Tips for the New Recession

I'm told the United States stock market has hit the skids and we're facing a recession as bad or worse than that of 2008, an ugly one around here, with shuttered businesses and gasoline at over $4 a gallon and city people dumping their pets here and country people poaching deer and echinacea roots, and meth labs in the woods.

Times were lean but I made it through. Just today I began listing what I'd do to survive this next one:

1. Purchases of any type are limited to one day per week: Sunday.
2. Avoid strip-mall businesses.
3. Prioritize health and friends. Travel, decor and trinkets when times improve.
4. Don't date people or acquire a pet.
5. Increase intake of beans and potatoes (which I like), but eat 3 meals daily with at least 3 ounces of protein at each.
6. Goodwill if needing something. Discount and ethnic grocery stores only.
7. Gorilla Glue, y'all.
8. Handkerchiefs and the rag bag.
9. Exercise, but not hard or long. Hard exercise increases the appetite -- savagely.
10. Use what you've got, like that passel of pink and orange lipsticks.
11. Library.
12. Work harder? No. Use leverage ( = making use of what you already have to move forward). 
13. Uber Driver if it comes to that; already called to adjust car insurance for that.

How I Coped

On May 14 all is peachy. On May 15, Mom, 83, is diagnosed with stage 4 stomach cancer. The next day I'm paralyzed on my back like a cockroach with my first pinched nerve and the worst pain I've ever borne. I text my neighbor who takes me to urgent care and wheels me in. She lent me two canes for almost a week so I could walk. I couldn't sit up long enough to do enough work and lost a week's income and am forbidden to exercise for three months, or lift anything, exercise being my major way of coping.

Then Mom's prognosis goes from 6 months to 6 weeks. Two sisters fly alternately to my parents in Phoenix to help out, and my stepdad's panic (he's 98; Mom was his caretaker) infects them; of course both parents refused to make any plans for such as this, and suddenly chaos like it's the last act of Ubu Roi.

Then a dear friend tells me she's moving to California; a dear friend with a health problem believed we were sitting in London. My steady date, so wonderful, suddenly ghosts me for a week, and on day 8 after I text "Are you all right" comes the "I'm sorry, didn't want to hurt you" email and enter a fresh hell of shock and anguish.

Meanwhile ulcer acts up (duh) and I lose 8 pounds in two weeks because food is repulsive except for coffee; it's my turn to go to Phoenix with 121 degrees predicted and the sister with power of attorney won't call a home health aide while my stepdad and his neighbor are screaming into the phone that they can't lift Mom by themselves anymore and I don't dare say I can't lift anyone because that'll really make 'em mad. It's finals week. Lose pair of specs it costs $400 to replace. Cellphone fritzes. Medical, travel and tax bills hit just as I retire from 31 years of adjunct teaching and lose that income stream.

How I coped: Without my neighbor's help and kindness I'd still be lying here, and she took me out for pizza which I wanted to eat. Chiropractic treatments cut the pain. Lay on my back all day and kept working until I was strong enough to drive. Prayer. Tried to write poems. Saw and hugged as many friends as possible. As my sporting outlet I went target shooting, blowing hundreds of bullets .22 and .38 with admirable accuracy. Spent hours composing furious emails to the date which I erased without sending because a horoscope told me not to. At exit interview with the apologetic mansplainer I requested compensation and gave him a four-figure figure and he paid it directly into my Paypal account. I told him to leave women alone, that he should just stay home and choke his chicken. He did not know what "choke your chicken" meant and I had to tell him.

The Dismal Science

"Hi, Galaxy," I said to my phone. "Call The Medicine Shoppe." A Walgreens recording answered. Figuring that Galaxy messed up, I myself dialed the Old Towne pharmacy I'd used for 14 years. Chillingly, the Walgreens tape answered again.

It was surreal. I'd picked up a refill three days before from the familiar pharmacists and techs in the drab little Shoppe that kept only one of each item on its shelves, and had a rack of greeting cards that I alone (I think) bought from.

I drove there. Medicine Shoppe #1390 has closed. All prescriptions were transferred to the Walgreens a quarter-mile away, the sign said. No chance to ask questions or say goodbye before the staff--a motley, earnest, totally sterling team of women whom I trusted with my life--dispersed--to where?

Walgreens welcomes "Customers of Medicine Shoppe #1390"

I'd shunned the Walgreens because The Medicine Shoppe ladies saw my husband through his two and a half years of fatal illness; they'd rented me crutches; they'd witnessed my weepings and ailments, phoned and argued with doctors and insurers, knew all my secrets, and had never, not once in 14 years, given me the wrong medicine. I saw them save their meds from floodwaters. My insurer tried to force me to fill prescriptions by mail and I refused. My loyalty is non-negotiable.

Closed now. Maybe bankrupt. Or not profitable.Could have been franchisee's retirement, corporate downsizing, or higher rent. Maybe unable to compete with the Walgreens, grocery-store, and Walmart pharmacies within a two-mile radius. Possibly new rules for Medicare prescription payments. But no goodbyes. The weirdest sort of shock and heartache. And they're all out of work. They call economics "the dismal science" for a reason.

Walgreens had a sign outside to welcome me. Things could be much worse. But I wanted to cry.

Everybody Loves Confusion

The light green hose is older and made of tough rubber that's gotten a bit stiff. It was in the garage when I moved here and nothing is wrong with it, except the car ran over and warped the brass coupling where it attaches to the dark green hose, and after that these hoses couldn't be separated.

Which was bad news, because the dark green hose, bought during hard times, is plastic, cheap and after a year developed semi-permanent kinks.

Last night I tried coiling it. I wrestled it. I pulled it to its full 30-foot length, took the twists out, and tried again. Tried to pinch the kinks open. Tried standing on the kinks to pinch them open. Then tried to coil it. It turned into knots, and kinked again -- Photo shows the best coil I could get. After struggling for an hour, it suddenly hit me: Throw this out. Buy a new one. And don't buy a cheapie!

The Last Day of Save-A-Lot

Farewell to the Save-A-Lot grocery at 225 Thresher Drive, Eureka. The store started up in the late 1960s and the sign probably is 1970s. I began shopping there in 1998, when it wasn't as nice as it is now; on my first visit people were smoking in the store. Then they spiffed it up and it was fine for canned goods and whatever I had to buy quickly and cheaply. Not very well trafficked -- there's a Schnucks grocery store half a mile away and a Wal-Mart superstore within 4 miles -- Save-A-Lot shopping peaked during the hard times in '08 when gasoline came near $4/gallon and the people of Eureka went for groceries and back on foot.

This is probably the last photo ever to be taken of the sign; I was the lone mourner in the parking lot, going in there to get day-old bananas, two cans of Great Northern beans, and a box of cornflakes. (It MUST be Kellogg's with the rooster. I am fond of that rooster and will never give it up.) But change has come. Already there's a new spiffy "Eureka Market" sign, and they've changed the house brand to "Always Save." Although that is objectively very good advice, I don't want to be seen eating out of those cans. P.S. It closes TWO HOURS EARLIER now, too, 7 p.m. instead of 9 p.m.

Mock Filet Mignon for Thanksgiving

Times hard this year? Or is your family just sick of stuffed peppers? Fulfilling my vow to bring you the best in trailer food:

MOCK FILET MIGNON

1-1/2 pounds ground beef

2 cups cooked rice

1 cup diced onion

1 Tablespoon Worcestershire sauce

1-1/2 teaspoons salt

¼ teaspoon pepper

¼ teaspoon garlic powder

6 bacon strips

In a large bowl, combine beef, rice, onion, Worcestershire sauce, salt, pepper and garlic powder; mix well. Shape into six patties. Wrap a strip of bacon around each patty & fasten with a toothpick. Place in an ungreased shallow baking dish. Bake at 450 degrees for 20 minutes or until meat is no longer pink. 6 servings. Try with steak sauce. It'll fill you up and don't taste bad neither.

Hard Times & Noble People

This sign is in front of a small-business auto-exhaust shop in town, and it speaks of the times. Many more people shop now at the no-frills grocery: all three checkout lanes are busy. People carry their groceries home -- walking.

There are more new employees at Wal-Mart, working very strictly, as if they have master's degrees from Wal-Mart University. Rummage sales, church suppers, food drives, fundraisers, foreclosures. Fewer doctor visits, less travel and dining out. Higher bills for everything. With gasoline $3.68/gallon (today -- who knows about tomorrow?) every soul feels pinched. (Thanks to a certain P------t of the United States whose name we don't mention.)

All the same, there's an atmosphere: everyone making an effort to hold their heads up, hide their worries, keep their dignity and put on a smile, and think to themselves, "There's some that's got it a lot harder than I do."