The Living Trust

Friday January 10, 1992

I try to sleep in a little but a telephone call wakes me. It's Kathy Murphy. She tells me about Echo, her daughter who's expecting her first child and her hubby is in the Army in So. Carolina. She doesn't have anywhere to go when the baby comes. Kathy tells her she cannot come home, though they have room. Echo decides to move to So. Carolina to be with her hubby. Kathy disagrees and says she should find a room in a home here. I think Kathy is heartless. How can she continue to treat her first-born this way. Our kids are always welcome.

I feel fine today. Frank is still disturbed about the living trust. We talk. I assure him I want him to have all my estate if he needs it, but I want what's left to go to my kids. I don't want his new wife to get one penny of mine.

We go square dancing, plus level in the valley and have a good time. We do pretty good considering how little "plus" dancing we've done since June.

I am assuming that "plus" dancing is a more advanced group of square dancers.

We went camping with the Murphy family 3 times every summer for several years. Echo loved babies. When Justin was a baby, on his first camping trip to Lake Don Pedro he was 7 weeks old. Echo wanted to hold him for hours on end. She was pregnant in 1992 just as I was with Derek. Considering how Mom always wanted to spend as much time with her grandson as possible, she must have been shocked that her good friend Kathy Murphy preferred to have her daughter and first grandchild living across the country in South Carolina where she had no family, than to take her into their home.

As for the living trust, I still don't understand what Mom means here. Is she saying that Frank gets everything, but when he dies, her estate will pass to her children? Frank's still going strong 20 years later, so I'm glad he passed her 3 rental houses on to my brother Gary and I. I'm kind of amused that Mom says she doesn't want Frank's new wife to get one penny. I wonder if she would feel that way if she knew that Frank ended up married her friend since second grade Carol Ziegler!

Feeling Good

Friday August 30, 1991

Feeling better these days. My knees hurt less and my back only hurts with certain movements. My arthritic thumbs hurt less.

I am very contented in general but that seems to be my nature, but even more so in my retirement.

I hope I don't appear smug about my cancer doing so well. It's just that I somehow knew or felt from the onset that it would turn out well. I swear God told me so back in April when I was diagnosed.

After lunch I go to Van Nuys to visit Aunt Elsie and Uncle Joe. They are old and frail and so happy to see me.

Frank cleans up at Lemona house after his day's work and we go out to dinner with Marty and Cathy Murphy. Echo (their daughter)is getting married in Vegas next weekend and they are very unhappy about that.

Mom's grandmother on her mother's side (Amanda Johnson) was one of the first residents of Van Nuys. She gave birth to the first set of twins born there in 1912. She had 14 children all together. The house in Van Nuys where she raised her family was now occupied by her daughter Elsie, who was 81 years old in 1991.