Reshuffling the family deck

Today is Thanksgiving and my daughter Jill was just over with one of her 2 turkeys for me to cook. She is cooking the other as Jill is doing Thanksgiving at her home for the first time. Our family is reshuffling, as I have mentioned in my blog. Pete and I become the queen and king in this family hand because our oldest family members just died.

Jill’s nervous and we did turkey talk , in the kitchen. My friend Andrea was an advisor because she had just delivered the stuffing, which was just what Jill wanted, my recipe. My 41 year old daughter has kept things somewhat the way I did- stuck to the template- but changed things too.

The biggest hit an aging family takes is this reorganization. When adult kids have to step up the plate and take over- chaos can ensure. In gero speak- it's called the filial crisis. When my 87 year old Dad and 93 year old mother in law died- Jill realized she wanted to take over Thanksgiving.

The secret of holidays is that they are rituals and like all rituals they have scripts and ritual implements. I have been preparing Jill for years, which is what families who have great success (nearly normal families) can do. I have bought her a setting of her wedding silver annually for years so she would have enough to set a large table. When you are young you never think of that, because someone else ( like Mom) does the meal. It does not have to be silver. It could be a set of any kind of matching dishes.

I also have done a family cookbook for several years, as a holiday gift . My turkey-marinating formula (listed below) and other treasured family dishes, have been slipped in. My Mom died at 62 and left no recipes so I decided years ago to leave them way ahead of time. It prepares young women to take over as the priestess for these ritual family occasions.

These last years I have become more tech savvy and put my Thanksgiving menu and who does what ,in a word doc and saved it each year to update the next. When Jill was ready, I sent it to her as a map of the territory. If it were my younger daughter Kali, she would do it on an excel spreadsheet.

So today, I am for the first time a guest at the feast, an accolade to the new Priestess. Far out, I say to that. The deck being reshuffled has given me a good hand.
Happy Thanksgiving and here my is drunken turkey recipe from my Cress Family Cookbook.

Turkey Marinade
In 1982 I was the director of Elderday, an adult day program. Many of our volunteers were conscripted, having committed an offense and were working off their sentence through community service. We had two women who were convicted of drunken driving and were satisfying the county by volunteering at Elderday. They were jolly, helpful women who had a great sense of humor and mirrored the old line about drunks being the nicest people. When Thanksgiving came along they told me they always cooked their turkey by marinating it in huge amount of cheap wine for days, in effect creating drunken turkey. They offered guffaws at the irony but swore it made the best darn turkey and indeed it did. I’ve marinated all my turkeys this way ever since. As the drunken drivers instructed me, I always use the cheapest wine possible, usually gallons. I use red wine because it gives a better flavor but beware that the turkey comes out not only drunk but red.

Turkey Marinade
1 gallon cheap red or while wine
1 whole bud of garlic crushed
Juice of three lemons
1 Tablespoon of sugar
1 Tablespoon of poultry seasoning or sage
1 cup of oil
1/3- 1/2 salt salt
3 Tablespoon pepper
Put all ingredients into a large pot and stir. You can also pour all ingredients into a Ziploc X large bag (2ft-x 1.7 ft.) Put turkey into marinade. Turn turkey twice a day. Marinate for 3 days. Can do a frozen turkey and then marinate for 5. If you marinate in a Ziploc bag it is a lot less messy. Just turn the sealed bag.

Holiday Visits-beware of lumpy gravy

Now that the holidays are here, many families will be visiting elderly parents. Sometimes, during your visit, you may see screaming ,red flags, like piles of junk mail, consistently dirty clothes, or the holiday not pulled together and the turkey gravy full of worrisome lumps.
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Below is a list of alarm bells to take with you when you go to Mom and Dad’s house for Thanksgiving, Hanukah, Christmas, and any holiday visit. If you do find worrisome signs, this is a good time to call a geriatric care manager.
➢ Unpaid bills
➢ Missed appointments
➢ Clutter in the house
➢ Weight loss
➢ poor grooming
➢ Getting lost
➢ Wandering


Long distance care providers especially benefit from geriatric care managers. It saves money because all those trips to monitor Mom and Dad add up, and having someone in your parents’ town who can check on them on a regular basis, evaluate their care needs and arrange services, and most of all knows all those services backwards and forwards is manna from heaven if you live far away from your aging parent. You can locate a geriatric care manager in your parents’ area at www.caremanager.org.

My new book, Care Managers and the Aging Family (Jones and Bartlett), has a chapter on long distance care providers written by Julie Menack. There is great new technology out there for family at a distance to help an older parent or relative age in place and improve communication.

One item I love is Presto. You can load pictures of you and your family or write notes and letters and send them to your parents. They don’t have to do anything. The service just prints your message and photos out in their home. It’s a great gift for someone with memory loss, or just for Mom and Dad to have in general—with the wonders of technology they don’t have to have any computer savvy.

Also, if you want to have a virtual meeting with your sisters and brothers about anxiety producing signs you spot while visiting your parents, there are virtual web meeting sites where family and friends can post messages to each other. In these virtual meeting places family can keep track of all interactions in one place. Examples of this technology are Caring Bridge and Care Pages. If you want to choose an affordable teleconference link for you family to discuss Mom and Dad's problems tryFree teleconference.com
Another item to use as a family if you need to organize care for a loved one after a visit is Lotsahelping hands , a calendaring program on line where family members can share care easily.
This also may be the time to pass on the ritual and plan next year to have someone besides Mom cook that turkey. Rituals give you an opportunity to reorganize your aging family, when Mom or Dad either needs care or can no longer can that heavy load. Again for help in reshuffling a family when your parent can’t cook that turkey or make that pumpkin pie- call a geriatric care manager.
Happy Thanksgiving

Grandma-in-Chief

Grandma in Chief

Michele Obama ‘s Mom -maybe- moving into the White House could be a media miracle for aging families. Arianna Huffinton,( http://www.huffingtonpost.com/) who subbed for the great Rachel Maddow (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26315908/)Monday on MSNBC, did a whole segment on Mrs. Robinson.

Huffinton, creator of the Huffington Post, has managed her spiraling career with a three-generation family. She laid her survival as a media star at the feet of her own Mom, who moved and helped raise her kids.

Not being an aging expert, as a fabulous geron-newbie,she asking why ”senior citizens” needed to be in “old age homes”. Didn’t they belong,she posited, with their families- where they were really needed to support working parents and spread more love to grandkids. If the Huffington Post can pick up on aging family issues, a media blitz could careen through the 24-hour news cycle. .
I would have to consult presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin but this may be the first instance where we had a supportive grandma in the white house.
If Mrs. Robinson decides to move in (it seems up in the air like Hillary Clinton) it will be a boon to aging families and perhaps the field of gerontology. With our relentless daily news cycle, Mrs. Robinson’s role with Sasha and Malia, supporting First Lady Michele Obama, could catapult the benefits of three generations families through, TV radio, blogs, and the national and international papers.

I have lived the advantage. My Dad Harry Cress resided with us from the time my youngest Kali was in 8th grade. When she could’nt sleep at night, he came in to rub her back, as their rooms were adjacent.
As her Dad and I worked, she came home to family every day, in the form of smiling “ Pop”.
My mother in Law Becca Butler moved in when Kali was a freshman in high school. Becca, as you can read in my October 22, 2008 blog, dispensed boyfriend advice to Kali and all her girlfriends throughout their high school days. Both grandparents sized up Kali’s “beaus” but Pop had the best line.
One night, Kali’s high school boyfriend Joey came over to watch a movie.Kali was a very prim and proper teen- a cheerleader type. Somehow the door got closed to the TV room. Kali recalled what happened next after Pop’s death To her horror, suddenly ,the door swung open and in marched scowling Pop.
” Nobody’s getting pregnant on my watch.” he growled’, humiliating Kali and horrifying the boyfriend.
I am sure Mrs. Robinson will be more discreet with her future teenage granddaughters. Kali loved her grandparents so much she went on to get masters in gerontology.
What really matters is she was brought up with the overflowing love of a three-generation family. I’m sure Marion Robinson dispenses the same. Let’s hope she takes the position. Like Hillary, I’m rooting for her.

Karl Rove and I agree

Who knew I could agree with Karl Rove. On the eve of the boundary breaking election of Barach Obama, Rove, now a Fox talking head, spurted, “ We’ve had an African American first family for many years in different forms. When The Cosby show was on it wasn’t a black family. It was the American family.” Gee wiz. Reading that that in the NY Times on November 8th I was stunned. Rove spun my head around pointing out about the best metaphor for the nuclear American family.

I just published a book on the aging family and have been preparing a new on- line class on aging family systems at the University of Fla. (see my web site www.agingfamily.com). And of course I do this blog. Yanking in television as a metaphor, I use TV families to teach the American family .Our media mad society picks up a raft of family images from the boob tube. As Marshal MacLuhan said, the medium is the message

A loving family is what every kid longs for. Since those toaster oven sized Philcos’ appeared in the early 50’s, if our family sucks, we have TV kin to turn to. For a half an hour, we can join a nurturing, normal family. There was Ozzie and Harriet in the early 50’s and the Donna Reid show at the end of that decade.

Social change is moved by popular culture. Post World War II mores and a roaring economy,gave birth to the baby boom in the Eisenhower 50’s, with indulged children wearing poodle skits and Davy Crocket hats. Ozzie and Harriet ,Ward and June and Ward Cleaver embodied that well off, intact parental family.

The saccharine Brady Bunch showed us the crumbling nuclear family of the late 60’s where the maid Hazel ran the show for the remarried Bradys' and their stepchildren. Single Mom Shirley Partridge and her 5 kids chimed weird rock and roll to us in the early 70’, reflecting the spike in divorce and a tornado tearing up Mom and Dad’s nest.

The 21st century family is made of steps, halves, and bloods parented by Mom and Dad, Dad and Dad, just Mom ,just Dad or just Grandma.

But tapping into the media image of the warm ,loving, nuclear family, the 80’s Cosby Show may have become the all time most influential TV family, pushing through a president of color in the last election

The Huxtables were perhaps a major change agent and thank you Mr. Rove and the New York Times for reminding me. This African American ,upper middle class situation comedy, gave us perfect image of the nuclear family. Bill Cosbys' wholesome feel- good TV clan may have been a media framework for our new African American President.

Kids in the 80’s, including Karl Rove, grew up on a diet of 201 episodes about a family that was intact and happy first and incidentally black. Eighties kids, some stunned by spiking divorce ,where Mom worked long hours and Dad was gone, were comforted by the tender, funny yet and strong and fair Cliff Huxtable and his beautiful wife Clair. The young voters in the 2008 election and Camp Obama grads, had lounged in front of the TV, watching patriarch Dr. Huxtable and his lawyer wife, deal ever so lovingly with kids trials, including dyslexia and drugs yet mostly cuddle and love their 5 children.

Cosbys'jocular Dad and strong loving Mama, had adorable children who got into trouble but had intact parents who made fair rules. The Huxtables fabulous town house was where the whole neighborhood wanted to come. They were comfort food. Future voters for Obama, grew up on this soothing model, and then voted in the election a week ago. An African American Family was really feel good to them and President Elect Obama and Michele Obama and their sweet little girls were nothing new to these young voters. The Obamas harken back to the warm, safe TV nest, 80’s kids climbed into once a week. This was even down to the future Obama Puppy- you get what you want but its got is safe.

This describes a reaction called the” Huxtable Effect”, where a pop-culture blogger posed a belief that young Obama voters grew up wanting to enter a warm, supportive upper- middle class nuclear family, who just happened to be black. Their childhood TV education made them welcome the Obamas', a family just like Mr and Mrs. Huckstable who they happily ushered into their kid living rooms.

So thanks to Karl Rove, Bill Cosby,Phylicia Rashad, Tempest Bledsoe, Keshos Knight Pullian, I am changing the way I teach. The Cleavers are still a great metaphor for the nuclear family but the Huxtables are better and maybe massive change agents for social justice along the way.
Could change we can believe in come from TV? ? You betchcha

Tell President Elect Obama the issues of the Aging Family

Just incredible - Barack Obama is our new president elect. I share the joy of everyone in every corner of the earth. What startles me - is how wildly people in other nations celebrated. I am not surprised at their glee, as we have alienated almost every other country. What shocked me is, after all that, how much people still wanted to believe in the United States. After Bush, after Iraq, after Guantanamo, after the Patriot Act- they still had faith in the vision of America. The world dancing in the streets to mark US voters turning the bums out and ushering in a man of color -was just mind blowing.

My hunch that Barack Obama’s success came from community organizing married to new technology appears right on. Yesterday, while driving around and listening to NPR’s, To The Point, Warren Olney had great segment called ” On the Way to The White House: Old Strategy Meets New Technology”

The radio piece says just what iconoclast filmmaker Michael Moore said a few days ago, laid out in my blog on Election Day, November 4th.

Olney, the shows calm voiced host, plays clips of Sarah Palin making fun of Obama for being a community organizer when she was nominated for VP this summer. Another clip has Rudy Juliani mocking the now president elect for his stupid resume including - 3 years of community organizing

The segment shows how the Obama organization took Saul Alinsky’s brilliant idea and created Camp Obama to train young people to do person-to-person contact and find out what each community's priorities were in real time. Camp Obama turned out the young and old, all over the nation, to walk door to door and get suffering local residents to make community change through voting. These off line relationships created transformation in the old fashioned way of the ward system - one resident, one voter at a time. .
Olney and his guests show how Obama used the Internet to bring people who shared Obama’s issues--- quickly into their organization via e-mails. Obama grew social networking tools through the internet to organize people who shared our new presidents’ values, to work person-to-person, in real time

Obama’s wizardly organization created small on- line clusters and followed up in real time to get these groups together to work towards issues/ change they believed in. . Obama political organization embraced technology around political goals. Yet this resulted in real time relationships- people who had meetings in their home and began to work together for Obama ‘s goals. I got e-mails from 5 neighbors who had Obama get out the vote meetings and met a slew of like-minded people. Obama took Facebook and connected those on line relationships to the real world where people met in dorms and in their homes.

So the answer to there soaring political success is not one or the other but a hybridized version of digital and real time to reach political goals.

Can they take this campaign tactic and translate it into governing? Can the bottom up approach keep going? How can we organize people to get a decent health care bill passed? This really affects the aging family as the young old between 60 and 65 are covered with a ripped up tarp. I was a prime example
Can this tactic be used to save social security, increase geriatricians, get money back to geriatric education that Bush cut out? Obama understands how our need for human relationships, whether meeting together in real time or on line - like Face book- can create change. Can this system effect change for the aging family?

Go to the site to see what Obama thinks are senior issues

Make change happen for the aging family.

Put in your two cents about the needs of the aging family on Obama's website

Obama,Saul Alinsky and my grandmother

click to see my my grandmother. she is on the bottom right, she looks like me

Michael Moore, the filmmaker extraordinaire, said in an interview on the Keith Oberman show a night ago, “This will show you what a community organizer can do to change an election”.

I sat up from my slumped seat and suddenly felt proud to be a social worker. For the first time in my life, I saw my background in community organization as a thread to explosive power and change

No matter what happens today- Obama understands, like community organizers before him----Saul Alinsky, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Gloria Steinham--- change starts one person at a time. It propels that lone individual forward through the trajectory of your vision.

Obama’s political vision was telegraphed via his mind shattering organization. In the old-fashioned way of community organizing - he put millions on the ground going door-to-door, sharing his vision. But he forever transformed the political and maybe the world map ,by reaching untold, others millions via the Internet and technology

My grandmother Anna Mae Cress ( click on her picture above with the 4th ward Republican club) was a community organizer for the Republican Party in the 1930’s. She knew the brilliance of ward politics, and was the president of the most powerful ward, the 4th ward, in infamously Boss Tweed type politics of Atlantic City, New Jersey. She organized all the ward leaders in the corrupt and tawdry Queen of Resorts, getting them to walk door to door to elect her Republican boss, the infamous Nucky Johnson, who eventfully went to federal prison. Never a republican, I understood politics from watching my beloved Grandmom work the phones in her small cramped apartment.

When the conservative right triumphed in the last few decades, I understood what Karl Rove knew about ward politics from my political grandmother. I knew how he got the vote out, in his case one church at a time, one conservative Christian at a time.He transformed churches into wards.

No matter what their politics, community organizers are the seismic change of the future. But they reach real change on the Richer scale of transition-through their new fuel-the internet, blogs, texting and technology I have no idea how to describe.

But I do know it still starts with that one person at a time
Whatever the outcome tonight or tomorrow, I’m now as proud as I have ever been to have my masters degree in social work, from UC Berkeley, with a specialty in organization, which mean community organizing.

My wonderful grandmother, whose 25 steps ,climbing up to her small apartment , each held a plastered bumper sticker saying “ I Like Ike”-- taught me everything in the 1940's and 50's. Obama has taught me the future.