My New Life

Though I stopped working in June, I have only begun to feel retired and to understand that this new life is my new reality.  As I was leaving behind work, colleagues, and a paycheck, Sheila was applying for jobs to replace hers, which was ending.  Her company lost their contract in New Mexico and she and all her colleagues scrambled for a place with either one of the companies that won the new contract or with their current employer in another state.

In August we learned that Sheila would be promoted and transferred to Atlanta, effective September 9.  I had made plans before all the uncertainty set in to spend September in Vermont at a women’s fitness facility.  We managed to make those commitments mesh and began our life in Atlanta together in early October.

Everyones’ first months of retirement are unsettled.  What do we do with all the unscheduled hours?  How do we replace the effortless socialization of meetings and hallway conversations?  Can we manage financially?  And then there is the question of identity.  Who am I when I am not what I do?  I experienced all of that plus the upheaval in Sheila’s career.

But now, in a big house in a mock-chateau subdivision in upscale Marietta, Georgia, I am finding my own way into the rest of my life.  I unpacked the last moving box today and guessed at where the napkins rings should go; guessing, really, where I might imagine I put them when it is time to look for them.  I watered the house plants and decided to repot the African Violet.  I put the redwood shavings in the dog houses that Cooper and Lily disdain but I think are necessary for their comfort.  I hung the halloween dish towels on the handles of the double ovens, glad that I had discovered them in that last box on October 31 rather than November 1.  I checked the schedule at my recently joined YMCA for a water aerobics class at a reasonable hour and set an alarm to give myself plenty of time to deal with the epic Atlanta traffic.  On my way home from the Y this afternoon, I’ll stop at the grocery store to pick up a propane tank so that I can start grilling again and I’ll figure out what to do about dinner.  Sheila will come home and tell me about her day while we eat.  She’ll ask about mine and I’ll feel a little less self-conscious today than I did yesterday as I describe the small accomplishments of my new life.

Hemingway’s Cousin Adelaide

My 12th grade English teacher, Mrs. Adelaide Truesdell, was Ernest Hemingway’s first cousin. With a little Googling, I learned that she was 60 years old when she was my teacher – four years younger than I am today. I remember her as slight, gray, fey, and gentle. My 10th grade English teacher had once heaved a glass paperweight at a disagreeable student. My 11th grade English teacher was especially fond of the boys in my class. I certainly remember those two and I even remember some of what they taught me about English grammar and literature. But Mrs. Truesdell stands out for me because of a few words in the margin of an essay I wrote for her class. She wrote, “You write with charm. Write more.”

And so I have.

Here is the essay that earned Ernest’s cousin’s praise.

Woodrow Wilson High School, Section 124-4. November 4, 1965

“Autumn is my season of serenity. In Spring, I feel restless; wanderlust grips me. Winter and Summer eke out unreckoned angers. Crisp air and brightly hued leaves tumbling end-over-end fill me with a deep awareness of the grandeur of God.

I have a perfect seat for viewing the unlimited splendors of Autumn. The window of my homeroom opens onto a corner of the campus with trees, streets, cars, buildings, and people — all subject to the winds, leaves, and briskness of Fall. The streets and buildings remain stolid in the face of beauty. Never still, the trees vibrate, the branches whip about, and the leaves fall to earth.

Throughout the last weeks of onrushing Autumn, I have seen the gradual changes of the shifting seasons. The trees, once green, became a symphony of reds, oranges, and yellows.

The people change, too. They wear coats or sweaters and walk more quickly, as if they were afraid of the season and must hurry out of its reach.

The sky looks colder. Even when the sun shines, there is a darkness. A darkness that invades the being of the world.

The season of death is approaching.

In this time prefacing the inevitable slowness of winter, the world seems to want to increase its tempo. As if to make up for the time soon to be lost, all processes speed up. The living process is quicker, the aging is quicker, but the dying process is the quickest of all.”

Citizen Legislators

I had just arrived at work today when a colleague asked me, “Aren’t you sick of politics?” I made a polite response, something about being tired of the meaningless wrangling, lying, and general bad manners, but no, I’m not tired of the process of trying to identify – and then elect – folks who have the welfare of the people – all the people – at heart.

I’m encouraged that Americans do seem to be paying attention to the current, unsettled state of the relationship between citizens and our government. And it is very unsettled. We have the ironclad partisanship of Obama and Romney supporters, with the full-throated baying about 47%, birth records, religion, race, the economy, Libya … and whatever the 24/7 news cycle has spun up for us to fear today.

More damaging even than that, I think, is the well-deserved opinion we hold about the gridlocked Congress, those representatives who are more directly responsible for the state of our nation and its individual States than the President. The Gallup organization reported at the end of last year that a new record-low 11% of Americans approve of the job Congress is doing, the lowest single rating in Gallup’s history of asking this question since 1974.

So what could possibly be encouraging about that dismal statistic? Well, in the past three days, I have received a number of emails from friends about something called the Congressional Reform Act of 2012 (actually not a legislative Act but rather a proposal to amend the Constitution). The emails begin with a quote from a CNBC interview with Warren Buffett: “I could end the deficit in five minutes. You just pass a law that says that anytime there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election.”

Based on the Gallup numbers and my personal email traffic, it sounds as if we may be ready to change something fundamental about the way we allow our Senators and Congressmen/women to serve us.

Here is the emailed text of the Congressional Reform Act of 2012.

  1. No Tenure / No Pension. A Congressman/woman collects a salary while in office and receives no pay when they’re out of office. No “entitlements.”
  2. Congress (past, present & future) participates in Social Security. All funds in the Congressional retirement fund move to the Social Security system immediately. All future funds flow into the Social Security system, and Congress participates with the American people. It may not be used for any other purpose.
  3. Congress can purchase their own retirement plan, just as all Americans do.
  4. Congress will no longer vote themselves a pay raise. Congressional pay will rise by the lower of CPI or 3%.
  5. Congress loses their current health care system and participates in the same health care system as the American people.
  6. Congress must equally abide by all laws they impose on the American people.
  7. All contracts with past and present Congressmen/women are void effective 12/1/12. The American people did not make this contract with Congressmen/women.

The email also says:

“The 26th amendment (granting the right to vote for 18 year-olds) took only three months and eight days to be ratified! Why? Simple! The people demanded it. That was in 1971 – before computers, e-mail, cell phones, etc. Of the 27 amendments to the Constitution, seven took one year or less to become the law of the land – all because of public pressure.

If each person contacts a minimum of twenty people then it will only take three days for most people (in the U.S.) to receive the message. Don’t you think it’s time?”

Does the Congressional Reform Act of 2012 (or the 28th Amendment) look like the solution? Not exactly, but it’s a good-enough place to start talking about fixing our broken legislative process.

By the way, Amendments either originate in the States (in an Article V Convention) or by a vote by two-thirds of each house of Congress. Congress will only call for an amendment-proposing convention, “on the application of the Legislatures of two-thirds of the several States.” That means 34 State legislatures would have to submit applications. Once an Article V Convention has proposed an amendment, then the amendment has to be ratified by three-fourths of the States (i.e., 38 States) in order to become part of the Constitution.

And if effectively having to get Congress’ permission to propose an amendment didn’t make it even more challenging to rein in Congressional perks, Congress also has the power to choose between two methods of ratification: ratification by the State legislatures, or ratification by State conventions called for that purpose.

Finally, all 27 amendments to the Constitution have happened in a procedural sense by going through Congress and not through proposal by State legislatures.

So … I’m going to forward the email, but I’m not holding my breath waiting for a national body of citizen legislators.

50 Shades of Greeen

We spent last weekend with friends at their lake-front home. Given the state of the drought in New Mexico, it’s a meadow-front home this year. The water that would fill the lake was released downstream. I didn’t mind the altered view at all, in part because at dusk a herd of female and juvenile elk moved out of the tree-line and onto the meadow. Bill set up the telescope on the deck and we watched the slow, grazing procession. The elks’ daily trek brings them from the Jicarilla Apache reservation onto New Mexico Parks & Recreation land, making them as safe from trophy hunters as any wild animal can be in the American West.

Off and on during the weekend we talked about retirement – Alane’s and Bill’s, and mine. They cut their final ties to work last year. I will finish up in July 2014, if all goes according to plan. For them, their retirement is ideal. They live in their northern New Mexico home from April to November, and move to their house in Sun City West, Arizona for the rest of the year. Two very different lifestyles, both of which they love. When I try to imagine myself in either place, I falter on my own Goldilocks conundrum. Sun City is too social and busy and their rural retreat is too remote and quiet. I need to figure out what is just right.

Sheila would like to live outside the city – and I think I would, too. But not too far out. I would like to rest my eyes on fields, trees, and 50 shades of green. But I want organic grocery shopping in town. I want to hear birdsong more often than I hear traffic. But I want a library close by. I want to watch storms roll over the hills and hear the thunder echo through the valley. But I want medical services within 30 minutes of home.

One thing we’re considering is scheduling vacations over the next couple of years in places we might like to settle. Huge swaths of America are already ruled-out, which limits our choices in a good way. We are not living north of the 37th Parallel, which is roughly at the northern edge of Arizona, New Mexico, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Tennessee, and North Carolina. It cuts California in half right around San Francisco. While I could settle in Portland or Seattle or actually any East or West Coast northern maritime region, Sheila, with her Mediterranean nature, would need to be on Prozac to survive the chilly, gray, rainy climate.

Cultural activities—and more importantly—cultural attitudes matter to us, too. Any community that says with pride that it is the “buckle of the bible belt” won’t work for us. I’d like a college nearby, for the performing arts and drop-in classes. A local historical society would be good for me. A cineplex, a mall, a Thai restaurant close enough to go to without having to pack a bag seem important, too.

So, just at the moment we think that a semi-southern small town or the far-suburban edges of mid-size city might work. We’ll plan a few vacations to explore our choices.

Condolences

I learned last week that a friend’s mother has cancer. She is quite elderly and the prognosis is not good. I was told of her illness via a text message and I expressed my sorrow for her and my friend by text, too. With that exchange, I started thinking about the ways in my lifetime we learned of deaths and our customs for delivering our condolences.

When I was young, people would place a wreath on the front door of the deceased’s house to signal that the residents of the home were in mourning. I remember my father wearing a black band on his coat sleeve when his father died. At the end of 7th grade, my friend Libby moved to Laos with her diplomat father and French mother and grandmother. Several months after they left, I received a stiff card, bordered in black, printed in French, that announced her grandmother’s death. The Philadelphia Inquirer called us when my father died to get details for his obituary. I subscribe to a magazine that includes brief articles on the passing of women who have been active in — and loved by — their communities. Over the years, I have received word of family, friends, and acquaintances passing by personal visits, letters, telegrams, phone calls, and emails. I see memorial messages on Facebook now.

In the past, when I heard of a death in my community, I went to the family’s home or wrote a note or sent a sympathy card. I’ve made phone calls, brought casseroles, written eulogies, boarded pets, attended wakes, viewings, visitations, funerals, and celebrations of life.

I thought when I began to consider this subject that I might fall into the notion that there are right ways to honor death; and that our modern, technological ways are not the right ways. My grandmother might have thought that a telephone call or a printed sympathy card was unfeeling and inappropriate. My mother was even more Victorian than her mother, and I am sure that text and Facebook condolences would have appalled her.

But I believe that however we learn of someone’s passing, and however we acknowledge and commemorate it, the support we bring with our attention, affection, and assistance is what matters. Not the manner of our communication, but the message that we care and that our world has dimmed a bit by the loss.

Compensation

It’s my Friday off and I’m at Flying Star for breakfast. I decided this would be a good time to study the paperwork I received from the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) Radiation Exposure Compensation Act department for my claim on my father’s behalf. He was a Navy officer and an atomic veteran who passed away from cancer in 1976.

Daddy was in the Navy’s Civil Engineer Corps and he was attached to the task-force for the atomic bomb tests called Operation Crossroads at the Bikini Atoll in 1946. He and his Seabees built structures on the islands. A favorite cocktail party tale of his had to do with building an “officer’s club” on the atoll. The admiral asked when they’d be toasting the success of the test and Daddy promised to be pouring scotch within 24 hours of the blast. I’m afraid he did.

The June issue of the AARP Bulletin had an article about a woman who received compensation for her late father’s exposure to radiation during atmospheric nuclear tests in the 1950s. I knew that my father’s cancer might be the result of his exposure at Bikini, but this was the first indication I had that the government acknowledged its role in the illnesses and deaths of vets and civilian workers exposed to ionizing radiation.

The DTRA and DOJ paperwork is, as you might expect, overwhelming. Nothing as simple as: was he there, did he die of cancer, are you his heir? Actually, those are the questions, but proving the answers is going to require that I ferret out his Navy serial number, unit assignment during Operation Crossroads, medical records (including diagnostic tests and pathology reports, physician & hospital records), my parents’ birth and death certificates, their marriage license, my half-sister’s birth and death certificates, and my birth certificate and copies of my marriage licenses and divorce decrees. It’s a good thing I’m a crackerjack researcher.

If I succeed with my search, and the DOJ and DTRA agree that Daddy’s exposure and cancer are qualifying events, I will get a nice windfall. Not really compensation for his death at age 63, though, to him or my mother or me.

Pleasure

A friend asked me, “What gives you pleasure?” At the time of her asking, I was gloomy because of yet another example of my inability to understand why people will stab each other in the back, throw each other under the bus, stir up shit. I felt like I was back in high school. My friend was, kindly, suggesting that I get out of the dumps and on with life.

Rather than immediately considering my pleasure index, I spent a few hours plotting clever revenge scenarios. When the fun of that wore off, I started trying to identify what pleases me, as my friend had suggested. It was harder than I expected to get started, but once the first brick tumbled, I was able to come up with a satisfactory list

I started looking at pleasure on Friday evening, while on a recumbent bike at the gym. Sheila was on the bike next to mine, beating herself at solitaire on her phone. I had the set called Favorites playing on my iPod. I realized I was enjoying myself as I listened to the Black Eyed Peas singing “Let’s Get It Started.” So maybe music was a pleasure for me. One style of music, though? No, the Favorites playlist includes George Gershwin, Jimi Hendrix, Bally Sagoo, Gary Clarke, Jr., and Gary Glitter among many, many others. So then I wondered why music makes me feel good. This led me to another discovery.

I like remembering the past and anticipating the future.

Music takes me back — to the first time I heard the song or, for songs I haven’t heard before, to a sense memory of how songs like that song make me feel. Rhythm is big for me. The strong beat in “Rumour Has It” turned me on to Adele last year. The insistent rise and fall of the clarinet in “Rhapsody in Blue” made me buy my first non-rock LP when I was 13. The piano coming in on the snare’s ride in Brubeck’s “Take Five” had me hanging out at the smokey, divey One Step Down on M Street when I was 18. So, music is transport to the past. And my past was generally pretty pleasant. Or, for those times when it wasn’t, I’ve made my peace with it.

Music doesn’t really figure in my thinking about the future. For me, there has always been music; there will always be music. What pleases me about the future is planning. Planning trips, planning gardens, planning parties, planning anything. I like figuring things out. I like planning more, usually, than I like doing. For travel, the destination is fine; getting there is a pain — scheduling, choosing, calculating is terrific. When I was much younger and had bouts of insomnia, I would put myself to sleep by planning a house I would build someday. Site selection and orientation, square footage, shortest possible drain runs, height of crawl space, pitch of roof, number of 2x4s! I could usually fall asleep counting 10d nails.

But, remembering the present tense in my friend’s question, I wonder what is giving me pleasure now?

I’ll head the list with music and planning. Then: moving my body, holding Sheila’s hand, improving clumsy sentences, entertaining my friends with stories, eating tomatoes I grew, petting my dogs and smelling their sun-warmed coats, and almost every minute of every day. Just the little things, the very consequential little things that really make up my life. Certainly not the stuff we think is big and important, like work, politics, economics. Those might be the outcome of life, but they aren’t the planning … or the music.

Poverty in America: Why Can’t We End It?

Excerpts from “Poverty in America: Why Can’t We End It?” By Peter Edelman, New York Times, July 28, 2012

RONALD REAGAN famously said, “We fought a war on poverty and poverty won.” With 46 million Americans — 15 percent of the population — now counted as poor, it’s tempting to think he may have been right.

At the same time, we have done a lot that works. From Social Security to food stamps to the earned-income tax credit and on and on, we have enacted programs that now keep 40 million people out of poverty. Poverty would be nearly double what it is now without these measures, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.

With all of that, why have we not achieved more? Four reasons: An astonishing number of people work at low-wage jobs. Plus, many more households are headed now by a single parent, making it difficult for them to earn a living income from the jobs that are typically available. The near disappearance of cash assistance for low-income mothers and children — i.e., welfare — in much of the country plays a contributing role, too. And persistent issues of race and gender mean higher poverty among minorities and families headed by single mothers.

We know what we need to do — make the rich pay their fair share of running the country, raise the minimum wage, provide health care and a decent safety net, and the like. But realistically, the immediate challenge is keeping what we have. Representative Paul Ryan and his ideological peers would slash everything from Social Security to Medicare and on through the list, and would hand out more tax breaks to the people at the top.

A surefire politics of change would necessarily involve getting people in the middle — from the 30th to the 70th percentile — to see their own economic self-interest. If they vote in their own self-interest, they’ll elect people who are likely to be more aligned with people with lower incomes as well as with them. As long as people in the middle identify more with people on the top than with those on the bottom, we are doomed. The obscene amount of money flowing into the electoral process makes things harder yet.

But history shows that people power wins sometimes. That’s what happened in the Progressive Era a century ago and in the Great Depression as well. The gross inequality of those times produced an amalgam of popular unrest, organization, muckraking journalism and political leadership that attacked the big — and worsening — structural problem of economic inequality. The civil rights movement changed the course of history and spread into the women’s movement, the environmental movement and, later, the gay rights movement. Could we have said on the day before the dawn of each that it would happen, let alone succeed?

We have the ingredients. For one thing, the demographics of the electorate are changing. The consequences of that are hardly automatic, but they create an opportunity. The new generation of young people — unusually distrustful of encrusted power in all institutions and, as a consequence, tending toward libertarianism — is ripe for a new politics of honesty. Lower-income people will participate if there are candidates who speak to their situations. The change has to come from the bottom up and from synergistic leadership that draws it out. When people decide they have had enough and there are candidates who stand for what they want, they will vote accordingly.

I have seen days of promise and days of darkness, and I’ve seen them more than once. All history is like that. The people have the power if they will use it, but they have to see that it is in their interest to do so.

 

Kids’ Stories

About a year ago I started writing stories for kids about the lives of two small-town, midwestern families. Each story is tied to a holiday, with the first one describing a period around Labor Day.

I’ve finished Labor Day, Halloween, and Thanksgiving, but I’m snagged on Christmas. I’ve written myself into a hole, I think, and I’m not yet willing to back up and start over. I have the major plot points for Valentine’s Day, Easter, Memorial Day, and the Fourth of July.

My characters include two 12-year-old first cousins, Kate and Billy, and their parents and Kate’s brother. The extended families include the kids’ grandparents, aunts and uncles, and other cousins. Folks from town, the church, and the school show up, too.

I’m interested in hearing what people think of the stories so far, and so I’m adding “Labor Day” as a page to this blog. You can find it here.