Idle essays

Well! Here’s a clarion bell announcing good news: from PBS NewsHour‘s Business Desk comes “Why the US Sits at the Brink of a New Boom.”

Let’s hope Mr. Morris has got it right this time, as he apparently did when the prognosticated a major crash. Think of what it would mean:

• The US deficit would shrink some more.
• Private industry and government jobs would bloom in gay profusion.
• The increased tax revenues from all that employment would revive Social Security, Medicare, and a wide variety of other key public programs.
• Our homes might increase in value to what we paid for them — for those of us who have managed to cling to our homes, that is.
• Most important: Our young people would have a shot at jobs that pay well enough to get them out from under the saddle of their college loans. They might even be in a position to save for their retirement and to help their own kids get through school without outrageous debt.

Speaking of “wouldn’t it be loverly,” we have that e-book I mentioned a couple of days ago. In a je ne sais quoi moment, I followed an impulse to run the manuscript past an old friend who happens to be a fairly big cheese in academic publishing. To my astonishment, she liked it.

A lot.

Enough to suggest I send it to a friend of hers at a very prominent academic press, with a recommendation from her.

Can you imagine?

Well, I think it’s a pretty long shot. But since cover design, page layout, and e-book formatting for print and electronic versions would set me back almost $1,200, I would be very pleased to get someone else to foot the bill for production, printing, warehousing, and fulfillment.

If a miracle happens and this publisher accepts the book, it will have to go through peer review, revision, and then design and production. So it’ll be a year or so before it sees print. But WTF? The interim will give me time to put together the three cookbooks I want to publish, which will be easy and relatively inexpensive to put together as e-books. 🙂

So I was feeling pretty smug this morning, trotting around the park, having dropped off the fat-loss plateau to the tune of another 1.5 pounds. Coming into the home stretch of Mile 3, I see a plump lady gamely running through the early morning heat. She has another 30 pounds to go, I figure.

Nya nya! I’ve only got 9.4 pounds left to shed!

Ahead of me I spot another woman, a large woman with a terrible limp — looks like she might have injured a hip that never healed up right, or maybe she has a birth deformity that’s nearly got her crippled. She’s a tough gal; she’s not giving up, but wrestles herself along the sidewalk with a twisting, rolling gait that must be exhausting to sustain for any length of time. My guess: 40 to 50 pounds overweight.

Thank God I don’t have to deal with that much fat!

As I come abreast to pass her, she pauses to gasp for breath, so we see each other face to face for the first time. And…my god!

It’s not a woman!

It’s a boy. He looks to be about 13 years old. Holy mackerel! The overweight probably derives from a combination of the injury or birth defect, mean classmates who make him feel inferior, and lots of computer gaming.

Baby boy, what happened to you?

Of course one doesn’t vocalize any such question. Instead, I smile vaguely and proceed around him at speed.

Forthwith I reach the end of the three-lap park circumnavigation and am flying up the feeder street toward home. At the corner, in front of the house that always has all the gay decorations at Christmas, I see a lady in a bright pink bathrobe, sitting on the ground by her garden.

She says something softly, and it takes a second to realize what she’s said is “help me!”

She’s fallen on the ground, evidently trying to get the newspaper.

I ask her if she’s hurt. She says she’s not, but would I help her get up.

She’s as tall as I am, but so frail and wasted she looks tiny. Under the bathrobe, she’s wearing an adult diaper that looks like it’s wet.

I take her hands while she struggles to get her feet under her. We try to get her upright, but it doesn’t work. She’s too heavy for me to lift, and she’s too weak to pull herself upright.

I say, “We’d better call 911.”

She says, “Get my husband.”

“Is he inside the house?”

“Yes.”

“What’s his name?”

“Chuck.”

I stick my head inside the front door and holler for Chuck.

No answer. The house is neat as a pin, spotless, and odorless. But other than that clue (this lady obviously couldn’t keep house at all, much less maintain a house and yard to perfection), there’s no sign of anyone else in the house. Maybe he’s still in bed.

I enter the home, still calling his name, and walk down the hallway toward the bedrooms.

Silence.

A closed door. I knock on it and call his name a couple more times.

Just as I’m thinking the woman is confused and only imagines her husband is still with her, he calls out from behind the door, “What is it?”

When I explain that his wife has fallen out front and that I’m not physically strong enough to lift her, he says he’ll be right there. Evidently this is not the first time.

A compact, fit-looking man, he appears to be in his early 80s. He hurries outside.

On the grass by the sidewalk he kneels beside his wife and caresses her face.

This is a man of extraordinary kindness, loyalty, and grace. He speaks quietly to her, and then he manages to haul her to her feet. The trick, it develops, is not to try to pull her upright by holding her hands, from the front, but to get behind her and lift her by her shoulders from the back. Again, she has to get her feet beneath her, a painful and difficult process.

Once she’s upright he holds her in his arms. She still isn’t walking — says she can’t balance upright but feels like she’s falling forward.

I ask him how else I can help them. He says it’s OK, that they’ll be all right.

Why do I doubt it?

As I walk away, I look up into the cloudless blue sky, symbolic abode of my personal deity.

Hey! You — the one with the omniscience and the universe and all that… What the hell are You doing back there? Either make it right or make it stop, will You?

The mockingbirds sing. The doves coo. The quail crow. The waiting sky resonates with construction and traffic.

If She has an answer, She chooses not to share it.

Respice post te. Hominem te esse memento. Memento mori.

Lordie! Looking back over all those defunct financial statements made me wonder where on earth I left my IQ during and after the divorce. I did sooo many stupid things back then, not the least of them leaving the corporate lawyer in the first place.

Shortly after the divorce was final, I hired a financial adviser who was the ex-wife of one of my husband’s ex-partners. Inexplicably, I imagined that these characteristics plus an ambitious post-marital career made her magically trustworthy.

In the first place, she was charging me through the wazoo, and in the second, she gave out bad advice. She had me dump a bunch of money into a mutual fund that was…well, OK, but just OK. And it, too, had high expenses — the word “Vanguard” was never mentioned.

But the worst thing she did screwed me over royally.

The ex- was five years older than I. When the alimony ended, he would be 59½ and I would be 54. Under the IRA rules, because together we would have been eligible to take withdrawals when he turned 59½, at that time we each could draw down from our respective halves of the fund. But, unknown to me, this largesse did not come without strings.

I figured I could get my freelance writing and book packaging business up and running in five years, particularly since my business partner was experienced in publishing and public relations and well known in Arizona. By the time the alimony ran out, I expected to be able to support myself with the business and the interest from this large IRA and a couple of smaller investments.

The IRA resided in the now defunct First Interstate Bank of Arizona. Their investment department also left something to be desired. A few years later, they freaking lost a municipal bond by dropping it, unregistered, into the snail-mail.

Long before that, though, my friend/financial advisor was lobbying me to move the IRA from  First Interstate to the care of her firm, thereby allowing her to start charging lots of money. Understanding exactly nothing about mutual fund and financial management costs, that’s exactly what I did: I rolled it over to a new IRA with her company.

A-n-n-n-n-d… Guess what? In the eyes of the law, rolling my half over made it “mine,” not mine and the ex’s. And so this move — effectively creating a “new” IRA — meant now I couldn’t withdraw a penny until I was 59½!

Well, of course, once the alimony stopped, there was no way I could reliably support myself on a freelance income alone, and I knew it. Ultimately, the upshot was that I had to go out and get a full-time job, selling the business to my partner. That’s how I ended up at the Great Desert University.

Why did I stay with her after that? What on earth was I thinking? I don’t even recall registering that this mistake was, after all, hers — a CFP with an MBA in finance and a brag that she specialized in single women’s money management should have known better. Later, the fact that she migrated from firm to firm to firm should have been a tip-off that her competence might not be the best.

Eventually I did walk, straight to the very excellent, indeed brilliant, financial manager who founded the firm that today is known as Stellar Capital Management. The guy had been there all along. I knew about him. Why on earth didn’t I turn to him first?

Here’s a weird one: I was so terrified of debt that, to ensure that I would never charge more than was in the checking account, every time I made a credit-card charge, I would write a check for it, enter it in the checkbook, and subtract the amount from the balance. Then at the end of the month I would stuff all these checks — sometimes 15 or 20 of them! — into an envelope and send them with the payment coupon. Gaaaaaaaahhhh! Please: steal my identity!

What possessed me to do that? Well, it was more than just fear of being unable to pay the month-end bill. Cash flowed through my fingers like water, and paying with checks or a card allowed me to keep a better grip on spending, mostly because both of those methods generated a paper trail. Writing a check at every cash register was a pain…it actually was easier for me to write a flurry of checks to the credit card. And I had no idea how to use Excel. I’d never even opened the program. ’Twasn’t until I went to work at GDU that my opposite number there showed me how to use it to create a grade book, and from there it didn’t take long to figure out that if it would keep track of grades, it would also keep track of a budget.

Speaking of stupid, revisiting all those old pay statements by way of grinding them up also unearthed a lot of correspondence over the fiasco that occurred when GDU’s leadership decided to switch from bimonthly to semiweekly pay at the same time as they made a switch from whoever was our payroll vendor to PeopleSoft. Creating and inflicting the subsequent chaos, described by a Wall Street Journal reporter as “all part of the plan,” cost the university $30 million.

My god! What a mess! Repeatedly, despite screams of rage from me, they would fail to withhold my 403(b) contributions and then, with the following check, hit me with a double whammy — leaving me to scramble to pay my bills that month. PeopleSoft decided that because of my job classification I had no right to vacation time (!!). They erased my accrued vacation time — which amounted to five or six weeks, since I hardly ever took time off — and stopped tracking vacation hours. And I was one of the lucky ones. At least I got paid, even if the amounts and statements were wrong.

Some people didn’t get paid for weeks. At least one guy got a paycheck in the amount of $0.00. Some got double-paid and, when they tried to return the redundant paychecks in person to HR, were told their pay would be docked that amount the following pay period. Some got double-paid, and PeopleSoft never noticed — if you kept your mouth shut, you just might get away with banking an extra paycheck.

Great plan, dear bosses!

Windy City Gal (HAPPY BIRTHDAY!) remarks that she’s taking riding lessons — so that, among other reasons, she can take a couple of wonderful riding excursions when she visits Scotland later this year. Wow! How cool does that sound?

Reminded me of how much I miss the ranch outside of Yarnell, where we had a small herd of horses. My favorite was Babe, a neatly trained quarterhorse on whose capacious back I performed some of the stupidest stunts of  my entire life. Flying down the Kirkland Junction road at a full gallop…bareback. What was I smoking?

Well you might ask! Next to me on the left was my best friend on Old Stewball, a retired racehorse that wanted nothing, nothing other than to proceed at a dead run. When a horse falls or bolts and I need to get off fast, I tend to jump to the left…don’t know why, just instinct. If I’d fallen or jumped off Babe, I would’ve gone right under Stewball’s hooves.

WTF. I survived, and Babe survived, solely by the grace of God.

Presumably that’s how we all survive, by Her grace.