mom as a young girl

I almost didn’t visit my mother but I am glad I did. For years and years I’ve wanted to talk about the past but she hasn’t wanted to. She would say the past is off limits as a topic for discussion or just change the subject. This time I put my foot down and said I wouldn’t come if we didn’t talk and after a couple of disagreement cycles she relented.

I told her that in writing the My Life Unscrambled stories on my blog I feel heard — no longer voiceless. The urge to bug her and Dad to please listen (obviously he can’t listen now anyway) is no longer driving me crazy but there still is the matter of understanding and reconciling. She thought it would help to tell me about her own life and that sounded good to me. I said it’s important to tell the family stories because it is so easy for them to get lost forever.

She said, “mine is already lost” and then told me the nearly lost story.

Her father’s first wife died leaving him with a working farm in Goldfield, Iowa and two young children. My grandmother, formerly a Chemistry teacher with “a paycheck of her own” left her independent life to become my grandfather’s wife and farm partner. The work was grueling and she felt bitter about losing her independent life. There was no time for more children but my grandmother gave birth to two more. The second child, my mother, was born in 1932 when my grandmother was 42.

My mother knew she was not wanted by Grandmother. She was always underfoot and told to get out of the way. Grandmother didn’t want to teach her to cook and sew but eventually my mother learned to sew on her own. She spent a lot of time outdoors whiling away time because she was of no use to her mother and older sister in the kitchen and garden and no use to her father and brothers farming. She rode her horse Danny for hours wandering off in any old direction and he would always know the way back way home. When puppies were born on the farm she would hide them so they couldn’t be adopted. There were kittens too — they would sometimes drown themselves trying to get milk from the milk pails. She was alone a lot but her father and brothers loved her and were kind. Her brothers knew she hated oatmeal and would finish hers off when Grandmother wasn’t looking. Her older sister was also kind but she was always very busy helping Grandmother.

Grandmother’s relatives would bring new clothes for the babies but this caused jealously with the relatives of the half siblings who viewed Grandmother as a usurper of the first wife.

Times were hard during the depression. My mother didn’t notice it as much going to the one-room school house near the farm but when she switched to the bigger school in town the kids would make fun of her wearing her brother’s hand-me-down coat and having cardboard inserts in her shoes to make the soles last longer. She didn’t know she was different until she went to the town school.

Her father borrowed money from the bank and from his father and somehow was able to hang onto the farm. During one of the Roosevelt administrations electricity and indoor plumbing came to the farm. Before that you had to use the outhouse or pee into a basin under the bed during the night when it was cold.

Grandfather knew she wanted to be independent and after she graduated from high school encouraged her to go to school to become a teacher or a nurse. She decided to become a nurse.

High School Graduation

She loved nursing school but the experience growing up on the farm didn’t prepare her for life in a medium-sized town let alone a big city like Chicago.

My mother met my father as his nurse when he was hospitalized in Chicago for a bad case of mumps. They dated very briefly and were married.

A couple weeks after the wedding my father went on a bender disappearing for days and my mother didn’t know what to do. She called her parents and was told “you made your bed now lie in it.” This was a shock as she knew nothing about alcoholism and didn’t see what she had done to cause the situation but understood that she was expected to make the best of it.

She tried to make the marriage work but my father’s volatile behavior, frequent unemployment and habit of disappearing for days at a time made life difficult, especially after my brothers and I were born and she found herself supporting the family mostly on her own.

She felt worthless, like a complete failure, in part because my father and his mother often criticized her, my father calling her stupid and my Grandmother saying “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.” Sometimes my father would hit her in front of us. She had no self esteem, no confidence about being a mother.

When I was defiant as a young child she responded harshly with physical punishment because that’s how it was growing up on the farm. Any sort of disobedience was harshly punished. That was what she knew. She didn’t realize until many years later after taking a course in Child Psychology that this might be damaging.

She also resented my defiance because she wanted to be independent herself and saw the spark I had to make my own way. She wanted to be like me but felt too worthless to see how to claim herself and make her own life.

It wasn’t until I went to live with my father that she had some respite to reflect on her own life and relive some of her own lost childhood and young womanhood, making new girlfriends and having boyfriends. The men were mostly a disaster. She never learned good judgment. It wasn’t that she meant to abandon me but that my father did offer to help with me and once I had moved and then went off on my own she didn’t see herself as having a role in my life until my son was born.

She didn’t know you weren’t supposed to abandon young adults because she was abandoned herself as a young adult, was told she was responsible for herself from that point forward. She is sorry for the pain. It was so brave of her to say all of this.

We cried my mother and I, holding hands. It is so sad.

My mother’s nursing degree was earned in three years but at some point in New York to keep your RN you needed to earn a four year BS degree. My mother went back to college and earned her BS when she was 51, one year younger than me.

BS in Community Health

It was in the process of earning her degree that she began to feel a sense of worth and purpose in life. She embarked on a new career as a Hospice volunteer coordinator for the East End of Long Island. She’s now 78 and has been doing this work for over twenty years, earning major respect from peers and families of Hospice patients not to mention the Hospice patients themselves. She is known for the artful way she helps families come together and make meaningful memories as a loved one nears the end of life and is especially proud of her work with Camp Good Grief, a positive camp experience for children grieving the loss of a loved one.

If I had to live my whole life over again, going through everything I went through, I would still rather be me and relive my own life than have to live my mother’s. I feel humbled.

And reconciled.

Note: most of the above is from what my Mom told me yesterday but as she spoke it triggered memories of some things she’d told me earlier when I was a bad listener and so I filled in those things too, like her horse Danny.

]]> http://www.financialorganizing.info/2010/09/09/16-lost-stories/feed/ 1 http://www.financialorganizing.info/2010/09/06/virgin-america-sfo-jfk/ http://www.financialorganizing.info/2010/09/06/virgin-america-sfo-jfk/#comments Tue, 07 Sep 2010 01:11:03 +0000 Susan Tiner http://www.financialorganizing.info/?p=3037

Flying to New York tomorrow to visit Mom tomorrow at the very far end of the North Fork of Long Island, near Greenport — coming back late Thursday, just in time to join the annual choir retreat at the Episcopal Church of St Matthew in San Mateo.

I’ll miss my bloggy friends and look forward to catching up with you all soon!

Our Little Man with his New Collar and Bell

Note: this was supposed to be an iPhone/iPad project update but though we’re working fast and furious there’s not much news. Brownie’s day is more important.

Today started like a typical day. Brownie woke us up at about 7am meowing to please open the garage door so he could come in for a snack. If he’s been out during the night, he likes to eat on the early side. Usually his pattern is to come in around 11pm or 2am to sleep on the comfy couch in the TV room off of the garage. In summer, when the weather is warm, he seems more interested in visiting around the neighborhood. Last night was a warm one and he was out and about.

Let me fill in a little background for this story. Martin and I adopted tabby kittens we named Brownie and Gray, two neutered male litter mates born to a feral cat and found on a street in San Francisco from San Francisco Animal Control in May 2005. We were ready to adopt a kitten and got inspired by the cutest story on KQED about the gzillions of kittens at the San Francisco SPCA needing adoption only to be disappointed when we learned on arrival one fine Saturday in May, that those kittens were still too young for adoption.

We asked if there were any other venues for kitten adoption and were directed to visit San Francisco Animal Control (SFAC) a couple blocks away. In contrast to SF SPCA, which exudes enthusiasm and has programs and much agenda regarding educating the public about pet ownership, SFAC seemed like more of a matter-of-fact animal intake situation. We were guided down a hall reminiscent of hallways in post-war-industrial-complex buildings and lead into a claustrophobic room containing cages of dogs and cats. Our boys were together in a 2nd tier level cage at the very end of this miserable room and we loved them instantly, in part because they seemed kind of dopey. Little did we know that they really were doped — had just the day before had their nuts toasted and were still recovering from the anesthesia.

We meant to adopt one kitten but who could resist litter mates? We played with them in the depressing play room set up for would be adoption candidates and all we could think of was that we gotta get these guys out of here. On the way home they yowled. Martin said “you guys have it made.”

Having read an article in The Atlantic about the brief window during which kittens bond with humans, we were prepared. The jist of that article was that you need to get a hold of them as young as possible and hold them a lot. So we slept with them for the first three weeks. Actually, we didn’t sleep. The SFAC had a policy of not doing the nut toasting operation until the kitten reached 2lbs in weight so this meant our boys were probably already 4-6 weeks old — a little towards the end of the ideal timeframe according to The Atlantic article (would love to provide a link but The Atlantic website is too nasty to bother with at this point). 4-6 week old kittens have some serious energy and there was the sibling rivalry thing too. Much toe biting, night time wrestling, chasing, jumping upon our chests, stomachs, legs etc. ensued. At the end of the three weeks we were exhausted but hoped the kittens were no longer feral.

Despite our best efforts, Gray Kitty, the inspiration for the Gray Kitty iPhone stories is still feral but Brownie is fully rehabilitated.

Our neighborhood is extraordinarily pet friendly but has a strong bias towards dogs. I would say outdoor cats are not generally appreciated but despite this Brownie has a fan following and this has probably encouraged his visiting spirit (Gray stays close to home — probably too freaked out to socialize). Brownie has encountered and grown used to many sunny neighbors and gardens.

So it was a bit of a shock this morning to get a call from someone at the Peninsula Humane Society & SPCA — the first words were “are you missing Brownie?”

Right from the get go — SPCA employees/volunteers must be trained — we were to understand that our kitty was in crisis. SPCA doesn’t want people to allow their precious kitties to go outdoors and everything that happened today, from the phone call to finally getting to take Brownie home, seemed designed as an “intervention” to get us to realize that we need to make our cats indoor kitties.

So that’s how we found ourselves today right smack in the middle of this debate going on in the US regarding whether responsible cat owners should allow their cats to roam freely.

We tried to make our cats be indoor kitties but it was obvious they wanted to go outdoors and Martin and I wanted them to be happy. Supposedly they should be dead by now according to the statistics — the average life span of outdoor cats is 5 years. They are 5.5 years old. When we take them for their annual veterinary appointment the doctor is always amazed by their trim weight — not an ounce of fat! — and their silky glossy coats. Our kitties are happy and very healthy. They spend many hours stretched out in the sun, have significantly reduced the rodent population in our neighborhood (this was a HUGE problem) and are generally friendly and gorgeous critters.

But someone in the neighborhood must not love Brownie’s garden visits. A feral cat trap was set and he got caught in it. It must have happened right after he had his morning snack and then went off wandering. Our neighbor brought our trapped kitty to the Peninsula Humane Society & SPCA as a stray and then — because the original SFAC folks implanted chips in the cats and we registered them — we got the call to come get him and bring him home. The chips worked! (As an aside, we tried getting collars on the cats when they were younger and it was clear they would hang themselves rather than wear a collar so we gave it up.)

The interaction with Peninsula Humane Society & SPCA was not neutral. There were three people helping us retrieve Brownie and each delivered a non-subtle message regarding our performance as cat owners. “You’re lucky” one person said multiple times as if we must be totally clueless. Another wanted us to know that if it’s an unfriendly neighbor it’s really our responsibility to protect kitty — we were pushing for contact info to call this neighbor and communicate but were told we can’t get that info. How sad.

We were treated like pet abusers. Several times we were challenged quite directly regarding our decision to let the cats roam — at one point Martin, in his quiet way, said that it’s not in their nature to stay inside.

The whole 1.5 hrs we were there trying to get our guy home – guess what they had him packed inside of? This is it.

Brownie's Prison

He couldn’t pee or drink water or poop or anything while in this little tiny box.

As soon as we were “released” Martin let him out of the box prison and on the way home we stopped at a totally precious store to get him an approved collar to which we could attached his newly minted city license.

To their credit, after much challenging questions from us, Peninsula Humane Society & SPCA did agree to put notes in Brownie’s file such that if the same neighbor tries to keep trapping him that neighbor will know that this kitty is not stray.

Meanwhile Brownie is sporting his new leopard print collar with bell and newly minted San Mateo license — if he’s picked up again for roaming at least he’s documented.

1934 - Holy City

In October 2000, when I was still married to my 3rd husband, my father came for a visit. He called several weeks earlier to inform me of the dates he planned to travel to the San Francisco Bay Area for business and the dates it would be convenient to stay with us.

“Hello Darling,” he said when I answered the phone, and before I could get a word in edgewise everything had already been arranged, like Cary Grant in North by Northwest telephoning the hotel concierge to arrange for his suit to be pressed after the unfortunate incident with the crop duster plane earlier that day.

I had given up protesting. No Dad, that’s a horrible weekend. There’s a project deadline at work. The kids have a school event. One of the kids is visiting family with my ex and won’t be here.

Protest had always been futile but throughout most of the nineties we had a game plan that helped make these visits easier to tolerate.

My father adored my third husband. When he learned we were getting married he said, “You know darling I always love coming to your weddins.” Belly laugh. “And besides, you’re finally marrying someone at my intellectual level, someone I can really relate to.” This had to do with my husband’s credentials — an undergraduate degree in Math from Princeton and a Phd in Math from Stanford — and my father’s opinion of his own genius.

The visits generally lasted two days, three days maximum, and the game plan involved my husband and father going by themselves to Half Moon Bay for breakfast in the morning so that I would have time to shower, dress and collect myself before actually participating in the plans for the day. This was crucial, as my meltdown button, the one my father would inevitably press before the visit was over, could only be activated after several consecutive hours of exposure to a non-stop brain dump of everything-going-through-Jack’s-mind.

Sensing that death was near my father wanted to revisit places in the San Francisco Bay Area he loved or that were familiar to him from the years he lived in San Francisco with his mother as a young child. We had grown used to there being a request list and didn’t mind accommodating day trips to various venues, such as his favorite viewpoints in San Francisco. One of these viewpoints — the spot by Ina Coolbrith Park on Russian Hill at the intersection of Taylor and Vallejo Streets — we visited repeatedly. He would stand on Vallejo near the steps to the park  in the foreground looking out towards North Beach and the Bay for several minutes, lost in thought. I did not know what he was thinking or feeling but his expression conveyed sadness. Sometimes he would sigh.

Taylor and Vallejo

During this particular visit my father wanted to visit Holy City which was, as he recalled, somewhere in the Santa Cruz mountains, near La Honda. On the way to Santa Cruz my father and his mother would stop at Holy City for lunch or ice cream. There were life-sized Santa Elves that looked like garden gnomes lining the road approaching the village as a way of welcoming visitors. He wanted to see the elves again. We loved driving out to La Honda and anticipated seeing some pretty Fall colors so it was a plan. When they returned from breakfast I packed some snacks and water for the car and we were off to La Honda via Route 84 West, expecting to see signs for Holy City along the way.

There were no signs. We drove past the La Honda Post Office for about ten minutes, then turned around and came back. I went into the Post Office, waited patiently for my turn, then asked the clerk if we were near Holy City? There was a large map of the Santa Cruz mountains on the wall behind him and he pointed to the place where Holy City was, very, very far from our current location, on a mountain off of Highway 17 towards Santa Cruz.

Still in good spirits, we reversed the drive back to Highway 280, then headed South on 280 to connect to Highway 17 towards Santa Cruz. My father talked incessantly along the way, mostly about politics, with my husband interjecting a point here and there. I listened and looked for signs. On Highway 17, near Redwood Estates, we turned off on Holy City Rd and started climbing up a mountain. On the way up we passed a building with the sign Holy City Art Glass and this seemed to confirm that we were on the right track but after miles of meandering off on side roads that lead further up the mountain and seeing hardly any homes let alone signs of a village we turned around and came back down the mountain, again passing the reassuring Holy City Art Glass building. At the bottom we crossed Highway 17 and ascended a different mountain up, up and up then slowly back down. No Holy City.

At this point, growing concerned that this might be yet another tall tale, I forced an interruption of my father’s stream of consciousness to ask “Dad, when was the last time you visited Holy City?”

“Hmm,” he said. “It would have been 1936 or 1937.”

I said, “Oh.”

Then after thinking about it for a moment I suggested we visit the Holy City Art Glass building and ask someone there about the village. They agreed and so we drove back, parked in front of the Holy City Art Glass building near a few other vehicles and came into what turned out to be a large art glass workshop. A man wearing a protective mask and holding some kind of blow torch tool saw us come in and greeted us. We explained our mission and he told us his business was basically all that was left of commercial enterprise in Holy City. The village was lost years ago as a result of fire and earthquake damage, and now only a few private homes dotted the mountain. He lead us to the back office and on the way explained what he knew of the history of Holy City.

The office walls were covered with memorabilia of Holy City and it’s founder, Father Riker, a white-supremacist religious preacher and huckster who founded Holy City as a commune for followers of The Perfect Christian Divine Way sect he also founded.

Father Riker, founder of Holy City, and Irvin Fisher, in front of their offices for the Perfect Christian Divine Way in Los Angeles.

On entering the office my father immediately recognized the Santa Elves in a faded old newspaper photograph tacked to the wall.

“Look, there’s the Santa Elves! Just the way I remember them.” He was delighted.

If you look closely you can see the Santa’s Elves in the lower left corner of the first photograph above. A better close up of the Santa Elves is on the second page of a San Francisco Bay Area Postcard Club article on Holy City by Dan Saks starting on page 3 of this document. A more in-depth article “The Whole Truth Right Here at Holy City” by Roxanne Nilan is available on page 3 of this issue of the Newsletter of the History of San José.

I normally post a memoir piece on the weekend but I love this brand new App for iPhone and iPad hence couldn’t resist squeezing in a review. And the timing is perfect because it’s currently available at an introductory discount price of $1.99 for both iPhone and iPad through this coming Tuesday August 31st and is free to the first 200 people who register here for the Thumbelina contest.

The colorful, whimsical illustrations by Hagit Hashimshony drew me right into the story, which is only loosely based on the beautiful but dark fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen. In this adaptation, the reader participates in helping the story unfold via touch events, such as helping the white winged butterfly pull Thumbelina along the stream.

The sound effects are charming and peaceful. For example, in the scene above, as you swipe your finger to help the butterfly pull Thumbelina, you hear the sound of a stream gurgling from the wave created by the motion.

There is a lovely balance between the rhyming text, which you can read aloud yourself or hear narrated in one of multiple language translations, and interactive touch events that reveal the full audio and visual possibilities of each scene.

Click here to watch a YouTube video — currently the #1 YouTube hit for iPad kid’s books — demonstrating the features of the App.

The developers, Touchoo, are members of our family-friendly App development group MomsWithApps profiled yesterday on ABC News. Touchoo strives to create Apps that help a child “learn a new skill while reading and playing.”

What I love best about this App is the way its interactive elements let you help Thumbelina progress through her journey. It makes you feel like you are also a character in the story befriending Thumbelina. Sometimes she needs your help to move the story forward and sometimes she needs help getting out of pickle, like when she realizes she wants to get out of Mr. Mole’s hole and you have to pull her up to safety. “Yay” she says when you have placed her above ground.

Our favorite reading Apps incorporate charming multimedia elements that enhance the traditional print reading experience yet are appropriate for bed time reading for a young child. Thumbelina is one of these Apps.

]]> http://www.financialorganizing.info/2010/08/28/11-thumbelina-for-iphone-and-ipad/feed/ 2 http://www.financialorganizing.info/2010/08/25/10-aesops-fables-for-ipad/ http://www.financialorganizing.info/2010/08/25/10-aesops-fables-for-ipad/#comments Wed, 25 Aug 2010 22:49:31 +0000 Susan Tiner http://www.financialorganizing.info/?p=2830

Normally I post mid-week on some aspect of our App projects but there’s not a lot to talk about this week — we’re waiting for Apple to review our 2nd App, porting both Apps to iPad and updating the free App with a rewrite of the English text and support for Spanish text and audio.

So this is a great opportunity to feature Aesop’s Fables for iPad, a beautiful reading App for kids developed by AppyZoo, a new member of our family-friendly App developer group MomsWithApps.

Click here to watch a gorgeous video trailer that shows you all of the Aesop’s Fables features, including a wheel that spins to select stories, settings to choose automatic narration in the language of your choice or record your own voice narration.

The App stories and sound effects are wonderful but what I love best about the App is that it provides motivation for kids to read more by allowing access to built-in games  based on how many stories are read.

The games consist of comparing two versions of an illustration from one of the stories and spotting all of the differences within the allotted time.  It’s hard! But you can always try again.

The text with gorgeous illustrations by Milo Winter are based on an edition of the book now in the Public Domain.

The AppyZoo two-person development team got the idea for the App after one of them saw how his three and four year old nieces took to the iPhone like “ducks to water” and chatted with the other about about their experiences with kids and iPhones.  They got excited about how touch-based devices dramatically reduce the computer learning curve for kids and started thinking about building their own Apps for kids.

After reviewing Alice for iPad, the developers decided not to include animation in their Aesop’s Fables App because they felt the animation detracted from the reading experience, which is their focus. They wanted to create an iPad App you read with your kids, not an App you give them to shake and play with like a toy.

Not all of the fables are included — the developers excluded some of the more violent fables invoking images of death and vindictiveness.

If you have an iPad and preschoolers in your life, you won’t want to miss out on this App.

Note: I hope these photos are old enough and obscure enough – the one of my kids is the cutest one ever of the two of them and besides I made that dress. Brother is now 31 and sister 25 and they love each other very much.

There was more to the eighties than big hair and ugly jeans, right?

It is difficult to reflect on my life during the decade of the eighties because during most of it my second husband and I were consumed with parenting and career achievement. The family was our focus outside of work and there was precious little time for solitude or self care or work on the self. We gave up ourselves.

We built this house in a suburb of Albany, New York. It still breaks my heart when I remember the trees. The property had been filled with trees when we first selected the lot with the builder. We didn’t know it was necessary to tag the trees we didn’t want cut. Construction vehicles needed access to the rest of the development and our property was in the best location to cut through so the trees were all lost. There was just one row left in the front along the street. What would have been a wooded property became a huge front lawn and a back lawn so large you could land an airplane there.

It was poorly graded and we had no money for landscaping so we planted the lawn ourselves, forever doomed to mowing over uneven terrain.

This was the Jewish period and so there was a lot of time spent celebrating holidays with family and friends and attending synagogue. This picture of my kids is probably one taken just before attending synagogue for Rosh Hashanah.

The piano photo is of my father and son. We tended to take family photos when there was some kind of family gathering. Not so much otherwise.

My in-laws owned a house on Cape Cod — in the town of Wellfleet — and this was a wonderful place to go with the kids for a Summer vacation.

I have two warm memories from those vacations. One was when my daughter must have been about three years old and she wanted one of those large lollipops with the colorful swirls. We got one, unwrapped it and handed it to her sitting in her stroller. She was just about to take a lick when my brother, who was visiting with us there, asked her for a bite. She broke off a piece but it was very small, much smaller than the remaining lollipop so she looked at the pieces for a moment and then she handed him the larger one. Lovey pie.

The other memory is of going to a restaurant that was known for lobster. My son, who was about seven, ordered a whole lobster and as my daughter, still about three (might have been the same Summer), watched him crack it open and eat the flesh her eyes just kept getting bigger and bigger in amazement that someone would actually eat something like that.

There are a lot of warm memories from this period though I was not a happy person. The experiences of premature independence followed by marriage, motherhood and divorce by 22 then remarriage and second child at 27 were a lot to process and I had not processed any of it. I was the proverbial pot waiting to boil over.

I had no idea who I was as a person or why I felt so horrible but I knew how to work hard and did. Career success was paramount. We wanted opportunities for our kids and saved aggressively, putting away up to 25% of earnings, such that by the time the nineties economic recovery rolled around we’d already built up significant equity.

This last photo is of the house my in-laws lived in Albany when they were still alive. I’ve included it because although the living room has been rearranged to accommodate holiday table dining it still shows some of the details I admired, like the nine-foot glass book cases that held their collection of Judaica, the green leather couch and brown leather wing back, the cool mid-century lamp right off the set of Mad Men.

I adored my mother-in-law. She was brilliant and talented – had a Phd in Public Administration and managed the New York Prison libraries. She had five children she doted on, was an accomplished artist, a fabulously creative cook. She read extensively on wide-ranging topics and was an excellent conversationalist. Everything interested her. Her home was beautifully decorated, each piece of furniture or work of art carefully considered and beautifully placed.

Sadly, she didn’t like me back and criticized my husband for marrying me. I understood why she didn’t like me. I was completely clueless at this time of my life. I had no sense of culture or personal style, was not a conversationalist, had not accomplished anything that would merit her praise. I was not good enough for her son and she let me know this in subtle and sometimes not so subtle ways. It was incredibly destructive.

And it was a shame because I wanted to learn from her and was a willing student. She is the first person I came into intimate relationship with that I truly wanted to be like myself. I tried winning her love, but my admiration made her uncomfortable. She didn’t want to be admired by me. And so I grew to admire her less, to challenge her, thus setting in motion one of a myriad of marital stresses that would ultimately lead to the undoing of our marriage. The divorce was not my mother-in-law’s fault – it had to do with incompatibility and both of us being overwhelmed with other stresses – but this family dynamic with the in-laws didn’t help at all.

My former husband and I are on good terms. He is the man both of my children consider to be their father and he is a wonderful father. We are both now living with the loves of our lives and are grateful for the family we created.

Click here for sleigh bells and Jingle Bells.

As of today the Gray Kitty Goes to School iPhone App story is done, but there are many, many details involved in submitting to Apple so it will be another week before I can press the “Submit” button and take a deep breath.

The last page of Gray Kitty Goes to School is a teaser for the next story, Gray Kitty and the Christmas Kitten, featuring La Belette Rouge’s adorable Westie Lily.

The Jingle Bells recording is an MP3 file I created in Sibelius from a Sibelius file posted via the Choral Public Domain Library website. The accompanying PDF file has this attribution: ed. Sven Dierke, 2006 after first edition, Boston: Ditson, c. 1859. The first edition he refers to is by James Pierpont.

This is what Jingle Bells actually sounded like when James Pierpont first published it circa 1859. It’s different than what we’re used to but  I think it sounds charming.

Going with the feeling regarding the importance of sounds and music, I decided this week to splurge on professional sound effects — public domain sounds are available on the internet but it’s a hunt and peck kind of thing and I am a freak about copyright. The sleigh bells in the above sound file are part of my new amazing sound library.

What really convinced me to splurge on the professional sound effects was the idea of including an old school bell complete with a rope pulling sound like I wanted for this scene — shown here in the Spanish option.

Click here to hear the old  school bell ring.

I hope you love the old bell too.

If you like the old sound of chalk on blackboard, you’re in for a treat in this school story. Maybe I’ll share that scene in the next Gray Kitty post.

http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:National_cash_register.jpg

In a previous post I wrote about S Corp Loan to Shareholder tax implications but what I see more often than cash outflows classified as Loan to Shareholder are frequent cash flows in and out of the business, with inflows classified as Loan from Shareholder and outflows classified as Loan to Shareholder.

There is some research (noted in the previous post) that supports carrying a Loan to Shareholder balance instead of netting it against the Loan from Shareholder account as long as both accounts are separately and legitimately set up, but there’s other research indicating the importance of establishing accurate loan basis — an outstanding Loan to Shareholder balance reduces S Corp debt basis.

How does one legitimately establish these accounts? The previous post provides guidelines for the Loan to Shareholder, but what about a Loan from Shareholder?

A loan to the S Corp from shareholders or other family members should be formally documented as per this www.nolo.com article. Shareholders and family members are typically more flexible about interest and payment schedules than commercial lenders but there must be a payment schedule that includes realistic market-rate interest.

If the lender chooses to not to charge interest or charges below-market interest the difference between the market rate and what the lender charges becomes a gift of imputed interest from the lender to the S Corp. The IRS Section 7872(a) treats this imputed interest as income to the lender that may be subject to federal gift tax.

The source for this article is Tax and Financial PLanning for the Closely Held Family Business — Gary A. Zwick and James John Jurinski.

The authors indicate IRS concern about abuse in S Corp treatment of financing as debt that should be classified as equity. There are several considerations but in summary, to avoid having debt reclassified as stock , the on demand or term loan must

• be documented and include market-rate interest payment(s),
• not be subordinated to general creditors of the S Corp, and
• not have an excessively long-term maturity date.

Furthermore, the S Corp debt-to-equity ratio shouldn’t be unreasonably large.

Disclaimer: This blog is for educational purposes only and is not intended to be a substitute for seeking personalized, professional advice. Be sure to consult a tax or financial advisor before making important financial decisions.

too big for my britches

I’ve been debating whether to file posts reflecting on my experience grappling with class in the History of American Money Values Series or in the My Life Unscrambled thread. Reflecting on my experience from a sociological point of view detracts from a straight telling of the story but I believe class is part of this particular story so it seems right to talk about it here. So for now I’ll put these kinds of reflections here and we’ll see what happens.

It is extremely difficult to talk intelligently about class in the United States because while there is not widespread agreement about what constitutes the different levels of class hierarchy there is widespread controversy regarding the values and cultural norms attributed to these fuzzy layers. We all know the layers are there and we form negative or positive opinions of them based on our perception of their distinctive values and norms as we encounter and interpret them from our understanding. My understanding is subjective, not objective, but for the sake of getting on with the story I’m not going to keep qualifying my point of view. From here on I will write as if I know what I’m talking about even though of course I don’t.

A solidly middle class situation is one in which daily family life emphasizes development above obedience and in which there is at least the hope if not the expectation of higher education for children. The solidly middle class has educational aspirations for its children yet is familiar and comfortable with vocational paths. The solidly middle class is not ashamed of aspiring.

It’s hard to say whether my background was working class or middle class or borderline but it was certainly not solidly middle class.

I would not have become so keenly aware of class had it not been for my experience living in Great Neck and going to high school with peers obsessively focused on getting into great colleges and universities. At the time, Great Neck, NY was demographically way over 50% Jewish. I think it may been 85% but don’t quote me. My friends were very busy striving and achieving, in many cases passing their parents by leaps and bounds. Kids didn’t apologize, parents didn’t criticize. I had no idea at the time that this striving was sometimes characterized by anti-Semites as a grab for power. I also did not know that questioning the motives of some of my friends who were mostly after power – blatantly admitted being so — would trigger the accusation of me being an anti-Semite.

I learned to shut up, listen and observe. I kept a gzillion questions to myself. What are my friends striving for? Why does reflecting back a comment about striving for power trigger a knee jerk response? It’s not that I had a clue anything was wrong with seeking power just that I could sense its importance and wondered about that. I was a student of a culture I admired and wanted to be part of in the worst way. As I made banana splits at Friendly’s on weekends friends at one end of the culture spectrum took the train to Manhattan for music lessons at the Manhattan School of Music while friends at the other end shopped for expensive dresses to wear to parties. I watched and collected observations and questions.

I know I said I’d say no more about my parents but need to make this one reference in passing. The photo above is one taken of me during the time I lived in Great Neck at the Episcopal rectory but was at my mother’s for a brief visit. It was her idea to take the photo. At the time I had no discretionary income for cool clothes but wanted to fit in with my friends and was pretty good at sewing. In those days you could actually acquire patterns and fabric inexpensively. I made the dress and felt sophisticated wearing it. My mother sensed that I felt sophisticated wearing it and perceived this as an affront. In the ensuing years, during visits (as recently as a few years ago), she would speak of this photo in its absentia (it usually wasn’t worth dragging out the photo album) to friends or new boyfriends (of mine) or other family members, recalling the details of my expression, the way my hands crossed my lap, the firey look in my eyes.

She described the photo in a way that totally embarrassed me. It’s not that she said “to the manor born” or “putting on airs” to me directly but I had heard family members make those quotes at times and somehow understood that in wearing that dress, slinging my arms just so, I was being “too big for my britches,” another family quote.

When I look at this photo now what I see is a young woman wanting to feel pretty and fit in with her friends.  I had no concept of this being a radical act.