Category Archives: Tingles

An odd ball day, alright.  I am preparing to drive down to see my elderly shrink when she calls to cancel the appointment saying she must go to the hospital because she just received a call about a friend who had to go to the emergency room.  She reassured me she was not the one sick and said she would get back in touch later in the day.  But she didn’t.

Then as I am pulling out of the Blockbuster Parking Lot I get a call from Brother Dave who has been contacted by hospital authorities saying that Joan wants to be resuscitated should she “code.”  But the doctors want her DoNotResuscitate because resuscitating her, in light of her overall condition, would probably kill her.  Talk about your experiential paradox!  When being saved is going to kill you, the end has probably come.

So I went through the Tingle family trust for what must be the 1000thnt time looking for language governing the situation.  I couldn’t find the material I needed, so I called Joan’s lawyer, and the lawyer’s secretary faxed the language to David and sister-in-law, Teresa.  This language appoints Brother David the guardian of Joan’s physical being, and in the document, signed by Joan and signed by the lawyer, she indicated that she did not want to be resuscitated.  So Teresa faxed these materials to the hospital authorities.  Have not heard about the response to that.

I called the hospital to speak with a doctor or a nurse about Joan’s condition.  I was transferred five times, and then the call got dropped.  With surprising calm I called again and this time get Joan’s nurse who can’t really tell me anything—I mean who knows what is happening exactly— but says Joan’s condition is the same as the day before.  Stable? I ask.  You could call it that, somewhat ambiguously she replied. 

 I spoke with Joan for seconds.  I could barely hear what she said.  I don’t think she knew who I was, but did know I was a relative.  She asked if Dan was walking yet.  This indicates she is aware something happened to Dan but really not what.  Then she complained at not having received some jello or something like that, something she was supposed to get to eat, but didn’t.  Then all was silence; then she started talking again, but about what I couldn’t tell since I believe she was talking with the nurse because the nurse came back on and I said goodbye to her.

Then Joan’s case worker called.  I had forgotten I had left a message for her.  She seemed like a nice person.  I said I wanted her to know that to a man—and we were all men—the Tingle brothers do not favor having Joan resuscitated especially if it would kill her.  I said I wanted her to know that, and she asked had I let the doctors know, and I said I had said it to everyone I had spoken with, and that my sister in law was faxing documents to that effect.

 Sort of pisses me off though to think that we must pay 100 day co-pay for the hospital room AND a hundred and fifty a day to reserve Joan’s room  at the place where she was before the hospital should she recover.  Damn I never thought it would cost so much just for a person to take up space.  And empty space at that.

Sister-in-law, Teresa, wife of Brother Dave, worked in hospitals in different capacities.  She and brother Dave visited Joan in the hospital just yesterday, I think.  Teresa writes via email:

She [Joan] has been getting some caddilac antibiotics that can only be given intravenously. She is having pleural fluid removed this afternoon; they insert a large needle in the back and remove the fluid. I think she will feel much better after this procedure. I just received a call from DR Chaun as I write, Joan’s procedure went well. The fluid was actually taken from inside the lungs because the CT of the chest showed the fluid to be "walled off." The DR was not seeing a consistent WBC (white blood count) it was up and down, so the decision was made to remove the fluid and culture it. DR believes Joan’s ability to swallow was impaired with the strokes causing her to aspirate when she eats. She literally inhales food. Joan has a drainage tube from the lung and the doctor said that may be removed tomorrow. No time given for discharge, I’m sure they’ll have to wait to see low consistent WBC numbers. The culture on the fluid will be able to identify the organism causing the infection and what specific antibiotic will work the best.

I find this form of getting old utterly appalling, though I suppose if and when I get to this point, I will welcome whatever the doctors have to offer.  In any case, I am feeling death obsessed again, and when I am just sitting or driving around, have these images of little pieces of crap breaking off in my veins and going to my head and stroking me out.

Teresa worked for a a good while with a biotech firm.  They were making human skin there.  I would tell my students this story.  That they had made a piece of human skin as big as a footfall field.  Also were they to have a male child and have it circumcised (though I did not recommend doing that since doing so reduces the sensitivity of the head of the penis and thus one’s capacity for sexual pleasure) but if they should do it, they should be sure to ask for the foreskin, since the biotech firm my sister-in-law worked for used foreskins as the source skin for the skin they were making, so consequently they might be able to make some money off the foreskin.  Although the market was probably not all that good since the biotech firm had a huge number of frozen foreskins in a vault somewhere in Iowa.

I have no idea how much of this I made up.  But I think the foreskin part is accurate.

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When we bought our little condo back in ’92, I think it was, we paid a bit more because it is an end unit, meaning we share a wall with only one neighbor, and in the back we look out unto a little golf course.  Back in ’92 that didn’t seem like such a big deal; there were open fields a couple of blocks away on all but the east side.  Now condo developments have filled in all the open area.  The little golf course is now a "green belt."  More importantly it’s part of a flood plain that drains off into a lagoon nearby that drains into the Pacific. So it looks as if our little golf course (it’s just nine holes) will remain a green belt into the foreseeable future. 

We have spent weeks and much online time over the last couple of months trying to determine if we needed to file an income tax form for Joan and the sale of the house.  Finally, today, after multiple tries, the lawyer who drew up the Tingle Family Trust for WB and Joan got back to us and said they strongly recommended that we file and get the sale of the house on record, to get the statue of limitations ticking.  If we don’t file and don’t get it ticking, who knows?  twenty years from now, when I am dead, the IRS may decide the Brothers Tingle owe back taxes on a house sold in 2006.

So Carol came with me and we made an appointment to go to H and R Block.  First we got lost, then we had to wait, after rushing around to get there because we were lost and were late.  And well—then, it had to be decided whether we were filing a trust form or an individual form.  So a call was made and it was decided that we do an individual form.  Turns out however that an individual form is actually a joint form, so we needed the social security numbers for both Joan and WB.  We had the former but not the latter, so we had to drive home and find the social security number and then phone back to H and R Block.  We then received multiple calls from H and R lady, plus we made calls to Brother Dave who was up north near Idlewild in a casino to gather information.  We learned WB and Joan paid 55K for the land and about 55K for the construction of the house in about 1980, which we sold for 575,000 in 2006.

So after the H and R lady ran all the numbers it seemed clear we didn’t owe anything tax wise and I guess we could not have filed, but if we hadn’t—who knows—we wouldn’t be on record, I guess.

Big Sky today in SB with winds gusting to 40 mph.

Well, the year that refused to die finally did.  And two days before it went off its final rewards, escrow closed and the money from the sale, minus paying off the equity line and back taxes, showed up magically in Joan’s checking account.

Maybe a couple of weeks before escrow closed—I can’t remember—I ordered another one of those huge dumpsters deposited on the Delridge property, and Dave and Dave and Dan and Dylan went up to Delridge and cleared out the final stuff.  They filled up that dumpster too with more stuff from outside the house and also with stuff from inside.

There had been talk of selling some of the furniture.  Really, though, it didn’t look like we could get much for any of it.  But we couldn’t throw the furniture out either.  So Dave decided that maybe the best thing to do was to rent one of those storage PODS and have it deposited on the property.  So we had one of those delivered to the propery and they filled that thing up too from stuff in the house—furniture and other smaller items.

For a few weeks, Teresa had been sorting through Joan’s clothing to pick out and save what might prove useful, and Steve had made several runs through the house with garbage bags cleaning out the refrigerators and drawers in what seemed an endless supply of chest of drawers.

WB and Joan had always had trouble—especially WB—with throwing anything out.  But during the last couple of years in their stay at Delridge things had just gotten out of hand.  They hadn’t thrown anything out, but stuffed every nook and cranny with old bills, paper work of all kinds, and just plain assorted junk.

 I now believe that if one is old and feels death approaching that one is responsible for cleaning up one’s mess before leaving this earth.  Sort of like picking up after yourself in a final sort of way. Because going through your parents’ stuff is hard, not just physically but emotionally.  

They ended up filling the POD completely up because Dave didn’t want to have to tell Joan, should she ask, that we had thrown out such and such an item.  The POD is now in a storage facility down in Escondido not far from where Joan is staying.  I expect it will stay there, unopened, until such time as Joan is no longer around to ask where such and such an item might be.

Then, who knows, what we will do, but we will do something.

Above: a POD, sometimes referred to as the “mobile storage experience.”  They come in all shapes and sizes.  When the economy completely collapses we will probably start living in those things.

Carol thinks I could have died from that pneumonia, had it been viral.  At the time she said, you look terrible.  I didn’t pay much attention, but one day I looked in the mirror, and I went out and asked her—pointing to my face—is this what you mean when you say I look terrible.  Yes, she said.

I had thought that when a person got old and grey that the grey applied to hair color.  Not so.  One can also get old and grey in the face.  I didn’t know that till the pneumonia.  The color of my face was beyond white; it had gone over into slate grey.  Now if my face isn’t positively ruddy, I think I look grey. 

H

Grey is the color of sick.  I saw this man about my age on campus.  I think he was down and out and had probably come unto campus from the bus stop to use the restrooms.  He had grey hair, a grey beard, his jacked zipped up to his neck, and he was grey. He was the color of sick.

I was getting back to my sort of normal color around the time the Delridge place went into escrow.  The buyer was a Native American; she had grown up in wretched poverty and never owned her own home.  It was a big step and naturally she hesitated, but she had money having become involved in some capacity with the local Indian run casino.

Apparently, she had, according to Suzi, felt spiritually drawn to Delridge.  Maybe it was the privacy and the brush all around.  She seems to have liked that it had been made out of the very earth upon which it stood.  She came up to the property a couple of times at night to check out the spiritual vibes in the moonlight.

We got through escrow somehow.  I made a mistake and wrote on some official document that the place had mold somewhere.  That’s what I had been told after they did the termite inspection.  They charged a pretty penny for that inspection; how many termites can there be in a house made out of mud?  But they had mentioned mold in their report, and so I checked yes next to: does the place have mold question. 

That scared the buyer apparently.  But Suzi managed to straighten it out.  I don’t know how she did but she did.  Also we had to get the propane gas turned back on, and there was some sort of 250 dollar problem with the septic tank. 

My sister in law, Teresa, Dave’s wife, thinks maybe selling the house helped to cause me some stress that could have led to or helped along the pneumonia.  Maybe so.  I had never sold a house before and didn’t know anything about how to do it, and I was doing it long distance.  And I have to say, it seemed, that when I wasn’t thinking about something else, and was just getting a little relaxed that damn house and trying to get it sold would pop into my head.  I couldn’t wait for it to be over.

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The picture shows the living room of Delridge. 

Finally, the summer of ought-six came to a close and it was back to school again, but about 2 weeks into the ten week quarter, I began to run a low grade fever.  It was strange.  I don’t run low grade fevers.  But I did this time.  I kept doing the school stuff but one weekend morning—a Saturday, I think—I woke to a temperature of a 104.  I felt crappy and a little scared.  I hadn’t had symptoms of a cold exactly, more just plain fatigue.

So I went to the walk in clinic with Carol and when they heard they had a sixty year old guy with a 104 fever they took me in almost immediately.  I had a doctor I had never seen before.  But he seemed to know his stuff and said we should get an x-ray.  So I walked down the corridor, sat, got an x-ray, walked back to the little room I had been in before with the doctor and he came in and said I had pneumonia.  He gave me a shot of something and a prescription for anti-biotics and said he was sending me home, rather than to the hospital because going to the hospital, with all the crap floating around in those places, was more dangerous than just going home.  Sleep, the doctor said, and don’t let yourself get dehydrated.

Of course pneumonia comes in both a viral and a bacterial form.  The antibiotics would help with bacteria but not necessarily with the virus.  I don’t know what kind I had, but the temperature went down in about 24 hours though it still hovered around 100.  Maybe the temperature had peaked on its own or maybe the anti-biotics helped.  Funny, but even with the fever I still had an appetite.

When you say you have pneumonia people look at you funny because pneumonia is serious business.  I didn’t really know what kind of serious it was.  I managed to have to cancel only one day of class, in the middle of all this; on another, I had a colleague show a video for me.  So I missed two days over two weeks I guess.  And slowly I understood why pneumonia is serious.  It just knocks the stuffing right out of you.  I had no energy.  Period.  I would drag my ass over to teach and as soon as I was done, I would drag my ass back and lie down.  It was like I needed a fork lift for my ass; it was dragging so bad.

And the crap just wouldn’t go away.  I had made an appointment—as I was told do—with my pulmonary doctor before the pneumonia hit.  So after I had seen my regular doctor about the pneumonia, we planned out that I would see the pulmonary guy to have a final check.  So I went and they x-rayed me again.  The doctor said I had pneumonia alright; the lungs were still a little inflamed.  And then he told me I had a bit of asthma.

Well, damn.  He had a doctor in training in the room with him, and he said to her, “Now what is the one thing Mr. Tingle can do to most improve his pulmonary health.”  Before she could reply, I said, “You mean other than stop this damn smoking.”  So one thing led to another and I was actually up and pacing the room on a rant about all I had tried to do over the years to stop smoking.  And I wanted help I said.  And the doc said this and then he said that, and I said I have tried all of the things you have recommended and that I didn’t understand why if cigarette smoking is as horrible as it is supposed to me why the hell couldn’t I check into like a Betty Ford clinic for three weeks to have a running chance at getting off the “shit.”  And I apologized for my language.

And then I apologized for my rant.  Thank goodness, the doctor, who himself looks like a stroke ready to happen, said my rant had been funny really.

Carol—who was there—said, yea it had been sort of funny, like watching a person ready to burst into tears at any second, and walking right up to the edge of the cliff and then veering away.
 

I don’t have a pneumonia picture, so here’s one of WB’s one good shed up on the Delridge property.

When we got back from taking WB’s ashes to Ora, SC, I stuck my head into this closet pantry we have right under the stairs to the second floor of the condo and right adjacent to the kitchen.  And man—when I stuck my head in—did it stink.  We had been gone back to SC at least a couple of weeks between the end of regular school and the start of summer school, so I figured maybe I had left something in there, an onion or possibly a potato, that had gone bad.

But I couldn’t find anything and when I started really looking I noticed that the wall of the little closet pantry was wet and covered with mold.  That’s what was stinking.  The damn mold.  So we took all our foodstuff that we had in the pantry closet—pasta and cans of stuff and rice and well just about everything we ate (except meat)–and put it all in cardboard boxes and piled them in the little corridor that runs from the main corridor to a little half bath.  The washer and the drier are in that little corridor.  So what with those and the boxes of food stuff it was hard to get to the little half bath and hard to get to the foodstuff too since it was all stacked on top of itself.

Finally, we figured out that while we had been gone there had been a major leak, more like explosion leak, in the closet outside our closet.  We have an end unit—our condo, I mean is an end unit—and at the end of our end unit is a communal closet that houses the water heaters for the whole building our little condo is part of.  So an explosion leak had occurred involving the water heater that had saturated the wall of the communal closet.  They fixed that, putting in new sheet rock.  But nobody had the sense to check to see if the sheetrock that was the wall of our pantry closet and was about four inches from the sheetrock they replaced had been damaged at all by the water explosion.

Man, what a mess.  I can’t explain condo law.  But because the explosion that saturated and ruined and molded up our wall was the result of a condo failure, the condo association had to replace the wall which meant the condo association did the hiring of the people to fix the wall and we consequently were at the mercy of the condo association to make sure the job was well and expeditiously done.  Well, I think it was well done, but it sure as hell wasn’t expeditious.  Damn, the repair drug clear into August what with people coming and going to do this and that.

 First, they had to dry out the wall.  I thought they would just knock it out, but no, because of the national mold scare, they insisted on drying it out just in case some of the mold might escape up the wall, mold apparently being very fast on its feet.  So they stuck this monstrous heat-a-lator thing in the closet that made a terrible racket and heated up the closet to about 120 degrees to kill off the mold.  And then there was this and then there was that and it just drug on and on getting the wall knocked down, getting it put back, getting it painted, getting a piece of carpet for the floor.

I was hoping to quiet down a bit and get some rest after the strenuous months before but, no, here I was teaching summer school—that was my mistake—and having to deal with the constant aggravation of people coming in and out of the condo at all manner of hours to fix that damn closet.

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Our renovated pantry closet is now the best organized closet in the entire condo.

Boy, my memory is just plain going.  Maybe not.  Seems to me you have to remember something before you can forget it.  So maybe my remembering is going.  Things go in one ear and out the other leaving no traces on those brain synapses.

In any case, the house sat unmoving on the market all through the summer.  I never thought about changing realtors.  I guess Suzi and I bonded.  She dropped by the Delridge house the day we were all there cleaning up.  She kept saying awfully nice things about our parents, until I said, well, frankly, we boys did not feel all that positively towards them.  And finally she had to say that she really hadn’t liked the way Joan had treated WB in her presence.  She didn’t go into details, but she didn’t need to.

Also, she told me that last year on almost the same day as the one we were sitting there at that table in the Delridge Kitchen, she and her husband had been topping a hill and were struck head on by a drunk driver.  Her husband was killed instantly, and she was in the hospital a long time.  You couldn’t tell to look at it, she said, but they had remade her whole face.  If I wanted, she said, I could tap her cheek and feel metal or maybe it was plastic.  In any case, I didn’t tap.  And she seemed to know her job very well, and be damned if I was going to start complaining to a woman, now a single mother, trying to make do after the sudden death of her husband and the remaking of her face.So I followed her lead and didn’t say anything as the house sat and didn’t move at 620K. 

 Carol and I belong to a club where we go to work out.  All the members there drive lexuses or Mercedes, or BMWs or some form of those monstrous SUVs.  My 84 Volvo with the paint coming off is always the oldest and rattiest car in the lot.  But I got to talking to a real estate guy in the locker room.  He was a real nice guy.  I haven’t seen him for a while but every time I saw him over the summer and into the fall he would ask about the Delridge house.

As we were coming up on November, he said one day that he didn’t think the market had bottomed out yet, and that maybe we should withdraw the Delridge House from the market for a while and then put it back on at the start of the new year at a reduced price, maybe 600K.  That way the listing would catch the eye of the realtors again and at the lower price it might move. This made sense to me so I called Suzi and suggested the move.  She wasn’t sure about withdrawing it but she did think, the way things looked, that the price should be dropped.

So we dropped it—I forget to what exactly—maybe 590K or 600K, and within two weeks Suzi called saying she had a buyer.  Turns out a person had been interested in the house for some time but hadn’t been up to the 620K, but she would be up to 585K, plus some of the fees normally paid by the buyer not the seller.  So we took it with one contingency.  Escrow had to close before January 1; then we would still be able to claim WB’s capital gains exemption and save ourselves an additional loss of 25K or thereabouts.

I ordered over the phone and put on my credit card one of those huge dumpsters you see behind stores.  Maybe 5 feet high or so.  The waste management company dropped it off and later picked it up at Delridge for around 800 dollars.  Carol and I drove down to Delridge on the Saturday when Dan, Dylan, Dave, and Dave gathered to try to pick up stuff from around and about on the property.

WB had three sheds and two of those had to be knocked down they were in such ill repair.  They were full of junk.  In addition to the tractor and the trailer previously mention, there was old cement mixer, the one used to mix up the adobe block, and more than one beat up and mutiliated wheel barrow and all sorts of other litter all over the place.  The guys filled that dumpster right up to the brim and overflowing in about four hours. But it looked like they had only made a dent and the inside of the house was hardly touched.

But things were getting into shape for eventual sale.  Suzi got a guy named Jose and his crew to come out and cut back all the brush a legal distance from the drive.  I don’t remember what he was doing but he was out at Delridge one late afternoon and was attacked by a swarm of bees.  This had to be looked into because Jose said he wouldn’t go back out there until the bee business was attended to and usually bees don’t attack people.

So I had Suzi call an apian—or bee specialist—who went out to Delridge and found that a swarm of killer or Africanized bees had taken up residence in one of the pillars on the wall around the court yard.  We hadn’t seen them because apparently they swarm only at certain times of day, late afternoon, it appeared, and indeed they would go after a person en masse if disturbed.  So the apian guy came out, located the hive, and wiped out the bees, lord knows with what.

I don’t know.  I just hadn’t expected to encounter killer bees as part of selling the Delridge property.  I had this quasi comic picture of poor Jose fleeing the Delridge property pursued by a pack of angry bees.  I guess we stepped in just in the nick of time because what with the bees and the rats it seemed the Delridge property was very rapidly ceasing to be a human habitation and becoming more a part of the local ecosystem.

The picture shows that portion of the wall where the bees took up residance, in a pillar I believe either directly adjacent to or under the bougianvillea.

What about those rats?

Those rats disturbed us.  WB and Joan had purchased four acres of Southern California savannah covered with mesquite, scrub oaks, and all manner of sticky bushes and grasses.  If a body got off the drive in and try to push a path through this brush it was a hard go; a machete might have been in order.  Certainly, bare legged one would have been scratched repeatedly and probably have given up any attempt at forward movement after a few minutes, and even with pants one would get scratched on the arms and sometimes even the face by a low lying branch.  It was pretty thick stuff with an occasionally bare space afforded by a protrusion of rock.

When WB and Joan first moved there in the early 80’s that brush was all there was in the area.  Higher in some places, lower in others, but mostly brush, a habitat: home to a variety of beasts and bugs.  Deer were seen migrating through the property when they first moved in.  Coyotes were spotted, and even as I recollect an occasional mountain lion.  It was not a good place to keep your domestic cat since they would end up coyote food.  Rabbits abounded and other small rodents.  Birds chirped; I especially liked to catch sight of your crazy looking road runner.

 But over the years more and more people moved in and, sometimes for aesthetic, some times for safety (mesquite goes up like a torch), folks cut back the native brush.  Deer no longer came through; no bob cats were spotted.  Dogs appeared and horses.  But Joan and WB did not cut back the brush, except such as necessary to protect the house from fire.  One of the effects of this ecological alteration appears to have been the mass migration of field rats from the brush where they had been to the brush on the Delridge property.

Those buggers were everywhere.  They had gotten into the attic at one point and then somehow removed.  But we worried, as we tried to sell the house about their having moved back in.  I want to call the rats field rats.  Field rats do not seem so alarming; they live in the fields and frolic about like free range chickens.  But a rat that lives in a house becomes, ipse facto, a house rat and that is another sort of rat completely.  A mean, viscious creature that eats wiring and leaves rat poop all over the premises and is generally a menace to society.

On the day we gathered to clean up the property,  I was inside when I heard shouting, yelling, cursing, rocks being thrown, and “Did you see that thing?”  For in their picking up of junk they had unearthed one of those rats which they described variously as being one huge sucker and as large as a small cat.  I failed to see it sadly.  And while we worried throughout the sale of the house about those rats, we never were required to bring in a rat exterminator.

Thank god.