Hotter than the Hubs outside. No car…not that I would go anywhere if one was sitting out there in the garage. Wasting time on the Internet.
One of my fave time-wasters: real estate ads. Another fave: reminiscing about growing up, and our time in the San Francisco Bay Area.
This little place looks kinda like my relatives’ home in Berkeley. Pretty li’l bungalow, early 20th century. Gosh, I miss that place, that neighborhood…my aunt, my great-grandmother. If I could move back there right now, I’d be outta here like a rocket.
It was sooooo pretty! Had a pie-shaped lot with a lovely little backyard. Its own garage (!!!!). Sat on a hillside street that took you right up to the stop for the train that ran directly into San Francisco. Overall, in this genre…
My great-aunt worked at Crocker-Anglo National Bank — one of the highest-ranking female staffers ever to come along — and so would walk up that hill every morning, five days a week and ride that train across the Bay.
She stayed in this sweet little house after my great-grandmother — her mother — passed away. Then eventually her son talked her into moving to an apartment in downtown Berkeley — I think she’d quit her (very!) longstanding job at the bank by then. And finally he put her in an old-folkery — uhm, an assisted-living facility — in the East Bay. She was at the end of her 90s when she kicked off. Just as her mother was: longevity runs in my family.
This reverie brings me back to the question of the day, which is will I be able to stay in my beloved home here until I die?
And I’m awfully afraid the answer is gonna be NO.
Not a chance, Duckie!
By way of background: I want my son to have this house. Given the family trend toward living a century or so, I probably will have to give it to him well before I croak over.
A hopeless lone wolf, I truly LOATHE living in communal settings. So the prospect of having to move into an old-folkerie makes me cringe. But short of jumping on a bus and heading away into the hinterlands, I don’t really see how I’m going to avoid it.
* I have no family to take care of me in my dotage.
* If I do live into old age, I may not even be able to care for an apartment, to say nothing of a house, a yard, and a pool.
* My son has…you know: a life. Remember those? It’s hardly fair to ask him to take the time when he’s not laboring at his job and devote it to caring for a crippled-up old lady.
* And, logically enough, the answer to these little challenges is simply to move into an institution whose whole purpose is to babysit elders until they topple over into the grave.
Our culture has changed, over the past 20 years or so, in ways that make it a lot easier to stay in your own home without having to gad about the city. Without having to drive.
Consider Amazon and its ilk, for example. You can buy almost anything your beady little heart desires online…and have it delivered to your door. Even prescription drugs can be dropped at your house or in a mailbox.
And THAT…yes: that is HUGE. It relieves you of hours of driving, piles of risk on the city streets…hot dayum.
But it still may not be enough to keep you out of the old-folkerie.
It occurs to me that one might be able to hire a helper — such as my cleaning-lady extraordinare — to stay with you during the waking hours, keep an eye on you, be sure your kitchen is stocked and your laundry is clean, be sure you get fed. Yea verily: Luz (the C-L extraordinare) says she has done exactly that.
One expects she’d still be doing it, if that were what she wanted to do. But if she’s around when the time comes, I surely will ask if she’d like to alter her job to become a care-taker for me instead of a cleaning lady for half-a-dozen gringos. We shall see.
But failing Luz, there may be some other candidate. Yea verily: we shall see.