Their Streak Ended

My mother's yahrtzeit approaches.  A notice came from my current congregation, as it always has.  When synagogue software first became available in the 1980s, automating special day notifications took priority.  People want a reminder of when they need to recite Kaddish.  Flag the date, assemble a packet for the office to mail, including a donation request with a return envelope, and both congregant and congregational treasury benefits.  Mass mailings were one of the first procedures to get successfully automated before personal internet access became the norm.  Snafus and uncertainties abound.  My synagogue keeps the deceased on its memorial list forever, irrespective of whether any survivors maintain their formal affiliation.  I do not know if they mail reminder notices to people who have moved away or otherwise left the congregation.  My former local synagogue stopped sending me an annual notice shortly after I stopped paying dues.

My childhood congregation took a very different path.  A quick chronology:

• 1964: Bar Mitzvah
• 1966: Breakaway group with Sugar Daddy forms a competing congregation.
• 1969: College in another city
• 1971: My mother's passing
• 1973: Relocation for medical school
• 1977: Marriage and relocation for residency
• 1980: Permanent settling in new city
• 2006: Closure of my childhood synagogue

Notices of my mother's yahrtzeit began to appear in my mail each winter starting in 1974.  I do not recall if I responded with a check before I started earning my own paycheck, but once established, they could count on a small gift in the return envelope each year.  As I moved to different apartments in the same city, or to different towns, the US Postal Service forwarded the requests.  As I responded with a check, the recipient in the congregational office had the presence of mind to record the new address, sending subsequent reminders there.  

Closure of the congregation created a branch point.  My congregation closed, it did not merge.  Assets were distributed under state laws regulating places of worship that ceased functioning.  Despite no formal merger, my congregation still had longstanding members, by then largely aging but still observant.  Nearly all defaulted to that breakaway shul, given no chance of long-term longevity at its inception, disadvantaged, or so people thought, by lack of our umbrella organization affiliation.  Whether by a preferable location or that Sugar Daddy, they not only endured, but now inherited pillars of my dying congregation.  They took the high road.  Memorial plaques relocated from the sold building to the active building.  The yahrtzeit list, including my name and address, merged with their database.  My notices kept coming.  

I had occasion to worship at the new place one time following my congregation's closure.  Familiar building sitting on prime real estate between my old elementary school and what was once modern luxury garden apartments that made that Sugar Daddy rich 

While I transitioned from place to place in my younger adulthood followed by extended stability, the institutions transitioned later in their life cycles.  The building where my Bar Mitzvah occurred lost its value as a suitable place for a United Synagogue of Conservative Judaism congregation but served as a desirable location for Hasidic institutions that had become dominant in that neighborhood.  At the successor congregation, nominally unaffiliated but with the form of worship characteristic of 1960s Conservative Jews, the neighborhood also changed.  My old elementary school had become an Orthodox Day School.  The houses where the people who attended that school, and that synagogue,  once lived, now had Orthodox owners.  While both my synagogue and the breakaway had always functioned as commuter congregations where carpools brought kids to Hebrew School and people drove to worship, that drive had become too long.  The building stood on valuable real estate.  Their leadership sold it, directing the proceeds to construct an opulent structure closer to where secular Jews now lived.  I worshiped there a single Shabbos morning, tied to a high school reunion later that night.  

Heavy entrance doors.  Posh sanctuary.  Those clunky bronze memorial plaques had given way to smaller uniform brass ones, my mother's name still among them, despite having never had a formal membership stature with them.  As secular congregations struggled, so did others in the region.  Two additional ones merged, pooling resources to maintain an elegant building and populate the sanctuary.  On my visit, a remnant of people from my Bar Mitzvah congregation, nearly all men, appeared for worship.  I greeted them but sat at a kiddush table with local contemporaries.

My final time there, likely 2009.  Still, each year that notice of my mother's yahrtzeit would continue to arrive each winter.  I returned a check promptly.  Later I learned that a high school friend, a fellow violinist in the orchestra, had remained with that congregation. Her parents had become charter members of the breakaway.  She ran a special project for the needy.  I wrote a second check for her to use, along with a brief note of admiration for her effort.  She sent a brief note of thanks to me.  And I added a third contribution to a semi-affiliated agency that dedicated a project in memory of one of my mother's close friends from my Bar Mitzvah shul, that one by credit card.

This year, that chain of fifty annual notifications stopped.  They had survived my relocations and their relocations.  People at one time devoted effort to keeping me, a minor donor, in the loop.  I do not know the fate of that congregation, though modern electronics offers a few hints.  They have a Facebook page to which I subscribe.  Every Shabbos, they post a greeting, at least until recently.  They have not had a Rabbi, but engage a Cantor, one with adult children. Within the last year, they posted that rather than maintaining their tradition of mixed seating/ male honors, their format since founding, they would try to make themselves more acceptable to the nearby residents by adding a mechitza.  This may also facilitate recruiting a Rabbi.  

The congregation offers a website, though a neglected one by modern standards.  It has not been maintained, with their newsletter postings ceasing in 2021 as Covid became less threatening.  

Why hasn't my reminder come?  In the pre-insulin era, Dr. Elliot Joslin, the recognized master of diabetes, used to ask his patients who descended to his Boston Clinic from far and wide, to send him a greeting card each Christmas.  When the cards stopped, he would have his staff try to contact that diabetic or family to confirm the expected mortality.  In our modern age, I could call the congregation or send a note to the office through their website.  I think I will send my usual checks, then inquire if they are returned.

Enjoying Spring Break

As a student, I would read about kids making their way to Ft. Lauderdale or Daytona Beach for spring break.  With my tuition and living expenses in school already burdening my father, any cost for debauchery would be prohibitive, even unthinkable.  No doubt some kids could load into another classmate's car, drive to Florida and back in shifts, and share a motel room, paid for by their part-time jobs in the school cafeteria.  In all my university years, I never knew anyone at my school who prioritized their amusement that way, though some devoted parts of summers touring Europe with rail passes and hostels.  Europe has an enrichment value that recreation on a beach drinking beer obtained by an acquaintance with an of age ID lacks.  As a wage earner, I had my share of vacations, some very memorable ones.  Few with hedonism as the focus.  Not even those on cruise ships or beach resorts.  A respite from work became the goal.  Sampling new things, staying away from the telephone, protected time with my wife.  Nothing close to debauchery on my agenda.

Now in my senior years, not needing a respite from any rat race but still with personal schedules to maintain, I find some chill time seriously overdue.  I last took a cruise about six years ago, an Adriatic one that included strenuous tourism in addition to the food, aquatics, and entertainment.  I cannot remember when I last checked into a resort for a few days.  Not since I retired.  My Osher Institute program has its downtime.  Six weeks in winter, more in summer.  One week at the start of spring.  My plans to get away for a couple of days in the winter fell through for the first time in a few years.  The last few spring breaks and the summers, I went on touring type vacations to major cities, places of history, or National Parks.  All places that required agendas or itineraries.  What I need now may be chill time, even if only for a few days.

My funds are ample.  So is my health and energy, adjusted for overdue recreation.  I disliked most of my visits to Florida.  Las Vegas may be a suitable getaway.  Facebook friends periodically travel there for a few days, sometimes prompted by a special show or a need to merge relaxation with stimulation.  It struck me as a good option.  Three or four nights at a hotel, depending on airline schedules.  Bright lights, places to get wet.  Buffets.  Day trips.  Shows at night. No rental car needed.  Just right for a few days.  I would just have to convince my wife, who to my surprise, seemed almost as ready for a few days of minimal responsibilities.  

On to the travel sites.  Air and hotel.  These have now embedded themselves into DIY getaways.  Look for airfares.  Assess places to stay.  Once transparent and straightforward.  Now with budget airlines competing with legacy carriers and people turning their homes or investment property as places to stay, comparisons of options require more sophistication than they once did.  The sites themselves more overtly serve their subscribers than their end consumers like me.  Low Ball teaser rates in big print.  Total packages once taxes, resort fees, and cleanup assessments of Airbnbs, change that considerably.  And the geeks who could enable sorting any way they desire restrict users to sorting by big print.

So three or four nights in Vegas, getting there and back, sleeping, amenities, and eating.  My airport has a dominant carrier with a few budget options.  Round Trip about $350 for American Airlines, $150 + baggage fees for the discounters.  So I thought.  Not that big a difference.  Pick based on departure and arrival times.  Round trip by American Airlines is not really $350.  It is $450.  If you pick a discounter for the return trip, it is $350 plus luggage fee in one direction.  You are not really buying a round trip but one way trips in each direction added to each other when you get to their electronic cash register to pay.  I was willing to spend a flat $350 or $700 for a couple to travel.  I am not willing to spend $900 for my own downtime just to get there and back, especially traveling home cramped in a high pack fuselage.

Hotels, or really places to stay, sorted by teaser rates in big print with full cost of three nights in little print.  Airbnb or vbro might be great if three couples are traveling or if somebody is staying ten days.  The cleanup add-on, part of a hotel's business model, is exorbitant but at least fixed.  Divided three ways over ten days, maybe a reasonable consideration.  Paid by one traveler who only stayed three days, or even one night, doesn't make sense.  Yet I cannot seem to get Travelocity and Hotels.com to eliminate them from my list.  I cannot get them to list the options by real price instead of teaser price.  Not that it matters.  The airfare reality eliminates Vegas.  Just as a college kid, or even as a gainfully employed prosperous adult, pampering of self never had high priority, as much as I enjoyed the times when it happened.

If not Vegas, what about Florida?  I dislike being in Florida most of my visits, don't want to rent a car.  What about Atlantic City?  It's a scaled-down Vegas with spas.  Its grand hotels discounted off-season, accessible by an amount of driving that I am willing to do if I only need to put myself behind the wheel for the hour and a half in each direction it takes to travel there and back.  On to Travelocity again.  Bargain resort hotels in Big Numbers, acceptable with the add-ons with adjacent fine font numbers.  Except what you see is not always what you get.  Some bundle use of the recreation facilities, some hotels go à la carte with a fee for the sauna and steam rooms.  The travel middlemen do not distinguish these.  After picking candidate hotels, I need to go to each site to calculate my own real costs for what I want to do there, from parking to pool, buffets to shows.  I'm getting close to maybe.  Generally you get what you pay for.  Figuring out what you do and don't pay for takes some exploration.  I've not yet abandoned an upcoming respite focused on my physical pleasure.

My age and background give me an advantage.  I learned basic numeracy in the 1960s courtesy of the taxpayers of Ramapo Central School District #2.  Math instruction and analysis of data in science classes progressed from one year to the next.  It was done with brain and paper.  My university years in the 1970s saw my own need to travel periodically.  Big stuff was sorted by a professional travel agent.  Hotels and airfare or train fare to visit family between cities required mostly the skills achieved the previous decade.  Air fares had fixed rates until the Carter years airline deregulation.  Even then, fewer carriers competed with each other, honoring their teaser offerings.  Hotels either advertised in the local newspaper or a handful of chains had begun to emerge.  Knowing how to assess transportation and lodging by hand lets me move from travel site boldface numbers to real costs fairly easily. This may be more difficult for younger folks who already had their numerical data pre-digested.  

How badly do I need an escape?  What is the monetary value of that escape?  I know how to answer this.  My personal hedonism is definitely price elastic.  That price, though, still has some flexibility.

My Phone Texts

Though a long way from a Luddite, not every innovation replaced what I did before.  Email quickly enabled messages. Accessed to excess multiple times daily.  Fax, introduced to me by my secretary, became a convenience for her, a burden to me as endless unselected papers arrived.  Seeing X-rays on a computer screen, great.  Using a poorly designed electronic medical record where checking boxes replaced doing real exams and following up on details of patient histories probably reversed quality medical care in many ways.  My cell phone keeps my world in a pocket.  For calls, it is a phone, whether initiating or receiving.  Its apps, though, rarely duplicate what they replace.  Camera not as good as my dedicated digital camera or even my prized Canon AE-1 purchased with my savings as a resident.  Flashlights on the phone screen not nearly as effective as a flashlight taken off a shelf, or even a key ring.  For tape recorders, I go to my small tape recorder collection, two digital, two with physical tape.  Annoyances mostly, but not harm, other than doctors no longer paying as much attention to patients as we should.

Text messaging brings me to harm.  No question, they have a place.  If a site I want to visit, like my bank or retirement plan, needs assurance that it is really me who opened that financial data, sending me a text message with code numbers adds security and privacy.  I solicit those from my sign-in pages on my laptop.  I know they are coming.  My phone is at hand and I record the number so that I can see my own accounts without anyone else accessing them.

Unsolicited messages sent as texts to a phone pose more harm.  My cell phone just stays in my pocket or in a holder in the car.  I know the telephone signal and usually answer it.  Instant Messaging preys on the addictive parts of our frontal cortex and probably more primitive centers.  People at the steering wheel engage in electronic conversations or invitations when they should have their wits attentive to their windshields and mirrors.  No FOMO for me.  For me, these messages fall beneath email in importance.

Despite my telling doctor's offices not to notify me that way, preferentially giving them my landline as the primary contact, some still bury messages on my phone.  Upcoming appointments I can track without their help.  Patient portal connected to email handle lab results.  

My text messages have become clutter.  They are unselected, random, taken from lists.  They depersonalize what should be interactive.  My last twenty unsolicited messages:

1. Political pitches for funds:  14
2. Charitable pitch for funds: 1
3. Asking feedback on experience with company encounter: 1
4. Comment from  a friend on Eagles Parade: 1
5. Confirmation of autopayment: 2
6. Realtor asking about my house: 1

The autopay confirmations could come by email.  They typically do.  Charitable solicitations come by email in large quantities.  Companies or medical facilities soliciting my experience with them usually arrive by email.  Comments from friends have a better forum on Facebook.  Other than clutter, these harm no one.  I cannot say the same about the dominance of political solicitations, both to me and maybe to my party.

As a result of 70%  political solicitations, I've largely ignored text messaging for all its purposes.  My relationship with my party has changed as well.  I suspect the election results shifting to the other party may also reflect that annoyance in a more widespread way.  At least the companies that want my feedback convey an impression, sincere or not, that they care what my experience had been.  My comments, or aggregate sentiment, could change their operations for the better.  That improvement could be better service for me as a customer with other options.  It could also be more profit for the company by having happier clients.  But at least that company that sought my feedback as text and many more by email, dangled something that might benefit me.

The political parties exist only to benefit the voters by adopting positions to issues we find compelling.  They should be the first to care about what their own base thinks.  Instead, they prioritize $10 or whatever paltry sum somebody responding to a text message might offer.  They pretty much tried to convince me that they are already adequate surrogates for the aspirations that I have.  My input to them is less important than my input to my cell phone carrier when I just called their helpline or to my medical network when I just visited one of their doctors.  They cannot shake their image of control by elites who direct a phone bank, an impression that in all likelihood is accurate.  My vote has a value of $10.  I price my visions of optimal political policies much higher than that.  They exist to represent me, but overestimate my loyalty.  Whether as a customer, patient, or voter, I have my grievances, all legitimate at least in my own mind.  My bank, electronics providers, and sources of medical care understand that.  They keep in touch.  They don't clutter.  My governmental advocates devalue me.  They make text messaging, which should be a communications asset, largely unusable.  And their voting loyalty teeters because of it.  They don't seem to be as smart as they claim to be.

In Memory of Priscilla

 

Our cat Priscilla, our pet, faded away peacefully after a brief illness.  My wife, who provided the bulk of her care and received the lion's share of Priscilla's affection, watched her final breaths.

She had come to us from a shelter.  Since our children were in grade school, we nurtured cats continuously for about twenty years.  The passing of Sadie, another shelter cat transported to us over some distance, left us without a furry pet, this time as empty nesters.  I do not recall how long we lacked a cat, months, maybe a year.  I was indifferent to having a pet, but my wife correctly judged the house as incomplete with no kids and no pet, despite some of the freedoms we had as a senior couple.  She contacted shelters.

Priscilla stood out.  She was a few years old, no longer a kitten.  Her recent time had been disruptive.  She amused a small group of nuns in their apartment.  As they aged, they required relocation to a new convent.  House rules demanded only one cat, which they already had.  Priscilla, already named, entered a shelter.  I do not recall how long she lived there, but the bond with my wife's visit stood out.  She became ours.  

As an adult cat, neutering and immunizations had already been provided.  She tested Feline HIV positive, but never needed treatment for this.  A few lower incisors were missing.  I found her docile, a bit tentative though not at all submissive.  At times, she liked to play, preferring a red laser more than her other amusements.  But mostly she devoted her adult years to keeping us company.  On our travels, she had a sitter who offered food and kept her sanitary facilities as appealing as they could be.

Each night for years this cat hopped onto my wife's side of our bed.  Priscilla did not particularly like being petted or otherwise handled.  She recognized a car carrier as Vet Appointment, resisting as best she could through a blend of hiding and combat.  The carrier always prevailed.  On the vet's exam table, she offered no appreciable resistance.  Growth records stable, no threatening illness over the roughly ten years she shared with us.

Insidiously, maybe over a month or two, she became less active though never appeared visibly ill.  At fourteen years, elderly but not ancient for a cat, some slowing might emerge.  It seemed a little more noticeable, at least to my wife, so she scheduled a veterinary assessment.  The doctor's assistant recorded a one pound weight reduction over about a year, significant weight loss.  The doctor herself noticed a respiratory rate that exceeded a normal feline baseline.  She took a chest X-Ray which showed a partially calcified lung mass and some lab work that showed minor lymphocytosis.  As Feline HIV positive, she was at risk for lymphoma, which has effective life-prolonging potential without undue toxicity.  I thought the mass had more characteristics of lung cancer, something I had encountered regularly taking care of people.  

The vet made a referral to a veterinary oncologist not that far away.  We transported Priscilla, a few weeks later and significantly droopier, to this monument to sophisticated animal care.  Parking spaces at this immense complex were few.  The waiting room contained a surplus of dogs on leashes but cats had their representation in carriers.  Our turn arrived.

The vet had seen the original X-rays referred electronically.  She thought it was a primary lung tumor. A new film disclosed that Priscilla had acqured a new pleural effusion.  The vet took an abdominal ultrasound which showed no masses.  She removed 75 ml fluid and did a needle biopsy of the mass.  The next business day, they reported malignant cytology in the pleural fluid.  Priscilla had a terminal tumor.

We opted for comfort care.  Each day for the next ten or so, she quietly faded.  Little food.  She would find herself a nook in any one of our rooms, rest in a lateral decubitus or prone position for a while, then move someplace else.  She no longer resisted being petted or handled.  To the final day, she managed to negotiate the stairs of our home.

Last night she lay down on the floor next to our daughter's bed.  This morning she had come downstairs, starting in the family room near my treadmill.  She must have arrived after my session started, as I did not notice her coming in.  Shortly thereafter, Priscilla made her way to the dining room, taking a decubitus posture at the leg of a dining room chair.  My wife found her, breathing more agonal.  She faded away peacefully.

Priscilla was our fifth cat, the only one living her whole life in our house without another feline companion, or in one case rival.  We've never considered euthanizing any of them.  And we have avoided comparing the memory of any of them one to another.  They are our companions, sources of amusement, sources of responsibility when our growing children needed responsibility.  All became part of our household.

Priscilla had her unique traits that endeared her.  She could be combative.  I admired her independence.  Our furniture got ravaged on occasion, but we responded by protecting and replacing some of it, never directing remedies at the cat's claws.  She could be affectionate sometimes, though not often.  And when she allowed petting I enjoyed that soft warm fur more than she appreciated the kind intent of my palm.  She brought us years of pleasure.  We hope the security we provided her, and the consistent kindness of our offerings, enhanced her life in equal measure.

Dropping a Class

In my several years enrolled in the Osher Institute Program, I had never previously withdrawn from a class.  In fact, to the best of my memory, I had never disenrolled in any specific class through kindergarten, though I did offer the Rabbi a Sayonara to the whole program in Hebrew School.

It's not that I've had disappointing course selections or had requirements to take certain classes that left me wishing I were someplace else in that scheduled time.  At OLLI I've given some candid adverse feedback.  In one course review I asked the University to send in a Mystery Shopper to see if the instructor's reasonably blatant negative view of Islamists breached University Standards.  I had an instructor up in years who read us his notes for 20 minutes at the start of each session before turning on the DVD of the Great Courses series with an internationally recognized lecturer.  But until now, I've never filled out a form to enable the University to offer my place in the class to somebody on the waiting list.  In fact, in all my years of schooling, I don't think I've ever expressed my negative opinion of a class by silently discontinuing my attendance, outside of a Rabbi series or two at my own synagogue.   The lady who demeaned Islamists has a good heart.  I know her in another setting.  The man who read his presentation from loose-leaf paper was once an esteemed public school science teacher.  Each class had offsetting merit to justify some irritation.  I've never left a class out of boredom.  I've even tolerated my own inability to keep up with the presentations, toughing it out for a full semester of Thermodynamics that flew over my head by about the fourth session.  Even this time, I considered just not coming anymore.  Instead, tomorrow ends the formal Drop/Add process, so I submitted my Drop on time.

So what makes a course tell me it has no salvageable value after two sessions, or really just the first session with the second as confirmation?  It had a formal title of Prosperity and Panic.  The Catalog provided a description that made me expect a dozen lectures or DVD series on economic cycles through the last hundred years of American History.  I lived through some of that.  I heard of the Depression from my grandparents.  Along the way I read about economic cycles.   We have Biblical stories of famines, but we also have the background of Pharaoh storing grain with insider information on a coming shortage.  He consolidated power this way, guided by his Hebrew Viceroy.  The Egyptians made their Faustian deal, but at least avoided starvation.  The rest of us got Pyramids and modern Egyptologists as the legacy of concentrated wealth.

I learned of Adam  Smith's positions on international trade creating global prosperity, though with an underpinning of self-interest.  He tempered it by assigning certain responsibilities to government to protect the vulnerable.  In high school I had to read and report on Andrew Carnegie's Gospel of Wealth.  Only by concentrating wealth can we all benefit from great public works.

I'm the beneficiary of this.  I've had a car for the past fifty years because cars have become plentiful. My TVs get better and more economical with each replacement.  I am connected to the world through cyberspace.  My medicines mostly do what they are supposed to do.  And if somebody else gets rich by making something better for me and for most other Americans, I'm for that.

That's what I expected from the course description.  When you watch Flip Wilson portraying Geraldine, What you see is what you get.  When I attend the two class sessions that's not what I got.  Instead, I sat at a series of long tables with mostly men of my age listening to a retired portfolio manager collecting recent newspaper clippings from the Wall Street Journal and Barron's.  No history.  No assessment of broad policies.  Not even simple things like changes in how investors create wealth and manage risk.  None of that.  At least my own financial advisor has some obligation to me.

The comments of the class shouted pooled ignorance.  As the basis of discussion.  For the first time in my OLLI tenure, I found the exit ramp the best place to be for this class.  Form completed and submitted.

It's Paid For

My car's title arrived from the finance company.  When I purchased it, the Toyota Finance gave me a preferred customer deal, 39 months, interest rate just a few percent.  Each month they debited about $460 from my checking account, sending me a notice that they did that.  I never kept track of the number of remaining payments until the final two.  Now the car is mine.

It's been a reliable car.  26K miles at purchase, the title says, about 30K added to that while under lien.  One collision in a parking lot, covered by insurance, not jeopardizing anything beyond the exterior metal.  No big repairs.  Replaced tires at a reasonably anticipated mileage.  One windshield repair.  

The car enabled two road trips to places I've not been previously:  Mammoth Cave when it still had the temporary dealer plates. More recently, the car completed a longer multiday drive to Tennessee and back. Most of the mileage came locally.

Starting next month, those monthly deductions, totaling about $5K each year of post-tax money, will no longer take place.  I didn't miss the money as it got debited each month, probably not likely to reallocate it to a different expenditure now that it stays in my checking account.  It is silent money in both directions.  Yet I can now anticipate another significant spendable resource.  Some travel, maybe.  And not necessarily by the car that I now own outright. My car creates mobility, even freedom.  So does an accumulation of what is best assigned as discretionary money.  Get ahead money.  Enjoy myself money.

     

    

Recapturing a Room

My basement has been a default repository since we moved in more than forty years ago.  When we shopped for a home, we only looked at houses with full basements.  Ours has one, with about two thirds floor space and one third crawl space.  I inherited a workbench left for me by the previous owners.  Metal shelving I installed myself.  It did not take long fill them.  The owner also left for me a partitioned room.  It had a cheap red carpet remnant, attractive wood paneling, a wall outlet, and a switch.  Despite its potential, primarily as a home office, I never used it.  Instead, the shelving vertically, the floors horizontally, and the cinder block portion of our crawl space became flat surfaces to put things.  

Returning to the basement as one of this half-year's semi-annual initiatives has brought a new perspective.  My shelves have decent stuff.  Passover dishes, pieces for entertaining that we never did in a serious way, explorations into hobbies that never took off.  Many things worth having.  We also had two children.  They have a way of developing in stages to adulthood.  Along the way, they outgrow infant cribs, car seats, clothing, and gadgets that allow them to sit at our level at the kitchen table.  Safety standards grow in parallel with their growth, so many of these items, which largely line part of the basement walls, can no longer be accepted as charitable donations.

Children produce things.  At school, they create art, write compositions, and generate reports from teachers.  These have mostly found their way into paper grocery bags, which line the crawl space ledge and that very enticing room with the fire-engine red carpet remnant.

We upgraded our house periodically.  A lovely crystal chandelier gleams as we eat Shabbos dinner in the dining room.  Its predecessor found a place on shelves under the basement stairs.  I painted walls and trim in my younger life.  Those paint cans contain hazardous waste.  There are a lot of them.  We bought new carpeting and wallpaper.  Unused portions sit in the basement.  My wife and I upgraded our mattress.  The unused one takes up a huge amount of space in that paneled nook.

My wife, children, and I all attended universities for college and advanced degrees.  We bought books.  We took notes.  We lived in apartments.  All leftovers fill our basement.  

My wife retired after a 32-year corporate career.  Boxes of her work fill the basement.

A month into the semi-annual period, I have begun sorting.  I think the best bang for effort would be to take that pre-existing room and create a pleasant nook for my wife, or at least her things and her memories.  To do this, I would need to stand the mattress upright, having already succeeded with the box spring.  Then I need a large plastic bag and a carton of significant size, maybe one used to hold k-cups.  I need a lamp to plug into the outlet, my cell phone camera, and a marker.  Children's work photographed randomly, papers recycled in the box, discards in the black plastic garbage bag.  Stuff that does not stay there, like any exercycle or my daughter's starter bicycle, get relocated to the larger basement floor for ultimate donation or landfill, perhaps even a yard sale.  Clothing washed and donated if still wearable.  Mattresses hauled away by a clean out company.  Wash it all down.  Replace the carpeting, either broadloom, tile, or area rug with underbase.  Then move the boxes with my wife's stuff around the perimeter, or buy additional shelving for the perimeter.  Add a desk and a chair.  Add lighting.   

My effort.  Her space.  Would make a Mother's Day surprise, hopefully a welcome one.  It is within my capacity.

Ice Storm

Cancellations.  My synagogue transferred its morning service to Zoom.  OLLI canceled its early morning sessions, allowing two hours for maintenance staff to prepare the parking areas and building.  When I retrieved the newspaper from the end on the driveway, the surface did not seem overly slippery but a coating of ice covered both cars.  My front and rear windshield heaters will defrost that.  The side windows do not have as secure a way of melting this.

With the right equipment, my wife and I made our vehicles safely mobile within a few minutes.  When she lowered her passenger window, the glass descended while the sheet of ice remained stationary.  Then he tapped out the ice, leaving her with a visible surface.  I tried that too, successful on one of four side windows.  The electric defroster of the rear windshield melts ice a lot faster than the warm air blown over the front windshield.  While waiting for that, I took the scraper to the other three side windows.  All had a thin sheet of water separating the glass from the ice.  I only need to make a few cracks, then scrape and brush.  By then, the rear window had a similar melting at the interface of glass and ice.  It scraped right off.  

My front windshield required more patience.  The warm air begins at the base, by the dashboard.  Then it ascends.  Usually I wait for the melting to allow the windshield wipers to perform the removal.  This time, I tried the scraper.  If created rectangles and other polygons of ice, partially thawed.  By pushing upwards towards the car's roof, I could get these to shatter at the top of the windshield, then drift downward.  The wipers handled the shattered segments but did poorly with the remaining polygons.  It did not take more than a few minutes for those to melt, so I will soon be on my way to today's remaining class, though the roads remain a question mark.  The car's thermometer registered a temperature slightly above freezing as does my home computer report of regional weather.  Except for a bridge en route, I anticipate the road surface will not create major skidding.  I have my choice of bridge.  The one more traveled, which is not the one I usually take to get to OLLI, may be the safer option.c

The delayed opening created some ambivalence.  Of my courses, the one canceled seemed my most expendable.  The class, live and remote, watches a video, and then discusses the topic.  That's a good way to pool everyone's ignorance, as the three moderators have expertise with very few subjects that the expert on the screen outlines.  Usually, though, there is somebody in the class, more often a person in live attendance, who has professional experience with the day's topic.

And what might I have been doing instead?  This being a treadmill respite morning, I hoped to allocate this unexpected block of time for creative activity.  The motivation was not there.  I am taking this week off from FB, Reddit, and Twitter so that time sink did not impede working on my twelve semi-annual projects.  The need to make the car mobile did.  Had the class been operational, I still would not have accomplished much at home leaving at the earlier time.  So I did what I do with treadmill time, not quite a half hour, that does not have me exercising?  Washed dishes, had a more substantial breakfast.  It's not my semi-annual projects, but it requires little concentration.  

Despite the delayed schedule for the morning, my daily pursuits will simply reset.  A new class in OLLI's late morning slot.  Focused projects when I get home.

Ice just becomes a minor snafu with little real consequence.

Disposing

Some projects are just big.  Eventually my house will require selling, likely forced, likely a burden to whichever of my survivors inherits this task.  I started.  My basement has the most unselected collection, stuff that I put there, my wife put there, the kids dropped off when they moved far enough to require air travel to their homes.  I have a lot of stuff stored there, most not needed, or even desired.  To make headway, I committed one of my semi-annual projects to its clearance.  Twenty minutes, twice weekly.  I've kept to that.  One recycling bin fully loaded, though pickup occurs only biweekly.  One big box taken to the state's twice monthly free shredding service.  

Amid the clutter, mice have found cozy nooks.   For the past twenty minutes I have tackled crawl space.  The state's program collects hazardous waste twice weekly, though in different locations.  I have a lot of paint.  Oil paints collected each week, latex only twice a month, on different days than the shredding.  So now I need to sort my paint cans.  I think most are latex.  At the edge of the crawl space, I found my medical books. Some thin monographs might still be of interest despite publication fifty years ago.  The textbooks do not yet qualify as antiques.  Those go to landfill.  My class notes fill a box.  I could empty the loose leafs to recycling, and either harvest or discard the binders.  One box, infested by mice, has my wife's unopened mail from nearly a quarter century ago. I extracted every paper, saved two of personal interest, emptied the box of its rodent calling cards, and then tote the paper and its box to recycling.

At some stage I will require professional help.  Our baby stuff predates modern safety standards.  We have mattresses, deteriorating carpet remnants, old patio furniture, obsolete or otherwise unusable furnishings that the kids dropped by.  I found a tambourine, usable.  I found part of a globe, not usable.  Along the crawl space we kept the children's school collections.  Photograph a few samples, recycle the rest.

There are services that could do some, along the lines of 1-800 Got Junk.  I think I can still make progress on my own, not counting items too heavy to lift or too bulky to fit in a garbage or recycling collection bin.  One or two boxes at a time.  Eye on the calendar for the state's collection dates.  Forty minutes a week, enforced with a timer, will enable the basement to function better.

Some things really have no home.  VHS tapes fill three boxes.  I discarded the pre-recorded movies.  I do not know which tapes just have convenient TV show recordings and which are videos of my children growing up.  

My first library loan of the calendar year was a ebook, The Swedish Art of Death Cleaning.  It expressed the same premise that I figured out on my own.  Either I dispose of my stuff or my survivors will.  While clearing a basement has its roadblocks, the bulky, the sentimental, things that are not mine, the book also had sections of my cyberspace imprint.  I'd like to keep some of that, my blog, YouTubes, other imprints of me that can survive me.  It may be cyberspace clutter, but cyberspace is big.  My basement is more finite.  I simply need to be persistent and decisive, convinced of the worthiness of my effort.

Expertise Matters

After months of inconsistent performance, my computer now works fairly normally.  It had accumulated three glitches.  The most serious involved access to my email.  Xfinity does not connect me to the internet pretty much every day.  It will loop me to an unfamiliar starting screen, denying me access to their site.  When I simply type www.xfinity.com which should take me generically to their site, it automatically adds a slash / which diverts it.  A few times a week I telephone Xfinity which I find agonizing as they will do anything to avoid transferring me to a person.  When I get a representative, they read me their script without ever listening to me explain what I encounter.  Eventually, I get the problem patched up, only to reappear the next day.

My computer does not always shut down.  Sometimes a popup called RealTek impedes this.  I will indicate that it should shut down anyway, which it does.  I do not know what RealTek is, never asked for it to appear on my screen, and when I asked the ISP to fix it, they tell me the problem lies in my computer.

Finally, I have a change in how my computer recognizes USB ports.  When I put my flash drive in a new port, it gets a message that says it is in Port D://.  The same used to happen when I plugged my phone into the port, but now it bundles it with the rest of my computer.  I could not navigate the phone from my computer. Calls to Samsung turf the problem back to my computer.  These corporate giants can do no wrong. Their agents are scripted to placate the caller without fixing a problem that they likely do not understand themselves.  

General Message:  they are not there to serve ME.  The megacorporations put barriers to even accessing expertise.  And these guys are proficient relative to the agents at my local Xfinity Store who are in the business of selling me stuff, not making stuff that I already have work at top form.

Out of exasperation, I considered shipping my laptop for service.  When I purchased it four years ago, I took Amazon up on their offer for a four-year warranty.  It expires in six weeks.  I've almost mailed it twice, and once spoke to a representative who expertly guided me through a programming glitch within weeks of purchase.  My problems, typing all caps and some similar annoyance, ran their course.  The insurer had emailed me mailing labels.  Having to back up all my data before shipping served as a deterrent to unnecessary utilization.  But with the warranty in its final weeks, I needed this resolved.  A not-so-easy email search through a temperamental email service identified the contract and a phone  I dialed it.  An agent answered promptly.   After she confirmed my policy was still active, she took my information, including a description of the problems.  Rather than ship my computer, she recommended that one of their 24/7 technical support people could probably guide me through this.  

Within a minute or two, I got connected to a representative, a man with a hint of an accent to suggest he had to learn English as a second language, but mastered it well.  He tried to share my screen but that got blocked by my protection software, so we did this verbally.

He explained that all major programs now automatically add a slash / with destination to their generic web address.  Mine takes me to a loop.  What I need is a slash / destination that takes me where I want to go directly.  He suggested www.xfinity.com/login.  It took me to log in.  I created a shortcut on my Google Search intro.  Subsequently, Xfinity changed /login to /email, but so far I've not had diversions to non-functional Xfinity opening pages unfamiliar to me trying to sell me something.

He addressed RealTek in a straightforward way.  It is apparently a factory-installed feature that allows the laptop's speakers to function. Why it pops up doesn't matter, as long as I can override it, which I always can.

For the Samsung issue, he accessed my telephone screen.  From its camera, I could now show him my laptop screen.  He brought me to the Samsung entry on File Explorer, opened it, and should me how to navigate my phone from that screen.

Total time, 38 minutes, not much different than the time it takes me to bypass the endless Xfinity automated messages and resets.  All solved.  This fellow did not read from the script.  He let me explain what I had experienced.  Were he able, he would have looked at my laptop screen and navigated it himself.  As he went along, he explained to me why I encountered what I did, along with its significance.  I do not remember what Amazon charged for the supplemental protection.  Worth everything I paid for it.

Having devoted my career to serving not only as an expert but with a responsibility to explain what patients sought in a way that they would find understandable, I connected well with the warranty representative.  Expertise matters.  He had it, and he conveyed it.  I valued it.  Our corporate giants accept a lesser interaction with their consumers.