paulmuses

Semi-scammed again

It’s been three years since I was last scammed. An ice cream man, believe it or not, crouching in wait under the Washington Monument, just a hop, skip, and jump from the algae-infected reflecting pool in front of Honest Abe.

Imagine a con in Washington, D.C., even before the biggest con man of all returned. You can read the hoary story here.

Scammed Under the Washington Monument by an Ice Cream Man

And what I learned

medium.com

Yesterday, it happened again, sort of, and serves as the foundation for this tale about personal independence, a response to Jerv Nai Matrap’s prompt.

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I’m soon to be 77, with the history of a mother who was determined to live out the winter of her life on her terms which meant, in her house, in control of paying bills, etc. Our father, also Paul, died of sinus cancer in 1993.

Mom was like a fort, impregnable, with a moat in front and the draw bridge up whenever any of us even tip toed close to taking any of these responsibilities away. She saw Trojan Horses everywhere.

One thing my two brothers and I worried about was mom’s vulnerabilty to phone fraudsters. So, sometime in her eighties — she would live to 95, all but the final two years, in her home — Pat, who lived five miles from her, and with mom’s reluctant permission, added his name to her bank account.

Which he would monitor on her computer every Saturday morning before they went for breakfast at Panera Bread.

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Did you know you can order a DIY castle online? According to the website, the first piece is the defensive perimeter. Amazon will deliver it on Tuesday.

Kidding aside, yesterday morning, a Saturday, I did order a PDF of what I thought was going to be information about my house that would include the deed that I needed and somehow I had misplaced.

The domain, Public Records Data, in it’s header come-on, promised a plethora of information about my property. Scrolling down, without reading too closely, I discovered the cost would be $7 for the report.

I filled in the required information, including my credit card numbers.About five minutes later, I received a text with a link to the report. Once downloaded, I began to read.

Lots of data but the names and dates did not quite fit. For example, it had me purchasing the house in 2003 when I had bought it in 2000. And there was no deed.

My tightened stomach told me I had screwed up. So did Rebecca, when I told her what I had done as I handed her a first cup of coffee.

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“You did what,” she said. “You’ve got to contact your bank, and the credit card company.”

“The website looked legit,” I replied, even as a feeling of dread swept over me.

Not a complete idiot, I first went to my online bank account. There was the $7 charge from Public Records Data, out of Las Vegas. Damn. I reloaded the bank site, and a $26 charge appeared from the same company. Double damn.

Next I called the number on the back of my debit card. Fidgeting and berating myself while on hold for about 10 minutes, I explained the situation to the Visa fraud specialist. She pulled up my account, including the two recent payments, and gave me the Public Records Data phone number. She said it looked like a legitimate business.

As I worked the problem, I began to calm down. Rebecca sat on the back porch every so often asking for an update. I called Public Records Data and, with very little waiting time, got a second real person. She asked for my email address and looked up my account.

I told her I understood the $7 charge but not the $26. She replied the additional charge was for a monthly subscription to their service automatically added whenever anyone purchases a report which was, she said, in the fine print.

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I cancelled everything and asked that my information be deleted from their site. She said it would be done immediately. Two minutes later, three emails from Public Records Data described the expungement of “Paul” from the site. They even refunded my $7.

I carried my computer out to the back porch to join Rebecca, still feeling unsettled. Public Records Data was not like the DC ice cream scammer. When I looked again at its web site, in smallish print, but not hidden, it describes the service it provides, pulling public information, from third party sites, and makes no promises about the accuracy of its information.

For someone not paying close attention, like the fellow in the image, intended to mimic me, it’s easy to purchase something that really is bogus. In that sense, the company is playing on the vulnerabilities of people who are looking for easy access to the information they need.

But are older people, like my mother, like me, uniquely susceptible to this phenomenon? As Rebecca says, I’ve always acted rashly, often jumping into things before I’ve thought them through. Exactly what I did this morning.

Perhaps there’s no reason to fit a tendency I’ve had at every age into an aging narrative. On the other hand, I believe Joe Biden at some point in his first term, before the disastrous debate with Donald Trump, did age out of being an effective President. Perhaps, the same will be true for me, regarding the routine tasks of everyday life.

In other words, that some kind of cognitive and emotional intelligence decline will impair my judgment requiring unwanted interventions.

When that happens — if that happens — I don’t want to just pull up the drawbridge. I want to do like my friend, Will, who at 90 turned over to his son the keys of his car as his periphery eyesight declined.

Wisdom, perfectly aligned with Will’s years.

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It’s always good to start a story with a bit of leg exposure. In the first photo, the before.

Now, two months later, the after. As one of my nurses said, ‘beautiful,’ and ‘now it’s completely closed, so no longer a wound.’

The rest of the story. And one more leg picture.

Healing

Five years ago, while dismounting a bike in Perry, Iowa, my right lower calf muscle scraped a pedal that left a deepish gash. I dressed it with a band-aidand rode on.

Out of sight and mostly out of mind for the next half-decade, except it never did really heal. Occasionally, I’d rebandage it and forget about it. Until last spring, when it reopened, Rebecca said, “You’d better go to the wound clinic.”

A test came back positive for Basal cell carcinoma, the better kind of cancer, in that it doesn’t spread beyond the tissue of origin. At least, that’s the theory. And our hope. The surgeon explained the Mohs procedure that, in my case, was done in the hospital under general anesthesia and took about two hours.

She cut away four times, thin layers of skin, and sent them to a pathologist to test for the offending cells. In the first photo, you see her precise work two days after the repair.

To replace the damaged cells, she placed skin grafting material over a hole about two by three centimeters. This wound would take exactly two months to heal, from the bottom up, with initially quite a bit of bleeding and draining.

So for the first week, my care nurses attached a ‘wound vac’ to drain the blood. I carried it in my backpack wherever I went.

Thankfully, the next week and for the duration of the healing, they replaced this behemoth with a small Pico canister that fit in my pants pocket.

The compression sleeve protects the incision and helps promote blood flow to the new skin.

Because I couldn’t get my leg wet, I wore a plastic covering when I showered or it rained. Amazingly, it sealed well enough.

In case you’re wondering, I did have to take my canister friend to bed, so I used my workout shorts with a pocket.

Humor

This morning, no machine, no drainage chord, no plastic sleeve while showering, and no compression sock. Just a 3 by 3 inch band-aid that I’ll wear for another month or so.

Sadly, no more Wednesday morning visits to the WinnMed Wound Center and the nurses that cared for me. I miss them. Because of staff rotations and vacations, I met 10 different professionals over two months of weekly dressing changes. All were women. It’s not often that a 76-year-old man starts his day cared for by people whose only concern is my well-being.

They became my friends. I learned about their children, partners, and vacation schedules. They asked me how everything went when I took my apparatus to Arrowhead Stadium in Kansas City to join 70,000 others for a World Cup soccer game or how I swing a golf club without catching it in the drainage chord.

And, on the last visit, I think it was Jenny who said, “I’ll bet you check your right side pants pocket several times a day to see if Mr. Pico is hiding somewhere inside.”

“More than several,” I replied.

Hope

What have I learned? Most obviously, pay attention to cuts that don’t heal. On the few times over the years I thought about that persistent sore on the back of my leg, I’d think it can’t be anything too serious since it started as a laceration.

Yesterday, encouraged by Rebecca and many others, I made an appointment with a dermatologist to have a full-body scan to check out the various blotches and bumps that naturally appear on a septuagenarian’s skin.

Forewarned is forearmed.

But there’s something else about this summer journey that I’ll carry along, not in a backpack or pocket, but in my psyche. My aging body can still heal and fight off, with a lot of help from friends, including the intelligent and aware parts of me, and not the dumb and clueless ones, the various less than malevolent invaders that lie in waiting.

Not forever, and not as well as they could ten years ago, and not the big daddies that lurk and overwhelm regardless of defenses, on that matter, and thus far, I’ve just been lucky.

So, Paul, don’t pat yourself on the back too much. When something big hits, as it slammed into your brothers Pat and Peter this year, and just last week, your friend Rick, who was like a brother, you’ll face the end with their grace and good humor in mind!

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I hope you don’t mind if I rest for a moment. I’ll leave something that will help your grass grow. I’ve heard you are one of the good ones who set a proper example for your children.

I try to do the same with mine. They’re across the street, enjoying Ed and Carol’s garden and that phenomenal stone arch. I tell them not to take more than they give. Some are only takers; a few, the enlightened ones, give and give and give. I believe in moderation, the best most of us can do.

What do you think?

By the way, we live in Palisade Park. We’ve noticed that you walk through it every day and are very respectful of our turf. Not everyone is.

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Rebecca and I rotate, every month, a home-cooked dinner with Maggie and Mike. They moved to Decorah ten years ago. We met at a retirement party Maggie’s daughter, Carly, organized for me. She hoped the four of us would hit it off. And we did.

Last night, it was their turn. Mike began with a precisely prepared cocktail. A Black Manhattan that was dark, strong, and with a licorice taste. He takes his role very seriously, and it’s fun to watch the careful preparation from this retired engineer.

Maggie, formerly an activities director at a nursing home, served a summer-themed meal on their back patio of chicken salad, corn on the cob, and the honey wheat bread you see in the photo. Mike scooped ice cream for dessert.

Three hours later, she tucked a loaf wrapped in moist white paper into my hands.

Breakfast toast.

Soon, our round.

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After my dad died in 1993 of sinus cancer, my mother decided to become a little more active in her Catholic Church, St. Paul’s, to take her mind off her sadness. The priest asked if she would take responsibility for the breakfast after the 6 a.m. Mass. This would require her to get to the church hall to set everything up around 5:30.

That was no problem as she was always an early riser. She didn’t catch a worm but did make many new friends in the decade she performed this service.

She passed this morning chronotype gene to her oldest son, who has been getting up around 4 am for half a century.

This morning my eyes popped open at 3:45 and saw those numbers on the ceiling from the new projection alarm clock. I haven’t needed a wake-up device since Richard Nixon. Oh, for those halcyon days of only one corruption story a month.

After putting on the backyard lights, I walked the garbage out and said good morning to Mr Owl. I’m writing these words at 4:30 after my first cup of coffee.

My night chronotype friends refer to my perverse rising time as insomnia disguised. Otherwise, they think, why would I do it?

They get up around 9.

They can’t help themselves, either. My wee-hour habit fits my natural endowment. It’s no more a part of character development than my obsessive neatness. Or your tendency to pile the mail on the kitchen counter, read after midnight, or say good night to Mr Owl.

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I’ve lost another brother.

That’s what I feel, three days after my friend Rick Brown died. He was 83 and went fast, with bone and lung cancer. So quickly that his final email to me, two weeks ago, said, “No good health news, early next week will work, your house.” Soon after, his wife Melissa told me he began home hospice care.

Rick, a Marine, saw combat in Vietnam and, eventually, became a substance abuse counselor. He was a practicing Catholic and Buddhist.

We knew each other well for about a decade, each taking turns hosting two-hour discussion sessions that wore me out.

Deep, deeper, deepest.

Politics, religion, soccer, and Truth, with a capital T, and by that he meant the continual search for how to Love better. Until we get that right, he taught, as individuals and as a people, we are lost.

Which is what I feel.

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Turn back before it’s too late

First, I tore the thin plastic bag off its mount. Next, slightly tilting my head upward, I checked which end had a seam. I then moved my thumb and forefinger back and forth, hoping friction would produce an opening. When it didn’t, I wet both digits and repeated the movement. Defeated, I used the bag as a glove to pluck the donuts.

As I waited to pay, I thought about complaining to the counterwoman, who had smiled and said “Good morning” when I entered the store, about the flimsy pouches.

But I didn’t because the symptoms are limitless for someone 75, one year older than Walter Matthau when he starred in Grumpy Old Men.

No part of me, including my mildly neuropathetic mitts, works like it used to. As my cardiologist said, after plopping a model heart down on her desk, “You know, Paul, your heart is 75 too.”

Yesterday, I changed the sheets, vacuumed the two front rooms, and washed and dried a few days’ worth of dirty dishes. Rebecca’s returning from a week-long bike ride across Iowa.

With earbuds secured, I got to work.

Each task took, give or take, 17 minutes, the running time of Bob Dylan’s 2020 song Murder Most Foul, which can be found on page 688 of the book of his lyrics you see in the photo.

On page 941 of Shakespeare’s Complete Works, also in the picture, and the textbook used in a 1972 college class, from Hamlet, Act I, Scene 5, is this line from the ghost of Hamlet’s father, the old King, who was assassinated by Hamlet’s uncle,

Revenge his foul and most unnatural murder

That I underlined 54 years ago.

So we’re in the land of spirits, Dear Reader, which is exactly where Bob placed us with his epic creation.

My story is short, as I hope you will spend some of your valuable time with this most extraordinary track. Whether a fan or not, I believe it will be minutes well spent. One of Dylan’s themes is that America, on that day, never recovered, “that the soul of a nation been torn away,” and that this crime still affects the USA.

I’ve linked the lyrics to the song’s title, Dylan’s performance here, and Timothy Hampton’s (author of Bob Dylan’s Poetics: How the Songs Work) analysis of Murder Most Foul here.

If you’re around my age, 75, you likely remember where you were on November 22, 1963. I was in a Catholic high school study hall as a freshman student when the announcement came over the loudspeaker. What Dylan gives us, according to Hampton, is a way to

Grasp and make legible what an event feels like, what it means, from the inside.

I’d be interested to know what you think.

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Last Saturday, I did a 1–4 serving shift in the Rotary Pork Chop on a Stick booth during Decorah’s Nordic Fest celebration — 1000s of visitors and 100s of chop lovers. I volunteered to manage the money, still comfortable counting up sixty years later.

Because the chops were $8, there were lots of ‘two makes ten’ and ‘four makes twenty’ returns and one ‘92 makes 100 ‘. An hour into the experience, I felt 16 again. Two hours later, I felt every bit 76, my age.

Once a teenager was more than enough.

Fortunately, I had help from a lot of people, especially these three.

Wendell

My Social Security account tells me my first year of official earnings was 1965, $585. So by the summer of 1966, I was a veteran ice cream scooper at Baskin-Robbins, used to the scowls of my first boss, Wendell, the owner, who said to me on my first day a year earlier,

Paul, wherever you are in the store, I can see you.

Wendell was a friend of Del Riefe, owner of Riefe’s restaurant, where my engineer father and his friends ate lunch. My dad had mentioned to Del that his oldest son, a high school junior, was looking for a part-time job, and Del relayed the message to Wendell, who said I should come in and fill out an application.

Two years later, Del would recommend me to Pierre, the chef at the Davenport Country Club, who was looking for someone to manage the pool snack bar during the summer; two years after that, Del hired me as a weekend short-order cook while I was in college.

Early in my life, I got used to standing on shoulders. And I also began my inoculation against the silliness of America’s self-made men myth. No one treks alone.

I don’t remember my first interview with Wendell, but I do recall his three uncompromised expectations: that each scoop be precisely 3.5 ounces and that as we excavated the ice cream from the three-gallon containers, we do it evenly across the top. Even today, when I walk into the local parlor, the first thing I look at is the tubs under the glass casings, and what do I see? A lunar landscape of deep crevices. Tut Tut.

The third requirement was that we count up, not down, from the 13¢ charge for one scoop on a pointed cone to the dollar the customer gave me; flat or cake cones were the same. Try it. You’ll understand why Wendell was right.

Sharon

The lessons I learned from a demanding boss were the second best thing about my first job. The prize was my first girlfriend, who happened to be Wendell’s daughter, Sharon, who also worked at her father’s store.

By the time I was 16, I liked the theory of a girlfriend. Playboy pinups had replaced Parent Trap’s Hayley Mills in my after-dark, under-the-cover fantasies. My friend Jim shared his brother John’s used copies that we hid in the woods a block from my house.

But a real girl? She was more complicated than scooping Chocolate Mint, leveling a tub, or counting out money. The magazine models seemed so welcoming, always smiling. How do you even start with an actual person?

Fortunately, late one Saturday night, Sharon was closing up her father’s store when she discovered her car would not start, and her parents were at a movie. Desperate and seeing my phone number in her father’s office behind the large freezer, she called.

At this point in the story, I need to tell you something. I’ll make it short. A few months earlier, Sharon and I had our first date. The longer story is here. It didn’t go well. Hey, even Willie Mays struck out at first. Who does things right the first time?

Regardless, that night, when I picked her up, we sat and talked in my parents’ Pontiac, in the shopping center parking lot.

Soon after we had a second date, then a third…

Mom

When I was 12, I attended a Saturday morning school for boys who wanted to umpire youth baseball games. For whatever reason, I didn’t go back the next Saturday.

At 13, I went to the first of five sessions to become a lifeguard. During a pretend drowning, the victim elbowed me in the face, and I panicked. I didn’t return for session two.

At 16, after my first week under Wendell’s whip, I told my mom I wanted to quit. She said,

It’s too easy to quit hard things.

I didn’t.

She also said, a year later, “You know, you and Sharon can’t really get serious because she’s Jewish. You need to stop seeing her.”

I didn’t.

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I will lose another good friend too damn soon. Cancer, of course. Rick and I have known each other for about ten years, with monthly seminars in our homes — that’s the only way to describe them — where we discuss the world. His lively mind and commitments as an active Catholic and Buddhist tired me out, in the best way imaginable.

Two hours of Trump castigating at the highest level! I don’t take any of my friends for granted, not at 76.

That includes you, my Medium pal. You know who you are. You hang out in my neck of the woods and make regular visits to my online abode. I drop by your place but not as often as I should. You live across the USA and Canada, especially, with a strange (in the sense of I wouldn’t have predicted the down-under phenomenon) coterie in Australia and New Zealand.

Meeting my partner Rebecca at 60 brought another group of friends into our lives as we divided our time between two communities, new friends for each of us in each. We just spent a few days with six of them in Colorado.

Settling into one community will bring friendship gains and losses.

Our decision three years ago to spend Januarys in San Miguel introduced us to yet another chance to meet and get to know wonderful people like Rick and Julie.

Yesterday, I had coffee at 1 pm at a local coffee shop with a group of seven headed by Lyle, who formed this political koffe-klatch band a few years ago. Tim, Shelly, Craig, Steve, Doug, Lyle, and I met for about an hour, focusing primarily on how Iowa might tilt slightly purple this year. Hope springs eternal.

Tomorrow, I’ll meet with an older men’s book group to discuss Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing, a book about the multigenerational consequences of slavery. We’ll meet at Jim’s house, who will provide the eats. Earlier in the day, I’ll play golf with Mike, Mike, and Steve as part of a regular summer Wednesday foursome. As the holes progress, the gimme putts get longer.

On Thursday, I’ll have breakfast at another coffee shop with a group of retired professors from the local college we all taught at for decades, none of whom hung out with each other while working. Will, at 93, is the oldest. I’m pretty sure I’m the youngest.

Finally, on Saturday, Rebecca and I will have dinner with Ed and Carol, who live across the street. We do this every six weeks or so, and we do something similar with Mike and Maggie.

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Thanks to Peter Mammitzsch for his prompt about meeting Medium friends. A few years ago, Rebecca and I met an online friend, Peter, and his wife, Mary, in their home in upstate New York. Peter and I met as part of a crew of 10 blues and 10 reds who met monthly to listen to the other side’s political perspective. Our Braver Summit was part of a national organization called Braver Angels.

Rebecca and I were visiting her daughter and family in Boston and decided to make the few-hour trip to have lunch with Peter and Mary. It was a gratifying experience, including seeing the physical setting, chair, and backdrop for when Peter joins our virtual group. And Peter and Mary were so gracious in their beautiful home in the woods.

However, it reminded me of when my 6th-grade class visited a local TV station and saw the set where the afternoon kids’ show was staged. I remember being slightly disappointed that everything was smaller than it looked on TV.

Some vision of mine had been punctured. Afterward, I never watched that show in the same way. In a way, it was like seeing the wizard behind the curtain. Part of me preferred the myth.

So perhaps, just perhaps, I’m really OK with not visiting your home and seeing where you write your Medium stories. I prefer you to remain as you are in my imagination, Hemingway or Smiley at their desks.

Of course, if you’re ever in my northeast Iowa vicinity, you are welcome to stop by. I’ll even let you sit in my writing chair.