The View From 96---=May

View96May

The View From 96---May

     The month of May started off inauspiciously when the right front wheel of my trusty walker came off.  It happened when I first got up in the morning, did my first painful sit to stand, grasped the walker handles and started to the bathroom when the walker tilted to the right.  I looked and the right front wheel had come off.  I also saw a plastic screw on the floor.  I didn’t see the plastic fastener that held in the screw.  I managed to retrieve the screw and re-insert it and I could use the walker.  Later in the day my next-door neighbor R--- came over with a box of screws and nuts, found a metal screw that fit and fastened it with a nut and I’m happy to report that the walker has been okay since.

     I ended the April View by reporting that my sister Ph--- in Long Island had had conflicting advice from two doctors regarding having hip replacement surgery, one saying that at her age, 91, he wouldn’t recommend it and the other saying he could do it.  In May she saw a doctor at a highly-rated health organization for orthopedics and he said the surgery would be okay.  First she had to see a cardiologist and have a stress test, which she passed.  Then the operation was scheduled for June 18th.  In the meantime she was in constant pain from the bone on bone and at times couldn’t get dressed or stand up by herself from a chair.  I still thought she should be prescribed some pain medication stronger than Tylenol but the doctors for some reason wouldn’t do this.  So I hoped the operation would go well and the same for the recovery, which, from my own experience, wasn’t exactly a picnic.

     Aside from this, the freezer saga continued.  I forget exactly what happened during the month but, as stated before, when the ice maker didn’t produce ice cubes the freezer was fine; when it did, the freezer iced over. 

     Something else had to happen and it was that one of my toilets stopped working.  I fiddled around with it for a while but it didn’t respond so got the name of a plumber from my neighbor N---, called and, to my surprise he came over that afternoon.  The plumber had a younger guy, his son, with him, and I guess the son was learning the business.  The plunber examined the toilet, which, like the house, was almost 29 years old and said, in effect, that its parts, like mine, were worn out.  He replaced them and lo, the toilet worked again.  Too bad he couldn’t replace my worn out parts.  His work took probably five or ten minutes and he charged a king’s fortune, which is what any repair costs nowadays.  His son will eventually be a multimillionaire.

     When I wasn’t preoccupied with these matters I wrote a couple of pieces I called Coping with Old Age.  I wanted to touch on things oldsters had to deal with such as buttons on shirts and so made a list of these.  Then it occurred to me the list might be of interest to other oldsters and so posted the two pieces on Storystar and used a somewhat altered version of one for my “Observations” column on Sun Senior News.

     I should mention that this was the month I made the donations from the Beverly Green Fund I had set up after my wife’s passing and which was administered by the Placer Community Foundation.  They charged a modest fee for this and I mailed a list of local charities to receive donations.  These included a choral group as Beverly was a singer who’d been in the Sun City chorus for years; an artists’ organization as she had been a skilled watercolor painter; several organizations that provided food to seniors, one which aided veterans and as always the Placer SPCA.

     While these events were occupying me, the war against Iran, Epic Something, was going on.  Unfortunately, Iran blocked the Strait of Humoz, through which twenty percent of the world’s oil passed, thus sending the price of oil soaring and gas prices in the U.S. to go over $6.  In retaliation, we blockaded all of Iran ships so they couldn’t sell their oil and their economy got worse than it already was.  Trump kept saying we were close to making a deal with Iran but the Iranis didn’t seem to think so.

     In the sports world there was plenty of activity and so plenty of sports to watch on tv.  The NBA playoffs were on (the basketball season seemed to go on and on) and, as I’d long ago given up on my local team, the Sacramento Kings, I reverted to rooting for my old home team, the NY Knicks.  The Knicks won their initial series against the Atlanta Hawks, losing two games by one point each (maybe  a record) but winning one game with a great comeback and breezing through the last three games.  They then played the Philadelphia Seventysixers and won easily in four games and did the same against the Cleveland Cavs.  So they won the East and would play against the West winner, which turned out to be the San Antonio Spurs, not the OKC Thunder, which had finished in first place.  When Philadelphia improbably eliminated the Celtics and Cleveland did the same with the Detroit Pistons I began to wonder if the Knicks might be a team of destiny as these two tough foes were knocked off.  When the Spurs beat the OKC Thunder, another tough foe eliminated.  So it was the Knicks agains the Spurs in the final with the Spurs, having Wembyama in their lineup naturally being the favorite.

     Meanwhile, in the tennis world, the French Open was going on.  Carlos Alcaraz was out with an injured wrist and so Janik Sinner, who’d won all the clay court tournaments leading up to it was the odds-on favorite.  Unfortunately for Sinner, Paris had a heat spell and he’s susceptible to hot weather so when he got to one game of winning his second round match he collapsed and was ousted.  This left the field wide open and gave

A;expander Zverez a chance to win his first major, which he managed to do, not too bad a result.

     So, May was a pretty eventful month and it was on to June and my sister’s hip replacement surgery of first importance (to me), a turn in the Iran war, an unpleasant surprise for me from California’s Franchise Tax Board and the Knicks striving for their first title in 57 years, quite a stretch.