No one “estates” anything to anyone. The language won’t allow it even if the tax codes would. The defining feature of an estate, in the modern sense of the word, is that it belongs to you. On the other hand, blood glucose belongs to you, too, and the two notions are treated very differently.
Everyone who knows what blood glucose is would wonder what you were planning on using it for. That is not the question that comes first to mind to people who know what an estate is. But today, I find myself wondering why that is. I think that is a really good question to ask about estates: “What are you going to use it for?”
Bette and I have found ourselves a part of quite a few conversations recently in which the basic logic of our choice of a Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC) has been called into question. The logic isn’t different than it was when we had those conversations over the last ten years, but we have actually done it now–we begin our third week at Holladay Park Plaza today– and the conversations seem to have taken on a little more edge.
There seems to have been a shift from “why would you…” to “why did you…” You can see where that extra edge came from.
The objection is that when you buy in to a CCRC the money is gone. If that money represented your estate—money you were thinking of giving to the kids or the grandkids—it is easy to think that in spending it on yourselves, you are depriving the children of something they had every right to expect. “We are spending this money on ourselves,” this couple might say, “and we hoped we would be able to give it to the kids.” And in some scenarios, we can imagine the kids saying the same thing.
I don’t have any trouble understanding the sentiment, but I see it from a different
stream of stories. I see “children” in their fifties and sixties (and older) seriously encumbered by the process of caring for an aged parent. [1] This parent could have invested in his or her (“”her,” usually) own care by moving to a CCRC, but she did not. She relies, instead, on the daily services of her children to enable her to keep living the kind of life she is used to.
“I want to keep my independence,” she says. “I understand,” says the caregiver, “I would love to have some independence.
If we consider this as an economic transaction—which it is, although it is more than that as well—then the “child,” the caregiver, is trading many years of exhausting toil against the hope of eventually receiving some money. No one would say it that way, of course. Both the giver and the receiver of these services think of them, on a good day, in terms of love and duty and affiliation. [2] These are personal transactions, as they see them, not financial transactions.
But what if the caregiver would gladly give away the hope of receiving “an estate” in order to see that the parent’s needs were thoughtfully and competently taken care of. If she felt that way, and it is a very common way for caregivers to feel, she would yearn for the parent to choose to live in a CCRC and to forego entirely the dream of “passing the estate” to the child. She is not taking care of her mother in the hope of financial gain. Besides, it would be nice to have some of her own life back. And in cases where the burden of caregiving has imperiled the marriage, it would be nice to have the marriage back as well.
This is not a wish for less contact with the parent. It is a wish that more of the the contact be with the person herself. It is crucially important that the parent be supplied with the services her or she requires: being driven to appointments, being reminder of medications, help with meals, and so on. It is not crucially important that the principal caregiver herself do all those things. It is entirely possible to go to visit the parent and just sit and chat or go out to lunch. To do together, in short, the things the two of you like to do, rather than always the things that have to get done.
Buying time like that is what you would get, in this scenario, for using the estate rather than saving it for the kids. But there needs to be a way to say that in less than a page and a half. If it were possible to say, “I would like to estate to you the freedom to use our time together as we choose,” that would do the job. No one will say that.
The notion of usufruct is not a matter of common speech. [3] If it were, the notion of the “use” of one’s retirement and the “enjoyment” of one’s retirement could guide us toward the distinction I am making. The estate is the income itself so “using it” would use it up. Still, I think the distinction is worth making since the parent’s use of the estate would make possible the enjoyment of the relationship.
We could say, “I am using the estate as a way to free you from being perpetually my caregiver and not mostly my friend.” But even there, “estate” is a solid and impenetrable noun and you have to establish a novel verb of some sort to mean anything but “give over after my death.” I like novel verbs, but it takes a lot of work to make them practical in use.
I could look my own children, all now in their 50s, in the eye and say, “I am not leaving you an inheritance; I am spending it on our relationship in these days we are now living.” And they would understand what I meant and appreciate it because of the relationship we have achieved as adults.. But a formula that requires that much background is not fit for use as a general formula.
And I end this essay by saying that I cannot think of an easy way to say this simple thing.
[1[ I know it is common to say “aging” parent, as if it were the process of getting older (I have an aging nine-year-old grandson) that needs to be highlighted, rather than just where on the aging spectrum you are. “Aged” is a place on the spectrum.
[2] On a bad day, maybe just the obligation.
[3]The gains granted by usufruct can be clearly seen in the Latin phrase from which the word developed, usus et fructus, which means “use and enjoyment.” Thank you Merrian-Webster.
He says of his opposite number, the American spy, “I do like him, you know. One can’t help it.” The opposite number in Hopscotch is Miles Kendrick, played by Walter Matthau. Like Yaskov, I just don’t seem to be able to help liking Nicholas Kristof. He writes a lot of things I find fault with (like his September 4 column) but it never occurs to me not to like him. And I liked his father a great deal. [1]
There really isn’t any way to categorize Jesus simply unless the purpose of the categorization is to turn him into a tool of some sort. The bad guys in this column “weaponize” Jesus as part of their social program: opposed to women, opposed to the poor, wholly without compassion. The good guys in this column “instrumentalize” (I know “weaponize” would keep the parallel, but I just can’t manage it.) Jesus as part of their social program: attentive to the needs of the poor, responsive to the feminism of our time, global in its compassion for those who are suffering. I like the second set of programs much better than the first, but from a Christian standpoint, they are both idolatry
McLaren continues with a series of examples of beliefs as distractions—actually, he considers only that they will be distractions. He touches on whether biblical miracles are true as a distraction and, of course they can be. They can also be an invitation to modern Christians to place themselves in the 1st Century as receivers of the good news about Jesus. He contrasts questioning whether Jesus actually healed a leper (that’s the miracle) with focusing on Jesus’s “outreach to the most stigmatized of outcasts.”
So let’s think back a little. Historically, the Democratic party integrated these two agendas within the party. There was a liberal northern wing, which ran the executive branch, and a conservative southern wing which ran (controlled) the legislative branch. Then there was a Republican legislative party that aligned itself with the liberals sometimes, mostly on supporting business and with the conservatives sometimes, especially on social issues. That blue band across the south, normally including Tennessee, was the natural home of the “Austin” branch of the Democratic party. Notice that everything else has changed a great deal.
Well, it is different in one way. Sen. Dirksen was famous for “delivering” the Republican vote in the Senate on the 1964 Civil Rights Act. That wasn’t what he wanted to do at the beginning of the process, but he stayed with it and kept talking to his R colleagues and at the end, delivered the votes.
And once I got that far, I saw that it was the old familiar Tragedy of the Commons and the rest of this essay is an attempt to play our the metaphor. As first formulated, it is about cows. There is a common grazing area which is big enough to sustain grazing by so many cows; not more. But the arithmetic underlying this arrangement is seductive. If Farmer A adds just one more cow to the commons, he uses only a small fraction of the grazing area and he keeps all the profit that extra cow brings for himself. Pretty good deal.
This point tends to be lost on an oversensitive member of the discussion because he thinks that racism is a really important issue. Crossing the line in talking about race is a serious offense. And this guy probably thinks that when someone else shows the sensitivity about sexism that he himself shows about racism, that he is being “oversensitive” or maybe even pretending to be offended to regain the initiative. I know that makes this “oversensitive to race issues” guy look stupid, but he isn’t using all his intelligence if he thinks that only one issue makes people angry.
Furthermore, what I find very hard to remember when I am the one being insulted or demeaned is that we are all beneficiaries of the commons. If the commons represent a style of discussion, not a topic to be discussed, then every kind of discussion is taxed by oversensitivity. We don’t talk about supporting and sustaining families the way we might if the commons had not been so shrunk from overuse. We don’t talk about poverty and homelessness the way we might. We don’t talk about American imperialism the way we might, or the frightening over-expansion of executive power under President Obama.
My solution is taking one for the team. [3] We’re having our discussion about The War of the Roses and someone makes a remark that bears on the race, religion, national origin, or sexual preference of someone else. The potential victim notes it (no problem there) decides it is not the opening gun of a bombardment, and lets it pass without comment.
Bette, her daughter Melisa, and her granddaughters Liliana and Lara [it’s Lara in the picture]—took the view, initially, that the best way to go about reading a novel was to start at the beginning and move through to the end. They granted that sometimes a book starts slowly and you have to exercise some discipline to keep reading until it starts getting interesting, but you will be rewarded for your efforts. Besides, it’s the right thing to do.
and the time of day.
see these characters and developments slide “into place,” I have to know where they are going. That means I have to know what happens and to do that, I have to read the ending. People who like the mystery suddenly resolved should read a murder mystery A and then B and then C, just as it is written. People, like me, who want to enjoy seeing the plot assembled should read it A and then C and then B. And that is the way I most often—not always—read a murder mystery. Jodi Picoult’s hopes to the contrary notwithstanding.
Eastman says that two things are necessary for something to be funny. There must be a discrepancy of some kind and there must be a setting which encourages or allows you to take it lightly. Jokes that turn on ethnic or gender or professional stereotypes are a good example. You can describe a situation that could be understood either of two ways, the classic discrepancy. But in an audience that disapproves of…oh…Polish jokes, let’s say…the permission to regard it as funny is missing. So it isn’t funny. Or at least you try not to laugh at the time.
It’s sad, really. The old agreement was that I tell jokes that make fun of your ethnicity and you respond by telling jokes that make fun of mine. The rule was that “equally offensive” was about the same as “inoffensive.” Under current conditions, the fact that someone was offended by it is the defining trait and we can see nearly anything as offensive.
Why did it take me so long? It wasn’t the Latin quotation. I didn’t know it, but it was easy to look up. The whole quotation is “Vita brevis est, ars longa.” My previous contact with ars with on the Metro-Goldyn-Mayer logo, which says “Ars gratia artis.” That’s how I knew it meant “art”—the motto means “Art for art’s sake.” And, in the same way, I knew that it was pronounced “arz.”
I think I was floating in that current when I hit au revoir because something divided the expression into “Goodbye to what?” and having gotten that far, I noticed that Au is the symbol for the element, gold. That means that one way of sensing the discrepancy is that Au revoir (notice the capital A) is a way of saying “goodbye to gold,” which is a pretty good way of categorizing the meeting where we write the check for our apartment.
Ferdinand Magellan sailed out of the very nasty seas around Cape Horn and found a relatively quiet body of water. He was thankful for how peaceful it was for the same reason that the Pilgrims were thankful for food after having lost half their number the previous winter. We could say that the seas Magellan found were “relatively” calm. So in the general sense, “pacific” means “peaceful.” Everyone who has ever given a baby a pacifier ought to understand that. [1]
But I don’t have any direct interest in Pacific Retirement Services where “Pacific” refers to the ocean. Bette and I are going to be living at Holladay Park Plaza—in a few weeks—and HPP is one of the retirement centers belonging to (affiliated with) Pacific Retirement Services. [3] So right away, as I begin to wonder whether PRS is good for HPP, my mind drifts over to a pacific retirement, the kind I want very much. And that raises the questions of what “services” will help me achieve that. [4]
But before we get to Rover Joe, let’s go back and pick up Kermit. Leroy’s bumbling master, Mordecai Sledge, managed to throw a Sousaphone up in a tree and it came down around Leroy’s neck. Leroy takes off, hauling a whole wagon of musical instruments behind him. He doesn’t know what this thing around his neck is and, having escaped “from”—with no thought yet given to the “to” part—he doesn’t really know who he is either. Kermit solves both of those problems.
throwed out.” That can be usefully abbreviated as OBUWATO. It is why, in response to the first question, he is sad. It is why, in response to the second question, the reason that his master, Mean Floyd, threw him out the window. They invite him to join them as a travelling musician. Rover Joe declines. What to know what the reason was? OBUWATO. He says it so often that T.R. begins beak-synching with him.
private if you know what I mean.” That seems clear enough. T. R. hears her with respect. “Come on Rover Joe, the lady’s got her rights.” But again, that is not what she wants and the second verse of the song begins “Well now no one care about this story…”
In the first scene after Leroy escapes, he is just a donkey running away. But he runs into Kermit, who says, in effect, “You are not a runaway donkey, you are a traveling musician!” I have never seen, in real life, the instantaneous transformation Leroy goes through because Kermit gave him an identity, but I have very often seen a new name given and I have seen a person grow into that name. I have been that person.
moments ago, you were lying here in solitary misery. Catgut was waiting to die and Rover Joe had been OBUWATO. But someone said, “Why don’t you join us?” The choice is really clear. Yes awful things have happened to you. Yes you are lying here because you had no alternative. But now you do. We are asking you to join us.
The Dilettante's Dilemma 