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A Pot of Gold At Age 18, Basically

CHEROKEE, NC - MAY 11: A rainbow over the Harrah's Cherokee Casino & Resort is viewed on May 11, 2018 in Cherokee, North Carolina. Photo by George Rose/Getty Images

Thanks to huge casino profits, the youth of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians receive a payment they call “The Big Money” at age 18 after graduating from high school. Payments — which were as small as $600 when the program started in 1996 — are now into six figures. At Topic, Sheyahshe Littledave reports on the opportunities and problems that come with large lump-sum payments and what the kids do with their windfall.

Tyra Maney, 22
Received $109,000 in 2016
Purchased a Ford Focus for $42,500; season tickets to the Georgia Swarm, a professional lacrosse team, for $1,600; a Prada bag for $1,100; and a traditional costume for the Miss Cherokee pageant for $1,000. She put $35,000 in savings.

Tyra paid for her dream car—a Ford Focus—in full, along with a year’s worth of car insurance. Then she bought a small Prada bag, bright white with a tassel, and clothing for the Miss Cherokee pageant. “I didn’t have any traditional clothes,” she explains, “so I used maybe about $1,000 or so and I bought moccasins and a basket, and I got my wool set [of traditional Cherokee clothing].”

Standing alongside the banks of the Oconaluftee River, which runs through the Smoky Mountains and ends at Fontana Lake, some 30-plus miles from Cherokee, Tyra reflects on conversations she had with her peers over what they would do when they got their big money. “A lot of people in my friend group were like, ‘I’m gonna be smart, and I’m gonna maybe buy this and then put the rest up,’ ” says the 22-year-old, who works as a retail associate at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, in downtown Cherokee. “Maybe 20 percent of us actually did that, and the rest were like, ‘Oh, I have money, so I’m gonna use it.’ And they blew it.”

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A Wealth of Perspective for a Free Ride, Now and Again

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Looking for more excellent perspectives on aging? Check out our Fine Lines series, edited by Sari Botton.

When Megan Kimble moved to Austin, Texas, she started to volunteer with Capital City Village, a nonprofit that allows people to age in their homes by connecting members with those that can do repairs and offer rides. Simply wanting to truly know her new city and its inhabitants a little better, Kimble discovered that spending time with those far older than her offered not only new friendships, but valuable perspective unavailable anywhere else at any price. Read the story at CityLab.

I’m trying to get to know Austin—to understand this city beyond its carefully curated twang and charm. And to do that, I’m looking beyond my immediate contemporaries.

I struggled to build a new community for myself in Austin. I drove in crushing traffic to eat tacos from trailers, sit on patios under twinkle lights, and stand in bars watching live music. But sometimes it felt like I was performing life in Austin instead of living it.

I imagine being on the flipside of my life. If, at 32, I have just finished the first third of my life, what will it feel like when I am beginning the last third? I like talking to people whose major life decisions have already happened—who they’ll marry, whether or not to have kids, where they’ll live, what they’ll do there. Over the months, as I become un-partnered and start “doing the computer dating,” spending time with these more seasoned humans offers a perspective that is grounding, calming. The decisions that feel so fraught now will be remembered differently in 30 years. They remind me to take myself less seriously—to relish rather than fear all that I still don’t know.

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‘It was illegal. And it ruined him.’

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At ESPN, Tom Junod reflects on his father’s gambling habit: “…he made people think he was a gangster when really he was just a mark.”

Everybody thought Lou Junod was a gangster. He not only looked the part, with his pinkie ring and French cuffs and blue dress shirts white at the collar, he played it, cultivating an air of danger. He had beautiful manners and always strove to be a gentleman, the striving itself a part of his charm. But there was something feral about him behind the civility, the elaborate coded masculinity and even more elaborate actorly diction. He chased down men when they cut him off in traffic and got into fistfights well into his 70s, his anger an eclipse you couldn’t help but look at even though you knew it would strike you blind. He had an underworld glamour, even to his own children, and a reputation. People figured he had “connections,” and he did — his connections called our house, like old friends. But they weren’t friends. They were bookies, and they had him by the balls.

He placed his first bet on the first Super Bowl, Chiefs-Packers 1967. That was also the first football game I ever watched, because my uncle George was married to Vince Lombardi’s sister. Who the hell knows why you fall in love, but I can tell you that several love stories began that day: between America and the NFL, between my father and gambling, between me and football, and between me and my father.

I was 8 years old at the time, alone in the house because my brother and sister had just gone off to college. I was afraid of him until football. He scared me often to tears, and football gave me a way of talking to him without crying. And it gave him a way of talking to me, well, without making me cry. I dedicated myself to football in an effort to reconcile myself to him, and to reconcile him to the rest of my family. That he lost tens of thousands of dollars in the process didn’t really matter as much to me as my role in trying to help him win.

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“How common is the lightning?” Gabrielle Bellot on Yeats, Walcott, and Finding Inspiration

The poet Derek Walcott (Getty Images)

For anyone who does creative work, Gabrielle Bellot‘s poetic piece at LitHub is a salve for the times when we’re plagued by artistic self-doubt. In relaying her own struggles and in deconstructing the work of poets W.B. Yeats and Derek Walcott, Bellot finds solace and inspiration in two other writers who at times sought to shed the “thick coats of impostors.”

Further reading: on how poetry can become prophylactic against stressful days and lonely times.

I have always been struck by “The Circus Animals’ Desertion.” Not because it’s unusual for Yeats—it contains a bit of the mythic dreaminess many of his poems do, and its darkness is less apocalyptically tinted than some of his earlier pieces, like “The Second Coming”—but because it feels like such a twilight poem, a poem written when you feel a peculiar kind of lowness: frustrated in your writing but not so much that you cannot write at all, for you are, counterintuitively, inspired by your lack of inspiration, even if you think the work you produce is nothing. It’s a poem for those of us who feel we are no longer doing anything new, no longer accomplishing anything; we wear the thick coats of impostors and hate ourselves. We feel like, whether or not we’ve been published, we aren’t really writers. We’re failures.

I know the feeling well, the way the waves rock—or don’t—when your boat has drifted deep into the sargassum of self-doubt. I feel it often. When I tell friends this, sometimes they react with surprise, as I’ve had the fortune of my work being published in places I once never imagined I could see my name in. But being published doesn’t remove the feeling of failure. It’s an almost universal symptom of being a writer who isn’t ruled solely by their own arrogance that we will feel, at some point, like impostors, like one-trick ponies, like authors who will never amount to anything, or whose time has passed without us realizing how sacred and finite those clock-ticks were. I don’t pretend to feel quite what Yeats did, our ages and careers and lives so different, but I understand it, all the same.

Yet, ironically, I also read “The Circus Animals’ Desertion” as a kind of hopeful paean. It does not, after all, tell us to give up when we feel like we’ve lost the bit of dream our work comes from. Instead, it directs us, simply and powerfully, to go forth and find it again. Write, Yeats seems to suggest, even against death—the death of our inspiration, or the one who measures us, when our time is nearly up, without us knowing. It is a poem of death, yes—but not one of ending, but, instead, of new beginnings, painful and poignant as they may be.

But, with or without fame, we can never know if our work will live on. Perhaps it’s enough to sing, and keep singing, and hope, after our own night-shawl has closed around us, that someone else will hear it, and, hardest of all, remember it.

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A New Low: Stealing From the Dead

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Did William Ernest Johnson III steal the homes of the dead by forging notary signatures to transfer ownership and flip them for a profit in Philadelphia neighborhoods ripe for gentrification, or is he — as he maintains — a victim too? Craig R. McCoy investigates at the Philadelphia Enquirer.

They are all dead. Yet if city records are to be believed, they all walked into the office of a notary public and signed away their homes, which just happened to be in gentrifying neighborhoods with soaring property values.

Gail Harrison lived alone in the house where she grew up on Seybert Street in North Philadelphia. She had her quirks, but neighbors looked out for her. “She was a nice, friendly, Christian-hearted woman,” one said.

Harriet Dunn and Dorcas Moone lived quietly in a North 27th Street rowhouse in Brewerytown that they bought in 1950 after leaving the Army.

Alex Krasheninnikow survived a Nazi concentration camp. He later handed out the Communist Party paper on the streets of Philadelphia. His home on Agate Street in Port Richmond was overflowing with books.

Their properties all ended up in the hands of a stranger, a 43-year-old man named William Ernest Johnson III, who wrapped up some of the deals while still on parole from a long prison term for a string of violent crimes.

In all, an Inquirer investigation has linked Johnson to at least six suspicious home transfers over the last 2½ years. In case after case, he acquired vacant houses with longtime owners who were dead or so aged that their grown children would later say they never participated in the transactions.

The taking of Gail Harrison’s house was the first of a string of suspicious acquisitions involving Johnson. To look into them is to find more dead sellers, doctored deeds, and a city bureaucracy blind to it all. The thefts took place so quietly that in two cases the relatives did not know about the illegitimate sales until they were contacted by the Inquirer.

One theft required the forging of two signatures — those of longtime companions Harriett Dunn and Dorcas Moone. Dunn had been dead a quarter century and Moone a decade when someone signed their names to the deed selling their three-story house at 1323 N. 27th St., another Brewerytown address. Moone’s signature on the deed misspelled her name.

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Pulling Out All the Stops to Understand a Distant Father

Interior, Hallgrímskirkja Church, Reyjavik, Iceland. Photo by Krista Stevens.

At The Walrus, in an excerpt from his book The Organist: Fugues, Fatherhood, and a Fragile Mind, Mark Abley deconstructs the pipe organ, examining its components, appearance in history and popular culture, and its powerful capacity for meaning via sound as he recounts his distant father Harry’s obsession with the instrument and with musical composition and arrangement — often at a cost to his personal relationships.

Above all, my father was a musician. He played, he conducted, he taught, he accompanied, he composed. When I was a boy, he would sometimes appear at the dining table with a pencil behind his right ear and an abstracted distracted look in his hazel–green eyes. After a few bites of food and a cursory exchange of words, he would excuse himself, return to the piano—the central item of furniture in each of his many homes—and play, over and over, some musical phrase. Just a few bars at a time, with tiny variations. Listening to him, short sighted as I was, I thought about how my optometrist would keep toying with the refractor’s glassy settings to arrive at a correct prescription. When a melody or chord had been fixed to my father’s satisfaction, and he had scribbled it down on the back of a used envelope or the previous Sunday’s church bulletin, he would resume his meal. My mother could be a stickler for proper manners and polite behaviour. But she tolerated these whims without complaint, knowing they were anything but whims. When my father was composing music—for choir, organ, solo voice, or piano, and occasionally, for other instruments too—he was happy, or something approaching it. Those were the good times, the times when nobody had to worry about his state of mind.

In each of their homes, my mother placed a crucifix on the living–room wall, and my father hung a portrait of Bach on the wall above his desk. Music ruled his life.

It did not rule mine, and therefore, his was a life I could not fully enter. I never took an organ lesson; maybe he was waiting for me to ask, or maybe I was waiting for him. More likely, he needed to maintain a private space away from the demands of his family, just as I needed to create an imaginative world in which my parents would not be dominant. An organ, any organ, no matter how shrill its tone or limited its range, would give him the space he craved. Not every organ held stops that allowed my father to speak with both the voix céleste and the vox humana. Yet he was a master at coaxing beauty out of unlikely vessels, making even the weakest instrument sound sweet or strong. To his wife and child, the language he lived and breathed was a foreign tongue: the language of a distant nation. The language of organists.

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When You Race Across Antarctica, Remember Your Spare Skis

Antarctica (Photo by Mario Tama/Getty Images)

At the New York Times, read Adam Skolnick‘s interview with Louis Rudd and Colin O’Brady, the two men who set out from the Ronne Ice Shelf on the western edge of Antarctica on November 3rd, 2018 in a two-man race. Pulling all the equipment they’d need to survive for two months on sleds called pulks, which man would be the first to traverse Antarctica — the coldest continent on earth — in a solo, unassisted journey of 921 miles?

[Louis Rudd] I couldn’t retrace my track. I went back on the compass bearing. Visibility was like 10 meters. I was thinking, “This is getting quite dangerous now.” I’ve got no tent and no sleeping bag. I’ve literally got a down jacket and I’ve got some food. I’ve got a sat phone, but nobody is coming to get me in these conditions. It could be a couple of days in this sort of thing.

Without my tent and sleeping bag, I’m instantly in a survival situation, and I was conscious as well that the winds were really strong. There was a ski sticking up, but if that fell over, the whole thing could have been buried. It took me a long time to do the two miles. I was scanning and looking. I’d almost gone past it, which would have been fatal, but by pure luck, I turned my head toward a gap in the spindrift and saw a black shadowy sort of shape. Instantly turned, skied a couple hundred meters, stumbled across it. Relief.

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Motherhood: ‘Thank God I think I love it??’

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In this hilarious piece at The Cut, Meaghan O’Connell reflects on all the “being a mom” advice she ignored before having kids, that now she not-so-secretly wishes to be consulted on.

Becoming a mother is a process — matrescence, I can’t quite bring myself to call it — and not usually a smooth one. My theory is that, these days, the identity transformation begins the first time you apologize for posting so much about your baby on social media. And it’s complete the first time you find yourself jumping into a new mom’s mentions to give her unsolicited advice.

I’m reminded of this every time I open Instagram and see the feeds of women I’ve followed and admired and laughed with and confessed to for years who have recently become a parents. As I watch them make their own transitions into the role, I feel full of affection and compassion and nostalgia, followed quickly by a vexing, almost irrepressible desire to be consulted.

It doesn’t happen with the first photo, where under current conventions, you post a photo of the infant, newly born, with his or her or their name and, as if the child is a fish you caught, their weight and length. If you’re committed to being thorough, you express some sort of loving sentiment that feels revelatory to you but reads as perfunctory: “We’re so in love.” (Which we know to mean something closer to: Thank God I think I love it??) “We’ve never been happier.” (My asshole and vagina are now one hole) “We’re getting to know each other!” (My nipples look like they’ve been run through a meat grinder and I feel completely and utterly hopeless but so much so that I’m afraid to say it out loud.)

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‘She changed my heart. And that changed my mind.’

Photo by Barry King/WireImage

At 33, Tabitha Blankenbiller believed she didn’t want any children, until — unexpectedly — she became pregnant. In this essay at Salon, Blankenbiller considers how the simple existence of her unborn child changed her perspective on motherhood and life, causing her to reconsider choices and beliefs, only to discover that just when she’d decided that this particular lemon would make great lemonade, sometimes life decides for you.

Think of how many passages you breach in a day. The driver’s door to your car. The turnstile of your favorite park. The impatient elevators of your building. The generous slide of the grocery store’s glass. Out of the bedroom, into the living room. One side of the tunnel, out the other. Hundreds of transitions switching backdrops, edging us forward in the routine, the occasional fresh adventure.

One in ten thousand will bookend us. We will pass through as one thing and emerge another. It will mark our Before and After. That day at work, I entered the single stall private bathroom as a drama queen clutching her pearls over a period missing for a scant blip of a week to take a test she’d managed to skip for an entire adult lifetime of Match.com horror stories and marriage and college, and then grad school bad jobs and dream vacations, first essay published and first book released, canning and handwriting and Thai cooking lessons, 40 pounds up and down five times over.

I peed on the stick, then set it on the counter while I played a game of Disney Emoji Blitz on my phone. The timer cut in for my three minutes, and I tilted the test toward me to discover the faintest line severing the woman I knew into another.

This was impossible. I took a picture in a haze and sent it to my best friend Charlotte, a parent of two.

Holy shit yeah, that is pregnant, she confirmed.

We weave hypotheticals of our lives, speaking over one another to announce what we’d do if it were us. We make lists, connections, promises. For 33 years I ran the simulation in my head of that improbable second line, and decided each time, without fail, that I did not want a child. I believed they were too expensive. I believed my life was already fulfilling and content. I believed that not all women should be mothers. I believed that the capacity and consumption of our species is unsustainable on this planet, and that some flavor of doom is inevitable. I believed that abortion is healthcare, a procedure that does not require an explanation to receive. I believed that a zygote is not a person, and a four-week-old clump of cells is a precursor to human life.

All of these convictions are still accurate. I stand by each one.

But there is the question, what would you do, and there is what happens when a sudden, impending new reality forks your life in two. Our hearts are a vast trove of too many secret reactions and desires to discover in a lifetime. And what I realized about myself is this: that I cannot name a time I have been happier than standing in our backyard gripping the back of the patio chair, demanding that Matt needed to listen to me.

“We have to keep it. I love her already.”

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Why Murder-Suicide is on the Rise Among the Elderly

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After a bout with cancer and several strokes that eliminated her quality of life, Becky Benight had had enough. She wanted to die on her own terms. Confessing her wishes to her husband Philip, he sprung her from nursing home hell in a bid for freedom; they made a pact to end their own lives to stop their chronic suffering. Everything went along according to plan until Philip woke up from his coma to discover that not only had Becky died, he’d been charged with her murder.

In this piece at Harper’s Magazine, Ann Neumann reports that mercy killings and murder-suicides are becoming more and more common in an aging society where getting old means ill health and industrial “care” in drab, expensive, privacy-free, for-profit nursing facilities that warehouse the elderly until they expire, all while collecting hefty fees for the service.

When Philip Benight awoke on January 26, 2017, he saw a bright glow. “Son of a bitch, there is a light,” he thought. He hoped it meant he had died. His mind turned to his wife, Becky: “Where are you?” he thought. “We have to go to the light.” He hoped Becky had died, too. Then he lost consciousness. When he opened his eyes again, Philip realized he wasn’t seeing heaven but overhead fluorescents at Lancaster General Hospital. He was on a hospital bed, with his arms restrained and a tube down his throat, surrounded by staff telling him to relax. He passed out again. The next time he came to, his arms and legs were free, but a drugged heaviness made it hard to move. A nurse told him that his wife was at another hospital—“for her safety”—even though she was also at Lancaster General. Soon after, two police officers arrived. They wanted to know why Becky was in a coma.

Three days earlier, Philip, who was sixty, tall and lanky, with owlish glasses and mustache, had picked up his wife from an HCR ­ManorCare nursing home. Becky had been admitted to the facility recently at the age of seventy-­two after yet another series of strokes. They drove to Darrenkamp’s grocery store and Philip bought their dinner, a special turkey sandwich for Becky, with the meat shaved extra thin. They ate in the car. Then, like every other night, they got ice cream from Burger King and drove to their home in Conestoga, a sparse hamlet in southern Lancaster County, Pennsylvania. Philip parked in the driveway, and they sat in the car looking out at the fields that roll down to the Susquehanna River.

They listened to the radio until there was nothing more to do. Philip went into the house and retrieved a container of Kraft vanilla pudding, which he’d mixed with all the drugs he could find in the house—Valium, Klonopin, Percocet, and so on. He opened the passenger-­side door and knelt beside Becky. He held a spoon, and she guided it to her mouth. When Becky had eaten all the pudding, he got back into the driver’s seat and swallowed a handful of pills. Philip asked her how the pudding tasted. “Like freedom,” she said. As they lost consciousness, the winter chill seeped into their clothes and skin.

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