Epistle 31 – House Hunting

My “retirement plan” of mutual funds and Florida real estate seemed like a hell of an idea at the time. When it went South without me, we were stuck with two houses whose value was fading faster than my memory. Impaled on the horns of the two-house dilemma, the answer seemed obvious—buy a 3^rd house! After all, it’s a buyer’s market, right? Of course, nobody wants to finance the purchase at any price, but somebody has to support the US economy besides the government. I just wish I wasn’t alone.

Actually, we have a real good reason for buying another house. The second job I had to take in lieu of retirement is a 5-hour commute, one-way, and that’s a little much even for someone who spent most of his adult life on the Kennedy Expressway. So, with a little courage and a lot of lunacy, even for a Boomer, we plunged into the abyss, a strange world of foreclosures, lease purchases, short sales, long sales, and even a regular house sale now and then. I always feel sorry for the folks who are trying to sell the family homestead the old fashioned way.

They usually don’t realize that they can barely give it away, let alone get their money out of it. They just want to pack up and move back to Toledo to be close to their grandkids. It’s actually a defensive move so their kids don’t move back in with them, but nobody warned them that their dream home in the Sunbelt would be taken over by the bank, which would be taken over by the government, which would be taken over by politicians from Neptune.

Anyway, back to our grand housing empire. While we are breathlessly waiting for somebody to buy our old house, rent our old house, or just steal away with it in the night, we need a place to hang our hat, so we have spent 6 months visiting every hat hanger in 4 counties. They range from mansions at ridiculous prices to something practical at ridiculous prices. Naturally, we leaned toward the former, but woke up in the middle of the night panicking to think we would actually have to live in it. At our age one of us could be lost for days if it was too big.

Having come to our senses and having frustrated more than one poor realtor beyond human endurance, we are making an offer on a modest home with a gorgeous view. My wife is busily planning the décor while I study the neighborhood golf course. Of course, the bank could still screw it all up by telling me I can’t afford another house, which is probably true, but the banks got me into this mess in the first place, right? The house we’re trying to buy is owned by the bank so it could be a poetic standoff—we can’t buy it and they can’t sell it. Maybe there is justice in this world after all.

We Will Win

Epistle 28 – Spring Break

Did you go to Florida on Spring Break? Nah, me neither. I always had to work, or at least I thought I did. About the only thing Boomer parents knew how to do was work so that’s all they taught their kids. All in all, not a bad plan unless you wanted a little joy in life, and once in awhile the idea would occur to me at which time I would sneak off in pursuit of some guilty pleasure—like a comic book when I was a tender lad or a Playboy magazine when I was a suave college student (just for the jokes, mind you).

Anyway, now I am on the Florida Gulf coast marveling at all the blue, half-naked kids shivering on the beach and pretending to have a grand old time. The temperature is down in the 60’s, but the sun is bright so they can at least get a great burn. And a new t-shirt with the image of some alien being or rock star (which is the same thing), that I never heard of but which must be cool because they buy them up by the millions.

The Redneck Riviera has more surf shops per capita than anywhere on earth, but I have never gone in one. Why? Fear I suppose. What if I find a dreadfully ugly shirt that I simply must have for $25? I would put in on right in the store, wander out to the street and blend into the crowd, mistaken for just one more student on Spring Break. What a blow that would be to whatever dignity I have left. And my wife would worry that I’d be overcome with emotion at the rock concert and damage my new hip jumping around. Not to worry. I can’t hear much, let alone jump.

Perhaps it was best that I never came here while I was in college, especially since the partying back then was in Ft. Lauderdale and I would have missed it. But seriously, wasn’t I a better person for drinking beer up north in the frozen tundra than drinking beer down here where it is warm and beautiful? Of course I was. I got in an extra snow storm or two and was able to improve my academic standing by spending the extra time studying. Yes, I was the lucky one all right. But if she was alive, I’d still have my mother arrested for child abuse.

Gotta go now. The surf shop just got in a new stock of Chad and Jeremy t-shirts. The kids will be green with envy, which, when combined with the blue from the cold, are perfect Florida colors.

We Will Win

Epistle 26 – Milestones

Well, it’s done. I did it. Or was it done to me? I turned 65 today. A milestone . . . or is that millstone? All of my youth I was taught that if I worked hard and behaved myself, I would retire at 65 and get a gold watch. That was a lie. Or maybe it was the “behave myself” part. Anyway, where’s the watch?

Not only didn’t I get the watch, there is no retirement on the horizon either. That’s called The New Norm. What a crock. It’s a government conspiracy to make us old folks hang out at Wal-Mart and work cheap. Not that I have anything against Wal-Mart. I shop there myself and smile at the other New Normers when they welcome me. I do the same at Home Depot, but I draw the line at McDonald’s. The old folks’ shift is okay but I usually miss that and get the pimply teenagers that mumble at me in alien tongues.

I may sound angry but I’m really not. It’s true I’d like to strangle a New York banker and a politician once a day just to stay in shape, but I am thankful I can still work. I’ve always believed Social Security is neither social nor secure, and I’d be lucky if it bought me lunch once a month by the time I got it. In the meantime, I’m healthy enough to keep on working and watch our national leaders spend billions just arguing about how to take care of me when I get sick. Makes me sick just to watch them.

So here I am, celebrating my 65^th birthday in O’Hare airport, where I’ve spent most of my adult life, waiting for a cramped plane to jet me off on one more business trip. When I was a lad, I could look forward to a genteel flight with free steak dinners and wine (it’s true, I swear!), but, of course, that was back when airlines were regulated and actually made money. Now they’re losing their collective shirts and hiring old folks who work cheap. Curious, isn’t it?

Well, enough of the Boomer Blues. Today’s my birthday and cause for celebration, so I think I’ll end my day by counting my blessings. Like:

I’m not nearly as old as my brother.

My wife will soon be older than I am, thanks to Boomer’s Rules of Rounding.

I get a free coffee from Starbucks.

I still have one original equipment hip.

I am now old enough to be eccentric instead of just an ass.

Gold watches are too damn heavy anyway.

We Will Win

Epistle 26 – Computers

Maybe they’re just a fad. Computers, I mean. That’s what I thought when I first met one in college. It was a big, hulking monster that you timidly fed punch cards in hopes of some grand pronouncement from the Beast, or at least a passing grade. It was like a carnival fortune-telling machine, only less reliable and without a raven-haired gypsy painted on the front.

I was in quest of a regression, correlation, rectal analysis, or something geeky like that, and had carefully filled in my stack of data cards with just the right information. That part took weeks and there was a foreboding sense the slightest blemish in the wrong place, like a beer stain, for instance, would strip the gears of the ravenous Beast and bring it grinding to a halt. At least I hoped so.

Alas, it was not to be. A week later I anxiously reported to the computer lab (an apt description for a room that compared favorably with Dr. Frankenstein’s lab) to learn that the Beast had gone tilt. The inference was that my stack of punch cards contained an evil message. Something erotic, I hope.

As it turned out, the Beast ate a lot of punch cards, producing only indigestion among the student body; the project was cancelled; and I concluded that if I ever needed a computer in my life, I would have to hire a geek. And then someone steeped in the occult invented the personal computer, and life as we knew it was forever altered, mostly for the worse. I now am the proud owner of four computers plus a cell phone that nags me with email messages anywhere on earth. Furthermore, none of them will play well together.

I’ve heard rumors that they sometimes cooperate on networks, but you couldn’t prove it by me. I’ve spent a small fortune trying to achieve some sense of teamwork, but they all treat me like a goof, running from one to another with a little stick of information that I plug in the side just so I can repeat everything I’ve done on all the others. Sometimes, even the little stick refuses to help and sends me an evil message, just like it’s ancestors, the punch cards.

I’m sure that I am somehow complicit in all this lunacy. Most of the human race says it’s because I use Macs (plus a blueberry or a gooseberry or whatever), which cost a lot more but are really cool. Well, maybe so, but I think it’s just one more major social trend with which I am woefully out of step, in typical Boomer fashion.

Hmm . . . maybe I can bring harmony to my private cyberspace if I cram this old-fashioned 3×5 card into this slot . . .

We Will Win

Epistle 25 – Bein’ Green

My car has 750 miles on it and is sitting in the garage, plotting to at least scare me to death, if not outright kill me. That’s what CNN says, and they ought to know. My car is being recalled because the floor mat or the accelerator or the brake or the computer or all of the above was designed by a mad, serial, automotive engineering loon.

Maybe it’s industrial highjinks by those multinational corporate funsters, but I believe it’s all my fault. I went green. Not just light green–green green. I decided I was not too old to save the planet and spent most of my money on a hybrid. And not just any hybrid.

One that came all the way from Japan with lots of whistles and bells and a spare tire you could also use on your bicycle. The GPS system magically pops up on the dashboard when you start the car (which you can’t hear because it has a big flashlight battery instead of an engine), and will pinpoint to the n^th degree the exact location of my death. So be it. I will be one less greenhouse gas polluting our planet, and for Boomers the gas can be considerable.

Oh, I know there are misguided people who pooh pooh this global warming stuff. I even did it a time or two myself. I just can’t shake this nagging image of dinosaurs heating up the climate in South Dakota with their automobiles. Anyway, I cast aside my doubts and fears and bought my hybrid. Not to say I haven’t carried my share of the ecological load in the past. My house in New Mexico had a swamp cooler instead of an air conditioner and a solar pool heater.

I turn off the lights as soon as my wife turns them on, which especially annoys her when she’s trying to read, and I only water my lawn on odd numbered days. I even recycle my plastic Perrier bottles. What a guy. Let’s forget the fact that I generate all those bottles in the first place.

So now that I am no longer driving a gas-guzzling, smoke belching vehicle, why is my life being threatened by a car that refuses to stop? In the good ol’ days, I didn’t have to worry that my cars wouldn’t stop. Most of them wouldn’t start when I needed them most, but they’d always stop. I was once cursed with a Nash Rambler that should never have been allowed on a public highway, but it always stopped.

I also had a 1959 Ford that occasionally had important parts fall off, but it always stopped. In fact, on the very day I tried to sell it, it stopped for good. And then there was the red Pontiac that I took to the car wash every Saturday because the wax was all that held it together. That car was world class at stopping–anywhere, anytime– until I finally had to put a bullet in it on a Chicago freeway.

Now, after all that, I am cursed with an evil machine bent on my destruction. Not only will it go 500 miles on a gallon of gas, it will keep going . . . and going . . . and going until I run out of road and meet my Maker. It ain’t easy bein’ green.

We Will Win