The Little Tractor

Man, it’s hard to write about this last 18 months.  Too much stuff, I guess.  But as I said we got a real estate dealer by the name of Suzi.  I didn’t meet her till the day we brothers got together at Delridge to try to clean up the outside of the place, and some of the inside for if and when the house sold.  Because at that time, early summer, late spring, the house had been on the market for a while and wasn’t moving at 620K.  But in any case, we knew we would have to clean up, even with it being sold as is, especially the stuff outside.

tractor 

WB had a least 2 sheds full of junk and junk all around the sheds full of junk.  You would walk around and stub your toe on junk, pieces of metal, scraps of iron, and a whole bunch of 50 gallon barrels, and a trailer for taking stuff to the dump that had four flat tires and, oh yea, the little tractor.  When one of WB’s neighbors had died, he had inherited this little tractor that he used for diverse grading purposes, including and mostly keeping the dirt drive into the place in drivable shape. 

So we had to get rid of that tractor since we doubted anybody moving into the place would want it and we didn’t want to just give it away since it was a good little tractor.  We thought about trying to fire it up.  But we had a problem doing that, what with no key.  So we told Suzi we wanted to sell it and she said she knew a guy that might want it, and I gave Suzi brother Dave’s number since he was the designated tractor guy.  And almost immediately this guy called Dave and said he wanted it, but Dave thought the guy was really trying to lowball us and he didn’t like the guy because he kept pestering.

So to continue with the tractor line of thought, the tractor was still sitting there right up till and after the time the house was sold.  By that time, we saw the tractor wasn’t something we were going to be able to move even with a key because the rats (those are another story) had eaten through all the wiring and plastic type tubing.  So I got the number of the guy who made the first offer to brother Dave, and called him, and he did seem like a peculiar fellow over the phone.  And I said we were selling the tractor and what did he think it was worth, and he said 500 dollars, and I said OK, but getting it off the property would be entirely his job. 

 I told him we didn’t have a key, but sure enough he called back and asked had we found a key, and I said no.  And then he called from the property and said the tractor was all stuck down in the dirt and the shovel part up front was down and  was stuck in the dirt and he didn’t know how he was going to move it at all.  Well, I said, I didn’t know what I could do being up in Santa Barbara and all; and if he couldn’t get the tractor off the property well that was the end of the deal.

Next thing I know he has called and he has gotten the tractor off the property and he sends a cashier’s check for 500 dollars and I send him a letter acknowledging payment and change of ownership.  I didn’t have a pink slip or even know if a tractor has a pink slip, so I didn’t send him one of those.  That tractor turned out to be a real hassle.  But we had it gone a few days before the deal officially closed

That’s the little tractor above up on a mound of dirt.  As you can see, it was not exactly a small mechanical contrivance.

Life Crisis

So selling a house long distance isn’t so easy.  Especially if you have our fax machine.  I don’t know why we haven’t gotten a new one.  I guess because we got very few faxes, but when I started doing the real estate stuff I started getting faxes all the time, what with papers to sign and so forth, and that meant you had to be right there when the fax came in because the damn machine wouldn’t load the paper properly.  You have to stand there and assist the paper by pushing it down a little to make sure the machine drags it through and does its printing thing.  What a pain!

 

delridgeback

 

 

I was feeling really tired somewhere in there last year in March, April, May, June, July—somewhere in there, so much so that Carol started wondering aloud and frequently if maybe my sleep apnea mask wasn’t working.  The sleep apnea mask really worked; before I started sleeping with that damn thing stuck to my face—the apnea mask I mean—I had begun to feel really tired.  Saturday especially got to me; the idea of going out to stock up on groceries gave me a bleak feeling, like when am I going to get a break.  But after I started using the sleep apnea mask that dark feeling went away and I had a bit more energy.

But back then in those months Carol felt maybe that energy had gone away since I had started to seem pretty bleak again.  Certainly WB’s death and Joan’s health and the equity line and selling the house, as well as what I do for a living, had built up to a good deal of stress.  But Carol’s sense was that this wasn’t stress exactly but something more physiological.  Like the sleep apnea mask.  So I got another one, and it didn’t help.

 It wasn’t until just last November I realized that I was especially tired, not only because of the pneumonia I got around that time, but because, sometime in February, I had decided to go off Effexor.  I mean I was doing 375 milligrams of it per day, plus 300 Welbutrin.  Like that’s 675 milligrams of anti-depressant, so I decided to get off the Effexor, very gradually as people suggest.  Like a drop of 37.5 milligrams once a month.  Looking back I now see that on top of being stressed out I was going through withdrawal from Effexor. 

So underneath all my conscious strangeness and feelings of weirdness and fatigue and sort of out of body disassociate experiences, beneath all that I was going through withdrawal from a real mean anti-depressant and I didn’t know it.  I told people, when they asked, that I was going through a life crisis.  That’s what I thought.  I didn’t have a life crisis at 40 or at 50—but 60 was turning out to be one hell of a life crisis.  Well, maybe it was a life crisis, but one aggravated, agitated and irritated by an undercurrent at the physiological, biochemical level of a really nasty withdrawal. 

No wonder then that I nearly threw that fax machine through the wall one day. Damn, just getting a piece of paper into that machine felt like an overwhelming chore of unspeakable proportions.  Or something like that.

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That’s the back side of Delridge on the same foggy day.

 

Continue reading Life Crisis

As Is

Next we had to set about selling the house and figuring out how to do that.  As it turned out, we were in the position of putting the house on the market at a time, for the first time in years, that house prices were going DOWN.  Hard to believe.  We figured that house would have gotten 660K, maybe more, the year before.  We thought about putting it off; maybe waiting to see if the prices started coming back up.  But that would surely take a year at least for them to bottom out, and more than that to turn around.

delridgefogyday

We just couldn’t wait.  Brother Steve was scared to death that Joan would somehow get herself out of the place she was and go back up there to that house.  I suppose we could have just let her do that and she could have cooked her own goose.  But to brother Steve’s credit and ours too I guess we didn’t want Joan to die inhumanely.  So we decided we had to unload the house and pretty pronto since prices were still tilting downward.  Another reason being that if we managed to sell within the 2006 calendar year, we would still be eligible to use WB’s capital gains exemption and that along with Joan’s we figured would pretty much protect the profit after bills to the state and to the bank were paid off.

A real estate dealer was on the scene as soon as she heard about WB’s death.  She contacted us, I think, and offered her services.  She knew WB and Joan having approached them on several previous occasions to see if they were thinking of selling.  They weren’t, but she already knew the house and from the web page of the firm she worked with it was clear they knew the area—Valley Center—really well, knew what was selling, and what wasn’t.  What was hot and what not.  In any case, I spoke with her on the phone and she impressed me with her knowledge of the area.  She knew all the adobe houses too and what they were like and how they were moving.

We settled on 620K as the asking price in “as is” condition.  That meant we were not going to pop a lot of money to get stuff painted or what not to make the place look better, and it didn’t look as good as it could have.  During the last years, WB hadn’t been up to his usual work standards and the place was looking pretty ragged around the edges; some blocks were coming off the patio walls, and there were dinks and dents in the walls inside from where they had hit them with their ponderous electric wheel chairs.  And WB had tried to build a sort of porch thing off the kitchen door that looked like the construction of a madman, all shambly and falling down.

But they had four acres.  That was good.  The acres might attract people who wanted to run horses.  There were a goodly number of horse people about. But the house was on the small side with just two bedrooms.  Not exactly a family house.  But the walls were adobe and 14 inches thick. There’s nothing like 14 inches of adobe to moderate the heat; and the roof was red tile, and when the big fire had come through a couple of years before, the abode was untouched while the regular frame house a couple of hundred yards away was burnt to the ground.

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That’s the "court yard," I guess you could call it, of Delridge on a foggy day. 

Make Everybody Pay

 

10194fireplace

My feelings about acting as the executor of the money part of the trust were mixed.  I could have just said no and walked away.  The trust said I could do that.  But then the business would have fallen to my brother Dave.  He had done plenty for the folks over the years, and really was at the end of his rope with them.  And Steve—having been written out of the will—couldn’t do it and surely wouldn’t have had he could have.  So I did it.  I suppose I felt good about being the dutiful son; but to really do that I had to see Joan as at least a competent mother.  I couldn’t do that.  So I ended up resenting every minute of time I had to spend on her affairs.

 

That’s partly why I got so fed up with the bank.  We were told we could handle getting Joan’s equity line extended through a local bank.  So that’s where we went with all our paper work.  We worked with a young woman—now gone to another bank—who was pleasant and pretty smart I think.  But neither she nor the bank seemed to know what they were doing when it came to extending an equity line to a trust.

I don’t know how many times we had to go back.  We thought we had given them a whole copy of the trust.  But they couldn’t find it, so we took what we thought they needed, since the trust was a large document, but that wasn’t enough, so we had to bring more documentation.  Then we started signing documents, and I noticed that the documents I was signing had William B. Tingle at the top and not William N. Tingle.  I thought maybe they could just erase the B and write in the N, but no way was that going to happen.  Every time we had to do something more, we would ask who says we have to do this, is there anybody we can call, and always the answer was the lawyers say do it and that was that.

This went on for months.  First getting the bank all the proper papers and then getting the bank to send back the right papers, and then for us to sign the papers, and get some of the papers sent back for correction so we could resign them.  And then we had to wait and wait for them to approve the extension.  We asked for 360,000 against the house, and really there was no reason why we shouldn’t get what we ask for.  But given all the mistakes already made and those damn lawyers out there some where, I couldn’t help but worry and worry over whether the loan would be approved.

 Finally, it was approved and all the documents signed when I got a call saying I had to prove WB was dead.  For God’s sake.  All this time, what had it all been about but getting money for Joan because WB was dead.  I was pissed and told Carol I was going to take in WB’s ashes and dump them all over the young woman’s desk and ask her if that was proof enough.  But Carol calm me down though I was about to blow a cork and managed to find WB’s death certificate that we had picked up when we got the ashes.

The whole thing just wore me down.  The bank as far as I could tell worked under the assumption that anybody who came in for a loan had to be a lying, cheating son-of-a-bitch whose only purpose in life was to find clever ways to defraud banks.  That’s one of the laws of bureaucracy: make every body pay for the actions of the worst among us.

_______
Oh, in the picture.  That’s the fireplace WB built at  10194 Ramona  Drive.  WB was sitting  on the  right end of that fireplace one hot boring day when he lit his lighter under Micky the Dog’s a-hole and made him fly across the room.

 

Clearly hers and fully legible

So how were we going to get that equity line extended?  Joan didn’t seem to have the mental wherewithal to do it, and yet she showed no signs whatsoever of being inclined to relinquish her control over her assets.  So I set about getting her declared mentally incompetent.  This was not so easy.

First I decided to contact the lawyer that had drawn up the Tingle Family Trust back in 2000, I think it was.  She said that she understood the situation being familiar with such situations as a practitioner of family law.  I had, she said, according to the terms of the trust to get two doctors to say Joan was not up to snuff mentally.  Honestly, I didn’t know if she was up to snuff mentally or not.  I didn’t want to force the issue.  One doctor had already given her some little test and he said she was sane.  She knew where she was and the date and everything. But the people where she was staying at that time seemed to believe that she was out of it.

I called and called and finally found out the day and the times of the visits that the doctor for that place was there.  The one responsible for Joan.  He was Dr. Lee, I do believe, and when I was finally able to get him on the phone, he said Joan was out of it and that he would sign a letter to that effect.  I said thank you and could he get another doctor to sign a letter to that effect also.  He said he would try.  I still don’t know what the big deal was; maybe it was something legal.  But I didn’t hear back and I had to call a couple times more, and finally he said he had the signature of another doctor.  With those documents in hand, I could drive down to the lawyer in Escondido and have Joan declared incompetent and by the terms of the Tingle Family Trust I would then be able to get the equity line extended with the overall goal of selling the house.

As soon as I got the doctor letter in the mail I thought there was a problem because it was one doctor letter with two doctors’ names on it, and not two letters each with a different name on it.  It just didn’t look right.  One name was where it should be and the other was just scrawled down at the bottom of the page.  But the lawyer said she thought it might do, so we made an appointment and drove down to Escondido to get Joan declared mentally incompetent.

As soon as I showed her the doctor’s letter, she indicated she was willing to accept it for the purposes of her paperwork but she was afraid no bank would accept it.  Honestly, I didn’t know at that time what the hell the bank had to do with it.  I thought if I had a legal letter from a lawyer a bank would accept that, but apparently not.  I started feeling pretty gloomy, but then the lawyer ask if we knew Joan’s mental state, and I said that we had just seen her not twenty minutes before coming to the lawyer and that she had been alert and knew who we were and had even talked with us cogently for a few minutes.  So the lawyer said, if that was the case, then we should all get in her car and drive back to the place where Joan was and get Joan, being of sound mind and all that, to sign the paper saying I was the financial executor of her estate.

All this was damn confusing.  I mean here I was with a letter signed by two doctors saying Joan was too out of it to know what she was doing, and here was the lawyer saying maybe Joan was sane enough to sign off on the Trust.  So we drove back to where Joan was and the lawyer and Carol and I sat there with Joan, and I told Joan that I wanted her to sign right here on this piece of paper—and I pointed to the line—and that unless she did that I would not be able to assume responsibility for her finances.  This I said, needed to be done, since she, Joan, didn’t seem up to it and I mentioned some things like her forgetting to pay bills.  She said she didn’t forget bills.  And I said, fine, but if she wanted her finances taken care of she needed to sign this document.  She took the pen in hand and gave me a real long look.  I wasn’t sure what that look meant.  But I think I saw some fear.  After all, Joan doesn’t trust anybody.  Why should she, being the kind of untrustworthy person she was, willing to write her most helpful son out of a will just because she didn’t get her way.

delridgeslab

 

I said, “I will take care of it.”  And rapped my knuckles on the table as I sometimes do when I want to make a point or seal the deal.  So she took the pen and made her mark.  She took a while doing it since she takes great pride in her penmanship, and I must say, while a little shaky, the signature was clearly hers and fully legible.

The picture shows the Delridge house in its early stages.  You can see the slab and behind that some of the 10,000 adobe block WB made, and beyond that you can see the hills show few signs of habitation because when Joan and WB moved there in the early 80’s there were very few people out that way. 

Continue reading Clearly hers and fully legible

And all his progeny….

God, even remembering the events of this last 18 months is exhausting.

So we got Joan into the place she is in now, a decent place.  But decent places cost.  In this case 5000 a month plus incidentals, plus drugs, plus trips for the hospital every time she falls down and they think she needs observation in case of concussion.

 delrdigedriveway

We needed we saw for sure to sell the house on Delridge, but in the meantime, we needed to extend the equity line Joan and WB had taken out on the house to cover the immediate expenses at the new place.  They had already taken out a number of years back an equity line for 50,000 but that was nearly used up and they were paying lots of interest.  Additionally, they had not been paying state property taxes for years, using some deal the state had, a real screw you deal, that allowed old people to defer property taxes with the idea that the money would be taken out of the property when sold.  So with that and having to pay off the equity line, a substantial chunk of money was to come out of the money we got for the house right off the top.

But first the equity line.  Since you just can’t put up a sign and expect the house to sell in a couple of days.  Additionally, Joan wouldn’t even talk about selling the house.  Also, she was forgetting things more and more and it didn’t seem as if she was up even to negotiating or doing the paper work necessary to get the equity line extended.

Doing that fell to me as the executor of the financial part of the Tingle Family Trust.  I wasn’t supposed to me the one to do this.  In the original trust brother Steve had been made the financial executor.  But at some point, Joan—and it was Joan’s doing—wrote Steve and “all his progeny” completely out of the will.  Unbelievable.  Here was Steve, living maybe 20 minutes from the Delridge place and going over there all the time to check on them, and bring in the mail, and take out the trash and make sure they had food, and even driving them occasionally to the doctor, several times when some sort of emergency occurred.

I mean damn.  One day Steve comes over and finds WB lying face down in the dirt and when Steve tries to help him up the old man curses him out.  Damn.  He helps out, puts up with their complaints about whatever he does and Joan writes him out of the will.  Probably she was pissed that Steve wouldn’t move right in with them at Delridge like she wanted, and then when Steve decided to take a break, for the sake of his sanity, and go on a little camping trip and visit us folks up in SB, she let it be known that she did not want him to go, and when he did, she had him written out of the will.  At least we think that’s when it happened.  The dates on the change in the trust strongly suggest the two events were related.

In any case, she didn’t tell Steve anything about it and he had to find out about it when looking for some papers she wanted and came across the trust and saw that he and all his progeny (if you can believe) had been written out of the will.  For God’s sake.  Around then we all started referring to Joan as evil.  We are linguistically a conservative group and don’t like to abuse a word and evil has been abused lately, but in Joan’s case it seemed to fit.

This is a picture of the drive into the Delridge House. When I say the house was off in the middle of nowhere, I exaggerate of course.  But this picture does suggest it was off a bit somewhere. 

Nor did he bowl.

After WB’s funeral ceremony in Escondido, Carol and I went to the mortuary to collect his ashes.

wbblock

They were in a pretty big little wooden box.  It felt funny driving around with his ashes.  But that was my job.  He had asked before his death that he be taken back to the little ARP church in Ora, SC, and I said that I would do it.  Joan had asked too.  It never crossed my mind not to do what he wanted.  In my imagination, that’s where he belonged back with his mother and father and the little daughter he had but who lived less than two weeks.

 

As hard as it was on me and Steve too to leave SC, the only place we had known at that point, and felt comfortable knowing, I think it must have been harder on WB to leave that area and his family behind.  WB didn’t develop any real connections to anybody outside family.  There was his wife, of course, and the boys.  And beyond that his brothers and sisters back in South Carolina and that was just about it.

 He didn’t drink so he didn’t hang out at bars jawing with his co-workers.  He wasn’t really into sports.  So he didn’t go to football or baseball games.  Nor did he bowl or go to auto races or golf. Nor did he play pool or any manner of board games. He had fellow bricklayers that he would mention from time to time and he knew some of the brick mason tenders.  But I can’t say that he made any friends in California.

Well, there was one guy that he seems to have done a few things with or maybe a few things for.  This guy was as crazy as a loon and in fact ended up in the mental hospital.  Jack Sickler, I think his name was.  I remember that he and WB staked out Jack’s house I think because Jack thought that his wife was unfaithful.  And I do believe Jack talked about killing his wife and himself at different points.  Maybe they were friends since WB was loony too.  But I think it more likely that WB sort of looked after Jack and tried to keep him out of trouble, though he wasn’t much good at it.

WB was not social really or a scintillating conversationalist.  Even later on when he visited the homes of his children he would say a few things and then go to sleep in the chair he was sitting in or maybe disappear off into one of the bedrooms and go to sleep.

I had occasion, when I was a brick mason tender, to observe him interacting with his peers at lunch break.  They would go sit in some unfinished house to get out of the sun.  They would sit on the concrete or pull up a can of some kind. WB would sit sort of off from the rest.  And mostly they weren’t talking at all.  But then WB would say something like, do you remember that job where we had blah, blah, blah and when was that exactly?  And then if any of the other guys had been on that job they would set to figuring out when that job was.  And then WB would say, and wasn’t so and so on that job.  And if anybody had been on that job too, they would set to trying to remember if so and so had been on that job or not.  And then somebody would say that no so and so had not been on that job but he had been on this other job over blah, blah, blah, and WB would wonder when that job had been, and they would set to remembering when that job had been.

And it would go on like that for the whole half hour, if they talked about anything at all. Those were some of the damndest conversations I ever heard.

That’s WB in the picture mixing up adobe for the blocks for his masterpiece, the adobe house on Delridge.

2.7.2007

 I think I will follow up on my previous entry by continuing to complain for a while.

wbhammerSo while WB was in the home—while all that was going on—and after too, Joan refused to face the fact that she had to leave the house on Delridge Lane.  It’s off in the middle of nowhere.  And partly because of her stroke and her obstinate refusal to listen to anybody, she had fallen down on more than one occasion, and WB being too weak, an ambulance had to come out and they had to pick her up.  This happened more than once; and they made it clear at one point that this falling down and their coming out to pick up business could not go on forever.

So that was one thing.  And we were not sure either about what our legal responsibly was, if any.  Steve was concerned that WB, when he was still there, would go out and even though he was nearly 100% blind from macular degeneration would climb up to the roof, fall off and accidentally kill himself.  If he did, was that our fault somehow?  Hell, we didn’t know anything about this territory.

Joan kept falling down and finally the brothers found a place for her down in Escondido, with a hospital right across the street.  She had a large and plain room and down in Escondido she was able to get herself ferried over to where WB was so she could visit him nearly every day.  She was getting about in this really ponderous electrical wheelchair.

Then I forget what happened.  But she ended up in the hospital, and when they went to release her, she got herself released into the care of a woman who had previously been their care taker, and what do you know, but over all of our expressed concerns about her moving back out into the middle of nowhere, she managed to get herself back into that house, upon which her health began to decline.

I had a long talk I remember with the care taker saying that Joan was just sitting there in her chair unresponsive and that she the care taker didn’t know what to do and that medical issues like this were outside of her range.  And then one night around then Joan fell and got stuck between two pieces of furniture and completely unable to move had to lie on that tile floor till past dawn when the caretaker came, saw her flopped on the floor, had to break into the house and called the ambulance to take her to the hospital.  Seems as if, from later reports, she had a real bad bladder infection and it had affected her brain in some way.  

Who knows?  But that ripped it.  No more Delridge!  So when she got out of the hospital, the brothers got her shipped off to a nicer place than the one she had been in before.  She didn’t have her own room, but she had three squares a day, and the place was clean, and what with brother Steve dropping by regularly and brother Dave too when he could, the staff was not going to just ignore her.

But that place was not cheap.  5000 a month, plus medicine, plus incidental doctor expenses.  5000 a month!  That’s not chump change.  So we had to move to step 2: sell the Delridge property.

 

That’s WB in the picture standing out in front of the house at 10194 Ramona Drive.  He must have just got back from church because that was not his usual apparel.  I don’t know what the hammer is for. He put the brick face on the front of the house and poured the walk way, and a little in front on him, you can see the footing upon which he erected a stone wall about 3 or four feet high.  And in the dirt right by his toe stretching back to the side of the house he put down flagstone, though, as I recollect the flagstone pooped out and he never finished laying it clear to the edge of the house.

This is February 7.  The day WB died a year ago.