Help lines

I’ve been forced to the help line on a daily basis recently.  Week days, that is.  I don’t often go to work on weekends. 

My little township, population 698, many of them children who don’t vote, is alligator deep in the federal government.  It was that way when I became clerk nine years ago.    I’ve told the trustees I believe the nice old clerk before me did not run for re-election because he had to register with CCR.  It was the first thing I did, in order to get grants we applied for.

CCR.  Creedence Clearwater Revival, no?  Actually, Central Contractor Registration.  It was a formidable data base if I noodled around it, but the township simply needed their name and address out there to be matched up with all the paperwork I submitted and the nice federal grant check to arrive in the mail.  Later on the nice federal grant arrived straight into the checking account.  Those were the days!

This past fall the feds decided to streamline.  It’s probably been in the works for years; I can almost see Al Gore’s internet finger in this, but that’s only speculation.  My friendly little CCR and all my paper vanished, rolled into SAM. System for Award Management. My technically illiterate self had to belly up and fill in the formidable data all the big central contractors had supplied for years.  I called the help line and went through the process stroke by stroke. 

Drained and stupefied at the end, I told the wonderful help line woman I didn’t have strength to remain on the line to take the satisfaction survey. But, there it was in my email.  I gave her ten of ten for everything and considered my problems ended.

Did you notice, SAM passes out “awards.” No money.  That is a platform called ASAP.  Of course it is incomprehensible, so I called help.  This help came straight from the federal reserve help desk.  The money comes from the federal reserve banks of the US Treasury, of course, and the tic boxes about messing with them can put you under the desk if a calm help person isn’t guiding your finger on the mouse.

I follow instruction well and now my township is set up to receive grant payments.  I stayed on the line and passed out ten of ten attaboys for the wonderful help.  Then the road super, who actually submits our grant requests for road assistance couldn’t access the account I bravely set up for him, on my own, on SAM.  Like two little kids we sat in front of my computer, called help and ticked the box I’d missed.  He made the December application deadline.

Don’t be thinking it’s over.  No.  The trustees made a contract with DOI (Department of Interior), which runs the federal parks, to do a teeny little job for the park.  Apparently contracts are not awarded.  I don’t care; I only want the township paid.  The contract platform is called IPP.  It’s not up and running yet.  “So sorry, this is not business as usual, please bear with us, bla, bla bla”. I have a Rolodex card for them, but there is no help line or password written down.  For the record, the township has fulfilled its obligation for the last three months of the seven month contract that ends in May.

But wait. There’s more.  The township is an entity of the state of Ohio.  We report to the Auditor of State (AOS).  We use government accounting software, which has remained unchanged since implemented almost twenty years ago.  Upgrades turned it into DOS with lipstick, but still DOS.  AOS intended to roll out a shiny Windows version effective January 1, 2012.  Every fiscal officer (that’s what we’re called now) in the state must have emailed:  this is ludicrous.  Every fiscal officer in the state stands for re-election for 2012 and takes office on April 1^st.  Training new electees  in a fairly new program, as well as the job and the law that governs it, is stupid. AOS held off for a year.

You know what I was doing on January 2, 3, and 4, 2013.  Rolling up a new accounting program, after closing the old program with all the reports required by Ohio Revised Code.  ORC, to those of us who live by it. When we call the United Accounting Network (UAN) help line we give our entity number to be logged in.  I’ll bet UAN’s reports at the end of the week had a page or more of my township’s number.  I gave all the helpers ten of ten.  I’ll be calling them again on Monday.

Boston Township Hall

   

Mom in Las Vegas

Mom came by her wandering foot genetically.  She was born in 1918 and on her father’s vacation excursions.  Niagara Falls or the Pacific Ocean, all the same to him, from Cleveland, Ohio.  I wonder what my grandmother thought of lugging bedding for a family, and probably guests, from one set of tourist cabins to another.  I do recall Mom telling of one vacation in which she had cherry pie for breakfast every morning.

Travel and vacations were important when I was a child.  A trip of several days to St. Louis when I was about six or seven involved motels and hotels, and probably tipped my frugal mother (and father) into the camping mode, the accommodation I recall from my childhood.  Some of my first blogs recounted family camping, and especially a tent my dad fashioned of a parachute, marbles, and a tent pole.

Mom budgeted for the annual family vacation.  She had a shoe box with envelopes, each labeled with something she was saving for.  One envelope was the vacation fund and the figures would accumulate down the outside of the envelope.  On one very cold winter morning the engine block of the family car cracked.  But by cashing some bonds and using the vacation fund our family left behind the 1935 Dodge.  My brother Walt and I were not sorry to be sitting in the back seat of a 1948 Dodge.  No more sheet metal slicing the backs of our legs.

When we moved to this house Mom was seventy, and still travelling.  In the preceding decade she had visited friends and relatives in Missouri, Texas, Florida and points between, accompanied by friends or her sisters-in-law.  Camping days were over, but I know Mom looked for the best motel deal available.  I have mental images of her at a motel counter, with tiny, white haired Aunt Helen Rita, negotiating a better rate.

Our Uncle Hank retired after we moved here, and mom noticed him and Aunt Flo taking a lot of little weekend trips—by bus.  Their church senior group organized the jaunts and mom was welcome to join them, if there was an unsold seat left.    After missing a few trips she would have enjoyed mom took matters into her own hands and joined Uncle Hank’s church.

The senior group of the church organized tours that required air travel and although Aunt Flo and Uncle Hank could be off to Disneyland or Broadway, mom was not interested in those tours.  Until the trip to Las Vegas came up.  Her cousin Tommy and his wife Mary would be coming from Texas to join them for several days in Las Vegas.  Mom was so excited she bought a new suit case. 

It would be my mother’s first ever airplane trip and I said I would see her to her gate and wait until she boarded (1995). Well, she could figure that out by herself!  It’s a long trudge to the gates at Cleveland Hopkins, but she only allowed me drop her.  As I slowed down, knowing my mom, I handed her two dollar bills and said that the approaching man, the Sky Cap, would be carrying her bag, and please tip him, and everyone else who helped her.  That’s how they earned a living.  I could not get out of the car in time; she got her suit case and marched right past the outstretched hand of the Sky Cap.

When I picked her up a week later she handed me two dollars, announcing she had carried her bag herself.  Everywhere. She and Tommy had a wonderful time.  In my files I have a picture of others in the party facing their machines, pulling handles, but Mom and Tommy sitting shoulder to shoulder, backs to a machine, chatting like long lost cousins.  I may never find the picture to illustrate the story, but you can see it in your mind’s eye, I know.  Oh, yes, she didn’t waste any money on those casinos, either.

Mom and Uncle Hank on vacation, about 1931

The basement train line

About the time my little brother, Mel, could put his finger tips over the edge of a table and pull himself up for a better look my dad started the freight business from the depot outside his shop, around the basement, through the steps.  The open topped fright car delivered a load of soap under the steps for mom to put in the washing machine and came back to the depot, to the utter delight of the little boy peering over the top of the plywood platform.

With a man and two boys for underwriters, the train business grew.  The square footage available at the large plywood station in the corner multiplied as the train tracks went up the hill against the shop wall, through a tunnel, stopped for crossings, went down a hill into the switching yard, to the round house.

The Lionel™ engine left the round house under a full head of steam, climbed the slight grade along the drive way wall, rounded a nice curve to the backyard wall, still climbing.  She headed straight through the open steps, stopped at the platform by the set tubs to off load mom’s scoop of soap and whistled along the down grade of the track on the next lower step, down, down, down, back to the yard.

I remember helping my mom with of loads of laundry while three guys whooped it up over their trains, which were a major source of entertainment for several years.  Then interest waned and the trains were boxed up on the shelf.  We kids still whiled away a rainy afternoon having marble races on the downhill track.  Two cat eye shooters can race side by side on O gage track!

Eventually all the rolling stock and equipment from the train yard in the basement was long donated to the train museum in Akron, and I thought no more about trains until my uncle was cleaning out his basement and gave me a Lionel™ locomotive he thought he’d borrowed from dad.  It had been run hard and put away wet, but I suppose that is the fate of steam train engines, the engineer and fireman’s combined ages not exceeding twenty one years.

I asked my brother Walt, the original engineer, to build a glass box to showcase the old war horse.  It was missing the cow catcher, saddest of all, and we had to buy a piece of O gauge track on line.  He built a wonderful glass box with walnut trim the glass panels slid into. I could interest none of my children or grandchildren in having the extremely heavy paper weight, so I took it to a nursing home.  It went on a ledge in the common room and had an audience of men in wheel chairs reminiscing, when I left.

With thanks to Bill Lisleman, who visited a train yard any engineer could love.

The Lionel™ Museum

The Big House

Our house is on old farm land, part of the pasture for a large dairy operation and cheese factory across the road.  The factory suffered a fire in the twenties and never reopened.  The land was sold off and in the ensuing decades homes were built on acreage on both sides of the farm lane.  In the forties the six families on the lane petitioned the township to assume responsibility for the lane; the usual assessments went out, the road was paved. 

Few of the houses are visible from the street, their access drives go through the wood and up the hill.  In the summer only we and the neighbor immediately down the hill have a house visible from the road.  All the foliage obscures the houses up the hill. 

From the back of our house, in the winter, we see The Big House. Mary has it lighted like a fairy wonderland in the winter, and she has cheered many a dark winter night at our kitchen table.  Like many houses on the street, this one just grew.  A small cottage, another room added, a wing put on by another owner and then one last owner, like Mary, who pulls it all together.

The Big House is visible, in the winter, through all the north facing windows of our studio.  Back when we were weavers we had ten hand looms in the studio and more weavers than ourselves.  One was Marge, a lovely old woman who loved to wander and talk, and never understood why she always made minimum wage, instead of the piecework rate of other weavers.

I loved Marge.  She always wore Mary Janes, and I loved her little feet treadling away under the loom. She turned on her hearing aid and asked if that was a joke we were laughing at, and please repeat it for her. The Big House, twinkling up the hill, fascinated her.

There are no city services in our township; every property has a well or a cistern, or both, and a septic system.  Because we fulled so much woven fabric we had our septic tanks emptied twice a year.  Angus was in dog heaven then, bouncing around the septic truck on his tigger springs, inhaling deep doggie breaths.

Of course the sewer smell would seep into the studio, which overlooked the septic tanks, and anyone working would breathe shallowly for twenty minutes.  “What’s that smell?!” Marge inquired very sharply the first time she worked on a septic day.  We explained the tanks were being emptied, then we explained septic systems, then we explained what they do, then we explained why there were no sewer lines in our township to an increasingly skeptical Marge.

“Well,” she said.  “I know The Big House wouldn’t have a septic system.  They’re on city water!”  And her little Mary Janes treadled faster.  She never understood why her paycheck was bigger that week, so I explained piece work again.

Source

On the road with Mom

Mom passed most of her driving skill genes along to her kids, and I’m pleased to say I sent those genes, at least, on to my kids.  Both are very good drivers, unlike their father. (I knew him before the term Road Rage existed; that’s the descriptor, I’ve come to understand, for his passing a driver who irritated him, cutting back in front and hitting the brakes.)

When I was young I had no idea my parents drove well.  We never broke down, had an accident or were stopped by a policeman, so there was nothing to hear on that score except a remark on the wrong doing of anyone observed pulled over to the curb by a policeman.

Mom was more obsessed with speed limits than dad, especially concerning his love of beating a train to a crossing.  Any 1950’s road he tried this on could not sustain more than 35 mph, and he certainly would not have defied flashing red lights or descending gates.  I think she disliked the impression he might impart to three children bouncing in the back seat, urging him on. 

This is the same woman whose father taught her to put a car in neutral at the top of the hill “to save on gas.”  And certainly the same woman who did not protest when Dad speeded up a hill to give three jumping kids the thrill of being air born at the crest.

In thinking back on her stories, a lot of Mom’s driving skills came from her father, who I did not know, and her mother, my Grandma Rolf who took me on many trips with her.  Her dad loved cars, loved to drive and saw as much of the country as he could back in the twenties and thirties.  He taught Mom how to drive those big Buicks across country or through New York City.

Mom’s big city skills were impeccable. She was an excellent leader of a caravan of cars and took good care of her train.  For instance, my first rotary, in Boston.  I was following mom; we were in the wrong lane, and needed the rotary to stay on our route out of town.  She applied a firm rule:  my plates are out of state, let me in.  I followed in her slip stream; there was no metal on metal and not even loud application of brakes, we did it.

Her finest skill was “making the hole.”  She kept her caravan together, or changed leaders of the pack, by dropping back slightly and allowing another of us to pull in ahead of her.  We would return the favor if we needed to swap leaders.  Occasionally she would see the need of another driver, drop back and wait.  “Good, he saw the hole!” Or, “Come on, I’ve made a hole for you!”

The penultimate driving statement remained:  “My plates are out state.”   “Our plates are out of state.” “Can’t you see these plates are out of state!”  We saw the USA before interstate highways were invented.  Our plates were out of state!

My Uncle's caption.  Mom in the front seat, watching her father's progress.