Remembering My Dad

Dad

27 November 1920 –26 August 2011

This picture of my dad must've been taken sometime around 1947. I think it says a lot about him. For one thing, he could be a total doof. It was not something he ever grew out of. He enjoyed being funny, and he liked to laugh.

He could do that thing with his eyebrow. In fact, he could do it with either eyebrow, at will. He could wiggle his ears, too, which my brother and I used to think was absolutely hysterical, but you can't tell that from the picture.

He wore a mustache. I'm not sure I ever saw him without one. He let it grow out some in later years, but it was always there. I don't know why. It never occurred to me to ask.

He was fit at 27, or whenever this was taken, and kept fit all his life. Never much for team sports – he was too little for most of them anyway – he did some wrestling and Golden Gloves boxing in his youth. After he retired from his day job, he'd leash up the dog early most mornings and go for a long walk. Usually multiple miles, at a pace that I found challenging even when I was mobile. On his 90th birthday he walked down to the beach, a jaunt of over a mile, going down and coming back up a serious hill. Just to see if he could do it. That's the kind of guy he was.

My mother must've taken this picture. Like every other picture she took in the 60-some years they spent together, she cut off the top of his head.

Empty-ish Nest

Tuffy lived at home while she was going to University of Washington, so this is our first holiday with an empty nest and her first holiday as a fledgling. She'll be sharing a Thanksgiving potluck with other JETs in Nagahama. The organizer assembled the contributions into the following menu:

Suzie: mac and cheese
Sandy: a pre-made meat of some sort that you will buy at Heiwado because I know you don't cook
Kayla: roasted root vegetables, pumpkin soup, maybe hummus
Amy & John: roast chicken
Melissa: eggplant side dish
Michael: mashed potatoes
Leslie: drinks, paper plates and cups
Tuffy: okonomiyaki
Caitlin: disposible utensils, and..
Willie: drinks, maybe a side
James: chocolate
Ellen: pie, & stuffing maybe

Tuffy was not much of a cook before she left for Japan. Now, she not only has to feed herself, she has to do it with unfamiliar ingredients, in a kitchen that has a stovetop and broiler, toaster oven (with no temperature control), and microwave. Like many Japanese kitchens, hers does not have a large oven. The one thing she says she can reliably pull off is okonomiyaki. Her Thanksgiving grocery shopping list (from creepy stalking on Facebook):

☆キャベツ
☆天ぷら flakes
☆たまご
☆肉
☆マヨネーズ
☆かつお節
☆green onion

Basically, ingredients for okonomiyaki.

Scarecrow's Thanksgiving menu is somewhat more traditional, although he's planning to roast a small-ish turkey on the grill rather than in the oven. Not as far from the beaten path as a potluck in Nagahama, but adventurous in its own way. Our nephew, Sparky's son Arkman, will be having dinner with us. This will be the first time we've seen him since he moved up to Bremerton from southern California a month or so ago for a new job. I don't expect he'll make an appearance until after the football games are over. Scarecrow warned him that we don't have a TV.

So it'll be different for all of us, but we'll all be celebrating the holiday with good food, family, and friends. I hope all my blogger buddies in the US have as much to be thankful for. Happy Thanksgiving!

Set Me a Good Example

Somehow, I expected Tuffy to be diligent about posting on her blog, and somehow I expected that would motivate me to post on my own. (Not that I'm competitive or anything.)

It's not working.

I suppose I should be glad that she's too busy having real life adventures to sit down and write about them, and I am glad. I am. I don't want to be the needy, nosy parent, and I know she's busy and she has a lot of stuff going on and all that, and that's all good, really. Really really. Neither of us have ever been much for chatting on the phone. There is Skype and it's a fine thing and we've done that a couple of times but I should probably let her know that if she ever wants to, you know, talk, that would be OK. In the meantime, I have to admit that Facebook status updates and photos are a lot more than my parents ever got from me when I was her age.

Scarecrow went out and got a mess of Indian food for my birthday. Not much else planned by way of celebration. But birthdays? Sure, I'll take as many of 'em as the powers-that-be see fit to send my way, and happy to do it.

Fair's Fair

It occurred to me that my previous post might have left the impression that my mother served in the military during World War II, and my father didn't. That's not true.

This was my father's main contribution to the war effort:

Between 1941 and 1945, Willys-Overland Motors in Toledo, Ohio, built a small four-wheel drive utility vehicle called the Willys MB. Production of this vehicle, popularly known as the Jeep, was considered essential to the war effort. It was so essential that, as a machinist employed by Willys-Overland, my father
was granted three deferments from military service.

He was finally drafted in 1944, and served in the Army Corps of Engineers. It was not a good fit. Fortunately the war ended in 1945, and the Army spat him back into civilian life. He went to the University of Toledo on the G.I. Bill, where he met my mother, and on to grad school at Caltech, which is how I came to be born in California. You knew this would eventually turn out to be about me, didn't you?

When my cousin was here for a visit earlier this year, he told me that our grandfather moved from Chicago to the Detroit area to work for Ford Motors. The story goes that Ford was not hiring Jews, so he went to work for Willys-Overland. This must've been before May 1914, because that was when my uncle was born in Toledo. (If you're not from around here, Toledo, Ohio is very close to Detroit, Michigan.) My grandfather was a cabinetmaker, and at the time, much of a car's chassis and frame was made of wood. My dad said my granddad was proud of the fact that he worked on the showroom models, the ones that had to be perfect. I don't know how long he worked there. In 1915 and 1916, the Toledo city directory gives his occupation as woodworker. By 1920, when my father was born, he had opened a grocery store. So this has nothing to do with my dad's military service, and it's not like my dad and my grandfather worked shoulder to shoulder on the production line or anything. They just worked for the same car company, 25 years apart.

Another digression: From 1926 to 1931, without help from anyone in my family, Willys-Overland produced a small car called the Whippet:

This also has nothing to do with my dad's military service. It doesn't really have anything to do with whippets either, but there it is.

My mom's family worked in the auto industry in Toledo, too, but that's a story I'll inflict on you another day.

Veterans Day

Marie Helen Couturier Spevak

13 September 1921 – 13 January 2012

photo c1945, U.S. Navy WAVES 

(Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service)

Thanks, Mom.

I Think I Need One of These

The wheelchair guy was here yesterday. This is a new wheelchair guy, one who belongs to the new insurance network, but he seems OK. We're working with a new PT, too, because the old one (with whom I'd worked for many years and who I liked a lot) didn't belong to the new network, but the new one seems OK, as long as I don't actually have to go in for an appointment, because the bathrooms in that building are really not very accessible even though it's a rehab medicine facility, for cryin' out loud! What were they thinking?

Where was I?

Nothing exciting in the works, chair-wise. A new seat cushion, because the one I have is getting distinctly butt-shaped. Taking a switch I can no longer work by hand no matter where I put it and moving it to my head array someplace, although we haven't figured out where, yet, exactly. And upgrading the electronics so the chair steers and tracks better, although the previous wheelchair guy said they couldn't do that in a chair this old, but this guy says they can. I guess we'll see about that.

Like anything having to do with medical equipment, it won't be cheap, which has me wondering how much I want to spend to upgrade a five-year-old chair. But whatever.

After a long blogging sabbatical, there are several things I want to catch up on, and I can't decide where to go first. Nothing that won't keep 'til another day, I suppose. Nice, not having a deadline!

Signature Required

Scarecrow put our ballots in the mail a couple of days ago. All voting is by mail in Washington state, which is very convenient, although I admit I miss the ritual of going to the polls in person, carving out time before or after work, braving crappy November weather, crossing paths with friends and neighbors, waiting for a little stanchion to open up so I can step up and mark my ballot. With a mail-in ballot, Scarecrow can fill in the circles for me. Voting is easy. The tricky part is signing the outside envelope, to assure the powers that be that the enclosed ballot was submitted by a registered voter.

Yesterday we were notified that the Powers That Be are not too happy with the signature on my envelope.

I understand that. I'm not too happy with it, either. My hands first went numb in spring of 2002, and signing my name has been a problem for me ever since. Some of that time I could do it, kinda; the result just didn't look like my signature. Now I have trouble making a mark on paper, even if Scarecrow shoves a pen into my fist and moves a piece of paper underneath. It does not look like a signature. It does not even look much like an X.

If I ever gave any thought, before I became disabled, to the ways MS could make your life interesting (which, I admit, I never did), not being able to sign my name would not have wound up on my top 10 list. Or my top 25 list. Or probably my top 100 list. I don't think it would've ever occurred to me. But it's a real problem. It surely is.

Really, you wouldn't think it would be that hard. I can't be the first person with this problem. I just need a way for Scarecrow to write my name for me. (He has terrible handwriting, and although mine was never that great, the thought that anyone would take that signature for something I would've written causes me almost physical pain, but I'm willing to cope. That's how far I'd go.) There's the whole power of attorney thing, and making Scarecrow my attorney-in-fact makes sense, but it's kind of scary. It says I can no longer manage my own affairs, when really the thing I can't do is write my name on a piece of paper. It's not that I don't trust Scarecrow to act for me. I do, absolutely. It's just a control thing, I guess.

We're supposed to close on a refi here pretty soon. In case you've never had the pleasure, closing a mortgage loan entails signing your name 8267 times. I'm really looking forward to this.

Catching Up

It's fall, and the leaves are doing that. With the shift back to standard time and the typically gloomy November weather, it starts looking like it's getting dark right after lunch. Scarecrow went out to scoop the dog yard and get the current batch of leaves off the deck. It appears he got carried away, and is raking leaves off the roof and removing a season's worth of compost from the gutters. He'll just have to do it again when the rest of the leaves come down, but he knows that. Won't hurt to do it twice.

I've been reading about what my Blogger Buddies have been doing while I wasn't looking. Honestly, for plot twists, and suspense, and cliff-hangers, authors of fiction have nothing on you folks! Being lazy, I'd always rather read about your adventures than write about my own, and your combined output for the past year or so will keep me in reading matter for a while yet.

Hang Time

It's almost a straight shot from the kitchen, through the living room, and down the hall. At first you just hear the thunder of whippet feet as they rip through the kitchen, then the frantic skratchel of their nails (whippets are hell on hardwood floors) as they accelerate towards the bedroom and gather themselves to leap…
…
……
………

After an improbably long silence they fly from the middle of the hall, through the door, across the bedroom, and 70-some pounds of whippets thump onto the bed. (For whippets, gravity isn't really a law. It's more of a guideline.) If you happen to be in the bed when they do this, particularly if you're asleep, it can be very exciting.

Where was I going with this?

I last posted not quite a year ago. In some ways, it's been a very eventful time. My mom died last January, in June Tuffy graduated from University of Washington, in July she left for Japan, to teach English to high school students, and Scarecrow and I became empty-nesters. In other ways, it seems like nothing much has changed at all. We still have two whippets. They are still thieving, cowardly, and disrespectful (as much as I would like to take credit for this wonderful if painfully accurate description, I got it from Terry Darlington, from whom I also appropriated the term "narrow dog". I am not clever. I admit it. I just steal from clever people). I still have MS. I still have an unhealthy obsession with stalking dead people.

So why now? Tuffy started a blog to record her adventures in Japan. I thought that would be motivation for me to start Howling again (not that we're competitive or anything), but it wasn't. Why now? Beats heck out of me. Really. It does.

Maybe it was because I came across an interesting article, and the only way I could think of to share it was to resurrect my blog. Who knows? An awful lot of bloggers don't have a reason, or seem to need one. Why should I be any different?

Where was I going with this?

Hang Time

It's almost a straight shot from the kitchen, through the living room, and down the hall. At first you just hear the thunder of whippet feet as they race through the kitchen, then the skratchel of their nails (whippets are hell on hardwood floors) as they accelerate towards the bedroom and gather themselves to leap…
…
……
………

I've had this post partly written, in my head, since about the time I put up my last post. I just didn't want to write it. The longer I waited, the more I felt I should write something. I started to feel kind of bad about it. My initial intention of having a blog where I could scribble down the casual observation du jour had become an obligation where I felt compelled to submit a tidily packaged essay. An obligation!

Well, that does it. Time for a blog sabbatical.

I don't know how long it will be. Setting a date for my next post feels kind of obligation-y, so I'm not going to do that. If I'm not back before the holidays, whatever you celebrate this time of year, have a wonderful, festive season.

I'll be back.

So Stop Dithering, Already!

From the moment that envelope arrived, I knew it would be trouble. It lurked, sullen and threatening, on the far corner of my desk, until I finally acknowledged the inevitable, and set Scarecrow to work on it with a very pointy letter opener.

Back in June of 2009, when I officially retired from gainful employment, December of 2011 seemed unimaginably far in the future. I had no idea how I would patch together some kind of spiderweb of health insurance coverage that would last until I finally became eligible for Medicare. Somehow, between the COBRA subsidy, Tuffy being a university student, and Scarecrow losing one job and immediately finding another, we seem to have managed it. Now I'm simultaneously extremely relieved, and very apprehensive. I've spent the last couple of weeks, off and on, trying to figure out Medicare.

The following probably won't be of interest to anybody who's already on Medicare, because you already know all this. And it won't be of interest to anybody who's not on Medicare, because you don't need to know about it. It won't even be of interest to anybody currently sorting through their Medicare options, because you probably don't have the same choices I do. But blogs aren't about what you want to read; they're about what I want to write. And I need to sort this stuff out. Just so you know.

So, Medicare.

My first option, as I understand it, is to do nothing. Being a lazy slime weasel, this has a certain appeal. If I do nothing, I'm automatically enrolled in Medicare part A, the original major-medical-type Medicare, and Medicare part B, which covers outpatient-type stuff. There is a premium for Medicare part B, which is automatically withheld from my Social Security benefit. This option has the advantage of being easy, cheap, and I can go to any doctor who is willing to accept what Medicare is willing to pay them. The downside is that it leaves some significant gaps in coverage, not least of which is that there is no limit on out-of-pocket expenses, and no prescription drug coverage.

Another option, almost as easy, would be to supplement regular Medicare parts A and B with what they call Medicare part D. This is a policy sold by a private insurance company to cover prescription drugs. Different companies offer different policies, covering different drugs, with different premiums and different co-pays, so figuring out the best choice for the drugs you take today, and for the drugs you may be prescribed in the coming year, is no small undertaking. Still, once you do your homework, this has the advantages of unadorned Medicare, and it covers drugs. It also leaves Medicare's coverage gaps, including the lack of limit on out-of-pocket expenses.

There is something called a Medigap policy, which sounded like what I was looking for: Medicare, with some of the gaps filled in. Turns out this is something insurance companies only need to offer to you if you qualify for Medicare by turning 65. If you qualify for Medicare when you're younger than 65 – like because you're disabled – most states don't require insurance companies to offer you this kind of policy; Washington doesn't, and they don't. Next!

OK, now it gets complicated. Medicare part C, as I understand it, is a policy sold by a private insurance company. It replaces Medicare part A and Medicare part B, usually with some additional coverage, maybe including drug coverage but maybe not. Some policies limit you to providers in their network but some don't. They have different premiums and co-pays and coinsurance and drug formularies and a million other moving parts. The Medicare website offered to help me compare the 53 plans that are available in my area. It took a while, but I finally managed to narrow it down to two. The major difference between them is that one plan limits you to providers in their network – and it's a pretty small network. The other plan has a very large network of providers, including the family practitioner, neurologist, rehab specialist, physical therapist, and occupational therapist I've been seeing for the past couple of years, and is somewhat more flexible if you don't find anyone you like. It would also probably cost about $1500 more a year.

So after all that comparing, and what-iffing, and back-and-forthing, and endless dithering, it comes down to this:

You get what you pay for. And you pay for what you get.

Might As Well Start Now

If you say you'll laugh about this one day, you might as well start now.

After yesterday, I've been laughing so much my ribs hurt.

It was one of those days. It started out with getting packed up to go into Scarecrow's office at Gloria's Books and Adult Day Care. He has mostly been working from home, which is amazingly wonderful for a number of reasons, but occasionally a little face time is required. As usual, I was going along, to hang out in an empty corner of the warehouse, entertaining myself and generally staying out from underfoot. Since my laptop is what I use to keep myself busy and out of trouble, I was trying to be unobtrusive about watching Scarecrow pack it up, to make sure that the earbuds and microphone and AC adapter and other bits all made it into the bag.

The commute to the other end of town wasn't too bad, all things considered. Even in Seattle, a little rain can do bad things to rush-hour traffic. It was only after we got there that Scarecrow realized that he had left my carefully-packed laptop at home. (Carefully-packed lunch, too, but it is possible to get lunch in Renton, if need be.)

Well, without my laptop, I'm pretty much screwed. Ironically, at one time, a day in a book warehouse would have been my idea of a really good time. Now, although I'm surrounded by books on just about any topic you can imagine and some that you can't, I can't pick them up, can't turn the pages. Screwed.

Not only that. I use the laptop to IM Scarecrow when I need his help; like for a bathroom break. Screwed.

Well, whatever. I can use the time to practice meditation. I've been meaning to do that. Or I can do some serious napping. Whatever. It's only eight or nine hours. No big deal.

So as I pulled into the wheelchair lift to negotiate the 4 feet between the parking level and the warehouse door, I was chatting with Scarecrow, secretly congratulating myself for not going postal over the carefully-packed laptop still sitting next to the front door at home.

"We're not there yet," I said, when the lift stopped halfway up.

Scarecrow pressed the button again. He turned the key off and on, then pressed the button again.

"It's not going," he said. "It's stuck."

He checked to make sure the doors were closed, and the power appeared to be on, and the other obvious stuff. Nothing. It was going just a minute ago. It was working fine. It just stopped.

OK, a couple of minutes ago, when I thought I was screwed? I really wasn't. Now I'm screwed. 

The maintenance guy who takes care of this kind of thing wasn't in yet. I'm sure this was just the kind of thing he was looking forward to on a Monday morning – a medium-sized old lady in a 300 pound power chair stuck in the lift.

I have to say he took it very well, particularly considering that this wasn't the only disaster awaiting him; one of the conveyor belts in the warehouse was stuck, too. After messing with some fuses and circuit breakers and other obvious stuff, he conceded that he had no idea what the problem was with the lift. He called the company that serviced the thing, stressing that with a medium-sized old lady stuck in the lift and it looking like it was about to start raining any minute, this was a problem of some immediacy. They said they'd be there in 10 minutes. Maybe 15.

It probably wasn't any longer than that, but I've got to tell you it feels pretty stupid, being stuck 2 feet up a 4 foot lift, waiting for the rain to start.

The lift guy used a 1 1/8 inch socket with a nice long lever to crank the lift up manually, about an angstrom at a time. Whatever works.

Once we were inside, Scarecrow set me up with a movie on his iPod Touch (have I mentioned that I'm easily entertained?). That was working fine, until a reminder popped up, stopping the movie and taking over the display. And bonging. And bonging. And bonging. And bonging. And bonging. Now, Scarecrow is pretty hard of hearing, and he's got that alarm set so it'll get his attention if the iPod is in his pocket. I was getting it through earbuds. Since I couldn't dismiss the pop-up or take out the earbuds, this went on for 15 minutes, bonging, and bonging, and bonging, until the device finally gave up.

After the bonging stopped I got some time to practice my meditation, or maybe I was taking a nap, when Scarecrow stopped to check in. He dismissed the pop-up, and restarted the movie.

Five minutes later, the reminder popped up again. He had obviously hit Snooze instead of OK. Bong. Bong. Bong. Bong. Bong.

The next time Scarecrow stopped in, he said he was going to talk to Bob (of Bob's Books and Adult Day Care), and then we'd call it a day. Since he was only going to be a few minutes, he packed up the earbuds, set the iPod on the desk, and went off to talk to Bob. Five minutes later, the reminder went off again. Bong. Bong. Bong.  Now I remember – there's no such thing as a short conversation with Bob. Bong. Bong. Bong. By now it's really pretty funny. And as long as it's not going off right my ear, I can laugh.

Might as well start now. I know I'll laugh about this someday.

The little rodent who had built a snug little nest inside the lift machinery, only to find out there was a good reason that nobody lived there? Well, he had the worst kind of bad day.

Samhain

Samhain is said to be the time of year when the veil between this world and the next is thinnest.

I wouldn't really know about that.

Lots of cultures have some kind of Day of the Dead, set aside to remember family members and friends who have died. That seems a reasonable thing, to me. It's not inherently creepy or evil. It's more like an acknowledgment that death is as much a part of life, and as necessary a part of life, as birth. It's a time to think about the ending of things, accepting losses, coming to terms with them, getting ready to move on. I'm down with that.

So I'm thinking, and accepting, and coming to terms, and getting ready.

And wondering.

Why the heck don't we ever get any trick-or-treaters?

Typhoid Tuffy

Tuffy came down sick last weekend. I mean sore throat, goopy chest, nasty cough, staying-home-from-the-gym sick. Bad sign. For this kid to stay home from the gym, she has to have one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel. She says she's feeling some better, but still sounds terrible. She's got kind of cough that hangs on forever.

Scarecrow came down sick a couple of days later. He took off work for a couple of days, and Scarecrow never takes off work. He took off work, even though he's been working from home. That's how sick he was. Even thought about getting somebody in to take care of me, he was that sick.

Me? I'm feeling like an opossum in the middle of the road, trying to ignore the headlights.

Looking for Sparklies

Two of my blogger buddies have asked where I'm getting all this stuff about stalking dead people. Since two people probably constitutes a supermajority of the people who normally read this blog, it's like an invitation to write about something people might actually be interested in. What a concept!

Before I jump in, I should emphasize that I'm no kind of rigorous, by-the-book-type genealogist. In fact, I'm no kind of genealogist at all. Those are people who meticulously document the blood relationship between descendent X and ancestor A. I don't do that.

A Family Historian tries to understand what life was like for people in their family; where did they live? who did they live with? in what kind of house? what kind of work did they do? what kind of clothes did they wear? what did they eat? That's a little closer, but I don't really do that, either. Not in any systematic way.

I'm more of a magpie. I go after the sparkly bits. Rather than following one person's life from start to finish before starting on another one, rather than starting with my parents, then going to my grandparents, and carefully working my way back from there, I jump from wondering why my grandmother had her picture taken on a farm when she was 17, to wanting to know how much stuff a typical voyageur canoe held and how many men it took to paddle it, to being tickled to find that in the late '20s Willys-Overland Motors made a car called the Whippet, even though I don't think anybody in my family worked there at the time. Or wait. Maybe they did…

Nope. My paternal grandfather worked there (as a woodworker!) in 1918, but by 1920 he had a grocery store. My dad and my uncle Willie weren't there until later – Willie, the older brother, didn't graduate from high school until 1937. So, no.

You see what happens? In checking to see what years various forebears might have worked at Willys-Overland, I ran across a photo of a jeep in a museum exhibit that looked like it might've been designed by a place I used to work. The museum exhibit, I mean, not the jeep. Of course, I had to see if the place I used to work actually designed that museum, but the museum webpage didn't say, and the place I used to work is out of business now. So that was an hour spent chasing after something totally unrelated. And I never did find out.

It's not that I mind. I don't have any place I need to be, or any time I need to be there. I'm just not very focused about this, I guess is what I'm saying. I can't tell you how to do genealogy, or how to research family history. I can only tell you about being a magpie.

And a disabled magpie, at that. At some point, people doing this kind of stuff usually wind up going places, like libraries, or archives, or courthouses; and opening books, or turning pages, or scanning microfilm; and writing stuff down. On paper. I don't do any of that. If it's not online, I can't get to it, so I don't bother looking for it. I don't collect paper copies of documents, because I couldn't file or store them if I had them.

So, after all that, where do I find all this stuff? I've got to tell you, there's a ton of stuff out there, with more appearing online by the day. In true magpie fashion, I have about a million bookmarks, organized in a way that doesn't make a whole lot of sense even to me, most of which would only be helpful to someone whose family happens to come from the same places mine does. There are, however, a couple of good general places to start looking:

Cindi's List probably comes as close as anything to inflicting some kind of organization on the bewildering amount of genealogy information available on the net.

FamilySearch is the genealogy website of the LDS church. In addition to a lot of how-to information, it gives you free access to a lot of genealogy database resources.

And as always, Google is your friend. Cindi's List even has links to information about how to take advantage of it.

So, that's a lot of disclaimer for not very much information, but there it is. I don't know How It Should Be Done. I just look for the sparkly bits.

Medicare for Dummies

OK, I need to buckle down and do this. After two years of scrambling to patch together some kind of health care coverage that we can more-or-less afford, in December I finally become eligible for Medicare. Apparently there are decisions to be made. I'm a little apprehensive about this.

Fortunately, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services provide a little (147-page) booklet:

Medicare and You 

This is the official US government Medicare handbook

Yes! Documentation! A user manual! As one of the infinitesimally small number of people on this planet who actually read these things, I find this very reassuring. It's filled with pictures of such happy people. If they've done this Medicare thing and they're still so cheerful, how bad can it be? Aside from the gray hair, most of them don't even look all that old. In fact, they look about my age. What's up with that? The print is comfortably large, I guess so they don't have to produce a separate large print version – accessibility and all that. Well, maybe not. On the back cover, it says it's "also available in Spanish, Braille, Audio CD, and Large Print (English and Spanish)." I wonder how large the print is in the large print version?

So I start reading. They put the index in the front, which seems odd. I don't know if I like the idea or not. On page 58, I find:

Things to Consider When Choosing Your Medicare Coverage

Excellent. This sounds like exactly what I'm looking for. They followed this with a bunch of questions:

Are the services you need covered?
Are you eligible for other types of health or prescription drug coverage?
How much are your premiums, deductibles, copayments, coinsurance, and other costs?
How much do you pay for services like hospital stays or doctor visits?
Is there a yearly limit on what you pay out-of-pocket?
Do your doctors and other health care providers accept the coverage?
Are the doctors you want to see accepting new patients?
Do you have to choose your hospital and health care providers from a network?
Do you need to get referrals?
Do you need to join a Medicare drug plan? 
Do you already have creditable prescription drug coverage?
Will you pay a penalty if you join a drug plan later?
What will your prescription drugs cost under each plan?
Are your drugs covered under the plan’s formulary?
Are there any coverage rules that apply to your prescriptions?
Where are the doctors’ offices?
What are their hours?
Which pharmacies can you use?
Can you get your prescriptions by mail?
Do the doctors use electronic health records or prescribe electronically?
Will the plan cover you in another state or outside the U.S.?
Are you satisfied with your medical care?

Seriously.

The Socratic method is just not working for me here. How the f#@k should I know? Isn't that what I'm trying to find out? If this is an FAQ, I've got the Qs. What I need are the As. And the $$. I need to know about the $.

Aside from the gray hair, I do not resemble the smiling, happy people in this booklet. Maybe I shouldn't have started in on it when I was already cranky about MetLife terminating my group life insurance because they aren't sure I'm still disabled. I wasn't really feeling open-minded and positive and cheerful.

Seriously.

If I put off dealing with this until I'm feeling open-minded and positive and cheerful, it'll never happen. That's just a fact. Aside from the gray hair, I never look anything like the smiling, happy people in this booklet. Maybe I'm going to need to grit my teeth and slog through this stuff anyway.

Maybe tomorrow. Maybe I'll do it tomorrow.

Seriously.

<Your Name Here>

“Block Card 902 Locust Street, c1937, courtesy of the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library, obtained from http://images2.toledolibrary.org/.” 

I just found this picture of the building where my dad's family was living when he was born. Turns out the Toledo-Lucas County Public Library has an archive of photos of buildings, many taken in the 1930s by the WPA for tax assessment purposes (and to give people jobs). This was obviously the same building that was there in 1920, when my dad was born, and the U.S. Census said the family was living here. Cool, no? Amazing, what you can find on the Internet.

My dad never liked the name Ezra. It always startled me a little when his brothers called him Ez, because nobody else did. Everybody else called him Charlie, after a trumpeter who led a big band in the 1940s. As long as I knew him, he introduced himself as Charlie. He used E.C. in correspondence and such like, but Charles wasn't his middle name. He didn't have one. He just picked Charlie, I guess because it was better than Ezra.

For those of us trying to untangle the limbs of the family thicket, a distinctive name like Ezra beats the heck out of a Charlie. In Scarecrow's family, I'm indebted to those old Puritans who gave their offspring names like Hachaliah Brown, or Preserved Reade. Or Philo Dibble Bates. As it turns out, the Puritans in Massachusetts and Connecticut were way more creative in their choice of names than their contemporaries north of the border. How pathetic is that?

You'd think, with the big French-Canadian families of the previous couple of centuries, that you'd see a large number of very imaginative names, just to keep them all straight. I wish. What happened was that the first boy got his father's name, the first girl got her mother's, the next couple maybe got the grandparents' names, then they'd start handing out names of aunts and uncles. So even if 15 kids had 15 kids apiece, they were all drawing from the same pool of 15 names, generation after generation. They might be in a different order, but every family had an Antoine, a Joseph, a Pierre, a François, and so on. To further confuse the issue, everybody wss Marie-something or something-Marie. This was so common that they'd sometimes leave the Marie part out, without feeling the need to mention it. And they sometimes recycled names, even within the same family. If Jean Baptiste or Marie Louise died young, the parents may bestow the same name on a later child. So you frequently got several people with the same name, living in the same place, at the same time.

The cultural peculiarity of assigning dit names makes it both easier and more difficult to track down individuals. As I understand it, it was common in the military of 17th-century France to give soldiers a sort of nickname. Gilles Couturier, for example, might become Gilles Couturier dit Labonté, or Gilles Couturier called Labonté. Since many of the early residents of New France came from the military, it was a common thing. Another Couturier might use a different dit name, perhaps Couturier dit Verville, which would help tell the different Couturiers apart. Or not. It turns out Gilles might be referred to as Couturier, Couturier dit Labonté, or just Labonté. One (or more) of his offspring might adopt the dit name, or not. Or they may choose a different one. I guess you had to be there to understand it, because I sure as heck don't. In addition to spelling being flexible in a largely illiterate population, it's sometimes not clear, at least to me, what name they're trying to spell.

On the other hand, at that time women in France – and New France – typically kept their father's surname after they married. So there's that. One Pierre Couturier might be the offspring of Joseph Couturier and Gertrude Maugras (hopefully not Gertrude-Marie or Marie-Gertrude), and another Pierre Couturier the son of a different Joseph Couturier and Marie Allard. If they were both Mrs. Couturier, I don't know how you'd ever sort them out.

So it's a puzzle. Some future family historian may get stuck trying to figure out what happened to Ezra, who was born and lived with his family and went to school and then seemingly disappeared. And where did this Charlie-person come from, anyway? It will be a puzzle. Dad would like that.

And I don't blame him. I wouldn't want to be called Ezra, either.

How Much Does an E-Book Weigh?

As grateful as I am that e-books became widely available just about the time I began to have trouble managing regular physical books, some e-book features require this elderly canine to attempt some new tricks.

I've been reading regular books for a long time, you understand, and I'm pretty well accustomed to that way of doing things. For example, just about any e-reader gives you some way to tell how much progress you've made through the book, and while I know the slider bar on the edge of the screen (or whatever) is conveying that information, it is not (yet) as intuitive as comparing the difference in thickness between the pages on the left side of the open book with the thickness of the pages on the right.

I also seem to have a heck of a time remembering to note how many pages are in an e-book. With physical books, it's obvious, isn't it? The breadth of the spine, the weight when you pick it up — it's not something you have to remind yourself to do. E-books, on the other hand, all look pretty much the same. It was only after I got started onCryptonomicon (Neal Stephenson) that I noticed that turning virtual pages seemed to have remarkably little effect on the position of the slider bar at the edge of the window. I guess it wouldn't. Turns out the darned thing is 1168 pages long, although admittedly that includes what they call "e-book extras".

If I'd been paying attention, I would've realized that I didn't need to check out any other books at the same time; particularly not The Game of Thrones (George R.R. Martin, 835 pages) and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle (Haruki Murakami, 640 pages). The Game of Thrones returned itself to the library when I was part way through it, thoughtfully sparing me any overdue fines. I had to put it back on hold, and I'm waiting for my name to get back to the top of the list.

Format aside, I guess it's a good sign when you finish a really long book, and would look for other books by the same author. Cryptonomicon is something of a classic in its genre, and deservedly so. Parallel storylines, engagingly geeky characters, elements of the theory and history of cryptology — it took me a while to get into it, but it was a lot more fun than I expected.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle… not so much. My English-major daughter recommended the author, so I expected it to be challenging. Opaque was more like it.

Just because I knew you'd want my opinion.

Stray Parsley

I'm not usually one to badmouth written instructions. I spent most of my working life writing technical documentation, and apologizing for it. I know how hard it is to explain something in a way that will provide all the information anyone would need, and be totally clear to everyone who might read it.

Maybe the problem is that I expected this to be confusing, so I'm making it harder than it really needs to be.

Or maybe I just assume that anything having to do with the healthcare delivery system is going to be a pain in the butt. You start with healthcare, then throw in insurance and the government, and it's got to be bad. Wouldn't you think?

Maybe I just don't want to be doing this. Well, that part's true, for sure.

But I've got to tell you, trying to figure out what I need to do about my upcoming eligibility for Medicare, and how it may or may not coordinate with the insurance I'm buying through Scarecrow's employer, is giving me a new perspective on what it must be like to live with a learning disability. I can still read the words. I can still understand each of them individually. At least I think I can. I'm just having trouble extracting information that might be encrypted in those words, arranged in that order. I read them slowly. I read them multiple times. It's like reading a webpage that Google has translated. Each of the words is right, but they're just… not… coming… together.

I was recently reading a page that was originally written in Russian. I don't know any Russian, so I don't know how good or bad the translation might have been, but I thought I was kind of getting the gist. Then I came across this:

"But as in all of Russia, the big crisis came to Bobruisk, in connection with the attitude of the Jewish population to the Russian school in the 70's. This crisis was, as is known, connected with the executing of the law of general military service in Russia (1874), which gave great privileges to people with Russian education and origin--shorter military service. It was a stray parsley! Even in extremely religious circles the "fence-breakers" multiplied."

It was a stray parsley!

Questions I Should Have Asked

I ran across a list of questions I've been meaning to ask my dad the next time we spoke. Nothing of world-shaking importance, no grand questions about life-lessons learned. Truth be told, my dad and I did not often agree on the message to be taken from those life lessons. I didn't expect him to impart great wisdom from the perspective of one who has lived  a long and eventful life. They were mostly just questions that came up when I was rustling around in the family shrub. Why did your dad never tell you what his name was before he came to the United States? What year did you buy the house you live in now? What was the first car you ever bought? I kept putting it off.

Dad died August 26.

It wasn't a tragic sendoff, as these things go. It was not unexpected. He was almost 91 years old. He finally accepted some drugs, so he wasn't in pain. He was home, with his family, the way he wanted. It was time. He was ready. Everybody should be so lucky.

Like most of us, I suppose, he didn't finish everything he meant to do. He was always going to write down what he remembered about his family, but he kept putting it off. He'd get distracted by trying to pin down exactly when the family moved from one house to another, when plus or minus 5 years would have been plenty close enough. He'd go chasing off after details, or get frustrated because he was such a crummy typist, and he never got around to telling the whole story.

Family history is all about the stories, isn't it? I'm not much interested in genealogy. My lineage is not so illustrious that proving it beyond all shadow of a doubt makes any difference to anybody. I don't need three original sources to confirm every detail. I don't agonize over getting every source citation exactly right. I don't really care all that much. I'm just in it for the stories. It's all about stories. It's history, the way it happened to one family. It's getting a sense of ordinary lives, the way ordinary people lived them.

Knowing that Louis Badaillac dit Laplante was born in Sorel, Québec in March of 1680 and died in Detroit in 1703 doesn't really say much about who this guy was, except that he was only 23 when he died. Finding that he accompanied Antoine de la Mothe, Sieur de Cadillac, when he went off to found the city of Detroit, one might be tempted to imagine a rather heroic figure. Finding that between that convoy and his eventual demise he was busted a couple of times for "fait la traite de l'eau de vie avec les iroquois" and for "causé un bruit public", he starts to look a little grubbier. Not pretty, maybe, but more like a real person. (Did you know, by the way, that Cadillac had a really big nose? He was nicknamed the Falcon, and often compared — presumably behind his back – to Cyrano de Bergerac. Hey, I read it on the web, so it must be true.) See what I mean? It's all about the stories.

I need to write down what I remember about my dad. As best I can, I need to tell his story. I'm not religious. In the metaphysical sense, I have no idea where he went, or what he's doing now, besides a literal, obvious fact – he donated his body to science. He made arrangements for that years ago. Some med students at UCLA will get a skinny old white male cadaver. They will get to know my dad in considerable detail. In a different sense, he's here as long as someone remembers him. Those stories he told over and over? I should know them well enough by now to be able to inflict them on someone who never got a chance to hear them from the source.

I've been wondering whether this blog is the right place to do that. I initially set it up as a place to dump MS-related stuff. Going off on a family history tangent seems pretty seriously off-topic. I even got as far as setting up a template for a new blog, called "Out on a Limb" (get it? Am I witty, or what?). Then I decided it was a pretty stupid idea. If I had two blogs, I would post even less often on either of them than I do on this one now. Besides, the topic of this blog is whatever I want it to be. Whippets don't have anything to do with MS, as far as I know, and I write about them all the time. So I'll be stalking dead people, and I'll be doing it here. It's too bad, though. The new blog was looking pretty cool.

There's a barbecue/potluck/celebration of my dad's life/excuse to put away large amounts of tequila planned for this weekend at the old home place. I won't be able to make it down for the festivities, but here's the story I would tell if I were there:

So many times when I was a kid we'd ask, "Dad, do you have a ____ <fill in the blank with the most bizarre item you can possibly imagine>?" He'd think for a minute, disappear into his garage, rustle around for a while, and reappear holding said bizarre item.

I thought everybody's dad could do that.