Fran Moreland Johns

Authors, caregiving, end of life, General interest, Lifestyle

You can’t quite find the right words?

April 9, 2021April 9, 2021by Fran JohnsLeave a Comment

RECOMMENDATION

Someone you know has just lost a spouse, a parent, a child? A friend is going through a difficult divorce? Perhaps you know a family member of one of the 550,000+ Americans who have died of Covid-19 since the pandemic upended our lives?

You need this book.

Dana Lacy Amarisa, who spent decades as a marketing writer in the tech world, was long empathetic with fellow humans in all of the above categories. As it happened, in those same years she suffered unimaginable losses herself. It was definitely the hard way to learn, and the long way to edit and rewrite; but Amarisa has just released a book that answers the stumbling- block question encountered by 99% of those listed above: “I just don’t know what to say . . .”

Amarisa’s little book – it measures four by six inches and is less than a half-inch thick – is titled Condolences Pocket Guide: What to Say and Not to Say to Grievers. Most of us have, at some point in time, managed to say the abominably wrong thing, or – worse – stayed silently absent because we didn’t know the right words. Now there is a guide to fixing that problem forever.

In spare language throughout the book Amarisa mentions her own losses. An infant daughter. Amarisa’s father’s death soon afterward. An eight-month-old son later lost. Divorce. Emergency surgery and a broken hand. Those experiences first taught her about the pain that can be inflicted by the wrong words, or by silence, as well as the comfort that the right responses can bring.

But Amarisa puts herself in our shoes and walks along. “Using pat condolences,” she writes, “is like trying to put out a house fire with a squirt gun. And grievers resent us when we do this.” Or – “Grievers need our heart. Unfortunately, most common condolences give grievers our mind instead.” Snippets of very good advice begin the short chapters in these ways. “Don’t push, insist or advise. Let them tell you what they need, and let that be enough.”

Condolences Pocket Guide manages to avoid the pitfalls of many “advice” books (the genre doesn’t quite apply) in never getting preachy or cloying or accusatory, or going in all those other directions that can quickly turn us off. Instead, it sticks closely to specific, recognizable situations and speaks without inflection. To help you avoid missing the point it also features thumbs-up or thumbs-down graphic illustrations throughout.

Amarisa covers the spectrum of grievers and condolers: what to say (and not to say) to kids, to casual acquaintances you run across in public, to someone whose loss is many months past. Ensuring its accuracy, Condolences Pocket Guide was written “In consultation with Dr. Alan Karbelnig, PhD Psychology and Dr. Carlos Bush, MD Psychiatry.”

It may be the collective grief we have all experienced since the pandemic hit. Or it may be having had one president utterly unable to express empathy followed by another president exquisitely adept in reaching into the hearts of his fellow humans. For whatever reason, it seems unlikely that anyone today wouldn’t identify with at least a few of the situations addressed in this compact little guide. But grieving and potential responses have been a dilemma since about the time civilization started trying to be “civil.”

In 2003 this writer published an essay on Beliefnet.com – then in its early days as a nonsectarian spirituality website – titled But I don’t know what to say. I remember being fairly pleased with it (I am easily pleased, especially if it’s something I wrote) although a copy does not seem to have survived. Subsequently I sent my agent a carefully crafted proposal for a 10-chapter, 60,000-word book on interacting with those who’ve suffered losses. The outline and proposal for that tome do remain in my files, along with a brief agent-client correspondence littered with phrases like “marketability” and “limited audience appeal.” I will look back on this as having been ahead of my time (the kindest way I have of looking back.) But I am now happily shredding the whole folder.

Dana Lacy Amarisa has said it all in 74 small pages.

This essay appeared earlier on Medium.com

General interest

When your insurance company ruins a good day

April 3, 2021April 3, 2021by Fran Johns1 Comment

“We’re calling about your claim,” the pleasant voice said; “about the hit-and-run collision you were involved in on March 17.” This is a really bad way to start your day. While I was still catching my breath the pleasant voice mentioned my car rear-ending the other car but then leaving the scene of the crime.

I knew, of course, that I’d not been in any collisions recently – the last being over a year ago when a 16-wheeler turned right from the center lane as I was turning right from the turn lane. The 16-wheeler won that one. But as my reaction had been swift; only the front of my car and the rear portion were demolished while I managed not to get demolished in the driver’s seat.

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This is critical back story to the current episode: I lost my beloved, snazzy green 2000 Volvo S40. It was immediately replaced by a slightly less snazzy silver 2001 Volvo S40 with about 100,000 fewer miles and with my bank account about $4,000 lighter.

But my new old car was thoroughly repainted and sort-of like new, and my learning curve (I’ve declared myself too old to deal with gadget-filled computerized new cars) remained flat.

Hearing one’s insurance representative declare you were involved in a hit-and-run collision is, nevertheless, unsettling. I assured him they had the wrong car, that I didn’t think I’d even driven anywhere that day. That my trusty Volvo S40 lives in a locked garage in a building with 24-hour security and really doesn’t go out rear-ending other cars without my permission.

Would this not have been a good time to say, “Oh, sorry; we’ll fix that”? I felt so. Instead, I was referred the “the adjuster of my claim.” Then I was asked to make a recorded statement, after which I was asked to email photos of my car from all sides. Which I did. Thanks to its having been all painted and spiffed up when I bought it, the little silver auto was quite emphatic about being without a scratch. I, though, was not undamaged. Beginning with the spike in my blood pressure from the original call, continuing through a trip to the garage to make sure I wasn’t crazy, recording my statement which felt like pleading innocent in a court of law and doing a photo-shoot in the garage – there went my day.

Eventually I received a copy of the “pending” file with assurance that it would soon be “settled” and nothing would appear on my record. It noted that the Vehicle Identification Number of the car involved didn’t match my car’s VIN, and – by the way – the car involved was green, so clearly not my car. This is “actually quite common,” the adjuster assured me, which was not reassuring in the least. Since no one seemed inclined to answer my emailed questions, I finally called the adjuster to ask.

The accident happened in Oakland, across the Bay from San Francisco and you couldn’t pay me to drive across the Bay Bridge. None of the streets in Berkeley or Oakland make sense to me any more, and BART does. How did the other insurance company (the one covering the car that was rear-ended) get my insurance information? “Oh, the driver of the other vehicle probably wrote down a license number one digit off, or something; that happens all the time. We were just doing our job.” Would it not have been simple to check the VINs and immediately know the car involved was not my car? “A lot of times we do not have the VIN on file . . . We were just doing our job.” I wanted to check out my now secret suspicion that my old car had somehow been put back together and sold to a careless driver in Oakland, but by this time I did not want to hear once more that my insurance company – which will remain nameless here to avoid further damages – was just doing its job. Does its job not involve trying not to drive its clients nuts?

Apparently not.

Death and Dying, end of life, General interest, Health, Lifestyle, San Francisco, seniors

Downsizing: The incredible lightness of being

March 26, 2021by Fran Johns7 Comments

On moving from a four-story, century-old Edwardian into a 1600-sq-ft condo eight years ago I wrote a lengthy feature for the local newspaper (The New Fillmore, May 13, 2013) titled “Lessons Learned from Downsizing.” It drew editorial applause and a bunch of affirmative comments. But it seems not to have sunk in all that well.

I am back in the downsizing business. This time around it is partly a matter of trying to get organized, but despite the donating/tossing/selling/shredding activities of 2013 I am once again (or still) overwhelmed with Stuff. You don’t have to be a Marie Kondo drop-out to know how quickly Stuff can overwhelm. (I applaud every KonMari success story out there, but frankly never got past Step One.)

Here is the Big Truth: downsizing is good for the soul. Whether it’s moving from a 4-story Edwardian into a 3-room condo or reducing a tall pile of photo albums into one small box, there is a lightness akin to joy in the afterglow.

Looking back on it, there was some pretty good advice in my 2013 article. But as it ran to something over 5,000 words I’ll spare you the whole thing. (Digital copy on request.) I itemized its wisdom in eight lessons learned, which included: Treasures are your enemy; and The Fast-Disposal Plan: put it on the sidewalk with a large sign taped to it reading FREE. Also, even eight years ago much of what is cluttering up the planet (and our lives) could be digitized and made to disappear.

Downsizing is probably good for the soul at any age. What’s your teenager going to do with that wall of blue ribbons from hockey games or dressage events? Maybe one Little League trophy could be representative of the other 57 after the other 57 go to the Goodwill? Or wherever the trophies of our youth go to die. And that, of course is the other half of the Big Truth: wherever our souls go when we leave planet earth, our Stuff remains.

Award-winning (multiple major awards at that) author Ann Patchett confirmed my theory of the Big Truth – this writer uses any crafty means of mentioning herself and Ann Patchett in the same sentence – in a recent, reflective article in The New Yorker. Letting go of an old manual typewriter was particularly problematic for Patchett, as it was for me. She had several more of these treasures than I, and solved the problem by keeping two that had maximum meaning and giving another to a delighted eight-year-old. I solved mine by giving Pearl the Pert Pink Portable to my daughter, in whose family room it is respectfully, somewhat regally, displayed. Although Pearl will live forever in my heart for getting me through college and launched into my literary career, she is undoubtedly happier on display in a room of constant socialization than on my dark closet shelf. (Patchett noted the tendency to anthropomorphize our treasures.)

Back to the issue of departing souls and remaining Stuff. “I was starting to get rid of my possessions, at least the useless ones, because possessions stood between me and death,” Patchett writes. “They didn’t protect me from death, but they created a barrier in my understanding, like layers of bubble wrap, so that instead of thinking about what was coming and the beauty that was here now I was thinking about the piles of shiny trinkets I’d accumulated.”

Disposing of the shiny trinkets, along with the ancient documents and the favorite jeans from the 1980s and the shelf of folded paper bags – there’s an unwritten law about getting rid of paper bags that came bearing bottles of wine or small gifts? – and even beloved manual typewriters is a liberating act. If the disposer has begun to realize that he or she may, in fact, die some day, it is liberating to the extreme. With every drawer-cleaning comes lightness.

I may die? Worse things have happened. At least no one will have to curse my ghost while clearing out this junky drawer.

When my beloved mother-in-law died I remember flying to Detroit with a sense of dread about dealing with her house and the trappings of 93 years. My husband was her sole survivor. But nobody had had to tell Isabel Johns to downsize. We would find in a drawer one carefully folded, tissue-wrapped sweater. In a closet, perhaps several dresses and two pairs of shoes. In the pantry, the barest minimum of canned goods and a broom clipped to the door. There were no mysterious piles of documents and receipts, no dusty boxes of unidentified photos, no collections of sermons written by her Methodist preacher husband of fifty-plus years – worthy though a few of the hundreds might have been. In lieu of Stuff, Isabel left only the enduring memories of a life well lived. And a lightness in the afterglow.

This essay appeared earlier on Medium.com

General interest

The Beauty of Storytelling

March 20, 2021by Fran Johns10 Comments

“There is no greater agony,” wrote Maya Angelou, “than bearing an untold story inside you.” Over the past, agonizing year, more than a few of us tackled our inner agony by telling our stories. Not for fame or fortune, just for the joy of telling that untold story.

Everybody has a story. This is an argument for storytelling, along with a few suggestions about how to tell your own.

I have just finished (you might have figured something like this was coming) a collection of stories for my children and grandchildren, thanks to the help and persistence of an interesting website called StoryWorth.com. This is a totally unpaid plug. Other sites may also be great, among them StoryCatcher, StoryCorps, Ancestry and MyHeritage.com; I just happen to have landed with StoryWorth and haven’t tried the others. Consider this anecdotal – but enthusiastic.

My enterprising daughter purchased – with my advance consent (an important detail) – a StoryWorth account for me over a year ago; that’s how long I’ve been working on this project. In the end there is now a collection of stories – as close to a family history as this family will come – about their parents and grandparents. But it is also about great-grandparents, great-aunts and uncles, far-flung cousins; cities and towns; quirks and foibles that inhabit the past. I would have given all my worldly goods for someone to StoryWorth my own grandparents.

How to start? The value of enrolling in a program of some sort is that the storyteller gets both guidance and a constant nudge. StoryWorth sent a weekly question such as ‘What were your grandparents like?’ or ‘How did you get your first job?’ or ‘What did you read as a child?’ When I later realized I could write my own questions I invited my children to submit their own. Surprise, they didn’t send any softballs. How about ‘What was the biggest challenge you faced growing up?’ ‘How did you handle it?’ But questions and nudges help get stories told; the challenges thing is in my collection.

Stories need not be just for families. Every cause you support, every job you’ve done or place you’ve lived weaves itself into history, just as all of us become a part of history in the process of passing through. And history is nothing but a collection of stories.

Storytelling also may just be good for the soul; what’s good for the story might be balm for the teller.

Among young people, storytelling is the great introductory ploy. It’s the way high school students break the ice, the way nonprofits build community among their supporters; in my MFA program (University of San Francisco, Class of 2000) we spent the summer session writing an autobiographical narrative – telling our stories – that launched us, both individually and as a community of writers, into the semi-rarefied atmosphere of graduate study.

In senior communities, encouraging people to tell their stories is increasingly seen as a way to bring meaning – and joy – into often lonely lives. For those not inclined to type their stories there is a growing supply of voice recorder apps, and there is the old-fashioned tape recorder which can record stories that then can be digitized. So it seems one is never too old (and seldom too young) to benefit from telling one’s story.

Today looks like a good time to start.

General interest

The Gift of Hand-Written Letters

March 1, 2021by Fran Johns7 Comments

OK, not everything about the good old days was all that good. But handwriting? For intimacy, eloquence and personal expressiveness in communication no replacement has been offered. Social media, photo apps, zoom calls all dissolve into a kind of frozen distance once you’ve taken a screenshot; but a few lines in the hand of a familiar are with you forever.

I miss cursive. I mourn the old fourth grade Locker Method exercises that drove us all nuts. I miss handwritten letters. When you got a handwritten letter you got the bona fide person, coming headlong into your heart through the mail slot. If it was a message from your mom, there was comfort before even opening the envelope. If it came from a lover, your heartbeat would quicken just at seeing your own name, as if spoken in your ear.

In the olden days one learned to print, but it was considered juvenile and (rightly) time consuming. Some bastardized quasi-cursive now functions for personal signatures and for those stalwarts who write actual notes on very special occasions. But with cursive the words flow, the emotions transfer to the page; individuality and identity are forever sealed into one’s signature. Entire careers have been built on the science of graphology: tiny handwriting = shy, studious, meticulous; big, bold handwriting = assertive, gregarious. Ugly handwriting? Maybe you’re just very smart and your brain gets ahead of your penmanship. Whatever. The key here is the writing – and printing is not writing. I miss cursive. Longhand, the real thing.

My father learned handwriting early in the 20^th century – probably in a one-room schoolhouse somewhere in rural Texas. Same for my mother in the farm country of Virginia. They were both born in 1897, into families with no money or resources but a ferocious dedication to education. My father, therefore, graduated from SMU (among the first of its graduating classes) and my mother, after two years of high school – her only post-elementary education – finished at the top of her 1918 class at Virginia’s Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. Over the half-century of their courtship and marriage they exchanged daily letters whenever they were apart – which was often. Hundreds of their letters survived; a few I could not toss when my sisters and I buried our father. (He outlived my mother by 20 years, those years punctuated by handwritten letters to his family, friends and newspaper editors until his eyes were no longer up to the task.)

My beloved’s longhand was of the tiny-scribble variety, but it served him well during his early ace-reporter days, and for about six more decades of note-taking at board meetings, art auctions, a limitless variety of occasions for which electronic devices now offer a cold alternative. Stare at an iPhone all you want, no emotion will ever rise from its impersonal digits no emoji is likely to express accurate emotion. You can always even print out that Word doc letter, but it will never reveal the person behind the word. Ah, longhand.

General interest

Watching History Eerily Repeat

February 20, 2021by Fran Johns4 Comments

We’ve seen this movie before:

A newly elected president is on his way to Washington to be inaugurated. The results of the election have been certified by electors in all the states, and are waiting in two boxes to be read aloud by the sitting vice president – a mere formality. But word has gotten out to thousands of Americans who vehemently oppose the new president and they are determined their candidate should be the one going to the White House. So on they come, storming toward the Capitol to take it over and reverse the outcome of the election. Many of them are armed – and they are a determined, angry mob.

This was one hundred and sixty years ago. That president was Abraham Lincoln, the man Republicans point to when they speak of being “the party of Lincoln.”

The Capitol survived that time, thanks to a vice president who protected the electoral college boxes despite knowing he would be announcing his own loss. (More than a few people were concerned he might be tempted to destroy them, or be set upon by someone who would make off with the boxes.) That vice president was Kentucky Democrat John C. Breckinridge; he was expelled from the Senate after siding with the Confederacy, which he later served as Secretary of War.

The Capitol was only lightly defended. The mob might easily have succeeded in taking it over, and lives would definitely have been lost. But there was another man who had opposed the newly-elected president and lamented the outcome of the election – but didn’t want to see the Capitol, or his country, destroyed. He was General Winfield Scott, also known as Old Fuss & Feathers (he was picky about military etiquette) and as the Grand Old Man of the Army. He was old, too obese to get on his horse, and a native of the soon-to-be secessionist state of Virginia; but a patriot. Fortunately he also happened to have his own militia, so he dispatched it to protect the seat of democracy.

Thus, 160 years ago, democracy survived a close encounter. Full disclosure: absolutely none of this came from a store of knowledge in my aging brain. Most of it comes from historian Ted Widmer’s excellent book Lincoln on the Verge. It was published about six months before history repeated itself in Washington.

We’re living through another painful repetition, with more than a few lessons to be learned:

“Hospitals unable to keep pace with the volume of new patients. Political leaders taking to their beds. The morgues overflowing. This isn’t Milan, London or New York during the 2020 coronavirus crisis. It was Paris in 1832 during the great cholera pandemic.” Thus wrote Time Magazine’s Maurice Samuels in the May 15, 2020 issue. (This was before we had a president working to address the problem.)

Others have pointed to earlier pandemics, their similarity to the covid-19 crisis and the ways they were or were not well handled. I’m old enough to have watched a cousin and several friends be stricken with polio; they would suffer the effects throughout their lives. I also remember the immense national relief when the Salk vaccine was developed. It was a painless little drop on a sugar cube; but to the consternation of government and public health officials, many Americans still feared the vaccine more than the disease. That virus was eventually eradicated in the U.S., but remains endemic in several parts of the world – perhaps as a reminder that we cannot close ourselves off and expect to be covid-free forever.

Another authoritarian leader may one day reach the White House; another virus will surely be roaming the globe. Here’s to lessons of history being learned and remembered.

General interest

Going From Vaccine Envy to Vaccine Guilt

February 5, 2021by Fran Johns9 Comments

Getting my first shot, from a dancing nurse

Recently I joined the ranks of the vaccinated. A great relief for an octogenarian, which I have been for quite some time. But, as has been or will be true for most citizens, about the time I rolled my sleeve back down I was beset by other emotions: guilt, angst and a nameless fear for my fellow citizens and the country at large. Not unlike the feeling one has when walking back to a warm home for dinner on a rainy day – and passing a motionless figure huddled in a doorway.

America is facing yet another division between the haves and have nots, the entitled and the shoved aside, but this one is a division between life and death. Here’s how that plays out, from the vantage point of one newly-vaccinated. I am also among the Haves: white, upper middle class, living in an expensive assisted-living facility. We the elderly are, of course, among the most vulnerable. Many of us have underlying health problems; all of us have the problem of being old. Which means we tend to die faster and in greater numbers if we get covid-19. It is admittedly scary to be old in a deadly pandemic. But should I be first in line? Should I have been ahead of my granddaughter’s teacher? Already my granddaughter has lost the experience of a normal senior year in high school. My friends’ grandchildren have lost other school years. How can we possibly weigh the safety of our own health against the hopes we have for our grandchildren’s future? If we simply concentrated on getting every teacher vaccinated and schools made as safe as possible, this might give our children and grandchildren at least a modicum of educational normalcy. Most of us would at least give that some thought.

But then again. Why shouldn’t essential workers be at the front of every line? Those driving the buses, cleaning the streets, making it possible at least for our cities and country to function. The janitors and cooks who make it possible for medical personnel to function. The vast majority of these bottom-level workers are Black or brown, so the vaccine divide feeds straight into the ongoing divide of racial and economic inequality. Even given the technological challenges of many seniors, most of us in the middle class at least have the skills and resources with which to check around for vaccine availability. But should that put us in line ahead of the less-advantaged who make getting in line possible? What about childcare workers? Millions of parents depend on these generally underpaid women (they’re almost always women) to look after their children. If childcare workers are somewhere far back in the line, their own lives are in jeopardy and the ripples of disrupted lives among their small clients and wider families are incalculable.

California Governor Gavin Newsom’s decision to prioritize vaccine distribution by age drew an immediate outcry from the disability community. How can this sizable demographic, which seems perpetually destined to fight one battle for survival after another, not be at the front of the vaccination line? Mobility problems beset many in this community; others have compromised immune systems that make them dangerously vulnerable. My lungs are compromised from being old, but they weren’t helped any by those years I smoked in my teens and twenties. Considered in this light, it seems hardly fair that I should be in line before my disabled neighbor.

It is also hard not to take the vaccine guilt business onto the global level, a peripheral part of the giant divide. America First isn’t going to cut it with this virus. I am enormously relieved to be vaccinated, and now I want my friends and neighbors – all of them, rich, poor, Democrats, Republicans to get vaccinated just as fast as humanly possible. If we reach herd immunity in the U.S., though, and the virus continues to rage across Africa, its mutant cousins are coming for us. Offering support for getting the vaccine into Ethiopian arms is less an altruistic wish than a matter of self-preservation. Would I have given up my dose for someone in Ethiopia? Or for anyone in the above demographics? Probably not. But this should not excuse me from wrestling with what is a national, universal ethical dilemma.

General interest

Staring into the Great Beyond

January 20, 2021by Fran Johns4 Comments

Since this space is often devoted to end-of-life issues, today’s essay is offered as a new and unique perspective. And in case you need a laugh. It was written by my old and definitely unique friend Bob Dodge, a fellow supporter of End of Life Choices California. Asked for identifying bio he replied only that “the author had become delusional and cynical while standing in a local Bed, Bath & Beyond. He grants no interviews and wants to avoid being crushed by requests for TV appearances, magazine articles and the like – BUT – PBS or NPR requests will be considered. Meanwhile – – – ENJOY LIFE.”

I have never thought much about the name of the chain of stores named Bed, Bath & Beyond, thinking as most would, one can find items for furnishing different rooms of one’s home or apartment. Trash cans, wash cloths, hampers, rubber thingamabobs for shower, kitchen or bathroom and now electronic security gadgets for monitoring your goldfish, pets and the creatures, like raccoons and skunks outside near your car and front door. I really don’t mind going to these stores once in a while to browse through the isles searching for an unusual item to ponder on as to why people might want to buy such an item. But, I guess they do buy them else the store would have swept them off the shelves and replaced them with something else also so bizarre that nobody wants or really needs.

Today, Friday, I had a revolutionary experience at a Bed, Bath & Beyond in Redwood City that changed my perspective of this commercial outlet and I may return on my own free will! Let me set the scene: Mary was looking for some new items for our master bathroom, like a new rug with matching hand-towels and face-cloths and a new squeegee for the shower glass. Also on her list were new pillows, none of which interested me given I tend not to notice if the rug and towels match, the shower glass is streaked or that the pillow is sweat-stained since I prefer sleeping with my eyes closed and therefore don’t see what my head is resting on. Just knowing the pillowcase is clean is what matters most to me.

Anyway while Mary is off down one of the aisles, I am standing there, masked as usual these days, gazing at the RING displays of electronic security items, trying to figure out what all the displayed gadgets do. This display is near the check-out counters and as I am standing there a voice calls out asking, “Are you ready to check out, sir?” I look up to see a young, maybe twentyish, masked female staring at me. “No, I am not ready to check out, thank you very much,” I replied. And then it dawned on me… The BEYOND part!! NO! I am not ready to check out. Come on, I am only 83 years and 10 months old and doing pretty well thank you very much! I really didn’t think I looked so bad physically that I would attract attention! I had not realized that End-of-Life issues had advanced this far and into retail establishments no less! Imagine asking potential customers if they are ready to “check out” right there in front of other customers. I would think the process would be kept a little more private. I kind of had the same reaction when I went to buy condoms for the first time in a pharmacy. “I need to buy a package of prophylactics, please”. Pharmacist: WHAT? “Oh, CONDOMS! WHAT BRAND AND WHAT COLOR?” he seemed to shout to the few others in the store. But at B,B & BEYOND it seems to be out in the open and maybe that is good for the movement.

Another thought about choices at the end of one’s life. I think there should be a hotel chain with a name something like SWEET DREAMS or THE LAST GOODBYE or maybe CHECKING IN BUT NEVER OUT Hotel. Senior citizens could pack a simple overnight bag of a few items like a small toothpaste tube, hair brush, old and well used toothbrush and a favorite pair of jammies. Then they tell the hotel clerk, “Checking in to check out”, simple as that. And they check in with confidence knowing that when check out time comes the next day there will be no line to stand in. Fait accompli.

This essay appeared earlier on Medium.com