Picking up the pieces

Well, by now I am at least able to take full breaths and push the panic down to where it doesn't debilitate. I have cried, sworn, slept fitfully, and also had to process Leonard Cohen's death. Watching the news and seeing the smug faces of Gingrich, McConnell and the like still gives me a queasy feeling.

But, here is what I have decided.

I am involved with local government as a Council Person. I am one of two females. To be honest, local government doesn't really involve much partisanship. We vote about which roads to pave, whether to buy a new garbage truck, things like that. The President of Council is a well-meaning man who has been serving for many years. In private once, he told me what an asset I am and that he is happy I am there. In public, he makes jokes about females. But no more in my presence. I plan to call him out about it the next time it happens, the more people there, the better.

I have many relatives, friends and acquaintances who are very conservative. Some of the acquaintances may drop off my radar screen, because turning 60 has helped me reset priorities about how I spend my time and my serenity. With the relatives and friends,  for the most part, there has been an understanding that we will always disagree, so we rarely go there. I usually pass by their facebook posts and choose not to respond in face to face conversations. They are people I love, even if I don't love what they believe.

My issue is that I was raised by a family whose background was of not having much to spare. My mother was one of eleven siblings, eight of whom made it to adulthood. My grandfather, whom I never knew, was injured in a steel mill before the days of unions and protections. So, my Granny went to work and he stayed home and cooked and baked and took care of the children who still needed caring. They both cried almost every day about that. She worked in restaurants and cleaning for people and doing whatever it took to put food on the table.

My mother, 90, lives with us in the house where she was born and raised, where we moved in 1980 to take care of my grandmother. The defining characteristic of life in this house has always been to share and welcome anyone and give them what they need. She talks of how my grandfather would never let anyone leave without having something to eat or drink. And how he stood to one side every day at dinner and didn't eat until he was sure his children had had enough.

That attitude is part of the very structure of this place. I enjoy having people here, and we have made friends of many strangers who have passed through. Throughout the years, we have opened our home, sometimes for months, to people who needed a place to stay and help in whatever endeavor they were involved, whether it was attending school, trying to find a permanent Pittsburgh home, or passing through on their bicycles as they journeyed through the U. S.

We never stopped to think about whether they "deserved" our help and hospitality. We didn't vet them through any agency to see if they might be unworthy. We just opened our door. To be sure, in some very few cases, we may have felt that they actually could have stayed elsewhere without great burden to themselves. But, even in those cases, we found their company and conversation to be interesting enough to have them back.

When I talk to anyone having a bad day, or going through a particularly rough period, or just trying against odds to accomplish something, my immediate reaction is to start thinking about how I might help. Most of my family is the same. I have a cousin whose daughter recently donated a kidney to a 4-year-old stranger, surpassing anything I have ever done to boost someone's efforts or ease their way.

That is why when I hear people talk about whether others "deserve" the help they might be getting, whether through health care, or EBT, or whatever it may be, I literally don't understand the conversation. When people need help, they should get help. Period. It is what Jesus did, it is what my grandparents did, it is what I do. And when the same people who question this consider themselves good Christians (and I know they do, because they tell everyone), it confuses me even more.

This week, we all suffered a blow the effects of which wont be known for a bit. People have been sharing their thoughts. But, here is what else we need to do: act. Share your thoughts through your actions. I have contacted the local Democratic Committee to see what steps I can take to help make a difference in the mid-term elections. I will call out those who use sexism and racism and other forms of intimidation against those of whom they dont approve, when it happens. Most of all, I will continue to help others, regardless of whether they seem to be deserving of my help. Because that is what I do and that is what I think we should all do.

2015 buyer's roundup

So, I have read many reviews of 2015, ranging from best movies to worst Trump quotes. We are in the process of making some changes in the house, both minor and major, and so have been doing more than our fair share of adding to the economy. We usually do consult customer reviews of products we are considering, but if I have friends who have experience with certain items, so much the better. And every now and then, something exceeds expectations, always a pleasant surprise.

In no particular order, here are my favorite purchases of 2015:

Our 4K 55" television. I had no intention of replacing the flat-screen Vizio that still seems new to me until our neighbor and friend mentioned that her husband was having trouble seeing their tv because of vision problems and she wanted to get him a new bigger screen for Christmas. She was going to opt for what seemed like a super deal, but involved an unknown brand. We decided to do a swap and give her our tv, a 42-inch HD that was five years old and hopefully has some good hours left in it and replace it with the new set. I didn't think I would notice the difference, but it is amazing. There is almost a three-dimensionality to the picture, and it amazes me every time I turn it on. P. S. Costco rocks!

Revlon paddle brush dryer. I am still enjoying long hair, which might seem strange unless you know how short my hair was for 20 years. It has just enough wave to be annoying, but not enough to make it  beautifully curly. I use a keratin treatment and a smoothing shampoo, and I was drying it with a regular dryer and a round brush. I spotted an ad for this dryer and thought it might be worth a try. It does exactly what I want it to with my hair and saves me time, space in the bathroom drawer and is much easier to use. 

Pre-lit Christmas tree. We held out, always taking pride in not replacing something unnecessarily, but there it was in Costco, with its switchable lights and remote control. We took the plunge, and I must say that the 10 minutes it took to assemble (as opposed to two hours), was worth every penny. 

Water-Pik water flosser. I have always had a problem with accumulating plaque, and that is probably enough said. After my last dental checkup, which included the half-hour of scraping and other indignities, I decided that see if the Water-Pik would make a difference. Costco (hmm, they should pay me!) had one which included a smaller travel unit, so I have been able to use it every night except during our trip to England, and I think it is making a difference. I will know at my next checkup, and just like the Christmas tree thing, the les time spent doing that the better.

Apple Watch. You all saw this one coming, right? As David Pogue said, no one "needs" one of these, but I decided to treat myself last spring and have not regretted it. It has helped in exactly the ways I hoped it would. I can discreetly check incoming calls when I am at meetings, I can see who is calling when I am on the bike, and in a pinch, answer. It can check emails quickly and track my daily exercise and activity, and I can even make it tap my wrist every time the score changes in a Penguins game.

So, for what it is worth, those are y thoughts about those particular items. Sad, in a way, that we are so surprised when something turns out to be worth it, but hey. Better than the other way around. 

Shuffling off this mortal coil

I read a theory once that the mobility that came back with our generation (remember that our grandparents and great-grandparents were the ones who moved across an ocean) was an attempt to hide from our mortality. If you don't watch familiar people growing old, you can ignore growing old altogether. 

Living in the house I grew up in shoves it into my face on a regular basis. Most of the neighbors who were here and part of the "village" that raised me are gone. I have very vivid memories of family and friends stopping by, and daily life with my Granny and my uncle because we lived here with them. My mother and I both grew up in the house where I live now. 

It was pointed out to me that this is a particularly Pittsburgh arrangement. Evidently there are more people who live in a family property here in Western Pennsylvania than anywhere else in the U.S. My husband and I have made many changes to the house and yard over the years, but it remains essentially the place I have always been. I was once even interviewed as part of a feature newspaper story about this phenomenon.

My mother's aging has been particularly difficult. She has suffered almost every illness known to medicine with the fortunate exception of diabetes. She has had several serious falls, and sometimes debilitating depression. By far, however, the worst thing has been the post-herpetic neuralgia that resulted from shingles back in 2005. She is never without pain. 

She moved in with me and my husband after knee-replacement surgery in late 2011. So I am constant witness to her physical and emotional decline. She can't fix any of her own meals, can't dress herself, needs help with the smallest of daily tasks. Nonetheless, she soldiers on. She has one of those devices which is a set of pedals that can be worked while sitting in a chair. She faithfully pedals 200 stokes while hooked up to her oxygen concentrator. She works therapy putty in her hands while she watches television from her bed. She uses her one-pound weights while sitting and talking with us in the living room. And every Friday she irons the four shirts my husband wore to school that week.

Her appearance has remained important to her. Hair is done weekly, and acrylic nails redone every few weeks. We match her outfits and she gets compliments everywhere we go. She doesn't leave the house without earrings. But there is a sadness to her life, rooted in her aloneness. She is the last of her immediate family: mother, father, ten siblings all claimed by death before her. My father has been gone for nearly twenty years. Many of her friends and most of our neighbors have died, and at 87, I am sure she thinks about what happens next. 

Recently, her oldest friend was convicted of third-degree murder. He was her childhood buddy and high school sweetheart and they had reconnected in recent years. He shot a man during an argument and shocked us all. My mother knew he owned the gun and worried about that, but he felt safer in his home with it. We are sick over the whole thing: a man is dead, a 90-year old is going to prison, both families are changed forever.

But I have a perspective on the situation that I only gained because of taking care of my mother and witnessing up close the powerlessness that comes with this kind of aging. I think that geriatric depression is greatly under-recognized and under-treated. Just stop and think about how you would feel if all of your choices were taken away and you had to depend on someone, even if a loved one, to do everything for you. 

The man had built up a business, raised a family, taken care of everything all his life. Gradually, he had trouble even caring for himself. In their frequent conversations, he talked about how tired he always was and how he missed the past when he felt useful and normal. 

None of this justifies taking a man's life. But I think I have a window into the souls of the elderly. Even those who have remained relatively vital, and I know several of them, admit to thinking about their mortality. And now I do, too, theirs and mine. I am hoping to remain vital; I do not have the health problems my mother had even when she was much younger than I am now. I exercise and eat well and try to stay mentally fit. But we can't predict when an illness, an accident or the normal aging process can rob us of what we take for granted. Not sure yet how to deal with all of this. But definitely admitting it is there to be dealt with. Hence my current love affair with the Serenity Prayer. Amen.

There are too many people in my kitchen!

Anyone who knows me well knows that I cook, therefore I am. So it was no surprise the other night that my dream involved my kitchen. Though retired, I juggle many activities.  With lots of help from some friends, my sister and I take care of my mom, I work very part-time at Pitt Medical School as a Standardized Patient, I serve on our Borough Council and chair the Planning Commission and in between try to have a life. 

This coming June, our friends from England are crossing the pond to spend a few days here in Pittsburgh and then the six of us will head down the Great Allegheny Passage to the C & O Towpath and on to D.C. on our bikes. We can't wait to see them, and had a flurry of preparations back in November setting up accommodations for the trip. Yes, we had to do it that early. Finding rooms for six in the peak of bike touring season on one of the most popular trails in the country meant early planning. 

After the itinerary was set, the next task was to stock up on wine. Since we normally drink French, Italian and South African wine when we are with them in England, I had decided that we would go with American wines while we are here. I have been collecting since January and have a little over a case now, to be supplemented with some "fizzes," as they say. 

Things have been rather hectic here of late. My new tenant is out of town on a school research trip. If she were still living in her previous place of residence, her housemates could have taken care of her dog, Mac. She is here alone, however, so I agreed to walk him several times a day, since I have a vested interest in preventing him from using the interior of my house as a potty. He is a good dog, well-trained and pleasant, but it adds a level of difficulty to days that are already packed. My mom has been extra tired of late, and we have a round of doctor appointments all squished into March since January and February's weather caused cancellations when the weather was just too bad for her to go out. 

I guess things had just piled up, and as they do, came out in a dream. In the dream, my friends were already here. I was trying to prepare dinner, but for some reason the house was full of people, all demanding my attention. My kitchen, especially, was attractive to them. My brother-in-law kept trying to get me to taste wine he had brought, my mother stopped by with giant chicken breasts that I decided needed to be incorporated into the dinner. At some point, I realized that all wine I had stockpiled was already gone and it was only their first day here. My neighbor came through to wash her hands at my sink and her grandson wanted me to help him practice for a job interview. You get the picture. 

Eventually, I just stood in the middle of the kitchen and yelled, "Everybody has to go into another room!" I woke up laughing about the whole thing, because everything about it was so, well, me. I love nothing more than to cook for friends. People do tend to congregate in the kitchen and I love to talk with them while I work. But once in a great while, it is too much. And now, I know that sometimes I need to protect myself from the kitchen becoming overcrowded, both realistically and metaphorically. We all need to clear our minds once in a while, step back and remember that we can only do so much. And then ask people to clear the kitchen. 

One Adam-12

You know your life has taken a strange turn when you find yourself chatting with police officers after midnight on a Friday night about how to break into your own house. (For the record, the best way to do it without breaking glass is to drill through the doorknob lock). The route to this means of accessing my own property is a long and circuitous one, to be sure.

It actually started in the 80s, with the demise of the steel industry. We were newly married, my father lost his job, thousands of people fled Western PA for prosperity elsewhere. Those who remained were either retired early against their will like my dad, retrained into more relevant jobs or just descended into despair and crime. The 90s came with their crazy Wall Street boom, real estate bubble, the birth of the variable rate mortgage, and more thousands fled to suburban greener pastures, leaving behind those of us who knew that despite its shortcomings, this area is a wonderful place to live. Close to downtown and Oakland, yet removed from the fray, we soldiered on, happy with our short commutes and long-time neighbors, whose quirks we preferred to think of as "colorful" rather than just plain wacky. For us at least, the grittiness was part of the appeal. That, and it was very affordable. Moving in to take care of my grandmother, who was 90 at the time, turned into a lifetime commitment to a very worthwhile cause.

As long-time neighbors died off their offspring, ensconced in suburban comfort, sold off their childhood homes for bargain prices to landlords who were only interested in the profit they could make. Over time more and more houses became rental properties with absentee owners who did not bother to vet their tenants well. Many of those tenants had "five-minute visitors," and property values overall fell. 

The police were very cooperative in keeping an eye on things, and the most troublesome residents did not last long here. And although everyone who came to visit agreed it was a great neighborhood, families did not flock to live here. Those of us who had just stayed became resigned to keeping an eye on things and enjoying our little corner or paradise, property values be damned.

So back to the police officers. Early last summer, we rented my mother's house to a medical student and his wife. My mom moved in with us two years ago, and we did not want to sell her house outright for several reasons. A one-bedroom house a few doors down had been for sale by owner for several years. We knew the owner, he had renovated it for his own daughter several years before, but she had moved because of her husband's job. One day at dinner, I said, "Maybe we should just buy Ray's house and rent it out, since we are already landlords." I had expected to be shot down by my husband and mother, but somehow there we were seriously discussing the idea. Our financial planner vigorously approved as well.

We bought the house a short time later and realized we could wait for the right tenant. And we found her. She is a graduate student in Pitt's social work program, a delight who was eager to start "living like a grown-up," as she put it. Very responsible, very social, very inexperienced with northern winters. From the south, she is not familiar with the realities of snow and freezing temperatures. In short, she thought that the heating system is comparable to lights: turn it off when you are not there. So when she dropped off a load of her things the week before her lease began, that is what she did. Combine that misunderstanding with last week's negative temperatures, and you end up with frozen, exploding radiators. 

This is why one buys landlord/homeowner insurance. Frantic phone calls to the agent, the plumber and the water company set us on track. Unfortunately, after an initial survey of the damage on Friday afternoon, the plumber locked a lock to which we had no key. Hence, the police. That night, because everything thawed, we could hear water running, but couldn't get in. A call to 911 brought two of our local officers with whom we debated the least destructive way to break into a house. (Drilling through a lock, remember?)

The damage seemed daunting. The first floor was flooded, the toilets were frozen, radiators had literally exploded, spewing dirty water through the only carpeted area in the house. So we turned off the water, brought the shop vac down and set things as right as we could at 1:00 a.m. 

The weekend brought an assessment by the plumber, a new meter from the water company and many  funny exchanges with the tenant, who was mortified at the havoc she had wrought. All is well that ends well, and we are on the way to a fully functional heated home. Theoretically all will be set right today as a result of an all-day stint by the plumbing crew. The tenant will be happy to have running water and heat, and oddly, we are not discouraged.

We will continue to try to rebuild our neighborhood and populate it with enthusiastic (if inexperienced) young people who will help revitalize it. Wish us luck. I think we are going to need it.

Random thoughts

What a week. We got home from volleyball perfectly fine on Friday, and on Saturday Bob woke up with chest congestion. We quickly evacuated the Mamá to my sister's house. From what I could see of his "affliction," it could have done her in, her lungs being her weak point. Sunday we visited MedExpress, by s request. That kind of scared me. "The flu," they declared. So we are treating symptoms with prednisone and Mucinex and hoping for the best. I have been trying to keep my distance and following him around with Clorox wipes. I have been taking echinacea and vitamin C and we wait nervously for it to pass and hope that neither she nor I end up catching it.

We have watched an amazing number of movies, and fortunately for me Sunday was highlighted by an NCIS marathon on USA. So that brings me to thoughts of NCIS. We were oblivious to the show for the first two seasons and discovered it while crossing the country on our bike. It turns out that wherever you are in the country and whatever day or time it is, when you check into a motel in any town and turn on the tv, there it is. So we got hooked. I spend what is probably a ridiculous amount of time thinking about the show and its characters, but lately I see posts on Facebook about shows like Breaking Bad, 

Downton Abbey, Scandal and the like, so I realize I am nit alone. It fascinates me that we can get so wrapped up in the characters  and plots. So I thought about what appeals to me about this particular show, besides that it reminds me of the epic bike trips.

It is the most watched show on tv and has been for several years. One theory I have is that everyone really wants their job to be just like this. They do meaningful work, use technology in innovative ways, get to handcuff people and they all like each other. What wouldn't you do to make your job that fun? And to top it off, there is David McCallum still looking amazingly good. Gibbs has an appreciation for substantive women and doesn't suffer fools lightly. They are a family whose members pool their talents and abilities for the greater good. The characters play off each other perfectly. 

See? Way too much thought. Tonight, after watching a movie about the race down the Great Divide on mountain bikes, we viewed an episode we had DVR'd from yesterday. It dealt mainly with the education of girls in Afghanistan, a year before Malala, and was fascinating for its depth. It also had Tony contemplating mortality and making his bucket list. So it got me to thinking.

What would be on mine? Knitting, for one. I learned to knit a long time ago, made one sweater and just never got around to doing it again, interrupted by a 17-year needlepoint project. (Yes, you read that right.) But I would like to do it again. Seeing Cuba, before it is overrun with McDonalds. Cycling in India. 

But the really odd thing about bucket lists at 57 is that you realize that there are some things that you will never get to cross off. I will never be a professional dancer or get to work with dolphins. I will probably never be really, truly fluent in Spanish, simply because the way my life worked out made that difficult. I most likely will not ride in Paris-Brest-Paris.

Some of these things are okay. Some not so much. But they are. And the trade offs have, on balance, been worth it. And on the whole, I think Gibbs and I would get along.

Who took my joy?

Yesterday was the harbinger of illness, literally. Bob woke up with chest congestion, fever and an overall bad feeling. I hustled the Mamá out of here and to my sister's to help her avoid the bad stuff, especially since he really complained about lung congestion and coughed like crazy.

Today started with a request for a trip to Medexpress, which confirmed a diagnosis of the flu, apparently one which was not "covered" by the flu shot back in October. I spent the day cleaning the bedrooms and hallway, so as to minimize contact with the infected one. A quiet day overall, enhanced by a well-timed NCIS Marathon, my personal guilty pleasure. 

Somewhere in there I realized that we really need to remember to notice and appreciate the joy present in our lives. We laughed about something while watching a movie, and it struck me how much I have been worrying lately. Every the proponent of not worrying, I need to remind myself of how much good there is. So noted.