My first Social Security check is due to arrive early next year, soon after I hope to pass birthday No. 62.
I'd always thought that reaching the required senior-entitlement age would be a pivotal passage, a big benchmark akin to being old enough to buy beer legally or earning admission to the blood bank's two-gallon donor club.
But so far, all it's meant is that my husband, Fred, and I have something new to argue about as we debate the merits and shortcomings of direct-deposit payments versus paper-check delivery by post.
Fred is in favor of the former, an option he's been exercising for nearly three years now. He warns that if I do otherwise, someone could steal my monthly check from the mailbox if it comes while we're traveling.
He makes us sound like some jet-setting cosmopolitan couple who constantly leave home on larks to exotic locations. But I tell him that, by my counting, our house has been unoccupied for only six nights this whole year.
Besides, I add, having been out of the work force for almost three years, I am hungry for the sensation of tearing open a pay envelope. I long to see my name on a check and to cash it in for lovely legal tender that I can fondle, fold and smell.
Fred scoffs at such silliness. He says, "Don't be thinking this is some slush-fund, mad money for you. It's going to reduce our 401(k) withdrawals and pay bills like my Social Security checks do."
He says this as if I'm an impossible spendthrift who'd blow incoming funds on something frivolous such as a dental repair for the tooth I chipped last May. His idea of a practical expenditure is apparently paying $52 for pecans as he did a few weeks ago.
(Incidentally, it's entirely normal for Fred and me to argue about finances, according to a survey I saw in several of 17 bridal magazines. Why I read them may be material for a future column. Anyway, the survey pegged "money" as the second most-frequent topic of couples' fights and the only bone of primary contention that both genders shared.)
Even if his testiness about money weren't typical, Fred's to be forgiven for his current economic anxiety. Shortly after I qualify for Social Security, he's set to become Medicare-eligible and is struggling mightily with the choices for supplementary carriers.
Reminiscent of hurricane nomenclature, the option names work their way down the alphabet. Also storm-like, each plan appears to come with its own incipient potential for fickleness and ruin. Fred is foundering under details of deductibles, doughnut holes and buy-now-or-never pharmacy coverage.
He's discovered, for instance, that one of his medications for bladder control, which currently costs $105 for a three-month supply, will cost $500 come February when he's on the Medicare rolls.
I asked, "Can't you just wear a diaper?"
Fred wasn't amused by my lack of humor. And he got even more disconsolate when a Medicare supplement agent recently visited and discussed options for two excruciating hours at our dinner table.
This was a nice, knowledgeable man who graciously provided us with 173 pages of bedside reading material. I wished him no personal ill, but when he left our house and discovered, in the driveway, that our cat had climbed through his car's open sunroof, my evil-twin side surfaced.
I should explain that Kitty Kitty Boots, despite hairball medicine and all manner of veterinary ministrations, throws up a lot. He seems particularly to delight in finding new places where he can leave his undigested stomach contents, such as inside a bag of groceries I'd left on the kitchen floor.
When I came outside and saw my cat, circling on the agent's car seat and pawing the man's insurance paperwork in what I recognized as pre-vomit mode, part of me wanted to cheer. Because that's kind of how I feel, too -- queasy at the notion of probable infirmity and illness in coming years and nauseated by the prospect of having to pay through the nose for it.
E-mail Jan Galletta at jangalletta@yahoo.com.
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