Is Rudy dere?

1980 was a milestone year for us. We bought our first house for $24,000 in the Riverwest neighborhood of Milwaukee. And we bought our first phone. Back then you called the phone company, they installed a landline at your house and you rented a phone for a monthly fee. But the phone company also saw a future in selling phones to customers and set up a store in the mall. Dan and I wandered in and fell in love with a retro looking dial-phone. (Push-button phones, while available, were not entirely commonplace.) The price was $180 and when we compared the monthly rental fee to the overall price it seemed worth it.

One month later we received a letter from the phone company, basically outlining the cost of the internal working parts we might want to purchase, now that we had bought the “shell” of the phone. What? Yes, that would be another $180. So for $360 in 1980 ($1102 in 2015, adjusted for inflation), we now were ahead of our peers and owned our own phone.

Two days ago, Dan called and cancelled the landline. These days, the only calls we get are from our parents and telemarketers. The phone will continue to hang on the wall, the source of many memories.

In the early days we got a lot of wrong numbers. “Is Rudy dere?” was a common call. Apparently, our recycled number (258-1503) had belonged to a very popular fellow named Rudy, as he was in constant demand. One evening we had a party and the call for Rudy came through, Dan said hang on, I'll get him. Our friends knew all about the Rudy calls and were happy to play along, picking up the phone for over 90-minutes, letting the caller know that Rudy would be along in just a minute.

There was the time Dan was helping out a friend on a Saturday and I got a wrong number from a woman who didn't believe she had dialed a wrong number. After taking that call a few more times I may have made some comment about her intelligence. She called back one more time and threatened to kill me. Home alone, I frantically called for back-up, finding Dan on the other side of town. He and his friend made it back to the house in record time, my knights in shining armor.

When Carl was just crawling his main objective was to get to the long phone cord, happily stretching it out for extended periods of time. Afraid that he'd pull the heavy handset down on his head, Dan purchased two phone cords at American Science and Surplus and made a giant loop out of them for his first birthday. Grandparents, aunts and uncles looked on with dismay as he ignored a cornucopia of gifts in favor of this new phone cord toy.

When I was expecting Hunter I went into labor early. Dan was out for the first time in a few months, with Malcolm, at Wolski’s. I used the phone to call Dan there and heard the classic bartender call to the patrons “Is there a Dan Johnson here?” When Dan got home, he called his parents house to come pick up Carl. Their phone was busy, so after several tries Dan dialed “O” for operator and asked her to break into the call (can you even do that anymore?). Dan heard his dad tell the operator he was going to have another grandchild.

Later memories include Hunter’s friends coming over to the house and needing to make a call for a ride. I’d point them to the rotary phone. More than once I'd see a kid pushing at the dial, trying to figure out how it worked. It was always a pleasure to explain the retro technology. Place your finger in the hole with the desired number, pull it all the way to the stop and remove your finger, letting it rotate back into position…repeat with each number. No lightning fast dialing, no caller ID, just basic pulse dialing technology.

We've started sifting through our belongings, making some decisions about things we must keep and things we can let go of. There are a lot of memories just looking at that phone that will never serve its intended purpose again. I’d advocate for leaving it on the wall when we finally sell, but I'm afraid the memories would hit the landfill. Instead I think we should take it with us, a metaphorical landline to many years of memories.

Music that resonates:
Call me - Blondie

Change in plan

Let me be honest. Any formal plan to make a location change is going to involve a lot of discussions about money. The topic is going to come up early and often. It’s stressful. And because I’ve never taken the idea of moving anywhere very seriously we did not put a firm long term plan in place.

I’m not kidding when I say this, I’m married to a man, who up until he ran his first marathon 6 weeks ago, planned to be dead before he was 54.  He absolutely told me this when I was 19 and we got engaged. He repeated this for the first 25 or so years of our marriage. My instructions were to collect the life insurance payments, become a rich widow and get married again (my silent amendment to that plan was to get a pool and a pool boy). Seriously, this was Dan’s original plan. And just for the record, I was never in favor of this…well…except for the pool boy part…I kind of liked that idea.

Our entire married lives we’ve negotiated money this way…I handle the monthly bills, Dan gets the taxes done. We’ve always had joint accounts. Money is pooled, bills are paid, a set amount goes into savings and the rest is, well, spent. We cinch in when we need to and our outflow flexes with our fortunes.  We’ve lived on one small salary and two generous salaries. We’ve both embraced the theory of if you can fix it with money, it’s not worth worrying about, because you can always make more. Shake your head in disbelief now, it’s OK.

As we begin to seriously discuss a relocation, we need to examine our lack of a truly responsible long term fiscal strategy. Please don’t misunderstand, we do have savings, 401k and retirement plans working quietly, in the background. However with this shift in thinking the magnifying glass is out.  What can we do with these accounts and how can we make more money? What are the trigger dates for maximum pension payouts? What happens if we exit work on this date versus that date?  It’s exhausting and I don’t like it.

And I won’t get to interview prospective pool boys.

Loose change

Anyone who knows my husband Dan, knows he's a man with a plan. For years now his plan has been to move south, specifically to New Orleans. He's convinced that his soul was switched before birth and that there is some guy, trapped in Louisiana, who thinks ice fishing is a good idea. All along I've nodded and smiled and said OK, sounds good, some day. But in my heart of hearts I have not been interested or motivated to move.

I fundamentally agree with Dan that there is no compelling argument to live in Wisconsin forever. My biggest reason for staying has left town. Our two boys have graduated college and are slowly moving to the coasts. Carl, a musician, lives in Philadelphia and seeks jobs playing his bass in New York. Hunter, an actor, lives in Chicago and has his sights set on Los Angeles. No matter what, they will live a plane ticket away. And yet, I'm not ready to do it, commit to the big move. 

But wait, I did say Dan's plan is New Orleans, and this blog is about moving to the Keys! Yes. There has been a location change in the plan. I'm a beach girl, I like to scuba dive and I don’t like cold water. So move south? Maybe, but New Orleans...no. We needed to compromise, and in our 30+ years of marriage we’ve learned how to do that. So, three trips to Key West and Dan is sold. He now understands why, if we are going to move, I need quick access to a warm ocean!

So that’s it, right?  Put it on the calendar and go.  Not so easy for me, which brings me to the title of this post, “loose change”.

We just returned from a vacation in Key West.  Dan, excited about the idea of moving, needed to ACT.  He proceeded to find all the loose pennies, nickels, dimes and quarters in various containers about the house.  He pooled all the coins and took them to the bank, making a $123.00 deposit.  “Paula, we need to pay down that bill, so mail it in.”  And that’s it, he’s off and running – next stop, Key West.

For me, it’s not so easy.  I've determined my inertia comes from other places that I need to explore. Extended family, a multitude of friends, community and neighborhood, a great job, a house I love and a feeling of stability I'm afraid to uproot.  Dan’s personal self-confidence in maintaining the important connections, regardless of location, has not rubbed off on me. This blog is my attempt to gather up the loose change in my life, figure out what I’ve got and turn it into a plan. Those of you who know me, know that once I've made a commitment, I'm all in. The question for me is, what will it take to get there?

I expect this will be part stroll down memory lane, part self-awareness exercise, and part check-list, as I push past invisible and real barriers.  Probably not the most interesting topic in the world, but I’ll try to keep it fun. I’ve read enough blogs to know the best ones allow the writer to talk about what is important to them. And, in my opinion, the best blogs are not so much prolific as they are pertinent to the author, in that moment. If you choose to read more, thank you.  If not, that’s OK too. For me, this is all about the journey. It will be fun for me to see where it ends…