Getting Shit Done...About Grief!....About Caregiving!

Yes. The water was really that blue. And I found beach glass too.

Or as our 4-time governor, Jerry Brown, might say, Age quod agis. Do what you're doing is what this Latin phrase means, and according to the report I listened to on the car radio this morning, it's one of Brown's favorite Latin sayings. There was live coverage of Brown's inauguration, and I almost got weepy. I think he's the current politician I most respect.

I wrote in a previous post that I'm not making any resolutions this year, but if I were, Age quod agis would be a good one. Go ahead, take it if you need one. Meanwhile, I'm just trying to get shit done which is similar, but not exactly the same as doing what you are doing.

What got done today was finding a new desk chair for my mom (has to be ordered, darn) but finally she'll have a safe chair for her to sit in at her desk. The one without arms was pronounced as unsafe by her physical and occupational therapists. New yoga pants were purchased too which means the stretchy pants that I bought after starting Jazzercise about 20 or so years ago can be retired. Honestly, those two pairs of pants really did get worn to the gym most weeks for almost two decades, but I felt I was in danger of stretching up into downward dog and suddenly finding my ass hanging out. Now I have three brand new pairs of identical black yoga pants. (Yeah, I went to Catholic school for 12 years and wore a uniform every day, why do you ask?)

And I waited on hold for 14 minutes to speak to someone at the City of Baltimore, only to find that my memory did serve me correctly, and that yes, it's perfectly acceptable to pay my mom's health insurance premium weeks late in January because that is just how the City of Baltimore likes to start the new year. They will get those invoices in the mail in a couple of weeks. Any other month that you pay late, you'll get a cancellation letter announcing that your policy will be cancelled within twelve days of the date on the letter. Which in my mom's case would be a financial debacle of proportions similar to what Jerry Brown took on with California's debt after Schwarzenegger's reign.

And also under the heading of unhappy tidings, I researched the cost of a power washing service to clean my boat dock which, as has been called to my attention by the HOA, needs a thorough cleaning. I'm normally all into maintenance and cleaning, but since I really don't get away to kayak anymore, it's like outta sight, outta mind. I'm the disgrace of the neighborhood.

And I am monitoring the fuck out of my mental health. I plan to take the month of January to record my lack of wellbeing in some cogent way and consider getting back on some meds. For those of you in a similarly leaky boat, I found some worthwhile things here:

Resolutions after a Trauma
Your Resolution Absolution
Self Portraits of Living after Loss

And in the caregiving department, I found THIS immensely helpful as I pondered whether or not it would be okay to try and get my mom into assisted living.

And meanwhile, here in Pillville, I'm doing what I do.

Countdown to Baltimore

In a few days my mom and I will be traveling to Maryland for her 89th birthday. The pill boxes are filled. The oxygen concentrator is scheduled to be delivered to my brother's house. We will take with us 4 empty suitcases so she can bring back the things that could not be packed into the car when M and I drove her out here last summer. On that trip her oxygen machine rode in the back seat with her.

Alas, M will not travel with us this time. She will stay home and take care of the house and the ancient cat.

I wonder if someday my children and I will live near one another so that a birthday celebration can be attended by all, requiring only a short jaunt by car.

Meanwhile I must return to my calculations so that I may determine how many of those little bottle of gin to bring on the plane. Let's see...divide the number of miles by the total of the ages of the people who will be drinking the gin....

photo credit for the wonderful picture of my mom: The man who loves me and his iPad--taken just last night.

City of Baltimore: Round Three

The invoices for my mom's health insurance premiums finally arrived today. They were forwarded by my cousin, whose basement apartment my mom moved from three years ago. I cannot  say for certain that she changed her address from there to my brother's house when she moved in with him, but I would bet a sheet of postage stamps that she made a reasonable attempt.

At it turns out the City of Baltimore has a near deity-like omnipresence. The envelope that the invoices were packaged in bear one return address. The top of each monthly invoice bears a second address, while the bottom of the invoice that one is instructed to return with the payment has yet a third address. I wrote change of address letters and mailed one to each of the three different addresses.

My project of setting up these monthly payments for auto-pay must be abandoned. Auto pay does not seem to be an option as there are no instuctions for such on the invoice. And, Baltimore knows, it is not possible to speak to anyone by phone that can instruct me. Ah, well. Should I somehow manage to get a parking ticket in Baltimore, it looks like I can pay it online.

Of further note, my panic about missing the payment deadline of January first has been assuaged. The  postmark on the city's envelope is January 10th. I've heard of "Tulsa Time," but maybe someone should write a song about Baltimore.

City of Baltimore/ Round Two

Oh, I could give you the blow by blow. Who I called. What they said. How long it took. How much of the time I spent on hold. How the last number I tried led back to the first number I called.

But I won't.

What matters is that I have not yet succeeded in paying my mom's insurance premium for January. Or enrolling her in auto pay so the specter of future missed payments no longer haunts me.

There are no more numbers left to call.

Dear Senior Citizens, How do you manage alone?

"I wonder if I'm ever going to get my bill for my health insurance," my mom says to me while I linger in the kitchen avoiding the dastardly coughing woman in my yoga class. Last night the wind rattled my windows, rattled my house, rattled my bones, and my very soul. Without any sleep this could be the morning Coughing Woman breaches my immune system---so I have a second cup of coffee. Oops, too late to go to yoga now.

"What was that you said about a bill, Mom?" My exhausted brain hears the alarm bell, albeit ever so faintly. Out from her bedroom she shuffles with an invoice from December, explaining that the December 1st payment was the last one she'd made. My mother has Medicare, but she also has supplementary insurance through the City of Baltimore where she worked for several years as a janitor in city office buildings. With all of her health issues, she needs that secondary insurance. The upper right hand corner of the last month's invoice carries a terrifying advisory, "If payment is not received by the due date, coverage will be terminated." Last week's trip to the emergency room rose up like an anvil ready to drop. "Uh-oh," I say. My mom went on to explain that the City of Baltimore sends a packet of a year's worth of invoices every January--but they always send them late. The payment is due on the first of the month, but the invoices never arrive in time.

I decide to call the employee benefits phone number listed on the invoice. It's 9:00 a.m. in California. There is no answer in Baltimore. Maybe I mis-dialed. I try again. Lunch? I try an hour later. Still no answer. No outgoing push one for this, two for that message either. Is it a holiday in Baltimore? A week long festival for the inauguration? Martin Luther King Jr. Week? I try the main number for the City of Baltimore. The menu of selections doesn't apply to what I need, but I select for speaking to a real live person and remain on hold for, I dunno, ten minutes? Meanwhile, my mom and I discuss auto-pay options--putting her monthly health insurance premiums on a credit card and enduring the service charge, auto-deducting  the payment from a checking account; why we should do this, i.e. what if you're sick mom, and in the hospital, and I forget to pay it for you? Still, I'm on hold, so I hang up. I grab the iPad and go to the City of Baltimore website expecting to see some banner across it: "City Closed on Mondays," or "Monday is Furlough Day." No. So I scroll through each link to see if we can accomplish setting up the auto-pay online. No. I try the first number again. Ah! "Push one for employee benefits." The person I speak to ensures me that they have the correct address for my mom, that yes, they send out the invoices late every year, that no her coverage isn't lapsed. "I'd like to enroll her in auto-pay," I say. She tells me that the person I need to talk to is on another call. She'll call me back.

It's noon now in California. 3:00 in Baltimore. While waiting, I've checked on my Mom's catastrophic coverage from Care First--which is, essentially, Blue Cross and Blue Sheild, too. My mom thought she'd changed her address with Care First by enclosing notification of her new address with her payment some months before her move here in August. When we finally received the forwarded invoice from them for the next payment, her coverage had lapsed. It took a bit of ranting, but I got it re-instated. It turned out that if you want to change your address with Care First, you need to call them, wait on hold for awhile, and then have them tell you the address of the mail room administrator in Lexington, Kentucky. This address appears nowhere on their invoice. There are no instructions of any kind on the invoice for changing your address. They will, however, drop you like a hot potato if your invoice goes to the wrong address causing you to pay late. But this morning, no worries there. She is paid up currently (after the near disaster of the lapse.) I requested a letter of confirmation. Which I had already requested in writing back in August when I wrote them a letter then after the reinstatement.

I assume that if we had national health insurance in a single-payer model, it would work much like Medicare. Here I am. A person. A citizen. I have this coverage. There would be no dancing around with invoices sent late. No slipping through the cracks. "Ooohhh, this country will never have health care like that!" my mom says.

Oh, dear old people,  especially you who are hard of hearing or with failing eyesight, you who are not computer literate, you whose blood pressure spikes a bit as you struggle to decipher "press 1 for this, 2 for that, etc," how do you manage? From the bottom of my heart, I hope someone is helping you.

Get Wet. Get In. Ride the Wave. Get Frosting on Your Clothes.

I've wanted to live by the ocean, I said, probably ever since I first saw the ocean in a movie.
And you just got here, she said. After all those years. Well, a person just can't do everything.
But you, I said, managed to live in Baltimore during the 40s. There are people who'd pay a million dollars to hear the music you heard.
Oh, yeah, she said.
Ever see Cab Calloway? I asked.
Sure, she said.
Louis Armstrong?
Oh, yeah.
And on we went. From the Inkspots to Glen Miller. The Dorsey Brothers. Bennie Goodman.
I heard about the clubs where she and her sister worked. The Club Charles. The Band Box and the Chanticleer.
And she told me about a crazy Martha Raye act. After she sang her set, she threw a cake at the audience.
People loved it, she said. They didn't care if they got frosting on their clothes.

The 47%-ers in My House

My mother is one of the 47%. She began her working life at the age of 14 after she graduated from 8th grade. That's how life was in the 1930s when you grew up one of the rural poor. Her first job was as a mother's helper for a rich woman who had postpartum depression--though they didn't call it that then. "Never leave the mother alone with the baby," she was told. But one night when my mother was off duty the woman tried to kill the baby even though the woman's husband was right there. Both the baby and my mother were packed up and sent off to the grandparents' house. The mother went to an asylum. There might have been another child-care job after that, and at some point she ran the roulette wheel at a casino across the river in East Dubuque, Illinois. Her parents were quite taken aback the night they stopped in for a bit of entertainment. There was a food-service job for a Catholic men's college. She remembers putting the cherry just-so in the center of the grapefruit halves for the priests' breakfasts. There was waitress work, too, her feet screaming for relief by the end of a busy night. During the war she worked as a file clerk for a big aircraft manufacturer. After that came the night club jobs. Fancy places in Baltimore with names like the Chanticleer and the Band Box where she worked as a hat check girl or taking souvenir Polaroid pictures. "You always had to ask first," she said. "In case the guy was out with another woman." She was the hostess in a restaurant after she returned to the midwest and met my dad there. She raised four kids on a budget that never had any wiggle room. She canned vegetables from the garden, made jams and pies from the fruit trees, sewed our clothes, and stretched every dollar to the breaking point. After my dad died she began a string of factory jobs and finally landed a union job that paid a decent wage. Her final job was as a custodian for the city of Baltimore where she was horrified at how much useable stuff got tossed in the trash. I've never thought of her as a victim--or as someone looking for a handout. Although she'll tell you it was a damn good thing there were food stamps after General Motors told her my dad's life insurance policy "wasn't any good." We fell into the safety net, but it wasn't long before she hoisted us back out.

This year my daughter will be a 47%-er, too, I suppose, since she quit her three jobs to start grad school.

As for me, I'm a taxpayer. I'll bet you my tax rate is twice as high as Mitt Romney's. But I guess we'll never know for sure.

photo credit: Carol Sigurdson Klein

Money, Theater, Cancer and the Radiation Vacation or What To Do if You're a Millionaire

I've been freaking out about money this week. 


I have an immense attorney bill. Apparently, they forgot my  DIRECTIVE of a few months ago.


I have other big bills to pay this month, too. And I'm taking my mom on a "radiation vacation." We're going to stay at a hotel in Baltimore while she gets treatment for the new spot on her lung. I'm going to see if some of THE PLACES she used to work are still in business. I want to hear every story of hers that she feels like telling. We're going to go to the Inner Harbor and look at the boats. Have a drink while we stare out at the water. Stroll in her old neighborhood. Whatever she wants.


I'm doing it, damn it. I'll get caught up. There's a person I CAN'T WRITE ABOUT, and this quote was frequently uttered by that person because way back when I was doing set-dressing for a play by Thorton Wilder called The Matchmaker. This is a line of dialogue from the play:


The difference between a little money and no money at all is enormous...and the difference between a little money and an enormous amount of money is very slight.


Which is exactly what I thought when I took myself out to a play on Sunday afternoon. I had to go, I really did, and I was feeling crappy about the splurge. But when I got there, there was a sign on the door---something about, "economic stimulus," and all the tickets where reduced to $5.00. That's right.  THIS THEATER COMPANY does this $5.00 thing once per run--so you can't see this show for five bucks, but you could see a future one. But even if you paid full price for Heavier Than...it would be worth it.  And so next month when I have extra money again, I'll have to make it up to them because I really didn't expect to get a theater ticket for five bucks. I mean.... see quote above. 


So, dear millionaires, now that you can be pretty certain your taxes won't be raised, how about donating some money to the arts? Or cancer research? Or something.