Granny

My grandmother was a very unusual person, especially for her times.  I have a number of memories since she babysat me while my mother worked.

Milk used to be delivered in glass bottles to her doorstep.  The bottles had a small bulge at the upper end, sort of like a disproportionate figure eight, where the cream gathered.  Milk was not homogenized back then, and the joy of tasting that wonderful cream was enormous.  With each bottle, you got skim milk and cream, not a bad deal.

Granny made pancakes out of buckwheat flour and served them with molassas.  She would also make them into shapes--letters or animals.  It seemed that no whim of mine was beyond satisfying, either.  I used to adore sitting on the floor reading a Mighty Mouse comic book and eating pumpkin from a can.  Once I went with her on a train trip and would only eat chocolates sprinkles and black olives, but that was okay with her.  I must have been a nightmare to try to feed, but I gobbled up her pancakes, her yellow grits, Cream of Wheat, and just about anything else she made.

If I wanted to make mud pies in the back yard, she would let me decorate them with toothpaste in lieu of frosting.  I left them out to dry in the sun ("bake"), only to find them covered with ants which ate the sugar from the toothpaste.

She had a kind of shed to one side of her house where she stored gardening implements and other odds and ends, even though she also had a small garage (to me it seemed huge).  Once while playing with my friends I was jumping up and down on the roof of the shed when it caved in.  No one was hurt.

In those days, we children roamed the neighborhood with almost complete freedom, although more than once when confined to the house by winter's cold, I would escape out the back door and run down the alley with Granny in hot pursuit.  (If I had to do for my grandkids what she did for me, I would drop dead within a week.)  My best friend Linda Hunter lived on the corner of our block, and that alley was our prison-break route.  We would often steal nickels from our caregivers' purses (her mom, my grandmother) and make a dash to the corner store where we spent our ill-gotten funds on tiny wax bottles shaped like Coke bottles, containing some kind of sweet liquid.  After drinking the liquid you could then chew the wax.

My grandfather up and left my grandmother for another woman, and Granny found herself having to support herself.  She took up bookkeeping, or accounting as it would be known now, and I remember the enormous, heavy books with minute lines for expenses, assets, etc., that she would work on at the kitchen table spread with papers and receipts. 

After a while, she had a number of suitors who would ask her out.  They may not have known they would also be saddled with me, but I remember one, Mack, who didn't seem to mind at all.  On summer evenings he would take us to get snowcones, and I adored him for it.

When she finally married Glen, they set up house on a piece of land that allowed them to have a nice garden plot in the back yard.  They were both avid gardeners and producers of various crops, and from them I developed a passion for growing some of my own vegetables--this year I am going to try Square Foot gardening, but more on that after the summer when I can report my findings.  Glen also loved animals, and it's a good thing.  My grandmother was singled out by every stray dog or cat in the area as the person to find.  She never turned away a stray animal, and you can forget about the Dog Whisperer--she trained cats to ring bells to go outside, her marvelous Cocker spaniel Roger would play hide and seek with me, and he would carry a basket to the corner store when Granny walked there to pick up odds and ends.  Roger would bring a can of soup or something equally important back with us to the house in his basket.  This, with no leash.  She had infinite patience and an innate sense of how to communicate what she wanted an animal to do.  Her collection of strays never strayed again.

She had neighbors who had an English bulldog, Soda.  Soda was the sweetest dog on the face of the earth, even more so than Roger.  I was long gone when Roger and Soda died.  My family had been sent to Georgia--my father was in the Air Force--and it was a tragedy for me. No grandmother, no dogs or cats.  I didn't want to go and couldn't understand why I wasn't allowed to stay with Granny forever.  God knows what my parents thought about this attitude, but the separation was just as hard for Granny as it was for me.

Decades later, when Granny was one of Alzheimer's victims, even though she didn't see me often, she would still light up when I went to visit her--somewhere, still alive in her mind, even though she may not have know who I was for sure, there lived that glorious feeling of love we felt for one another.

The IRS and I

Last April, having completed my very simplistic tax statement, I printed it up and sent it to the IRS along with a check for the relatively measly amount I owed them.

Around July (okay, I'm slow but sure) I decided to ask them why they had not cashed the check.  At the time I wondered if maybe I hadn't included my SS number on the check itself--that alone is enough to fling a spanner into the whole works.

The IRS sent me a letter stating that both the check and the tax filing form were lost.  They told me I didn't have to do anything at that time since within 45 days they would contact me again with more information.

More information said that the items were still missing, that the IRS had a considerable work load (read "horrendous backlog") of similar problems, and I didn't have anything I needed to do at that time.

By this time it was November.  I cancelled the check I had originally sent, wrote a new one, included a copy of the original tax return, a cover letter listing the items included in the envelope, and shot it off to the IRS.

Last week (and quite a while after noticing the check had been cashed) I received a letter from the IRS telling me they had received the check but that I still owed them a tax return form!  It was in the same envelope, folks! 

Two days ago I sent yet another print-out of my tax return, but my blood runs cold.  I can see myself still trying to file for 2011 when it is time to file for 2012.  Not only that, but I cannot prove, beyond circumstancial evidence, that I ever sent that first check and tax return, so I also contemplate with horror the idea that I may be charged interest and sanctions and a staggering portion of the national debt load. 

I am certain that the amount I paid in taxes was a lot less, by far, than the cost of writing back and forth to me and searching for my original documents.  And just think--I'm an honest taxpayer.  If such a complete snafu can take place with such an unimportant taxpayer as I am, what happens with dishonest people who try to take the system for all it's worth?  If government spending needs to be reduced and income increased, the gov could start by making the IRS a functional entity.  How much does it cost to process thousands upon thousands of screwed-up tax returns, lost statements and checks?  There's something loose in the offices of the IRS and it aint Albert Einstein...