Takin’ Care of Business

Hey there, little buckaroos. Yes, it has been awhile! I’d apologize, but I doubt anyone has gone through withdrawal symptoms because I haven’t written anything for a few months.

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If you aren’t familiar with the song Takin’ Care of Business by the Canadian rock band Bachman-Turner Overdrive, I don’t know what to say to you. It was released in 1973, and it’s their best-known song of all time. The song has been used in a few hundred thousand movies and commercials. If you can honestly say you don’t know the song, you need to get a life.

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I’ve been retired for five years now. If you’re not retired, you should try it sometime. If you are retired, you may have noticed the same thing that I have: Retirement is literally days, weeks, and even months of not having to do anything if you don’t feel like doing it. You don’t have to go work anymore. You don’t have any pending appointments or meetings you have to attend on your calendar.

There might be some things you’ve been thinking about getting around to doing, but they’re not anything pressing, so if you decide today isn’t the day to tackle them, no one is going to care.

And then it’s almost as if all of the things you didn’t have to do conspire and BOOM! all of a sudden there’s a whole lots of shit that needs to be done.

Right. Now.

And that’s one of the reasons I haven’t been writing about my mostly incredibly boring and bucolic life. I’ve actually been busy.

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Way back in September, I conceived an idea to write about. A lots of goddamn stuff has happened since then, and I’m no longer interested in writing about it. I may get around to explaining that — we’ll see… Instead of writing, my lovely supermodel wife and I flew back to the States to attend my Aunt Noreen’s 90th birthday party at Lion’s Park in beautiful downtown Swanville, MN.

Aunt Reen is the last surviving matriarch on my mother’s side of the family. All of the elder relatives on my dad’s side of the family got dead years ago. Reen is my mom’s youngest sister, and to the best of my knowledge, she’s the oldest living person in my family’s history. We don’t tend to live much beyond the age of 80. And far too many of us tend to die much younger.

Noreen is a really neat gal, very much like unto my mom. They were best friends, and when Reen came over to my parents’ house to say good-bye to my mom just before she died, that was the sweetest thing I have ever seen in my life. It still makes me cry whenever I think about it.

It’s the only reason why I thought it was important to go to her party. I doubt any of my cousins will ever come visit us in Mexico, so I don’t see a preponderance evidence that suggests I need to spend a lots of money and energy connecting with people that aren’t going to make any effort to connect with me.

And speaking of people I don’t want to ever connect with again, there’s John, my Idiot Brother. As you have probably deduced, John and I are not good friends. Mainly because every time John contacts me, he threatens to kill me. I don’t believe 99% of the bullshit that emanates from him. I’m not sure if he’d actually kill me if he ever saw me again, but I have no doubt that he’d try to.

I knew there was no way John would miss going to Reen’s party, if for no other reason than there would be a whole lots of free beer there. So, yeah, this created a bit of a dilemma for me. As it turns out, I’m not the only person in my family that doesn’t want to be around my Idiot Brother. None of my cousins wanted him at their party either, however, they didn’t think he would even bother to attend.

Cut to the chase: John arrived at the party about half an hour before Lea and I arrived. My cousins messaged me to let me know he was there — even though they still didn’t think he would come — then they asked him to leave. John said, “You don’t think I’d really kill my brother with all these witnesses present, do you?” And they replied, “Because you say things like that, you have to leave. And if you don’t leave now, we’ll call the police.”

It was a very nice party. I got to see my old friend, Shorty Girtz. I’ve written about him and our epic vacation in Dallas, TX. You can look it up in the archives if you’re really bored. He took Lea for a ride on his new touring motorcycle, which I have to admit surprised me. Lea has never been all that interested in motorcycles, but she had blast.

According to the 2010 census, there are 350 people that live in the city of Swanville. At least half of the town was in attendance at Noreen’s party, mainly because she is probably related to almost everyone in Swanville in one way or another. Reen was very happy that we had flown up all the way from Mexico for her party. I gained a new level of respect for my cousins. And my Idiot Brother messaged me to tell me he was really going to kill me the next time he saw me, this time for sure. Again.

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We were in Minnesota for five days. On short visits like unto this one, you scramble like hell to see as many people as you can before you leave. The list of people that I’m willing to try to see keeps getting smaller, mostly for the reason previously stated above. The other reason is the impermanence of life itself. And that’s the other reason we went back to Minnesota.

I wanted to see Paul Anderson before he died to death.

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Paul and I were registered nurses, and we worked together at the Minneapolis VAMC in the In-patient Psychiatric Department for the entire twenty years I was employed there. Paul was mostly an excellent nurse. I had the utmost respect for him as a colleague, and I learned a helluvalot from him about how to do my job with the most efficiency. We supported each other through every fucking miserable event that befell us during that time, and we both had more than our share of traumas and tribulations over those two decades.

We celebrated every victory together. We celebrated even when there wasn’t much of anything to celebrate. I taught him everything I knew about smoking marijuana, and he taught me everything he knew about craft beers and red wine. Yeah, he was my drinking buddy. Unlike all of my other drinking buddies — who didn’t want to have anything to do with me after I quit drinking — Paul and I remained close friends.

In vino veritas. We knew everything there was to know about each other. He was my best friend, possibly the best male friend I’ve had in my entire life, despite the fact that he rooted for the much-despised Green Bay Peckers.

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If you’re wondering why I’m not writing another installment entitled For Whom the Bell Tolls, I just don’t have the courage to do it, even though Paul is more than worthy of a tribute from me. I’ve lost two of my best male friends in less than four months. Those losses have taken a lots of wind out of my sails, simply because losses like unto these are roughly the emotional equivalent of getting kicked in the balls.

The pain from the grief is acute enough as it is. Opening myself up to further pain by writing about it is more than I am willing to take on right now. And it’s one of the reasons I haven’t written. I rarely know what I’m going to write, and yeah, the idea that something like unto that would pour out of me honestly scared the shit out of me. I had to wait until I was sure that wasn’t going to happen.

Writing about Francisco’s death helped me process the shock and dismay that plagued me in his absence. I needed to write about him. I don’t have to do that with Paul. I’ve known he wasn’t going to live very long for the better part of this year. He told me he was dying in May. I told him to stay alive until I saw him in September.

He promised me that he would.

Lea and I drove out to see Paul, one last time, at the house he built, mostly all by himself, on September 20th. It was a bright and sunny day as we headed east on Highway 94. We visited with Paul and his wife for about an hour. That was the extent of the strength he had left. Lea and I have a boatload of fond memories of Paul and Synneva’s house. We got together frequently, usually at their home in rural Wisconsin, and shared many an ice cold beverage and a lots of laughter over the years.

It wasn’t bright and sunny anymore as we drove west, back to Minnesota and the Airbnb in St. Paul we had rented for our stay. Dark gray clouds had rolled in, and the skies opened up, unleashing torrents of rain that fell like rage. It was as if the sky had offered me an unction by crying the tears I no longer possessed.

If you were to ask me where I am in my grieving process right now, I don’t know if I could tell you. I’m not even sure who I’m grieving over half of the time. I don’t know if I can grieve individually anymore. It’s all become a kind of Grief Casserole to me, and I don’t really know how to cook.

The one thing I have going for me is I discovered I have a really great support system. My friends and family here have been there for me every time I’ve needed them. And they will be there if I need more from them.

Excuse me, I’m going to have to take a break here…

* * * *

I talked to Paul almost every day after we got back to Mexico. Our conversations rarely lasted even five minutes. I just wanted to hear his voice again, knowing there wouldn’t be many times we would talk.

I sent him all the pictures I had taken of our adventures, and his family, because I had fucking forgotten to pack them when we flew up there. I had pulled them out of storage, meaning to give them to him when I saw him, and set them on the bookcase in the Peach Room. And that’s where they were when we got back to Mexico.

He appreciated the pictures. We had had a lots of great times together, and he smiled a lots remembering them. His wife told me that.

I was going to call him on his birthday, Monday, October 11th. But when I opened my Facebook account, I had received a message from Synneva. Paul had passed away in his sleep during the night. He would have been 65 if he had lived three more hours. On the bright side, he got to see his beloved Packers win one last football game that they should have lost at least twice. So there was that.

* * * *

Time ceased to exist for me for awhile that morning. I went to the end of the patio because it was it was in the sunlight, and the mornings are getting a little chilly here. The birds were chirping in the trees. A light breeze was blowing, just enough of a breeze to tickle the hairs on your arms, but not enough to really do much more than that.

A few hummingbirds flitted from flower to flower in the garden. A vermillion flycatcher flew into one of the plumeria trees, looking for a meal. The warmth of the sun felt good. And I smiled, remembering the good times, wishing there had been at least one more visit…

Paul would have liked Mexico if he had ever gotten down here. He was planning to visit us in May of 2020. He had even bought his airfare. Then the pandemic hit and brought the world to a screeching halt. Paul cancelled his trip, with the idea to reschedule for a later date. Then he got too sick to travel, and that ended up being that.

True to his word as always, he stayed alive long enough so we could say good-bye to each other in person. Thank you for doing that.

Twenty days later, he, too, was gone.

Vaya con Dios, Mr. Anderson. The last thing you said to me was we will meet again. That is a promise you had better keep. I’m counting on you to show me the ropes again.

* * * *

In early October, our oldest daughter, Gwen, her husband, John, and their dog, Tori Belle, took up residence in the casita we had set up as a guest suite. They’re going to stay here for the next five months until they decide what they want to do when they grow up. They both work remotely from here. I guess that’s one positive outcome from the COVID-19 pandemic.

This has been somewhat of a surprise to us, that one of our kids would want to move back in with us, but it has been a good surprise. We have a kind of communal living experience going on here at the resort — minus the drugs and free love that were so popular back in the 1960’s.

It’s also somewhat ironic. Prior to moving into this house, I observed that there are a lots of gringo mansions down here. Huge honker homes that were probably occupied by one or two old, white people and maybe a couple of dogs. And then we moved into one one of those huge honker places… That’s why we invited Todd to move in with us. We had more than enough room for another person here.

When Gwen and John asked if they could take over our casita for an extended stay, we were well-versed in the process. Things are going smoothly for all of us as far as I know. If there’s anyone that is not satisfied with our current living arrangements, they haven’t talked to me about it.

* * * *

Because we no longer had a guest room for all of the people that said they were going to visit us, but probably never will — and because I needed something to do — I repainted the Peach Room and turned it into our new guest room.

I guess you could call the Peach Room a bonus room/flex space. We had it set up as a second living room/den, but we never used it. The kit-tens used to hang out in it occasionally. They probably used it more than any of the people that live here.

Yes. It’s a very big room. And that’s a queen-size bed. There’s an adjoining Jack and Jill bathroom between the guest room and Todd’s room. In this picture, the bathroom would be to your right. If you come to visit, you’ll have to share that.

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The next thing that needed to be done was repairing the ceiling in the master bedroom. I can’t remember exactly when it happened, but a few months ago our landlord finally replaced the malfunctioning solar heater for the swimming pool. Said heater rests on the roof of our bedroom.

The summer months here are the Rainy Season. We received over 40 inches of rain this year, so yeah, they call it the Rainy Season for a very good reason. That’s how we discovered the leak in the roof. We assume it originated with the new solar heater because it wasn’t there with the old solar heater. Our property manager sent a crew here to repair the roof three times. The Rainy Season has ended, so we probably won’t know if the leak has actually been sealed until sometime next June…

Just in cases you didn’t know, all of the buildings in Mexico are primarily constructed of bricks, mortar, and steel. Someone told me it was because of the termites, which are pretty much everywhere down here. Maybe that’s true. I don’t really know. Concrete might have a lots of advantages as a building material, but one disadvantage it has is it is very porous and sucks up water like unto a sponge.

And that’s pretty much what happened on our roof. Water followed the path of least resistance and after one particularly heavy thunderstorm, part of the ceiling in our bedroom kind of collapsed — not much, just a little — but it continued to do so with each consecutive rainfall. After a couple months of this process repeatedly repeating itself, the ceiling in our bedroom was in a very sorry state of affairs.

Repairing the ceiling amounted to scraping away all the loose mortar and paint, then plastering all the cracks and crevices and canyons that the leaking roof had created, and then sanding all the rough spots down until they were more or less smooth. Plastering isn’t something I would call one of my strengths, but the end result looked comparable to the other repairs that had been done to the bedroom ceiling prior to when we moved in.

Lea said she was happy with it, and that was really all I needed to hear.

The worst part of this process is the mold remediation. If you have never attempted to get get mold out of a concrete ceiling, you haven’t missed much. It is a long and tedious process. Oddly enough, the mold is no where near the spot where the ceiling first started falling apart. I might be done with that part of the job by Christmas…

When we moved into this house, we hired Francisco to paint almost every room in the house. Just about the only surfaces he didn’t paint were the ceilings — except in the master bedroom. It must have looked like hell, so that’s probably why Lea asked him to paint it. It’s the only reason why I had paint that matched perfectly, and I won’t have to repaint the entire ceiling.

The final bedroom renovations entailed moving the TV set that had been in the Peach Room that no one ever watched into the master bedroom and connecting it to the DVD player I had purchased at Best Buy® while we were in Minnesota.

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Probably Little Known Fact About DVD’s and DVD Players: they are coded for the country they are manufactured in. Yeah, I didn’t know that either, until I bought a DVD player that was made in Mexico. It would not play any of the DVD’s I had purchased in the United States of America.

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It took me awhile to switch from VHS tapes to DVD’s, but once I did I thought it would be stupid to have just one DVD. Hey, do you want to come over to my house and watch my DVD? See? I told you… So I bought a lots of them over the years.

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It took me the better part of an hour to figure out how to change the codes in my Mexican DVD player so we could watch a movie, and I’m pretty sure we didn’t bother to even watch it after we finally got everything working. I don’t use that player to watch movies. I have it hooked up to the stereo on the patio because DVD players also play CD’s, and I have a lots and lots of CD’s.

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The last thing that kept me from writing was working in the gardens here at the Chula Vista Resort and Spa. They were starting to look tired, so I tore almost everything out of most of them. Then Lea decided she wanted to trim the Royal and Ancient Hedgerow in the South Garden.

I guess I should have asked her what she meant by the word trim. Lea more or less ripped out everything that had regrown, leaving the fence looking almost exactly like it did one year ago when we originally attacked the hedgerow.

I was originally a little bummed out because the hedgerow looks like hell now, but as we have seen, it will return again. And her extreme trimming may even benefit the vines that I actually want to grow. Time will tell on that account. All I know is they didn’t fill in the places I wanted them to this year…

* * * *

It’s been a tough year for me. It just goes to show you that you should never think things can’t get any worse than they were last year…

I had originally planned this post to be about the Anti-Vaccine Movement, and how incredibly selfish those people are in the midst of a global pandemic that has changed, and will continue to change our lives for the foreseeable future.

I think they’re moronheads. And that’s about all I have to say about that anymore. Except I hope the Green Bay Peckers don’t secure a bye in the playoffs because of Aaron Rodgers being an anti-vaxing sissifated sniffle-snaffle. It’d serve him right.

It’s also been a very good year for me. I am very aware of that. I don’t need anyone to point that out to me. Life is all about balance and equilibrium. My life is balancing out gradually. I no longer experience the wild mood swings that owned me in July.

I remain resilient. The losses I have felt this year have bent me and stretched me to my limits at times, but they did not break me. At least, I don’t think they did.

I have lost dear friends, but I have also found support from a group of people that I didn’t expect it from. That was another good surprise.

Thank you, everyone. Everyone that has supported me. Everyone that has helped me support Francisco’s family. Thank you all from the bottom of my broken heart.

It isn’t as broken as it used to be. And that is very much because of all of you.