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This Is Not Your Great Aunt's Retirement

When I was younger, my view of retirement was informed by my Aunt Han (short for Hannah, and actually, she was my mother's aunt). In my eight or ten-year-old mind, Aunt Han was a true spinster -- she'd been married once, but had been widowed for a long time. Her claim to fame, she told us incessantly, was that she was in Paris in 1927, one of a hundred thousand people who thronged to witness Charles Lindbergh land at Le Bourget airport after making his historic trans-Atlantic flight.

But by the time I knew her, in the 1950s, Aunt Han was a wizened old lady who lived in a far-off land called Florida and came north to visit in the summer. She lived with our family for about a month, then stayed with my Uncle Tom for a few weeks before returning to the land of the heat and the old.

She was a dour old woman who never smiled. She spent most of her time drinking tea and scolding us kids. My mother would sometimes make me sit at the kitchen table to keep her company. That was an excruciating experience, sitting there, watching her sip  tea. I'd scarf down my snack in 30 seconds. "Tommy, don't bolt your food; you could choke," she'd warn. "You're supposed to chew each bite 30 times before you swallow."

Meanwhile, it could easily take Aunt Han an hour to eat one piece of toast. They were the longest hours of my life.

So . . . how times have changed! We don't associate Baby Boomers with spinsters. And most of the retired people I know are doing a lot more than sitting around the kitchen nibbling on toast.

Meryl Baer of Six Decades and Counting says that one of the advantages of retirement is the opportunity to do things that a working schedule doesn't allow, such as attending a Broadway matinee in New York City. She recently enjoyed a reunion with four long-time friends, enjoying a long lunch (including dessert!) and joining throngs of other tourists in the Big Apple.

If you want to know what show she saw, open the curtain at One Friendly Summer Day in the City. Here's a hint: all five of the retirees walked out of the theater "with smiles, memories past and present, and familiar songs ringing in their ears."

Meanwhile, Laura Lee Carter is going one better. In retirement she and her husband are building a new solar-powered home in the Colorado foothills. This week they're putting on the final touches and moving in.

It's a chaotic time. But she is thrilled that she's met a new friend who knows people in her small town. And now, after all the preparation and anticipation, she is reminding herself that "all of this stress will pass, and then we will be set for some serious rest and relaxation!"

I don't know if my Aunt Han had to worry about her medical bills. In any case, I'm sure they would seem quaint by our standards. On The Survive and Thrive Boomer Guide, Rita R. Robison, consumer journalist, writes about congressional restrictions on the government’s ability to negotiate with the pharmaceutical industry that causes Medicare Part D drug prices to be significantly higher than those paid by anyone else, including people on Medicaid and in dozens of other countries. Costs in the United States per capita for pharmaceuticals average $1,010 annually -- more than twice as much as in most other developed nations.

That's enough to make us outraged, or in some cases even desperate. As Robison reminds us, Medicare Part D covers almost 40 million people, and an untold number of them do not fill their prescriptions for financial reasons.

Kathy Gottberg of SmartLiving365 found a book, Desperate: Hope for the Mom Who Needs to Breathe, about how moms sometimes feel desperate and need hope and encouragement to help them carry on. But that made her consider: Don't we all need help and encouragement, now and then?

We all face challenges at different phases of life, and while feelings of desperation might be universal, what we're currently facing and how we're coping are usually quite different. So Gottberg has come up with 5 Ways to Cope with Life at This Stage -- issues that most of us will likely encounter somewhere in midlife or later, along with some possible solutions for helping us get through them . . . and be able to breathe.

Posted by Tom Sightings at 7:58 AM 9 comments: Links to this post 


How to Get Fat

I saw an ad on TV last night promising that I could shed 40 pounds in 40 days. This seems to be a time of year when you see a lot of ads and articles assuring you that you can lose weight, fast and easy, without dieting. (Is there a time of year when there aren't a lot of ads promising that you can lose weight?) I think it might have something to do with fitting into a bikini, not that I personally have ever tried.

I've lost a little weight in my day. For example, I lost eight pounds after my latest colonoscopy. But my true field of expertise is not losing weight. It's getting fat. I got fat in my 30s, because my wife got pregnant. I got fat in my 40s, because I was middle age. I got fat in my 50s due to my slowing metabolism. Now I've passed the 60 mark, and I'm getting fat because I don't give a damn anymore. You see? I always have an excuse! Since I know all about how to get fat, I thought I'd pass on some of my expert advice. Here are five of the fastest ways to pack on the pounds.

Don't eat breakfast. You'd think if you skip a meal, it would help you lose weight. But it doesn't work that way. Everyone I know who pats themselves on the back for not being hungry in the morning (myself included) ends up with either a pot belly, or a rubber tire worthy of a hybrid car, if not a monster truck. I think it has something to do with balancing things out. If you don't eat in the morning, you implicitly give yourself permission to stuff your face at 10 p.m., just before you go to bed.

Drink diet sodas. I don't know why – they only have 1 calorie, or sometimes no calories. But drinking diet soda conclusively and inevitably leads to gaining weight. It's not just what you consume along with the diet soda (for surely you've seen the person at the fast-food place with a double cheeseburger, french fries, a sticky dessert ... and a diet cola. Yes, that was me!). I don't know exactly how diet sodas add on pounds; I just know that they do. They must stimulate something in the sugar part of your brain that goes unfulfilled with the diet drink, and so you subconsciously make up your sugar quotient with more pie, or more whipped cream with your pie. In any case, whatever you do, if you're trying to gain weight, do not drink water. Water is just empty calories!

Take full advantage of your spouse. When you're sitting on the couch watching TV – by the way, watching TV, playing video games and sitting in front of your computer are all fully approved activities for the aspiring fat person -- and want a snack from the kitchen, do not trouble yourself by giving up your comfortable seating arrangement and walking into the kitchen. Instead, call out to your spouse. Or a kid will do, if there's one around and they'll cooperate. Ask them to get the snack for you, and bring it to you on the couch. By the way, potato chips make an excellent snack, especially of you have dip to go with them.

Do not own a pet. After all, you might have to change their bowl, clean up after them, take them for a walk, throw a stick for them. All of these activities burn up those precious calories you want to horde in your belly fat. So relax. If you want animal companionship, put up a picture of a pet as the screensaver on your laptop.

Drive everywhere. You have a car. Why not use it? It's silly to spend 20 minutes walking down to the corner, which might be almost a mile, when you can jump in the car and be there in three minutes. Similarly, when you go to the mall, and have to shop at the two anchor stores at either end of the building, park at one end, and then when you're done there, get back in the car and drive around the mall to the other store. There's no point in walking the whole length of the mall. And by the way, if you have to go from one floor to another, never, ever take the stairs. Use the escalator or elevator. They're there for your convenience.

I'm sure you know some other ways to gain weight. Drinking beer, for example. Or, as I once did, giving up beer – then making up for that sacrifice by indulging yourself in all the dessert you can eat. You probably have your own guilty pleasure, which is fine ... in moderation, of course!

Posted by Tom Sightings at 4:15 PM 17 comments: Links to this post 


Which New Taxes Would You Vote For?

Hillary Clinton last week proposed raising the capital gains tax on long-term investments, and this got me thinking about taxes in general and income taxes in particular. Now I don't make myself out as a tax expert -- why, I've only read 30 - 40 pages of the tax code which by some measures is 70,000 pages long, by others "only" 2,600 pages long -- but I do have some background in business and economics. Don't take my views on taxes as any definitive analysis, just one retiree's semi-informed opinion.

Clinton suggested applying a sliding scale to investment profits, based on how long people have held the assets. Currently, capital gains are taxed at personal income tax rates if the assets are held less than a year. Assets held more than a year are taxed at a preferential capital gains rate. The idea is to reward true investing, but discourage short-term trading. Also, as many retirees are well aware, dividends are taxed at a preferential rate, although income from bonds is not. Clinton's plan would increase the maximum rate on capital gains made on assets held between one and three years, currently 20 percent, to at least 28 percent.

What would be the effect of this increase? Clinton did not say how much revenue would be raised; she said she'd offer more details at a later time. But clearly, it would increase taxes for people who own stocks and mutual funds. Wealthy people. Retired people. People saving for college or any other reason.

It would not affect real estate, nor would it affect tax-advantaged retirement accounts. But in any case, it seems like the Clinton proposal is a trial balloon that is going nowhere fast. Even the liberal Huffington Post cast a dim eye on the plan, quoting Bob McIntyre, director of the progressive Citizens for Tax Justice, who said most wealthy investors avoid capital gains taxes by finding ways to defer asset sales but small investors in mutual funds would be penalized by Clinton's plan.

A more sensible approach might be to tax investments on a sliding scale based not on how long they are held, but on how much income a person makes. In other words, to tax investments like earned income -- a lower rate for lower income people, a higher rate for higher income people. But nobody that I know is suggesting such a thing.

Also, nobody is talking about raising the tax on co-called "carried interest." This is a fairly obscure, but very profitable tax dodge that allows partners in private equity firms to count a significant portion of their income as capital gains or qualified dividends rather than regular income. So instead of paying the top rate of 39.6 percent, plus the 3.8 percent Medicare surcharge on income over $200,000 (and you can bet these hedge fund managers make more than $200,000), they only pay the capital gains rate of 20 percent.

Why is nobody -- not Democrat or Republican -- talking about abandoning carried interest? I do not know. But do you think, just possibly, that campaign contributions might have something to do with it?

And while we're on the subject -- a subject near and dear to every retiree's heart -- why is there so little talk about "saving" Social Security by getting rid of the salary cap on the payroll tax? Everyone who works pays 6.2 percent Social Security tax, plus 1.45 percent Medicare tax, on the first $118,000 of earned income. Employers pay the same amount for each employee, again up to the limit of $118,000 per year. After that, people don't pay any more Social Security tax. How fair is that? The more money a person makes, after $118,000 per year, the lower their tax rate.

Finally, I saw that Bernie Sanders also has a tax proposal. I'm no fan of Bernie Sanders -- he wants to take money away not just from rich people but from middle-class people like me, and give it to other people he likes better; plus, he's against gun control, and I'm in favor of gun control -- but this particular tax plan, which he calls a Robin Hood tax, may have some merit. He wants to place a 50 cents tax on every $100 of stock trades, plus lesser amounts on bonds and other financial instruments.

The question I have is, does he mean 50 cents for every $100, which basically is an additional half percent tax on all our investments? That seems a bit steep to me, adding to the punishment that savers already suffer. Or does he mean a 50 cents tax on every trade worth over $100? That seems more reasonable: He wants to skim a little off the top from major investors and give it to a worthy cause.

He says the tax could slow down automated high-frequency trading, which might be a good thing. And he wants to use the money to give everyone a free college education. He doesn't say whether his Robin Hood tax would actually raise enough money to support college education for everyone; but that's a whole other issue ... how much college really costs and what the effects of free tuition would be.

Well, there's plenty more on taxes, but that's enough for now. You can't bite off all 2,600 pages, or 70,000 pages, all in one gulp.

Posted by Tom Sightings at 12:43 PM 12 comments: Links to this post 


Who Is More American?

I don't know why I am so fascinated by the Dutch experience in the New World. As far as I know, I do not have a drop of Dutch blood in my lineage. And my ancestors came nowhere near the New World in the 1600s or the 1700s. They didn't arrive until the 1800s.

On my mother's side, there were two brothers, Thomas and Patrick, who left Ireland around 1850. They traveled to New York together. Thomas, my great great grandfather, made his way upstate and settled in for a while somewhere around Albany. His brother Patrick shipped out again as a deckhand on a freighter. He spent six or eight years working at sea, traveling as far as Australia, before finding his way back to New York. He then reunited with Thomas and the two of them started a tugboat business in New York Harbor.

My grandparents on my father's side of the family arrived here in the 1890s, both from Central Europe. They met and married in New York, then wandered around Pennsylvania and Ohio looking for work. After a few disappointing years they settled in Connecticut where my grandfather found a steady job in a metal-fabricating factory. They had seven children. The oldest died in the 1917 flu epidemic. The youngest, the last surviving sibling, served in World War II and died in Las Vegas in 2003. So I sometimes wonder: When I'm reading about our Founding Fathers, or the Puritans in New England or the Dutch in New York, am I even learning about my own heritage? My ancestors had nothing to do with America at that point; they were trying to scratch out a living somewhere in Europe.

But then, I think, in a way I'm more American than the Daughters of the Revolution, or anyone else who claims ancestry back to colonial times. After all, my immigrant experience is much more typical than someone who claims some faint connection to the Founding Fathers. The population of the United States in 1776 was around 2.6 million people. But some 4 million Irish immigrated to the U. S. in the 19th century. And there were even more from Central Europe. The total figure I found put the number at 30 million Europeans who migrated from Europe to America between 1836 and 1914.

Maybe I find the Dutch interesting because, according to Robert Shorto, they deserve credit for bringing the first seeds of democracy to the New World -- the seeds of freedom, opportunity and self-rule -- and that above all is what defines our aspirations, whether we're from the Netherlands or Nicaragua, or England or Estonia or Ecuador.

Also, the Dutch also gave the word for cookies (originally koekjes), which in my book is reason enough to celebrate their culture!

And as Robert Shorto points out, the Dutch also brought us the word for boss (originally baas) which he says is a uniquely American concept. The word does not connote any divine favor or royal lineage. It just refers to the person who's in charge. There's the Mafia boss, the political boss, the boss at work -- all of whom attained their position not by any royal connection, but by some combination of talent, hard work, street smarts, and maybe a little luck. The boss is no better than we are, and if things change, as they often do, the boss could be gone tomorrow . . .  and maybe we'll become the boss.

Then there's The Boss. American icon Bruce Springsteen, from working class New Jersey. According to Shorto, the Springsteens were among the original Dutch settlers of New Netherland.

Posted by Tom Sightings at 10:15 AM 9 comments: Links to this post 


The Hilly Island

Last weekend B and I drove over to see the Hudson Valley Shakespeare Festival production of The Winter's Tale.

Before the show began, I took in the view of the Hudson River. I could see West Point across the water. Gazing upriver, through the wooded hills, I noticed the view was unspoiled, almost primeval. And it made me wonder: Is this what Henry Hudson saw when he first sailed up the river all those years ago, in 1609?

Hudson was English, but sailed under the Dutch flag. He was looking for the Northwest Passage to the Far East, but soon decided this particular waterway was not the answer. The next year he tried again, sailing farther north until his ship got stuck in the ice. His crew mutinied, leaving Captain Hudson and a few of his followers behind in a small boat with scant provisions. Hudson froze to death, not knowing people would name a great river after him, and a great bay, as well as a city, and many streets, schools, restaurants, neighborhoods.

Hudson had claimed the area around the river for the Dutch. So in 1624 a group of Dutchmen -- following on the heels of some Pilgrims who had gone to Massachusetts four years earlier -- embarked for the lands marked out by Hudson.

The Dutch settlers sailed under Captain Cornelius May -- for whom Cape May, NJ, is named. They nosed into what they called the North River and landed at Mannahata, or the "hilly island." One contingent of colonists then set out again for what they called the South River (today the Delaware River), and another went northeast to settle on the Fresh River (today the Connecticut River). And thus the Dutch established their colony of New Netherland, situated between one English colony to the north, and another to the south in Virginia. The settlements on the Fresh River and the South River were always secondary, as the Dutch focused on developing New Amsterdam as a main shipping point for overseas trade. The leader of the colony, Peter Minuit, negotiated a deal with various local tribes regarding Mannahata. Minuit paid out 60 guilders worth of goods (calculated by one historian, at one point, to be the equivalent of $24). But there was a slight misunderstanding. Minuit thought he was purchasing the island. The tribal leaders thought they were simply giving the Dutch the right to live on the island, and hunt and farm along with all the other people.

The Dutch settled in peacefully and developed a thriving fur trade. They established another settlement about 150 miles upriver, called Fort Orange, as a trading post. They were more tolerant than the Puritans who had established a rigid theocracy in Massachusetts. Mannahata became a commercial hub where people of many nationalities and religious persuasions came to live and trade. A number of people who didn't fit into the Puritan way of life drifted down from Massachusetts to the more liberal New Amsterdam.

One was Deborah Moody, who was run out of Massachusetts because she espoused the heretical view that people should not be baptized until they were old enough to understand its meaning. Along with a few of her followers, she settled on a plot of land in what was then called Breuckelen, on the southwestern tip of Lange Eylandt. Moody thus became the first woman to establish a settlement in the New World.

Yet the Dutch were no saints. They were avid participants in the Atlantic slave trade, and they either wiped out or forced out many of the indigenous peoples of the region. But the Dutch did bring the first inklings of democracy to the New World. In Europe, the Dutch had rebelled against the Spanish crown. The provinces had joined together to form a kind of republic. Encouraged by rationalists like Rene Descartes, the French philosopher living in the Netherlands, the jurist Hugo Grotius, and a swirl of intellectuals around the University of Leiden, the Dutch were beginning to believe that people could govern themselves, rather than be subjects of a divine monarch. They believed in hard work, and earning an honest guilder. They rejected the pomp and circumstance of the Catholic church and thought the English preoccupation with witches was somewhere between paranoia and hysteria.

New Amsterdam, on the island of Mannahata, was a freewheeling city, even after the dictatorial Peter Stuyvesant, who'd lost a leg fighting in the Caribbean, came to crack down on the colonists and bring more order to the colony. The settlement around the South River was lost to the Swedes (led, ironically, by the deposed Peter Minuit), who came to stake their claim in the New World. The area around the Fresh River was overrun by English fleeing persecution in Massachusetts.

Eventually, peg-legged Peter Stuyvesant was forced to cede control of New Netherland to the English, when their well-armed ships sailed into the harbor in 1664. England and the Netherlands, two great European powers, were at odds for most of the century. And with this show of force, King Charles handed over these lands to the Duke of York, who of course renamed New Amsterdam after himself.

So the 40-year colonial empire of the Dutch came to an end, and the Dutch were all but forgotten as the history of the colony was written by the English. Yet the Dutch are remembered, if not for their nascent democratic values, by many place names, from the cities of Rensselaer, Batavia and Amsterdam in upstate New York, to the Catskill Mountains, to Yonkers, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Harlem and Staten Island . . . as well as Hoboken, NJ, and the Schuylkill River in Pennsylvania.

Not to mention the Dutch forays into the Far East. But that's another story, which I will report on if and when I ever go to New Zealand (named after the Dutch province of Zeeland) or Tasmania (named after Dutch explorer Abel Tasman).

Now . . . just a note to my children:  No, I do not know this history simply because I remember it. Despite what you might think, I was not around in the early 1600s. After I got home from the Shakespeare Festival I found I was more moved by the river than the play, so I got a book from the library, The Island at the Center of the World, by Russell Shorto -- and so I learned a little more about the river that flows by every day.

Posted by Tom Sightings at 8:31 AM 7 comments: Links to this post Labels: Retirement Activities, Tempus Fugit


Talk About Renovating Your Home 

Posted by Tom Sightings at 7:34 AM 22 comments: Links to this post 


Idle Minds

The other day B and I were standing around the kitchen. She was making a pitcher of Arnold Palmer -- a mixture of iced tea and lemonade. She had a fistful of teabags in her hand, dipping them into a pot of hot water. Then she looked at me and said, "I wonder who invented the tea bag?"

I pondered a moment. "Gee, I have no idea."

"I bet it was the British," she said. "Probably a guy who was the Earl of something."

"Or, it could have been the Chinese," I countered. "Maybe they figured it out a  thousand years ago, and Marco Polo brought back the idea to Europe."

Suddenly, B was out of the room. A minute later she came back with her phone. She googled tea bag. "Actually . . . it was an American," she reported. "A man named Thomas Sullivan, a tea and coffee merchant in New York. He invented the tea bag in 1904."

So, we learn something new every day. Then B continued, "But it was an Englishman who invented iced tea. Or, at least, it says the first recorded serving of iced tea was by an Englishman, Richard Blechynden, at the 1904 World's Fair in St. Louis."

So I learned two things the other day. Then, this morning, I was lying in bed and for whatever reason I started thinking about two other things. Don't ask me why, but in that blurry time before I was fully awake, I began to run down a list of all the euphemisms we have for dying. And then . . . if for dying, why not sex? The beginning and the end.

Here's what I came up with; but surely there are others.

die                                                                     have sex
croak                                                                 make love
meet your maker                                               do it
perish                                                                sleep with
expire                                                                make whoopie
buy the farm                                                      go all the way
pass away                                                         do the dirty
reach the promise land                                      screw
go to sleep                                                         bang
kick the bucket                                                   get laid
go toes up                                                          hump
lose your life                                                      have intercourse

So anyway, don't blame me. Who knows what random ideas pop into our heads in those murky moments when we're swimming back up to the surface of consciousness? Maybe it was the caffeine in that Arnold Palmer I drank last night.

Posted by Tom Sightings at 9:40 AM 11 comments: Links to this post 


I Am an Idiot, and Janet Yellen Is a Liar

Some of you may remember that I write a column for the U. S. News Retirement website. Last week I wrote a piece titled "Why Higher Interest Rates Could Hurt Retirees."

In the article I was trying to point out the silver lining to the cloud of low interest rates for retirees. Many retirees, myself included, bemoan the fact that because of low interest rates their retirement savings are producing little or no income. Back in the mid-2000s, when interest rates were around 5 percent, I received about $700 a month from my savings account. Today, with rates close to zero, I receive less than $10 a month. That's quite a salary cut.

But the silver lining is the current low inflation rate, which comes along with low interest rates and benefits retirees more than anyone else. Low inflation tightens up the job market and puts downward pressure on salaries (one reason why wages have not grown for the last 10 or 15 years). But it helps people who are on a fixed income. And most retirees are on a fixed income. Pensions are typically not indexed to inflation, and while Social Security does offer an inflation adjustment, the increase is usually taken back by the increase in Medicare payments. Now, if you own rental property, you can protect yourself from inflation because you can raise the rent. But only 7 to 8 percent of retirees own a rental property. So that doesn't help most of us. The bottom line: Retirees are hurt by high inflation; and they benefit from low inflation.

Honestly, I thought this was mostly a beside-the-point economic argument. I was trying to make people like me feel better. Instead, when the piece got picked by by Yahoo Finance, I got a lot of vitriolic reaction to the article.

A few people actually agreed with me. One reader wrote, "The war on savers has continued for years. Savers who are trying to get historical levels of interest on "safe" investments -- t-bills, CDs, etc., have been crushed."

But most people thought I was an idiot. Some figured I was part of a government conspiracy, in league with Janet Yellen and the hated Federal Reserve. Still others felt that I was shilling for the banks.

Why? Because most people don't believe the government when it says there's no inflation.

One person responded: "This guy is clearly an idiot. The first sign is that he believes inflation is near zero. I keep asking the Fed governors what universe they live in with their 2 percent inflation rate, because I would sure like to move there. Virtually everything I pay goes up by at least 10 percent a year."

Someone else added, more mildly, "If inflation is virtually zero, how come so many things these days have gone up considerably in price, and companies are giving us less product?"

Another wrote, "What does he mean there is no inflation? Doesn't he ever buy groceries? Doesn't he ever pay medical bills, property taxes, utility bills or insurance premiums? The Federal Reserve has been raping old people dependent upon savings for ten years by holding interest rates artificially low. The elderly are paying a huge tax in the form of no income while their money is used by the banks."

If you like reading nasty comments, you can go over to the article and find more. They are mostly along the same lines. But I don't take them personally. I just think people are angry and frustrated, because they don't understand how the world is working these days. (I know I sure don't.) For so many people, their perceptions are different from the reality reported by the government. They don't trust government numbers. They don't trust the government at all. You can find the same distrust when the government reports employment figures. A lot of people simply do not believe, based on their own experience, that the unemployment rate is 5.5 percent as the government claims.

Anyway, just for the record -- and you can look it up -- according to the June 2015 report from the U. S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, "Over the last 12 months the Consumer Price Index was unchanged before seasonal adjustment." In other words, the U. S government says that for the past year inflation is at zero percent. There is no inflation.

But it's not just regular people who don't believe it. Legendary investor Jim Rogers said recently, "Right now, there is inflation, but the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics says there is no inflation. I don’t know where they go to shop, or where they send their kids to school, or go to baseball games. There is inflation all over the world."

As for me, honestly, I don't know what to believe. My home insurance bill just arrived. It's up by 7 percent over last year. But I still pay $40 to play golf -- the same rate I've been paying for years.

Posted by Tom Sightings at 10:12 AM 17 comments: Links to this post 



She recently turned 90 years old. But even in her prime, in the 1980s, she was known for her prematurely white hair.

She was born in Queens, NY, on June 8, 1925, but raised in the tony suburb of Rye, NY. Her father was president of McCall Corp., the publisher of a string of magazines including McCall's and Redbook. She was a true blue blood, distantly related to Franklin Pierce, the 14th president of the United States.

She attended upscale Rye Country Day School, then went to a boarding school in Charleston, SC, before heading to Smith College in Massachusetts. She dropped out of Smith after her freshman year, and on Jan. 6, 1945, married her boyfriend, home on leave from the Navy. He was the son of a prominent Wall Street banker, who had joined the Navy at age 18 and seen aerial combat in the Pacific. The couple moved around with the Navy until the war ended. Then she followed her husband to Connecticut, where he went to Yale University, graduating in two and a half years in an accelerated program. They then headed to Texas, where her husband went into the oil business. He first got a job with a company connected to his father's business, and for a few years they shuttled from one Texas town to another, with a few layovers in Bakersfield and Compton, California.

They finally landed in Midland, Texas, where her husband co-founded Zapata, an oil drilling company. By the mid-1960s he had made his millions and was getting interested in Texas politics.

Meantime, she had six children, the oldest born in 1946 and the youngest in 1959. Her second child, a daughter born in 1949, died of leukemia in 1953. It was this tragedy, she allowed, that prematurely turned her hair from light brown to chalk white.

She had spent the first 20 years of their marriage raising children. But in 1966 her husband was elected to the U. S. House of Representatives, and she became a political wife. She joined him on a number of campaign stops, sometimes reluctantly, but continued to stand by his side for the rest of his political career, which included two losing bids for a seat in the U. S. Senate.

And by now you've got to be thinking ... blue blood, white hair, Texas politician. It has to be Barbara Pierce Bush.

After losing his second bid for the Senate in 1970, George Bush was appointed U. S. Ambassador to the United Nations. Two years later, as Watergate heated up, President Nixon asked Bush to head the Republican National Committee. Barbara advised against taking the position, but he accepted anyway.

In 1974, President Ford appointed Bush head of the liaison office in China, and the couple spent the next three years in Beijing. Bush returned to the U. S. as head of the CIA; and then ran for the Republican nomination for president in 1980. During the campaign Barbara spoke out in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment and said she was pro-choice on abortion. This caused some consternation among the conservative elements of her party, which ultimately chose Ronald Reagan as the nominee.

But as we all know, Reagan in turn chose Bush as his running mate and won the presidency. So Barbara Bush spent eight years as Second Lady, and then four more as First Lady.

During this time she presented herself as a traditional political wife. She took up some of the usual causes, such as homelessness, AIDS, the elderly, volunteerism. But her main push was for literacy, since one of her sons, Neil, had had trouble reading because of dyslexia.

She served on several literacy committees and chaired a number of reading organizations. She also wrote a bestselling children's book from the point of view of the family dog, and donated the proceeds to literacy charities. Along the way, Barbara Bush became known for her matter-of-fact style, her self-deprecating sense of humor, her domestic interests and lack of pretension. Nevertheless, she was not a complete stranger to controversy. When asked in 1984 what she thought of Walter Mondale's running mate, Geraldine Ferraro, she said she couldn't say on TV, "but it rhymes with rich."

Later, she made disparaging remarks about TV coverage of her son as president; she worried about too many "underprivileged" people moving to Houston after Hurricane Katrina. And she had a run-in with Republican vice presidential hopeful Sarah Palin. TV interviewer Larry King asked her what she thought about Palin, and Bush responded, "I sat next to her once, thought she was beautiful, and I think she's very happy in Alaska -- and I hope she'll stay there."

And more recently, when asked about her son Jeb's prospects for president, she claimed that while he was well qualified, she doesn't like the idea of family political dynasties. Her conclusion: "We've had enough Bushes."

All of which demonstrates that on the surface, Barbara Bush is the picture of dutiful suburban housewife and family matriarch. (By the time she moved into the White House, she had moved 29 times in 44 years of marriage.) But underneath that veneer, for better or worse, is a sharp, cut-to-the bone kind of wit.

Posted by Tom Sightings at 2:13 PM 8 comments: Links to this post 


Retired ... but Busy!

I have to make a conscious effort not to roll my eyes when retirees complain that they have nothing to do, and then they whine, "So how come we're so busy?!?"

When a retired person says something like that, it makes them seem a little ditsy (dare I say senile?), and not in control of their own time or their own life.

However, be that as it may, for the past few weeks, I want to say: If I'm supposed to be retired, how come I'm so busy?!?

Well, there was the wedding. B's son got married last weekend -- everything went off swimmingly; the ceremony was sweet, the reception was fun, the family all got along together. The preparations and the event itself took up a lot of time and mental energy, even though my responsibilities were fairly minor. My chief role in the wedding was to carry copious amounts of Kleenex and parcel out sheets of hankies to B immediately upon her frequent requests.

Okay, I might make fun of her. But it is an emotional time. Besides, I admit, I'm jealous. My own two kids are older than hers, yet they don't have any wedding plans on the horizon, or even (as far as I know) over the horizon.

But it's not just the wedding. I bought a new car. Actually, I leased the car, since that required a smaller outlay of funds and seemed to be a better deal in the long run anyway. But it takes a lot of time to do the research and visit the car dealers and then do more research and visit more car dealers and then make a decision. (I got an Acura TLX which, so far, I'm liking very much.)

Then I had that eye problem. I made and kept a doctor's appointment; and even though he said my floaters were routine, he wanted me to come back. And when I did go back, a few weeks later, he said he wanted me to make yet another appointment. Everything looks fine, he said, but I have some little spots of blood in the fluid in my eyes and he just wants to check them out one more time.

Then I had to get a crown on one of my teeth. I was getting a cavity, and there was already a large filling in the tooth, and the dentist said there wasn't enough tooth left to add another filling. And of course, it turned out the crown needed some adjustment, so it was back to the dentist again for a little extra drilling and buffing.

All those medical appointments. They take up a lot of time. But I guess I'd better get used to it. I'm not getting any younger.

Then I joined a golf league, which plays every Monday morning until mid-August. So that takes pretty much one whole day out of the week (because, at my age, after 4 - 5 hours on the golf course, in the heat, all I want to do is come home, lie on the couch, sip iced tea and read the paper or watch TV.)

And then, after taking almost two months off from tutoring, I've signed up for the second summer session. Three hours, twice a week. Plus the commute. Plus fielding all the emails from the tutoring coordinator, who seems to have not much to do but write emails to her volunteers.

And in the midst of all this, what should happen? A former colleague called me up. Do I have time to take on a job? Yes, of course, I said. Because if you're a freelancer, and you turn down a job, you're afraid they'll never call you back.

So you see? I'm a very busy retired person! But please don't roll your eyes. Just answer me this: Can you retire from retirement?

Posted by Tom Sightings at 6:55 AM 17 comments: Links to this post Labels: What's Happening
