Bureaucracy

I’ve reached the age where there are a lot of bureaucratic rites of passage: Medicare, Social Security, Numenius’s retirement (which has bureaucratic consequences for me as well as for him), and, today, mailing off my request to start collecting my British pension. This was a 16-page form in which I was asked to provide addresses of places I’d lived in the UK (in the mid–late 1980s, good luck with that); dates of trips to the UK including holidays (again, good luck with that); to provide originals of documents proving I’d worked in the UK (well, I had one, but it didn’t give my address or employer); you get the idea. Assembling notarized copies of birth, marriage, and divorce certificates and my forms, I trotted off to get them sent to an office in Wolverhampton. Unfortunately this also entailed some bureaucracy, because tracking wasn’t available from certain services, Fedex would cost over $100 to send, and several false steps (not all of them mine, to be fair) later in the rising heat, I parted with my documents at the US Post Office to the tune of $81.

I say all this not to ask for sympathy but to point out that as people get older we are more easily overwhelmed by these kinds of things. It makes me appreciate my 92-year-old mother’s struggles more and to have a bit more compassion. I came home and wound off all the Tour de Fleece spinning I’d done so far onto storage bobbins, it being a rest day (finally!) in the Tour de France.