As you get older . . .

What’s a good remedy for mental confusion, or whatever you call it when you lose track of what you’re doing? It happens too often to suit me.

I went to a seminar last week and took my digital recorder along; a nifty little gadget that can record hundreds of hours of music and speeches in reasonable quality. I recorded the meeting. I always put it into my shirt pocket, along with my small cell phone.

This week I wanted to do the same thing but I couldn’t find the recorder. It’s a tiny thing, about 4 inches high and an inch wide. The last time I remember seeing it was on the stand beside my bed.

It was Trash Day at our place and I dragged the kitchen trash bag around to the various waste baskets and dumped trash into it, including some from the waste basket right by the bed stand. I tightly knotted the trash bag closed and carried it outside by the lane—in the wind and rain. Then I checked all over for the recorder.

My wife Lucy helpfully suggested that it could have fallen into the waste basket. It gave me pause. The trash bag was already outside, ready to be picked up but I went out into the wind and rain again and retrieved it, brought it back to the kitchen and systematically emptied the contents of the trash bag into another, checking thoroughly through all the dust, hair, cardboard, papers, wires, a broken flower pot, wrappings, egg shells, plastic, and other nondescript flotsam, ad nauseam. It took some time. There was no sign of what I was looking for.

I went back down to the basement to look around my computer to see if I missed any spot it could be. As I thoughtfully went back upstairs, I reached into my trouser pocket . . .

The meeting went well. I recorded the whole thing in an effort to refresh my ailing memory ... if I don't lose it again—my mind or the machine.

Don't believe anything they say!

The caller, "Dave Foster" stated that I won $1,500,000 and a 2011 Mercedes. He asked if I was an American citizen and he noted that I had no criminal record. Married or widowed? I told him married. (He didn't ask if I was single.) I stayed with him and he helpfully described that I go to a Western Union payment center, like at Walmart, and send $1,850.00 to Rosalind Hawthorne at Carencro, LA 70520. I checked on the internet while he was talking. Then I hung up. I would have liked to follow through with getting as much information as I could but I guess I should let well enough alone. He tried to call back twice and I didn't answer. He may try to call again. He spoke careful English but sometimes his accent momentarily indicated possibly Chinese or Japanese.

This is about the fifth or sixth call from supposed sweepstakes companies in two weeks. I believe the total winnings was up to $15,000,000 and three Mercedes Benz.--and all the signs pointed to Scam Central Unlimited!

I followed up on one call, however. It was from a John Anderson who said that I won $2,000,000 and it was a legitimate win. I definitely would receive the money. I listened to what he had to say, and then he said that all I had to do was send them $385 to defray the cost of sending it through customs, etc. I played along just to see how much information I could get from them without me supplying any personal information.

He asked me if I had any credit cards. Yes, Mastercard and Visa. When I told him I didn't have any money he asked what my credit limit was on the cards. I knew one was $12,000 so I told him. He said he would send me a check for $12,000 and I could pay the money out of that and keep the rest, "just spend the money wisely," he said.

The next day a man with an accent called and asked if I received the check yet. I told him it was only a day later, the mail doesn't normally travel that fast. He called again a couple days later and when I told him I hadn't received the check yet he suggested I could use my credit card, or take a loan out with my car as collateral. I told him I don't work that way.

A day or so later he called again and, again, I had not received the check. He then said he would send it to me himself. What is my address? Well, parting from the caution to not give out information I gave him my home address anyway. That would be the only way I could get solid evidence. At one point he had asked where I banked and I gave him a fictitious name.

It was at that point that I called the local police and got more information about how scam artists operate. The detective told me if I received a check it may be legitimate but somewhere along the line the money would disappear to some secret account somewhere and the bank would not get the money and would hold me liable for the loss.

Finally a check came. It was in a small handwritten envelope, and the check was filled out with my name and signed by one of the parties listed on the check, but there was no amount. When the caller called again and asked, I told him I got the check but there is no dollar amount on it! He informed me that they did not know how much the government would charge for the distribution of funds and he would check now. In a few seconds he told me to make the check out for $9,500.00 and then I can put the money in the bank. He didn't say anything about paying the $385 that was mentioned earlier but he asked me if I was going to go to the bank NOW. I told him I'm working on it. I then gave the check with the envelope to the detective after making a copy of it in case the caller would call again.

The detective meanwhile checked it out. The check was drawn from a bank in Louisiana. The names printed on the check were legitimate, but the man had died, and his wife was now in a nursing home. The bank stated that there was trouble with that account and they closed it.

It was about this time that I was determined to have no more involvement with any more questionable phone calls. It was hassle enough to deal with this one in the attempt to garner evidence for the sake of diminishing the gene pool of telephone scammers. It was giving me a headache. The names of the persons involved were most likely to be fake too. And all this throughout the fact that we're on the DO NOT CALL LIST.

Sometime later I got a call which was evident to be a plea for a donation. I told him I was not interested, but he continued to ask so I asked where he was calling from. He told me an area which was over 50 miles away although the donation for within the county I live in. I then told him that I'm actually on the DO NOT CALL LIST. He replied that it did not apply to charities. I told him it did not seem to apply to anyone because I keep getting phone calls from everybody, foreign and domestic, and I then hung up.

With all the technology around, scamming is definitely out of control, and the ones most affected are the elderly who do not have the capacity to say NO, or just hang up.

Christmas 1996

This is an article I wrote years ago, and I realize it has been a long time since I contributed to this blog so I'll continue with this past history. Much of what I wrote has changed, my parents are deceased, the pastor of the church we joined has continued on to another pastorate, we no longer travel like we used to. Other than that, this is a piece of history in our life that bears remembering.

This year has been an interesting one. We started out with a cold, wet spring, and summer was relatively cool. Fall turned to winter weather pretty fast though but the cold snaps are interspersed with warm sunny weather, which is a little unusual for this time of year. Ohio usually starts seriously bedding down for the winter in November already. Personally, Lucy and I would like to fly south for the winter, or go into hibernation.

Early in the spring I had the idea to plant morning glories. Someone from work gave me a whole handful of morning glory seeds and we sprouted them and then planted them at every fence post along the driveway, and in back of the grape arbor, and by the telephone pole, and at the south end of the porch. Because we started late, they didn't take off right away but by July and August they were all blooming all over the place ... the ones our resident wild rabbit left alone.

We had a strawberry bed that was too old to bear much fruit so the plants were pulled and I started digging up the garden. The part I dug up was planted in tomatoes. We settled for pick-your-own strawberries at some nearby berry patches in the neighborhood.

This is corn and soybean country but they got a late start due to wet fields. In the spring you see a lot of plowing done with horses since there are quite a few Amish in the area. Plows pulled by five or six horses. The horse-and-buggy Mennonites just down the road use their steel-wheel tractors for plowing and planting.

In April, our Sunday School class gave a surprise 50th birthday party for Lucy. I kept the secret for two weeks or so and she was quite surprised because it was held at the church a week after her birthday. My 50th had gone by without fanfare a couple years before, but I do remember one thing--that was the day (in February) that I proposed to Lucy!

In June, Lucy and I became members of the Mennonite Christian Assembly congregation in Fredericksburg, Ohio. Scott Hochstetler is pastor there. The Hochstetler family got a newborn recently so Lucy and I catered a Fellowship Lunch to them on Nov. 24th. She spent all day in the kitchen on Saturday of that week baking bread, pecan pies, making candy, and preparing the main dish, Shepherd's Pie, letting me in the kitchen only to make the cranberry relish. On Sunday morning we transported it all to Fredericksburg and someone fired up the oven in the kitchen to warm up the food in time for lunch after church. We also invited a couple of widows and other friends to the lunch--15 in all.

Around August we attended the Jerry Yoder (Lucy's great-grandfather) reunion near Berne, Indiana on the Roman Schwartz farm. Lucy was the only one to represent Michael Yoder (her grandfather) at the reunion. Everyone brought a covered dish, and for the whole afternoon we feasted on casseroles and desserts of all kinds. It was a hot day but there was a nice breeze. I wore myself out pitching horseshoes for a couple hours. I didn't feel it until the next day; by then I could hardly walk. On the way home we visited with Lucy's cousin Eli Troyer's in Hicksville, Ohio.

Lucy and I took two week-long trips this year. In June we stayed in Medford Lakes, New Jersey at sister Jane's house while they were on vacation. My parents also live there. We took them for an overnight trip to the Souderton Retirement Community in Pennsylvania to visit with Mom's,sister Tilly Freed and dad's sister, Lydia Landis; and other friends and acquaintenances of years gone by. Dad is 86 this year and Mom is 75. They celebrate their 54th wedding anniversary on December 24. After we spent a few days with my parents we traveled to Myerstown, Pa. at the invitation of cousin Warren Hackman, Jr., who treated his employees to a chicken dinner at Kauffman's. We then stayed at his place and took him along to Wellsboro, Pa. where we attended his niece's wedding, Willard Hackman's daughter, Lorraine. On the way back to Ohio we traveled through the beautiful mountains of Pennsylvania, stopping in Belleville, Saturday evening, to visit the John L. Zook family. Ten o'clock p.m. is almost too late for a surprise visit so we stayed at a nearby motel for the night. The next morning I called them and they were delighted to hear from us and invited us to church. It's the first time we ever attended a Beachy Amish church. We then stayed for the noon meal, and then left around 3 p.m. for Ohio.

The second big trip we took was in September, going to Canada by way of Kentucky. We took a 6-hour drive south and stayed a couple nights at the Galilean Children's Home near Liberty, Kentucky. On Saturday afternoon we went with a group of the children and Jerry and Sandy Tucker on their bus where they put on a program near Guthrie, Kentucky, not far from the Tennessee border. Then we traveled toward Watertown, New York where we would attend the wedding of Maryann and Lloyd Martin's Loyal's wedding. We had a few days to travel and we stopped in Berea, Kentucky and had a pleasant visit with Levi and Miriam Yoder.

We stopped in Winchester, KY for the night and it was during that time that the tone of the trip changed drastically. I was saddled with a bad case of indigestion for a couple days. I drove 310 miles on an upset stomach all the way to Morgantown, WV where we stayed the night (Thursday night). If I didn't get better by morning, we'd execute Plan A, travel west to Ohio and home. Plan B, we'd continue on, taking I-68 east through Maryland to I-81 north through Pennsylvania to Watertown, New York. As it turned out, I nursed myself carefully sipping ice water every hour or so to alleviate nausea. At 4 a.m. I finally slept solid until 7:30, waking up hungry and in no pain whatsoever. We happily went with Plan B, arriving in Watertown in the evening. The next day was the wedding. We stayed overnight at Lloyd and Maryann's and then headed into Canada in heavy rainfall. We spent the next night at Niagara Falls and after some sightseeing the next day we headed for Ohio and home.

On a sad note, maybe most of you know, my dear sister Sally (Hackman) Lee passed away suddenly on November 23. leaving behind her husband, John, and her two daughters, Samra and Sharon.

We wish everyone a nice holiday season and a blessed New Year.

Wes and Lucy Hackman