Connected by Stories

... her skillet is a tangible reminder that there really were people then, as now, who came to this country looking for a better life.

While visiting my sister recently, we came across an old cast iron specialty skillet used for making ebelskivers, a kind of pancake, muffin thing with fruit (or chocolate or cheese) inside. We remembered that our mother made these every July 4th holiday while we were growing up. Seeing the skillet conjured images of July 4th breakfast parties in our back yard with dozens of people sitting around in lawn chairs eating home made ice cream and playing in the pool.

The skillet originally belonged to Mom's grandmother who came to this country from Germany more than a century ago. For all we know, it was passed to Grandma Rickertsen from a previous generation. It could be older than we think. It's black and heavy and indestructible.

I never knew Grandma Rickertsen. She died before I was born. But I knew her son, my grandfather, who, when encouraged, would tell stories. Mom would occasionally chime in with details and editorial.

Having arrived in Nebraska shortly before World War I, Grandpa's family had to keep pretty close to the farm for their own safety. Americans at that time didn't take kindly to people with German accents. They could be agents for "the Hun."

100 years ago, just like now, immigrants were welcomed with prejudice and ridiculous ignorance. Why would there be German spies in Lexington, Nebraska?

Grandpa told me other stories from his youth: about mischievously digging up hidden beer buried by bootleggers during prohibition in the 1920s - he claimed he emptied the bottles and used them for rootbeer; and about waking up in the 1930s to see his new wife covered in dirt because during the drought induced dust bowl it literally blew through the walls overnight.

Without those stories, the dust bowl would only be a black and white photo. Prohibition would be nothing more than a cartoon. But because someone I know lived though and described them, I see those events as real, happening to living, breathing people.

And even though I never knew Grandma Rickertsen, her skillet is a tangible reminder that there really were people then, as now, who came to this country looking for a better life.  And they weren't just crowds waving on a ship in a crackly old newsreel. They were human beings who carried personal items, like skillets and recipes, with them.

Now we tell countless stories about my mother. There's the time a neighbor shot at her while she walked the dog; and the time she packed a lunch for me and my friends for a day of skiing. When we opened it at noon, we found a note that said, "Keep cold or die," a subtle warning that the mayonnaise might spoil and make us sick. The sandwiches were frozen solid.

Stories about Mom help us to remember her.

On the way home, Clyde and I stopped to see my niece, who I can't quite believe is all grown up and has a child of her own. My great-niece is not yet a year old, but has a winning smile and charming personality. Naturally, the entire world revolves around her. I was eager to hold Kaycee and couldn't help but think about how pleased Mom would be to meet her.

My mother is Kaycee's Grandma Rickertsen. I hope Kaycee gets to enjoy the stories about her great grandmother. Perhaps one day she'll inherit the ebelskiver skillet. I hope she knows it was Grandma Rickertsen's and what a treasure it is.

In case you're wondering, we made ebelskivers for July 4th,  using the recipe Mom attached to the skillet years ago before wrapping it up for posterity. They were delicious.

Enough! I'm Not Sharing My Email Address

It doesn't matter that every other company in the world, from Microsoft to the neighborhood ice cream shop, already has my email address. I'm not giving it to PetSmart.

Way back in the 1970s I went to Radio Shack for an adapter to hook my tape recorder up to my LP stereo so I could play cassettes through the big speakers. I was very high tech back then, and Radio Shack was the place to go for odd little things that nobody else had, such as adapters to hook things up to other things.

Radio Shack was the first place I remember that always asked for your phone number whenever you bought something.  At first it seemed odd, then it became annoying. All I wanted was an adapter. Why did they need my phone number? Even then, I suspected some sort of vast conspiracy though I wasn't sure what it was.

In fact, it was the beginning of the data megastorm that now characterizes the 21st century.

What started as Radio Shack attempting to keep track of individual customer spending is now every company keeping track of everything you do, buy, look up online, and watch on TV.

Our world now runs on data - bits of information you can't even see that fill warehouses full of computers all over the world.

It's so pervasive we don't even think about it. Every rewards program is just a way to keep track of your spending habits so they can figure out how to sell you more. Every click of your mouse is tracked. Every web site you visit is tallied. Department stores know from tracking your cell phone when you walk through their doors. They even know what section you're shopping in. Based on your age, zip code, marital status, and lots of data that doesn't even seem relevant, they can estimate the probability of your buying a particular item. Have you seen the little TVs in some store aisles? They might be programmed to advertise a particular product to you, personally.

And companies don't just collect and use data. They sell it to each other. That's why when minutes after I look up prices for tickets to Hong Kong on the United Airlines web site, I see ads for Hong Kong hotels on Facebook.

The main thing that George Orwell, author of the book, 1984, got wrong is this: it's not the government that tracks your every move with the intention of controlling everything you do, it's big business. Corporations monitor everything you do with the intention of controlling everything you buy. 

I'm sometimes disappointed when the data gods don't work better than they do. Last year after we purchased a brand new TIVO system online, TIVO started sending me advertisements for TIVO systems. Wasn't it smart enough to figure out I'd just bought one? Why would I buy another one so soon? TIVO should wait a year and then push out the new ads.

But then the data harvest gets annoying. It's not enough that businesses passively collect our personal information and then swap and sell it to each other. Sometimes, they mandate it, as if they have a right to it.

PetSmart demands my email address every time I make a purchase. They already have my phone number. I use my credit card every time I shop there. What more do they need? But when I buy cat food, the check out clerk doesn't politely ask for my email address, she commands me to give it to her. The system actually won't process my purchase until she enters an email address.

I don't think it's the clerk's fault. She's just taking orders from above. Yet she must suffer my ire when I continue to refuse to give my email to her. I imagine "Corporate" thinks I'll just give in and surrender it, but at this point I'm feeling stubborn. I'll be damned if I'm going to be pressured into giving up any more personal information. It doesn't matter that every other company in the world, from Microsoft to the neighborhood ice cream shop, already has my email address. I'm not giving it to PetSmart.

To complete the transaction, both of us near tears and all of the people behind me in line getting agitated, the PetSmart clerk finally types in a fake email address (noname@noname.com) so the transaction will complete and I can take my cat food home.

I've shopped at PetSmart for years. I am a loyal customer. I appreciate their partnership with shelters to promote adoption of homeless animals. But this is ridiculous. I wonder if PetCo requires an email address when you make a purchase.

Your data is out there no matter what. To fight it is exhausting and probably futile. In addition to the physical "you" there's a data "you" and there's not a thing either of you can do about it.

The Cost of Clean Clothing

It holds about a third of what the old washer did. So we have to do smaller loads. Clyde thinks it's cute. It looks like R2D2.


Our washer died.

It was a cute little European model, a combination washer and dryer. It was a good washer. A terrible dryer. But it got the clothes clean.

It looked smart and efficient tucked under the counter in our kitchen.

It came with the house. It was in fact, one of the few things that didn't contribute to that bottomless money pit.

There are some things I've refused to do in my adulthood: mow the lawn, shovel snow, and drag my dirty clothes out to a public place where I have to shove quarters into a machine that God only knows in who has washed God only knows what.  So naturally, when the washer died, I jumped on line to see what new washers were available that would fit under our counter.

Buying the same model we had before turned out to be a little on the pricey side, so I looked around and settled on a less expensive portable washer.

Clyde and I live modestly but comfortably. We don't have a lot of debt. We eat out and travel. But our house is small. We don't drive fancy cars. And we don't waste money on deluxe washers.

Turns out this new little washer is too small to to reach the kitchen plumbing. It has to be dragged into the bathroom, hooked up to that sink, and drained into the bathtub. But it fits under the counter and it was cheap.

It is a lot smaller than I expected. It holds about a third of what the old washer did. So we have to do smaller loads. Clyde thinks it's cute. It looks like R2D2. It took a few days to figure out exactly how to hook it to the sink - turns out we didn't have the right attachment for the faucet. I went to Home Depot and came home with the wrong size. Don't ever send me to Home Depot. I'm a disaster at Home Depot.

The laundry was piling up.

Clyde managed to find the right size faucet attachment at McGuckin's Hardware in Boulder.

After much trial and error, I was finally able to hook up the new machine. I plugged it in. I attached one end of the hose to the sink and the other end to the little washer. I set the program to wash, rinse, and spin. I turned on the faucet. Water shot me in the face, blasted the wall, the shower curtain, and the floor.

I tightened the hose. Tighter. Tighter. Finally, a little water dribbled into the washer. My shirt was soaked.

Tighter, tighter.  My finger started to bleed.

So it turns out the laundromat isn't so bad. You can put a 20 into a machine that churns out a whole bunch of quarters. The washers and dryers are huge so you can do a lot of clothes at once. The other customers are mostly nice. For extra convenience, there's an "all natural 'green' medicinal and recreational health clinic" next door. For those of you who don't live in Colorado, that means it's a marijuana shop.

R2D2 remains under the counter for emergencies. If you cover the sink and the hose with a towel while you use it, water doesn't spray all over the place. I'm still looking for ways to make it better. I might go over to Home Depot and see if they have a better hose.

I Had a Casa Bonita Poster Over My Bed

When 90% of all the other boys my age had Farrah Fawcett above their beds, I had a poster of the divers at Casa Bonita.

My family thought I was interested in diving.

For you readers who may be too young, Farrah Fawcett was the arguably the most famous sex symbol of the 1970s. The poster of Farrah lounging in her red one piece graced the bedroom wall of every (straight) pubescent teenage boy of that era.  With her nipple so quietly poking out, her famously feathered blond hair (many girls at my school had that same style), enormous white smile, one leg up and the other down, Farrah no doubt caused a lot bedroom doors to close tight for a few minutes every evening in those days.

I, on the other hand, had a poster of the perfectly toned, speedo clad male divers poised over the waterfall at Denver's famous Casa Bonita.

I had nothing against Farrah.  I watched Charlies Angels, the TV show that made her famous. But I preferred Kate Jackson - the smarter angel. I have to admit, I was more into the cars they were driving.

To call Casa Bonita a restaurant is misleading. It's more of a theme park. To walk inside the old-world
Spanish colonial style tower topped villa on West Colfax is to enter another world. You find yourself in a "Mexican" village festooned with palm trees, caves, walking paths, and right in the middle, a huge waterfall plunging into a deep green pool. It's really quite amazing.

Locals look down their noses at Casa Bonita. It's true - the food isn't very good. There are approximately 1 million places in metro Denver where you can go for better Mexican food.

The exception is the sopapillas at the end of the meal. When you put the flag up at your table, a basket of hot, fresh, doughy, slightly sweetened pastries appears. You take one, tear it in half, pour honey inside, and let it melt in your mouth. When you want more, just raise the flag - it's all you can eat.

But you don't go to Casa Bonita for the food. You go to see the waterfall, Black Bart's cave, the roving mariachi singers, and of course, the divers.

When Casa Bonita opened in the mid 1970s, I was just becoming aware of my sexuality. While I
didn't self-identify as gay until 1980, I REALLY liked the divers at Casa Bonita years before. Back then, they were all male and because it was the 70s, they all wore skimpy speedos. During one of my family's occasional trips to Denver, after I observed their perfect forms fly gracefully into the emerald water, I made a beeline for the gift shop to purchase the poster, and my interest in diving commenced.

On a visit years later, I noted that young women had joined the ranks of divers. The grace and skill were the same, but something was missing - a little charge, a bit of fantasy.  Plus, I realized the divers were all probably 16 years old. No thanks! At least I could put the flag up for more sopapillas.

Surviving the Diet of the 1970s

I thought orange juice and Tang, a sugary drink made from dusty yellow powder, were the same thing until I was in high school. Of course Tang was marketed as what the astronauts drank, so that made it ok.

A New York Strip, perfectly grilled, delicately sliced into a bite sized morsel with a sharp knife, a tiny drop of peppercorn sauce quivering on the surface as I lift it to my mouth with a fork, juicy flavor flowing around my tongue, making me reluctant to swallow as it melts away.

That was the 50 dollar steak I had the other night. It was fantastic.

I didn't have a good steak until well into my 20s. In my experience, steak was always fatty and required endless chewing before you could swallow it. I'd heard it could be grilled, but my mother always prepared it in a frying pan. I don't think we even had a grill in my childhood home.

My family was pretty well off. We had the biggest house on the street. We had 3 cars. We  took nice vacations with our motor home and spent culturally uplifting weekends in the city. We had a swimming pool in the back yard. My siblings and I expected to be sent to college. We didn't show off, but we were clearly not poor.

So it baffled us that Mom scrimped and saved pennies as if we were still in the Great Depression. We existed on the cheapest cuts of meat and the lowest quality store brand instant foods. The milk we drank as children was made from powder in a box. It was terrible. I hate drinking milk to this day, and will only put Vitamin D whole milk on my cereal. I thought orange juice and Tang, a sugary drink made from dusty yellow powder, were the same thing until I was in high school. Of course Tang was marketed as what the astronauts drank, so that made it ok.

I don't think it was just my mom. In the 1970s, between inflation and middle class mothers going to work outside the home, nutrition was a secondary consideration compared to saving money and saving time.

Vegetables? Always canned. I didn't set my eyes upon fresh asparagus until I was in college. Green beans were soft and squishy as were peas. Exotic vegetables were the mushy "Chinese" variety in the can of chow mien purchased from the ethnic shelf at the grocery store.  I'll never forget my first water chestnut.

Today's moms would shudder at the nutritional value of what we ate as children: sugar coated cereals (preferably generic), lifeless white iceberg lettuce dressed up with fake bacon bits and Nebraska's famous Dorothy Lynch salad dressing, as much Kool-Aid as we could drink (in place of expensive carbonated sodas), dry Hydrox cookies (cheaper than Oreos), and sandwiches made from big yellow blocks of Velveeta imitation cheese-like substance along with Miracle Whip spread (not mayonnaise) and the store's cheapest (whitest) bread.

For the record, there was no such thing as "gluten free." We'd never heard of a Vegan. Vegetarians were hippies that lived out in far away California.

It's not like we weren't cared for. Mom made sure we had 3 solid meals a day. We never missed a breakfast, lunch, or dinner. We'd even get a special treat every now and then. For example, we'd occasionally get a Tony's frozen pizza with bits of pepperoni or something that passed for sausage on top.

If Mom needed a break, Dad would pick up a bag of McDonalds hamburgers and fries. He never got cokes though - we saved money by washing those fries down with Kool-Aid or Tang.

I'm a little surprised that obesity rates are higher now. That probably has to do with the amount of moving around that kids did then compared to now. There were only 3 channels on the TV. We didn't have computers and iPhones so we had time to go outside and run off all that fat and sugar.

Slogging Through the Trump Era

"The United Corporations of America exploit ignorant citizens, largely those who are economically disadvantaged because of those same pro-corporate policies, with propaganda that would shock even George Orwell."

Regular readers of Billsweek have commented that postings have been few and far between. I apologize for neglecting this space, allowing mindless drivel to wash up in its wake on Facebook and in other media.

I like to inject a little humor into these posts, or at least something to think about. But it's been hard to work up the gumption to do that. It's been a depressing year.

The beginning, and it's only the beginning, of the Trump era has left many of us worn out. There are so many things wrong with the country that it's hard to know what to focus on. Every day brings another low point - often lower than the one from the day before. It seems the Republican strategy is to bombard us with outrageousness to the extent that while we're still reeling from yesterday's disaster, they throw another one at us today. We are kept running from protest to protest so we'll be too busy to take in the bigger picture of what they are really doing, which is dismantling the institutions of our democracy that protect civil rights, provide a safety net for the poor, and care for the sick. All the while, they cede more and more power to big business, benefiting only the extremely wealthy and weakening the middle class.

The United Corporations of America exploit ignorant citizens, largely those who are economically disadvantaged because of those same pro-corporate policies, with propaganda (via Fox News and other right wing media) that would shock even George Orwell. The media that our president calls fake news is not the fake news that endangers us, but his favorite program, Fox and Friends, the epitome of fake news. It's enough to make your head spin.

I think what would shock Orwell the most is that the citizenry swallows their propaganda hook, line, and sinker not at the point of a gun, but willingly and freely, drunk on credit fueled consumerism and vapid social media and, yes, fake news.

It's depressing.

Personally, I've had a tough year medically as well, and if politics weren't enough, my energy has been drained by health insurance paperwork, navigating doctors' office bureaucracies, and visits to Rose Medical Center - not to mention the medical conditions themselves.

In short: a bout with pneumonia early in the year uncovered an arterial blockage which led to a stent in my right main artery and a permanent diagnosis of heart disease. Several weeks of cardio-therapy ended just in time for a skin cancer scare which resulted in 2 separate surgeries. The cancer was not the life-threatening terminal kind, but was uncomfortable and inconvenient all the same. These were in addition to my other, pre-existing chronic illnesses which only complicated things with potential drug interactions and a spiderweb of communications between doctors, if I could manage to get them to communicate. All of this was expensive too, and I have health insurance.

Luckily, I have a good job and money in the bank. I have a loving husband and a warm home. I get to travel and have experiences that many others can't. I have the opportunity to serve my community through my church and in other ways.

The challenge is to keep the depressing stuff in perspective and to use the good stuff to slog forward so the bad stuff doesn't stop me. Because if I stop, "they" win. And we can't have that.

Defying the Insurance Company Actuarial Tables

This has not been my year, medically speaking.

Of course, it could have been worse. I'm not dead yet.

It started right at the beginning in January. As I wheezed my way onto the examination table, the doctor listened to my lungs, diagnosed pneumonia, and took an extra listen to my heart. Noticing some swelling around my ankles (edema) and a somewhat alarming high blood pressure, he asked if I would mind if he did an EKG as well. In my feverish stupor, I was barely aware of what he was doing, let alone in any position to argue or question.

After a typically long recovery from pneumonia, two visits to a cardiologist (and all of the delightful related experiences dealing with insurance companies, lengthy referral processes, and lackadaisical doctors' office staff who didn't give a shit about whether my life was in danger), I ended up in the Rose Medical Center Cardiology Unit where it was discovered that my major left artery was 80% blocked.

No wonder I was always winded after climbing the stairs to my office on the second floor. I just thought I was in terrible shape. I was, of course, but anyway ...

Major heart attack and possible sudden death averted, a stent was inserted and I was prescribed several weeks of cardiac rehabilitation which turned out to be three visits to the hospital per week where nurses hook you up to an EKG machine and take your blood pressure while you exercise. Some of the nurses have extra training in torture as they push you to exercise harder and harder while criticizing your diet and general lifestyle.

By the end of the summer, however, I was able to bound up the stairs to my office without running out of breath. Yay!

Thinking that everything was under control and that perhaps I would survive my 50s after all, I woke up one night to discover that a mole on my back had decided to erupt in a bloody mess. Naturally this happened on a Friday so I had all weekend to worry about it before my doctor's office opened Monday morning. But I was on that familiar exam table by Monday afternoon and the results of the biopsy came back on Thursday - so I only needed to push away "worst case scenario" trains of thought (chemo, end of life directives, death ...) for four days.

The results were not benign, but neither were they of the terminal variety. It was basal cell carcinoma, a slow growing skin cancer that is merely annoying, not fatal. It did, however, require minor outpatient surgery, which I had on Friday. There is now a big crater in my back which because I can't reach it, Clyde has to clean and bandage twice a day. This is the part of marriage that they don't show you in the bridal magazines.

So I'm back to assuming I'll make it through my 50s, though I keep imagining the insurance company's actuarial tables which must show my ever decreasing predicted life span.

I realize that 100 years ago, and in many other parts of the world today, I wouldn't have survived long enough to even have these problems. Many men got into their 50s, had heart attacks, and died. I sometimes try to remind myself that beyond a certain point, every day is gravy and that I should be thankful for it. I have things pretty good, after all: happily married, good home, comfortable life.

I keep remembering my dad who because of a heart condition, was given six months to live around the age of 70. He was 86 when he died. I take after him in a few other ways, so maybe I can look forward to a long life in spite of some health issues.