Bits, Pieces and Bright Futures

Times flies by but I often wish it would take the train instead. A slower pace, not as scary in this day and age of Homeland Security trying to keep us safe from hijackers and sabotage. I’ve only been on three trains in my life and two were just short sightseeing trips pretending to give its riders a taste of the past. One even had pretend, gun-toting bandits riding horses alongside the train in an attempt board the train and rob the men of their pocket watches and the ladies of our wedding bands. Fall often reminds me of those color tours by train they have up in Canada. The video clips and still shots are beautiful…until they show the train trestle bridge in Alberta over the Oldman River Valley. It’s over a mile long and supposedly its the highest trestle bridge in the world. I don’t know where I’m going with this post but it won’t be over the Oldman River. I’m afraid of heights. I’m afraid of a lot of things that keep me from being a world traveler. Like getting diarrhea on a plane or getting lost in the back alleys of Calcutta or having Homeland Security not let me back in the country because my last name is a common one in Central America.

One of my Gathering Girls pals just got back from a ten day trip to Africa. Talk about a world traveler! She’s been all over the place including the Amazon---the forest, not the online store. She apparently sold a large parcel of land, then a farm and has no money worries. Along with taking a couple of trips a year, she also bought herself a cherry red Trans Am convertible. Boy, does she turn heads with she parks it off all by itself and gets out. She’s a little bitty thing, my age and not at all what one would expect paired with that car. But is she any happier than I am? Who’s to say? She’s got a couple of kids who look after her interests and a new condo to go along with her car. But I was surprised to learn recently that she and another one of my Gathering Girls pals are going weekly to a widow’s support group. I’ve never been to a widow/widowers support group but my brother went to two or three meetings. He said he couldn’t take all those crying women. Fast forward a couple of years after his wife died and he managed to find himself not one but two girlfriends. Life goes on for those who are not afraid of their own shadows. (I've often wondered if one of us was adopted. He's been fearless since he was four and rode his three wheel bike off a six foot high porch.)

I went to another meeting of my future neighbors at the continuum care complex. Our independent units aka the three story apartment buildings will break ground later this fall at which time there will be a party and they’ll collect another $20,000 check from each of us. How scary is that? The media will be at the ground breaking so someone watching the local news that night might be able to pick me out of the crowd and I will probably go home tired from trying to always stand sideways to the cameras in an attempt to make myself look skinner. They had new schematics for us to view on a large screen that showed the removal of a building they’ve taken out of phrase one and in its place is a green space with walking paths and a Michigan wildflowers and butterfly garden. That will be my new view for the next 10-15 years. Now instead of a community of 72 units we’ll have 52. 

They had a question and answer session while we ate from beautiful trays of hors d’oeuvres and drank wine. One future resident had a mini melt down when she asked about the shower stalls and found out there won’t be built-in shower chairs. I asked if we’ll get to customize the placement of the grab bars…and the answer was ‘yes’. A couple of the guys had questions about financing this 3 million dollar building project and tipping points and if the non-profit parent company is picking up any short falls caused by dropping the 4^th building. Others wanted to know about fire walls and heat run walls and one bright and shining star kept raising her hand and each time she was called on she’d say, “I just want to move in tomorrow” and then there would be a few amen callers responding with, “Me too!” She is petite and sweet and she pulled if off like she was Gracie Allen standing alongside George Burns. 

The management also brought to the meeting copies of their sixteen page, by-monthly newsletter that covers the activities on their other two campuses plus articles. I’ve always found looking at a community newsletter to be a good way to judge a place. Once our campus is up and running we’ll be included in this newsletter because if you live on one campus your ID will get you into activities at all their campuses. Apparently anyone one of us will also be able to submit articles to the newsletter. Oh boy! And there was a whole page devoted to an upcoming residents art and quilt show. Double oh boy! Reading that newsletter made me want to move in tomorrow. © 

NOTE: At the top is a drawing of the complex I'll be moving to. The building to the back left is the one that's been eliminated and replaced with walking paths and wildflowers. The two buildings in the foreground face the lake. Those units are all two bedrooms and the one bedrooms with a small study, like mine, are on the back side of those two buildings. The first floor of the building on the right towards the back is community stuff like the restaurant and cafe, the mail room, concierge service, etc., and there more units on the top two floors. The private street and sidewalks along the buildings will be heated to melt snow and the parking is underneath the two buildings along the lake. A mile long, paved walking trail goes around the lake and connects the old section of this complex.

From Doctor’s Bills to Elephant Bells

I got a bill from the doctor’s office for the first time I saw his nurse practitioner about at my Popeye’s Elbow. $39.00 for the clinic visit and after the “Medicare Insurance Adjustment” the grand total came to $107.43. What the heck? Insurance adjustments are supposed to lower your bill, not raise them by $68.43. I called their billing service and was told that Medicare likes to help you get to your deductible faster. “By making me pay for services I’m not getting? That makes no sense what so ever!” I told her. “I know,” she replied. “You’ll have to call Medicare for a more comprehensive explanation. We can't do anything about it.” Medicare takes forever and a day to send out their Summary Notices but when it gets here you can bet your grocery money that I’ll be calling about that $68.43 “adjustment.” In the meantime I was told I should pay the bill in full. It’s been years since I’ve racked up enough doctor appointments in a calendar year to satisfy my Medicare deductible before November. And I like it that way because that means I haven’t been sick. What a crazy, stupid change in Medicare if it pans out not to be a mistake. What if I didn’t have an extra seventy bucks to throw around on something I didn’t get?

The next day I got another bill from the doctor’s office, this time for $52.00 and after the “Medicare Insurance Adjustment” it was reduced down to $43.39. I called again. I was told the first bill was for the use of the clinic room, the second was for the services of the nurse practitioner. I used the bathroom while I was there so I'm surprised I didn't get billed for a toilet paper and flushing fee! 

Service people saw the surly side of me this week. My irrigation company called two weeks ago and wanted to come out this week Wednesday to turn my system on and fix any heads that winter may have damaged. Great, I could be home then but the scheduler couldn’t give me a window of time they’d be here. “I’ll let you know later,” he promised. He didn't. Tuesday morning I called him and asked if he could give me a window for the next day. “I’ll call you after six when I have the route set,” he said. I replied---and not too nicely, I might add---that I liked their old system better. “What was the old system?” he asked and I told him that the guy who did his job for years before he took it over always gave us a window of three hours in the same phone call when he’d set the date. “I can do that when I call tonight.” “A lot of good that does,” I snapped, “when I’ve had to keep the entire day open for two weeks waiting for you to call with a time!” Fortunately, the young guy who showed up to do the work was a sweetie pie and I didn’t give him a lick of surly or sass. 

Thursday the tide was about to change. When I came out of the grocery store I loaded my bounty into the car, hopped in the driver’s seat and hopped back out to take a sheet of notebook paper off my windshield. In block print, no punctuation or capitalization---a sure sign the writer was under thirty---were the words, “have a happy day” followed by a happy face drawing. I looked around and of course no one was around to see me smile. Then a cynical thought crossed my mind. Maybe someone scratched or dented my car and he/she left that note because someone saw it happen and the note writer was pretending to leave their contact information. I walked around the car, carefully eyeballing the gray metal and plastic. It was fine. I was truly the recipient of a random act of kindness. I kept the note and I’ll pass it on to another unsuspecting soul who will probably wear a silly smile all afternoon like I did---hopefully without my momentary cynical thought. 

Life was good again and it got better on Friday when I went to a lecture called, What Happens When You Tickle an Elephant's Toes? Crazy name but an interesting lecture about the Elephant Nature Park outside Chiang Mai in northern Thailand, which is a place where dozens of elephants live who’ve been abused and neglected. The woman giving the lecture took part in one of those volunteer programs where she paid to spend two weeks working at the sanctuary bathing, walking and feeding the elephants who live there. She’s a fascinating person. She works in a Search & Rescue K9 Unit and has been to over 40 countries. Her vacations are never your standard, hotel and tour bus kind of vacations. She finds these off the wall, ecotourism vacations that I’d never do but love hearing about. Why is it that some of us are doers and others, like me, are their cheerleaders? In my next life I want to be a doer who finds out firsthand that if you tickle an elephant’s toes they "laugh" just like we do and who learns that elephants are so smart they'll pack grass up inside the bells they wear around their necks to make them stop ringing when they play hide and seek with their Mahout. ©

NOTE: Ecotourism is defined as, “tourism directed toward exotic, often threatened, natural environments, especially to support conservation efforts and observe wildlife.” In other words you pay to work to make a difference for good causes.  Volunteer for Wildlife 

Photo at the top is of an elepant bell.

Hiking Africa

If you saw the movie, Out of Africa, the travelogue I went to this week would have caught your attention from the first few slides. They were of the plantation where Meryle Streep and Robert Redford roamed around while filming the movie and where the woman who wrote the memoir it’s loosely based on lived. She was a Danish woman who ran a 4,000 acre coffee plantation in Nairobi between 1914 and 1931. Our travelogue narrator says the place hasn’t changed much since the movie was made and you can even picnic in the exact same places as Streep and Redford did for a couple of scenes, high up on Kenya’s Oloololo Escarpment looking out at spectacular, panoramic views. I used to love that movie. I loved those views and so did movie goers. The movie won the 1986 Academy Award for Best Cinematography.

That was the only civilized place the travelogue covered. It was the starting point to a hiking safaris called The Great Walk of Africa. It’s a trademarked travel adventure tour that covers a 100 miles of hiking 3 to 6 hours a day, for 11 days covering 9 to 15 miles a day. Daytime temperatures: 80 to 90 degrees and at night it was cold enough to need hot water bottles in their cots to take off the chill. There are eight paying guests on each tour paying $7,000 each, plus you pay your own way to get to Nairobi. Along with the guests are four guides---two armed with guns, two with spears, plus fifteen others who move the camps each day and do the cooking and who mostly stay out of sight. The tour group walks in single file, five feet apart and you’re not allowed to talk which makes it easier to sneak up on the wildlife and to enjoy the smells, sounds, sights and feel of Africa as they follow the game trails first along the Tsavo River, then the Galana River in Kenya. It also makes it easier for the guides to protect the guests from danger if they’re not spread out and are paying attention to hand signals.

The speaker, a woman in her forties who lives very close by me, says she’s always had an incurable wanderlust and she’s gone on seven hiking tours like this around the world and this one, she said, was one of the greatest experiences of her life. She’s a paramedic as were a couple of her companions which would take some fear out of being off the grid. Even so, I can’t imagine me---even in my younger years---doing a trip like that. I’d be the one who’d have to go with a medical box full of allergy pills and potions for insect bites and hives and I’d still come back with malaria because mosquitoes love me. The company who does these hiking safaris’---Tropical-Ice---has been doing them since 1987 and they’ve only had one client charged and injured badly by an animal, a rhinoceros, and they’ve never had to kill an animal. A shot in the air usually keeps them from getting too close. The scariest part, our speaker said, was crossing crocodile infested water and they’d group up as close as they could, holding on to the person in front of them, hoping to fool the crocs into thinking they are a large elephant splashing across the river. Rhinos, though, are considered to be the most dangerous of the animals in Africa. They are “grumpy” and let humans know their presence isn’t appreciated.

I will never leave the country to take a trip like that. I will probably never even leave the state. Heck, I’ve even passed on several great day trips planned for this summer through the senior hall. But this speaker was inspiring none the less. “There is nothing better than enjoying the world when you leave your devices behind,” she said, “get out and walk around the block if you can’t go anywhere else.” And I learned that elephant dung is not gross or smelly, looks like a pile of bread loaves and is mostly grass. You never know when information like that will come in handy. She told about coming upon a dead elephant and a pride of lions was waiting in the bush to feed on it, none too pleased to have their meal interrupted. They concluded the elephant had died of natural causes and they called it into the wildlife people who flew in to harvest the tusks to take back and burn as part of their effort to stop the ivory trade. She said they were so heavy she couldn’t even lift one off the ground. One of the ladies in the audience said she thought that was so wasteful to burn that ivory when it’s worth so much. She got booed by several people to which she retorted rather loudly, "Well, it IS wasteful!"

This summer our speaker is giving another lecture about the efforts being made in elephant conservation and I signed up to go. She told us about one of their guides who had spent several decades working for Kenya’s wildlife department and had personally killed twenty-three elephant poachers which is legal there to kill them on sight. And don’t get me started on the fact that Trump quietly reversed a law Obama put into place banning big game trophy hunters from importing the spoils of their kills. The photo of his son proudly holding up an elephant’s tail he’d just cut off still disgusts me. In my book, trophy hunters are pond scum. Hiking a 100 miles across Africa and only bringing photographs back home is more “manly” than killing majestic creatures just for the “fun” of watching them die and hanging their heads on your wall. ©

A National Geographic’s article about The Great Walk of Africa