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Retirement

California Dreamin’…or is that a nightmare?

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Amazed to learn from my son that, like me, he also is bothered by driving over the increasingly Southern California-esque roads here in lovely L.A. East. He is a confident, assertive driver who isn’t bothered by lunatics, morons, flashing red lights, gunshots, and assorted other features of driving on the homicidal streets of Phoenix. Nor is he inclined to fly into fits of high rage, as his muther is…

Wouldn’t it be grand if I could leverage that to persuade him to move SOMEPLACE less massively tacky?

To my mind, the Valley of the We-Do-Mean Sun gets more and more like the crowded, smoggy, grody L.A. Basin with every day that passes. I detested living in Long Beach, with its air that would make me sick and its blandly ticky-tacky aging suburban style and the streets mobbed all the time and the grodily casual style of its fine inhabitants. And the longer I live here, the more I think I’d like to be living somewhere else.

I don’t think he’ll choose to make an escape, because his dad is firmly stapled to the Valley floor. Current Wife has a daughter who works as a librarian here, and so she’s unlikely to agree to move to Prescott or some such. As long as DXH stays put, my son will stay put.

Hm. Wonder if I could talk him into investing in a second home, off in some remote locale. Then I could stay there most of the time. He could come up and hang out when he wants some peace and quiet. But he’d still have a foothold down here, from which he could keep an eye on his Dad and New Wife.

Wonder if he could be talked into moving to Fountain Hills? That at least is pretty far from Crime Central. But truth to tell, it’s a long way from his Dad’s place, too. If either of those two old folks has a stroke or a heart attack, it would take him 40 or 50 minutes (at best) to get to the hospital. Here, all three major metropolitan hospitals are within five or ten minutes of his house.

DXH, who was happy to escape life in small-town Western Colorado (actually, it was the largest burg on the Western Slope…but still: a backwater), absolutely positively will NOT be persuaded to move out of central Phoenix.

Hm. Maybe. Unless..he thought that Fountain Hills, being adjunct to Scottsdale, would put him closer to the Cultural Venues he favors. But…no: the Chamber Music Society is performing at Central Methodist — they used to haunt the Scottsdale Center for Performing Arts. AZ Theater Co performs downtown, too…so that scheme wouldn’t work.

BUT….really, the kid and I are both very spoiled to a) living in central locations and b) construction that is not ticky-tacky. Most of Fountain Hills IS ticky-tacky. All very nice and new(ish), but strictly from stick-and-Styrofoam. In Wickenburg–formerly a railroad town on the way to Las Vegas and southern California, now effectively a suburb of Phoenix–you can find some very pretty properties, but the same issue holds: newer structures are certifiable junk. I happen to favor houses with WALLS. Remember those?

The more I look at the real estate listing in those suburbs today, the better I like my house. And neighborhood.

Construction is better. Houses here are not QUITE right on top of each other. The place is centrally located. No jet aircraft graze the top of your chimney. A-a-a-a-n-d…as gas skyrockets up, the fact that we’re right on the lightrail line starts to look better and better. Conduit of Blight and Gangbanger’s way, along which the lightrail is slated to run, begin to look like assets.

Contemporary house construction is cheapied down to the point that if they built the places any flimsier, people would be living in tents.

Interior walls hardly exist anymore. Those that do often don’t go up to the ceiling — they’re more like room dividers. Most late-model houses have no gas service, and builders proudly present you with a glass-top hotplate instead of a real stove. For most people, that’s prob’ly OK, given that Americans don’t cook anymore. But…I still want an actual stove!.

Even expensive tracts are now fields of houses built eave-to-eave — in one Wickenburg development, even with the tricky marketing photography you can see that the neighbors behind you can gaze right straight in your back windows. So ALL of your drapes and blinds would have to be closed ALL of the time! Why have windows at all?

Meanwhile, in quieter venues like Wickenburg and Fountain Hills, those nice desert-y backyards are gonna be full of coyotes and rattlesnakes. Dandy! You wouldn’t dare let your dog out to snuffle around in peace. And in fact, you probably ought not to let a small child play in those yards unsupervised. Every…minute…the…kid…is…outside, Mom or Dad or Babysitter will have to be peering over her shoulder.

Here in the ‘Hood, our houses are made of block. Interior walls are insulated. Gas service allows you to have a real stove in the kitchen. And you don’t have to take out a bank loan to drive to the grocery store, what with gasoline now almost $5 a gallon.

It does make our centrally located districts look highly desirable — notwithstanding Biker Central and the constant cop copter fly-overs and the late-night drag-races and the nuisancey lightrail and the panhandlers in every parking lot.

Ugh. I guess next week…or maybe this afternoon, depending on mood…I’m going to have to think through a set of Instacart lists. With the price of gasoline now, unless Instacart has jacked up its rates accordingly, it will cost no more (maybe less) to order up delivery of grocery and Costco items than to traipse around the city after them. This would relieve me of two hassles in one trip: Californicated roads and astronomical gas prices.

Wow! Life in These New-nited States!

What’s a Dollar Worth, Anyhow?

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The other day I was reminiscing about my father and his times.

Born in 1909 in Fort Worth, Texas, he was a change-of-life baby. His mother apparently was in her late 40s, and, having raised two sons to adulthood, his father decidedly did not want to bring up another child. He walked out, ran off to the Chisolm Trail and waypoints. After some time (how much time, I do not know), he was found by the side of a road, a bullet in his head and a pistol in his hand: presumed suicide.

The mother, however, prevailed. She had inherited what was then a handsome fortune from her father, who’d struck it rich freighting buffalo hides out of Oklahoma into Texas, there to be shipped to the East Coast. By the time her husband ran off, she not only had that substantial chunk of dough, she owned a gas station (in 1909 that must have been a novelty!) and a large home. Fort Worth was a wide spot in the road, where the family presumably enjoyed a very comfortable lifestyle.

My father’s two brothers were adults by the time he came along. One was a cowboy who eventually became a ranch manager, and one went to work for Metzger’s Dairy, where over time he became a mid-level manager or executive.

In her husband’s absence, the mother fell prey to any number of opportunists and con artists. She got into spiritualism, which was quite the rage in the early 20th century. Adherents to this nouveau-religion believe the soul persists after death, and that it is therefore possible to communicate with your deceased loved ones. This activity drew the woman right in: my father described séances conducted by supposed mediums…who really acted not as a medium to chat with the dead but to funnel the credulous client’s money into their own bank accounts.

Then she got taken in by some building contractors, whom she had hired to make a few improvements on the family manse. Next thing anyone knew, she was paying them to construct grand additions to the house.

By the time the absent father was found, kaput, she had diddled away all of the money she had inherited from her father, including the gas station (which she sold to help fund her spiritual advisors and her construction crews). My father was still a teenager, but his two older brothers fell to blaming each other for not keeping an eye on her. This led to a permanent alienation between the two men. At 16, my father dropped out of high school, lied about his age, and joined the Navy.

Naval service started him on a decently-paying career in the Merchant Marine. By then he had formed a lifelong ambition: to earn back the entire amount his mother had squandered, and, once he reached that goal, to retire and live the life of Riley for as long as he had left to inhabit this earth.

That amount was $100,000, and that was his target. He worked, he scrimped, he saved, and he invested every spare penny.

By 1962, he had stashed away that amount: the cache he figured he could retire on.

So the other day I was contemplating the absurd rise in housing prices that has taken place recently — a house just down the street from my first house here in the ‘Hood, for which I paid $100,000, is on the market for $640,000. Same model as mine, a block closer to Conduit of Blight and its crazy-making noise. For a middle-class tract house, apparently it was underpriced: it sold in a few days. Six and a half times what it was worth when I moved into the neighborhood!!!

This led me to wonder how much that $100,000 of his would be worth today.

To live in the style to which that amount would have supported my father — just about in my present rather modest middle-class style — you would need $923,185.43…almost a million dollars!

And how much would he have needed to replace the buying power of his mother’s hundred grand in the year he retired, 1962? $173,563.22 when he bought their little house in Sun City.

He wasn’t so far off: only $23,563 short.

What it means is that in the time since he retired — 60 years — inflation has vastly devalued the dollar’s buying power — much more so than during the time he worked: 37 years.

So what does it mean to us, here in the first third of the 21st Century?

My guess is that if you’re a young adult today, you would need to calculate how much you need to earn now and how much you need to save to retire comfortably in middle- to old age, and then multiply that figure by a factor of two to ten. Depending on the style to which you hope to remain accustomed…

You can’t rely on today’s dollar to support you tomorrow.

Aging in Place: How to Pull It off

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As you know if you read Funny about Money off and on, one of my goals in life is to maintain my independence through my dotage. That is: to stay out of life-care communities.

Is there anything intrinsically wrong with a place where you fork over most of your life savings and cede your independence in exchange for shelter until the end of your life and a guaranteed place in a nursing home when you need it? Possibly not.

But from my point of view: yeah. Everything. The whole idea of a warehouse for old folks conflicts with my basic concept of a decent lifestyle. Understand: a life-care community is not a nursing home. It’s more like an age-restricted apartment complex with a built-in restaurant or two and a staff of keepers. And rules that constrict your behavior in much the same way that a dormitory’s rules do. In effect, it’s a dormitory for old people.

I hated living in the dorms during undergraduate school. And you may be sure I’m not going to spend the last few years of my life in another dorm!

But…as a practical matter, how can one avoid it? Or can one, in any safe and sane manner?

When you move into a life-care community, you fork over most of your life savings and cede your independence in exchange for shelter until the end of your life and for a guaranteed place in a nursing home when you need it. While you live there, you occupy a tiny apartment and are expected to take at least one meal a day in the institution’s “restaurant” (more like the chow line at the dorm), where you are treated to lots of processed, packaged, oversalted and oversugared foodoids. The reason you must show up for one meal a day is so that the proprietors can easily check to be sure you’re still alive and conscious.

There are some sterling benefits to moving into one of these places:

  • You don’t have to prepare your meals every day. In some cases, as in the place where my father stayed, you wouldn’t be able to do so in any practical manner.
  • You have lots of old people to make friends with.
  • Usually a nursing home is attached to the life-care home, and you get first dibs on entry to it. Sometimes getting into a decent nursing home when you need it is extremely difficult.
  • The level of security is very high.
  • Some housekeeping services are provided.
  • Various entertainments and amusements are provided: crafts rooms, a small library, musical performances, lectures, and the like
  • Some of these places have a swimming pool, a hot tub, and an exercise room.
  • Some also provide Alzheimer’s or other dementia care.
  • You could in theory live there without ever having to drive a car or go to another grocery store.
  • A doctor is usually on the staff or hired on contract.
  • If you fall, have a heart attack, or suffer a stroke, someone is on the premises to help you, 24/7.

All of those are good things. However…I would argue that alternatives exist, and those alternatives cost a whole lot less than a life-care community and do not lock you into a prison for old folks. You can get most or all of those services on your own — without forking over your life savings for the privilege.

First, let’s take a closer look at the benefits and the downsides of moving into one of these places.

We have two sets of friends here who have made two contrasting life decisions. One has determined that she’s not going into a life-care community, come Hell or high water. At 95, she still lives on her own, in a freestanding house with a large yard and an irrigated lawn here in the ‘Hood. Let’s call her Margarita. The others, a couple exactly the same age as Margarita, decided to sell their patio home and move into a two-bedroom apartment at the Beatitudes, one of the two most prominent life-care communities in the city of Phoenix. Let’s call them Dick and Jane. Knowing these folks well gives us a chance to think about their choices and how they work.

Bear in mind, as you’re perusing the first two lists below, that Dick strongly resisted moving into the Beatitudes. However, Jane owned the house where they lived, and so it was her decision whether to sell or not to sell; also, Dick had some serious health challenges that were making him infirm. Additionally, Dick and Jane lived next door to a crazy woman who was constantly doing battle with the homeowner’s association and who had taken to threatening to run down the neighbors in her car. Jane saw this madwoman as a serious threat, and she surely was right. So, at her behest, it was off to the Beatitudes!

How, then, has this worked out for our friends?

As you can see at a glance, both householders face similar challenges: advancing frailty, growing risk of injury from falls or health problems, the difficulties of obtaining and preparing food and other necessities. Dick and Jane faced an additional challenge: a neighbor who was batshit crazy. This woman took to threatening to run down other members of the small patio-home HOA with her car, and she in fact did aim her car at Dick a couple of times. She also harassed him every time he rolled the trash barrel out to the curb for pickup, and sued them in a misguided attempt to engross part of their backyard into her own (she lost).

Margarita does not have the crazy neighbor problem, but all the other issues are similar. Her solutions, however, did not entail consigning herself to a warehouse for old folks.

As we make this comparison, we do so with several assumptions in mind:

  • They all have enough money to handle whatever they need to handle.
  • They have access to medical help.
  • They retain all or most of their marbles.
  • No one is trying to cheat or rob them.
  • Dick and Jane’s kids are doing little to help them; Margarita’s husband and her only child are deceased.
  • They have no hired representatives (except for the Beatitudes) to handle various financial, health, and custodial matters.

These are not necessarily givens, but rather are assumptions based on what I’ve observed.

Okay. So what are the pro’s and the cons of their respective decisions: to stay at home or to move into a custodial setting?

HOME


LIFE CARE INSTITUTION

What seems like an advantage or a disadvantage would certainly depend on your own disposition and experience. To me, the disadvantages of the life care setting so outweigh the disadvantages of living at home that there’s really no choice. But on the other hand… That’s because I value my aloneness. I like privacy, I like independence, I like quiet, and I don’t much like people in my face. And I’m used to those things: I’ve lived that way for years.

Thus we have the question of just how important is a given advantage or disadvantage, when it comes to thinking about where you’ll spend the last few years of your life. How much do these things really matter?

To figure this out, let’s assign a value to each advantage and disadvantage, on a scale of 1 to 10, where 1 is least important and 10 is most important. What do we get then?

Here we see the advantages of aging in place at home are almost a wash when compared to the disadvantages. There’s a very slight tilt in favor of the advantages, but the disadvantages are very serious, and in fact when they’re weighted in terms of their importance, the advantages just barely outweigh them.

How does this way of looking at things work when we apply it to life in the Beatitudes?

Now we see a much more significant difference. Whereas the total point value of the stay-at-home advantages (the total advantage factor) was only one point more than the Beatitudes’ advantages, the total point value of the Beatitudes disadvantages outstrips its advantages by 23 points. This is because there are more disadvantages than advantages to living in the Beatitudes. That was not the case for the stay-at-home scenario, which presented an equal number of advantages and disadvantages.

Nevertheless, when you calculate an average, you come up with figures in the same ball park. Except…here the disadvantages on average outweigh the advantages by more than 3/4 of a point. whereas the advantages of living at home just barely outweigh the disadvantages.

Parsing it out, we can make these observations:

  1. There are more advantages to living at the Beatitudes than to living at home, but…
  2. Some of the advantages are rather low in value. This is reflected in the fact that…
  3. The average value of the advantages to home is higher than that of the Beatitudes.
  4. There are many fewer disadvantages to living at home, but…
  5. The overall weighted value of the disadvantages is about the same. That is, there are some major disadvantages to living at home, so that some advantages are outweighed by disadvantages.

Okay, so how did Margarita pull off the feat of living in an upscale home on the fringe of the tony North Central neighborhood, all the way into her dotage…all by her little self?

Well, in the first place, both her husband and her only child died some years ago. This means there’s no one that she feels bound and determined to leave her estate to. Thus that nine-point disadvantage posed by a reverse mortgage goes away.

That being a given, she had no impediment to taking out a reverse loan on her house. And if you believe Zillow, her house is currently worth $662,000. That puts a lot of cash in her pockets.

The house is in a fairly upscale section of the neighborhood, across the street from some mighty valuable horse property and nestled among well-maintained 1960s ranch houses on big lots. That suggests her husband made a good living and without a doubt left her a decent retirement fund. Plus of course as his widow she would be getting his full Social Security. The house is paid off. So all she has to do is pay the utility bills, pay the taxes on it, and hire people to maintain the place and assist her personally.

So: a major part of the plan could be to add the equity in your home to whatever you have in your life savings and to your Social Security income to support yourself in much the same style that you would enjoy at the Beatitudes. This would mean hiring housekeeping help, yard workers, and possibly a practical nurse to come in and help cope with your infirmities. It might include someone to chauffeur you around, if and when you reach the point when you ought not to be driving.

Given the value of Margarita’s home, she presumably would have plenty to cover those costs. If she added, say, $30,000/year to her Social Security income, which is probably around $16,000 or $17,000 a year, the cash in her savings and house equity would outlast her for many years,

My house’s value is nothing like hers — despite the influx of Californians and resulting inflation in real estate values, it’s presently worth about $461,000. But I have cash in savings. The result: there’s enough there to support me until I croak over, assuming I don’t live more than about another 20 years. That would put me at the end of the lifespan of my most long-lived relatives.

If you figure I spend, on average, around $30,000 a year on everything including taxes, insurance, medical care, house repair & maintenance, automobile costs, housekeeping help, yard guys, the pool guy: the equity in my house would support me for 12 years. The amount in savings would last for 22 years. Combine them, and they would keep me going for another 38 years in this house…and believe me, I ain’t a-gonna live for another 38 years! 😀

By “keep me going,” I mean provide most of the amenities one gets at a place like the Beatitudes: prepared meals, people coming in every day or two to check on you, transportation, home maintenance, medical & dental care, utilities, and whatnot. But you would get all that in the privacy in your own home, without having to give up much independence. Over time, you might become more dependent on certain kinds of helpers…but you would be the one who hired those people, not some institution’s management, which means you would be the boss.

So, what would be the drawbacks?

Assuming you weren’t incapacitated by a fall, the main things that would work against you would be cancer, stroke, or dementia. You could suffer cancer or stroke at any time of your life: my grandmother was in her 40s and my mother was 65 when they died of the Big C. If you evade cancer, a stroke or a heart attack are probably the likeliest wormholes into the other world. In that case, most of the cost for end-of-life care would supposedly be covered by Medicare plus my long-term care policy.

But dementia is the monster lurking behind the curtains… If you were demented, you truly could not take care of yourself and would die, slowly and expensively, in a nursing home — with, as far as I can tell, no way out. If on the other hand you suffered a disease that could be treated and staved off, you probably could return to independent living. This fact would be true, though, no matter where you lived: in a private home or in a warehouse for old folks.

Incidence of dementia in the US has fallen: at this time about  20-25% of over-65’s have “mild” cognitive decline. Furthermore, dementia rates in the US are continuing to drop as the population ages. Harvard University notes that dementia cases in this country are dropping at 15 percent per decade. The Alzheimer’s Association claims the numbers are growing…but then, it’s in their interest to do so. Additionally, the level of education a person attains is somehow associated with one’s likelihood of succumbing to dementia: the more education, the less likely you are to suffer senile dementia. I have a Ph.D. So presumably I’ll remain sharp as a tack no matter how superannuated I get!

The Alzheimer’s Association’s claim that the numbers are rising measures something different: their figures represent the fact that a huge bubble in the U.S. population — the baby boom — is advancing into old age, not that the percentage of people with Alzheimer’s in that population is increasing. In other words, if (let us say) 10% of people develop Alzheimer’s after age 65, and a city has a population of 100,000 people 65 and older in 2010 and 200,000 such people in 2020, obviously the city will see a lot more citizens with Alzheimer’s in 2020 than it did ten years earlier.

Gina Colata, writing in the November 21, 2016 issue of the New York Times, reported that “the dementia rate in Americans 65 and older fell by 24 percent over 12 years, to 8.8 percent in 2012 from 11.6 percent in 2000.” If this trend continues, then one’s likelihood of developing dementia drops accordingly.

It’s a crap shoot. If you can hang onto most of your marbles and you don’t develop a debilitating disease such as Parkinson’s or ALS, you should be able to maintain your freedom until close to the end of your life, if not until you’re all the way home. In my case, the peripheral neuritis surely could become debilitating. However, Margarita has it and says it’s not the reason for her crutches. It’s annoying, but apparently no more crippling for her than it is for me, which is…not at all.

Neither Jane nor Dick appears to suffer from dementia. Dick is ill because he has heart disease. Jane has suffered from hip pain, but a hip replacement seems to have resolved the problem.

The hip thing was one of Jane’s motivations…she was afraid she wouldn’t be able to continue caring for Dick much longer. But…she resisted having the surgery. After she went into the Beatitudes, someone finally persuaded her to do it. At 94, she came through it just fine and now is walking pain-free. Had they stayed in their home, she could have hired someone to come in and take care of Dick — or have rented a place for him at the Beatitudes for a month or three — until she recovered. After that, she probably would have been better able to cope, at least for awhile.

One powerful motivation for her decision to move them out of their perfectly manageable patio home was that a nut case lived next door, and this woman was threatening them with harm. So…let us say that you arrive at your dotage and find that you truly do need to move out of the home you’re living in, not so much because of infirmity but because of other issues.

Is there an alternative to the life-care community?

Well. Yes.

Check out this place.

This is an apartment in the high-rise where my friends and coreligionists Jack and Lou live. Personally, it’s not to my taste, mostly because I’m less than fond of apartment-house life. But…it’s one helluva lot better than the Beatitudes. $385,000 for 1261 modernistic square feet: that’s probably more than Dick and Jane paid to get in to the Beatitudes. But…

It’s not a prison. Also, Jack and Lou’s place is larger than Dick and Jane’s two-bedroom digs, I believe. Certainly the kitchen is vast, by comparison. The sitting areas are far more pleasant, and the master bedroom is large enough to accommodate…yes…a king-sized bed. One of those will not fit into Dick and Jane’s main bedroom.

Though it has no cafeteria in-house, it’s within walking distance of quite a few eateries. It’s also less than a mile from the beloved AJ’s gourmet grocery store. That shopping center has at least three restaurants.

It also has no monthly gouge, other than an HOA fee. At the Beatitudes, the monthly fee starts at just $2,815 with a one-time 90% refundable entrance fee starting at $144,800. The final pricing depends on the size of apartment you choose.  So they say. It’s impossible to get a straight story about their buy-ins and fees online — the only way you can get straight dope is to go down there and subject yourself to a ferocious sales pitch, and give them private information so they can keep hustling you til the end of time.

One site says the monthly fee starts at $2254 and is coy about the buy-in Another says the buy-in is $180,000, but that’s undoubtedly for a studio: Jane told me it took ALL of the proceeds from sale of their home to buy into the place…that would be around $350,000. Plus.

Here we have a more realistic claim of $350,000: “Residents in independent living pay a buyin fee. That price can range from two hundred and fifty to three hundred and fifty thousand dollars. They pay a monthly fee for services as well. We also have month to month rental units with no buy in requirement.” They claim 90% of this is reimbursed to family when the person dies — that has got to be BS. My understanding is it’s gone, once you move in. This article appeared in January 2017, over 4 years ago.

Dick and Jane’s place is supposedly 2 bedrooms, but it’s nothing like the size of Jack and Lou’s place. J&L’s kitchen is huge — probably bigger than mine. It’s three times the size of the Beatitudes’ kitchenette, which doesn’t even have room for a built-in microwave. It has a living & dining room, but so does the Beatitudes’ place, sorta: a large-ish room divided by a pony wall. It has a second bedroom — so does Jack and Lou’s. But the Beatitudes’ master bedroom isn’t large enough to accommodate a king-sized bed!

No kidding. Dick and Jane had to get rid of their marital bed and replace it with a queen-size bed, over Dick’s strenuous objections. Within a couple weeks, Dick fell out of the thing onto the floor! Only by sheer luck and the grace of God did he fail to break a hip.

Back at the Central Avenue high-rise, Jack and Lou’s place has a generously sized master bedroom and a normal-size second bedroom, both with astonishing views of the entire East Valley, the Superstitions, and the South Mountains. It has a dining room/living room suite that easily accommodates 15 or 20 guests for a party (I’ve been there!), and in addition it has another sitting area, a rather private alcove off the entry that could be used as an office or just a separate seating space. If you put a fold-out sofa there, you could use it for overnight guests. Or it could serve nicely as a small library.

The cost of a two-bedroom apartment at 1 Lexington (right on North Central — step out the front door and the light-rail will whisk you to AJ’s, to a Safeway, to any of half-a-jillion restaurants, the library, two nationally prominent museums, the baseball stadium, a live theatre, or your lawyer’s office downtown) is about the same as the buy-in for the Beatitudes, only without the exorbitant monthly fee and without the Big Mama constraints.

As for a chow line: it doesn’t cost anything like the Beatitudes’ monthly fee to order food from Instacart or meal delivery services. What’s to stop you from ordering seven meals from a restaurant at a time? Plus grocery stores sell rafts of prepared meals, which are the same damn thing you get at the Beatitudes’ dormitory-style eateries, only cheaper. But if you like real food, an in-the-wild apartment has no requirement to show up at the mess hall to be counted and assessed by your keepers while you eat institutional yuckum: you can cook your own meals.

We do have the fact that at the Orangewood institution, one of the office staff helped my father with his bank account bookkeeping when he no longer could cope. But again…for one helluva lot less than your entire life savings and a gigantic monthly fee, you could hire a bookkeeper to do that.

Obviously, a stylish high-rise apartment condo has no nursing or custodial care on site.

But it’s a five-minute drive (or less) by ambulance to not one but two major hospitals. And if necessary, you can hire people to come in and ride herd on you.

To my mind, the biggest drawback of this alternative is that it provides noplace for your dog. You’re allowed to keep a dog at the Beatitudes, but you have no yard space, so of course you have to take the dog out on a lead, meaning you have to stand there in the heat or the rain until the dog decides to do its business.

But we do have this thing coming up the pike: a plan to demolish a Paradise Valley ghost mall and replace it with an apartment/office/restaurant/retail complex.

Except for the dog problem, that could be ideal. And if you could get a unit on the ground floor, it would work: you could just step outside with the dog, rather than having to get it up and down an elevator and pray it doesn’t pee in there.

Other alternatives already exist.

For example, there are some older but very pleasant two-story garden condos down by the Phoenix Art Museum. These places also are close to Central Avenue — a short stroll to the light-rail line, minutes to the nearest hospital, across the street from a Safeway. They’re also within walking distance of the main city library, the Heard Museum, the Phoenix Little Theatre, and a variety of stylish restaurants.

Better yet: a patio home is your basic apartment…without anyone tromping around overhead.

The latter would give you some yard space for your dog.

Alternatively, you could re-home the dog and buy a suite on a cruise ship. Sail away into the sunset and never come back!

Or you could buy a room or a suite in a hotel. This would accomplish essentially the same objectives as moving yourself into an old-folkerie, only sans the age segregation, the bad food, and the officious supervision.

So…if there are better ways to get by without locking yourself in a prison for old folks — ways that cost no more and may cost less — why on earth do people do that? As I mentioned above, the sales tactics at these places are highly aggressive. I went in there one time with Jane, met a sales rep, and my mailbox still gets stuffed once a week with advertising junk for the Beatitudes. Too, I suspect peer pressure works its magic…my father was put on to lifecare communities by my great-aunt, who came into town looking at places when she wanted to move out of her (spectacular) place in Sausalito, California.  She ended up staying in the Bay Area, in a (very tony!) old-folkerie in the East Bay. But no matter how swell, the fact still remains: this is a prison to which the inmates deliberately sentence themselves.

Realistically, though, if you live as long as is theoretically possible, there’s going to be a point at which you will have to have help with daily living. How to get that remains a conundrum.

Another lovely day in Arizona…

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So along about 3 or 4 a.m. I happened to remark to a correspondent that the day was shaping up to be a Day from Hell…

Chortle! One should never say things like that. God finds those one-liners too, too funny.

Well, wait though: Her practical jokesterism at least did not extend to conkering out the car. That’s good, no?

Dawn cracked, and I decided to try to find out what could be done about the propane bottle that developed a weird leak after the barbecue cleaning dude reattached it to the system. This was about as fruitful as you might imagine any bureaucratic exercise to be. After jumping through a long and pointless series of phone hoops, I gave up with the city. Called Gerardo, who said he would don his Superman cape and fly over this afternoon. This was another exercise in futility, but as it develops, it’s prob’ly just as well that he didn’t. In fact…very, verrreeee good that he didn’t surface late this afternoon….

But we get ahead of ourself…

First, I go on about my business: traipsing half-way to Timbuktu to visit WonderDermatologist. She agrees that the Thing disfiguring my left-hand finger-flicking finger is yet another precancer and must go. Now.

Does she wonder how I am going to drive with this crucial navigation instrument disabled? Probably just as well that she doesn’t. She practically runs her nitrogen squirt bottle out of juice. This is good. I’m invited to visit her again in two weeks, when we’ll assess how today’s antics worked, and out the door I streak.

Decide to venture across from the 101 on Gangbanger’s Way,  a thoroughfare that runs faster and more smoothly than Main Drag South, which at this time of year is more crowded than Gangbanger’s. Fly low up the freeway, fly low across the city…through the lovely slums that grace the central west side, ahhh yes eventually arriving at the war zone that is the intersection of Gangbanger’s and Conduit of Blight Blvd.

This journey is one endless reminder of Southern California and all that I used to hate about it. The smog. The traffic. The ticky-tacky. The instant-slum tracts. The tired and dreary strip malls. The crowded roads, sun glaring off acres of asphalt. The panhandling derelicts. The exhausted workers navigating the streets on foot. Lordy, but Phoenix is SUCH an ugly city! Just like Long Beach: an ugly place to live.

You know, I do love my neighborhood. It’s a pretty little enclave, gentrifying like mad now that young parents have learned they can put their kids in the Madison schools from here. (Madison is the only decent centrally located public school district.) But driving in from the northwest on Gangbanger’s Way is just deeply depressing…and it gets creepier and creepier as the months pass.. From about 43rd Avenue all the way over to about 23rd Avenue is plain old slum, dirty depressing dangerous and scary. Some of the houses facing Gangbanger’s around 23rd are OK, holding their own; then, eastward-bound, they give way to commercial properties, some of them abandoned.

The city is about to extend the accursed lightrail up to MetroCenter, which is now dead, a ghost mall. Why? It escapes comprehension. The highest and best use of that property would be to turn it into a social service center for the homeless, but the city has big (hallucinatory) plans to revive it as offices and medical centers. Har har harrrrr!!!!!!! So this boondoggle will be yet another fantastical waste of taxpayer money, and the train will continue to transport drug addicts and homeless into our neighborhood.

Catholic Social Services has built a charity home for pore folks on Main Drag South at Conduit of Blight, and an even bigger project has gone up on Main Drag about a half-mile west of that. Alas, while this kind of housing is indeed much needed, projects good neighbors do not make…

So…every now and again I think about whether I should move while I still have the physical strength to do so. And if so, where???? If the church never re-coalesces, there’s really no reason to stay in North Central. Or in Phoenix at all. But where on earth to go???

  • Sun City is a definite NO.
  • Arcadia I cannot afford.
  • Biltmore I cannot afford.
  • The Southern-California style ticky-tacky tracts of the far east and west valley: no, thanks.
  • Payson: eek! no Costco!
  • The south of France I cannot afford.
  • But why not Fountain Hills? Like Sun City, it’s quiet as the tomb, and it’s close to my doctors’ office and close to the kind of shopping I enjoy. Nice view of the mountains, and a straight shot up to Payson, where KJG and Mr. Firefighter hold forth!
  • Oro Valley outside of Tucson is supposed to be very nice, and it’s convenient to Tucson. It is part of Tucson these days, actually.
  • Prescott: a possibility, but further from friends and established huntin’ grounds than I’d like.
  • And of course Patagonia, venue of some lovely country houses just up the road from the border with Mexico…

Depressed after this fine tour of my hometown, I crawl back in the sack for a little nap, hoping to catch up the sleep that ended around 3 this morning.

Soon enough, Ruby jumps to attention. DAWG ON POINT!!!!! 

Something is going wheeeeeeeeeeeee….

What? Rattie’s in the hall? I hear a squeal, and it ain’t the Song, Song of the Rat. No indeed. It’s the serenade of a vehicle that needs a brake job.

WTF? Climb out of the sack, stumble to the front windows, peer out and lo! A cop SUV is idling in the street in front. Two of the biggest rhinoceroses you have EVER seen charge into the front yard (Holy doggerel! Where’s my pistol?). Call the hound to heel…and watch the show.

These vast lumbering critters roust some poor, scrawny little bum out from under the shade trees in front, where he’s been trying to sleep in the gravel.

Yes. That’s on the gravel. Like, little sharp pieces of granite.

Understand: it’s 108 degrees out there. He must weigh all of 130 pounds, he’s filthy, his hair is matted, he doesn’t even have a backpack in tow. They start to rough him up. Amazingly, he manages to slip out of the grip of the guy who’s grabbed him and he takes off down the street. The cops give half-hearted chase but quickly stand down. Doesn’t seem to enter their minds that he could easily hop over the wall into the backyard, just like Matthew the Garage Invader did. Now moderately well armed myself, I watch them give up and drive off. Then I patrol the front and back yards and the alley.

Poor little sh!thead. What do you suppose brings a man to such a pass?

Gerardo did not show up. Good thing! Otherwise he and his suspiciously unilingual cousins would have landed in the middle of this…uhm…manhunt. {sigh} Could be they drove by and saw the game in progress, so decided to move along.

Welp, our visitor having failed to steal today’s Amazon delivery, we also move along: Unwrap the package of tinfoil pie tart pans and combobulate the much-vaunted RAT REPELLANT DEVICES!

The scheme is to punch a hole in a pie tin, run it up the metal rod that holds the bird feeder (endlessly attractive to Rattie), and secure it in place over the existing DYI rat baffle, made of a plastic doodad that has proven too small to discourage our little pal. Fiddle with this briefly, and dayum. I think it’s gonna work. If it doesn’t, at least we had some fun trying it.

The resulting gadgets look weirdly like little flying saucers, come to light on the bird feeders’ hangers. Got them attached fairly firmly (if hilariously) but gave them just enough play to wiggle a bit, should a four-legged critter decide to climb on top of the UFO. Unless Rattie is acrobatic enough to jump down and backward in one motion (from a platform that wiggles), I don’t THINK she can hop from the contraption to the lower end of the hanger. If she can, by golly, she’s earned her share of those bird seeds!

Seriously, I think if she tries to proceed past the tinfoil barrier, she’ll most likely fall on the ground. This will cause an annoyed Rattie but should do no damage to much of anything else.

Cop helicopter shows up a little before 7 p.m. and frantically buzzes the street just to the north, right where my old house resides. They used to materialize every goddamn Friday and Saturday night at 11 p.m. sharp. This is a little early for them…maybe our scrawny guy showed up at someone else’s motel. 😀 Now, shading a little after 7:30, they’ve roared off somewhere else and it’s quiet out there again.

So it goes. That is what we Arizonans call “one helluva day.”

To top it off, WordPress crashed as I was finishing this post, so that helluva day is no longer today but vaguely yesterday. Wouldn’tcha know?

 

If You Were Your Kid…

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If you were your kid and you were an American, come of age in a time when America the Great was rapidly turning into a Third-World Country, what would you do differently from what your parents did? From what your kid him- or herself is doing right now?

Do strange little thoughts like that ever cross your mind? They sure as Hell cross mine.

My father planned carefully for his retirement and his old age. Thanks to his planning — and to his lifetime of amazingly hard work —  I haven’t had to put in that much single-minded effort: he left me enough to live on comfortably through my dotage. But that’s not so true of my son.

Although my son’s dad is affluent, like me he also no doubt will live (expensively) into advanced old age. My son’s grandmother just died at the age of 106 (no, that is not a typo), having spent the past 20 years wasting away ruinously in a nursing home. The new wife is a good 20 years younger than me, and though she has a highly competent son, she also has a feckless, dependent daughter who never will be able to care for herself and her offspring. Thus most of whatever my son’s father has now will be dedicated to supporting the less gifted occupants of that side of the family.

My son, the recipient of a spectacularly expensive private education, has a decent job but not one that will make him rich. It can, however, allow him to work remotely from just about anyplace that he chooses.

My mother smoked herself into the grave in late middle age. We have no clue how long she might have lived had she never picked up a cigarette. Her father died of Hodgkin’s disease, an acquired cancer not uncommon in his part of the country: we have no idea how long he might have lived had he dwelt someplace else, never smoked, and never drank. Her mother chippied herself into the grave: we have no idea how long she might have lived had she never been exposed to the kinds of reproductive viruses one acquires during a wildly misspent youth. But the other women on her mother’s side of the family were Christian Scientists who lived into advanced old age: we do know that in the absence of alcohol and tobacco, they lived into their mid-90s even without ever going anywhere near a medical doctor or a patent medicine.

So what we have here, in the planning department, are two people — me and my son — each of whom have a shot at living into advanced old age. Or not.

What can be done for my son — by me or by him — to ensure that he will be financially secure into his dotage?

We know that I absolutely positively do NOT want to spend my last years in a “life-care community,” a rabbit warren in which to lock up old folks. My father consigned himself to one of those places after my mother died, and I have several friends who are now living (expensively) in similar prisons. I will take a swan-dive off the North Rim of the Grand Canyon before I allow that to happen to me…and that also is neither a joke nor a typo. My house is paid for: if I die tomorrow my son will inherit a piece of property worth about $400,000, free & clear. My son’s house will be paid for in another 10 or 15 years; it will be worth around $325,000 to $350,000, if all things remain equal. He lives frugally and invests in IRAs, and so he presumably will have some retirement savings in hand, if he lives into his dotage.

BUT…

The Covid-19 fiasco has shown his employer, clear as handsomely chlorinated swimming pool water, that there is no reason to maintain expensive office space to support a profitable insurance business. He believes the company will never re-open its pricey new digs in Tempe, a dreary suburb of Phoenix. Shortly before the Covid fiasco began, he was promoted to a managerial position. He remains a manager: remotely.

What this means is that there’s really no reason for him to continue living in a dump like Phoenix, a vast, ugly, crass bedroom tract that we might kindly call L.A. East. If the company settles permanently into a mode in which most or all of its mid-level employees can work online, he could in theory live anyplace he pleases.

And there are many, many better places to live.

In Arizona alone, for example, towns such as Prescott, Bisbee, Patagonia, the outskirts of Tucson, and even Payson have far more temperate climates and are nowhere near as grubby and  crime-ridden as Phoenix. Nor is there any reason to stay in a culturally backward hole like Arizona. If you want to live in the Southwest, there are many better places to live in Colorado, Utah, Nevada, and parts of New Mexico. If you don’t mind jumping on a plane to visit your employer for monthly staff meetings, Oregon, Washington State, parts of Mexico, Costa Rica, Panama, and waypoints are highly desirable venues. With a fistful of cash from the sale of two houses, you could easily install yourself in the Low Countries, Ireland, the south of France, Italy, Scandinavia, Switzerland, Canada, New Zealand, or parts of Australia.

Why stay in a declining economy with a corrupt leadership and a moribund health-care system?

Why not use the capacity of electronic telecommuting to ensconce yourself — now, while you still have some years to enjoy life — in a better place?

If I were my son, I would be so gone. Right now: I wouldn’t wait for retirement, certainly not given the wacksh!t direction into which our country’s politics have dragged us. I probably would leave the US, given half a chance to pull it off. But even if I chose to stay in the this country, you can be sure it wouldn’t be in Phoenix.

Speaking of the which: as we scribble a cop helicopter is buzzing its way toward us, the dog has flown into a batsh!t frenzy, and I suppose I’m going to have to get up, dig out a pistol, and lock the security doors. So much for the scheme of taking a moonlight dip in the pool.

Where would you want your kids to spend the best years of their life?

Routine, Crisis, and Grief in the Age of Covid

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Up at 3:30 sharp. Hate this…especially in the Age of Covid. In the middle of the night, your neuroses and your hypochondria are unleashed. But it has become a custom, a habit, some kind of physiological necessity. The internal alarm clock goes off every morning between 3 and 4.

M’hijito is bringing his dog over here around 8, on the way over to pick up his dad and New Wife. Word came down that his grandmother — DXH’s mother — is breathing her last in the Grand Junction, Colorado, nursing home where she’s spent the last 20 years or so of her life.

She is 106 years old, God help her.

They were told that they would all have to take and pass covid tests if they are to go in to her room to say good-bye. Not that this would make much difference, as she’s been blind and deaf for upwards of a decade.

My son used to go over there several times a year to visit with her. But finally he announced he was not going back, because he didn’t believe she even knew he was there. That decision came down several years ago.

At any rate, from here he will run over to his dad’s house, pick them up, and drive them to Grand Junction, a 10- or 12-hour junket.

I am not pleased.

DXH is 80 years old, for God’s sake! He’s had a heart attack and bypass surgery. If he catches this thing, he is not going to get to be 81. NW is significantly younger…but you can be a whole lot younger than 80 and still not be a spring chicken. So both of them are put at risk by this junket, as indeed is my son. Unless they brought food with them, they’ll have to stop to eat either at Flagstaff or at Kayenta. They might make it to Four Corners without fainting from hunger…but I wouldn’t put money on it.

Kayenta, where we always used to stop to grab a bite to eat partway through this journey, is in the middle of the Navajo. The plague is holding forth there, as it has from the outset, with a vengeance. On the Rez, 8,243 people have fallen sick…they’re not even saying how many have died, but other sources report that it is a LOT. These are rural, almost nomadic people. There are no large towns on the Rez. By comparison, Yavapai County, which comprises the town of Prescott (once the state capital) has counted 1,167 cases so far. The population of the Navajo Nation is 273,667. The population of Yavapai County is 235,099. So…uhm…think of it this way: 273,667 is NOT to 8,243 as 235,099 is to 1,167.

Not by one helluva long shot.

So. I do not want my son or his father or his father’s wife driving through that area!

Of course, I have no choice in the matter. They decided not to fly, apparently figuring that was riskier for the old folks than driving. And that no doubt is true.

§§§

At 4:20 sharp, the hound and I are out the door!

Took her out to pee about 4:15 to find it was JUST GORGEOUS outside, Venus in the morning sky, the air highly tolerable.

I had decided to opt the morning walks until it cools off a little: by 5 or 5:30 a.m. it’s just gawdawful out there. (To give you an idea: it was 113 yesterday, down from 116 a couple days ago.) But in the predawn gloaming a thought occurred: y’know…we could shoot out, make our dash through Upper Richistan, and get back before the heat comes up.

What a brilliant idea! It was just lovely out. We encountered only one(!!!) dog, and that was on the way back into the ’Hood. Normally I have to wrestle Ruby past a dozen or more dogs. A coyote lives on the road that leads through Lower Richistan, but if she was in the shrubbery over there, she didn’t make herself known. Forgot to bring my shilelagh, so felt a little antsy about that…but mercifully, nothing happened.

Back in the house by 5:20. Dog fed. Human dropped into the pool. Plants watered. Bird dish refilled with water. Hot dang!

§§§

I never got along very well with my mother-in-law. She’s way too much like me: highly opinionated, and not very polite about it.

My mother, who struggled all too visibly to reserve judgment, was nevertheless unmistakably abhorred. And over time MiL did not wear well with me. I do not care whether your political and social and moral beliefs fail to come up to my elevated standards. Seriously. You can be as wacksh!t crazy as you like, you can even be a damned Trumpeter, and as long as you stay out of my face, you’re welcome to it. But that one…could not stay out of your face. If you did not think just the way she did, well then…obviously you were none too bright. And she was happy to tell you about it.

You know the type. Facebook is littered with them.

So that marriage entailed a 20-year struggle to stay polite around the woman. Thank God she lived in another state.

Yet at this point…well, I feel sorry for her but do not feel sorry she is passing.

To live to be 106 years old is to outlive life.

That horror is not something you would wish on anyone. Imagine being confined to a bed in a nursing home, unable to so much as get yourself to the toilet or into a shower stall, unable to see, unable to hear. Not even a mindless daytime TV show to while away the endless hours. There must be a better way to get off this mortal coil.

Her other son lives in Texas. I assume he’s flying over to Grand Junction. Whether they intend to linger at her side until she passes (if she passes…), I do not know. Whether funeral arrangements have been made, I do not know — although given that New Wife is a woman of sterling common sense and considerable prescience, I would assume so. And if so, are they going to stay in Colorado until a funeral and wake and whatever hoohah take place? Or what?

MiL made herself a minor celebrity there on the Western Slope, during her heyday. She wrote a newspaper column for the Grand Junction paper, worked for awhile as an announcer for the local NPR station, and carried a bright red banner of feminism over the heights of Grand Mesa and right into the precincts of Denver, where she got herself appointed to various political jobs, whenever a Democratic governor was in office. So active was she that at one point she was anointed Colorado’s Woman of the Year.

She did a lot, for a small-town librarian who had ill-advisedly married a bright but mentally questionable young man, struggled through 20 years of marriage, finally unloaded the clown (after he took up with his old college girlfriend), and ended up stuck in a small city in the middle of nowhere. Overall, she seemed fairly happy. She had friends. She adored her sons. She achieved a degree of recognition for her public work.

Not a bad life. All things considered.