May 22 Friday roundup

In the latest podcast episode, I talk about the specific ways that both Trump and RFK Jr.’s MAHA movement are repeating and reinventing the history of eugenics in America. (This episode has a bonus statement from eugenics history and bioethics expert Paul Lombardo!). You can watch it on YouTube or listen on Apple, Spotify, and elsewhere. If you’d like to check out the links in the written version, you can read Tuesday’s post.

Last week I wrote about relying on surprises when I write my books. And this week, I want to address different kind of surprise. One example is Hungary, which beat a heavily gerrymandered electoral system and years of reactionary government to make a turn back toward democracy. The election was the result of a lot of work on the ground there, but the surprise has been a shutoff of the spigot to authoritarian-loving groups here in the U.S.

Another nice example is the Senate shutting down for the long holiday weekend rather than passing Trump’s $1.776 billion slush fund for criminals. That things can sometimes break in a good way without your being able to plan for it or foresee it isn’t a reason to sit and wait for things to happen. Instead, it’s a reminder that sometimes events will go in a good way you might never have predicted.

Here’s a smaller example from my own life, which I try to keep in mind. In May 2019, my stepfather was diagnosed with advanced lung cancer. In his eighties, he’d already survived throat cancer years before and had no interest in doing chemo or radiation again. He never returned to his oncologist’s office after his diagnosis. Instead, he took a home remedy someone at church gave him.

His belief that God would cure him led him to avoid a lot of planning, but later that year, when he started to feel really bad, I got him to sit down with me at his house in Toledo and make a will. My visit was grim for all of us, as I went through question after question from the will preparation packet a local attorney had given me. I wrote down each item of value he owned and what he wanted done with it.

It didn’t help that my mother was deep into a paranoid dementia and had become extremely hostile to her sick husband. Each day she would forget he’d been diagnosed with cancer, and continued to believe he might not feel well, but all he needed to do to get better was to get some exercise. She was also in complete denial about her dementia, making up incredibly complex and conspiratorial stories about people out to get her and the danger she was in.

She refused to work with me on making a will at all. They had both already made wills back in West Virginia, she claimed.

“Okay,” I said, “then where are the wills?” She had no answer.

I continued my questions with my stepfather, figuring out who would get what heirlooms, how best to sell their small fishing boat, and what he wanted given to his friends in Amway. But my mother was relentless.

“Our accountant in Morgantown already did this!”

"What’s his name?”

“Greg Cason.”

“All right,” I said. “Let’s look Greg up and give him a call.”

“No, no, no!”

My mother was able to spin fantastic stories out of absolutely nothing and had completely lost touch with reality by this point. So just imagine my surprise when I looked for a Greg Cason in Morgantown on my phone and found that not only did he exist, he was an accountant.

And my phone quickly showed me that the year before, he had been convicted by the U.S. Department of Justice for tax fraud. Though I showed her the press release from the DOJ, she refused to believe it.

“That’s just a story he put out because he didn’t want more new clients,” she said.

So her husband and I continued logging their possessions, his wishes, and his end-of-life preferences. The three of us eventually drove out to a lot on which he rented a space for the 1990 Airstream Excella that he used when he went to remote worksites. (Though he should have retired decades ago, they had saved no money. So he remained a petroleum plant inspector almost until his death.) He showed me where the Excella was parked, and the little card he had with the gate code to get in.

He told me their fishing boat would only sell at specific times of year, and that his ATV had maybe 400 miles on it, so it should have kept its value. We cleaned the Excella up a little that day. Though it was in good condition, I knew at some point I’d have to come back and take all his things out.

***

He didn’t want me to bring my mom to live with me. But eventually, having her there and out of control interfered with even being able to sleep. His daughter planned to take care of him in Texas, while my brother and I took our mom to Virginia, to protect him from her. It was a bleak situation all around, but most of all for him. He died in May 2020, a few months into the pandemic.

My brother and I had arranged a kind of split custody of my mom. And during the window in which he had her, I went to clean their house out to sell it. (You can read more about that here.) I met with a realtor, we listed the house, and they recommended an estate sales agent.

Nothing, it seemed, had been paid off yet, including the house. And neither of their cars, nor their ATV, nor the little fishing boat were titled in a name under which we could take any action without some kind of legal process. Which meant hiring two lawyers and filing petitions.

My stepfather had left some notes in his desk. He told us who should have the two big hunting knives and who should get the long guns in the safe. It was pretty clear where everything should go, even beyond what he mentioned in his will. But there was nothing more about the Excella.

The house and cars were titled in Ohio. We got those retitled under Ohio law, but the boat was titled in Michigan, and the ATV and small trailer were titled in West Virginia.
It was disaster. Try getting information from DMVs in three states during a pandemic. Try finding sellers when you don't have clear title that you can turn over.

But slowly, we made progress on each of the vehicles. Except for that 34-foot Excella.

I tried to remember the name of the lot where it was parked, but couldn't. Then I recalled the photo I’d taken of the business card my stepfather had shown me. I found it on my phone, and called the lot. The manager was sympathetic and offered condolences. She pledged to help me in any way she could. But when she looked up my stepfather's name, she didn't find anything in their records. Nothing under my mother's name either. They had no spot rented at that lot.

But I'd been there myself less than a year ago! The lot manager and I were flummoxed. I offered to drive out from Virginia to Ohio to the lot and look for it. Luckily, I had taken pictures of it in October that I could send her, to prove I had been there and to show what it looked like. I headed back to Toledo the following week.

Meanwhile, we had also gotten a replacement title, in my mother's name. So I had the VIN number, too. The lot manager offered to help me. Because of coronavirus, we rode in separate cars, up and down the rows, looking for Excellas while using our phones like walkie-talkies.

Together, we found four Excellas on the lot. The first was too new and shaped wrong. The second was closer, but when I looked on the side, it wasn't the right number for their model. The third one was tiny. But in the back row—there it was. The right length, the right model, and in the row I'd remembered.  

It looked a little worse for wear. Toledo winters are pretty rough. One taillight had fallen out of its casing. I was bummed it had been a hard winter, because I wanted top dollar for it. And the estate agent already had someone who was interested in it.

The lot manager was kind, but said she couldn’t give me possession unless I had the keys. Wait, I told her, explaining that I had a photo of the title, which would have the VIN. We decided to match the VIN. But after searching the outside of the vehicle top to bottom, front to back, and couldn't find a VIN.
 
I didn't know what an Excella key looked like, so I'd brought every key in the house. The lot manager said if I could open it, I could claim it. It turned out a deadbolt had been added, so two keys were involved. I tried every key I’d found over and over. Nothing fit either lock.

I cannot explain how much in despair I was over this Excella. I was completely overwhelmed with my own kids and care for my mom while trying to work and emptying their house. By this point, the Excella was haunting my days and nights.

“What about the plate?” she asked.

So I went to take a photo of the license plate. It's a Michigan plate, but my stepfather had titled the Excella in Ohio. He was prone to cutting corners, not paying taxes, not switching residences if it helped him taxwise not to. This had left us other messes to clean up.

I told the lot manager I'd check on it. Back home, I looked up when he had titled the Excella in Ohio. It was the month he was diagnosed with lung cancer. He must have retitled it when he was near death but never put the new plate on.

By then, the estate agent had a buyer prepared to pay me cash, but I couldn’t establish ownership of or find a key to the thing itself. No one at the Michigan DMV answered the phone—the system just sent me to a phone tree. I emailed them with the VIN and asked whether it was attached to the Michigan plate. Weeks later, I still had no answer.

I asked the owner of the lot if I could bring in a locksmith. Not unless we can match the VIN, she said. Meanwhile, she called the guy who's supposed to own the vehicle parked in that spot, but he said it wasn’t his. Someone parked in his spot a long time ago and he just took another spot.

She started trying to figure out what happened. It became apparent quickly that tons of people in her lot were parked in the wrong spaces. She had no idea who was where. I had become a harbinger of horror for her, deconstructing every coherent part of her job and showing her reality had no meaning.

But meanwhile, she found an old, dead account in my stepfather's name. It turned out that he had called them in March, to give advance notice on closing out his rental account for the space. The remaining time had expired long after his death, and ended the very week I showed up to ask her about the Excella.

I realized he must've intended to move it before he died but never did. But I still had no way to claim it. The police said I would absolutely have to go through the motor vehicle department; they would not trace that plate for me or come out and help me open the vehicle.

But then! The estate manager found a key I'd missed, in my mother’s car. It looked like it went to an RV. And so she dispatched someone to the lot to try it. Meanwhile, my husband looked up where to find the VIN. It should be on the tow bar. I had hope for the first time.

Two hours went by. I didn't hear anything from the estate agent. Once more, I succumbed to dread. In the end, I called her. No VIN appeared on the tow bar, she said. And the key didn't work. Also, it looked to be in much worse shape than I had described to her the first time we sat down together. She was no longer sure her buyer would want it. If he did, the price would definitely have to be lower.

Not having saved any money and with steadily worsening dementia, my mother would be reliant on whatever I could get for her by selling these possessions. Losing the money from the Excella would be a disaster.

But the larger crisis was irrelevant for the moment, as we still had no way to get inside. The agent and I decided to put it off as a project to deal with after the estate sale. Meanwhile, I got caught up in convincing my mother to move into assisted living, which was the hardest of all the things I had to do that year.

I moved her in on a Friday in August, the very afternoon the estate sale was underway in Ohio. Afterward, my brother came over to my house, so that we could sit down and coordinate where we were at: what money had come in and what outstanding issues we had left to deal with.

“Ugh,” I said, “the Excella. I'll try the DMV again.”

My brother left to go home. A half an hour later, I got an excited phone call from him. A mysterious letter had arrived, forwarded from my mother and stepfather’s house in Toledo.

The letter was from Steve, who had been desperately trying to reach my stepfather. Of course my stepfather's cell phone account had been cut off shortly after his death months ago. We didn't have the password to his email, so we had no idea what messages he'd received.

But Steve wanted to reach him to let him know that he had $20,000 to give my stepfather for the Excella but didn’t have any idea how to contact him.

We were baffled. Did he mean he had a buyer for the Excella? Or that the Excella had already sold? Maybe Steve had the key, at least! What was going on? We had no idea. We were intrigued.

It was after business hours, but a phone call the next day solved the mystery. Months before, my stepfather taken his Excella to a dealer who sold used models. He had signed over the title and okayed the commission. Steve had been trying to sell it for months.

But my stepfather never told me. The vehicle I had found on the lot and spent weeks trying to get into was the same year, make, and model. But it wasn’t my stepfather's Excella. He hadn’t just closed out the account from that lot, he had also taken the RV away.

He was a kind man, and he did all this when he lay just weeks from death, in an effort to make everything easier for my brother and me. But by failing to let us know what he had done, he’d condemned me to a months-long quest I could never complete on my own.

I had no idea about or control over what was going on with other people in other places. Help had come from a completely unexpected quarter. Not only had Steve kept his bargain, but he had been trying to do the right thing and deliver my stepfather’s money for some time.

Not everyone in life is going to be Steve. But the mystery of the Excella—like the shift toward democracy in Hungary, or the Senate’s unwillingness, for now, to rubber-stamp a slush fund for the January 6 crew—reveals that sometimes you can catch an unexpected break. You can’t plan for that kind of good surprise, but sometimes it can help you keep going, knowing that if you do, one will eventually happen.

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