My Old Kentucky Home -- and My Old Rhode Island Home, et al.

It was inevitable. It had to happen.

I got interested in genealogy.  No, I don't care about YOURS, and no, I don't even want to hear my brother talk about OURS. I have found there is little else more eye-glazingly, brain-numblingly agonizing than hearing someone else talk about their relatives.

How do I know such things?  My late mother-in-law did lots of genealogy for her and her husband's family. We have records of her work, and I accompanied her on a few British genealogy projects, including the one where she used the name of a dead ancestor to get into the British Museum to see records there. But I didn't want to hear much of it unless I had a glass or two of wine. Or more.

Also, one of my brothers has been digging up dead people, so to speak, for quite a few years, and used to spam me with all kinds of family documents, photos, and other detritus of the dead.

The documents did have their allure from time to time, as did the page from the Rhode Island Registry of Births, Deaths, and Other Big Doings that he sent me one time. I actually took time to peruse the page and made an exciting discovery: Mixed in there among various male grandparents , I found the name of one of their sons, my dead great uncle.  Just by reading that page, I found out that my paternal grandfather had had a baby brother who died within a day or so of birth. None of us knew that.

Now, THAT meant more to me that all the Mayflower folderol, honestly.  And let me tell you, I do have plenty of Mayflower folderol, on both sides, and I still gotta pay for Starbucks.

Still, despite the discovery of this sad little chapter in my great-grandmother's life, my response to dead relative spam was usually a comment along the lines of "Mom's still alive, and that is about all the ancestors I can manage right now.  I have to worry about the ones that are living, so the dead ones don't matter all that much."  I ticked my brother off more than once, I am sure.  :-)

Things changed, though, on Labor Day weekend, when I went once again to our local Scottish Games, and as before, I was exhilirated, whoo-hooing wound up, about the massed bands of bagpipers, 600 in all. I thought there must be some genetic reason for that over-the-top response, and I asked my brother if he'd traced a particular strand of relatives back to Scotland yet.

The short answer, No, took about 10 minutes to get to, once he started reciting all the begats, but no, he didn't cross back over the pond yet. But somewhere in that conversation, he told me about the website FindAGrave to check out one relative.

That was about 2 weeks ago, and I have been on that darn site every day, a-postin' pictures and a-writin' comments and a-settin' up new memorials.

Can you tell much of my time has been spent with ancestors' graves in Kentucky?

Well, I imagine that has come from my mom's recent death. She was born there, and I have missed her more than I thought I would -- not the poor, ill old woman she became but the woman I grew up with and heard but didn't listen to, so much -- or so I thought.

But I had been listening, and I could tell my brother about other relatives he had never heard of, and I created memorials to them.  By carefully reading existing memorial pages, I found headstones for relatives I had heard about and got them linked up to each other.

I have seen the headstones for great-grandmothers I never had the chance to meet. Thanks to google, I can zero in on the cemetery in the Kentucky countryside where my mother's mother's mother is buried, and when I do that, tears well up in my eyes.  I don't know why, but it happens every time.  And they are not sad tears, or not exactly. I have a picture of her, but seeing where she ended up makes her even more real and makes me feel very connected to her.  That is my mother's grandmother. Those more immediate relationships really bring it home.

They brought me home, in a way.

It struck me that although I had the chance to sit with my father's maternal grandmother while she worked on quilts -- one of which I still have over 30 years later as a wedding gift, completed after her death -- I never met my dad's grandmother, who died the year before I was born, but with whom I share my birth day.

I am just as much Gertrude in Kentucky as I am Harriett in Texas, as much Ethel from Rhode Island as Emmeline in Kentucky.  One I knew, three I missed.

(But thanks, Mom and Dad, for not naming me after any of them!)

So, I have been diligently working on making the connections there on FindAGrave, which has helped me make the connections in my own mind and has helped make my mother's side of me more real for me than it ever was.

And I have found other benefits.  I have found relatives in KIN-tucky that share my new interest, and that's a nice bond. I will have live people to visit when I make my journey to pay my respects to the dead ones scatted throughout south central Kentucky.

I have learned that one family name is all over the state of Rhode Island, as is another one, and so besides the ancestral region of south central Kentucky, where my mom's people are pretty well interweaved, I also belong very much to Rhode Island. I have never set foot there, but I am a-fixin' to remedy that omission.

Perhaps my most gratifying 'mission' was finding the grave of my late mother in law's baby sister. Janice Mary died around age 2 and was buried in Illinois, and then her parents and her sister (my mom in law) moved to California, where all 3 are buried. I found Janice's grave, which had been listed by someone in IL, requested a photo of her headstone, and linked Janice with her family  who ended up in California. It might never to matter to anyone else, but I know without doubt that Libby, my mother in law, would have appreciated the effort.

I wrote somewhere shortly after starting this that I am more firmly grounded, with no pun intended, but there is something that has been very settling for me in finding where I came from, that I actually belong to a whole long line of someones.

And I look forward to learning more about them, with such information as there is, as I work my way back. If all that entails is standing in a cemetery where they are buried with each other, at least I will be in their place and that may be enough.

Goodbye to Mom

I've been away from the blog for a long time, mainly because, like many other bloggers, I just ran out of steam, or ideas, or something, I thought. I used to be all fired up about writing here and really enjoyed sharing ideas and reflections. And then I just stopped back in August.

I hadn't realized I'd been away for so long, but then when I see August was the last date, I realize why: that was the last time I visited my mom where things were pretty much the same as usual.  I didn't go back up there for a couple of months, but when I did, her decline had started in earnest, and my monthly trips to the Portland area apparently took all the mental energy I had left.

That, and the weather.  GAH.

After those monthly visits to check on a health condition that wasn't improving for my mom, and after making some very tough healthcare decisions for her, I got a call in mid-February that she was not responsive. I flew up the next day, expecting to say goodbye to her very soon.

When I got there, she was out of it, but by golly if she didn't rally for a few days when she knew I was there.  On the last day of her life, I spent all morning with her, making sure she had adequate pain medication.

"We give it to her when she asks for it," staff told me.

"But," I replied, "if you don't go in there to hear her crying out, how do you know she NEEDS it and is asking for it?"

["Terms of Endearment" kept going through my head, and I thought to myself, "I'm fixin' to go all Shirley MacLaine on y'all if you don't get going here." But then, they probably wouldn't have known what I was walking about.]

"What ELSE you got for her pain?"

Mom was finally not feeling any pain and even got some appetite back. In fact, she ate a great breakfast and was her usual coffee connoisseur self, complaining, "This coffee's no good.  It's COLD."  (Ha, the thickener didn't bother her but the temperature did!)  The microwave fixed the sludge-thick coffee and she finished the whole darn 12 oz cup.

A little later in the morning she repeatedly said, "Come up! Come up!"  Over and over.  I asked her who was telling her to come up, but she didn't reply, just repeated, "Come up! Come up!"  Hmmmm.

Around 11 am I left her so that she could have her dressings changed and so that she and I could both get some rest. That was the last time I saw her awake.

I came back around 3 pm and she was zonked out.  Staff said she had been 'non-responsive' again. I wasn't sure what that meant, but I said I'd come back later. I got a call around 6:30 that her breathing had changed, so I went back to the nursing facility and spent the next 5 hours with her, watching my mom's life come to a slow and peaceful close.

I imagine she was in labor with me for longer than I was watched her go, so I figure I owed her.
And I wanted to be there.

When I got there and saw her, I knew she was all but gone. Her breathing was pretty much on auto-pilot at that point.  I sat beside her and held her hand; I leaned across her and held her; I leaned behind the head of her bed, over to her best ear, and talked to her and told her all the things I wanted to tell her, things I hoped she wanted to hear.

From time to time I heard her breathing 'downshift,' so I knew the change was coming.  I continued to hold her hand, as I always did, hoping she'd know from that gesture that it was me, the bringer of coffee and new clothes.

Finally, I didn't see or hear her breathe. She was still.  I watched her for a few moments and then called the nurse, Desirae.  She checked her and said Mom was still there. I held Mom and spoke some more.

Very soon, a final check with the stethoscope told me my mother had died.  It was immediately evident.  Her pretty  ivory complexion with faint pink roses on her cheekbones was no longer there.

That was February 21, just before midnight.

When I came home from that trip that Friday, I had my mom's cremated remains with me as carryon luggage.  THAT was an experience. Two trips before I'd come back with a puppy in a doggie carrier, and now this, ashes in a cardboard scattering tube with an ocean scene printed on it.

I had had the discussion with the undertaker about putting those ashes into a great big red Folger's container, but we agreed that would have been too tacky.

However, it would have been Mom.  And hey, it wasn't my idea anyway; those "Bucket List" guys did it.

Oddball thought. Laughing, crying, feeling in a fog for a few days.

What does this have to do with accidental retirement? Not much, really, except that I am more grateful than I can express that I wasn't tied down to some damn  job where I had to scrape and beg for time off.  I have had the time the past couple of years actually to slow way down, and that very slowing down gave me precious time with my mom that I'd never had before.

That's all for now. I may be back.

Estate Planning: What We Can REALLY Pass Down to NextGen

As a couple with no children but a few assets that may or may not outlive us, my husband and I have spent some time creating a living trust. We've revised and updated it a time or two, and it's getting time to make another pass at it.  It's part of getting older and being responsible, I suppose, and making sure that if there's anything left when we're done with the assets we've accumulated over the years, those assets go where we want them to.

It turns out it's a very values-laden exercise, this allocation of our potential financial remains.  We have earmarked quite a few charities, organizations that value what we value, and our trustee tells us she is looking forward to being our appointed philanthropist.  (Not so much on cleaning out my office!)

My husband and I have also talked a lot about the savings and investing habit that his grandparents and parents inculcated in him.. I wish I had learned those things from my relatives, but I don't know that it was a lesson they could pass along. Fortunately, I learned it from my inlaws.

The whole reason we have been able to ride out our 'accidental retirement' stems from those good savings habits that he learned from his elders and we brought into our marriage. We started with IRAs and 401(k) contributions in our 20s, and we never stopped.  (Well, hardly ever.)

Is this happening in our next generations, in our families?

What are they doing to take care of their own future?  And how can we encourage them to be actively seeking a healthier financial future, when they're in their 20s and 30s?

I have often thought about sending the N&Ns (nieces and nephews) a subscription to a financial magazine, or a book on finances; however, my experience has been that unsolicited advice is unappreciated advice.

We believe there is something valuable we can  pass along to the N&Ns, along with the money: an appreciation for the value of saving and investing that may also incentivize them to think NOW of their own financial futures.

What we're leaning toward in our trust is writing a provision for our trust that while our trustee is doling out the estate monies, she can match the N&Ns'  IRA and 401(k) contributions, up to a limit.  What's left goes to our favorite charities!

We are also considering a premium for funds put away before they hit 30, so that they really take advantage of compounding, a great financial tool on its own. Just ask Einstein! It's not rocket science.

Had I been offered that deal from one of my family members, I would have thought very hard about the money I was farting away on stuff I didn't really need; instead, I'd have put something away, even if it were just $25/month, into an account where that money would grow and last longer than the things I farted it away on.  It would earn me even more down the road, potentially.

And hey, I'd keep my Auntie really healthy so that she didn't have to blow my potential inheritance on health care!

But seriously, the best things we got from those who preceded us were some values that have put us in good stead.  I hope we can do the same for those who follow. 

Save those financial statements, kids!

Tick tock.

Can you hear me NOW?

Just recently I've noticed, more than ever, that people don't listen, particularly those in customer service positions.  When they're older, I just figure they perhaps can't hear me; when they're young, I figure they don't listen. They aren't paying attention.  Perhaps because I am not on their text screen?

At our local sandwich shop just a while ago, my husband ordered "A #9, white bread, hold the mayo." I said I would have the same.

The young woman then asked me what kind of bread I wanted. I said the same as his, white bread.

"Both of you?"

!!!!!

And then she asked whether we wanted mustard and mayo. "No, hold the mayo," we repeated.

And then she asked, do you want lettuce, etc., on it?  "Does it come with the #9?"

"Yes," she replied.

"Then, yes, we want all that," and I walked away before I reached over the counter and smacked her out of sheer frustration.

Oh, and then she wanted to ask us how our day was going so far, and what plans we had for the weekend.

Oh, I dunno. Stand here and wait for you to figure out the sandwich order?

SAME.  Is that a hard word? 

We have a majority of non-native English speakers in our area, but this was not her issue; she was as white as the bread on which she eventually made the sandwiches.  I believe the bread has a higher IQ, though.

I don't know what has prompted her short attention span, and I guess I don't want to delve into the reasons now because there's not much I can do about it, anyway.

However, it really does strike me that with this "Silver Tsunami" coming towards our youth, astute business people would be well advised to train their customer service staff to PAY ATTENTION.

I think they train these kids to cross sell and upsell -- or try to train them -- but it becomes so much of an automatic thing they say that they never really pay attention to the responses, and so they miss the whole point.

Just before the sandwich shop, I went into my local supermarket branch of my bank.  As I made my deposit, the teller asked me whether I am a homeowner   I replied I am, and she asked me if I am happy with my mortgage rates. I stopped her there and suggested she take a good hard look at my bank portfolio and then decide whether she wanted to continue. She kept trying to sell me a new loan, a first mortgage, to replace a very small HELOC we have.

I was nice about it, but there again, it would make so much difference if you felt that your bank knew you.  Even the regular branch I've gone into, just about weekly, for banking, trust business, stuff like that?  I had the woman who set up our trust account and who has seen me there many many times stop me and ask me for my ID.  All I was trying to do was correct HER misspelling of my first name on the account into which I had just made a good-sized deposit.

Am I the only person, the only boomer, out there, who would like accurate service and would actually patronize such places if I were to find trhem?

Cunning and Connivery at the Checkout Counter?

Just recently, I've been in pie-making mode.  My first attempt was a pumpkin pie, sugar-free for my husband. I figured pumpkin is healthy.  It's squash, right?  Fiber? Vitamin A?

Keeping health considerations in mind, I went down the aisle at my local grocery store the other day to get the fat free evaporated milk. The national name brand had a price posted, and hey, it was on sale! The store brand had no price posted.

I first went for the national brand, on sale at $1.39, but grabbed the store brand, too, just to see what the non-posted price was.

It was 99 cents.  I told them to keep the 'sale' national brand and I'd take the one for 40 cents less.

A couple of days later, Iwent to the same store, looking for French bread rolls for French dip beef sandwiches (OK, so, we took a break from the healthy stuff!), and on a table in the back of the store, there I saw just what I wanted, and hey, they were on sale! Next to these rolls I saw another brand, no price. 

I took both packages to the front, and once again, the sale brand was more expensive, by quite a bit, than was the similar product (lower in fat and carbs, by the way!) that had no price posted.

I am starting to think they do this on purpose.

Today, while shopping at a clothing retailer, I went through checkout with a nice, chatty cashier who asked me whether I wanted my receipt in the bag.  Sure!  And then, I stopped. I pulled out the receipt and noticed she had overcharged me for one item by $8.00 and charged me TWICE for the ONE cute coral straw hat I bought to wear out in my backyard while gardening. It took her a while,but she fixed it. 

And finally, in my last shopping foray of the day, I ended up back at the local grocery store, where I was going to save another 50 cents per item if I bought 8 'mix and match' items.   I watched that register tape and didn't see the discounts. The 'helper' at the self checkout couldn't figure out how much we were supposed to get back; she didn't have a calculator handy to help her figure out how much 8 x $.50 was going to be, so she sent us to customer service.

We got back our $4.00.  On one hand, I think, "These people have jobs?" And on the other, I see why they do.  If they make enough mistakes or yack at us enough to distract us, we may get home and never realize that we've been overcharged.

I try not to be any more paranoid than I have to be, but I really do wonder . . . and I have learned to watch the prices.

As my Granny would say, "Thievers!  They're all thievers!" :-)

Oprah, Meredith, and Me

When flipping through channels lately, more and more do I see that less and less will I see anyone my age on television.

That is, unless it's those models doing household chores and then with an accidental touch, their immediate landscape turns into the great outdoors and finally, eventually, they end up sitting companionably side by side in two separate bathtubs.  Beats post-coital cigarettes, I guess?

What's up with that two-tub thing anyway?  Middle age sex is that dirty?  I don't get it at all.

Well, two tubs is maybe slightly better than the Depends commercials, or "I've fallen and I can't get up!"

And then this morning, I saw Meredith Vieira leave "The Today Show," as Oprah left her show a couple of weeks ago.  Even Katie Couric is now moving from evening news to a talk show.

It's not that I see myself in Katie or Oprah or Meredith, although I have always liked Meredith's hair, but it's that their all leaving around the same time has gotten me to wondering why.

And I am wondering whether their leaving has anything to do with the rest of the people I see on TV and whether the networks are moving these women out.

Diane Sawyer was just over in Afghanistan. Maybe we should have told her to watch her back!

Just wondering . . . . 

A Silver Tsunami on the Streets of the Bay Area!

Well, I've been a Baby Boomer for a while now and praised and vilified accordingly, and now, thanks to last night's newscast, I'm part of the impending Silver Tsunami ready to terrorize the streets and highways of the Bay Area.

The newscast 'warned' that in the next 10 years, 1 in 5 Bay Area residents are going to be 65 (I think that was how they put it) and so younger residents will need to start thinking about how to have "the conversation" about our not driving when the time comes.

Really?  The younger folks should be worried about me? I am not talking on my phone, or texting, or playing grabass with my passengers, or shaving my bikini line, or smacking bratty kids -- or all of the above!

Actually, I find that over the last couple of years, I've become somewhat more careful as a driver. For example, I no longer drive with the stereo blaring; I want to make sure I can hear sirens coming down the road -- and approaching intersections!  I also find that I watch out for others a whole lot more; I am not being so distracted by daily worries of work, etc., and instead pay more attention to what's going on around me.

Part of that, I must admit, is trying to be a more defensive driver since I find the frenetic pace of the Bay Area freeways getting worse and worse.  If someone is coming from behind me and wants to get off the freeway at the same exit I do, will they wait for me? Nah, they speed up and go around me and cut in front of me, and yes, I am driving the speed limit or maybe a bit faster,depending on the flow of traffic.

The freeways have not been very pleasant around here for a very long time, and they seem to be getting worse. I can finally understand why my elderly friend would only take surface streets. She found the freeways too hectic.  I am starting to feel that way, too.  Even dear ol' 680, which I've always enjoyed driving, isn't quite the pleasure cruise it used to be.

The other factor that may be playing into this is the fact that my life has slowed down, anyway. Since I am not out driving in commute traffic any longer, I am not caught up in something and am not acclimated to the faster speeds and the need for quick reaction times for the idiots driving erratically on the roads.

I am glad to be out of  life in the fast lane, in all respects, but sure wish there was time and space for some slow lane time.

Even the slow lane is the fast lane on our freeways!