Ringing the Bell
When we moved here more than three years ago, we had to make lots of arrangements to accommodate being here full time rather than only once in a while. We had owned the house for eight years while we thought about when the right time to retire might be. On Wall Street, for various reasons including the stress of the work and the hard head banging that goes on in the business, it is not unusual for people to retire with enough savings when they are in their forties. I spent a lot of years thinking about retirement, but not really longing for it the way some do. I liked what I did and as I stumbled through several failed marriages, with all the added costs associated with that, enough never seemed enough and there seemed no good reason to stop working before I did. I actually chose to move out here almost exactly when the Social Security Administration says I was supposed to retire, the month I turned 66 years old. I had been somewhat forcibly driven into an alternative career at the age of fifty four (which is to say, moving on from Wall Street proper and into situations where I used my Wall Street experience, so less a retirement and more a career change. But when we moved out to this hilltop, it was meant to be a retirement even though I knew I would stay busy working at several things including teaching and doing expert witness work.
With a second home, the challenge is always to find people to take care of the house when you are away and when you come to use the place. Clearly those are different needs, but they tend to fall into three basic categories, housekeeping, gardening and fixing things. The first two are regular scheduled activities whereas the last one is episodic and when and as needed. My team for those three have been with me since we moved here three years ago. Isabel has been our housekeeper, Joventino has been our gardener and Handy Brad has been out handyman. Handy Brad has just spent the last few weeks fixing a year’s worth of things that need fixing…just like the old days, except now I am able to do many of the things that he might otherwise be stalled on to do and I have the power tools to do that. Joventino is still with us despite a hiatus where he got his father, Benito, to substitute for him for a fe months while he was in Mexico having surgery. Joventino only comes for one day every three weeks and in between I do much of the incremental gardening and an increasing amount of the maintenance as well. Joventino is a beast and probably always will be. We will always need Handy Brad in our home as well.
But unfortunately, Isabel has left us after eleven years. She has been our housekeeper longer than any other service person has been with us. But recently Isabel succumbed to a long bout with cancer. Every Thursday until she got sick, Isabel would be in the laundry room ironing our sheets, directing the efforts of her cleaning crew of young Hispanic women. She was a demanding boss to those girls, but it was all for good reason. It was good for her clients and it ws tough love for her girls as she taught them to be valuable, hard-working immigrants like her.
I don’t know all the details of Isabel’s history, but I know she has been running a housecleaning business for over 30 years and she has been cleaning this house for twenty of those. Today was the day Isabel’s family had a memorial gathering on her behalf. It was her wish that it not be a formal church service. She wanted the event to be a happy gathering with nothing but good feelings all around. It’s a good lesson for us all. You’ve heard it said before, celebrate life rather than cry about death.
Isabel lived in Vista, one town closer to the Ocean from us. She lived there with her husband Roger (an Americanization of Rogelio) and their son Rogelio. We drove over into an area of Vista we hadn’t been to before. It was a higher density, but nice area with lots of neat smaller houses. We had never met Isabel’s family but we thought so highly of her that we wanted to pay our respects to her and console her family for their loss. What we found was a lovely suburban house that was set up in the back patio with a tent for a large group of people for the gathering. Two of the most senior of her crew were acting as caterers for the event. The back of the house was a lovely garden with a small in-ground pool with an auto-cleaning unit running around the bottom. The plantings in the various beds were delightful and lovely in a Southern Californian succulent way. It was a house that Isabel and her family must have been very proud of.
When we met her husband Roger, Kim told him the story of how she learned that I speak Spanish. I corrected her story by saying that I spoke “Gardener Spanish”, which is my way of saying that I only spoke a bit. Roger used that to explain to us that he had been a gardener for forty years and that Isabel had specifically married him with the promise that he would make a lovely garden for her home some day. That day had come and they did, indeed, have a lovely home and garden, and a vast array of friends and family that cared enough about Isabel to come to show their respect and love for her and the family.
What struck me was that this was the exact example of the American Dream that so many Central and Latin American immigrants are coming here to achieve. What could be more prototypical than a young immigrant gardener and a young immigrant housekeeper getting together to raise a family and work hard toward their dreams. It is heartwarming to see that hard-working immigrants can attain the good life as we think of the suburban ideal. I recognize that suburbia isn’t everybody’s cup of tea, but from the look of it, it was a home that Isabel and Roger dreamed about many years ago and then achieved.
This week, the Title 42 COVID-based restrictions placed by the Trump Administration on asylum seekers trying to escape their home country’s oppression, expire and it is expected that as many as 10,000 immigrants seeking asylum will try to cross the border every day. We are a country of 332 million, and if that was a steady flow of immigrants, it would represent a 1.1% increase in population. That is only slightly higher than where immigration has historically run and to say that we need it with increased longevity and increasing Old Age Dependency ratios, not to mention declining fertility rates, is an understatement. Of course we all know that our national history is all about immigration-led population growth. Technically, Immigrants and the children born to immigrants are considered part of the almost 100 million U.S. immigrant population. That means that 30% of our country are like Isabel, Roger and Rogelio. It is estimated by the Census Bureau that five years ago we used to possess 19% of the world’s migrants in this country, but that number has clearly shrunk (probably to below 15% as other countries have wised up demographically and starting taking in more immigrants to bolster their aging economies. We, on the other hand, are moving in the wrong direction due to largely unfounded fears generated by conservatives and with the help of red herrings like Mexican cartels and unsavory immigrants to build walls around us and insulate us from the nastiness of the outside world. Meanwhile, the Isabels, Rogers and Rogelios are building out our shrinking middle class and making this a better, not worse, place to live.
Isabel is gone, but the legacy of Isabel is as clear as a bell to me. Have a dream, work hard day-by-day towards that dream, live a good and honest life and become a part of the fabric of American life that has made this such a special and successful place for 250 years, a place where diversity energizes the the lower portions of the cultural pyramid of the country and allows more of the free market benefits come through for everyone. Let’s all ring that bell for Isabel.