Oh, Honestly...

So Bill the trustee has been telling me that the closing is December 1 and I have to find an apartment, right? And Richard the real estate guy has been telling me he'll help, right? And Bill's going to take care of the money end? Yeah, well, not so much.

I thought I'd take a look at Stuyvesant Town over the weekend, because they keep advertising at the top of their lungs, and why not? So I trotted over to their renting office, saw an apartment (a model apartment) that was like the one I wanted (one bedroom converted to two), and fell in love with it. It's pretty tiny, but really, that's only comparative...I mean, I've been living in damn near 1400 square feet here, and I'm sure as hell not going to get anything that size on my budget. And it was all new and shiny and clean and uncatted...with an actual window in the kitchen AND one in the bathroom! My house tends to be somewhat dark because it's surrounded by other houses on three sides, so the only light comes from the bedroom window/sliding door thing in my room, and its skylight, and the skylight in Sarah's room, and the front window downstairs. And the kitchen has a built-in microwave AND an actual (very small) pantry! AND it's on 14th Street and Avenue C, with an entrance placed so I can walk out of my front door to a bus stop on 14th Street, with plentiful taxis. My favorite supermarket is a block and a half down the street, there's a deli and a 99 cent store across the street, and utilities are included...no more electric bill!

So I tried to get hold of Bill to tell him all about this wonder. No Bill. Not anywhere. I did email back and forth with Richard, but without the money, there's nothing he can do about anything. And there has been no word from Bill between Saturday and today, which, as we know, is Tuesday.

Now I'm beginning to get worried, because he's not all that young (70s), and I left him several urgent messages and a long email. Of course, he doesn't read his email every day, as far as I can tell, which is no help to me at all. I'm sure he's just gone off for a long weekend to visit one of his kids in South Carolina (well, it's somewhere like that). He's done this before. But wouldn't you think he'd TELL me? And if anything HAS happened, wouldn't it occur to someone to let me know? I mean, since I'm in the middle of a house sale that he's orchestrating? And if the worst has occurred, what do I do NOW? I mean, I know the Northern Trust Bank in Chicago is the backup, but WHO at the Northern Trust?

This is one of the times when I would cheerfully kill my father, were it not for the fact that he's been dead for some years (I usually felt that way when he was alive, now that I think of it). Daddy set up this damn trust, and one of the stipulations of it is that I was never allowed to know much about it. In other words, where other trust fund babies have monthly account statements and drawing accounts, and/or a monthly payment, I have always had to ask for what I needed, backed up with facts and figures, to be scrutinized. God bless Bill, he's always been wonderful about seeing my point, and has always been there when needed...but I should have had, at the very least, a set of emergency instructions about a million years before this. My father couldn't bear to relinquish the reins even after death. Part of this, of course, was the fact that Daddy was born in 1899 and didn't think women should have their own money anyway, and the other part is that he was just basically an SOB.

So here I sit, with my dream apartment slowly receding, losing my mind, and at the same time terribly worried about poor old Bill, of whom I'm very fond.

I do wish people would quit leaving me entirely in the dark...isn't it ME who's supposed to be leaving her home of 20 years standing? In about THREE WEEKS?

Love, Wendy