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May 24, 2021

I don’t live in LA anymore. Twenty six years ago that made me feel lost, rootless, far from home. Today 26 years later I call East Oakland home and so it is. Like the LA neighborhoods I like, College Court in East Oakland was subdivided in the 20s for small working class homes built for the growing population of Oakland.

Before development it was farmland and orchards. The Fruitvale train station is two miles west of here and Mills College a quarter mile north. The houses sold with restrictive convenants, no people of color, no immigrants and Catholics probably discouraged. In the 1960s real estate predators were block busting in East Oakland. They would move a black family, hope to start white flight, buy the houses cheap and sell at inflated prices to the new Black families moving in. Not everyone fled and this neighborhood like some Mid City neighborhoods in LA was stayed diverse with a good mix of Black and White families. Now it’s a neighborhood that’s beginning to gentrify but still has a strong African American base. In the gentrification cycle we’re not quite trendy yet and we’re not urban pioneers.

We’ve been here six years and it’s home. Like all of Oakland it is probably the most diverse place I have ever lived. Not as latino as I am used to from LA, but a mix of White, African American, Asian and some Latinos. Mostly Americans, not immigrants though immigrant neighborhoods are nearby. South of here, a more urban neighborhood is Latino, Mam, Arab, and Asian and the barrio starts less than a mile from here and Little Vietnam is less than 3 miles west.

My 11 year old Black Latinx Irish daughter is right at home here. When we moved here friends from school or church came to visit the first time they were cautious, East Oakland, even Deep East Oakland, but were surprised at our neighborhood. It’s genteel, a quality I think it’s retained for the last 100 years, no matter the color.

It took a while for me to feel at home in the Bay Area. When I first moved up in 1995 I lived in Mill Valley, a beautiful place, but a place I never feel at home in. When my then wife Susan got a job in Los Angeles, we got an apartment in Glendale where she lived and I joined her for a week every month and I got an apartment near Lake Merritt. Lake Merritt, Lakeshore, Grand Avenue and Park Avenue, neighborhoods next to each other, is one of my favorite places in the world. A library, a bookstore, bicycle shops, cafes, restaurants, a kosher bakery, a vacumn repair shop, the Grand Lake Theater and plenty more, wonderfully dense and urban. With the lake it should be a tourist attraction, Japanese and Midwesterners enjoying California at its best, but it’s not.

I lived there a year. At first working at Juvenile Hall in San Francisco and then a cadet at the State Parks Ranger Academy at Pacific Grove. I’d come home most weekends. I moved out of my apartment when I got a Park house at Mt. Diablo. After Mount Diablo I lived in a Park house on Angel Island.

Six months before I retired we moved off the island and I found us a place next to Lake Merritt. The apartment was OK, the neighborhood was wonderful. After a year there Suzette’s 17 year old son moved in with us after living with his father in Florida. The apartment was too small for us. Suzette made the move from Los Angeles to the Bay Area when she went to Cal and lived in University Village in Albany. For her home is that part of the East Bay, Albany/El Cerrito and Berkeley.

She found us a house in El Cerrito. The landlord was selling the house in a year or so but planned to rent it in the menatime. That was OK we were planning to go to Spain for a year. And then my father-in-law convinced his daughter that was too risky and a year and a half later when our landlord wanted to sell the house we went looking for another one nearby. Suzette found us a house in a development called Hilltop Green in El Sobrante, technically Richmond but with an El Sobrante zip code.

Hilltop Green was developed in the 1970s on land owned by Chevron Oil. It is a bowl like glen below a bluff with Highway 80 above it and out of earshot. It is spacious single family homes with apartment buildings on the eastern edge of the bowl. It has one road leading in and out. It is like a gated community without a gate. There is a Park and community center with a swimming pool for residents. It was one of the first integrated tract developments in the United States. Forty years later it is still wonderfully integrated with a strong African American middle class respectability. It was one of the nicest neighborhoods I’ve ever lived in, neat suburban streets, a park, a community center, and everything we needed a short drive away.

We would have stayed there comfortably but our landlord raised the rent nearly 10% after one year. There were houses in the development that we could afford and we began to think we should buy instead of rent. Hilltop Green has one big disadvantage we became aware of after we moved in, there is a constant cascade of invisible pollution from the freeway into the bowl where we lived.

So we started looking, El Sobrante, kind of far away, Richmond, there are good neighborhoods in Richmond in spite of its reputation, El Cerrito and Berkeley. We had a wonderful real estate agent Anita Jaffey, recommended to us by Karimah. We made a bid on house in Richmond, acceptable on a nice block in a hard neighborhood. We didn’t get it. We looked and looked. Berkeley was just too expensive. The one house in our range was across the street from a liquor store where the neighborhood leisure class loitered.

Like everyone else we weren’t thinking East Oakland. My bicycle explorations had taken me to neighborhoods like the Dimond and I knew there were neighborhoods in East Oakland that didn’t fit it’s reputation. We began to think of it as a real possiblity when we saw a home near the Laurel, another one of those Oakland neighborhoods, a cafe, a biycle shop, restaurants, a hardware store, laundromats and a bank. The library was nearby, no book stores, but a neighborhood nonetheless.

Affordability was the key point and we began looking more seriously near the Laurel. We made a bid on a house and almost got it. The last time I had bought a house it was a buyer’s market or at least the owner asked a price and the buyer bid below until the owner and buyer reached an agreement. In Oakland in 2015 the owners offered the house at a price that everyone knew was too low and the buyers compete in bidding it up. It’s all done in a matter of days. As buyers we had to bid high enough to get the house, so to overbid but not too much. We had already lost two bids before we bid on this house.

It reminds me of the diamond dealers in some Central Asian trading market who talk trash to each other with their right hands touching under a scarf and they finger bid.

And in August of 2015 we got it. I used retirement savings to make the down payment and costs. And we moved in. We’ve been here six years. College Court, we call it home.

Money

 Nothing worried me more about retiring than money. I went to the workshops, I met with the representatives. I called Social Security. No one could give me the answer I wanted. Would it be enough?

As I walked out the door it seemed like my money worries had reached a crescendo. Could I afford to live on what was going to come in? The week I left there was enough in my accounts to live for the month.  Then the State’s parting paycheck was an unexpected 3 months of salary with vacation and back overtime.  We weren’t going to be on the streets for at least three or four months. It certainly gave us a cushion for the beginning. In December my Social Security deposit and the one for Paloma arrived in the checking account. And then the CalPers deposit was more than I expected. Four months later they caught their own mistake, they hadn’t deducted medical insurance and I had to pay it back over the next year. But that initial oversized deposit was nice to have for a few months.

Is it enough? 10 years after retirement the answer is definitely yes. Social Security, CalPers State Pension and savings, I’m not rich but I have enough.

Before retirement I heard the hardship stories about old people barely living on Social Security and often it involved cat food.  I knew Social Security payments were reduced according to how much I got from CalPers.  Just before I retired I learned from Social Security that since I had 30 years of paying the tax there was no reduction.  I was surprised when my checks (automatic deposit) started arriving. They weren’t that small. In fact they seemed pretty large to me.

The check I got looked good enough for one person to live on frugally. If it was my sole income I’d reduce my expenses considerably and move out of Oakland to somewhere with lower rents. For me Plan C was to move to Mexico where my Social Security would be a comfortable income.

Of course, I have Paloma and one person living frugally wasn’t the real plan. My financial advisor Karimah Karah told me before I retired to make sure I apply for Social Security for Paloma as my underage dependent. Who knew? I was surprised to receive a monthly check that was half of my own Social Security and increased our income to nearly comfortable.

Add CalPers Pension and I was there. After I paid back the overpayment it settled into enough to pay my Kaiser MedCare and Dental Insurance for Paloma and me and still net $1,000 a month.  I told Kaiser I wanted a plan that was equivalent to the care I had been getting before I retired and that’s what I have. The only difference is the minimal copays are less. Through CalPers I’m paying a rate negotiated to its minimum, $325 a month.  Paloma and Suzette’s medical insurance is part of her benefits package at her employer.

Suzette has a full time job with a reasonable salary and benefits. My mindset has always been to pay my own way and that seems to be Suzette’s attitude, so we split the household expenses, mortgage and utilities in half and then the substantial private school tuition.

Without the tuition I’d be OK, so I take that out of my savings. And Bob’s your uncle, that’s how we live.

Housing expenses in the Bay Area are among the highest in the country and what we pay in mortgage and taxes would choke people outside of New York or Los Angeles. And private tuition at a very good school is only slightly less than college tuition at the best schools in California.

And there it is, most of my life I’ve never made the big bucks, but I’ve always been comfortable. I never admitted to anyone but it always seemed more than I expected.  And now in retirement the same is true. We’re not rich, but we’re comfortable and it’s a lot more than I ever expected.

Half my savings was from my mother’s estate. My father didn’t have anything to do with money. He just earned it, like me his whole life, he wasn’t rich but he earned enough. My mother saved. It’s given me a comfortable cushion and let me make a substantial down payment on an Oakland house. The rest is money I paid into, Social Secuirty, IRA contributions, savings, retirement from the State that was part of the pay package.  

After all is said and done I have an income that covers expenses and I don’t work.  It feels like free money to me.

Retirement - Over the Cliff

I retired 10 years ago. As my college roommate Tony Cole said, “This is the job I was cut out for.” I don’t have a boss. I don’t have tasks to do. I’m retired, jubilado as they say in Spanish. It’s great. I don’t do anything I don’t want to do or at least that's the idea.  

Of course, that doesn’t mean I don’t have to keep up with my own life, do the shopping, take care of my daughter, meet my obligations as a parent. Life is complicated and the daily tasks fill in and spill over the space once taken by a job. But did I say, there are no bosses.

Just as retirement was getting close I had a heart attack in 2010. After that I began to let go of some of my previous ideas. I gave up the daydream of going to law school and becoming a public defender or going to college and getting a degree in science or math. Taking it easy seemed an attractive alternative after that. 

I spent the last seven years of my working life as a Park Ranger trying to keep up with people half my age. It was a gift, working so hard to learn a new job.  It made me feel vital, not like old bankers I had known daydreaming of the day they would drive away in their new RV. And then there was the surprise baby at age 63. Fatherhood was going to take some time.

So November 2nd, 2011 I turned sixty-five and on November 5^th I retired. That day I took off my badge and turned in my gun. The first thing I felt was relief.  I no longer had to wear a gun every day and be a target for anyone out there.  I had sworn to protect the public. I had done my duty and now I was not required to put myself in harm’s way. It was exciting and satisfying when I did it, but I didn’t have to do that anymore. I was proud to have been a police officer but I was done.

That unexpected sense of relief was there but at the same time I had just jumped off a cliff into a world I didn’t know. I’ve done that a few times, leaving solid ground and hoping I would land safely. My plan was to enjoy the flight. I would take the first three months as vacation. In AA I had heard the cliché, “When one door closes another door opens,” and the speaker added, “but these hallways are a bitch.” I was going to enjoy the hallway and let the next door open, not force it.  

Two months into retirement I started a blog and that quickly became my long postponed memoir/biography. Some twenty years before a friend had quoted his father’s biography.  I was impressed a published author.  "No," my friend said, "he just wrote it for us, my brother and me."  

Like most English majors I have always been a wannabe writer. My friend Richard’s remark gave me permission to write an autobiography. I didn’t have to worry about publishing it. I could just write it for my family. My target audience were my great great grandchildren, a written record of who their great grandfather was.

My grandfather in the summer before he died told me Lashley stories.  It connected me back to my great great grandfather Thomas Lashley and the American Civil War. It was a thread that took me back 140 years. I barely remembered the details of everything he told me, but it was wonderful. I could tell my grandchildren I had spent time with my grandfather learning the family history. What if Thomas Lashley, born 1817, had left a journal?

And so I began my blog, Stories I Tell Myself. Writing is communication and without someone reading it, it’s only half done. Captive readers are few and easily worn out.  For me there’s the internet. My readers are mostly anonymous.  It's just out there. It’s there to be found if anyone wants to look for it.  It surprises me when my blog gets any “hits” at all.  A high school classmate, I didn’t know very well in high school, claims to have read the whole thing. But people I don't know read it too, And my grandson Caius said he read it in one night after I told him about it. Every month it gets 30 hits or so. It’s Bulgarian tractor programs plowing for data but a few I imagine are actual readers.

And so that’s what I did. I got up in the morning, made coffee, did the things that needed doing and sat down and wrote. Every week or so I posted another piece for Stories I Tell Myself. I lived the writer’s life. I worked on a daily basis, I forged ahead. Each day when I wrote I accomplished something. It made going out and enjoying myself in the afternoon easier to do. At the end of two years I had finished it, my entire life up to retirement. Or at least I had a first draft.

It was inconsistent, lacked cohesion, but it was there. I had done it. I have to say, the next task seemed so daunting I gave myself a break, stopped writing for my blog. Every so often I’d write something, an opinion piece, but even that was rare. After enjoying it so much, I just stopped. Writing is hard work. I knew I needed to finish it.  The next step is to stitch it together, to polish it, make it cohesive.  I took a break but since then the urge to finish it has never been enough to go back to it.  

Eight years later I realized I've been retired almost 10 years, a big chunk of my life and I needed to record that.  And that's what this is, the next chapter.  Of course, it's still part of the first draft and I still want to stitch the whole piece together, polish it, make it a finished work.  The urge is still there.