Thank you, thank you
Letter from Away — January 23, 2024
When you tell people you are retiring they ask what your plans are. Over the last few months, not wanting to project into a future whose purpose was in large part to see how life goes when the weeks do not adhere to any particular agenda, I offered some version of, my plan is to not make plans, When pushed, an answer I sometimes gave was, I’m going to find out if it is possible to live on a bit less than $1200 a month.
As my last day on the clock got closer, some plans did emerge. By the time the chef brought the cake down from Culinary (Thank you to Steve and to those who participated in making the dark layers, stacked impossibly tall and layered with an exquisite velvet of chocolate mousse) and small group of Adult Education instructors, high school teachers and administrators, and other supporting workers like myself had joined the party, my most urgent post-retirement task was clear and I had narrowed the question down to “What will I do tomorrow?”
Mentioning the Department of Health and Human Services in social conversation can elicit varied responses. For many, it is an embarrassing reminder that there are people we actually know, for whom financial assistance is a necessity. We all feel a need for more than we have. It seems to be built into us. Those with much may or may not be more grateful for what they have than are the ones who must wait for a deposit of benefits to go shopping.
Since my first job, pumping gas at the age of 13 in 1966, I have earned and paid income and Social Security taxes on a lifetime income of $371,019 — not much in 21st century dollars. My Social Security payments went into the fund that cut checks to my mother’s generation and those who have come since; now my daughters and other current workers contribute and some of that money comes to me.
According to a popular meme Jeff Bezos, the man who sells you packages that smile on the outside and contain varying levels of necessity or luxury on the inside, paid his maximum required contribution to Social Security a few hours into the new year. Lest you think I am picking on the super-rich, a run-of-the-millionaire will stop paying into this year’s pool of support sometime in February.
Thanks, Jeff. Thanks to you all. Mostly, thanks to those for whom those FICA payments constitute a noticeable deduction.
Thanks also to the friends and relatives who joined me for pizza, to the kitchen staff who added tables as our party expanded to more than a dozen, to the last handful of us once again a single square hi-top. As the last pair of friends stopped to linger with others in the room, I slipped out the door full of excellent food and good wishes and laughter and warmth, replete with gratitude for the proximity of so many people I love.
I am an organized person. This was not foretold by my childhood behavior but there it is. I keep all my paid bills in a file and have, since the age of thirty when I started keeping the books for Auciello Stone, paid my bills and filled out my forms in a timely manner. Having previously applied for heating assistance, and knowing I would need to again, there is a separate file of paystubs, bank statements and other materials that I use to establish my credentials as a poor person.
Friday morning found me collecting current statements of my bank accounts, continuing on the the DHHS office to apply for help, the two-step plan that was my most thought out plan for retirement.
Medicare is not the total health coverage most of us imagine, before crossing into seniorhood, but rather a four-part disharmony of programs paid for by a monthly deduction from that hard earned Social Security benefit, and in larger part by separate payments for coverage plans an old person is required to have, plans that can easily cost half or more of the benefit one earns through decades of work. We don’t means-test the wealthy, those whose money is derived from the labor of others and from speculation on the future value of their discretionary investments, who pick and choose from all the choices and need not sweat another deduction.
I brought a good book for my wait at DHHS, but arrived early enough to bet started on my interview by 10. The agent asked a bunch of questions, looked at my 2022 taxes, my recent paystubs, rent and utility payments, and the letter confirming that I was no longer employed, and told me that I was eligible to receive full support for the health insurance that will cover my primary physician, lab tests, specialists, and a variety of things like eyeglasses, dental care, and prescriptions. I felt my heart open up. I felt protected against some of the risks of mortality that loom ahead.
It was a good start to this first week of my new life. I didn’t plan the storm on Saturday that kept me in but, in preparation for an upcoming visit from City Mouse and in the spirit of a fresh start on my day to day existence, I gave the place a most thorough cleaning, even hand washing the shower curtain and scrubbing the kitchen mats.
I practiced piano and sat with my breath. I cooked and read and watched nonsense on the screen. I went for walks and reached out to see if the scholarship, offered to me in December by the PenBay Y, was still available. On Monday I got a call from City Mouse and knew from his voice the call was not about his next day’s bus ride to Maine.
Death is the door we all go through, the one we cannot describe. We know it is there and that it cannot be avoided. In concept, we are prepared to lose those we love to an unknown eternity.
The friend who had died that morning was someone I met in my early twenties. Three years younger than I — full of energy and ideas and commitment, talented with words and good at connecting people, ideas, and action. City Mouse had known her almost as long, meeting on the dance floor where we all gathered in the early ’80s, working with those who kept the dance going through major transitions.
Over the phone, City Mouse and I decided that we both would prefer to be with a person who loved our friend than to sit, sad and bewildered, in our separate apartments 200 miles apart. Unless the coming storm stopped traffic entirely, he would come on the 3:30 bus as planned. Tuesday morning I did the recycling for The Good Tern. I went home to finish preparing for company and, after lunch, headed back to Rockland to activate my Y membership and walk a mile on a treadmill while listening to a novel. I met the bus from Boston and brought City Mouse home.
Friends came that evening and we played cards and laughed and told them stories about our friend who had just died. Two of the usual players were absent, one through appropriate caution over road conditions and another having lost a beloved friend that morning and needing something other than talk, laughter, and stories.
After the last hand was played and the cards put away, City Mouse and I cleared and washed dishes and made up the futon. He settled in for the night and I went to my room to call my oldest friend, the one who introduced me to the woman whose heart stopped on Monday, whose death has since stopped our own hearts, if only for a moment here and there.
On Wednesday the Mouse and I walked in the woods, letting the quiet of winter hold us. Listening to the creaking of trees, the whisper of snow dropping off branches, going step by careful step along the path. We drove down the peninsula to spend some time in the presence of the relentless and life-giving sea, observing the ways wind and wave and tide can disrupt human infrastructure, just by breathing.
That evening I went to a training for election workers and learned how Maine’s election laws allow voters to choose which party’s primary they can vote in, and how our open carry law allow voters to bring firearms into the polling place. You have to take the bitter with the sweet.
Thursday I brought City Mouse to the bus. We hugged and I went to the Y for another mile or so, placing one foot in front of the other with a good book in my ears. I found my way to the French language group at the Rockland Public Library. A half-dozen or so of us, stumbling over the syllables, searching for the right word, ignoring the grammar. One, an old friend who invited me for coffee after the group broke up. We did some catching up, sharing this moment of now in the passage of life, carrying stories of those who leave their bodies to the earth and their memories to their friends.
At home I wrote, my eyes on the screen watching the words scroll out, letting my hands get to know the keyboard as a writer instead of a clerk, sinking into the idea of time, of plans, of the unreeling of life.
Shlomit Auciello is an award-winning writer, photographer, and human ecologist who has lived in Midcoast Maine since 1988. Letter from Away has appeared online and in print, on and off since 1992.
