Skype With Mom

It's been three weeks since I was able to visit Mom. I am grateful that the facility where Mom lives shut it down early and restricted visitors, but I do miss that weekly visit. I miss the quiet lunches where I watch Mom slowly push her food around the plate so that it looks like she ate. I miss the one sided conversations where I talk very loudly so Mom can hear me.

"So, how is Mark? Why doesn't he visit me?"

"Mark isn't feeling well. He has trouble going up and down the stairs."

"What?"

"MARK ISN'T FEELING WELL."

"What?"

"I SAID, MARK ISN'T FEELING WELL. HE CAN'T VISIT."

"Mark fell?"

And this is in the dining room filled with about twenty other old folks who don't even look up when you shout into Mom's ear. As a replacement for face to face visits, the good people at The Crossings have come up with a program that lets us see Mom. Skype. You call ahead and schedule a time for the Skype session and at the assigned time an employee brings an iPad up to Mom's apartment. Last Thursday was my turn. At the assigned time I tapped on the Skype icon and I was connected to the aide who was helping Mom. For the first ten minutes we couldn't get past my face staring back at me.

"Press the little camera icon."

From the other end I heard confusion.

"Okay.... can you see him Lila?"

More confusion, and then finally a picture appeared of my mom's apartment with a little fluff of white hair at the bottom.

"Move the pad down a bit. Mom's not in the picture."

The pad got moved, but moved up so that I was looking beyond the fluff.

"No, down. Angle the iPad down so I can see Mom."

"Okay, I thought I had. Is this better?"

"Sure, sure it is. That will work."

And for the next ten minutes I talked to the top half of Mom's head. I would talk, Mom would say, 'What?', and the aide would yell what I just said into Mom's ear. It worked perfectly. Sure was great to see her. She seemed very upbeat and happy and she looked good. At least she looked good from the eyes up.

Golfing With Dad

Dad at work. Associated Truck Lines.

I don't golf. I don't like to golf, it's frustrating and requires a lot of walking. Now that, that is established, let me tell you about my phone call with my Uncle Joe. Uncle Joe called the other day to check up on me and Mark. My eighty seven year old uncle called because he was worried about me and Mark. Let's just stop and think about that for a moment....   Anyway, during that call with my uncle and aunt, we discussed my dad and wondered how did he come to be such a cusser. One of the enduring memories of my dad was his cursing. I suggested he learned it when he was in the Army Air Corps during WWII. Uncle Joe felt it was probably something he picked up from the drivers and dockhands during his decades working for a trucking company.

This memory of Dad involves golfing. One bright Saturday morning my Dad, my brother, and I went golfing. It was the very first and the last time I ever golfed. We drove out to a small golf club near Orlando, Florida. Luckily for me it was not crowded. Just our trio and a few others, including a group of elderly ladies. So I tee off and my ball travels about five feet. Dad starts cursing, "What the hell are you doing? Goddamn, you gotta hit it better than that." First hole probably took me ten strokes. Beyond that things got worse and Dad continued to swear. He swore when I fucked up, and he swore when things didn't go well for him. Meanwhile, my brother seemed to be disturbed by all this swearing. Especially when the group of elderly ladies caught up with us. That was when my brother Dave, pulled Dad aside and asked him to calm it down. After all, this golf course was owned by the Baptist Church and those were some very genteel Baptist ladies that we let play through.

The Catch Basin on Wellington

After a few months of home ownership, I discovered that my shower and sinks wouldn't drain properly. My brother the plumber came over and diagnosed the problem as a full 'catch basin'. He took me out into my backyard and pointed at what looked like a little sewer. "There, that's your problem. We have to clean that out." A catch basin is a large tank that is placed underground in your drain line to the sewer. The purpose of it is to catch all the crap that is flushed down the drain that the city doesn't want in their sewer. Now the proper way to clean out this tank is to bring in a truck with a pump and suck all the gunk out into their tank, which they then take away and out of your life. What we did was to get two fifty five gallon drums, then take buckets to scoop out the slop, fill the drums with the slop, and then roll them out to the alley for the garbage men to pick up. One interesting thing we found out is that the people who lived in this house before me ate large quantities of SpaghettiOs®. It wasn't just a few SpaghettiOs® floating on top of the slop. No, almost all of the waste in the catch basin consisted of SpaghettiOs®. We proceeded to fill one drum with the slop/SpaghettiOs® and managed to get it out to the alley. It was when we were trying to wrestle the second drum, heavy with slop/SpaghettiOs® out to the alley that it all went wrong. As my brother and I pushed and pulled the drum towards the alley, one of us got out of sync. The slop sloshed against the side of the drum like a wave against the shore, and flew straight up and out at me. It happened so fast that I didn't have time to cover my face or even close my eyes. In seconds I was tasting the SpaghettiOs® of the previous residents. It was all over me, in my hair, on my clothes, in my face. I stood there screaming in disgust, with slop and SpaghettiOs® dripping off me. To this day, the sight of a can of SpaghettiOs® will trigger my gag reflex. 

The Backyard on Wellington

The Garage on Wellington

When I bought my house on Wellington Avenue in 1975, it came with a garage. A very old garage with barn doors instead of what we now call a proper garage door. Those doors were problematic when it snowed because you had to shovel all the snow out of the way to open them. So I really never kept my everyday transportation in that garage. Instead I looked upon that garage as an excuse to buy a series of things that I couldn't have if I was still living the life of an apartment dweller. First up, a well beaten 1966 Chevrolet Impala Super Sport convertible. This car was in such bad shape that the driver's seat was bolted to a couple of two by fours because the floor pan had rotted away. But I saw that car for sale on the side of the road and I had to have it. I enjoyed it for about one month before I realized it needed to go. I sold it to some Puerto Rican guy who test drove it down Lincoln Avenue at fifty miles per hour with me in the passenger seat, crapping my pants. I replaced the Chevy with a beautiful eighteen foot long, wooden sailboat. I saw that boat for sale on the side of the road and I had to have it. It just fit inside the garage if I opened the window at the back of the garage so that the mast could stick out. I took that boat out on Lake Michigan where I discovered it had the sailing characteristics of a pile of lumber strapped together with a sail attached. It didn't move very fast, and if the wind was under ten miles per hour it didn't move at all. I didn't use it much after the day the wind died out and I sheared a pin in the outboard motor. We were stuck a couple of miles out in Lake Michigan until a good Samaritan towed us back.

 So, I had the boat on one side of that old garage, but still had room for a car. Driving down an old country road one day outside Chicago I spotted the most beautiful 1955 Studebaker. It was for sale on the side of the road and I had to have it.

I now have a very nice garage with one of those automatic garage doors and room for two cars. If I get rid of a bunch of that junk that seems to have gathered on either side inside the garage, I'll bet I could fit a second vehicle in there. Maybe a nice antique Ford. They're small and wouldn't take up much room at all. You never know what I might find for sale on the side of the road. 

1323 West Wellington

Proud Owner of 1323 Wellington

In 1975 I bought a house on Wellington Avenue in Chicago. I paid $18,000 dollars for that building. It was a frame home with two apartments, an attic, and an ancient garage out back. It was run down, had only space heaters for Chicago's harsh winters, termite damage, and a chain link fence around it. I lived there for three years. In those three years I had two tenants. One that I liked a lot, and one that I had to evict. The thing about that house is that it taught me a great deal about real estate and timing. You see, I paid $18k for it in 1975 and sold it in early 1978 for $22k. That house was in the heart of the Lakeview neighborhood. A very working class place in 1975, but move ahead ten years and it was suddenly the gentrified 'Yuppie' destination. See what happened there? If I had hung on for just seven more years I could have sold that rickety dump for half a million dollars. Instead I sold it and took my money out to California. Not that I didn't enjoy my year in California. At least half of that year was fun, until I ran through my little real estate nest egg. So yes, I learned something from that experience and never sold a home short again. Termites, bad neighbors, the lust to move on to another state, none of those things would ever again lure me away from the prize. I recently looked up that property to see what it was worth today. It's worth $1,200,000.  Yes, eighteen thousand in 1975 and over a million dollars today. But I don't feel that bad because this is what it looks like today. 

Yep, they tore down that dump and built this.