Who’s On First?

It is not as savage a day out on the Bay as it was yesterday, but the gun-metal gray waves are still thrusting east toward the pale brown sand of the beach at the State Park and the low gray cotton-wool clouds are nestling in the chill.

I got up fairly early after some vivid and dreams I was not completely comfortable with and made the coffee and started to get ready for the arrival of my brother here in the Little Village By the Bay later today- I am not sure when he is getting in- it is one of those fly-to-Detroit deals with a rental car and the long flog Up North.

There are too many variables, so I just will chug along and see when he shows up. I was sitting with Big Mama yesterday at lunch, talking about his arrival. She is eager to see Spike for the “big reunion,” and we were negotiating the timeline.

I normally spend a block of time in the morning wrapped around lunch and an evening block wrapped around dinner. I have taken to feeding Raven at the table, which is both disconcerting and comforting. He is still around and not completely out of it, though the whole thing is painful to watch.

Mom no longer has much concept of time, and Raven has none, so I get a break in the morning and afternoon during which I simulate work by sending short and cryptic e-mails to my colleagues back in the capital.

I have told Big Mama several times that Raven may be going on a trip, and that we will see what Dr. Blanchard says. She is pretty much oblivious to it, and I have got her to spend some time with her binders of family history she so painstakingly put together.

She wants to get back to writing, and she wants her car back. Neither are going to happen, of course, but it is something to talk about.

‘So when will Spike be here?” she asked. “Today?”

“No, Mom, he will get here Friday.”

“Is that today?”

I shook my head. “Who’s on First, Mom.”

“Who is on first?” she smiled, remembering the routine from long ago. That stuff is still there in her mental attic, and it makes it fun to talk to her. We were on the same wavelength for a moment. Lou Costello was on the radio show, which is a coincidence since Big Mama is pretty convinced that this is all part of a movie now. Lou talks to Bud Abbott, the manager of the mythical St. Louis Wolves.  Bud wants to make sure Lou knows everyone’s name on the team:
Costello: Look, you gotta pitcher on this team?
Abbott: Now wouldn’t this be a fine team without a pitcher.
Costello: The pitcher’s name.
Abbott: Tomorrow.
Costello: You don’t wanna tell me today?”

“You are first, right?” asked Big Mama.

“Yes, I am, but What is on Second, and that is Spike. He is the second kid, and Annook is on Third. Today is Thursday. Yesterday was Wednesday- Rita came for Bath Day, and we have to work on that.

“There is a back way?”

I don’t know if it is hearing or cognition, I swear, but did not want to give up. “Yes, Mom, of course there is. Spike is coming Friday.”

“Isn’t today Friday?”

No, Mom, Yesterday was bath day. Remember, Rita was here?

“I don’t remember last night,” she said, not particularly concerned. I took a deep breath- this was so much like her mother, towards the end, when she was still in her own house in Massillon, Ohio, and the family was all there for some rite of passage.

It was raining, and the kids were little and asleep in their car seats. She looked out the door at the Taurus wagon and then at me with those sweet brown eyes of hers. “Should we bring them in?” she asked.

“No, Grandma, they are fine. It is raining, and we will just let them sleep.”

She nodded in agreement, and then asked me if we should bring them in. I reeled myself into the present.

“It is Thursday today, Mom, and tomorrow is Friday.”

“Is that when Spike is coming?” she looked around the Challenged Dining Room. “All these people seem familiar.”

“They are here most days, Mom.”

“Do some of them have other lives?”

“I would expect so, Mom. Some people do double duty, like Karla here. She has a whole other life.” Karla made a face and topped up the cups with Decaf. She winked at me.

“That is nice for her,” she said earnestly. “What about them?” she said, gesturing at Irene and the Cowboy’s table next door.

“I would say they are almost part of the core group, Mom.”

Raven bit his tongue, and said so. “Bit. Dammit. Tooth, again.”

“Crap, I am sorry, Dad.” That was the most I have heard out of him in days.

Once we know when Raven is going to go on his trip I can start to plan on when I can get out of here. I will be happy to come back for Thanksgiving, I think, but that will be very strange if they are apart, not that it isn’t now. Mom has been talking about a big reunion, and using my brother’s lapsed club membership at the Otsego Country Club for the big holiday meal, with all of her family around her, which is not going to happen.

Hell, I am going to engineer the theft of her husband of 63 years.

I sighed as we walked back to the elevator. I guess I will fall off that bridge when I get to it.

I feel a contagion with the dementia at the Village. I despair that am going to warehouse the Old Man and then take off. They have been together for 63 years. There probably was a different way to do this, but I imagine things happen the way they do for a reason.

It is like they said a long time ago:

Costello: I get behind the plate to do some fancy catching, Tomorrow’s pitching on my team and a heavy hitter gets up. Now the heavy hitter bunts the ball. When he bunts the ball, me, being a good catcher, I’m gonna throw the guy out at first base. So I pick up the ball and throw it to who?

Abbott: Now that’s the first thing you’ve said right.

Costello: I don’t even know what I’m talking about!

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Lovely Rita

I had a report to knock out for the office, and I need to get started on chores at the house. So I was running a little late in getting to Potemkin Village for the lunch shift.

I went straight to the Challenged Dining Room, where I am becoming a regular feature. Raven and Bib Mama were sitting at their regular table, though Raven had moved from his accustomed seat by the window and was sitting where I usually did.

I had news, pretty significant news, but it wasn’t anything I wanted to reveal before my brother Spike gets to town tomorrow. I mean, I have told Mom several times that Raven might be going on a trip, but it doesn’t seem to register.

Raven was in a new outfit, a mystery, and I only found out about it in an elliptical conversation with Big Mama who said that Rita- the mysterious Lovely Rita who Annook told me about had been there that morning to give Raven his weekly bath.

Wednesdays are apparently The Day for Raven, and I made a mental note to contact the Friendship Center where she works and catch up. There is so much to how this works that I do not really understand yet, and I know that this woman has been providing personal services for him that are quite intimate, and which, of course, will be changing dramatically.

The news I had came from another direction. I talked to Mary, the Licensed Practical Nurse who used to wear four-inch heels. She runs Admissions over at the Bluffs Nursing Home told me they were contemplating moving two men in their dementia ward to make room for Raven. She could not give me a precise time line, since the families of the individuals concerned had to sign off on the change.

“This is not a hospital,” she said firmly, “and we have to ask.”

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” I responded. “I am committed to staying here until we get the situation stabilized.”

“I will notify you once we have been in touch with the other families.”
It has got to be done, I know that, and the prospect of his eviction makes this inevitable. But it still fills me with dread.

If only he did not escape and go on his adventures. He is a sweet man in this sad state, and the more time I spend with him the more I realize that he is still in there someplace, trapped in cotton wool so thick and profound that only echoes of him can escape.

I don’t know what the consequences of locking him up are going to be- on him, or Big Mama.
I guess we will find out next week. I was sitting at the kitchen table trying to catch up on business and the ways of the wider world before plunging again into dementia-land.

The tragi-comic opera of deposed Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi ended as I woke. Apparently NATO Jets caught his convoy on the move from Sirte, his last hide-out. I once was responsible for the plan to take out the surface-to-air missile battery there, just in case, and I am gratified that he was apparently captured alive. He is the poster child for the notion that you can be demented and still run a modest-sixed country.

I could not get out of Michigan if I wanted to. The sheets of rain have returned, along with winds gusting to thirty knots and the combination caused someone to do something stupid on the mighty Zilwaukee Bridge near Saginaw. The resulting multi-car wreck shut down I-75.

Not that it mattered- the Bluesmobile is in the shop north of town for voyage repairs. Something is hitching up the power steering and the massive road-pig is just too big to steer it without the help of hydraulics. Anyway, that is why I fled after lunch, promising to return for happy hour before dinner.

I got a lift back from Brown’s, and managed to fire up Big Mama’s piece-of-crap ’99 Cirrus walked in as intended to be startled by the presence of an imposing blonde woman in one of the wooden chairs, facing Raven and Big Mama.

“Hi,” I said, thrusting out my hand. “I am Vic, their son.”

“I am Rita,” the woman responded with a firm grasp. She was just about my size, and had a warm grin and prominent pumpkin earrings.

“Lovely Rita,” I corrected. “I have heard a lot about you.”
“I hope it was good,” she said, smiling.

“Nothing but the best. You have done some great stuff for the folks, and I really appreciate it.” I pulled one of the other wooden chairs over and sat down next to her.

“Big Mama won’t take her bath,” Rita said.

“NO,” said Big Mama firmly.

“Aw, C’mon, Mom. You have been taking showers all your life. You need to have your hair washed and your blouse is stained. Help us out here.”

“No, I won’t. I would take a shower if it were Wednesday. But I am fine.”

“Mom, it is Wednesday, and that is why Rita is here.” I took out my phone and showed it to her. My screen-saver has Liz-with-an-S and Tinker Bell on it, but clearly the screen showed the time and the Day- Wednesday. Bath day.

“Well, I might let her wash my hair,” said Big Mama, ever the negotiator.

“That is a start,” said Rita, rising, “But we really have to change at least your top. Come with me, Betty.” Lovely Rita looked at me and frowned, saying sotto vocce, “She smells.”

“I remember the day Raven forgot how to shave,” I said. “Seems to be some sort of cognitive plateau that they slide down off of.”

Rita got Big Mama in the kitchen and washed her tangled gray locks, and we they reappeared her hair was combed and she wore an clean and quite elegant blouse.

“Mom, you look great! That is quite an improvement.”

“I would only do this on Wednesday,” she said. “On my terms.”

Rita and I compared notes on a variety of issues of common concern: the unopened bottles of Cranberry Juice that are piling up, along with the dish soap and paper towels that are spilling out of the pantry.

“I do the dishes when I am here, but the front desk has not changed the shopping list, and they won’t let me do it. I don’t know about the management at this place.”

“I will get on it, Lovely Rita. It looks like a lifetime supply of soap at this point. I wondered how the dishes got done- I guess I thought Big Mama was still up to it. Thank God for you being around to give a second opinion.”

She nodded, and I saw what this strong woman had invested in my parents. Then, I told her that Raven was going to take a trip.

“They never should have let him in here in the first place.”

“We let it go too long, and Big Mama was too fierce to trifle with last year.”

“Still is,” said Lovely Rita, “but I will keep doing what I can.”

I thanked her, though as we walked down to the Challenged Dining Room, I realized just how deeply in debt I am to people I don’t even know.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

The Truman Show

Well, no long journey is complete until you have the hull lashed firmly to the dock in home-port, and this voyage has a ways to go. But Big Mama has joined Raven in a special place now. She is still with us, still engaged, but living in an alternate reality.

I finally got it yesterday. It is not unusual, the place she is, and it even has a name, even if it is not listed yet in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of the American Psychiatric Association. Not that I am saying Big Mama is crazy. Far from it.

She has always been a woman of extraordinary determination- that is what got her to college, first in her family to attend one, and then to New York City, out of the morass of the Ohio River Valley. She is highly engaged- better said, almost fixated- on figuring out the riddle of what has happened to her.

It was not a good lunch- too early for the Dementia Twins, I guess, and things went downhill after the bank called in the morning and informed me that there were insufficient funds to do something I needed to do with the Mouse Guy, and that meant the morning was thrown into a cocked hat, and I needed to make a trip to the bank to throw some of my paper at the problem.

That cascaded into everything else that disintegrated the day. I got to the bank and gave them a thousand off my checking account to make Big Mama’s healthy enough to get through this cycle, then took the back way over to Potemkin Village, realizing as I rolled over the low sandy hills that the stupid Bluesmobile’s power steering was failing.

Crap. Put it on the list of things to be done, along with emptying Raven’s office and getting started on clearing out both garages and policing up the leaves.

The Dementia Twins were just getting up when I arrived. Raven was seated on the end of the bed in some sort of red shorts- I hoped they were his and not Big Mama’s, and she herself was looking for shoes.

I busied myself with dressing Raven, trying to think through what I needed to do on the other end of town, at the Broker, and the Car Dealer and the Department of Motor Vehicles. Raven was quite out of sorts and unable to help me much. Then, suddenly he hitched up his sweat pants and headed on a mission out the door.

That would not be the way to start the day with an intrusion, so I stepped quickly behind him and took his hand.

They are sleeping at all hours of the day, and having just roused, things were not going well on the road to lunch. Leading Raven back into the apartment, I united Big Mama with her shoes and then ushered our little party to the elevator.

We rounded the corner and into the Challenged Dining Room, where we were among the first to arrive. Karla was on shift, a neat lady who is a grownup, unlike the young kids who make up most of the staff. She was wearing long dangly earrings with a spider web and little skulls in honor of the coming holiday. She provides a ray of humanity the younger gals can’t, interacting with Raven and getting him to offer up some of the old grimaces he used to do for emphasis. Now they are all that is left.

Raven insisted in sitting at my accustomed place, and as he plopped himself down, I realized I was starting to get sucked into an ADD sort of world where everything had to be same, day after day. I finally shrugged and moved his blue napkin and silverware over to where he was and let him be.

Karla’s strategy is to give him a little decaf coffee first, and bring the milk-with-ice once he gets rolling on the entrée. Otherwise, she said, “he drinks the whole thing and then gets dried out.”

Big Mama was eager to chat. She is great fun to talk, even if it is a little hard to figure out precisely what we are talking about. She remains vital and charming and her vocabulary is as vast as ever. I realized suddenly as Karla deposited the main plate (chicken loaf sliced onto a sandwich roll, Brussels sprouts, mashed potatoes and canned gravy) that she is living in the Truman Show.

Like I said, she is not crazy. She is just trying to figure this out, and has come to several working hypotheses.

Maybe it is the restored magic of the Turner Classic Movie channel that has blurred the boundaries of her reality, but there is clearly more to this than simple delusion.

The Truman Show was a 1998 film starring rubber-faced Jim Carey, back when he was funny. The title character was named Truman Burbank, a man who discovers he is living in a constructed-reality television show. All the people in his life have been paid actors, and the dramatic tension is created as he tries to find an escape from the set of the show.

That is precisely what Big Mama is trying to do: unwrap the riddle of what has become her, and why all these people around her, me included, are trying to do to her.

It is fun working through it, though a bit confusing.

The current state of play in her reasoning is about the twenty. That apparently is the total number of some group, divided into two squads of ten. I work with her on the composition of the number. Could it be her, and Raven and the three kids? Their kids, too?

That gets us to an even dozen, and I offered that up after encouraging her to eat half of her sandwich. She picks at her food now, and I was gratified that she had that much. I fed Raven some of her Brussels sprouts, and then let him forage through his plate.

“Do you thing they know?” she asked me earnestly after one of the young girls offered dessert before the main course.

“Of course they do, Mom, but it is just easier if they keep working. That way they are not only acting in the big show, they are actually working in it. Really, it is quite elegant.”

She nodded, and said: “I didn’t comb my hair this morning.”

“Nope. Dad wouldn’t give us any time.” It was around that time that I realized why there was such a feeling of déjà vu. The Truman Show, and the accompanying Truman Syndrome, are actually something that has been around a long time. Renowned science fiction author Philip K. Dick has explored this territory long before the screenplay for Jim Carey’s film was written. Several of his short stories and, most notably, a novel, Time Out of Joint, have explored the nature of reality, just as Big Mama is doing now.

In Dick’s novel, the protagonist lives in a created world in which his ‘family’ and ‘friends’ are paid to maintain the delusions. That mystery is at the heart of Big Mama’s musings. Being from Washington, DC,  where everything is an illusion, I find quite plausible.

My favorite version of Big Mama’s story is from way back. Robert a. Heinlein wrote a short story called “They” back in 1941. I ran across it in one of the anthologies I devoured as a kid, and the memory of it has stuck with me.

The premise is this: a guy is confined in a mental institution because he is suffering from a delusion that he is one of the few “real” entities in the universe, and that the other “real” entities have created the rest of the universe in a conspiracy to deceive him on the nature of reality. He has some great verbal sparring with the attending psychiatrist, who is trying to integrate him into the real world and abandon the delusion.

Of course, on the last page, Heinlein revealed that the s belief is true; and just as the protagonist is about to figure it out, the psychiatrist character directs that the scenery all be struck and the set changed.

So, I am playing the psychiatrist character at lunch, although I am just along for the ride, since I am not sure she is wrong.

Big Mama pointed out the people who owned the place- other Challenged people- and introduced me to the people at the adjoining table again. “It is strange how this all happened,” she said. “But why is crucial. How long can this go on?”

“Well, I imagine it can go on exactly as long as it needs to. Not that anyone gets out of it alive.”

“What I cannot figure out is why me? How did I get here? What was the criteria for selection?”

“Selection to what, Mom. You mean Potemkin Village?”

“The whole thing,” she said gesturing around. “The food, all these people. Are they all teachers?”

“I imagine there are a lot of teachers here, Mom. It just stands to reason. You got here because you fought to get out of Ohio, and go to New York, which is where you met Raven over there-“ I pointed at Dad who held a Brussels Sprout speared on a fork pointed generally toward the ceiling- “and then you came to Michigan.”

“You were all born here,” she said. “I think that is remarkable. Were you the first?”

“Yes, Mom. I was the first.” I have abandoned trying to contest where we were all born. If she wants us all born here as a function of the miraculous nature of this new world, that is fine with me.

“You seem like a first. That would make you one of the five,” she said brightly, patting my hand.

“I don’t think there is any question about that, Mom.” I said with a smile. See, this all goes back to something very ancient. The philosophical school of solipsism (Latin: solus/alone and ipse/self) holds that real knowledge of anything outside one’s own mind might not actually exist.

You can tag that back to the Greeks, if you feel like it,  The ancient pre-Socratic thinkers held that nothing really exists; and:

* Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it; and,

* Even if something could be known about it, knowledge about it can’t be communicated to others.

Big Mama has come to that particular conclusion that that this is just a movie set, like the Truman Show, since it would not make sense as reality.

“You are right, Mom. It is all sort of unbelievable.”

“I did get out of Ohio,” she said. “Maybe that is part of it. Why we were selected to be in the twenty.”

“You were always a woman of fierce determination, Mom. Everyone knew that.”

“I want to do a map of all the airports. Annook left my car at one of them. I want it back. I have a plan.”

“Yes, cars are good, Mom. Making a map of where they are is a great project.” I was happy that I stole the license out of her purse last visit.”

“Then we can figure out who all these people are, and why they are doing what they do.”

Karla came by with some decaf for the Folks, and I took the fork out of Raven’s fist. “I am all over that, Mom.”

“It just doesn’t make any sense any other way.”

“I completely agree,” I said, and actually, I think I do.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Raven Passes His Test

So, in the end, it was no big deal, though of course it is not the end, strictly speaking, just another buoy on the long voyage.

I hit the door to the lobby at Potemkin Village at ten sharp. I saw two women- one young and the other a bit older than me- though that is increasingly a tenuous guess- waiting at the elevator.

I had a hunch it was them, Mary from Admissions and the Bay Bluffs Social Worker, and they were headed upstairs to do Raven’s assessment.

I raced them in the other slow elevator and managed to catch them in the corridor before they knocked on the door.

“Hi,” I said, extending my hand to the older lady. “You might be Mary?”

“I am,” she responded, and shook my hand. She had some semi-Euro glasses and nicely cut dark blonde hair. “This is my associate, Kelly, our Social Worker.”

“Great, glad I caught you before you went in.”

“We thought you might be Vic when you came in the lobby.”

“Yeah, our appearance lowers the average age here by a couple decades,” I said.  “So, what is it we need to accomplish in this meeting?”

“Nothing really,” said Mary. “We just want to chat with your father.”

“That is likely to be a challenge,” I said brightly. “But let’s get on it.”

I made a symbolic tap on the door-knocker to the apartment and ushered the women in. Big Mama was a little flustered by the appearance of the ladies, who I explained I had met at my meeting, and they wanted to chat.

Raven was seated on the faux leather couch and was briefly stimulated. He had no shoes, so I had to locate some and got down on the floor to put them on him. While I was down there I noticed Mary had on some stylish flats, constructed of elegant swaths of shiny geometric contrasting leather.  “Nice shoes, Mary,” I said appreciatively.

Big Mama said: “Don’t put holes in my floor.”

Mary laughed. “I used to wear spikes, I did. But not any more.”

“How tall?” I asked.

“Three or four inches,” she said, seeming embarrassed. “It was another life.” I was interested by her reaction, and what she might have done before becoming a licensed Practical Nurse and living in Alansan, Michigan. She might have thought the same thing, and opened her notebook to demonstrate that an official moment had begun.

Mary asked Raven the first question, which was something like “William, Bill? Which do you prefer?”

Dad was slowly slumping to his left and looked at Mary without much interest. I said he preferred Bill, back when he was communicating, but that we called him Raven now because of his fondness for shiny articles. The first stop on the trips up here were always to the locksmith, since he gathered up all the keys to the house and hid them someplace. We didn’t find the hoard until we got down to the bottom layers of his closet in the big clean out.”

Big Mama was engaged in the moment, glad to have guests, and carried on a conversation that had nothing to do with what we were talking about. Raven lost interest and seemed to sag in on himself and went to sleep, his mouth gaping open.

Mary introduced Kelly to Big Mama, and Kelly in turn started to ask her when we first noticed stuff was going wrong.

“You know, I went to that High School,” Big Mama said, apparently referring to something playing on Turner Classic Movies we could not see.

“I think it was when Raven was 84 or so,” I said. “We thought it was his hearing at the time. Remember when he lost all those hearing aids?” I said to Mom.

She nodded. “I don’t think it was hearing, I think it was cognition.”

We continued a nice chat, Big Mama talking about the movie, and her high school, and Mary and Kelly asking me about the family history. I filled them in as Raven slept, slumping slightly to his left, mouth agape.

Mary seemed genuinely interested in getting to know Raven, whether he was going to participate or not. Big Mama interjected points she thought were important along the way. “He was a Naval Aviator in World War Two,” I said.

“Oh,” said Kelly. “We have an Air Force photographer at the Bluffs.” The way she said it made me think of butterflies in a collection, but then, that is what this is about, right?

“And he was an artist and a an auto stylist and a corporate CEO. He owned Curtis Wire here in the Little Village By the Bay, too. He was our Mayor pro tem when he was on the City Council.”

Kelly took notes. Raven dozed. I showed the ladies the many wonderful features of my iPad, which, coincidently, adorned the cover of this week’s New Yorker, with St. Peter shown looking up a name on his tablet at the Pearly Gate in front of a fellow in jeans and a black turtleneck.

After twenty minutes, Mary folded down the cover of her spiral notebook and asked Kelly if she had any further questions. She said she didn’t. The ladies got up and I was not fast enough to help Mary with her coat. Big Mama was excited by the activity, and got out of her chair.

“Why don’t we take Dad down to the lounge and get coffee and a donut. Would you like that, Mom?”

“Oh, yes. That would be wonderful. I glanced at the clock, realizing I had a full hour to kill before the Challenged Lunchroom opened up. Raven awoke to the bustle in the apartment and spoke for the first time. “Thanks!” he said.

Big Mama was working on getting her shoes on. I went out in the hall to speak to the ladies.

“So,” I said. “What is next?”

“Well, we think that your father needs a space in the back room,” said Mary. Kelly nodded. “We would have to move things around. We will call once Kelly’s evaluation is filed and we make a plan.”

“You will call?” I asked. Mary nodded, and the ladies walked down the corridor toward Sheri’s beauty shop and the slow elevator bank.

I turned and went back into the apartment. Raven was up, and in the kitchen.

“Great news,” I said to Big Mama. “Raven passed his test.”

“Oh, that is wonderful,” she said. “Did they spend the night here?”

“No, Mom. But everything is going to be just fine.” I have no idea if that is true, sptrctly speaking, but I figure if I say it enough it might be true.

I held Raven’s hand as we slowly moved down the hall and boarded the elevator with Irene and one of her helpers. They were apparently headed for the exercise class in the multi-function room. I sang the first bars of “Irene Goodnight,” to her, as I always do, and she said that she loved me.

Raven was very interested in the exercise class, but we steered him into the coffee lounge. Beth, a stout woman in dark scrubs, showed me the trick to the coffee maker, and in exactly as much time as that took, Raven got out of his chair and disappeared into the corridor. He was reaching for the knob to apartment 132 to enter when I got to him.

“No, Dad.” I gently took his arm above his now-thin left arm. “That is what is getting you evicted. Let’s just get a cup of coffee and a donut, shall we?”

“Damn,” he said.

“I wish you could have said that when the ladies were here. But the good news is you passed the test.”

“Damn,” he said.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Finding Raven’s Roost

Two days without The Daily. Many of you must be relieved. I am engaged in the adventure of Finding Raven’s Roost, prompted by his coming eviction from the Potemkin Village Assisted Living Facility.

As Big Mama has declined, he has regained some of his strength, and has been leaving the apartment to “go to meetings,” which is the term of art Big Mama uses for his uninvited intrusions into the apartments of other residents.

So I am here again. There has been an enormous amount of stuff to process- all of it against the audio backdrop of a dozen waxing-and-waning National Public Radio stations having simultaneous Fund Drives across the Midwest. I think that is one of Dante’s circles of hell, but habit it habit.

It was not like this with satellite radio in the rental caddy a few weeks ago, and that is really the way to travel if you have to drive 800 miles to get to the Little Village By the Bay. I will stipulate that there is no highway ride like a big Crown Vic police car, so long as you get to ride in the front.

The memories are swirling this morning, along with the brightly colored leaves being ripped from the trees in the rising fresh gale off the bay where the whitecaps are rolling toward the sandy beach of the State Park to the east.

And I need to get this out of the way and prepare for the meeting with the nursing home and Raven and Big Mama later this morning.

I am always a little dazed up here on arrival. The sun comes later, this far west in the Eastern Time Zone, and there are so few people Up North in the fall, compared to my bustling Northern Virginia. I don’t know what other motorists thought of the big police cruiser with the white “Fight Terrorism” plates of the Old Dominion roaring past them.

It was a full day last Friday, peering into gray sheets of water in Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio and lower Michigan, with the windshield wipers on the Bluesmobile beating like a metronome before my drooping eyes.

It rained most of Saturday as well, finishing the dash Up North, clearing out only late in the afternoon as I drove to have dinner with some of my oldest friends in the world- family, really- in a little village in Leelanau County on the Big Lake.

It was grand fun, seeing them, and it was purely remarkable yesterday morning. I am too old to attempt the two-hour drive back to Petoskey in the dark, so I was invited to sleep over, and I gladly accepted.

I woke at 0400 to use the head and step out of the guest suite at Round Top to listen to the roar of the waves on the shore below and think about what needed to get accomplished. Fun time was over. Now, business.

After all the rain on the trip, this day dawned fresh and crisp and with the blue sky that Hemingway said only came in northern Michigan. That is nonsense, of course, as anyone from Carolina will tell you, but it was stunningly pretty as I fired up the Bluesmobile. I entered the GPS coordinates for the Cherry Hill Haven Nursing Facility in Traverse City.

I promised my siblings I would check it out as part of my attempt at “due diligence” to determine the “best value” for Raven’s “quality of life.”

The village of Leland is just north of the Sleeping Bear Dunes National Lakeshore. Leelanau County is one of the prettiest places in he world- Sleeping Bear was just voted so by the National Geographic. Were it not for the savage winters I would have been here long ago.

You can say this generally about Up North Michigan: if you were not intending to go there, it is not one of those places that you would wind up. It is not ‘on the way’ to anything except the rolling timbered hills and the spectacular views of the big lakes and the introspective looks at the hundreds of little inland lakes that snake in a chain right across the 45th parallel from Lake Michigan to Lake Huron.

Leelanau County is the little finger on the upturned palm of the hand that serves as a map of the State of Michigan. Northport is at the very tip, with views of the Mission Peninsula to the east and the vastness of Lake Michigan, all the fresh water in the world, to the west. It is the end of the line, completely out of the way of everything.

The County itself is dotted with lakes, carpeted with lovely farms and cherry orchards amid the sharply rolling terrain of the ancient dunes left by the last ice age.

The micro-climate created by the moisture of the big lake and soil has made this the cherry capital of the known universe, and the vistas of the brightly colored trees and the sharp cutting light of the post dawn filled me with wonder.

I drove south on lovely Michigan Route 22 through Sleeping Bear, and then west through Cedar, a little island of Poland that starting with the first wave of immigrants in 1868. The first wave of Poles in the county came to scout out the area. In the 1870s a large second wave came to join the scouting families.The Polish community in Leelanau County originally consisted of four small settlements a couple miles apart.

I rolled past Shomberg, Bodus and Isadore on the way out of Cedar, hardy locals in jackets standing near cars outside the cafes.

The GPS took me the shortest route, which involved county roads across the peninsula, skirting School Lake and a dozen others, nestled in their pines and maple trees. I had the window down, and the smell of the trees and soil and brightness of the light low on the eastern horizon was magical. I turned up the radio, which was playing The House of Blues Hour. Buddy Guy and Junior Wells brought me across the county with a pulsing, driving beat.

I approached Traverse City from the southwest, and GPS directed me without fault across the silent roads to Cherry Hill Haven.  This was the place that Dad had been parked while Annook took Mom on the long drive across the Midwest last summer, en route the Shakespeare Festival in Ontario. That could be the second-to-last journey Big Mama gets outside a facility, and it was stressful for all concerned.

I swerved the big P-71 into one of the empty parking places along the side of the low white building and walked up to the covered entrance. I found I could not operate the crypto lock, though the key-pad was right by the door and the code posted on the inside of a plastic sleeve taped to the door. I lifted the flap, entered the four digits, and nothing happened.

The admonition typed on the outside read: “Do not allow residents to see code.” Apparently ‘demented’ does not mean ‘not clever,’ like me, apparently.

I sighed, and decided the plea was on full lock-down for Saturday night, and this early on a Sunday the place was secured. I walked around the building and saw a couple of the residents sitting in the lounge, staring ahead. It looked fine, as a place to sit, and I wondered if Raven would know the difference. I made a note of the phone number to contact the admissions people on Monday, after the interview was done with the Bay Bluffs people.

The hazard of distance is an issue. If we warehouse Raven in Traverse City, it means essentially that we will not see him again. Even if it is more expensive, I think The Bluffs location across the bay will enable us to visit him. I was feeling introspective, so I called my best pal to talk it through.

“I wonder if we should move them both? But having them in Traverse City would make the house in Petoskey irrelevant.”

“Why don’t you wait and see how they are doing. Are you going to Potemkin Village for lunch?”

“Yeah, but I want to stop and look at Meadow Brook in Bellaire. That is a home in Antrim County near where their old friend Dee lives on Torch Lake. That would be funny- Mom grew up in Bellaire, Ohio. I probably could tell her she is going home.”

“Let me know how it goes,” she said, and somewhere between the cell towers on the rolling hills of Michigan the call was dropped.

I decided to wait and see how Big Mama was doing at lunchtime, when I made my formal appearance in the Northland for this trip.

I made it across M-66 and several county routes I had never experienced. This is incredible country, down in the blazing color of the trees in the valley of the East Jordan River, and I hit US-131 near Boyne Mountain in time to roar north and arrive at Potemkin Village in time to find them still in their apartment, unaware that lunch was being served. Big Mama was dozing on her bed, and Raven was perched on the couch in the living room.

Raven had not been shaved in weeks- probably not since I left them three weeks ago- and he looked like hell. Mom was delighted to see me, and not at all surprised at the unannounced arrival. I told her a couple times about that fact that Raven was going to be having a big meeting on Monday, and might be taking a trip, though the implications did not penetrate.

I shaved Dad and got him into a sweatshirt over the t-shirt he was wearing over his sweatpants.

Mom took exactly one bite of lunch, while Rave demolished his ham-steak after I cut it up for him, and mashed most of his pumpkin pie (and Big Mama’s) into his mouth at the conclusion.

I screened the mail after lunch, and announced that I had a couple of meetings to go to- part of the big Hemingway conference I am planning for next summer, around Big Mama’s birthday. That is a convenient fiction I have manufactured that borrows from reality and pure fantasy, which is where she is living these days.

Raven startled the shit out of me. I was sitting on one of the wooden chairs from the little dining table (nothing can soak into the wood, and I prefer to sit on one rather than the couch) and he pointed at the fancy silver Zuni bracelet that holds my watch.

“I like that,” he said, and then went silent again. He is still in there, someplace. Damn.

I reminded myself to get the title to Big Mama’s car changed into my name so I can sell it.

The appointment to have Raven assessed is in three hours. I assume I will know more after that. Then I will take them down to lunch and back, and then try to get some work done at the house- or hit the Department of Motor Vehicles.

Mom remembers the trip from last summer, and perhaps we can get Raven roosted some place without a lot of drama.

At lunch, and later at dinner, Big Mama remarked about how strange it was. She talked a lot about her old home, and the cemetery and the people who have gone before. She is determined no to lose them, though of course it is the essence of what is happening to her that she clings so intently to some facts while the rest are allowed to float free and vanish in the breeze.

“Can you believe it?” she said, picking at her chicken dumpling. “How we all got here?”

“No, Mom. I could not have imagined it in my wildest dreams.”

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

32BJ

I was on the way to Willow yesterday afternoon to spend some quality time and avoid packing for what I now have to do this morning. I stepped out of The Madison, where I talked briefly to my pal Mac and dropped off a book I borrowed from him.

When I emerged, I could hear the chanting and the bullhorn up the block, and took out my camera and ran to the sound.

It was a peaceful demonstration by 32BJ, which is the Brotherhood of Janitors, a component of the Service Employees International Union, which has been flexing its muscles lately. There were a couple dozen folks there, and the rally did not last long. The Arlington Cops looked on. I don’t know if they thought about organizing or not.

I don’t have any particular opinions about the janitors. I want dignity for everyone, but the SEIU has been particularly prominent in an alliance with ACORN and the American Family Party. It feels a little different than the Iron Workers, or the UAW. It feels political more than a union, but what do I know?

That was where things started to get all confused in the stream of demonstrations, The story yesterday- Deep Green- is one of the ones that started as one thing, went in a whole new direction and kinda lost the connective tissue. I got an inquiry from a pal in Detroit, who said: “I don’t get it. Vegans are OK. Who is the crazy woman and why the pie? You are not in favor of eating meat, are you?”

From Colorado came the admonition that I ought to slow down and make myself clear, and get the recipes in line with a sustainable philosophy.

Fine- I was processing too much stuff. I don’t want to do what I am going to do this weekend, and jammed some strands together.

One strand was about the Occupy Wall Street, and the thought I was trying to get out was that the Administration is at least tacitly supporting the effort, even though what is being protested is exactly what Clinton-Bush-Obama have cemented: private bank control of the Treasury and monetary policy- and bailouts.

Not a Republican or Democrat issue- they are both complicit and they are both guilty as sin, regardless of the periodic and feeble efforts to reform things and the valiant rhetoric by those who are continuing to milk the Wall Street cash machine.

The OWS crowd is comprised of True Believers, in my mind, and a bunch of kids like us who just like to be where it is happening. The True Believers who created the framework for the current protest in New York are the American Family Party, an offshoot of the ACORN organization and headed by a former VP of a SIEU local.

But like, so what? I am not opposed to janitors having some dignity, are you? It is just sort of mystifying about how well organized they are. Like the professionally-produced signs at the 32BJ demonstration yesterday afternoon.

The OWS movement is as big as it is because people are pissed, and there are (to remember some ancient terminology) plenty of fellow travelers to go on the journey, just as we went along with the Yippies and some of the wilder elements of the anti-war left back in the day.

The first guy convicted in any of these was sentenced to 13 years just today. We need some more people to do time for what they did, undermining the very basis of the market in which you trade for part of your livelihood.

Anyway, as you know, the OWS is all things to all people, one part of which is the Climate Change True Believers.

I am a bit of a skeptic- I do not think that there is consistent and unambiguous evidence of warming directly as a result of Man release of CO2. There has been a measurable increase of a degree or so over the last century- and I do not think the “science is settled” as Dr. Michael Mann and the Hockey Stick Graphic claims.

There is a pretty robust group of real scientists who feel the same way- but note, please, this does not mean I think everything is fine, and that something fairly dramatic doesn’t need to be done to protect the bio-mass of the world ocean, or that pollution is bad, or that green energy cannot be a valuable adjunct to more reliable conventional/nuclear technology that is getting better.

See, that is what I think is getting lost here- reason. And the ability to compromise and do some mildly unpleasant things in order to avoid some really bad ones.

The President’s people use a solar panel company owned (coincidently, I am sure) by Rep. Pelosi’s brother-in-law as an example of the shining future, just before it declares bankruptcy on a half billion in Federal loans. Corrupt, corrupt, corrupt.

The Right has been bitching about the EPA, but the Agency is not doing anything in issuing the blizzard of regulations that the President didn’t say he was going to do. If the Congress won’t pass his sweeping cap-and-trade legislation, he said he would do it by regulation, and that is precisely what happened.

Based on the staggering cost of implementation, those CO2 regulations have been deferred until after the election, or the economic turn-around.

Which is where I get around to Deep Green Resistance. It is worth going to their site; they put the darker moments of the Weather Underground into positive sunshine in comparison: I spent an hour yesterday morning rooting around there:  deepgreenresistance.org/

They honestly want to shut down commercial power generation; organized agriculture, finance and move back to subsistence farming. The fact that this would, if their asymmetric attacks on the infrastructure were successful, kill millions is irrelevant. It would “save the planet.”

The young lady who got pied (Lierre Keith) is one of their thought leads. She most recently wrote a scathing indictment of Vegans (she was one, of course, before becoming even more enlightened) and a proposal to destroy global agriculture.

Her book is “The Vegan Myth.” I read the first fourteen pages and believe she is rational but quite deranged.

Thus, she was hit by the pie by pro-Vegan forces.

What seems sort of a light-hearted prank was actually was an attack, if you believe what some of the activists are saying, that the cream pie was laced with cayenne pepper and was the equivalent of Macing her.

I can’t make this stuff up.

I have to drive. Maybe there will be more in the morning, or maybe the next installment will have to come from the Little Village By the Bay.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra,com

Deep Green

“The task of an activist is not to navigate systems of oppressive power with as much personal integrity as possible; it is to dismantle those systems.” -Lierre Keith

It has been grand fun watching the kids in New York, occupying Wall Street and avoiding showers while castigating the oppressive patriarchal capitalist system. It evokes the great times we have when the G20 and the World Bank protestors cavort in the streets of DC.

I am not opposed to protest; in fact, I recall vividly trying to stir up some focused resentment to the greedy swine who nearly ruined the global banking system and who have paid exactly nothing for their crimes against us.

I diverge from the Occupy movement in that I consider this to be a systemic failure of the entire body politic- I am not a knee-jerk critic of the Administration, nor an apologist for the former ones.

Any objective analysis of what was done to us shows the fingers of the Clinton and Bush Administrations, and their four complete Congresses all over our collective disaster.

If I like James A. Johnson, a Mondale Democrat, as the architect of the housing bubble, there are plenty of Republicans who ought to go to jail, too, so relax.

That is what Occupy is about, at the heart of it. The Obama administration has been generally supportive of the Occupy Movement, which is, I suppose, another Lead From Behind strategy, but I think the parade has already launched off in its own direction, down a road of inchoate rage that has more in common with the Tea Party than anyone would like to admit.

My pal Muhammed called me the other day to see if I would be passing through Ann Arbor on my way to the Raven Rescue Mission this weekend. I told him I might, all depended on how the first five hundred miles of the trip were going in the Bluesmobile. We were room-mates back in college, and stay in touch. He said:

“This whole Occupy thing makes me think back to fall of 1969 through about 1972 at UM. Remember when we hung out at the marches? I think we shared something with the kids today. The “movement” was afoot. It was cool and it provided us with excitement, something to do, fun, and a way to be cool and attract the attention of the ladies.”

“Yeah,” I responded with a sigh. “So, we went to demonstrations that broke out into riots, and watched Sheriff Doug Harvey and the rest of his County Mounties hit people over the heads with clubs and then carry them off to the Washtenaw County jail”

“Yep. That was the part that got the adrenaline flowing. But the leaders of the movement, the meetings, the speeches, were tedious and boring and basically out of touch with the people who were demonstrating. We never wanted to be part of that, we just wanted to be part of it- to be cool,” I said, thinking of the sweet smell of smoke in the crowd, and how cold the beer was.

“I think the leaders of this thing are pretentious idiots, who were probably homeschooled by aging ex-hippie dumbasses,” Muhammed declared. “The kids may have good ideas or good intent, but they are going about it like morons. A nation run by this movement would be fodder for Russia, China, even the Mexican Gangs would chew us up if these idiots ran things.”

“Thank goodness the Iranians can’t tell a Mexican cartel guy from a Federal informant. I am still going to stay away from the Peking Gourmet Restaurant, and I asked Joanie at the Willow reservation desk to alert me if the Saudi Ambassador makes reservations there.”

“Smart move, Vic. Hope to see you on your trip north.”

“Back at you, Muhammed,” I said, and clicked off the connection. The kids in the park will be driven out by the cold soon enough, and it will be interesting to see if this is just a trial run for the campaign season next summer.

Jeeze, why is this stuff happening now, when we are so old? Does it take a generation to lose complete perspective on reality?

Checking the rest of the morning mail, one of my skeptic buddies wrote me to note that on Oct. 8, 1,500 skiers and snowboarders converged on remote Wolf Creek Ski Area, four hours from Colorado Springs, Colo., for the most memorable (and earliest) ski season opening in recent memory.

I wrote him back immediately. “Climate is not weather,” I said. “Don’t fall into that trap.”

He came right back, this time on Instant Message, with the chimes from the machine startling me. “Don’t imagine for a second that there are those who are not ready to take action.”

Mystified, I clicked on the link he provided. I was delivered to the Deep Green Resistance site, and got this clarion call to action: Deep Green Resistance is for those who can’t wait anymore.

“This is the question: Are you willing to accept the only strategy left to us? Are you willing to set aside your last, fierce dream of that brave uprising of millions strong? I know what I am asking. The human heart needs hope as it needs air. But the existence of those brave millions is the empty hope of the desperate, and they’re not coming to our rescue.”

What followed was a manifesto as intricate as Ted Kaczynski’s Unibomber rant, and just as bizarre. Deep Green advocates active war against the industrial, energy and agricultural sectors of the world economy to save the planet.

One of their seminal thinkers is Lierre keith, who used to be a Vegan but now considers them to be revanchist pigs. Just when I think it is safe to go outside, there is something else to worry about.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

The Usual Suspects

I was going to talk to you about a couple other things this morning, but then the news of Frank’s death spread, and I had to draft an obit, and I put aside an analysis of the origins of the Occupy Wall Street movement.

It is all quite curious, and worth some discussion about the usual suspects. There will be time for that- the coming cold weather will drive the kids off the pavement soon enough, and it may be that this is just a dry run for the big demonstrations that will happen in the run up to the election next year.

I have seen this movie before, as many of you who are a certain age, and remember it well, since most of us were participants in the last widespread street actions in the waning days of the Vietnam conflict.

Mostly for fun, which is why a lot of the kids are doing it now, I suspect. But there is time to get to that in the next thirteen months.

Thoughts about the American Family Party, a front group of ACORN and the SIEU, were driven from my mind as the other news spread.  about the Iranian plot to assassinate the Saudi Ambassador here in DC. The plot involved bombing the Peking Gourmet Restaurant over on Route 7, which is where we celebrated my pal Mac’s 92 birthday.

When the al Quds Force is planning on bombing restaurants that serve exquisite Peking Duck, this gets personal. That is, if this is not a “Wag the Dog” moment presaging lobbing some cruise missiles at Baby Food factories.

I don’t know what to think at the moment, though I probably will once I am on the road to Michigan again to deal with the Raven Affair this Friday.

In the meantime, we wound up at Willow last night. That will come as no surprise, but we had a bunch of folks over at the office for a late meeting, which I avoided, and instead swung by The Madison to have my copy of the new book by Eliott Carlson signed by Admiral Mac.

“Joe Rochefort’s War” is one of those books that is absolutely definitive about a deep secret that proved to be the margin of victory in the titantic struggle of the Pacific War.

Mac wrote the introduction to the book, which I read in the advance copy in his apartment last week. Carlson had given him a couple copies in recognition of the more than forty interviews he contributed to the burgeoning narrative over the years.

“It is incredibly thorough,” Mac said. “Carlson went everywhere to talk to the families of the men who have died, and to those few of us who are still around.” I read him the words he had written as the forward to the book, and Mac smiled. “Those words are right from the heart,” he said. “Now, you have to remember, this is embargoed until the 15th of this month. But take a copy with you to get started.”

“I will replace it,” I said, and slipped the thick volume into my briefcase.
I ordered the book from Amazon when I got home, figuring that it would probably show up a couple weeks after the embargo date.

I was amazed that Amazon paid no attention to the embargo date, and happily shipped it to me over the weekend. Accordingly, I decided to take his copy back and have him sign mine before heading over to Willow last night.

Mac is a little more frail than usual- it is either part of an inexorable process, or more likely, the insidious medication he has been prescribed for the slow cancer that all men will get, if we are lucky to live long enough. I read what he wrote on the flyleaf of the thick book, and thanked him for his friendship.

“I am sorry you can’t make it to Willow tonight, Admiral.”

“I know. Me too. If we can fix the medication maybe we will all be there again.”

“I sure hope so,” I said. “I will stick my head in here before I leave for Michigan.”

“Sounds good,” he said, and picked up his magnifying glass to continue to check the footnotes. “And good luck with that. It is never easy.”

I nodded, slipped the signed copy of the book in my briefcase and headed for the elevator, and the bright lights of Willow across the street.

The usual suspects were there, and more. I passed the book around, and Jim Champagne looked at the words that Mac had penned.

“He is an American Original,” he said. “And not just one of the usual suspects.” Then he ordered another Budweiser.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Monday, Monday

I like Mondays, don’t you? Can’t help that day. It great to get to the office on a Columbus Day holiday and really stretch out and do some problem solving, and I was hard at it all afternoon.

I was startled when Raven picked up the phone. I mean, shocked. Stunned. It was late in the afternoon, and my juices were starting to get rolling about what Happy Hour White was going to be at Willow that evening, and whether that out-of-sight Duck taco was going to be on the menu.

I had got through a long list of action items, many of them business-related, since we are gnawing at the 72nd solicitation from the Government on my contract vehicle.

But there was time for more. There were calls to the Brokers to line up resources to handle the Big Negative that is going to occur when we move Dad to a nursing facility- coordination calls to keep the siblings in the loop, calls to schedule Raven’s assessment visit, a courtesy copy of emails to keep Potemkin Village satisfied that we are moving forward.

Where exactly that it remains a little murky. I am hoping that Mary, the Queen of Admissions at The Bluffs, will shine a little illumination on the process. I can’t have them march into the apartment and start a conversation about warehousing Raven without being there, and hence, I have no idea where I am going to be or when.

So, being on the implementation end of things, to have Raven suddenly speaking to me was a stunning development.

“Hello,” he said in the familiar voice.

“Dad!” I said with a tone of wonder. “Great to hear your voice!” What on earth, I thought.

“Yes. Good.”

“How are you? How have you been?” A pause, as he processed my question.

“Here and there…going here and there. Busy busy,” he said. He got going at the front end and ran out of steam as the thought progressed. I asked him questions, and he responded, not knowing precisely who I was, but engaged and attempting to respond.

Jeeze, I thought, this just at the time I am going to be the instrument of breaking them up after 63 years together. We went back and forth, me asking the same thing, and letting him put out random comments.

“Dad, can I talk to Mom?” There was silence. “Is Mom there, Dad? Let me speak to her, would you?”

I heard him say something not directed into the phone, and a response.

“Is it Annook?” asked Mom in the background.

.“Some guy,” he said. “Talk? Here.” The phone rustled as he passed the handset over.

“Hello?” she said brightly.

“Hi, Mom. It’s Vic. Just calling to check in.”

“Where are you?”

“I am in Washington, Mom, where I live.”

“Oh, are you coming here soon? I need your help.”

“I am just the guy for you, Mom. I will be there soon to help. What’s up?”

“Well, it is the ten of them. Or the other ten. Do they want to go to law school?”

“Which ten are we talking about, Mom? Who are they?”

“Well, there is some confusion about that. There is the five of you.”

“Mom, there are only three of us- Annook, Spike and me.”

“Then why do I think there are five? Are we all related?”

“Well, yes,” I said, furrowing my brow. “You are quite right. There are five of us, and always have been if you include Dad and you. That was our family, five in all. So that is good.”

“but what about the others? Suppose they want to go to school?”

“I think they should, and I will be up there to help out. Maybe Dad can go back to school with them. Can you help me out with who they are? All those Law School tuitions are going to be pretty expensive.” I was thinking hard. Had she just watched “Cheaper by the Dozen” on the Turner Class Movie Channel? Spike had gone to law school out in Wyoming when he stopped being a river guide and became a professional.  “Heck, I might want to go to law school, too.”

“Well, that is good, but I need you to be here to advise me on what to do.”

“You can count on that, Mom. For sure.”

“So when will you be here?”

“Soon, Mom, I just need some more information from my sources up there to make a schedule. I will let you know as soon as things firm up.”

In the background I heard one of the Nursing Assistants tell them it was time to go to dinner. “Mom, it is time to get Dad ready to go to dinner.”

“Oh, I don’t think so. It is lunchtime.” I could almost see her peering at the gigantic clock that Annook had hung on the wall, and which Big Mama can no longer interpret.

“Right, Mom. But it is time to go down to the dining room.”

“We can do that. Will you be here soon?”

“Yep. I will keep you posted.”

“Good. I need some help figuring this out.”

“I completely understand, Mom.  Have a good dinner.”

“Or lunch,” she said, upbeat. “I will get your father ready.”

“That is good Mom. Great to talk to you.”

“Good to talk to you, too, Honey.”

“Bye, Mom.” I reached over to the desk and punched the button to turn off the speakerphone.

I wonder how this is going to work, I thought. Then I wondered what the Happy Hour White was going to be at Willow. I knew it was not lunchtime. I don’t drink at lunch, at least not any more, but I could see that this was going to be interesting, now that we are all unstuck in time.

And what the hell are we going to do about the ten others? And all that tuition?

It was a good thing I had asked Elisabeth-with-an-S to join the Socotra legal team as a special consultant. This is going to be complex.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com

Open House

I felt good after doing a modest amount of work at the farm. I got the truck unloaded, finally, and hauled the media cabinet and little blue couch up to the front door, up the plank stoop and into the back room.

I moved out the existing Adirondack chairs, transferring them to the garage, and the old footlocker and oriental chest that the flat screen television sat upon.

Then I swept the deck of debris and dead birds and got the truck washed, returning the old Blue Rhino propane tank and trimmed the branches of the pine tree that kept hitting me in the head approaching the front gate.

The work was simple and repetitive, requiring no thought. It is  totally different than what I do for a living and I was startled when I glanced at the cell phone to see that it was time to head back north to the Capital.

I didn’t want to go. It was too nice. I collected the clothes I washed in the machines in the little laundry room, scratched Heckle the Cat and got in the Bluesmobile and blasted north. I listened to the radio- replays of NPR from the week, mostly, and reception is crappy down Brandy Station way. But I did hear them talking about the Occupy Wall Street protests.

There is even an alternate newspaper that has emerged from the chaotic protestors- the Occupy Wall Street Journal.

Apparently some folks are comparing the movement to The Arab Spring, a spontaneous explosion of democracy that will do….well, no one is quite sure. The only manifesto I can find is something that was published in the Journal of the Alternate Universe, penned by a fellow named Arun Gupta. He wrote:

“Our system is broken at every level. More than 25 million Americans are unemployed. More than 50 million live without health insurance. Perhaps 100 million Americans are mired in poverty, using realistic measures. Yet the fat cats continue to get tax breaks and reap billions while politicians compete to turn the austerity screws on all of us.

At some point the number of people occupying Wall Street — whether that’s 5,000, 10,000 or 50,000 — will force the powers that be to offer concessions. No one can say how many people it will take or even how things will change exactly, but there is a real potential for bypassing a corrupt political process and for realizing a society based on human needs, not hedge fund profits.

After all, who would have imagined a year ago that Tunisians and Egyptians would oust their dictators?”

I could quibble with his numbers- they are skewed by about a quarter- and throw in the latest news from Egypt that reports Coptic Christians are being hunted down and killed by Islamic radials and security forces- but I take his point.

I have certainly urged my fellow citizens to take up torches and pitchforks and march on Goldman-Sachs, so Mr. Gupta and the other five hundred folks who are camping out in New York have clearly tapped into something that resonates on visceral level, and protests have radiated across the nation.

The apparent contradiction between a Progressive crowd protesting the most Progressive Administration in history does have me a bit bemused, but never mind. Nor do I have any idea what sort of concessions the Occupiers have in mind.

My thought was to try the greedy pricks who brought down the markets, find them guilty by law, strip them of their ill-gotten gains, and move on. I have a list of names, by the way, just in case anyone wants to get serious about this. James A. Johnson, former Fannie Mae CEO heads my list, but I would suggest that the mob might want to Google up the addresses of:

Alan Greenspan, chairman of US Federal Reserve 1987- 2006
Bill Clinton, former US president
George W Bush, former US president
Abby Cohen, Goldman Sachs chief US strategist
Dick Fuld, Lehman Brothers chief executive
Ralph Cioffi, Bear Stearns Smart Guy
Matthew Tannin, Bear Stearns.
Lewis Ranieri, “Godfather” of mortgage finance,.
Barney Frank, unapologetic fan of Fannie Mae
Joseph Cassano, AIG Financial Products
Chuck Prince, former Citi boss
Angelo Mozilo, Countrywide Financial
Stan O’Neal, former boss of Merrill Lynch
Christopher Dodd, chairman, Senate banking committee
The American public

I throw in all the rest of us, since we acted with what War Criminal Greenspan might have characterized as “irrational exuberance” at the whole circus. We forgot that what seems to good to be true usually is.

Anyway, I got the laundry out of the Bluesmobile and put it in the rolling cart to take upstairs. Elsbeth, the German war bride, was the desk. She is a remarkable woman. The GI she had married to get out of Berlin had died on her, laving eight children behind. She could tell us something about pulling up our Big Girl pants and getting on with life.

She had been from a town called Danzig, which no longer exists, and cared for her sister after the Red Army had its way with her at the Battalion level.

I never asked if they had her, too, but didn’t quite know how to phrase the question. Nothing had come in since I left town, but I noted there was a sign on the end of the counter advertising an open house on Unit 604.

My ears pricked right up. I had made an offer on the unit across the hall- Number 603- back in the bubble days.

I have never been so grateful about not winning. I think the gal who was selling wanted $415,000, and the two-bedroom, two bath unit is on the end of the building. Those units have an extra couple hundred feet, and windows on the end that face the lights of Ballston.

The sixth floor is still above the tree-line, too, and 604 overlooks the Big Pink pool and gets the afternoon sun.

I dumped the laundry in my place and walked up the two floors to check it out.

Karen-the-Realtor was there alone when I rapped on the door. She showed me around. There had been a nice upgrade to the unit: walls knocked out of the kitchen,  breakfast bar installed with black granite countertops, chair rails, new glass closet doors, closet organizers, re-done half bath, new convectors, and a roller-screen door to the balcony.

I asked how much they wanted for it, and Karen said “$315K.”

“Wow,” I said. “That means if I had bought the place across the hall, I would be out a hundred thousand dollars and still underwater. Man, am I lucky.”

“Well, at least the market seems to be stabilizing,” she said. “And look at these views!”

“I paid $375K for a place a little smaller than this,” I said, pointing down in the direction of my unit. “I can’t refinance even though the mortgage is current and I have not missed a payment on any of the houses I have ever owned.”

“They do want 20% down,” said Karen. “It makes it almost impossible to refinance since so many people are underwater on their property.”

“Yeah, it is sort of crazy that they seem to think that I can’t afford to continue to pay them less money on time, even if I give them a point or two up front for the privilege. “I thanked her for her time, wondering if I should make a bid on the place and sell the one with the onerous 6.1% mortgage. That way I could just take my beating and be done with it.

I took away the advertising information and walked down the staircase. As turned the key in the upper lock to get in, I thought there are indeed some people I would like to see do the same thing.

Or invite myself over for an Open House and administer the beating myself.

Copyright 2011 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com