Dear Editor, Welland Tribune

East Main Street, Welland, ON, Canada

June 22, 2013

Dear Sir or Madam or Mademoiselle,

Retiring with a low income and having a fixed low income from the government or other sources, is not fun.  It’s liveable but quite restrictive.  In the past 10 years, I have learned to get along with less, as have all of us.  Inasmuch as the cost of living rises faster, by far, than the increments of pensions, such as OAS and CPP, the amount of spending money, pure and simple, diminishes regularly, once a year.  And each year, the cost and maintenance of almost everything increases at least once every year.  Even the cost of postage stamps has increased logarithmically.  A bag of simple groceries can easily cost a hundred bucks and that would last about 3-4 days, not a week, as a bag of groceries would some years ago.  Gas is off the charts.  Talking a simple ride in the countryside is liable to cost you more than twenty bucks, especially if you think you have enough money to buy a coffee and a piece of pie for you and your honey.

My feeling is that I have had to change my life-style in dramatic ways and I’m about to change it more.  Gas for driving my car, maintenance, insurance and a parking place, cost more than ever.  If you drive, you must have noticed it.  There’s no one to whom to appeal except for kith and kin to continue to give you charitable handouts, a very distasteful and psycho-sociologically expensive interchange.  I’m lucky enough to have made it to age 75.  These are my “golden years.”  I believe that stubbornness is my most successful factor for living to 75, too stubborn to see a doctor, too stubborn to lie down and die and too stubborn to change my ways to make it easier on myself.  Well, I resign my stubbornness.  My car is my most expensive toy and it has to go.  In this day and age, large city dwellers do give up their cars or park them permanently.  It’s cheaper to take public transportation and drop your car insurance than it is to maintain a gas-guzzler and drive to a large supermarket once a week or visit your folks in another state, once a month or your kids in another country once a year.

Well, it’s time for me.  I’ve given up on internet at least twice because of the expense.  These days internet with things like Skype can be as good as a visit to relatives, who now all have computers and the internet.  Giving up the car will immediately save me over $300 dollars monthly, just in car payments and insurance costs.  There will be substantial savings in not having to buy very expensive gasoline and maintenance.  It will also foster better health and fitness from the walking and bicycling, and it will engender more close relationships with citizens and denizens of my small town.  Relatives will now have to visit me, instead of vice versa; this should sort out the lambs from the sheep.

I wish that everyone would start car-pooling, everywhere, in town, out of town and for special trips to things like MLB games or NHL games.  I’ve already given up cable.  I miss the visual newscasts and the sports events and PBS.  I listen to the radio, a lot.  It’s not free, but it’s consistently less expensive that many other things and it reminds me of my youth when we used to sit around a radio and watch the dial, as if Jack Benny were just behind it and was just about to come around the console and play for us in person.  After the car and my new budget squeezing, maybe I’ll have to sell my blood.  I’ve done it before.  It’s lucrative but not something one could do frequently without passing out.

Thanks for listening to my whining, Habakkuk and Esther.

Sincerely,

Izzy Sommers, MD, retired

Welland, Canada