picking up

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I see homeless shelters overflowing, people camp nearby for life not a summer trip, and I realize this little job I have typing for studios is what keeps me in my little room. I'm isolated from both bad and good, my room is even hidden from the road, a secret part of the inn, with privacy and a view of thick sierra forest and tahoe blue skies, through a very grimy unreachable window. If i was among the campers, I'd be less lonely, and less safe. I think I have to be grateful for what I've got, as slippery as it is, and hold on tight.

Rebounding

It's hard for me to make friends when almost everyone I know my age is retired and living a completely different life from mine. 

Some women in their sixties like me, and older, chide me for being a dud because I won’t sit in bars with them for hours, and watch them pop now and then into the loo to cover their wrinkles with pancake makeup, so the drunk young guys outside will think these dentured ladies are of close enough age. I can't. I have to get up early for work.

Did you know that if you stay married to a man for ten years, decades later when he dies, you get his Social Security?  I did not know that, I never heard that ever.  But women in foreign countries marry our soldiers and come home with them to America, convinced in part by that very policy. The city of Lancaster California is full of aging women with foreign accents who came to the US around the time of Vietnam, and then stayed married to their soldiers for ten years plus one or two days. Then they got divorced, partied hearty in America, and now as old ladies they have comfy pensions.  All they had to do was stay married to an American guy for ten years to have security in their old age. Apparently this is information soldiers tell girls around the overseas bases, but no one ever told that fact to me when I was growing up here in the USA.

No, I believed the liberating Joni Mitchell lyric: “We don't need no piece of paper from the City Hall” and never married anyone, even the men with whom I had babies.  Instead I scrounged here and there with part time jobs and raised my daughter by myself, my son was raised by his dad and I never even got to know him.

Now in my old age I have nothing to live on.  The women who came over from Germany etcetera and held onto that ring for ten years have security, me the American who scrabbled here her whole life, I have nothing to live on in my old age.

This is my retirement, these are my golden years. I'm up every AM and at the laptop by 4 for my job, Every Morning, even Sundays and holidays, for the rest of my life. 

Sigh