Dad in his skivvies at Army Reserve camp one summer. He was preparing for a target shooting tournament at Ft. Ord, California, where mornings can be very chilly. The weapon, of course, wasn't loaded. Yet.
My father has been talking quite a bit lately about the funeral he would like to have. This is difficult for me. I am not yet able to face losing him. But he is 89and he does think about it and, even though he has dementia, it isn't illogical for this to be on his mind.
One day this week he told me and one of his favorite caregivers, a smart young nurse named Carmen from Argentina, that he wanted a firing squad at his funeral. The two of us got to giggling as we told him a firing squad was for executions and since at his funeral he would, presumably, already be dead he would have no need to be done away with in this fashion.
But as much as we were laughing and trying to get him to laugh with us, he was determined to tell us that whatever we said, he still wanted a firing squad at his funeral. "They shoot blanks in the air as a salute," he said. He was an award-winning sharpshooter on the Army pistol team for many years, so he doesn't use military terms lightly, even now that he's ill. And I'm sure he's been to a lot of military funerals. Still, the term firing squad sounded very funny to our ears.
"Will you get to have a final cigarette?" I wrote, asking him the question in writing because he is now totally deaf. "Will you wear a blindfold?"
Even he started to giggle at this. "You two girls are laughing about my funeral," he said as he, too, found himself unable to do anything but laugh. "But I know what I'm talking about. I still want a firing squad."
My Dad retired from the reserves as a full Colonel. He now has supplemental insurance from the military called TRICARE and with it he and Mom pay just $3 for most of their prescriptions. I should have deferred to a man smart enough to have his kind of investments and who nevertheless pays just $3 for his pills. He may not remember seeing my sister since she was a baby, but he still knows his military terms, as I was about to learn.
I Googled, "firing squad." It turns out there are two definitions, to wit:
1. A detachment assigned to shoot persons condemned to death. 2. A detachment of soldiers chosen to fire a salute at a military funeral.
"Okay Dad," I said to him when I saw him next. "I will make sure there is a firing squad at your funeral."
He looked at me carefully. Dementia has taken so much from him, but often, he still has his sense of humor.
"That's fine," he said. "But not yet. You'll still have to wait 'til I'm dead."
Dad asks about my sister Kimberly a lot, because right now he only remembers her as a baby. He wants to know what she has been doing since, and is always surprised to learn she is now a grandmother. She doesn't look like one here.
Winston Churchill (who recently relocated from Florida to California) now joins the old Seth Thomas family clock as an earthquake veteran.
It was 10:40 a.m. as the lamp on my desk started to rattle and dance. When you are in Florida you say to yourself: Oh, I didn't know the Space Shuttle was landing today. When you are in California you say to yourself: I wonder if that was an earthquake? And then: HEY! I WONDER IF THAT WAS JUST AN EARTHQUAKE?
Lucky for me, it was just a 4.3 magnitude on the Richter Scale and it was centered in Morgan Hill about 20 miles away.
I was thankful I had secured the 170-year-old family clock on my mantel with very strong sticky strips. It made it through the quake just fine. It is a veteran of the 1989 Loma Prieta quake (7.9 magnitude) in which it flew across a room and (fortunately) landed on its back, cracking the case but leaving the center glass panel intact.
My Royal Doultan Winston Churchill mug made it through okay too, but I must remember to sticky strip him down as well. Don't want Winston coming through the London Blitz only to be smashed into smithereens in a California quake.
It all brings to mind the quake we felt one morning in our apartment when I was a graduate student at UCLA. It was 6:45 a.m. and my roommate and I were in our pajamas and bathrobes reading the paper when the lamp over the table began swinging back and forth over our heads. We ran to the front door, flung it open and stood in the doorway (the door jambs are supposed to project you). The Air France pilot who lived in the next apartment and seemed to come and go at all sorts of odd hours, suddenly flung his door open too and stood there, in full uniform, eyeing us approvingly. He tipped his uniform hat as a good Frenchman should. We dashed back into the apartment, the risk seeming to be less inside than out. The lamp over the kitchen table gradually stopped swinging. Don't know if the Air France pilot ever did likewise.
(For more on the Morgan Hill quake of 3/29/09 go to the USGS site at http://earthquake.usgs.gov/eqcenter/dyfi/events/nc/40234037/us/index.html)
The Chapman family back when the world was young and no one was worried about estate planning. Faye and Ashley, Kimberly at left, and Robin, before she discovered the Neiman Marcus shoe department.
That big organization, AARP, sponsored a program on Public Television last year about facing end-of-life decisions. A friend and neighbor urged me to watch it, knowing I had parents in their late eighties, and I told my sister about it as well. In our two separate cities, we watched it with, at first, amazement and then, with some hilarity.
Why?
Because the program had all sorts of sensible advice such as: "Sit down and talk with your children about your preferences for nursing care." And: "Be sure and give more than one child in the family your Power of Attorney, your Living Will and your Power of Attorney for Health Care." This was great advice, like; "Always brush your teeth," and; "Please adjust your dress before leaving."
Trouble is, my sister and I have learned that not all people are sensible, especially when faced with end-of-life decisions. What do you do if your parents don't really think they are ever going to get sick and die?
Aye, there's the rub.
My father, the engineer, was the family's sensible planner. He invested wisely. He created a family trust to avoid probate for his heirs. But he missed out on some important aspects of estate planning: he didn't discuss with my sister and me his philosophy of investment. He didn't even tell us where he invested, and with whom. He didn't write down the names of his various banks, and, because he wanted to make sure each account was FDIC insured, there are at least half-a-dozen of those. He didn't teach anyone in the family, including our mother, how to manage the estate in case he were incapacitated prior to his death.
And now, that's exactly what we face. The worst case scenario. Dad is incapacitated. Mom, with no knowledge or experience in investing or accounting, is in charge of the finances and determined to stay in charge in spite of her lack of skill. My sister and I have had to become forensic accountants (well not quite, because no one is dead, but you get my drift) to find the money needed to care for our father who is permanently incapacitated and needs 24-hour-a-day care.
I suppose it is not as bad as if he didn't have any money at all. But it is almost as bad. In times like these, stocks in an investment account can become worthless in just a few months if not managed properly. My father's haven't been managed at all for almost a decade. My sister and I just learned about an investment account that, God forbid, actually contains some high tech stocks. I dread looking into this.
I wish AARP would have a program about these end of life issues. About how to sit down and discuss important things with parents who don't believe they will ever get sick and will never die.
I wouldn't laugh quite so hard at such a program as I did at the AARP program I did see. "Always brush your teeth" is great advice. But if fear of the dentist prevents you from keeping your regular appointments, you'll lose your teeth anyway, no matter how much you brush.
The work of an unpaid student intern, at the beginning of her journalism career, at the Los Angeles Times.
We had a big story in Northern California over the weekend that had all the drama, pathos, loss, and sorrow that makes a story a fascination. It cried out for good reporting. Five Oakland policemen were shot and four were killed when a parolee, afraid of returning to jail, ran amuk with a handgun and an assault weapon.
On-the-scene reporting of crime is the forte of television journalism. Unfortunately, this happened on a Saturday, a day when HUT levels (Home Using Television) are low, ad revenue also low, and stations understaff newsrooms. .
So you reach for the newspaper, hoping to find the story behind the story: who was the killer and what had been his life? Who were the officers and what was the record of each? Who were their families? What was the initial incident about? When the SWAT team went in, why did it go in as it did?
I opened my San Jose Mercury News on the Sunday morning almost 20 hours after the shootings and found the answer to none of these questions. Four officers were dead (give their names), suspect also dead (give his name), end of story. Print journalism isn't what it used to be, and what's more, maybe it never was
The San Franciso Chronicle had a much more in-depth report in its Sunday paper and it should have, being 45 miles closer to the scene (though one might argue that 45 miles is nothing today). Its follow-up reporting has been excellent. But the Chronicle, still owned by the family of legendary Californian, William Randolph Hearst, has been hemmoraging money (losses of $300M between 2000 and 2006, at least $1M a week lost this year) and may not survive. Unions at the paper recently agreed to some concessions, and that may help. But the Hearsts say they don't know how much longer they can continue to lose $1M a week and still publish a newspaper.
You can Google the newspaper business and read the long list of papers in America that have folded this year (the Seattle Post-Intelligencer ended its long run last week). What we'll miss are the background stories, the back stories, the talented "story telling" of veteran reporters that give us the "why" we so rarely learn from a television report.
Will all information gathering and dispersal now move to the Internet? I guess the answer is that "experts" believe it will. And that's okay if we can find Internet sites that check their facts--as established newspapers have been careful to do--and have talented storytellers on call, as good newspapers have always been able to hire. A business such as journalism has to adapt--as it continually has since Benjamin Franklin used to haul his own printing press around to make sure his own views were circulated wherever he went, France included.
My career in journalism began when I worked as an unpaid intern at the Los Angeles Times. All of my by-lines were on stories no one else at the paper wanted to cover. But it was good training for me. As a journalist who knows the limits of television (time limits being among the most critical), one of the things I continually seek in print reporting is depth and background I can't find and don't find on television. So it has been distressing to see newspapers, in response to the competiton from television and the Internet, attempting to be more like these new technologies instead of less like them. I have long thought that newspapers needed to find a unique position--fill the void of longer, deeper stories instead of giving us lighter more shallow coverage. We're already getting that elsewhere. Do they think we're fooled when they try to make a newspaper more "graphic" and thus more like a television story?
Newspapers have been slow to adapt. Unions on newspapers have been slow to make concessions that might have made adaptation and innovation possible. Joint publication with other organs--say a New York Times/San Francisco Chronicle, that had local stories by the Chron and the national pages of the Times--hasn't even been considered that I know of. Innovation on delivery (you print it, you put it on a truck, you throw it on a porch--come on!) hasn't been attempted, that I know of. Businesses in America that don't innovate cannot survive. And print journalism, as much as it is desperately needed, has continued to be one step behind the curve, just when it needed to be otherwise.
I want my morning paper. I want print journalism to survive, in some form, so that I might find and read information I need and can trust to be true. I confess, I like to read! I like to read long, interesting stories! Newspapers operated in old-fashioned, old-union ways won't make it. And I want them to make it because, it is true, as Thomas Jefferson said, that: "The light which has been shed on mankind by the art of printing has eminently changed the condition of the world." Somehow, the same just cannot be said for a Twitter or a Tweet.
It's not for nothing my grandfather called me Sparky. I had this idea this weekend involving Jell-o.
You see, my friend Leslie's husband Mike has had surgery on an unspeakable part of his body that makes digesting food somewhat challenging at present. He's just home after two long weeks in the hospital. I thought it would be fun to make him a really fancy dish of Jell-o to help him laugh through the pain of the bland diet he is forced to consume for the next few weeks.
I asked my mother if she had any Jell-o. I don't even know where you buy the stuff. Haven't made it since I was in Girl Scouts. Mom says, oh sure I think there is some up in the cupboard.
Some? How about a dozen boxes, all purchased in about 1964. There must have been a big sale on Jell-o that year. Anyway, we read the directions and I unearthed a spectacular copper Jell-o mold from the bowels (oops shouldn't use that word after my friend's husband's surgery) ... er, from the depths of Mother's kitchen. I removed the two bugs that had died in it long ago, washed it, made the Jell-o and managed to get it into the fridge without spilling too much of it on the floor of my parents' house.
Dad, meanwhile, had been having a few difficult days. His caregivers on the weekend may have confused his medicine, or perhaps he's just having a little trouble with his diet, but he's had a few nights of--sorry to have to mention this--throwing up. Last night I gave him a Pepcid after dinner and hoped that would do the trick.
I was worried about him, so I called this morning at 7:30 a.m. to see if Dad had had a good night. My mother said he'd had a little trouble with his stomach, but then said she had something difficult to tell me. Oh no, you say to yourself. When anything is difficult to tell and your parents are in their late eighties, you expect the worst.
"The caregiver on duty during the night was worried about your father's upset stomach. So she served him some of your Jell-o."
The laugh was supposed to be for Leslie's husband, but it turned out to be on me. My fancy gelatin dessert--destroyed before it every saw the light of day, just as Mrs. Jordan's aspic had been in Dinner at Eight. Well heck, if Dad needed my Jell-o, it was okay with me. Hard to believe I'll be making Jell-o for the second time in one week after a thirty year hiatus. But there is--and I can say this with absolute certainty--a lot more Jell-o where that came from.
My best friend Keith, at left, my sister Kim, Robin, and my sister's best friend Gene, on a birthday outing to the Fleischacker Zoo in San Francisco. They sure dressed us up in those days!
I've wanted to write about my childhood friend Keith for a long time and this week, writing about my father's remote controlled model airplane, the Sparky-K, I came across a picture of the two of us, long long ago, with my Dad. Keith was my best friend growing up and his bittersweet story has haunted my life.
Keith lived just up the street and he and I were close in age, so it was probably inevitable that we would be friends. Or, it may have been that I always felt Keith somehow needed my protection: odd for a girl to say about a boy, but I was boisterous where he was shy and we became inseparable.
Brownie had a Chevrolet station wagon that was two-tone red and white and he had a fishing boat he had painted red and white to match. Once, he had Keith and I help him clean his garage (it was the immaculate garage of a meticulous flier) and I remember he pointed to a bucket and asked me to take it out of the garage so he could sweep. I reached down to pick it up. It weighed more than I did! He gave me a wink. It was a bucket full of fishing weights and when I found I couldn't budge it he reached down and picked it up with one hand. No wonder we adored him.
The elephants get the most ink in this shot on the same birthday outing to the zoo: Robin at left, sister Kimberly, Keith, and friend Gene, clowning it up.
Keith was adopted. It wasn't a secret. I think Keith told me himself. His mother Elma was thin and fragile and Keith had no brothers or sisters. I remember his mother Elma as ethereal--almost the opposite of Brownie. Where he exuded happiness and good health, she looked liked porcelain--as if you could see the light through her skin and hair. She dressed beautifully every day and wore a neatly-ironed apron when she came to the door to call Keith in from play. She was very nice and loved Keith dearly, but there was a shadow over her that even a child could see. We were told she had asthma and she was often ill.
The year I was six, Elma's health deteriorated. Keith's father was often away with his airline job and Keith spent most of his time at our house with me. His mother's asthma had gotten worse, they said, and she was often bedridden. Doctors came and went. My mother asked Keith to eat dinner with us some evenings and that was pretty unusual.
One morning, the phone rang before school, also unusual. When my mother put down the telephone she looked worried. Keith and I always met on the corner to walk to school together. She took me aside.
"Keith's mother has died," she said. "Brownie called to say he would tell Keith when he gets home from school today. Please don't say anything to him. His father wants his mother to be gone before he breaks the news to Keith." Keith's mother had had lung cancer, not asthma, and though I didn't understand then what "gone" meant, I do now.
It was an awful day. For a child to keep such a dark secret from a best friend was awful. I said very little. My mother even came to school at lunchtime to see me and make sure everything was okay. It was okay. I hadn't said anything. But it was a terrible day.
And then it became a terrible year. Because Brownie was gone so much, he hired a series of housekeepers to care for Keith. And Keith was miserable and absolutely awful to all of them. He cried often and shouted at the housekeepers that he hated them--of course he hated them, they were not his mother--and he stomped his feet a lot and begged his father to come home. I did what I could to comfort him, but there wasn't much I could do. Imagine what his father must have gone through. He had lost his wife and had to work to support his son. Flying had been his life. And now it was keeping him away from the son who needed him.
After a year, Keith had what sounded like good news. His father was going to get married again and he, Keith, was going to have a new, older sister. Brownie had known the widow of a pilot friend for many years and I'm sure he felt that marrying her was a solution to the seemingly impossible problems he faced with Keith.
Keith was intrigued. He loved the idea of a new mother and a new sister. I remember Brownie and his bride going to the Caribbean on their honeymoon. They brought Keith and me back some some maracas.
But the honeymoon was a short one with Keith and his new stepmother. He wasn't used to having a sibling, favored by the new mother figure, and he wasn't used to sharing his father with this stranger. He made life difficult for himself and his family with his misery and grief.
Unfortuantely, just that year, my own mother's health took us to Phoenix for one winter school term. Keith, who had been forced to adjust to death, the absence of his father, and the addition of two strangers in his home, had now lost his best friend. In desperation, his father bought the family a new home and it became another agonizing adjustment for Keith.
So when we returned to Los Altos nine months later, Keith was no longer a neighbor. I wanted to go over and see him at his new house, but we had a family vacation planned and Mom and Dad said we could go over and see Keith when we got home.
We went on vacation. Then, at my grandmother's house in Spokane, my parents received a special delivery letter: Keith had drowned in a swimming pool accident. I remember my mother telling me and I remember how unreal it seemed. I hadn't seen Keith in ten months and I was never to see him again. There were no goodbyes. It was an impossible concept for a nine-year-old child. Keith had vanished from my life.
The funeral was over when we got home, but Brownie called and asked if I would come over with my Mom to see him. I knew Brownie loved me and I wanted to see him too. I thought perhaps he could explain this sad thing to me--I expected a lot from adults back then. The Browns new house wasn't far away but instead of letting me ride my bike, my mother put me in the car and we drove to see Brownie.
It was a pretty house and Keith's stepmother answered the door and asked us in. She served us lemonade and cookies. The house was dark. It was a sunny summer day, but all the blinds were closed and the dark room made me shiver. And then, I heard a sound I shall never forget. I heard Brownie sobbing in the next room. Big, hearty, handsome Brownie was crying. We sat and sat, but he was unable to come out and see me. Finally we went away. Brownie had not been able to leave his room.
I hadn't thought about Keith in many years when I came home one year to Los Altos during a difficult time in my own life. I was all grown up and I was getting a divorce and I was hurting. In my family, if you are hurting, you are expected to hide it. I kept it in.
One day, I reached for a book on a bookshelf in the house my parents had owned since I was a child and as I opened the book, a letter fell out and drifted to the floor at my feet. I picked it up. It was a letter from Keith that he had written to me during the nine months my family and I were in Phoenix, the year of so many sad changes for this young boy.
"Dear Robin:
We miss you. My Dad says to say "hi" to all you girls. I hope you will come home soon.
Your friend,
Keith"
How that letter got into that book and how I happened to select that book at that very time in my life is a mystery. It was as if Keith reached out to me to remind me that I had once given him my unconditional love, and that he had returned it and that it had never really gone away. Perhaps that kind of love doesn't disappear and is only transmuted.
I've thought for many years that young Keith's life had become too painful for him to endure and that his death at the age of eleven was a release for him. The letter that fell at my feet that day touched me, because it suddenly made it clear to me that my own pain was not as his had been. Mine was endurable and I would recover.
You never lose a friend like Keith. Perhaps I had only been able to help him a tiny bit long ago, but that tiny bit of love had connected us. And perhaps, just when I was in need, he had reached out to me as a way of saying thanks.
Robin and Dad at the flying club on the one and only day she flew in his plane.
Airplanes have always enchanted my father and have thus been part of the life of my family since my sister and I were children. He was eight when Lindberg flew the Atlantic and he even got to see the Spirit of St. Lewis when it came to Birmingham later in 1927. My Dad learned to fly when he was in college, spent his war years building runways for airplanes (and asking pilots if he could go up with them "for a spin"), and then began his working life as an aeronautical engineer.
There was a 1950s TV show called Sky King, in which a rancher flew his own plane and kept the bad guys on the run from the air, and I'll always think of Dad as our own Sky King.
Mom wouldn't let him fly when we were young. For whatever reason, which we won't analyze today, she believes gratification should be postponed indefinitely.To his question of "why?" she told my Dad that she didn't want him to auger in and force her to raise "these two girls" alone. She made him promise not to fly until we were grown. Fair enough. But statistics show he was much more likely to die in a car accident on the ground.
Dad, Robin, the Sparky-K and Robin's childhood friend Keith. One day, when I can, I'll tell you more about Keith, who died when I was nine.
Anyway, while we were kids, Dad flew model planes, long before there were model plane clubs that made flying these toys a social event. You could say he was ahead of the curve. Or you could say he was a man who marched to his own drummer. Or you could just say he was a nerdy engineer who liked planes and, deprived of the chance to fly real ones, flew toy ones instead.
The Sparky-K posing under our clothesline.
The first one I remember was one he built himself that had a little gasoline engine. He called it the Sparky-K. Sparky was the nickname my grandfather gave me for reasons that I assume are obvious to my acquaintances and K was for my sister Kimberly. Until it was damaged in a slight landing mishap in a field adjacent to Stanford University--Sully Sullenberger wasn't available to glide her in--she was Dad's favorite toy plane for Saturday afternoon-after-the-chores fun.
You could have knocked us all over when my father, who has a very long memory, joined a flying club after he retired. At the age of sixty-nine he started flying real planes again. I guess my mother figured if he augured in at that point she would be left well-fixed indeed and, what the heck, it would get the old guy out of the house.
He and his flying club friends never went anywhere in particular when they took off from Moffet Field in Mountain View, California. Mostly they would just fly to another Bay Area airport, have lunch, and fly home. Once, when there was a whale stuck in the Sacramento River, he and a friend flew to Sacramento, rented a car and drove to the river to see if they could spot this Wrong-Way-Corrigan mammal-of-the-sea. It was all just fun for Dad. His hearing wasn't good, but he and his flying pals wore special headphones with microphones that amplified each other's speech and the voices of the air traffic controllers, so it was still possible for him to fly safely, even with his handicap.
I'm always up for an adventure. So one summer day in the 1980s when I was in Los Altos on a visit, I asked Dad if he and his friend Ollie would fly me to Carmel, where some friends of mine were staying. Dad checked with Mom and the trip was set. This was a rare time when my Dad's flying club plane was actually going to be used for transportation.
His aircraft, his checklist. Prepping for flight on that fateful day.
We got into the plane on a sunny morning and my Dad took the old battery out of his headset and put in a new one, just to be safe. He tucked the old one in his back pocket, ran through the check list, and off we went.
I must say I wouldn't recommend flying when the pilot is someone you know and love. For the first time in my life in a plane, I was scared to death. Dad seemed very fidgety, too, and when we flew over the Coast Range and then, briefly, the Pacific Ocean, I was sure I was going to have a heart attack. He kept squirming in his seat--not comforting, I must say.
Finally we approached the Monteray-Salinas airport and I heaved a sigh of relief. And then the pilot, my father, said a bad word . My father never says a bad word. This is not done in my family. This particular day, the bad word was damn! and since it was said as we made our final approach to the airport I put my two little hands together and told God I was very sorry for all the bad things I had done in my life and hoped he would, nevertheless, let me in to heaven when this plane crashed and we all died.
But we landed safely.
"Dad," I said as we disembarked. "I think it might be best in the future not to say "damn" on final approach and scare your passengers to death." He laughed and laughed. It turns out a funny thing had happened.
When he put the old battery from his headset in his back pocket he didn't think a thing about it. But as we flew over the Coast Range and the air grew a little bumpy, his old battery began making contact with his keys and all during the rest of the flight he had been getting repeated little shocks to his rear end. I guess as we were on final approach he got a big shock, not a flying kind of shock, just a battery-in-the-bottom kind.
It was funny. But, from that day foward Sky King flew without me. The crash of the Sparky-K was still a fairly recent memory, after all. I much more enjoyed admiring his flying prowess from afar. Very far afar.
When he turned eighty and could no longer hear at all, he quit flying. But he did not really quit flying. He went back to flying model planes and it was just a few years ago that my sister took some pictures of him at our old junior high, flying a remote-controlled plane someone had given him. You just can't keep a good aviator down. Just make sure to keep the 9 volt Energizer out of the pocket of his pants.
He's not flying anymore, but as recently as 2004 he was out launching his planes in the summer sunshine.
