died on an Easter Day in the early ‘80s and while Easter changes dates every year I associate the holiday with losing and still missing her. And it should be noted here that my brother and I still argue over who Mom loved the best.  © 

Photo at the top: My Mom (age 30) and I (age 2 weeks old) on the day we were released from the hospital, and that's my brother.