The Small Pickup : The Vanishing Unicorn

Our "New" Mazda B2300 110k Mile Truck

A Unicorn.

Got a hobby that's physically bigger than stamp collecting or watch repair? You'll probably need a pickup truck at some point. It's a fact of life. Recently we needed to schlep my Kawasaki AR80 motorcycle to have a new exhaust fabbed in Houston. Then we needed to get it down to San Marcos for some dyno time. Now we need to go to Temple and retrieve my Honda CA77 Dream from a four year delay in its restoration at the hands of a well meaning procrastinator. I've found borrowing a friend's truck to be a royal pain and most people drive trucks that are thorough overkill for small projects anyway. What to do? Easy. Buy the vanishing unicorn of trucks: the small, four cylinder, 5 speed 'compact' truck.

Go to any dealer today - Japanese or American and try to buy a small, efficient pickup truck. Now, while you're off on a fool's errand I'll break it down for the rest of you: they don't exist any more. As far as I can tell people would happily buy them but nobody makes them anymore. I think this might be a bit of collusion between oil cartels and America's auto manufacturers, but more than anything it's this one dirty secret: it doesn't cost appreciably more to manufacture a larger truck than a small one, the cost differential is vanishingly small even if the perception of value isn't. So for a captive, domestic market bigger is better. Unless you're the consumer and you value efficiency.

As I typically don't use a sledgehammer to hang a picture on the wall, we similarly don't need a 15mpg Ford F-150 Super Crew behemoth to cart tiny motorcycles around. Our needs were crystal clear: small, four cylinder, five speed manual transmission and late model either foreign or domestic. I implored two close friends who own 90's Toyota Tacomas  to sell theirs to us as both kept dropping hints they were looking to unload. Naturally they resolved to keep them upon detecting our fanatical interest.  I remembered my friends Les and Hilde who drove a Ford Ranger truck for more than a few years on the mean streets of New Orleans and never ever had an issue with it. Their experience opened my eyes to the non-crappiness of Fords, at least since the late 90's. A bit of Googling revealed that they cost a bit less than their Toyota counterparts, had two decades of development on their chassis and if it meant anything, we could get one with the word MAZDA emblazoned across the tailgate even if it was really a Ford in a tailored shirt.

So I hit Craigslist and made calls. Lots of choices. But as a longtime user of CL I know that the good deals are snapped up within hours of posting and that trucks with a few days or weeks hangtime were probably not worth my effort. There's a rule of thumb: buy the best you can afford, usually that's cheaper in the long run and we didn't want a project. Other buyer's shorthand exists too. If they say "just add freon" that means a $1000 repair minimum. No receipts for upkeep? The oil's never been changed and it'll crater in your first week together. Dirty ass interior in the photos? Same thing.  I specifically wanted to find one that was a one owner truck. The first owner is the one most likely to care about the welfare of his car.  Amazingly on my first evening of calling, I found it: one owner, receipts, and garage kept with recent BF Goodrich tires and a tuneup. The next day (9/1/14) we were face to face with Raj, an Indian semiconductor engineer looking to unload his 2003 Mazda B2300 with 110,000 miles. He'd used it for commuting to work and it looked like it had lead a pampered existence despite the burst stitching on the grey vinyl seats, a typical problem.

The test drive revealed a problem that Raj hadn't noticed: at any throttle setting above easy-does-it the engine would stumble and miss.  I reasoned that if he hadn't noticed this problem that he similarly probably had never driven it spiritedly, or perhaps even any faster than 55mph.

I had Luu Auto Repair do a pre-purchase inspection (PPI) which I can’t stress enough the importance of. One should always invest in this. It revealed that the truck has excellent compression on all four cylinders but needed new brake pads, rotors, drums and shoes. It needed all fluids changed, a new coolant expansion tank and a right front sway bar link.

Initial crank on each cylinder as well as continuous cranking scores:

#1 95psi, 190-200

#2 90psi, 190-200

#3 95psi, 190-200

#4 93psi, 190-200

Raj then inexplicably followed Luu’s recommendations & spent $375 replacing the inner and outer valve cover gaskets as the spark plugs wells had oil in them (its a dohc) as well as the intake gaskets. He also replaced the ignition coil as the car had a check engine light, returning codes P00301 and P0316 for missing cylinder #1. On top of this he also changed the oil! As we were going to offer him $3200 for the truck before these repairs, this was like getting a $200 better deal than we’d hoped to get. Woot!

BRAKES & ALIGNMENT

Despite having lead a pampered life, miles still = wear and tear. We took our B2300 to Austin’s Alignments and Brakes where my pal Matt runs a tight ship and threw some Benjamins at it. Here’s the breakdown: (9/5/2014)

   * Front Ceramic Pads x2    $45.49

   * Front Wheel Seals x2    $$17.94

   * Front Hub & Rotor Assy x2     $135.92

   * Rear Brake Drum x2     104.90

   * Rear Brake Shoes      $33.88

   * Shop Supplies (aka tip)     $5

----------------------------------

   * TOTAL $686.03 (parts $343 - labor $315)

The labor included tire rotation, brake fluid flush and bending the slightly cockeyed front bumper straight. Hopefully this is the last we’ll hear from these brakes for another 100k miles.

Then, feeling that we hadn't blown enough money on the B2300, we went back and had a front end alignment and fixed the worn out sway bar end links which also silenced the sleigh bell jingles from the front suspension. (9/18/2014)

Sway Bar Link Kit x2 $40.64
Shop Supplies (cigarettes & booze) $5
Alignment Labor .70 hour $63
Sway Bar Labor 1 hour $90
----------------------------------
TOTAL $201.99

STEREO & TINT

Next stop, bumping’ music and dark tint at CustomSounds on Burnet Rd. We literally took it straight from Austin’s Alignments to CustomSounds, heeding the axiom “no time like the present”. Mike Guerrero greeted us and remembered me as being that pleasant guy who asks probing questions then buys from Amazon. Well, not this time. Jennifer has a tendency to do things right now, so dorking around with delayed gratification was not in the cards. Our needs were complex: the fidelity had to be top notch, the stereo couldn’t intrude on the limited space in our single cab pickup and the head unit had to quickly read a 1tb hard drive, have bluetooth as well as a parametric or multi band equalizer. Here’s what we picked:

Kenwood CD KDCX998 - $230
JL Audio Amp KD5003 - $280
JL Audio Basslink control - $35
JL Audio Box Sub CP108LG - $230

Hushmat Ultra Door Kit - $100

Rockford Fosgate 5x7 Speakers R168X2 (2 pairs) - $140

Ford Multi w/ Pocket - $20

Ford Harness ’98 Up - $20

Step Up RCA 12 Ft - $30

25ft 16 Ga Spkr Wire Pack - $18

8AWG Power Kit 600 Watts - $50

Plus these additional charges from our two visits that I find maddening, inscrutable and wildly inflated:

Shop Parts     $44.25 + $8.25 (% labor heat shrink screws paint wtf)

Shop Charge $19.17 + $3.57 (% labor covering same stuff wtf)
Audio Labor  $350 + $55 + $25

WHAT IF I'D DONE THE STEREO MYSELF? 3X LESS EXPENSIVE!

Years ago I pieced together a complete headunit, amplifier and custom built sub enclosure sub installation for both my Scirroco as well as my '85 Civic, and did a decent job too. So I looked around online at what we would've spent if I'd been just a bit more motivated and had searched out the lowest prices and done the installation myself. It's REMARKABLY cheaper.

Me, buying online would have cost: $682 vs $1829 from CustomSounds. I'm not knocking going the dealer install route: it's a package deal and there's a warranty. No knuckles get scraped and there's no surprises, other than spending triple what a talented DIY'er would.

Sub $220 Crutchfield

Speakers $70 eBay (both pairs total)

Headunit $220 Rakuten

Hushmat $60 Amazon

Bass Knob $30 Amazon

Fascia single din $15 Amazon

Amp Wiring Kit $12 Amazon

Spkr Wire 14ga $11 Amazon

RCA cables 2x $24 Amazon

Incidentals, Solder, Connectors $20
----------------------
TOTAL $682

COOLANT SYSTEM

The mechanic at Bill's Complete Auto Service is an older epically bearded gent who works at a glacial pace and often stops to stare off into infinity, I guess contemplating how he wound up in a trade he was so unsuited for. He left a rubber grommet off the firewall and we drove around with a loud whooshing noise in the cab until we could get the truck back to him.
Radiator and Clutch Master Cylinder Repair 12/20/2014:
Clutch Master Cylinder $104.86
Radiator $261.99
Antifreeze $16
Labor $225
---------------
TOTAL $639.43

A few weeks later I bought and installed these parts myself as I'd rather not pay someone to do a worse job than my own bumbling attempts:
Coolant Expansion Tank - $49.23
Heater Vacuum Valve $20 (Murray Climate Control - Vacuum Bypass Closes Heater Valve
Part # 74809 make sure you get the right one, either 2 or 4 port)
Ford coolant expansion tanks were made to fail. What shitty plastic. The only upside is that the expansion tank and the valve are replaced using basic hand tools and an afternoon of spare time.

NEW (To Us) TOPPER

Used, green bed topper. Smells of mold, doesn't match the truck's color and its clear coat is mostly gone. Pros: keeps the rain off our stuff and is lockable.
$200

TINT

Custom Sounds of Austin also did the tint. How Raj drove this truck for a decade under Austin's baking sun without tint completely mystifies me.
Pinnacle Ceramic Tint 30% sides and 15% rear + eyebrow - $168

Pinnacle Labor - $110

Pinnacle Tint Labor Parts (huh wtf) - $3.19 

CLUTCH PILOT BEARING

The pilot bearing suddenly decided to commit seppuku (or is it hari-kiri?) resulting in a truck that often refused to go into any gear unless the engine was first switched off. Similar to my contentions that the stereo install's cost was greatly inflated by usurious labor, so too is the installation of a new clutch - but not nearly as much of a drubbing percentagewise as the stereo. Where the stereo component's cost were roughly a third of the final overall cost, in the case of the clutch it's closer to 50% so not as much of a bitch-slap to the bank account.

The cost to do the clutch includes replacing the slave cylinder on a just-in-case basis. This is proactively done as the engineers at Ford (obviously high from sniffing glue) thought it made sense to mount the slave cylinder at the center of the output shaft, necessitating a transmission removal when it fails. For such a well designed and thrifty truck this is a big, stupid booger of a mistake. But it is what it is. While it was all apart we went ahead and tossed a new clutch in too. If you're smart enough to change your hydraulic fluid every five years it likely will never have any issues. Unless ... while changing the fluid you screw up and introduce air into the system. Then the only way to bleed all the air out is to do a voodoo dance while removing the transmission so that you can turn the slave cylinder upside down while introducing fresh fluid to it. So don't do that.

COST:
Clutch Slave Cylinder $67.50
Clutch Kit $214
Gallon Oil $32
Labor 5.10 hrs $382.50
Labor Resurface Flywheel $65
--------------------------
TOTAL $792

TIRES

New shoes for the truck were needed as the BF Goodrich Comp T/A's were older than we realized, tired and quite the hand full in the rain. New kicks ran a bit pricey with most good tires being roughly $100 per. Being of a frugal bent we checked Craigslist & found 4 General Grabber AT-2 225/70-15 tires with an asking price of $250. Adam posted the ad and stated that they were only a couple years old and had approximately 1000 miles on them. He'd removed them after noticing a slight loss of fuel economy on his 70 mile commute but wanted to keep them for an impending move to a snowy climate where they'd work well. Eventually he replaced the Ranger they were on with a Wrangler, so it was time to let them go. A slight haggling took place and we acquired them for a piddling $220.

Discount Tires mounted and lifetime balanced them for $76. Total cost = $296. Contrast this with if we'd bought them through Discount Tires with all their ancillary fees, disposal charges and taxes of $542. Thanks to Craigslist we have $240 additional dollars to spend on pizza and beer.  Re. the Grabber AT2's the drive home was quieter than before as the prior tires would really sing. These are a bit more muted despite their very blocky tread design. Also slightly evident is the additional strain their 7 additional pounds per wheel puts on the engine. As the truck is not going to be used for long distance commutes, their lack of LRR "low rolling resistance' credentials is not as important. Overall they're good and we look forward to how they perform in the rain and eventually in the snow.

THE MORAL OF THE STORY

What initially looked like a great deal turned out to be a mirage - but it was just bad luck rather than ignorance on our part. The clutch throwout bearing could've happened any time, same too for the coolant system that waited until it was in our hands to puke. When buying any used car one should set aside a stack of Benjamins for all the consumables and assume they all need doing. I'm tacking this bit on in July 2017: we've had to remove the transmission again to replace another coolant line. Seriously. There's a plastic coolant line that snakes behind and around the engine that can't be replaced without removing the transmission, so that was another $500 labor bill. The alternator died while towing our TR6 across the country. Then a friend of ours destroyed our air conditioner compressor using a ham fisted technique to lever off the old a/c clutch, so there's that too.

Would we buy another Ford Ranger / Mazda B2300? Probably not. On a positive note, we're pretty confident that we've covered our bases for the foreseeable future for sh*t that might break. If you buy one of these trucks, find a pampered one and bargain hard on the price.

Or make your friend follow through on the promises to sell his Toyota truck to you.

Chad Gets Some Bad News About Herman "Guppy" Brown

Anyone whose been to the Caribbean knows the enchanting sound of the steel drums, a.k.a. 'pan' or steelpan - the perfect upbeat music for sun drenched beachside afternoons spent with friends. It's impossible to be sad and be around pan music - unless you've just discovered that your hero, the manufacturer of the most revered steelpans in the Caribbean has just passed away.

Jen & I visited London early December 2015 and spent our time doing some very untouristy things like trying to find Lawrence Hayward in Shoreditch, seeing Wire at Tufnell's Dome and shopping on Regent Street. Early on an uncharacteristically warm evening at the Oxford Circus tube station entrance we heard some accomplished pan playing - Christmas songs all. We stood close to the lone musician (later introduced as Chad), a dark-skinned man of African heritage as he played intently while a mass of holiday shoppers streamed by mostly oblivious to the talent they were briefly exposed to. Maybe I'm more hard-wired than most for appreciating the music; I spent the first five years of my life more often than not a nude brown baby on the beaches of Eleuthera Island in the Bahamas where such a sound was not uncommon. But here in London? A treat I could not ignore.

I made two recordings of him with my Zoom H2n recorder. The first I elected to stand back a bit and get the sounds of London - people walking by speaking Russian, French and more, their heels clicking on the paving stones (the recorder was on the ground where it would pick up less wind noise). The second recording was started after we'd already talked to him for a few minutes about his time in London. For that I held the recorder. A very interesting aberration in the first recording is the high pitched noise, like electronic crickets that my recorder captured. My best guess is that there's a ton of buried power and telecommunications cables beneath the street that introduces EMI to things like a digital audio recorder. I can't think of any other cause for the noise. It's much less noisy in the interview when I held the recorder. Oh well. It's better than NOT recording it, eh?

Recording 1 - street playing 

Recording 2 - interview and Pan in A-Minor by Lord Kitchner

The second recording is Chad talking about why he was in London and encouraging me to not waste my time in cold New Orleans for Mardi Gras when I could be in Trinidad listening to pan music. While we were talking he received a phone call and became crestfallen. Turns out that his favorite manufacturer of the pan, artisan Herman "Guppy" Brown had passed away the same day. Chad pointed out that his pan made by Desmond "Mappo" Richardson, while being excellent in craftsmanship still wasn't the equal of one by Guppy Brown. 

Take a minute to listen to this man excitedly talk about the music that makes his life go 'round and revel that we live in the kind of world where magic like this can be found at Tube stops and beaches in the Caribbean.

Anyone interested in purchasing the world's second best hand-crafted steelpans would be advised to contact Desmond "Mappo" Richardson in Trinidad at phone: + (868) 675 0918. Life's short. Wait too long and you might have to resort to the third best.

Honda Dream CA77 Electronic Ignition and Coil

My 1967 CA77 Honda Dream. There are many like it but ...

I own a 1967 Honda Dream CA77. Being prone to rash decisions and quirky life choices it's a match made in heaven. I bought it in 2007. Now it's 2014 and I've ridden it ... once. It ran awful. That was after an ill-fated engine rebuild that it didn't even need, but I'm getting ahead of myself. At some point I'll go back and fill in the details on how I got here with so little accomplished (an innate talent). But for now, onward and upward.

I recently shelled out three Benjamins on a Probe Engineering FS-02E Electronic Ignition for the beast as after the rebuild I never could get it to run without fouling the plugs and/or flooding. I also got a Dyna DC8-1 Dual Output Coil  from Z1 Enterprises for $70. My rationale for throwing this vertigo-inducing amount of money at my shitty running bike is predicated upon my incompetence with adjusting stuff and a general disdain for having to do any task more than once. A points ignition system is a guarantee that you'll be doing the same task again and again, searching for your timing light, ordering new points off eBay, messing around with it constantly because you're not sure you got it right, wondering why the timing drifted and so on. I'd much rather be riding.

Probe Engineering FS-02E Electronic Ignition for CA77

I know guys who prefer points and condenser manual ignition systems. They have split fingernails and fingers like sausages. They disdain any technology after the AM transistor radio. They're also known as masochists. I'm not alone in this observation as I recently read this in a Norton motorcycle forum:
"There are many who will swear by the point and mechanical advance. Good for them. I am sure we will see them on the side of the rally route with the points cover off smiling from ear to ear."

The old coil and regulator looks like something puked out of a 1950's vacuum tube radio. Modern regulators are infinitely better at being efficient, small and protecting the bike's circuitry from alternator voltage spikes. I don't have my new regulator as it's a pending hand-me-down from my massively patient pal Scott, but I'll post its install when I get it. For now you can compare the old coil to the new Dyna. This 5 ohm coil is half the original's size and will make a very hot spark + I can go to my local NAPA Auto parts shop and buy spark plug wires by the foot as they aren't molded into the unit like the factory did in the 60's.

Out with the old...

The Probe Engineering box arrived containing the black control module with its internal components thoughtfully sealed in epoxy, the pickup plate, trigger rotor, rotor clamp, velcro for mounting it and bonus NGK spark plug boots that have resistors built into them so I don't have to find resistor spark plugs, I can use any that fit. Also included: an 11 page manual. As a veteran of I.T. work, my first question to the end user was typically "have you tried rebooting" followed by "have you read the manual?". RTFM indeed.

My decision to buy this ignition system was weighed against the alternative kits: Charlie's Place carries their own very different take on the concept though they were out of stock when I decided to buy mine. Then there's Elektronik-Sachse but at €320 the American dollar exchange rate would have been seriously out of kilter for buying this from Deutschland (why is the American dollar such a worthless proposition abroad when, for the first time in my life I have a few to spend? That's a rhetorical question btw).

Obviously there's a big difference in the design ethos of the Charlie's Place ignition system and the Probe Engineering unit. The Probe control module is remotely mounted, thus not on the cylinder head as Charlie's all-in-one design is, and therefore operates at a lower temperature. Mark Whitebook at Probe feels emphatic that a power transistor's operational temperature range is exceeded when mounted to a bike's cylinder. Other Honda's, CB's in particular had the points pickup mounted on the crankcase/crankshaft so the temperatures there are cool in comparison to the cylinder head but the Honda Dream's points are on the hottest part of the engine so mounting the control module module there is likely problematic. In the interest of full disclosure, I'd have bought the Charlie's Place system had it been in stock as it's $70 less expensive, but that's me, always looking to pinch a penny. Soon the difference between the two systems will be a moot point as I heard that Mark at Probe is discontinuing production of the FS-02e at the end of 2014 - or perhaps of ignition systems in general. If I hear otherwise I'll let everyone know.

Headed to the Harvest Classic...

Meanwhile, I must take some time to get my Dream out of storage and prepare it for the rapidly approaching Harvest Classic in historic Luckenbach Texas October 17th and 18th. Their website is down as I write this, so trust me it's a great event for any lover of vintage motorcycles to attend. It's a breath of fresh air for this part of the country as the focus is on European and Japanese bikes - Harley Davidsons are generally not evident unless they've been modified to a cafe racer spec (rare). Harley owners thankfully have their own festival called Republic of Texas Rider Rally (NAMBLA) with featured musical "talent" Ted Nugent. I strongly urge them to go enjoy their music and bikes there while we enjoy our microbrews, rockabilly and Betty Page lookalikes in scenic Luckenbach. Then again, I am a bit biased. I know one Harley owner who predates the modern era of accountants with mid-life crises riding $20k bikes covered in Harley logos - but he's the exception to the rule. There's always one.

When I first saw Quadrophenia, the classic Who movie about Rockers vs. Mods in mid 60's England, I totally identified with the Mods. I still do. Mods ride scooters and Vespas. Mods are intrinsically much cooler than their rocker counterparts with their big motorcycles. They bathe, they like ska and rocksteady. They've got cool fashion. The Harvest Classic is the modern manifestation of this epic rivalry. Go Mods!

Okay Bokeh

Not wine. It's bokeh.

It was over a glass of wine at San Francisco's Sons and Daughters restaurant that I realized the tragic lack of bokeh in my life. Here's the picture taken by my lovely girlfriend with her Sony Nex-7 that made me aware I wasn't going to impress anyone with the artistic capabilities of my Nikon Coolpix P510. It also made me aware of a new-to-me photography term: bokeh. What to do? I could go blow six Benjamins on a camera like hers, but I'm often tight with my lucre and like to explore creative options. My solution? Go back to my roots as a photographer and buy another Canon AE-1 Program and shoot film.

In photography, bokeh (pronounced boh-kay and sometimes boh-kə) is the aesthetic quality of the blur produced in the out-of-focus portions of an image produced by a lens. A lens with a large aperture can take photos with a narrower depth of field than one with a smaller aperture. Borrowing from the wiki "depth of field is the distance between the nearest and farthest objects in a scene that appear acceptably sharp in an image" and there you have it. Okay, bokeh. The wine is in focus, nothing else is.

One sure method to significant bokeh is to use a non-zoom camera lens, i.e. "fixed" in its focal length. Such lenses are often better for capturing the maximum amount of light and have larger apertures. Natually, you'll pay for this capability. Bigger diameter lenses make for much more stringent tolerances because a large lens amplifies defects, so they command higher prices. That's why the tiny lens in your cellphone often gets everything in focus, though this is not a rule of thumb.

My Nikon Coolpix has an astonishing 42x zoom lens, 24-1000mm if that's how you roll. I can take clear pictures of the moon's craters or the paintings hanging on a neighbor's wall - from one block away. What I can't take a picture of is the drama of bokeh, when only the desired object is in focus and everything else fades into blurry patterns and colors. Try as I might, the Nikon is a very literal camera, with typically everything in good focus even in aperture priority mode. Looking back through my favorite shots from my undergraduate journalism student days, the common thread that emerges is this: they're of people. They're doing things. They're neither far away nor are they macro. Some exhibit bokeh. All the times I carried a telephoto I wound up with pictures I don't care about today: an airplane. A race car. Things. But when I shot with a fixed mm lens like the 50mm f1.4 on my Canon there were the indefinable elements of atmosphere, tension and ambiguity. And I shot pictures of people.

   Canon fd 50mm  f1.8 Lens Haze

As I sold my Ae-1 Program in the early 00's I now had to search out another. Craigslist immediately yielded two. My first call to Carrie in Buda inspired enough confidence that I skipped the other listing. The camera I bought for $60 seemed a good deal, visibly in mint condition but on the pricey end of the spectrum. The battery was dead, but conveniently the 5th place we went had a PX28L and I could test it. I cranked the film winder over and hit the shutter button. It was much louder than I remembered but it seemed to work. It came with a Vivitar dedicated flash, a 50mm f1.8 lens and all the original boxes and manuals from 1984. I bought it and trekked home.

Canon AE-1 Program, Mint!

This is where I realized three things: the loud shutter squeak was abnormal and required repair, the 50mm lens, though free of dust and fungus, was fairly hazed looking eerily like cataracts and finally the Vivitar flash, despite looking like it had never been removed from its box, would not power on. Oh well. I'm sure Carrie was unaware of these things and I was not motivated to drive to the ends of Texas seeking a refund, then discover that all AE-1's look like this anyway.

My fix for the lens was simple: buy a much better lens on eBay. I found a fd 50mm f1.4 and asked questions and sent the seller the link to the Ken Rockwell page on how to test with a flashlight. Lunkfish57 said it looked fine so I took the plunge and what I got for a mere $50 looks like the elves at the factory made it yesterday. Let's contast this with what I'd pay for a similar lens for my girlfriend's Sony Nex 7: there isn't one. The closest E-mount is a 50mm f1.8 and even then it's a $300 purchase. Chalk one up for being frugal.

So now I await the syringe I'm going to use to oil the gears in my camera, and I'll run a roll of Kodak 400 asa color print film through it and we'll see what kind of dramatic bokeh my $110 got me.

Hospices Are For Goodbyes, Not Arrests

(This story was originally published December 17 2021. I've backdated it to appear at the beginning of my blog as I want my current blog to focus on life affirming topics rather than traumas. As this is still an ongoing topic in litigation, expect updates at which point I'll restore it to a current date.)

A semicircle of six bored Lakeland Florida cops are standing around discussing the merits of arresting me. The Black one, obviously the lowest ranking member of the group is fixated on me, his body language telegraphing a strong desire to see my face in the parking lot gravel. I hand my license to him but his eyes only look at me, not my license. As I extend my arm to hand him my identification he pulls his hand back making me reach even further in a subtle show of dominance. He then looks at it dubiously as if holding something unclean.

It's a warm December day and the sun is incongruously pleasant as I stand there in the parking lot of the Lakeland Hospice House where my mother lays dying, wondering how sideways this will go. I can't believe that forty eight hours previously I was hugging dear friends goodbye over pilsners in Germany, having no idea my brother Lewis was hiding my mother's impending death from me.  

The officers exude an air of detached levity, one of them lightheartedly mocking his superior for being so serious when he called for backup against the calm, grieving man. I guess two cruisers and four cops were not enough. My wife Jennifer stands a distance away observing and afraid. The third cruiser had just arrived and a young blonde female officer exited which dominated the attention of the cop who seemed to be the ranking member of this group of Polk County intellectuals. Noting his name tag I offer my explanation regarding what had transpired but he was so focused on the woman that he didn't respond. I try again, but louder: "Officer Pettit!" at which he snaps out of his trance and blurts "Yes ma'am? - uhh I mean sir?". Uncertain as to whether he was trying to insult me or just dumb, I press forward in an attempt to communicate.

"My mother is in that building dying" I explain, not sure they understand what happens in a hospice. "I'm here to tell her goodbye but apparently my brother has told the staff I'm not allowed." 

Just a few minutes prior I'd signed into the facility's guest register (noting that my mother's opportunistic and unsettlingly weird neighbor Miriam's name preceded mine). I asked to speak to a nurse for the latest status on her palliative care. Instead of a nurse I got a shockingly dour woman named Supervisor Sue and a big broad shouldered man she introduced as a "social worker". In case you wonder, this is all verbatim:

"There was a miscommunication, the family is requesting no visitors." says Supervisor Sue.

"I am the family".

"Sir the family is requesting no visitors".

"I'm literally the son".

"I need to ask you to leave".

"Since when is a son not allowed to see his mother?" 

"I'm asking you to leave the building"

"Under whose edict?"

"Sarah call the police!"

"Have you no empathy? Stop and consider this from my perspective ..." 

Her reply was to wait in the parking lot while they attempted to contact my brother - the first I was aware he claimed any jurisdiction over my dying mother. Seeing no path forward and in disbelief that my brother could legally make such a request, we exited and sat in our Fiat by the entrance.  I called my mother's friend Vicky who was also being kept in the dark and didn't know her friend was in hospice. She was thankful to hear from me said she'd come straight over.

I wouldn't have known my mother was dying had I not called my estranged cousin Lee that morning after our ten days in Germany and asked her how my mother was doing. Her guarded answer only raised more questions as it was apparent she was either similarly in the dark or was telling me the minimum her conscience allowed without the specifics. I surmised that between a cancer diagnosis at the age of 89 and a hospital stay from which she hadn't returned that she must be in a hospice. I called a number of hospices in the area using the gambit "I got a garbled voicemail from you and I'm worried about my mother ..." until Lakeland Hospice House answered in the affirmative. 

Now I'm standing in their parking lot trying to reason with six cops itching for a distraction. I explain to Officer Pettit that Supervisor Sue cleared us to remain in the parking lot to await our friend. Officer Pettit says that when they made the call they reported I had "made fists and stepped threateningly towards her" - an utter fabrication. He adds that Supervisor Sue wants me "trespassed" to which I pointed out the glaring contradiction "then why would she grant permission to remain on the property with my car?" This logical Catch-22 confuses Officer Pettit, but he presses on "the power of attorney is the one who said you can't be in there". I'm not a lawyer but find it hard to believe that a power of attorney would grant the right to keep my mother prisoner.

Ever the optimist, I offer "you guys gotta know what it's like to be a son ... all I'm asking is that you show some empathy" to which I swear to the gods above and the devils below that Officer Pettit looked me blankly and said "wut?" and I again said "empathy" at his blank expression of incomprehension. 

"It's one of them situations where you gotta make an arrest, where you think the person being arrested really shouldn't be arrested but you don't got a choice" to which I again said I'd been permitted to remain with my car. He said they'd been told that too then added "it don't make no sense" to which I agreed. They bantered for a bit, then the Black officer with the attitude hands my ID back to me in an odd slow motion and says "we come back here for another 'issue' there's gonna be problems". 

That all went down December 15th, a bit over a day ago. Vicky did show up, they let her sign in and she walked to my mother's room and noted weird Miriam sitting in the corner like a guard. Miriam who is not a family member told Vicky that my mother was unconscious and Vicky had to go as she wasn't a family member then called Lewis. Vicky ignored her and managed to get a couple uninterrupted last minutes in the room with her friend.  She offered the lighthearted quip that she needed some Tennessee Ernie Ford music (a favorite of my mother's) to put some life into her - and my mother who they claimed to be unconscious and unresponsive raised her hand, which Vicky perceived as an affirmative. Then the staff tossed Vicky out too.

The next day I contacted Gerald Hemness, a local attorney I knew to have a reputation as a fighter and who had been a cop in a former life before realizing how low he'd aimed at vocations. Our consultation revealed my gut instinct that a Power of Attorney didn't convey the right to imprison a person was true.  Gerald used the metaphor that while a person could be evicted from a place of business, a hospice was a different case altogether and was like an apartment complex: each room represents a different family "living" there and if the apartment complex owner doesn't like someone, they don't have the right to deny anyone entry who was behaving lawfully. Furthermore, a PoA similarly doesn't convey the right to deny visitation from immediate family, so on both counts I was correct. Attorney Hemness (who was at that point out of state and not able to make an in-person visit) called Lewis' attorney to request he stand down. Obviously while I am legally permitted to visit, without a lawyer physically present I risked cops unfamiliar with the law arresting me - and as we know, when a cop screws up absolutely nothing happens to them 99% of the time.

This was my text exchange with my brother that afternoon:

LEWIS: You and spouse are cleared to enter while strictly observing rules Supervisor Sue has explained to you. The visit will be 60 minutes maximum and should occur ASAP. You will notify me of your ETA

ME: To be concise: we were never NOT clear to visit. I'll coordinate with the staff as you're not part of the equation. -- Stay clear of me.

I called Supervisor Sue once I was sure she'd gotten word of her error so I could get a mea culpa. None was forthcoming. I then asked her who told the police I'd made fists and stepped towards her to which she became angry and refused to offer any explanations. I made it clear I was on my way and would prefer a visit without drama.

We drove back to Lakeland again, an hour's drive. We signed in and I noted Lewis had signed in just a few minutes earlier, obviously intent on not letting me visit my mother without him hovering outside her door, which he did. Weird Miriam was there and vacated upon our arrival in a manner reminiscent of Gollum. We stayed for two hours and I held my mother's hand and talked to her with no signs of consciousness at all. 

My window to speak final words to her had closed. 

Why am I sharing this private disaster with you? I can't say exactly. Perhaps as a cautionary tale for siblings you don't trust. Maybe also as a warning to raise your sons and daughters in a manner that lends to them solidarity with their siblings. Teach them love and inclusiveness. Be a good parent. Be the parents I didn't get. And when you write lengthy superlatives and odes to how fantastic your parents were and how they always bent over backwards for you and inspired you to achieve greatness, remember that there's other adults out there who view your words as emblematic of the pile of cinders they'd been handed. 

The full backstory will eventually appear on my blog. As for now I must await notification of her death, then funeral, then the obvious aftermath of that. This story is far from over. 

Losing a Parent to Dementia & QAnon

Jonas visits and easily wins her heart

(This story was originally published December 22 2021. I've backdated it to appear at the beginning of my blog as I want my current blog to focus on life affirming topics rather than traumas. As this is still an ongoing topic in litigation, expect updates at which point I'll restore it to a current date.)

Yesterday I became an orphan. My mother, a simple woman with a deep distrust of doctors, succumbed to lung cancer a month or so after discovering what was causing her shortness of breath. I'd like to write that I'm devastated - and I am to a degree - but honestly I feel as if I lost her years ago. There was a time when my mother despised George W, forwarded endless emails about Iraq war crimes and police cruelty, repeatedly warned me (a man with a journalism degree) to not watch FOX News and reliably voted for the more progressive candidates whether or not they were Democrats as she considered herself nonpartisan.

Then came Trump and his MAGA promises and towards the end of his presidency my mother was arguing that the Holocaust never happened, that Obama was gay and his wife Michelle was "Michael with a sex change", that Democrats should be shot or hanged, that Qanon were fighting the Democrat Deep State pedophiles, that a Soros funded Muslim army was stationed in the American desert southwest waiting to wage war and ... you get the gist. And that's just a small example. Generally I tolerate some Republican ideology but this blatant insanity was beyond the pale. After a while I stopped reading her emails as I couldn't stomach their unhinged content and phone calls with her were hardly better. Worse still was her flip flop a few years ago from loving my wife Jennifer as the daughter she never had to treating her as an enemy.

It didn't occur to me that this shocking paranoid change in her personality must be dementia until after she'd been scammed out of thousands in a blatantly obvious Publisher's Clearing House phone scam and invented astonishing, evolving stories defending it then destroyed her home in an easily preventable fire caused by a microwaveable pet bed warmer. Worse were the ceaseless, strident complaints that her home's power 'smartmeter' was making her house radioactive and literally violently shaking her bed every night with angry outbursts at me for not somehow "fixing" that problem to the extent that she'd abruptly slam her phone down on calls with me if I didn't cheerlead her insane theories about smartmeters. There were hundreds of other manifestations of her derangement like robotic dragon flies spying on her and hidden underground rivers only she could hear ... I could go on, but I'll spare you.

I helped her move into a local assisted living facility and conferred with their social worker about the issues and she said "get a guardian". She explained that a guardian would, for a fee, take care of a demented parent and handle their finances and health needs, thus firewalling the toxic and emotionally painful behavior that I as her son and caregiver couldn't tolerate any more. My feelings about this were crystalized when she intentionally perjured herself in her deposition against the seller of the defective pet bed warmer and destroyed her chances at restitution from them - which is in and of itself worthy of its own story.

An emergency guardianship with Florida's Polk County court was filed in July and granted. An attorney was assigned and went to her house to alert her to this new reality. She was enormously angry - the expected reaction of someone lacking in self awareness. The county court then sent three psychiatric professionals as an Examining Committee to evaluate her over a week with observation and cognitive tests. She failed all cognitive tests, behaved bizarrely and all three recommended full "plenary" or 100% guardianship. It was at this point that I discovered a fourth doctor had also evaluated her upon her move into the assisted living facility and similarly had noted her failure to perform in the cognitive exam and recommended a guardian.  A court date was set for early October to finalize the guardianship and I began to breathe easier, knowing that she'd be in good hands. 

Nope.

As the saying goes, no good deed goes unpunished. I have two older brothers who haven't been even remotely a part of her life: one who hasn't made any contact since 1987 and Lewis, my extreme right-wing sibling who stopped visiting or calling her in 2005. Back in 2008 when my mother was still a clear-headed woman she wrote both of them out of her substantial estate and granted me Power of Attorney as I was the one who made a concerted effort at frequent visits, taking care of whatever business I could when home, calling and writing regularly. Thus it was a surprise to find my mild mannered attorney and myself in court battling Lewis' two aggressive shark lawyers who spun every misdeed of my mother into paradoxical proof of her cognitive excellence.

They hired a local gerontologist who charged $1700 for four hours of her time to write a lengthy document full of superfluous and unrelated details suggesting my mother was somehow passably okay - despite not successfully giving her any cognitive exams. She made an aborted attempt at the Clock Drawing Test then quit and refused any further testing. This report then pads out multiple pages with comments on how neat her house appeared despite the reality it was freshly rebuilt and she'd just moved back into it and the contents of her refrigerator as if that conveyed a clear mind. This gerontologist literally skipped giving her a mental capacity evaluation, the one task she was sent to do.

They introduced into evidence some cherry-picked snapshots of her home after the fire that suggested the damage was minimal: a close up of an expanse of bright blue carpet without noting that it was the carpet protected under a removed bed in the most distant room from the fire, a detail shot of a white wall and more carpet with the brightness boosted to the extent that the grey smoke damage wasn't evident, a shelf in the same room with books that had been behind a tchotchke which protected them but was now gone and so on. This fraudulent portrayal of the destroyed home whose debris my wife and I had spent weeks sifting through was an insult - but our attorney hadn't thought to introduce our photos into evidence. (additional photos taken by Jennifer). The official photographic record as far as the court is concerned is that her home - written off by her insurance company as a complete loss - was okay.

His lawyers also contended that she was doing a great job at managing her own healthcare - contradicting my claim that I'd never been able to get her to go for any physical exams. Obviously now only eleven weeks later she's dead from a sizable malignant tumor in her lungs I noticed every time I hugged her that would've been caught had she actually been seeing doctors for proactive care. 

I surmise my brother inserted himself into this situation and leveraged an opportunity for personal gain with a very substantial carrot in the form of a revised will if he'd contest her guardianship - and he succeeded. His attorneys found minor issues with the examining committee's three reports and they somehow got the fourth doctor's assessment tossed out because it was a letter and not a proper "medical document". That doctor incidentally had volunteered to give testimony in court that day via Zoom, which the judge disallowed. After eight hours in court the judge sent us home and rendered the heartbreaking edict the next morning that based on the examining committee's reports minor issues and one report's suggestion that she was borderline, yet still recommended a 100% guardianship, the whole guardianship was tossed in the trash. And just like that I saw my $24,000 in legal representation and perhaps another $10,000 in fees relating to other legal expenses evaporate. I also knew at that point she'd retaliate, likely at my brother's behest and either write me out of her will or give some insignificant portion that would be an affront after my decades of help and love.

You may have read my post a few days ago about nearly being arrested at her hospice and wondered how it was possible for brothers to possess that level of animosity. I'll spare the details now, but it didn't help that we had a manipulative father who pitted his sons against each other, nor did it help that my mother failed to either notice or make an effort to raise her children like a cohesive unit. Honestly I could write a book about my parent's and sibling's toxicity. 

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An addendum: I've omitted numerous illuminating details in the hope that I could keep this brief enough to make my point without taxing the average attention span. If or when I flesh this out you'll see what I mean. Some details will never stop bothering me, like my brother unapologetically asserting in his deposition that his mother's plunge into appalling far-right ideology proved she was clear-minded and that "it's never too late", blissfully ignoring that it took dementia to put her in his ideological corner. 

To be fair (& balanced) FOX News was the gateway drug that lead her to YouTube where the algorithm only fed her a straight diet of extreme right wing bigotry and Russian disinfo. When I tried to explain to her it wasn't representative of the actual world she wouldn't listen. It was the perfect brain candy for a mind teetering on madness, a diet of constant anger and outrage. Those suffering from dementia see their love and happiness fade as their capacity for wonder and inspiration departs leaving only fight or flight as the fundamental primitive emotions that outlive the others. To her the algorithm she'd fallen into WAS objective reality, as real as Walter Cronkite had been to her in the 1970s. In the end, I found myself paradoxically hoping that she watch FOX News as at least they occasionally reported on the news rather than the frightening content she consumed on Youtube.

We've got to fix this problem before our society goes up in flames. We also need to protect our oldest generation from those who'd prey on them.

Meanwhile, here's the kitten we attempted to gift her while she was at her independent care facility last year. She'd lost her cat in her house fire and we were willing to handle the responsibility of my mother outliving her new pet - but she wasn't swayed by the monumental cuteness of Miette. I think having a pet in her life would've made an enormous difference in her disposition but it wasn't in the cards.

Post Funeral & Burial:

Jennifer and I attended her funeral in Colquitt Georgia December 23rd. Also attending was my brother and four people I've never met who appeared only as a result of me telling them about it as far as I could tell. The officiant was a pastor of some small local church who operated in a complete vacuum as to who Vera was and then got the number of her grandchildren wrong, omitting Lewis' first two children Paloma and Sofia from a failed previous marriage of his. Obviously he'd been given bad data. In lieu of knowing anything about my mother he'd been told "pretend Vera was your grandmother ..." and so he rambled for 20 minutes about his grandmother and somehow also about America's "freeloading society looking for handouts rather than a hard day's work" because if you can't get a misleading political jab in at a funeral, when can you?

The next day she was interred at the cemetery with Danny the funeral home director soon departing leaving only myself, Jennifer and two gravediggers as the sole remaining witnesses to my mother's 89 years on this planet. Lewis' absence was thematically on-point regarding how much he'd been in her life since 2005. I was asked if I had any final words. At first I said "no" but then I changed my mind and asked the two gravediggers to do me a favor - always make damn sure that they vote. Both were emphatic that they always did and the older one told me about an argument he'd had with his wife back in 2018 when she said she wasn't going to vote because she didn't think that it mattered. 

"Do you think Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X died so that you could not vote?" was his reply. 

We then shared our thoughts on what an inspirational and sincere person Stacey Abrams is and our hopes that she'd become governor of Georgia.

Those were the last words spoken over her grave that day. I'm sure that my pre-dementia mother would've approved.

Interment attended only by me, Jennifer, Danny and the gravediggers

Prologue

There's some irony that probate sounds like prostate, two topics generally not given much consideration until things go sideways. Vera drafted a new will December 3rd then passed away two weeks later on December 20th. If you don't know where to look for a will and if your brother doesn't want you to find it it's on you to figure that out. In this case it was posted in Polk County Florida's court probate system. 

It's a most instructive example of spiteful will-writing apparently drafted with the assistance of my sibling. As legalese is hard to stomach, I'll provide a summation as to what happened to my inheritance - a sum I'm omitting but which was quite substantial, enough to buy a home in Germany for example:

• I get 30%
• But only after I die
• My wife is specifically denied any stake in it

And Bob's your uncle. My brother is naturally quite pleased and posted some gloating comments here - which he deleted though their text is archived, then several expletive-laden comments I chose to not pollute my blog with as they only postured without meaningful rebuttal. All read like a deeply insecure fourteen year old authored them and motivated me to add him to my spam filter. I won't bother quoting but it does engender within me a deep sadness that a man significantly older than me could never let go of his lifelong antipathy for his youngest brother.

Our mother told me a startling anecdote a few years ago that answered the question as to why he'd never been remotely a brother to me. She said when she was a week or two from term and about to give birth to me that our estranged father who was seeking a divorce told him and his younger brother (12 and 10 at that time):

"When your mother has her baby, she's going to stop loving you".

Both boys were traumatized and crying when he dropped them off. 

How is it that he could grow up, internalize that and never stop to think "man that was some fucked up shit my father said to me when I was twelve"? Or consider how manipulation like that might've shaped him. He's been that same damaged child inhabiting an adult's body ever since. 

And for that I honestly feel some sympathy for him.

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So you made it this far. Despite her faults I loved her - she was my mother. Now she's gone and every step along the way has been pointlessly traumatic.  The only moral I can leave you with is the same one I ended my almost arrested at the hospice story with, so here it is again:

Why am I sharing this private disaster with you? I can't say exactly. Perhaps as a cautionary tale for siblings you don't trust. Maybe also as a warning to raise your sons and daughters in a manner that lends to them solidarity with their siblings. Teach them love and inclusiveness. Be a good parent. Be the parents I didn't get. And when you write lengthy odes to how fantastic your parents were and how they always bent over backwards for you and inspired you to achieve greatness, remember that there's other adults out there who view your words as emblematic of the pile of cinders they'd been handed.