10 May 2025
Appointments are not just for dentists and debridements. Once in a while, you actually have to go to the bank, for example. And when I finally got the bill from Golden Heights, Joyce had to go to the bank. So I made an appointment. For last Friday.
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JOYCE GOT THE BILL (you may recall) herself on Tuesday when someone from the business office delivered it to her in her room, which resulted in a meltdown.
The next day I came a bit early to talk to three people in the business office about the bill. Don't give Joyce the bill, I tell them. She was crying all morning. Mail it to me.
They had not mailed a bill to me at all, it turns out. The two prior "estimates" I got (and ignored on the advice of the social worker because we were applying for Medi-Cal) were mailed from Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
I get Michelle's attention (they were all setting up a punch bowl) and ask her why the previous mailed bills I got were from Florida. She tells me that's their billing department. She also says she put a copy of the bill in the mail yesterday (which I did get the next day).
I tell Michelle, who runs the office, I have to sort our Joyce's accounts at the bank with her so I won't be able to give her a check until next week and she's fine with that. She won't send the bill to collections, she says.
Hell, she couldn't even send it to the house.
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SO IN TRYING to put Joyce's finances on her computer, I managed to get the Wells Fargo checking account on and then found a Bank of America checking account which I also go on the computer. It was what she used before she started using Wells Fargo to pay her bills.
But then I found another Bank of America checking account that she apparently never used.
I looked at the old statements online, which go back to 2018, but they showed nothing but interest payments.
She has a CD with the too and I wondered if that was tied to this mystery account. Or if her investment account used it somehow (no).
She couldn't shed any light on this so I made an appointment for Friday with Edouardo at the branch I used near Serramonte for my mother's accounts when the West Portal branch clearly had no idea how to help. Edouardo got my mother's affairs straightened out after telling me his wife's maiden name was Pacini.
I thought he'd remember me.
Armed with an appointment I let Julian the Transport Guy know Joyce had an appointment Friday at 2 p.m.
"The bank?" he said. I nodded. "Oh, I'm sorry, I can't drive her to a bank. Only medical appointments."
"No, no, no," I smiled. "I'm taking her. I'm just letting you know we're leaving at 1:30 in case anyone looks for her."
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for her to do her usual routine. Dress, weigh-in, something in the gym, lunch, brush her teeth and get in the car.
Which we did.
They had a crew installing new parking lot lighting (and blocking eight parking places on a day when half the neighborhood street parking is illegal from 11 a.m. to 1 p.m. for street cleaning) so I had to park on Southgate, a good walk from the front door.
So I left her in the sun while I walked to get the car. Julian was leaving at the same time so he kept an eye on her briefly.
She got in the car with no problem. And when we got to the bank and waited for an old gent in a Honda Civic like ours to leave, she got out of the car just fine. We were 10 minutes early, so we waited for Edouardo in the waiting area.
He came back from lunch on time and invited us into his office where he informed us we could get 4 percent interest on the CD for seven months if we paid a $9 penalty for early withdrawal now but if we wait until next week when it matures Joyce would have to come back or it would renew for the same rate she has now. The difference in interest pays for a month at Golden Heights.
He also found out the checking accounts were not linked to anything else and the older one that had never been used had an interest rate of 0.01 percent and the newer one she hasn't used since 2013 had a 0.02 interest rate. So we moved the old account into the new one and closed the old one.
He reinvested the CD after that and put both our names on it so she won't have to return when it matures.
Through it all Joyce was worried about what she had to do next. Get in the car? Did she have to walk anywhere? Where are we going?
I kept reassuring her and Edouardo assured her he was almost done. He just had to print a few things out and get some signatures.
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AS WE WERE wrapping things up I asked him if she still played in the band. He threw his arms up and moaned. "I had to stop!" he lamented. " For a year now. I got too tired," he confessed, "working all day and then until 10 at night!"
He told Joyce how he played in a band with an Italian band leader who would tell them the name of the next song in Italian. "I had to translate what he said to figure out what to play!" he laughed. "Some of them were easy like Bella Ciao but sometimes!" he shook his head.
He also told Joyce about his wife's maiden name and asked if we speak Italian and told us about an Italian restaurant where they tell you right away "if you don't speak Italian, you can't eat here."
It was the perfect distraction and I thanked him. "Thank you so much," Joyce added as we said goodbye.
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THE MYSTERY MONEY consolidated into one account can now be used to pay Golden Heights without touching the Social Security payments she uses to pay her bills. If she remains there until July, she'd still have half of the mystery money, which is money she didn't know she had.
And then we'll no doubt have to use it for in-home help.
So if the Medi-Cal share-of-cost burden hasn't exactly been lifted, it has been eased in the short term. And at our age, who thinks long term?