Day 39, Consultation

Wednesday, 1/9/2019

Had a good run, that is, one where I didn’t need to stop anywhere. Then headed out to

A meeting

as arranged, with Alan Brauner of Senior Seasons, a referral agency for senior living facilities. Alan turned out to genial, frank and seemed to be well-informed on all the local facilities. We went over my particular desires, and he promised to get back to me with details on several places he thought would suit me.

One thing I learned from this talk was the two classes of facility. One is the “buy-in” type, where you pay what he referred to as an “exorbitant” fee, effectively purchasing your unit, as you might a condo. The advantages of this arrangement are two. One, you have purchased some form of a real-estate property, and in theory you (or more likely your heirs) can sell that when you don’t need it. His experience with the buy-in home that his parents retired to, however, was that the contract was so written that the facility kept a good share of the capital gain on the sale. When his parents died, their estate realized only a few percent more than the initial purchase cost.

The other advantage of a buy-in is that you lock in a monthly rental — oh yes, despite buying in, you still pay a monthly fee in the thousands of dollars — which will not increase even if you need a higher level of care. Channing House, where my distant acquaintance Craig lives, is a buy-in facility. I mean to contact Craig and get a tour, and if it seems appropriate, I’ll grill him a bit on what he paid and what he gets for it.

The other style of facility is month-to-month. You make no commitment other than to give 30 days’ notice before moving out. (Well, I imagine there are longer leases available.) You are renting an apartment with full services (“like being on a cruise”, Alan said) for a monthly fee. You don’t own anything, so there’s nothing to come back to your estate; and while some are “continuing care”, that is, providing various levels of assistance, the monthly charge goes up with the level of service needed.

I headed home to

Kill the freezer

What? Well, for several nights I have been annoyed by the noise of my refrigerator, which is separated from the bed by one wall. The circulating fan in the freezer has developed a buzz. The fridge is old, in fact (referring to our Home Inventory spreadsheet) we bought it in 2000. (All of our appliances are of similar vintage. ISMISEP!) I had replaced the fan in the freezer several years back; now it was buzzing again.

When it was keeping me awake around 4am, it suddenly occurred to me: why am I keeping that freezer compartment going anyway? There’s nothing in it but ice. Previously we’d “cook for the freezer” a couple of times a year, filling it with containers of home-made soups and stews. Then we’d take an entrée from the freezer once a week or so. Well, those were all gone, and won’t be replaced. Marian kept a couple of gel-pads in the freezer to use on her back, but I tossed those old pads in my semi-hysterical clean-out on Day 1. The freezer compartment is empty except for a few odds and ends of leftovers that frankly, I don’t want to eat.

So, back home from my meeting, I put the the food items from the freezer in the green recycle and turned the freezer thermostat to off. I strongly suspect my electric bill will go down. I know I’ll sleep better.

Then it was off to FOPAL for a sorting shift. Wow that is a workout: on my feet and continually moving for 2+ hours, shifting heavy boxes of books around. This weekend is the first of the bi-weekly sales of the year. Most section managers have loaded their shelves and declared a “hold” on their subject, meaning that when a box of “History” of “Nature” books fills up, we can’t take it to the sale room as usual. It has to be stacked in the sorting area, the center of which is now dominated by a mountain of boxes, leaving less and less room to walk around. People showed up at the door with more books every few minutes. Three sorters could pretty much keep up with the flow.

On the way home I stopped at Goodwill and handed in a bag with the last remnants of Marian’s stuff and a few items of my own I’d culled from my side of the closet.

By 5pm I’d received an email from Alan, listing seven facilities he thought might interest me, with details on their costs and amenities. Well, as I emphasized to him, I’m in no hurry. I’ll look at those maybe this weekend.

Day 38, Social Security

Tuesday 1/8/2019

I started the day with a brisk walk to the YMCA and my (short, perfunctory) round of strength exercises.

Today was the day for the long-anticipated appointment with the Social Security that I’d been given on Day 12. Then I’d been unable to complete the process because I hadn’t brought proof of marriage. I’d been worrying about whether the government shutdown would be affecting SS offices, but no, everything was operating normally. I only had to wait a few minutes, and in fact I think my name was called within a minute or so of 1pm, my scheduled appointment time.

I’d left early and stopped to pick up some kind of lunch at a Safeway store across from the SS office. When checking out there I had realized to my great chagrin, that I didn’t have my wallet with ID and credit cards. I had carried it on my exercise outing and neglected to transfer it from my shorts to my jeans when I dressed. Well, no biggie, I knew right where it was, on the dresser, and shouldn’t need it, right?

So what is the first thing the very nice and helpful SS clerk asked for when I sat down? My ID, of course! God damn I felt like a… like a forgetful old fart, is what. But he said smoothly, “No problem, I’ll just ask you some security questions,” and proceeded to grill me about where I was born, mother’s maiden name, and a few other things. After some more interrogation he told me that my Survivor Benefit would have the effect of raising my SS payment by about $400/month. Mentally I calculated that would mean I’d be getting about the same amount that Marian used to get, a bit over $1600/month.

In the end, the net effect of (a) the end of Marian’s IBM pension, (b) the end of her SS payment, offset by (c) the increase in my SS and (d) some reduction of monthly expenses (I’m paying way less for groceries than before, for example), is a drop of about $3500 in the monthly household income. In the past we lived comfortably off our combined pensions. Going forward, it is clear I will have to begin to dip into the nest egg on a regular basis. Fortunately the nest egg is pretty chunky and can survive many years of dipping. (Actually, now I think about it, just raising the “required minimum distribution” out of my IRA somewhat above the minimum will come close to covering the shortfall.)

Back home and with my wallet back in my pocket, I made out the check for the first quarter estimated tax payment and mailed that. When Marian did our taxes last spring, she had prepared the federal and state quarterly estimated tax vouchers, each with its mailing envelope and a big post-it note with the date by which it should be mailed. Today I mailed the federal one with the “1/15” post-it. One remains, the state one to mail before “2/1”. And that will be the end of Marian’s carefully prepared tax materials. I’ll have to step up for the next cycle. Me, the guy who walks out of the house without his wallet.

Suli, our cleaning lady, came today. I showed her the remaining items in Marian’s closet and she said she’d take them all, “for my mother”. OK, fine. And when I got back from the SS, that side of the closet was empty at last. I moved my collection of hats to the upper shelf on that side.

I spent some time inventorying our collection of basketball memorabilia. We had a number of items relating to the short-lived San Jose Lasers professional team: sweatshirts, signed team photos, etc. I emailed a friend, another Lasers fan, with the list. She’s very well-connected into that fan base and will forward the list. Hopefully somebody will want some of these things.

Day 37, mo’ bidness

Monday 1/7/2019

My run was not as easy as last week. Some days, including twice last week, I can go the whole 35-40 minutes without stopping except for a traffic light. Some days, like this one, there are “internal headwinds” — as I used to say when a bike ride got too long — and I end up pausing to breathe. No pattern to this that I can tell. Oh well.

Back home it was time to tackle the IBM Benefits package. I re-read the instructions for claiming the $5000 life-insurance benefit and carefully filled out the beneficiary form. Put it in the postage-paid envelope with the death certificate and sealed it — and noticed I’d left out the second page. Sigh. Tore open the postage paid envelope and made up a new one with stamps, and sealed it.

Then turned my attention to that peculiar $5/month settlement. I called the benefits office and spoke to a helpful gentleman. He said, well, it was a settlement for a lawsuit, and IBM had to pay some retirees extra. That was all he knew. Could I get it merged with my existing pension payment? Probably, but that would be up to the Pension group, and first I had to claim it. So, there was nothing for it but to return the necessary forms relating to that.

Which meant that, after I carefully filled out the form for direct payment to my bank account, and the state and federal withholding forms saying, no, I don’t want taxes withheld from this $4.89 payment each month, I had to tear open my stamped envelope and add several more sheets. Now it was beyond the capacity of a normal envelope but fortunately I had bought 9×12 envelopes (on Day 14). So for the third time I inventoried the sheets I was mailing, sealed and stamped them and later mailed the package.

Later I filled out a contact form with a senior housing referral service, and in the afternoon got a reply. I’m scheduling a meeting with “Alan” and we’ll see what kind of advice he has to offer.

Day 32, the year actually starts

Yesterday afternoon I did something that wasn’t on any of my to-do lists except the vague one in the back of my head, the looming little thundercloud of “shit that gotta be done pretty soon but not yet.”

Specifically, I started to sort all our little decorative tchotchkes and identify the ones for which we saved some kind of provenance record. The source was a big envelope labeled “art and decorative”, into which we’d tossed receipts and artists’ cards and brochures over the years. I was able to pair up a lot of objects with their receipts or other info. I was left with a dozen bits of paper that I couldn’t match to an object. I’m particularly intrigued by a receipt for an Inuit “Raven Fetish” in “dyed walrus ivory”. I don’t remember any such object.

In the picture, the seagull statue is by Ken Shutt, a sculptor who worked most of his career in Hawaii. Marian bought that sculpture when she was working for IBM in Honolulu in the 1960s. A nearly identical statue can be seen on EBay priced at $395. That one differs in two ways: one, the upper bird was broken off and re-glued; and two, its birds are bright white, where mine are about the color of my teeth. Say “cream” to be polite. I assume the yellow color is the result of the birds living with first one, then two cigarette smokers for thirty years. I’ve made a couple of tentative efforts to lighten this color, first with warm water and dish soap, then with warm water and a little ammonia. No result.

Anyway, at the end I have a dozen items I could price fairly accurately, from $40 to $500, and maybe 30 more objects that I can’t — but which are probably worth $1 to $10 or so. When I started the project I had the vague notion that I’d sell the items singly on EBay myself.

Then I got real: do I really want the job of creating 20 or 30 EBay listings, and then packing and shipping 20 or 30 packages, plus re-listing the ones that didn’t sell with lower reserves, etc. etc.? Seriously? How many hours would I spend on that and, if I paid myself $15/hour, would those sales even cover my time plus the packing materials?Nunh-uhn, nope. So I left this project frustrated.

Wednesday 1/2/2019

Started the day with a run. Well, actually, started the morning with a few minutes of anxiety, the “something undone” thing that’s been coming and going occasionally. It’s not bad; when I recognize it I can deal with it by taking deep breaths and thinking through my schedule for the day. But it’s annoying. (No, I am not interested in any chemical treatments.) So then the run. And spent some time looking up comparables for my tchotchke collection, then looking up listings for estate appraisers on Yelp. I think I will consult with my friend the realtor for a reference on that.

And then off to do stuff. First off, drive over to Stanford hoping to buy good seats for the now four relatives who want to attend the UCLA game on Sunday. I swung by the ticket office at the stadium Monday, saw it was closed, and went away without looking closer. Today also it was closed; grumping, I walked close up to read the notice in the window: closed for winter break, back on the 7th, buy tickets on gostanford.com. Oh, sigh.

So I went back home and used gostanford to buy very ordinary seats in the upper sections because that was all the computer could sell. I am pretty sure that if I talked to a ticket agent directly, they’d have courtside and such that don’t show on the computer. So later in the day I sent an email to Amy Tucker, politely asking if she has any comps. Bet she comes through.

With the ticket issue tabled, I drove down to the Mountain View Community Center and found where they accept donated food. Left off my two bags of canned stuff from the pantry. Then on to FOPAL for 2-1/2 hours of sorting, and so home for a quiet evening.

Day 30: Monday washday

Monday 12/31/2018

Stripped the bed; sorted and started the laundry, then went for a run. On return the bleach load had finished, so had some underwear to put on, yay!

Yesterday I learned that following the UCLA game this coming Sunday, Stanford Women’s Basketball will honor two recently-deceased supporters. One is DeeDee Zaweya, for many years the office manager for the WBB staff office. Last night at dinner at Nancy’s, I learned that DeeDee, while apparently loved by the staff and team, was not particularly popular with at least some fans. I had only very brief encounters with her, so have no opinion.

Anyway, the other person to be honored is Marian! I was asked to supply some photos and answer a couple of questions, which I did. And I emailed Jean and Darlene (Marian’s sister and cousin) suggesting they might like to come to the game, and they quickly replied they would. So now I need to get four seats together. It’s a regular-season game against a popular rival, so I can’t count on there being empty seats near my usual place, as there usually are at pre-season games.

So I drove to the Stanford ticket office on campus, on the chance it might be open, but of course it wasn’t. I’ll have to do that first thing Wednesday.

Finished up the laundry and re-made the bed. I’m a little conflicted about the bed. I’ve been sleeping in my usual spot, on the right side, and the other side of the double bed is unused of course. Not even a pillow. I just pay no attention to that side of the bed, except to tuck in the sheet on that side. Well, so what? Nothing wrong with that. In my next abode, I’ll probably have a single bed; and this bed will be sold along with the rest of the furniture. Fine.

Did a spot of programming, added some features to the program and fixed one bug (yay me!) I don’t mean to be mysterious; I’ll write about my software projects in more detail sometime.

I’m scheduled to have dinner with long-time friends Bob and Lolly at their retirement place in Berkeley at 5. So I “dressed up” a little. Meaning, I got my sport coat out of the closet and put on slacks instead of jeans. I’m not happy with the fit of any of my slacks. Although my reduced weight means they are a comfortable fit at the waist (instead of suck-in-my-gut-and-button-the-waistband-quick, as they were last year), they have too much fabric in the thigh. There’s a jodhpur-like wideness I don’t like. I suspect they are… mature in style. And the sport coat: only worn for the WBB awards dinner the last few springs. It’s ok but I dunno. Not snappy in any sense.

Dear lord am I actually thinking about buying clothes? I may be! Yuh go into Macy’s Men’s and buy a new belt, and who knows what will happen next!

I’ll write about New Year’s Eve dinner tomorrow.

Day 27, socializing

Friday, 12/28/2018

Went for a run first thing. Ordinarily my Friday exercise is a long walk, but I’d shirked exercise both Tuesday and Thursday. Passed the time unproductively until 1pm when it was time to go to the Museum to lead a docent tour. The Museum was unusually crowded and I was the only docent who’d booked for the 2pm tour. Ordinarily there’d be two on a holiday weekend, so we can split the tour crowd to manageable size. Not today; so I started off with over 40 people in tow. That’s too many; there’s just not standing space around the exhibits I want to talk about, and the people in the back can’t see. Well, the visitors solved that for themselves by just peeling off and leaving. At the end of the tour I had about 20 still with me, which was just fine by me; but I regret the other 20-odd having a frustrating experience.

In the evening, met Su for dinner at a restaurant (hi, Su!). A lot of the conversation revolved around retirement facilities: what we want out of them, what we know of them. That was fine (and informative to me). At least we did not talk about that perennial subject among elders, our medical problems!

Emotionally this was a pretty calm day, and at times I felt quite comfortable in my new skin. I’m only slowly grasping that this is really my life now, and it’s up to me to run it. You’d think I’d’a figured that out during the months of anticipation, and I did, at an intellectual level. But there’s an emotional settling-in taking place now which is quite different (and hard to describe).

Day 26, out of town visitors

Thursday, 12/27/2018

Today I had a long-planned visit from Joanne and Brad. Joanne is the daughter of Marian’s college roommate and long-time friend Lolly. Marian liked Joanne and Joanne shared Marian’s interest in birding. Joanne and Brad planned this visit back in November, expecting, of course, to see Marian. When that sadly did not work out, they came anyway and I was glad of their visit.

Besides Joanne and Brad, there were their daughter Sierra, and Ria, a visiting student from Thailand. As I had planned, I gave Joanne a silver and onyx pendant that Marian had made when she was learning jewelry-making in her 20s. The pendant is kind of large and clunky, but Joanne seemed to think it was quite wearable.

Then with some trepidation I invited the three women to look at the remaining items in Marian’s closet, those “better” items that consignment stores didn’t want (see Day 20). I thought they might flip their way through the hangers and see just old-lady stuff, but in fact they seemed to enjoy looking at everything and critiquing each other’s taste, and took away several items each.

Then as planned we went to look at the Stanford campus, although since the trip was planned Sierra has decided not to apply to Stanford. After a short walk around the quad and a bit of a drive around, they dropped me at home and headed off to meet another friend. So that was a pleasant and warming visit.

In the afternoon I spent another couple of hours on a programming project and actually made some progress.

In general I think I am feeling more comfortable in my new life. I haven’t been bothered by that low-level anxiety for several days. It’s easy to trip into spasms of grief of course (I nearly broke down explaining the provenance of the pendant), but on the other hand I’m noting little satisfactions. Every partnership requires compromise, and when the partnership ends, those constraints are removed. I mentioned in passing on Day 9 that I’d gotten rid of three ferns that I’d never liked. That was one compromise eased. Here’s another: I stopped at the grocery store yesterday and among other items, bought a loaf of bread — bread of a brand that we never had in the house because Marian didn’t like it. I did like it, and now I can bring it home when I want. Trivial, but a tiny up-side to the process of fitting into a new life.

Day 25, Boxing up shards

Wednesday, 12/26/2018

Began the day with the customary run. (Marian often complimented me on doing something for exercise every — well, almost every — weekday morning. I accepted the compliments but felt awkward, as if I didn’t deserve credit for doing something so simple. I really do it out of fear; I’m scared by prospect of how fast my body will turn into a blob if I don’t keep it moving. Twenty years ago, when I was still cycling, I was “off the bike” for six weeks because of a persistent pneumonia. I’ve never forgotten the shock, when I could get back on the bike, of how feeble I had become in a few weeks, and how long it took to get any sort of condition back.)

Then I took care of a loose end. I’ve been keeping Marian’s laptop going just so I could check it each day to see what mail she’d gotten. Boy, was she subscribed to a lot of lists! But after a couple of weeks of clicking “unsubscribe” — and changing the contact email on a number of financial accounts — I’d gotten it down to almost no incoming mail at all. But in the middle of the night a couple of nights ago, it had dawned on me, doh! why do I not simply redirect email to her gmail account, into mine? There must be some way to do that. Today, with only 15 minutes of fiddling around reading Gmail help articles, I found out I could sign in as her, then designate me as a “delegate” who could read her emails and reply or delete them. So I set that up.

Now I can let her laptop sit on a shelf until such time as I can get up the nerve to reformat the drive and sell it. Opening it to see her familiar messy desktop littered with files she’d created… I can’t. Not yet.

I spent a couple of hours on a programming project, or rather, an hour rummaging through system documentation trying to figure out how to do something, and then encountering a bug that kept me from running a test case, then an hour googling for solutions for this bug. Programming. I do it for fun, I tell myself.

Shards

As 2pm was approaching and I’m due to help sort books at FOPAL today I pulled down another shelf of books to box up and donate. Here I hit a couple of “shards”, bits of the old life that is going away, which hurt quite a lot as they peel off.

One is a box of bookmarks. We were both readers and until, say, ten years ago we had several books apiece in progress. So we needed bookmarks, and we’d grab free bookmarks wherever, and after a while Marian set up a box on a handy bookshelf to hold bookmarks so it was easy to grab one. There are bookmarks in the box from several decades of reading. Bookmarks from bookstores we’ve been in: Powell’s in Portland, Davis-Kidd in Knoxville, the Tattered Cover in Denver, Munro’s in Victoria. Dozens.

Now, here’s the thing. Starting a decade ago, we pretty much stopped buying physical books and moved to reading on our laptops: stuff on the web, or books on Kindle for Mac. We typically had one (1) bookmark in operation, in whichever book we were reading aloud from at bedtime. Everything else was on a screen. So these bookmarks have been gathering dust, unused, for years. The newest is from a hotel in Normandy from our 2012 trip there.

Unused, unregarded bookmarks. They should be tossed. But it definitely hurts to do it.

As I was boxing books from this shelf I hit three map books from our days touring the UK: a road atlas for Ireland, the AA road atlas of Great Britain, and a book that was absolutely essential to us for several years, the Master Atlas of Greater London. You see, children, there was once a time when we didn’t have GPS or a phone that ran a map app. We were utterly dependent on maps printed on paper, if you can imagine something so crude!

These handsome volumes have no use whatever now or in the future. The maps are out of date; before today they literally haven’t been off the shelf for 20 years; it has been literally forty years since we used the London Atlas. On my first day of sorting at FOPAL I learned that travel guides printed before 2000 are not kept; they go straight to the recycle bin. These books need to go into the recycle bin right here at home.

Along with the bookmarks.

And it hurts.

I can imagine a sympathetic person saying “Well, why don’t you keep them, then? Or a couple of bookmarks anyway.” But that just puts it off. I’d face the same issue when packing to move to wherever I go next spring. It’s just more possessions to be responsible for, and really useless ones at that.

There’s the contradiction: these objects have a triple nature:

To me, they are powerful symbols of a life I once lived.
To anyone else they are meaningless.
And for me, they have no practical use in the life I am moving into.

There are a lot of objects in this house that have this contradictory nature. How many do I keep?

Day 22, another Sunday

Well, that’s a boring title, innit?

Sunday, 12/23/2018

This Sunday I maintained my long tradition of doing the Sunday* NYT crossword, the big one, first thing. Time, 38:40, about average, and entered it into my spreadsheet of crossword times, now nearing its fifth year of daily crossword time records. Who’s an obsessive nerd? Not moi!

That brought me to 8am, and I went off by car to Baron Barista for an almond croissant and a cappucino. I didn’t walk, like last Sunday, because I needed to get back before 10. I think I’ll go back to our old haunt for Sunday coffee from now on, the one 1/4 mile away.

Showered, shaved, and at 11 headed off to the Computer History Museum to lead the 12pm docent tour. Sunday of a holiday weekend there should have been two docents, but none of the other volunteers signed up, so I got to lead a group of 30, about twice normal. I did it well and several people told me they enjoyed my presentation, so that’s nice.

On the way to and from the museum I was “talking to my steering wheel,” a habit I’ve had since I’ve had a driver’s license, to lecture my dashboard about what’s concerning me. Homeless people do it while pushing their shopping carts of trash through the streets, and look crazy. In your car, nobody can hear you — and if they notice you talking, these days they’d assume you’re on the phone, probably talking to (depending on your vehemence) your dealer, agent, or parole officer. But not crazy.

Anyway, I was explaining the reasons I’m quite sure I won’t be hooking up with another romantic partner. There’s a lot of things I don’t expect to do ever again; this morning for some reason it occurred to me I’ll probably never go camping again. But not taking another partner was one of the first decisions I made when I began thinking seriously about “being a bachelor”, months ago after Marian’s diagnosis. Then it was based on practical reasons. Now — as I explained to my dashboard — I have another and stronger reason, one I couldn’t have conceived of then.

It’s this (and here’s the kind of snappy dialog my dashboard is privileged to hear): At the very top of my list of experiences to never, ever have again, is the experience of supporting and nursing a loved partner as they fail and die. I did it once, did it I think as well as it could be done; but a saint I am not, and I am not going to put myself in line to do it again, thankyouverymuch. At my age, any anticipated pleasures of love are very much overtopped by the anticipated pain of that experience. Or by the pain of the alternative, being the one who goes through the dying process, dependent on the generous care of a partner. Nope. Not going to be in an emotional partnership ever again, because at my age, one of those scenarios is the inevitable end.

That settled, I was home at 2pm to enjoy the rest of the day. A pretty slow afternoon; I should have improved it with something useful, but didn’t. The only event of interest was the delivery of a new reading lamp, but I think I’ll write about that tomorrow.

*actually the Saturday NYT puzzle, but our newspaper has always printed it on Sunday.

Day 17, Shards keep falling

Tuesday 12/18/2018

I hit a couple of smaller instances today of the emotions triggered by the removal of “Beau” on Sunday, where the grief was not for the loss of my wife, but for the visible removal of a piece of the life I am leaving behind.

Similar thing today. I started by recycling a stack literally 6 inches thick, of paper transaction records and monthly statements from the early years of our managed accounts, and some other historical records dating back into the ’80s. When that wad dropped into the blue recycle bin it was like there was a mechanical connection to my sinuses. I just choked up. At old papers of no value, papers that we stopped accumulating over 15 years ago and hadn’t looked at between then and now?

Here’s another trivial trigger: the corkboard in the kitchen where we thumb-tacked things to remember. I started pulling irrelevant stuff off it. Out-of-date notes about museum exhibits to see, phone numbers of vendors I’ll never use again. Stuff. And I got to the printed list of the thirty-odd dishes that we liked to cook. It was a reminder list, so when we were planning the week’s menu on Sunday, we could look the list over and say, oh, right, I’ll do that pasta, you can do this stir-fry. Won’t be doing any of those dishes again. I know this, in fact I’ve been living very contentedly and healthily off meal replacement shakes supplemented by fruit and the occasional can of tuna, for two weeks. But to pull down this visible reminder of the old life was just — hard.

More and more I am coming to grasp that as a widower perhaps the least of my bereavements is the loss of my wife. With her went an entire, carefully-crafted lifestyle. It doesn’t go all at once; it peels away in chunks, or shards as I found myself saying on Sunday. And each shard that drops away is a fresh bereavement.

A more direct trigger came a bit later. While organizing the now stripped-down file drawer in the desk, I saw yet another folder labeled “Stocks”. What? How many stock broker folders were there, for pete’s sake? It turned out, this one was possibly the oldest. It contained Marian’s records of her IBM Stock Purchase Plan purchases. Heart of it was a small spiral-bound leather notebook in which were her hand-written records of employee stock purchases starting in 1962, and continuing to 1980. There were other papers as well, a printed spreadsheet showing the purchases and changes in value over time as the stock split and so on.

Historically and financially these are of no value. All those shares were accounted for and sold in ’95, the capital gains taxes paid, and the money pooled in our managed account. I recycled the papers but I could not bring myself to trash the notebook. It was so typical of her that she would, one, keep a record in a journal in her neat draftsman’s printing over twenty years of employment; and two, retain that in her desk, ready for reference, for another thirty years. I put the journal into the “Marian” folder. I’ll probably never look at it again, but it is just beyond me to discard it, at least yet.

Anyway the cleaning lady came and went, the house is all spiffy. I stained the two table tops, got the car washed, and faxed my witness report to the insurance company for the lady whose Prius I saw bashed the other day. Takin’ care of bidness. Gonna take a nap now; and then going out with Scott for the evening. Report on that tomorrow.