Very tough.

When I was toiling for a Knight-Ridder newspaper, the executive editors of each paper wrote a monthly memo to HQ, bringing the boss and peers up to date about what they’d been up to for the last calendar page. Personnel changes, great moments, etc. Mild stuff that got passed around.

They varied in readability, but the best one by far was from the Philadelphia Daily News, i.e., the tabloid, i.e., the one that didn’t take itself as seriously as the other. That editor, Zack Stalberg, sprinkled his with short, blackly comic items from the police blotter, each one subtitled, “It’s a tough town.”

I thought of that when someone sent me the website for Philadelphia DA candidate Charles Peruto. The About Me page specifically, past the blather about his career bio and to the subheading “The girl in my bathtub.” The dead girl, specifically:

In 2013, I was dating a girl for about 6 weeks, and didn’t really know her. I learned more about her after she died by reading an investigative article done by Philadelphia Magazine, written by Lisa DePaulo, which opened my eyes.

In short, the best way to start with this is the Medical Examiner’s report. Her BAC was .45. The cause of death was alcohol intoxication, but because she was found in my tub, everyone, including myself, assumed she drowned. So many empty vodka bottles were found, it looked like there was a party in my house, but inspection of the security video of people entering and leaving showed only her.

Whoa, really? What a tough town. Of course, as in any story involving…anyone, really, it’s wise to seek out alternative versions, especially when the girl in the bathtub isn’t even named. In this case, the Daily Beast filled in some blanks. The girl in the bathtub was Julia Law, and:

The 26-year-old had been a paralegal in Peruto’s law office, where they struck up a romantic relationship. This was something of a pattern for the 66-year-old lawyer. As news of Law’s death broke, Peruto received a series of angry calls from a woman named Genna Squadroni. She was “his 25-year-old recent ex-girlfriend of three years,” Philadelphia Magazine reported, who had also worked in Peruto’s office—she had hired Law herself.

Also, the six weeks of dating and how he “didn’t really know her?” Hmm:

The description clashes somewhat with the message Peruto shared on Facebook shortly after Law’s death. “It’s very hard to find someone who really matches you on all eight cylinders,” he wrote at the time, in a post cited by NBC 10. “I found my soulmate hippy, and can never replace her. We worked and played, and never got enough life…Earth lost the best one ever. Happy birthday baby.”

Philadelphia isn’t my town, and I’m staying out of this one, but you know what I hear? That it’s a tough town.

So, a little more bloggage:

I don’t think Melinda Gates and I would ever be friends, but it’s refreshing to see one person immediately had the correct reaction to Jeffrey Epstein and acted on it, also immediately.

And how the second Civil War will start. With an election, of course:

The Big Lie that Trump really won the election is now canon among a majority of Republican voters. Any Republicans who refuses to toe the line is branded a heretic, and elections officials who dared to certify Biden’s win are being censured or stripped of their power. Arizona Republicans have sponsored a bogus “audit” of the election full of crackpot conspiracy theories, and Republican legislatures have been busy taking control of both running and certifying elections out of the hands of county official in Democratic-run cities and counties. The context of the January 6th insurrection at the Capitol was the attempt by Congressional Republicans to refuse to certify the Electoral College tally, in the hopes of sending the election back to gerrymandered Republican state legislatures and handing Trump a win as part of a anti-democratic coup. It was a physical coup attempt designed to intimidate Congress into enforcing a legislative coup. Republicans who refused to back the latter are facing steep primary challenges.

It’s hard to overstate how dangerous this is, and what its consequences might entail in the very near future. As Greg Sargent notes, the “GOP appears to be plunging headlong into a level of full-blown hostility to democracy that has deeply unsettling future ramifications.”

Monday we put the boat into the water, an act that is rarely easy but hasn’t led to disaster so far. Of course Mother’s Day at our location was rainy and dreary and cold, and only the rain and dreary will be gone tomorrow. But we’ll see. Wish us luck.

Posted at 4:13 pm in Current events |
 

49 responses to “Very tough.”

  1. Deborah said on May 9, 2021 at 6:18 pm

    Good luck on the boat launching Nancy.

    Mother’s Day around here is sunny, windy and too cool to eat outside.

    We spent the morning driving my husband out to Abiquiu to get the cabin ready for the summer. What we found was ghastly. Somehow the back doors to the lower level had come open and there were mouse turds everywhere. Shudder. My husband thinks it happened recently as the temps warmed up the double door frame expanded and the locks didn’t penetrate anymore. I was horrified. My poor husband is spending the next few days there, solo cleaning it all up. He has to go through everything to root out critters and find nests etc. you couldn’t pay me a million dollars to do that.

    Meanwhile LB and I headed back to Santa Fe where there’s another whole shit show going on. There’s a Boys and Girls club next door, or there was, they moved out after having been there since the early 40s and the city is selling the property. Our condo property backs up to the athletic field part of the B&G former property. A month or so ago a city crew came out and butchered all of the greenery around the field along our property, encroaching on our greenery too. It looks horrible and exposes our property in an unfortunate way. It’s going to take weeks to clean it up and come up with a way to bring privacy to our side. This will involve extending a wood slated fence when wood is so expensive now.

    I’m not in a great mood this Mother’s Day. Sigh.

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  2. alex said on May 9, 2021 at 8:34 pm

    Our gardening plans got rained out so instead I spent the day preparing a nice meal for Mother’s Day and we dined with my parents this evening. What a monsoon it was, and less than 20 miles north of here it was coming down as snow.

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  3. Sherri said on May 9, 2021 at 11:16 pm

    “Many times, the reason being is that qualified people won’t get into politics because things in their background will be brought up, that they have no control over, and they don’t want to deal with it.”

    Says the man who liked to date young women in his office 40 years younger than him, but is upset that one of them drank herself to death in his bathtub and people keep bringing it up.

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  4. beb said on May 10, 2021 at 1:20 am

    Was it “never be caught with a dead girl or a live boy.” Or was it dead boy or live girl? Either way Peruto must be an idiot to think he can be elected with a skeleton like that on his CV.

    Our Mother’s day was spent driving around to pick up coffee, some cat food, Chinese for supper and ice cream. Not much of a Mother’s Day but we did get out of the house, something we don’t do every day.

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  5. jerry said on May 10, 2021 at 2:30 am

    Yesterday wasn’t Mother’s Day over here. Instead we had our two Uk based sons round and celebrated our long delayed Christmas – wonderful to see them and to hug them. It was the best day to date this year.

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  6. ROGirl said on May 10, 2021 at 4:40 am

    Off-topic, but if anyone watched 60 Minutes last night, there was a story about a WWII intelligence unit called the Ritchie Boys. My father was a member of that unit. He was born here, but he knew German and French. The limited stories I heard were that he trained to go in with the Normandy invasion, but he got appendicitis so he wasn’t part of it. He did end up in Germany in 1946, where he was an interrogator. He mentioned that he could have joined the CIA after the war, but he wasn’t interested.

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  7. Dexter Friend said on May 10, 2021 at 6:02 am

    I am not a word nazi, but “hippy”? How could anyone of that age not know how to spell a keyword of his own times?
    I called all three daughters to check in on them about how they spent Mother’s Day and all were in good spirits, while I had a horrible nightmare, which I was not surprised from, as we always, always had joyous family gatherings before. I am self-enforcing the no-dining-in, no travel rule until July 4. These full baseball stadiums like in Atlanta, with only a few masks visible, seem insane. We can really minimize the virus if we just hold on for 7 mere weeks. Nope, don’t wanna do it. This will ensure a fall flare-up I just heard. People think they get the shot, wait two weeks, all OK. We can all contract the virus and spread it all over…the vaccine just means we ourselves won’t get sick, hospitalized, or die. I try to tell people I heard this from Fauci, Redliner, and other scientists, and some think I subscribe to wacko nation. The facts are facts. But things are coming back, resorts along the Eastern Seaboard are booked solid, and get this: NBC Nightly reports that rental cars are averaging $700…per day. Yes. Now who in the fuck can afford a weekly car rental for $5,000? Jeezuss!

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  8. alex said on May 10, 2021 at 7:27 am

    I saw the Ritchie boys segment and was surprised, as I’m sure many are, that this isn’t a better known part of WWII history.

    In upcoming mayoral and gubernatorial elections in Indiana it will be interesting to see where Republican candidates stand on the Big Lie. The mealy-mouthed “well, there were irregularities” bullshit is already wearing thin and won’t pass muster with either side. Pass the popcorn.

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  9. Julie Robinson said on May 10, 2021 at 9:19 am

    Sherri, if you really want to get angry, listen to the tape of Matt Gaetz speaking at The Villages yesterday. He was using the allegations against him as the basis of a joke; one that brought lots of laughter. I had to get up and turn off the radio.

    Deborah, I would rather clean up mouse turds than listen to Republicans promote the Big Lie.

    jerry, I knew that Mothering Day in England was earlier than here, but I learned only yesterday that it’s the fourth Sunday of Lent, so movable.

    I had as good a day as you can when it’s 38 degrees and raining all day. Brunch here with my mom, both kids called, then the ultimate Mother’s Day luxury, a nap. Today it’s back to packing.

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  10. Deborah said on May 10, 2021 at 9:45 am

    It was so nice to look out the kitchen window here in Santa Fe and see greenery, now it’s just a dull brown field through a chain link fence. Eventually it will get covered with a wood fence and then we’ll plant vines to grow up it, but that’s weeks if not months away. There are remnants of a thick vine all intertwined within the chain link fence that’s now dead of course. We have to unclog that from the fence first. At least it’s outdoor work, something I miss when I’m in Chicago.

    The report from Abiquiu is that it’s all cleaned up. Poor S slaved away yesterday. He had to go through everything, lock stock and barrel.

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  11. LAMary said on May 10, 2021 at 10:27 am

    I just heard that Matt Gates and MTG story on NPR. What crap.
    Deborah, it’s good the mice and their poop have been removed. I recall Hanta Virus being a problem in NM, spread by mice and droppings.
    And on a less scatological note, both sons did my mandatory tree, brush and whatever maintenance yesterday as a mother’s day gift, followed by grilled chicken, corn with miso butter and scallions, homemade Cole slaw out on the deck. The fire dept. has strict requirements and the sons saved me about a thousand dollars by putting in a long day’s work.

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  12. Julie Robinson said on May 10, 2021 at 10:33 am

    Is anyone else making travel plans, save our hostess? We’re going to New Orleans in October for our niece’s wedding, postponed a couple of times during the worst of the pandemic. Finding places to stay was extremely challenging and made more difficult by NOLA architecture, which is to say lots of stairs. While we were looking at places, two of them got booked. So we jumped on one with a minimum of stairs.

    Then there’s the plane trip. I thought moving to Orlando would mean more choices than Fort Wayne, but most were two flights going through Atlanta, where I’ve never had a good experience. So we’re driving; it’s nine hours and won’t take much longer than flying, plus we won’t have to rent a car at an exorbitant price. It also allows us to cut a night off the Airbnb and leave right after the wedding.

    The logistics of planning this trip gave me a headache. I’m out of practice.

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  13. Dorothy C Michalski said on May 10, 2021 at 10:56 am

    Dexter I booked a rental car for our July trip to San Diego and the price came to just under $500 for a five day rental. I assume they will honor that price and not jack it up just because of other locations having difficulty finding available cars to rent. On the other hand, I’m sure this is a boon to apps like Uber.

    The rain was never ending yesterday but we had a sunny visit with 4 year old Olivia who is really into treating her grandparents as if we were the little ones at her day care/pre-school and she’s the teacher. Lots of marching and singing and getting us in line to walk around the house, with occasional orders of “EVERYBODY FREEZE!” She’s a born leader. She decorated the birthday cake with her gramps (Zah Zah) who turns 64 today, and was just generally delightful all day.

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  14. LAMary said on May 10, 2021 at 10:57 am

    Julie, what is it about Atlanta airport? I had to go through there a couple of times a few years ago and it was awful. Hot, either crowded or abandoned, bad signage, long security lines.

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  15. Deborah said on May 10, 2021 at 10:58 am

    I’m probably going to have to bite the bullet and fly in a month or so, to St. Louis because I’m going to be working on a design project with a good friend I used to work with about 20 years ago. Hopefully by then more people will be vaccinated and I won’t feel so nervous about being on a plane with lots of people.

    I’m going through the zone adjustment, getting up at the crack of dawn. Also I must remember that when I have a couple of glasses of prosecco at 7,200 ft elevation it effects me differently than when in Chicago.

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  16. Deborah said on May 10, 2021 at 11:00 am

    What’s wrong with the Atlanta airport: bad design.

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  17. JodiP said on May 10, 2021 at 11:05 am

    It’s weird that my mom has passed on so I don’t get to do Mother’s day stuff with her. We took my MIL out to lunch, along with my wife’s brother. He made the big anouncement he and his wife are expecting! That made for some bright spots in an otherwise stressful day. My MIL has always been a chatterbox, but now with the early frontal lobe dementia, ooof! We had to pull her away from different customers, she held up the buffet line, yikes. She also got her DL revoked on Thursday after failing an eval.She is talking about how she is going to get it back–it will not be an easy transition for her.

    I spent gobs of time in the garden this weekend. I took my weekly walk with a fellow master gardener, and we ended at a garden center. I am excited about a new rose bush. I haven’t been successful with the one I have, and I think it’s past saving. It’s one lonely stick this year. I am always baffled when I see roses thriving when they clearly aren’t getting care–like at an auto repair shop in my neighborhood!

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  18. Heather said on May 10, 2021 at 11:43 am

    Julie @9, I’m flying to New Orleans in about three weeks, and I’m planning a fair amount of travel this summer–Montana, Minneapolis, and maybe the Boston area. Might slip in a Europe trip this fall if I can swing it. Except for NO and Europe I’d be staying with friends/family though. For NO we got an AirBnB which was kinda pricey, but oh well. I don’t think we’re getting a car, or if we do it will just be for a day trip. Last time I was there I used the shared bike program a lot but I know that’s not an option for everyone.

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  19. Julie Robinson said on May 10, 2021 at 11:45 am

    Deborah has it in two words. Every single time I’ve flown through Atlanta the gates have been miles apart and flights delayed. When you finally get to the gate there are three people waiting for every seat. Inadequate ventilation or cooling; I hope they don’t still have the smoking rooms? You’d walk by one and the smoke would come billowing out. Yet it’s the main hub for Delta so at some point I won’t be able to avoid it.

    Heather, the wedding is the day before Jazz Fest starts so that’s making it more expensive too. Knocking a day off helped, but we’ll have to drive through the night, which leaves me out of it. Since all four of us are going, I figure we can let two sleep, and I’ll keep the driver awake. We helped raise this young woman and we aren’t missing her wedding.

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  20. Suzanne said on May 10, 2021 at 1:02 pm

    I am still hoping to avoid flying fo a while. I kinda forgot how. We just found out about a family wedding this fall that I thought was going to be in either Long Island or Cape Cod but instead it’s upstate New York. Hooray! We can drive!!

    I have to travel to the Chicago area with my 90 yr old mother-in-law this weekend for a bridal shower. I am totally not looking forward to it. The bride-to-be is the daughter of the my clearly-the-favorite-child sister-in-law which extends to her daughters making them the grandchildren who can do no wrong. While my MIL is sharp mentally, she’s also has a habit of letting me know how inadequate she thinks our children are and has a history of falling. So, I fully expect an incident before the week-end is done.

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  21. LAMary said on May 10, 2021 at 1:21 pm

    The only sibling I have who might be part of things like wedding showers or whatever is distant geographically and relationship-wise, so I don’t have these issues. While sometimes I feel bad about it, more often than not I am relieved to not have to deal the weird rivalries and jealousies that exist in families. For certain in that branch I referred to. Mother’s day has been rough for me forever. My mom died when I was seven. Every year there were the elementary school mother’s day plays or concerts, the making some kind of mother’s day gift and card and the uncomfortable sort of including but excusing me attempts by the teacher.

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  22. LAMary said on May 10, 2021 at 1:41 pm

    I’m job hunting and I just got an email about a job as a recruiter of stool donors. They need the stool of healthy, young athletes.

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  23. Jeff Borden said on May 10, 2021 at 4:11 pm

    The Atlanta airport blows chunks. I hate it with a profound passion. I had to make connections there a lot when I lived in Charlotte 35 years ago and the old saying was that if you died in the South, you had to go through Hartsfield to reach heaven.

    I saw my doctor this morning for a blood pressure test. He said I’m A-OK to go maskless outdoors. I’ve been to Wrigley Field twice and dined out four times in the past several weeks. All good. The eateries are following the rules to the letter.

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  24. brian stouder said on May 10, 2021 at 4:42 pm

    Thread Win for LA Mary!! I’m still laughing, as any number of easy jokes can be made, in response to that news…..and I shall simply hold off (as best I can!)

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  25. David C. said on May 10, 2021 at 5:18 pm

    I rented a car for this weekend. It was $273 for four days. That’s probably about double what it was in the year 1 BVE (before the virus era). I went with a mid-size instead of my usual compact so maybe it’s not quite double.

    I spent Mother’s Day with my parents and sibs for the first time since we moved out of state. We had the you can’t drive anymore talk with mom. We also has the you should think about living in a more manageable place talk. The no driving talk went down better than the it’s time to move to a smaller place talk. If they’re going to stay, we’re going to have to Marie Kondo the shit out of their house. They’re in the save the box for every little thing they buy phase. I didn’t dare go downstairs for fear I’d find the string, aluminum foil, and rubber band collections

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  26. Deborah said on May 10, 2021 at 5:55 pm

    I’m sore, LB and I spent a lot of time today trying to extricate the thick vine from the chain link fence. It’s actually impossible, we used two different saws, two different clippers, chisels and finally whacking it with the claw side of a hammer. We made some progress but it will take way too much time and muscle power than I’m willing to expend. So we’re trying to figure out plan B. The vine was great at hiding the fence and the field beyond but now that it was butchered to death on the other side it’s useless.

    In Chicago today a fairly famous architect, Helmut Jahn, was struck and killed while riding to work on his bike, he was 81. The low point of his career was designing the State of IL office building on La Salle (I think), that awful building that looks like a ship from outer space landed in Chicago, it did not hold up well over time. But Jahn designed some other quite nice buildings over the course of his career. The architecture world is reeling from the announcement and cause of his death.

    Edit: apparently Jahn didn’t die today, not exactly sure when.

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  27. alex said on May 10, 2021 at 6:07 pm

    I second what everyone has said so far about the Atlanta airport. I’ve only stopped there for connecting flights and never once have I made my connection on time. My flight invariably arrives late, and then I have to run to catch a train to another terminal and after the whole tense ordeal I learn my flight has left without me.

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  28. Deggjr said on May 10, 2021 at 6:48 pm

    Helmut Jahn also designed the colorful walkway in the United Airlines terminal at O’Hare Airport. I’ve gone through that walkway many times. Different, still cool.

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  29. Julie Robinson said on May 10, 2021 at 7:08 pm

    According to the paper, on Saturday Jahn rode through a stop sign while on his bike, and was hit by two cars each going the opposite way. I can barely stand to think about it.

    And according to my mother, Deborah is correct about the Thompson Center.

    David C, our first estimate for moving all my mom’s crap was over 12K. For a huge storage unit of worse than garbage. These are trying times.

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  30. LAMary said on May 10, 2021 at 7:41 pm

    My experience in Atlanta was similar, Alex. Delayed flight, attempting to find the gate for a different flight, it’s about 85 and humid in the airport and I’m dragging a suitcase and a laptop, walking as fast as I can, in a near empty airport at 10 pm. A guy who was cleaning up a coffee place actually asked me if I was ok. I must have looked distraught and/or pissed off. Seattle airport, the other place I regularly had to use for that job, was a wonderland of efficiency by comparison.

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  31. Deborah said on May 10, 2021 at 9:20 pm

    Oh my god Gweneth Paltrow ate bread during quarantine. Oh the horror. That she claimed was her low point.

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  32. bb said on May 10, 2021 at 10:53 pm

    Sure, those who want to bash the Atlanta airport have plenty of material to work with, but I have to say it was the backdrop for one unusually pleasant travel memory. I’d flown in to attend the wedding of two friends outside of Atlanta. When I checked in for the return flight the desk attendant looked at my ID, got a flustered look on her face, and stammered rather shyly, “Nice game last night!” I can only assume she thought my ID said I was Brett Butler, the center fielder who had made his Major League debut with the Braves. While another traveler might have gotten offended at being mistaken for someone nearly 10 years his elder, I just said, “Thank you, ma’am.” I mean, it’s not every day that one gets mistaken for an MLB All Star. So far, that’s been the only day it happened to me.

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  33. Mark P said on May 10, 2021 at 10:54 pm

    I occasionally traveled from here in the East to the LA area (John Wayne airport, maybe my favorite). I live in Rome, Ga, about two hours from Huntsville, Al, where my job was, and about two hours from Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta. If I had to travel to LA, I would drive two hours to the Huntsville airport, and then fly back to change planes in Atlanta just to avoid the drive to H-J, finding a long-term parking spot, getting into the airport, getting through security, and then wending my way to the gate. The Huntsville airport is small and easy to navigate. There was never a line at security. It was worth adding several hours to my trip just to avoid the drive to the Atlanta airport.

    I wish my wife and I had relatives that would worry about us. I just had rotator cuff and knee tendon repair surgeries, and my wife has really bad sciatic nerve pain, plus she’s a falling risk. She fell Sunday night and if she had not been able to get up, I would have had to call an ambulance, and even then couldn’t have gone to the hospital because I can’t drive with my current peg-leg. We have no one within a day’s drive that can help us out. We have a few neighbors that might be able to help a little, but we are really on our own. I have told my wife we need to move to the Denver area where we have old friends, and my nephew. Of course we would have to live under an overpass, given the cost of housing there compared to here.

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  34. A. Riley said on May 10, 2021 at 11:09 pm

    We made our first postpandemic visit-family-out-of-state trip over the weekend, driving from Chicago suburbs to Indianapolis suburbs. I learned that over the past year+ of sequestration, I’d forgotten the skill of *calmly* (key word there) keeping up with fast expressway traffic through construction zones. Clearly we survived, but jeez.

    I’ve never liked struggling through that tangled mess at the south end of Lake Michigan just to get to boring old I-65, so we take I-57 down to Kankakee and then US 52 southeast as far as it goes. One of these years I’ll figure out how to make the whole trip, end to end and back again, without setting a tire on an interstate or an expressway. A worthy goal, don’t you think?

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  35. Deborah said on May 10, 2021 at 11:13 pm

    Mark P, I don’t know if there’s anything like this in your community, but I recently found out about this organization called Village (name of city). It’s for people over 50 who are looking for a support system in their community so they can stay in their homes, not have to go into retirement homes etc. Lincoln Park (in Chicago) has a very impressive group and a friend of mine was on the board of Village St. Louis. Here’s some info about it https://www.npr.org/2017/12/12/570248798/village-movement-allows-elderly-to-age-in-their-homes

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  36. Deni Menken said on May 10, 2021 at 11:16 pm

    LAMary,
    That sounds like a crap job.
    Teehee. Sorry everyone.

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  37. Dexter Friend said on May 11, 2021 at 1:33 am

    LA Mary’s tale of walking while tired and having a coffee guy ask about her well-being reminds me of when I exited the seating area benches at Michigan Stadium and was walking the concourse towards the south exit, a rather long walk. This was before I was cane-dependent but I walked with a noticeable limp. A worker, a nice lady driving a gator mini-tractor told me to hop on and she drove me the distance to the gate. That never happens, much anyway. And in 1977 I flew to Atlanta from Cleveland for the men’s NCAA basketball Final Four. I rented a Camaro and hit I-75 for the 8 mile jaunt to my hotel. As soon as I got up to 60 MPH, the fucking hood flew up, blinding me, but I got to the curb/emergency lane. I was able to get the hood down but the latch was damaged and broken. By grace, unbelievably, in the crap that always is roadside on freeways, I spotted a length of wire and a piece of metal junk, which I wedged through the grill and wired the hook latch on top to it securely. People drove around me as I proceeded north and pointed how my hood was open. I vented a little at the car return place when I tried to exchange the car for a decent safe one…all sold out due to the basketball tournament.

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  38. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on May 11, 2021 at 7:02 am

    Hey, A.Riley, that’s my homeland you’re calling a tangled mess . . . accurately so, but still.

    Julie R., we can amend Thomas Paine’s phrase “These are the times that try men’s [and women’s] souls.” Got through a duplex weekend with my father-in-law and mother, both steadily increasing the repetition of certain stories from each visit to daily to now multiple times a day, and other confusions cloud their decision making, but they still have enough autonomy that my sister and wife and I are all tied to not disposing or relocating items they want “handy” which extend from pencils from the 1920s that have sentimental attachments to wanting to keep every scrap of paper passing within their dimming view.

    But my main weariness was navigating from here to one, to the other, back again than returning home, and seeing the orange barrels going up for much of the route — it will be another summer of “keeping up with fast expressway traffic through construction zones” except when it’s sitting stopped cold.

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  39. Suzanne said on May 11, 2021 at 7:11 am

    Oh, backwards Indiana! The state legislature just overrode the governor’s veto of a bill that limits the power of local public health administrators. Because here in Indiana, we like our citizens stupid & sick.
    Now, with an outbreak of some dread disease like COVID, county health commissioners first have to consult the county commissioners on what to do. Which in my area, means there would have been no masking, no social distancing, no nothing.
    https://www.wthitv.com/content/news/Indiana-Legislature-overrides-Governor-Holcombs-veto-of-Senate-Bill-5-574391941.html

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  40. alex said on May 11, 2021 at 7:46 am

    Suzanne, there was a good Howey Politics column a few Sundays ago explaining what happens when a state like Indiana has a gerrymandered Republican supermajority in the legislature for too long: The Dems get frozen out entirely and the Republicans turn into warring factions who eat their own, transforming the governor into a de facto liberal even though he ran as a teabagger and has inked every bad bad bill that has been presented to him. Given that lines aren’t likely to be redrawn fairly any time soon, we’re in for at least another decade of freedumb.

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  41. Mark P said on May 11, 2021 at 9:19 am

    I have some friends in their 50’s who are dealing with one elderly set of parents, one 90 and one in her 80’s and on oxygen. They’re going to sell their house and move to a condo, so they need to get rid of a bunch of stuff. So the youngsters drove from Denver to Omaha to make it happen. It didn’t happen. For example, “We want to keep our bicycles because we might want to ride them again.” I think the solution will be a storage unit where everything they ask about will be, but they will never actually go to look.

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  42. Jeff Borden said on May 11, 2021 at 9:30 am

    Chicago drivers. . .

    We found a way to avoid the Dan Ryan and the Skyway and all the other routes to the Indiana Toll Road and I-65. If you follow the signs for Rt. 41 after LSD turns into South Shore Drive, you will zig and zag through some interesting areas –including a vast plot of land where the South Side steel works once stood but is now empty and awaiting redevelopment– before deposting you on Indianapolis Blvd. The turnpike is less than a mile to the east. No tolls. No speeders. No tailgaters. Just a pleasant passage.

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  43. Jeff (the mild-mannered one) said on May 11, 2021 at 9:33 am

    I have gotten all too good at flat out lying to my mother. “Yes, we have your third set of Christmas china at my house.” “Sure, we will keep those.” “Yes, I will make 8×10 prints of all of those and frame them and put them up on my walls.” She can’t see, will never come to Ohio, and just wants some kind of existential confirmation that her life is not going to a landfill wholesale, so there’s a lot of stuff she thinks is with me that’s . . . not. But for a woman who can’t recall if she took her meds this am, or if I’ve been to see her yet since Christmas, she has an encyclopedic memory of odd obscure items she had down in Texas that my sister and I did not bring back, and keeps bemoaning the loss of. A collection of highway maps that were in the glove compartment of the long-gone van which died a week after my dad did, which she says “if only I had my maps” about each time something comes up on the news about Alabama or Arkansas, etc. And she has macular degeneration to where she couldn’t see a thing on them . . . but we pull up online a map of the town, put it in giant form on the wall, and “my maps had much more detail on them.” Right, Mom, I threw away your maps. Can I get you more lemonade? (Don’t even bring up the window clings . . .)

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  44. Julie Robinson said on May 11, 2021 at 10:30 am

    Welcome to nnc, the children of elderly parents support group.

    We’ve now given up on any sorting of the crap; it’s getting moved to yet another storage unit. I try to be empathetic as this move was not her choice but her behavior is causing me trauma. However, last night I bought tickets for our final flight outta here on June 29, so it’s short-term pain.

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  45. Heather said on May 11, 2021 at 10:38 am

    I suspect I have a hard time losing/getting rid of things because after my mom died when I was a teen, my brother and I went to live with a different family and we lost or lost track of a lot of our stuff. However, I can see how it becomes a burden already. I bought my condo because I didn’t want to continue to have to move every 3-4 years as a renter, but at least when you do that, you tend to dump a lot of stuff. I’m really overdue for a good culling.

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  46. Jeff Borden said on May 11, 2021 at 11:40 am

    I envy all who still have their elderly parents. I lost my mom in ’06 and my dad in ’08. Once in awhile, I still get the thought that there’s something I really want to share with them. Guess I always will.

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  47. Julie Robinson said on May 11, 2021 at 1:17 pm

    Jeff, of course you’re right about this; it’s just hard to see the forest when the trees are so darn thick. Dad left us in 1994 at the age of 62 and that was horrible too.

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  48. LAMary said on May 11, 2021 at 3:09 pm

    I lost both parents by the time I was 20. There were some keepsakes that had been set aside for me but another family member snagged them. What can I say about missing having my parents? My mother died when I was 7. I have no idea what it would have been like having her live to see me become an adult. My father died when I was 20. He was a hard core alcoholic and frankly not much of a parent for the last five years or so of his life. I tell people I was feral.

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  49. Deborah said on May 11, 2021 at 3:30 pm

    My mom died in 1964 and my dad in 1991. I hardly remember what it was like to have a parent as an adult. I always lived far away from my dad, there was no way I was going to go back to Florida to live. I only saw my dad about once a year and maybe talked to him on the phone a half a dozen times a year, birthdays, Christmas, Easter and if something extra special happened which was rare. We weren’t estranged but we weren’t close. My dad was a big sports guy and I wasn’t and still am not the least bit interested. It was hard to work up enthusiasm for the Miami Dolphins and my dad had no interest in design so aside from family stuff and the church there wasn’t much to talk about.

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