Into the Death Zone
I get my inspiration in many places, but none more than the here and now of what is right in front of my eyes. It’s late Saturday afternoon and I have spent an active day of gardening. I bought three trees and used my new power cart to place them on the back hillside where I want them to be planted. They were each heavy and the power cart was essential to getting them in place, but as I learned, this is still not a task without some significant physical effort. Choosing trees at Green Thumb Nursery was easy. The staff happily hauls the plants to the truck and puts them in the trailer bed. They even tie on a red ribbon after leaning the trees down to reduce wind burn such that no one at CHP can suggest that we are not street legal. The obvious effort comes in the placing of the trees into the power cart off the truck (in the case of the big boy) and off the driveway from the other two after Handy Brad had left. I figured unloading would be easier since I have a tilt feature on the cart hopper to dump material forward and out of the cart. How that would work with two six-foot and one nine-foot trees was yet to be seen. What I hadn’t realized, but should have, was just how challenging the maneuvering of the cart down the hill would be. That and wrestling the cart back up the hill with the wheels spinning on the unballasted cart was where the effort came into play.
So, I feel I earned my hour in the steaming hot tub, finishing up my last story and thinking about this one. Once out of the hot water and back inside, I stepped on the scale since I had forgotten to do so this morning. In the last two weeks I have dropped eight pounds for some reason. I have never worried about losing weight in the sense that I feel it might be a bad sign of my health, but eight pounds in a short period of time that included five days traveling to New York City, is a lot. I am also now at a weight that is lower than any I have seen for almost forty years. I am thirty pounds heavier than when I left high school for college and one hundred and forty pounds (don’t bother with the math, just know that I am and have always been a true heavyweight). The point is that I am eating less and less, not so much by choice, but by declining interest in doing so. Even when we had a nice catered party fare last night I ate a bit of this and a bite of that and that now seems to suffice. Today I didn’t eat a thing by circumstance of being busy until I went into the hot tub with a snack at 3pm. With Kim losing weight due to her recent gastric bypass surgery, she too is at her adult low, so we are quite a pair, neither of us caring so much about food any more. I think this is a natural part of getting to this age, but we have both had the help of bariatric surgery (mine fifteen years ago, but still working meaningfully for me). It also doesn’t hurt that Kim is walking Betty every day and I am up and down that darn hillside all day long.
As I sat down this evening to start the TV watching for the evening, I turned on what I would call a gap-filler movie, one that I do not need to please Kim with since she will not be sitting down until she serves me my dinner of a baked potato in an hour or two. The movie I have chosen is called Into the White Zone and it is about five WWII soldiers (three German and two English) shot down over Norway in the winter of 1940 when they were battling for that country’s mineral reserves. This was sort of after the Battle of Britain, but before the Yanks joined the fray and things got nasty. These five find themselves in the inhospitable frozen wasteland of mountain Norway where snow and cold seem in no short supply. The five holed up in a bare cabin and spend the days during a storm getting to know one another and jockeying for domination. They alternate as captors and POWs based on who last grabbed the gun. But eventually they all start getting along with one another and even enjoying one another’s company when they find a stash of alcohol in the barren cabin. It is fair to say that they become friends, or at least four of them do. The fifth man is a rabid brown shirt young German who is too inculcated with the words of Mein Kampf to see beyond the manifesto of the Third Reich. He symbolically loses his arm to gangrene in what seems to be a message that the poison of hatred rots the human flesh and soul.
This was a true story of five men who survived a brutally harsh environment after being shot down during an air war over a hostile and foreign land. They come out the other end as genuine friends. Only two of them survive long enough to transcend the war and carry on the friendship they began in that cabin in the snow field. Their time in the White Zone of the Norwegian glaciers introduced them to the Death Zone. Both crews lost men in their respective plane crashes. Then, one of the Germans is shot by Norwegian resistance troops who are decidedly anti-German. It is a shocking reality to his German comrades, but even more so to the British airman who had befriended him. We are accustomed to seeing soldiers, especially Nazis, being numb to the horrors of war, but this movie shows us a different side of war, the side that is dominated by humanity and not hatred. By going into the White Zone and facing the Death Zone, these men from different worlds transcend their cultural biases and change forever.
I watched a war movie before Kim came in for dinner because I knew she would want to watch a Christmas movie (Elf is on the menu tonight, Francisco). I had no idea that it would be a movie about moving past hate to a better plane. The Death Zone is simply not a place we can avoid in life, and maybe it holds more hope than we realize. Today I had a trip into it long before my day really started. I need to replace the trustee on my life insurance trust. Most estate planning specialists will suggest that holding your life insurance policies in a life insurance trust is the most tax-efficient route, so that is what I did twenty-five years ago. At that time my accountant was Peter DeCoster, a friend who had worked at Bankers Trust before setting up his own tax accounting service. He served in that capacity for me and many of my friends for thirty years and took on the role as the trustee of my life insurance trust. Peter was three years my senior, but he was a rather slender Brit who seemed happy-go-lucky and healthy. Every year he would come to my house and have dinner and drink two beers while he gathered my tax information. It was our ritual and it bonded us over the years. Then, in the summer of 2014, I got a call from Peter’s assistant, Daisy, telling me that Peter had been mowing his lawn at his upstate Saratoga Springs summer house when he unceremoniously dropped dead. He was sixty-three and it was all very unexpected. Having your long-time tax guy die is traumatic (not as traumatic as for him and his family, which consisted of only his wife). I only knew Peter from twenty-five years of those dinner and beers, but he was my guy for a long time.
I’ve moved on from Peter for tax purposes (not painlessly I must say) but I have never replaced him as trustee. As I was reviewing my yearend insurance policy status (I have five different policies accumulated over the years starting in 1976 when I was preparing to get married). To show you how times change, I took out a $50,000 policy in ‘76 and that seemed like a lot for someone earning $17,000 per year right out of business school. Anyway, once I looked into how to change a trustee I realized that I would need a death certificate for Peter, which meant contacting his old assistant, who is contacting his very private wife. The State of New York only wants to give out death certificates to family and lawyers and I’m hoping to avoid spending money on a lawyer and that his wife can help me.
This trip today into the Death Zone had an unintended positive result for me not unlike the result for the soldiers in the White Zone. It gave me a chance to fondly remember Peter and what a pleasant and kind man he was. I no longer have a tax monkey on my back so I can just remember my old friend Peter and reflect at this nice time of year about what a nice man he was and how I always enjoyed those dinners and watching him enjoy his two beers. Here’s to you, Peter.