Unemployed

In 1993 my youngest son Benjamin graduated from high school.  For twenty years I'd been dreaming of quitting my job when I didn't need to earn good money.  I wasn't quite ready, I needed a little more time to think about it but I could see the light at the end of the tunnel.  There were parts of banking I enjoyed and a lot I didn't.  I liked working with the customers, doing a service, I liked analysis, but the most of it was a pain.  It's what I did to make a living.  It was how I payed the bills.  

About this time I was learning to speak Spanish. I was speaking Spanish in LA, listening to tapes, and doing weekends once a month in Tijuana and then I did a two week immersion in Cuernavaca. I returned with a head full of Spanish dreaming of speaking it one day. Back at work I got a call from an attorney. I was reputed to be a CRA expert, a Federal regulation called the Community Reinvestment Act. There was a bank in CRA trouble. Could I recommend somebody? Everyone knew BanaMex, the big Mexican bank, and their California subsidiary California Commerce Bank were having a hard time with the Feds over CRA.

I recommended me. I met with the President of the bank, Salvador Villar, and we argued for an hour. After that personnel called, could I come to work for them? I figured if I stayed at Dai Ichi Kangyo Bank I’d have a bad year trying to appear enthusiastic but at BanaMex I might have a bad year and learn to speak Spanish. I started there January, 1994. One great advantage of a Mexican Bank, during the World Cup, that summer we had extended management meetings in the conference room with a wide screen TV.

I met Suzanne in August of 1994, 8 months after going to work for CCB. In that short period CCB’s CRA problem had been mostly solved. In February I was going to move to the Bay Area. I told Salvador I was quitting. He said, “You can’t quit. Work up there or something, go to the San Jose Office. But you can’t quit.”

So I moved up there and made do. At first I went to the office in San Jose, three days a week, a two hour commute, but that didn’t work very well. Then the San Jose office was closed. I worked at home in Mill Valley. I went down to LA when I needed to. I took care of CRA. I did the job. That did not require 40 hours a week and I didn’t work 40 hours. In Marin I became a regular kayaker. I enjoyed life.

The Mexican nationals at California Commerce Bank were all bilingual and the gringo credit officers were fluent in Spanish. The rest of us, mostly admin, wanted to learn to speak Spanish and two of us were serious, Tom, the bank’s in-house attorney and myself. Salvador hired a private teacher, who came in once a week and tutored us, mostly Tom and me, in Spanish for a couple of hours. 

Eventually at California Commerce Bank I felt I’d worn out my welcome. I had been good insurance for five years, but they didn’t need me after the first couple of years. They were doing just fine. It had been good for them and good for me but it was time to go.

So in October, 1999 I quit. Ironically five years later Suzanne, my wife, got a job with Citibank doing PR and CRA in Southern California. Citibank bought BanaMex and CCB’s CRA officer worked for Susan. Not too long after that Citibank shut CCB down, they didn’t need an in-house competitor for offshore Mexican dollars in the US . In the process they slandered Salvador and the Mexicans for questionable banking practices. Citibank should ever be as professional as CCB was.

In November I started “my year off.” I packed my Honda CRV with supplies, a laptop computer and a bicycle and started a road trip. I would have liked a year to wander but I had a new wife and a month would have to be enough. I got on Interstate 80 and headed East.

My first night camping was at Pollock Pines in the Sierras. I camped on a dirt road deep in the woods well away from the highway. The next morning I started writing. I had recently started working with the book, The Artist’s Way. It was an enhancement of my journaling practice. I can’t remember what I was writing but I do remember from that day on I began to think of myself as a writer. It wasn’t planned or anticipated, I just began to relax and let it be.

In Reno the newspaper had a short article about Shoshone Mike and the Last Indian Massacre near Winnemucca in 1911.  The story seemed incomplete and it started me d reading old newspaper accounts at the Winnemucca library.  Camping near Great Basin National Park I had this daydream, the full moon, the desert, the mountains and Shoshone Mike and his renegade band.  I began writing a story. I don’t think I had written any real short stories since my college days and certainly never finished anything.

The rest of the trip was dreamlike. Years before I had met someone from Nebraska, a place I had never been so that became more or less my destination.  What's Nebraska like?  I spent a week or more in Nevada and then continued East. I passed through Nicodemus Kansas, a Black pre-Civil War farming settlement, where Suzanne’s mother was from and eventually Lincoln, Nebraska. The West ends at the 100^th parallel and as I traveled further East I felt out of place. There were fewer open spaces. At Lincoln I turned around.

I stopped for a few days at a cheap no name motel and spent my days writing. I had begun the writer’s life and I enjoyed it.

North of Scott’s Bluff I detoured to Agate Fossil Beds National Monument. Now that I think of it the whole trip was detour. At the National Monument I saw a painted deerskin, the History of the World by the rangers and local Lakota artists.  It began at creation and spiraled through time to the present, battles, births, horse raids, barn burnings, the Dawes Act, World War I; it was personal and rooted where it was and universal at the same time.

Later I had the same experience reading Norman Davies Europe, A History. No matter how objective the historian tries to be, it always is like the Agate Fossil Beds history, told from the place where the historian is. For Davies it was the edge of Europe. For the Lakota it was Nebraska. 

I finally made it home after a very magical journey and continued to write. I wrote a Shoshone Mike Story. I joined Zoetrope, a writers’ workshop online. Zoetrope is this wonderful mix of new and experienced writers. My first attempt, which I published on Zoetrope was a real lesson for me. Voice, tenses and point of view as badly set as jello, wiggly and all over the place.  I kept writing and workshopping. I did it for a year and the stories got better, much better.

I had a regular routine and I worked every day. I was a writer. Like all of my writing, when I’m good I’m pretty good, but never quite good enough. I have these flashes. My last short story on Zoetrope I really liked. I had learned some things.  I told myself, this life I'm learning, if I keep at it in my next life I might be a Nobel Laureate.  

At 54 people would say to me, “Oh, you’re retired.”  My answer was “No, I’m unemployed.”  I didn’t feel like I retired, I had just quit banking and was clearing my palate before I looked for work again. I didn’t want to be a banker anymore or anything like it.

Who knew about age discrimination?  In Los Angeles I had a reputation and credibility.  In the Bay Area I had none.  What I thought would be an easy task turned out to be damned hard. I started working temp jobs just to get back into the swing of it. They were interesting, sometimes very hard work. My idea was to get into fund raising. I wanted to start at a low level job working with an experienced fundraiser. Learning the trade did not fit anyone else’s idea of what a man my age should be doing. What was wrong with me? To myself it felt like I was disabled. I had a serious lack of ambition and they knew it. I just wanted a decent job.

After a year and a half I needed to earn money with benefits. I got a job at Consumer Credit Counselors of San Francisco. Back in LA in the 70s I had met CCC and admired the manager and the work he did. CCCSF was an affiliate. It was banking related but god’s work and I needed the paycheck. We did a lot of phone appointments. I hate talking on the phone. The salary was half of what I had been making as a banker. Less was OK, half was not good. At the same time I had applied to CCCSF I started the paperwork for San Francisco Juvenile Hall.  Six months after I started at Consumer Credit Counselors I got a call to be a substitute or on call at San Francisco Juvenile Hall .

I worked weekends at Juvy, weekdays at Consumer Credit Counselors. And when I was sure I liked Juvy and might last I quit CCCSF.

I did the on call with San Francisco Juvenile Hall and then went full time in December, 2002, three years after I left banking. A year of wandering, a year of looking for work, and then a year of getting work. It was a long time. The pay at Juvy was not great but it was OK, a good job, and I enjoyed it. Now I wasn’t unemployed I’m a juvenile hall counselor.

Second Wife

I liked to sleep with the window open                                                   and you keep the window closed.                                                                    You’re Kind                                                                                           Paul Simon

A friend of mine invited me to San Francisco to meet an interesting woman who might be interested in me. She said, “By the way, she’s the daughter” and she named a well known political leader in LA. Suzanne and I met for dinner at Kathy and David’s a few weeks later. Suzanne was interesting, charming, a good dinner guest. We were both on our best behavior and it went well, we liked each other. We agreed to meet again for a date after she returned from a vacation in the Caribbean.

And so we did. She flew down to LA and I planned a date that started with tea at the Biltmore. I didn’t know Suzanne had spent a half year in England on a fellowship and had a taste for tea and things English. I think we went to dinner after that and finished up at the dancing fountain at the new Water Plaza on Bunker Hill. It was as I had planned it a romantic evening. A week or two later I flew up to San Francisco. From the Oakland Airport we went to lunch at an Italian Cafe Deli Market in the Rockridge neighborhood in Oakland, my first experience of the wonderful neighborhoods in the East Bay. And then we went to her house in Mill Valley.

The romance began on our second date and after that we became distance lovers, exchanging hot and heavy letters. I think we were still using the post office. It seemed more appropriate than emails. The letters were passionate, though in person we were stiff and out of synch.

I think we were both ready for a longtime relationship even marriage. Suzanne was a manager at the Phone Company and like me active with community groups and causes. She was 36. I was 47. At the phone company her cause was disabilities. She had an older brother who was developmentally challenged. At one time she had worked for Willy Brown and had been very active in the early response to the AIDS epidemic. She had a network of gay friends. Suzanne fancied herself a libertine, but like me at her core I think she really was a prude.

We fit in many ways. She was a successful middle manager and community leader. I respected that instead of staying in LA in her mother’s shadow, she had gone up to the Bay Area and made a life for herself. She had graduated from Cal and gone into politics working for Ron Dellums and then Willy Brown. She might have had better contacts than most people but she wasn’t capitalizing on her mother’s name. She was committed to equity and working for a better community that included everyone. She was also a longtime member of the Sokka Gakai, formerly the Nicherin Shoshu of America, NSA, the people who chanted “nam-myoho-ringe-kyo” and in chanting sutra discovered a new life. When I was in college in the 70s they, like the hare krishnas, actively proselytized everywhere particularly on college campuses.

She wanted me to join the fellowship and I was happy to go to meetings with her and chant but not to dedicate my life to chanting for long periods in Japanese and follow the teachings of their sainted leader. I was an active member of AA and got the results of surrendering myself to powers that be and the contradictory empowerment I found in doing that.

Suzanne had a similar middle class background mine. The Givens had a house in a middle class area of Los Angeles. Walt Givens had been a designer and aircraft worker like my father, but as an African American he was the last hired, and the first fired and he had tried his hand at various ways of making a living. Her mother had been activist in the school district on behalf of her special son, and then ran for elected office and had a successful career as an elected official and leader in education and civil rights.

Suzanne's parents divorced when she was a teenager. Her brother’s health and special needs had been at the center of their family dynamics. She had a great need to be recognized and acknowledged, not to be overlooked.

Her way of living was to create challenges and to struggle for status, income, and respectability. For her success was a beautiful home in a tony neighborhood of Marin, corporate success, recognition and a good salary. Suzanne also had an interest in theater. She traveled to New York when she could and attended shows and was a board member of an experimental theater in San Francisco. She also was a key person in putting on Soka Gakkai public events that highlighted their involvement with world leaders and peace.

Suzanne worked hard with great intensity at everything she did. She could be abrasive and demanding but she was respected and appreciated. She had street cred. We seemed compatible. I had a good education, a responsible corporate position, served on a number of non-profit boards. While she was driven and always pushing; I was more self effacing and downplayed status in a perverse sort of way.

We went forward more a willful choice on both our parts than a giving into passion. I moved up to the Bay Area and we shared Suzanne’s house in Mill Valley in February 1995. I had been working for California Commerce Bank a year and had helped solve their regulatory problems by then. My boss said, “you can’t quit, so work up there, go into the San Jose office, do whatever, but stay.” That summer Suzanne and I went on vacation to the Caribbean and stayed in a luxury time share she had bought the year before and went on a short sailing ship cruise. Our differences, her demanding the best and luxury and my trying to blend in, go below the glitz, conflicted. We are both strong willed and as much as Suzanne tried to dominate I clung to my independence and my way of doing things. We got through it but there had been some bad moments.

Nonetheless I proposed either before or after that vacation together. Suzanne planned a big wedding and I went along with it, so in April, 1996 we got married before hundreds of people. My professional friends in LA were impressed that I was marrying into power. I was impressed by the easy way Suzanne traveled in the world of community, state and even national leaders.

One time a young African American working with Suzanne in San Francisco learned who her mother was and said, “Oh my god, you’re LA royalty.” And that’s what she was, LA royalty, a princess living anonymously in the Bay Area. My LA friends were quite aware I had married into royalty, particularly my African American friends. I think that was an attraction for me.

We did well together at first. I think we were both people of good will. Each of us had married for our own reasons and maybe it didn't run as deep as it should have. My attitude was this could work, we’re compatible and for me it was a new life, Northern California, the Bay Area, Suzanne traveled easily in the world of foundations, community activists and political power.

Over time our differences grew. I am maniacally punctual. Suzanne was notoriously late. She was a take charge, always in control person. Her drive to be successful came out in being decisive and aggressive. I like to just go along and get along.  For me when it doesn't go my way I detach.  And I can be very independent or stubbornly perverse.  Some people called that passive-aggressive.  Our qualities or flaws didn’t mix well. Our relationship devolved into a contest more than a partnership.

Long before we actually divorced I knew I didn’t like being married to Suzanne. About the time I was done Suzanne got a job in Southern California. I was working at San Francisco Juvenile Hall and establishing myself in San Francisco. We decided to get an apartment in Los Angeles and a small apartment for me in the Bay Area. And that worked well for almost three years.  When I was getting the job at San Francisco Juvenile Hall I started on-call as a substitute. I was stuck in the hiring process, Juvy had terrible personnel department and things could go on forever without resolution. Suzanne offered to call her friend the Mayor, Willie Brown. I let my boss know she might do that and the next week four of us in the limbo of on-call, were hired full time. They were always short handed and they paid comp time for overtime. I worked a few double shifts every month and took a week off to stay in LA. With distance and long breaks Suzanne and I were OK.

I’ve always loved women and enjoy women friends. Sometimes as someone described it, there were inappropriate female friends. I am too much of a prude to really have affairs, but I enjoy flirting and lunches or getting together with a friend where there’s attraction and a little tension. A few years before I had made an inappropriate friendship with a young woman I worked with at Consumer Credit Counselors. It was fun, a little strange, we didn’t touch or hold hands, but the tension was there.

Suzanne changed jobs and moved back to the Bay Area. By that time I had a Ranger’s House in the State Park. They’re not all that great, the maintenance isn’t good and the landlord is your boss. I was new at Mt. Diablo State Park and not doing all that well with my boss. Suzanne in her take charge way, demanded repairs and improvements to the house and then we had to have an antenna for her internet that violated park rules. She was making my job difficult and not willing to go along with things. That wasn’t her way.

My inappropriate friend seemed all that more attractive and her situation was changing and she was more available. I realized I was risking “my marriage” but I went ahead. At that point I was getting ready to quit the marriage anyhow. Living with Suzanne seemed impossible and just a constant struggle.

So my friend and I began holding hands. I informed Suzanne we were done. She accused me of having another woman and I denied it since that wasn’t really the reason and it got worse from there. Suzanne was very angry.  I didn't do it well but I think in the end I certainly didn’t regret our breakup. I didn’t want to live with her any longer. Life with Suzanne had been like a battle  not just between us, but Parks, and airlines, and restaurants, and contractors, and doctors and nearly everyone else.

And so we went our separate ways. I lived in Parks and flew as low under the radar as I could, but punctually, and Suzanne went back to her home in Mill Valley which she had been renting out for three years and started another remodel project. 

75 and getting older

I recently congratulated a friend on his 75^th birthday, a few months late but I’m 75. Denis and I had attended Ranger Academy together becoming California State Park Rangers, police officers. We were 57 at the time. In turning 75 I’ve thought about the age and tell myself, 75 is just plain old. It’s not the new 50 or anything close, it’s just old. Denis’ perspective is that 80 is really old.  He stopped for a moment, he was thinking, and then said, "75 is pretty close to 80."  

I’ve been retired nearly 11 years now. In my 20s, I dropped out of college, served 4 years in the Air Force, got married, had three children, finished college, started a banking career, and bought a home, all in less than 11 years.

In the past 11 years, I’ve retired from working at all. I got married and we’ve had a child. We’ve moved four times and finally bought a house. I wrote a first draft of a memoir that takes me up to retirement, been a board member and then president of the Berkeley Unitarian Universalist congregation, been a volunteer teacher’s aid in transitional kindergarten and now kindergarten, and most importantly raised my 1 year old daughter to 12 years old.

Two sisters have passed away, one at 74 and more recently my eldest sister at 81. I have a third sister, younger, who in the 60s dropped out and I haven’t seen since. A few years ago I heard she’s doing OK in Hawaii. At 72 she’s probably retired too.

My friend and I agreed our retirement checks feel like free money, even though we paid social security taxes, put aside the savings, and earned the retirement, I get money and I don’t work. I find my net worth and my income put in the 80 percentile. I may not be as comfortable materially here in coastal urban California as I might be in Indiana or Ohio, but I am certainly not poor.

Twelve years ago I had a heart attack, major blockages repaired, but a minor attack. My best friend in high school had a heart attack about the same time and died. I’ve had minor aches and pains, inflammations, infections and that sort of thing, but for the most part I’m in good health. I have diverticulitis, stenosis, hypertension, high blood sugar and I’m overweight. 39 years ago I dealt with the alcoholism and stopped drinking. Up through my sixties I was still physically active, but now at 75 not so much. Hikes are out, I don’t run and if I walk too far my hips and my feet hurt like hell. BUT, I bicycle. I ride 30 minutes to an hour nearly every day.

It’s been a good marker for my aging. I used to ride 10 miles or an hour most days. Now it’s more often 40 minutes and 5 miles. Still at it, but slower.

And sometimes I go in a room and ask myself, why did I come here. I know, it happens to everybody, but at my age it happens more frequently. My mind isn’t untethered yet, I think I still have a long ways to go but my moorings are beginning to feel a little loose.

So I was chatting with some parents at my daughter’s school, people in their 40s and 50s and revealed that I was 75. Oh no, they said. And I told them, yeah, 75 is the new 74. I’m OK, but I’m old.

Home

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.  

The Worst of Times

These are the worst of times. Often quoted to describe “these times” is the Charles Dicken’s opening to Tale of Two Cities, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” This week in December, 2020, I think is the worst of times. The quote I think resonates with so many of us is because even during the worst of times we see the seeds of a brighter future germinating. This last year and the previous three years, it has been hard to be optimistic. The seeds of our destruction as a nation are all too obvious and they’re not going away. In the past we’ve been fortunate even during the worst of times we’ve survived to continue our slow progress toward the American ideal.

As I write this we are in the 9^th month of a worldwide pandemic in which the United States is faring worse than most of the world, more infections, more deaths. We have inconsistent leadership and instead of a unified nation Americans are choosing who to believe between left and right, elite and populists, establishment and anti-establishment. We just had an election in which Donald Trump, the worst president in the history of the United States was turned out of office. Before the end of this month there will be a vaccine against Coronavirus SARS 2 that is 95% effective.

Seemingly the end of our double catastrophe is in sight. I have a hard time being optimistic. President Biden will enter office probably without a Senate majority and the prospect of a government that can’t legislate. There are plenty of villains during these times, but one of the worst is Mitch McConnell and he will continue in power as Senate Majority Leader for at least another two years. And Trump the leader of the Republican Party, not yet out of office. has already begun to mount the opposition.

During the pandemic Trump demonstrated a characteristic incompetence and when he might have insured his reelection by making an effort to defeat the epidemic he did the very opposite. He made ignoring the epidemic policy. He tried to pump the economy up when people were afraid to go out. He succeeded in keeping the financial markets strong and whether it was intentional or not he made Social Darwinism the national policy against Covid. He politicized the worst health crisis in the last hundred years and the Republican Party was complicit.It seems that nearly half of Americans think the pandemic is not an issue and that 265,000 dead Americans are a hoax or not that important. And for now a significant number of Americans won’t accept a vaccine. To defeat the virus as soon as possible will take leadership and national unity. With Trump and a large number of Americans already set against the new administration American unity is a long way off, if ever.

The divisions in America are rooted in slavery and the War we fought over it. The neo-Confederacy and Populism are fighting the establishment and common sense. During national crises in the past we have overcome our history and pretended to national unity. That’s not even remotely possible in the coming year.

The two vaccines will probably be approved shortly and are 95% effective. The vaccine should work if people take it. Or it can drag on into 2022 and we’ll see an end to the pandemic when it follows its natural course to extinction, in a year or two, or three.

This is the worst of times. Maybe they’ll get better. When I think about it I can be optimistic but in my gut for now I’m not.