A Rose blooms in heaven

As the dust settles on another holiday season and we have begun the task of sorting through piles of gifts received and finishing off sugary, starchy, calorie-laden leftovers, we also find ourselves considering what 2022 has wrought and how it will be remembered when we look back perhaps decades from now. And if any theme has emerged over the past 12 months, for us it has been one of loss and challenges faced. 

Loss took on a deeply personal dimension for our family on Dec. 2 with the passing of Glenn’s Grandma Rose Sorenson at the age of 104. Barely a week earlier we had passed around a cell phone during our family Thanksgiving gathering in Hayward and exchanged greetings with her as she spent what would be her last holiday in Hemet with her son and caregiver, Norm. It didn’t take a medical professional to see that Grandma was tired and winding down from her long journey through life. We all felt it likely she might not make it to Christmas, as sure enough we learned the sad news just days after she went into hospice care.

We had hoped to attend her funeral in Hemet, thinking that it would happen sometime around the middle of the month when making the trip by car would be more practical for us. But as fate would have it, a tight schedule for services at Riverside National Cemetery meant a delay until Dec. 29, a Thursday, which during the week between Christmas and New Year’s was more difficult to accommodate. So although we couldn’t be there physically, we were there in spirit and mourning right along with Glenn’s parents and sister who did attend. 

And thanks to modern technology, we were able to dial in through Apple FaceTime to see and hear a bit of the proceedings live as they took place — a luxury we did not have when Grandpa Bernie’s funeral was held in August 2006. A flaky connection unfortunately caused us to miss a portion of the first eulogy presented by Glenn’s dad, but we understand that Jenny got video as so we look forward to seeing it later when everyone is home from Hemet. 

Home. Our sadness at the loss of Grandma — the last remaining of Glenn’s grandparents — is somewhat tempered by the knowledge that Glenn’s dad will be back in the fold at our future family gatherings. Norm had been down in Hemet for nearly four and a half years, coming back home occasionally for birthday celebrations or family vacations including those we took to Sea Ranch and Pajaro Dunes in Watsonville. 

Our Christmas celebration this week in Hayward was the first time he’d been able to be with us in four years, an occasion that was made even more special because it coincided with his 80th birthday just three days earlier. Jennifer made sure that it was a birthday he would well remember, presenting him with a tennis racquet adorned with tinsel garland and photos taken through the years of our family patriarch, along with a tennis-themed poem commemorating the occasion. If you know anything about Dad, he was a big tennis enthusiast in his day and some of our fondest memories were of the weekend morning trips we’d take to Chabot College to serve a few volleys on the public courts or hit a ball against the practice walls. Perhaps he’ll pick up that activity again now that he is likely to have more time at home.

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S DIFFICULT AS it is to lose a family member, we can take comfort in knowing that Grandma died peacefully at the end of a long, full life, with her only child by her side. Such was not the case for a family in our community of Oakley this year, who lost one of their own in a most unthinkably tragic way.

Alexis Gabe was only 24 years old when she went missing on the night of Jan. 26 after driving to Antioch to see her ex-boyfriend. Her family and volunteers spent months searching for her unsuccessfully, leading police to conclude that she had been murdered and her body discarded in the Sierra Nevada foothills. Her former boyfriend was the main person of interest in the disappearance, and when police closed in on his Washington state apartment in June to arrest him, he pulled a gun on them and was shot dead. 

Still, the search for Alexis continued until police received a tip that led them to the grisly discovery in November of some of her dismembered body parts near Plymouth in Amador County. Yet even though the family had by then accepted the likelihood they would never see their daughter and sibling again, there was no real closure as now they embarked on a quest to locate the rest of her remains. 

Operating under the new mantra of “Justice for Alexis Gabe,” the family held a candlelight vigil in downtown Oakley on Dec. 9 around the city’s Christmas tree at Civic Park Plaza. It was attended by about 200 people, many of them friends and relatives of the Gabe family, but others complete strangers who had been touched by the tragedy and came to pay their respects or share a communal bond. That included us. And while we are not generally so moved to participate in public memorial services for strangers, this case caught our attention. 

While we likely would have attended the vigil anyhow, it marked a bit of a turning point in Glenn’s journalistic career as he also elected to cover the story for Local News Matters, the nonprofit he works for. It was the first news story he has written in well over five years since leaving the newspaper world, and you can read it here. 

Attending an event as a member of the working press is quite different than being there as a member of the general public. For instance, it wasn’t practical to light a candle in honor of Alexis during the vigil, even though it was offered to us, because you can’t hold a candle and shoot pictures or video at the same time. And while others spoke or bowed their heads in prayer, we had to maintain our roles as documenters and observers, recording the audio or video for future broadcast. 

Roni, using her iPhone 14, shot photos of the vigil for her newspaper, so it was one of those rare moments when we both covered the same story for different employers. At least three of the large Bay Area television stations covered the evening as well. The family’s Facebook page has more than 16,700 followers, and people from all over the country and the world have reached out to show their support of the family. This is how national charity foundations are born. 

We don’t know the Gabes personally, but we hope they are successful at recovering Alexis and were able to find some peace during what was their first Christmas season without her.

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N THE SUBJECT of Christmas, ours turned out to be rather pleasant once all the preparations and gift procuring were out of the way. It has been a little more than a year since we made the decision to remodel our living room fireplace, and as part of that project we planned to build a larger mantel capable of holding the bigger art objects we have to display. But in typical fashion, Glenn’s energy and enthusiasm for the construction waned before the mantel was added, and so for the past year we’ve had a rather unsightly set of wall studs where the mantel should be.

But that changed this month when Glenn vowed to give Roni the mantel she wanted for her holiday decorating. It wasn’t intended to be a permanent solution; the one we really wanted to make involved solid oak and miter joints to disguise the seams. But because we didn’t want to accidentally ruin expensive wood, we settled for cheaper pine and poplar. 

The construction criteria made easier, Glenn was able to build the box mantel in a weekend and have it installed on the wall by Sunday night. It is a little ugly on the ends and hasn’t been stained, but at least the wood looks nice and it seems strong on the wall, anchored on the studs by a single screw to enable future removal. Roni quickly added her metal Christmas tree, some snowmen and a lighted wire star to the décor, and we have been displaying the smattering of Christmas cards we still receive. 

While Santa can no longer fit through our chimney, given that we blocked it off when we rebuilt the hearth, he was nonetheless generous with the gifts he sent our way. Roni was quite pleased to receive a new iPad Air, Ben got the new Nintendo OLED Switch he asked for, and Glenn enjoyed several coffee-related presents as well as some protective capsules to display the collectible silver coins he owns. 

We did our best to avoid spending too much time or money at shopping malls, and what we couldn’t order off of Amazon we made up for in the presents we created for others ourselves. Ben put his art ability to good use, making paintings for several of his relatives. Roni got busy with her resin crafts and designed glittery snowflakes that adorned several of the presents. 

Glenn, who discovered a love of making concrete objects this year, got ambitious and came up with sculptures for his mother and sister. Jennifer, the lover of all things Beatles, received a concrete rendition of the Yellow Submarine that he carved into the appropriate sub shape by hand and painted once cured weeks later. For Mom, it was a pair of amorous kitties in front of a large heart — a double-layered sculpture Glenn dubbed the “Love Cats.” The heart and basic cat shapes were cast a half-inch thick using Styrofoam molds and then mortared together before being attached to their base.

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HINGS GOT BUSY with work in late November and early December, so our best intentions to get decorations up didn’t happen right away. Roni had to enlist Ben’s help to set up the tree, and she and Ben did all the work putting the ornaments on it. For the second year in a row, Glenn didn’t get around to stringing the large ornaments from the ceiling, saving his time and energy for completing the mantel instead.

This lack of preparedness extended into our seasonal baking. We’ve never made a lot of sweet treats for the holidays, but there’s even less of a reason when you plan to visit family on Thanksgiving and Christmas, so less time in the kitchen is generally required. Glenn actually considered forgoing his traditional Christmas bread, which is generally a 4-hour task of baking and dough preparation. Standing over a breadboard rolling out braided dough with a bad back isn’t a fun experience, and lately locating candied cherries for decorating has been a major scavenger hunt. Finding none at stores this year, Roni resorted to making our own candied cherries using a jar of maraschino cherries that she cooked to perfection over the stove. The result was a bit stickier than usual, but the bread still came out great and we were all glad it came together for Christmas breakfast. 

Our unwrapping event Christmas morning took longer than planned, as usual, not aided by the fact we slept in longer than intended because we were tired from a night of the neighbors playing loud music at 2 in the morning. Silent night? Not! And after our gifts were opened, we still needed an additional hour to finish boxing up the two sculptures we had to deliver to Hayward. Roni had a sore ankle, so she actually let Glenn handle the driving (which is how you know she was really in pain!) Still, we didn’t arrive at Glenn’s folks’ house until nearly 2:30, about half an hour before dinner was to be served. 

It turned out that we weren’t the only ones running late. Jenny and Tom arrived in separate cars at separate times with separate kids in tow. Sean, busily packing his bags for a plane trip to Vietnam with his girlfriend Chi the following day, also showed up after we did because he had to walk her dog, which he was caring for while she was vacationing in Tahiti. This left us with some quality time to visit with Glenn’s dad, who had just returned to the Bay Area following days of handling details of his mother’s estate. He seemed more relaxed than he has been in recent years, a large duty as Grandma Rose’s full-time caregiver at last discharged. (As a note of trivia, the 20 days between Grandma’s passing and Dad’s 80th birthday marked the first time since 1992 there hadn’t been at least one octogenarian or above in our family.) 

A dinner buffet preceded the opening of more gifts, and we were delighted to see the reactions of people when they received Ben’s handmade drawings and Glenn’s sculptures. Sean was the hit of the party when he opened his present from us — a framed deed to his very own square-foot plot of land in Scotland. Roni accompanied his gift with a tartan cap and we piped in some bagpipe music from YouTube as Sean read the proclamation of his lordship in his best Scottish accent. (Glenn also got to be a lord this Christmas, thanks to a 2-for-1 sale at Established Titles, the self-proclaimed “most hilarious gift of 2022.”) About the only thing more fun than a holiday family gathering in Hayward is having clear weather for the drive, which we were fortunate enough to get for a change. Or maybe it was just because Glenn was driving instead of Roni. Whatever the reason, we’ll happily take it!

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S WE SIT here writing this segment on a cold and dreary Thursday evening, two days before the end of the year, it is the perfect atmosphere to take stock of our stocks and what an unexpectedly horrendous year it has been in the financial markets. Everything being clearer in hindsight, how we managed to avoid this economic malaise during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic might be the more noteworthy miracle. What has unfolded since is the logical conclusion of an artificially inflated stock market borne on the back of government printing presses that encouraged and rewarded people to stay at home, locked in their living rooms with streaming devices and Peloton bikes. 

But there is no free lunch in a free market society such as ours, and when the bills finally started coming due in the form of runaway inflation at the grocery store, the gas station and the employment office, the Federal Reserve responded in kind by hiking up interest rates to get things back under control. The long term success of this effort is yet to be known, but in the short term it has been devastating for investments, growth stocks in particular. 

While our IRAs have weathered the financial storm well thus far, thanks in no small part to a heavy investment in dividend-paying energy stocks, our tech-focused taxable account has been pulverized. Apple (AAPL), which initially had been a bright spot that blunted some of the drawdown, has since sold off heavily, achieving a new 52-week low just this week. Whereas we began 2022 with 500 shares of the tech titan in our taxable portfolio, we have parted with 300 of them and may soon say farewell to another lot of 100 as our cash reserves run low. 

Our margin balance at year end is substantially lower than it was at the end of 2021, but it is still too high for current bear market conditions, and was made worse by December’s steep declines. As investors part with losing positions for the sake of income tax deductions, putting further selling pressure on already beaten-down equities, we have been forced to buy several stocks via put options at severely depressed prices — in some cases down 70-80 percent from where we had to buy them. 

This month alone we “acquired” at least 800 shares of Ideanomics (IDEX), 300 shares of Spire Global (SPIR), 100 shares of Grocery Outlet (GO), and there may yet be others that will greet us in email messages from our brokerage over the next few days. Meanwhile, most of the open option trades that have not yet otherwise concluded we have rolled out to the middle of 2023 and as far as January 2024 in hopes that the positions improve by then, although the economic forecast remains glum for the foreseeable future. 

The situation in Glenn’s IRA is less dire, and we have recently taken advantage of depressed prices to pick up a few shares of dividend-paying Rithm Capital (RITM) along with 100 shares of Archer Aviation (ACHR), 20 shares of Alphabet (GOOG), and our first-ever purchase of 10 shares of Amazon (AMZN). We also added 100 shares of ChargePoint (CHPT) when it reached its 52-week low the Friday before Christmas Eve; we now hold 1,200 shares of the EV charging company across all our accounts and will buy more if it falls further, firmly believing in its long term future as our world switches away from gas-powered vehicles. Glenn also holds put options on shares of Carnival Corporation (CCL), The RealReal (REAL), Archer Aviation (ACHR) and Carvana (CVNA) at various price points and expiration dates, willing to take some risk on adding those for the long term. 

For Roni, we bought 25 more shares of Walt Disney Co. (DIS), although our timing before earnings day was poor and the shares have sold off even further since November. Her account has held up reasonably well, although we wouldn’t want to have to withdraw from it in retirement just yet with the markets so far down. 

Will 2023 be better? We’d certainly like to believe so, and perhaps there will come a point when the Fed stops aggressively raising interest rates, war in Europe recedes and China gets a grip on its pandemic toll. But that day isn’t today and probably not soon, so for now we cross our fingers and play the waiting game, ducking swipes from the big bear’s paw and trying to conserve cash. 

That is about all we have to say for 2022, except that we are glad to have it over. We send out love to all and pray for an abundance of better days ahead in the new year.

Glenn, Roni and Ben