I’m sorry if you read this on Medium and now you feel like you’re being scammed and abused because you come here for fresh storytelling and here I am, recycling this piece about…. well, a lot of different things.
I’m only posting it here because it’s weirdly popular on Medium and I’m not sure why. Any suggestions are appreciated.
My mom is old. Really old. Like, OMFG, please do not let me get that old.
So today we loaded up for a ride to the bank to break into her safety deposit box, which is the one thing I can’t make payable on death. I either get into it now, or I’ll have to open up an estate for just that: a box full of $2 bills and pictures of her furniture.
Preparing for a loved one’s death is just one of those things you have to do.
My advice to you is, start this process before they turn 93.
Eighty is probably a good time to seriously get your ass in gear on this front. Of course, good luck breaking down their resistance, since we’re all convinced we’re going to live forever as the 18-year-old who still resides in our heads.
Now, I’ve never seen a safety deposit box in real life because I own absolutely nothing of value. I’ve only seen them on TV, where James Bond or someone else equally suave and debonair, usually in a tuxedo, is escorted into a bank vault where a long metal box is placed before them on a swath of green baize, after which the bank employee discreetly leaves the room so that the person can count their diamonds or retrieve their nuclear codes in private.
I didn’t think about the fact that we would need a key. And no, no one fucking mentioned it when I was scheduling the appointment, thanks for nothing, Huntington Bank. If you don’t have the key, they have to drill out the lock, price TBD, but I assume it’s more than what I want to pay, which is zero.
Thus started today’s episode of “Indiana Jones and The Quest for the Key to the Safety Deposit Box.”
After an hour of tearing the house apart (so, so much wrapping paper and empty cookie tins), I left my 93-year-old mother on the couch to further contemplate where she might’ve hidden one small key 40 years ago.
I can’t even find my car keys, which weigh five pounds and have more things dangling from them than a Mardi Gras parade float, so I had little to no hope that my mom would come through.
My second task of the day was to find the most distant and thus least busy branch of the BMV that I could reasonably get to — i.e. in Amish Country — so I could scope out the parking situation since my mom needs to get a photo I.D. before her driver’s license expires in three weeks and she can barrrreeely walk and won’t use a cane or a walker because my life isn’t difficult enough.
Side note: there is no branch of the BMV that isn’t packed to the gills with cars and people every minute of every day.
I’m not clear why old people still need a photo I.D. to see the doctor. If a 93-year-old wants to commit insurance fraud, maybe we should let ’em.
As I was driving back from my little foray to the back of beyond (did I get lost? Of course I got fucking lost), I crested a hill into the most godawful smell you can possibly imagine.
In fact, you can’t imagine it. Don’t even try. Skunk would’ve been vastly preferable to the miasma of liquified pig shit that was jetting upwards like the fountains at the Bellagio from a tractor peeling through the fields as fast as a tractor can possibly go. I seriously could not breath for a minute.
Needless to say, we’ve got some stiff winds from Hurricane Ian, I was downwind from the tractor, and my truck still smells like pig shit. Thank god my windows weren’t open.
As my reward for wasting my weekend, I shortly thereafter saw a bald eagle. He was sitting near the road in a field, possibly stunned by the stench.
He was actually more brown than black, which I didn’t know was an option. Maybe it was the light. Maybe he was covered in pig shit.
And don’t tell me that maybe it was a hawk or something. It’s our national bird, for Christ’s sake, I think I know a bald eagle when I see one. Especially when it flapped its GINORMOUS wings and got the hell out of Dodge.
And by some miracle, my mom found the key. It was in the silverware drawer. I guess that’s as good a place as any.
Not a subscriber yet. This was VERY good. Your chance encounter with a hog farm reminded me of Jonathan Franzen Foer book Eating Animals. There are very few things as difficult to experience as how our food is raised and manufactured. Better to not know. Just pruned my Substack Reads. Might have to ditch one more to make room.
When mundane errands escalate into a complex headache, what a super bummer. Gawd, all that got done. You saw a bald eagle but circling overhead all day long were the banking vultures and their key fees.
Banking institutions in the US are designed as a one way business proposition, all input no output. So, they have a contingency for any issue that might cost one of their highly underpaid grunt workers more than a penny extra's cost or so thus affecting the bank's bottom line in a non-increasing way. Fees.