Dale Says

Two new residents have joined us at 163 Jersey Street. The newest members of our family, George and Gracie, are two-month-old shorthair kittens who made the journey this weekend from the SPCA to Noe Valley. They are step-siblings who have been together (in a foster home and the SPCA) since they were found abandoned in SF as tiny kittens.

George is a very active black-and-white boy who appears to be wearing a tuxedo. He has a black mask, white tummy, and white feet with black polka dots. He also has non-stop energy which includes tormenting his step sister, jumping and playing, and chewing on anything loose.

Gracie is quiet and reserved, ‘though she seems to be the alpha cat, calling most of the shots among the two of them. She’s calico, with patches of tabby stripes and soft gold polka dots.

George and Gracie are living in Patty’s bathroom until the pantry is finished. At that point, they will move downstairs, and eventually they will be given the run of the house.

So much for peace and quiet!

We lost our kitty last Thursday. Miss Molly, our faithful companion for nearly 17 years, grew very ill and had to be put to sleep while we were out of town.

She had a bad heart, arthritis, and diabetes and had been on a special diet and insulin for the past six months. Despite her ailments, she tried her best to rally for us, and she spent a lot of time sitting on our laps, sleeping at the foot of our bed, and letting us know she loved us.

Each night when I got in bed, Molly would jump up and lie on my chest, purring and snuggling in as close as she could to my face. I petted her and told her she was the best kitty ever, and I think she understood me. After a few minutes, she would go to Patty and snuggle in the crook of her right arm — sometimes spending the night that way.

Now it’s very quiet when we go home, and there’s no one there to greet us. We miss our furry little friend in so many ways. We are comforted by the fact that she had a long and very good life.

In the small town of Naseby, New Zealand I developed an appreciation for the sport of curling.

Prior to this, curling had been one of those sports (like fencing and water aerobics) I saw only on TV during the Olympics. And while I assumed that participants were skilled at what they did, I had little understanding why grown-ups would chase a stone down the ice with brooms.

Naseby, as it turns out, has the only dedicated indoor curling rink in the Southern Hemisphere and by a fortunate coincidence the Pacific Curling Championships were taking place while I was there. So off I went to watch this peculiar sport. I saw Olympic-level men’s and women’s teams competing from Australia, China, Japan, Korea, and New Zealand, watching from a spectator’s gallery above the ice. I sat behind the Australian women’s team, who were watching their male counterparts and waiting for their turn to compete later that night. The ladies patiently explained the sport to me.

Curling is a team sport with similarities to shuffle board and bowling, played on a rectangular sheet of ice by two teams of four players each.

Teams take turns sliding heavy, polished granite stones down the ice toward the target (called the house).

A game consists of ten “ends” (an end is similar to a baseball inning).

During an end each team delivers eight stones – two per player.

The object is to get the stone as close to the center of the circles as possible.

Two sweepers with brooms accompany each rock and help direct the rocks to a desired resting place by smoothing the ice in front of them.

As the Australian ladies instructed, “it’s all about the last throws.” Early throws are designed to set up obstacles in front of the target, or to knock those obstacles away. The last throws for each team are aimed at the target and decide who gets the points (only the closest one or two score).

The team with the most points at the conclusion of ten ends is the winner.

Most curlers have other full time jobs, and some have to pay their own way to regional matches like the one we saw. Most of the Australian women players are also mothers, and they talked about the difficulty of leaving their families behind as they compete. But it seems to be in their blood, as they have been curling for most of their lives.

I’m a convert, and I now believe that curling is an interesting and graceful sport.

The next time you really want to insult someone, call them an “oxpecker” (as in “she’s such an oxpecker!”). 
 
These nasty little birds live in Africa and spend their lives perched on large mammals such as buffalo and rhinos – eating ticks, fleas, and maggots, as well as blood and other secretions from open wounds. 
 
Oxpeckers use their bills to dig in the host’s ears, mouth, nose, and anus.  They travel with and feed off the host.  Each day an adult oxpecker eats around 100 engorged ticks (or more than 12,000 larvae), living off the blood the tick has consumed.
 
We’ve all worked with people like that … 

Miss Molly has been part of our family for more than 16 years.  We found her at the SPCA in 1991, and she picked us out.  I took her and another kitten out of their cages and put them on my lap.  The other kitten wandered away, but Molly immediately snuggled with me, as though to say, “I pick you!”  We didn’t really have a choice. 

When we brought her home, we opened her carrier expecting to see a timid, sickly kitten.  Instead, we encountered a “devil” cat, who lept out of the box with her claws bared.   

She has been with us ever since, and and we’re the only family she’s ever known.  She has been a constant source of companionship, and she loves attention and is very affectionate (to us).  She’s had good health her whole life, and she lives with people who care a great deal for her. 

In return, Molly has been a source of comfort.  Whenever one of us was sick, or down, she knew it, and she found that person and curled up with them.

Now Molly needs our help.  For some reason, her pancreas stopped producing insulin, and she can’t process her blood sugar.  That’s caused her to lose weight, drink excessive amounts of water, and be generally lethargic.  This week, we started giving her insulin twice a day.  It seems to be helping, and will certainly improve the quality of her remaining days.  Giving her shots, monitoring her weight and thirst, and finding extra care for her when we’re gone will be difficult, but really … it’s the least we can do.  Afterall, she’s given us so much.

We may have finally overwhelmed the Magic Corner.  This spot in front of our house has for years been a convenient repository for everything we wanted to get rid of — broken microwaves, used furniture, even a decrepit dartboard.  Every item we have placed there has “disappeared.” 

We replaced a broken coffeemaker a few years ago, and put the old one in the new box and left it on the corner and poof!  it was gone within an hour.  When a friend left his old aluminum trash can on the corner it vanished, and last week our neighbor put a cardboard box full of old clothes leftover from a garage sale … presto! it disappeared.  Nothing, it seemed was too difficult for the Magic Corner.

Well, two days ago I put a shelving unit out there.  It’s one of those “put-it-together-yourself” items from Ikea or Scandavian Design; a three-foot, blond, wood-like thing.  I was sure someone would snap it up in a hurry.  But now, 48-hours later, it’s still there, sweating in the fog.  I’ve seen several people stop and look at it, but so far there’ve been no takers. 

I’ll give it a couple more days and hope it gets picked up.  Afterall, the corner’s reputation is at stake.

(A limerick for Kevin on the 20^th anniversary of his 30^th birthday)

A young man was lured out west

To live his life with more zest.

He found love and was wed,

Became very well fed,

He broke bread and drank wine with the best.

The lad found a niche he could fill,

And a house in the grapes – what a thrill!

His 40s flew by,

In the blink of an eye,

And now he is nearing the hill.

His life so far’s not so bad;

Consider the fun that he’s had.

With friends like those here

And Julia dear

There’s no reason for him to be sad. 

Take comfort and solace, good friend

And know where you stand in the end.

Your birthday, you see

Is only 50 – whoopee!

While the rest of us have gone ‘round the bend. 

I bumped into her at the gas station; I was heading back home and she was running errands.  We stood in the sunshine and visited for a few minutes and she told me what she had been doing since the night my father died last November.   She still worked the night shift at the nursing home, and she would likely continue to work nights for awhile, since she had the lowest amount of seniority among the RNs.  She didn’t mind nights too much, since she was by now used to the hours and it was pretty quiet at night, but she was starting to get a reputation as the “Death Nurse,” which troubled her some. 

Since that night in November when she had been so kind and gentle during my father’s death, five more patients had died during her shifts and she had been there for all of them.  The physicians and other nurses had begun to tease her a little about it, and it was taking a toll on her.  It wasn’t the dying itself she told me (that was part of her job) but not knowing just how present she should be and how much privacy to give the families. 

“I try to get a feel from the family members,” she told me.  “Death is a very personal thing, and every family wants to handle it a little differently.”

 I assured her she had done it just right for our family.  She had asked if we wanted her to stay in Dad’s room, and we had assured her we did.  So she got on Dad’s other side and gently rubbed his back, while we held his hand and gently assured him that everything was alright. 

“I pray a lot,” she told me.  “And pretty much leave it in God’s hands.  And hope I do it the way the family wants.”

 As far as I’m concerned, she’s got the hardest job in the world. which she does extremely well.  And I thank God for her, and for the other nurses like her, who help our loved ones in their final moments.

Thank you for helping

Those who need it most;

And thank you for caring

For loved ones who are lost.

We put them in your hands,

We entrust them to you.

So thank you for being there

And for all the things you do.

Yours is a special calling

For which you’re not well paid,

Except with the inner knowledge

Of the difference you have made. 

President Obama is left-handed.  That may not mean much to “righties,” but it’s a big deal if you’re left-handed.   Lefties keep track of each other.

There have been eight left-handed U.S. presidents; including James Garfield, Herbert Hoover, Harry Truman and more recently Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Barack Obama.  During the 1992 presidential election all three major candidates were left-handed (George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and Ross Perot).  And so were both major party candidates in last year’s election (John McCain and Barack Obama).

Lefties have been leaders (Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon Bonaparte), artists (Michelangelo, da Vinci, Picasso), authors (H.G. Wells, Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain), actors (Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, Tom Cruise), and musicians (Judy Garland, Paul McCartney, Jimi Hendrix).   

Two late night TV talk show hosts (Dave Letterman and Jay Leno) are left-handed, and so are two U.S. Supreme Court justices (Anthony Kennedy and Ruth Bader Ginsberg).

Given the numbers of accomplished lefties, you would think we would have reached equality by now.  Not quite.

Left-handed people don’t live as long as right-handed people, probably because of the stress of adapting to a world made for right-handed people.  Many products (for example, school desks, cash registers, and oven mits) are made for righties, and even simple tools like scissors have to be used in a less than efficient way. There’s a report going around the internet that 2,500 people die each year trying to use power tools with their left hand.  Toilets are the only things made for lefties, which tells you what designers think of us.    

And lefties have a social stigma.  Some people don’t want to sit next to us, for fear of being elbowed, so we are typically relegated to a corner spot.

It’s somewhat comforting that lefties aren’t alone.  Around one in eight people are left-handed, which makes us a sizeable minority group and, if we were to unite, a significant voting block.

Lefties ought to ask Justices Ginsberg and Kennedy to include us in anti-discrimination laws. Or better yet, maybe we should ask President Obama to include financial help for lefties in the economic stimulus bill.   

Note:  This article was published in The American Legion Magazine in November, 2008. 

As a boy growing up in the early 1900s in Baker City, Oregon, Leo Adler’s father advised him to forget about college.  “Let those other boys go, and you stay behind and work,” he counseled his son. “You will be four years ahead of them.”  Leo followed his father’s advice and sold magazines on a street in Baker City.  He worked diligently and eventually developed a seven-state empire with 2,000 outlets and annual sales of more than three million magazines.  When he died, he left virtually all of his money to the communities of Baker City and North Powder, Oregon.  Over the past three decades his bequest has helped fund numerous community projects and (ironically) provided dozens of college scholarships. 

Leo Adler’s generosity has made a significant difference to an untold number of people in northeast Oregon, all because of the thoughtful action of an ordinary man.  And he’s not alone. 

There were no pretensions to Tom Buckley, a wheat farmer in Western Nebraska who appeared to be just getting by. He was typically seen driving an old car and dressed in bib coveralls.  But in his will Mr. Buckley left an estate of more than $7 million to the small community of Chappell, Nebraska.  Today, the trust set up in his name dispenses over $600,000 each year to rural Nebraska communities, providing college scholarships and support to local community projects like nursing homes, fire stations, and sports teams. 

Leo’s and Tom’s stories are heart-warming examples of the type of legacies that have been left to communities throughout the U.S.  Many of these benefactors were ordinary, nondescript citizens who led quiet lives and didn’t appear to have a lot of money.  But in their wills, they left part of what they had to help others.   

Is there a town or organization you would like to help after you’re gone – maybe the community where you grew up, or a school or group that means a lot to you?   

An enormous transfer of wealth (as much as $41 trillion, according to one study) is expected to take place over the next fifty years as the Baby Boomer generation ages.  That’s an incredible amount of money, and even a small portion of it could do an amazing amount of good for America’s communities. 

You don’t have to be rich to leave a community bequest; there are many ways to donate, and many examples of people who have helped by leaving their house, or property, to help future generations. 

Dacie Moses is an example of someone who donated what she could to a cause she cared about.  Dacie, a long-time employee at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota, was known for inviting students to her house for cookies and conversation. In her will she donated her house to Carleton College.  Today, two students live there each year, and her house is a favored gathering spot for students to bake cookies, share brunch, or attend music rehearsal sessions.

Mary Edwards of Grandby, Connecticut cared deeply about her hometown and was determined to help preserve its rural character. In her will, she donated land her family owned, known locally as “The Mountain,” to the Granby Land Trust.  Mary also wanted to make sure her gift was permanent, so she and her attorney structured a fund to pay interest income from her estate to the Land Trust, thereby supporting in perpetuity the costs of preserving the open space.  There are several options for making a bequest, including: 

Create a private endowed foundation Give to a community foundationEstablish a supporting organization

Develop a business or corporate foundation 

Each has advantages and disadvantages and all have tax implications.  Contact an attorney or tax accountant to discuss the best method for you.  Resources for creating a charitable bequest: 

Association of Small Foundations (www.smallfoundations.org)

Council on Foundations (www.cof.org) Foundation Center (www.foundationcenter.org) 

National Center for Family Philanthropy (www.ncfp.org)

Forum of Regional Association of Grantmakers (www.givingforum.org)

Foundation Source (www.foundationsource.com)

Fidelity Charitable Services (www.charitablegift.org) 

About the author: 

Dale Fehringer is a freelance writer and editor. His articles on people, places, and contemporary culture have been published in a variety of magazines and newspapers.  He lives in San Francisco, where he can be reached at 415.602.6116 or by email at dalefehringer@hotmail.com.