Jim Klobuchar: This Just in From the Dentist
The record will show that at exactly 4:32 p.m. on June 22 I reached into my mail box at the neighborhood delivery station. Mixed in with the daily harvest of fund raising appeals I found a bill from my dentist.
I looked at the envelope postmark with silent amazement. It read 06/21/11. Reviewing my movements of the previous 24 hours, I traced myself to the dentist’s office shortly before noon of that very day, 06/21/11. There I had been booked for one of the twice-annual tooth-polishing rehabilitations that my dentist thoughtfully schedules, mostly to learn if there is a clear and present danger of my teeth falling out.
Working backwords at the mail box, I calculated that no more than two or three hours could have elapsed between the time when (a) I left the dental clinic, clutching my usual complimentary packet of floss and my fruit-flavored mini-tube of tooth paste, and (b) the delivery of the bill at the nearest post office for next-day arrival at my mail box.
I marveled at the speed of this billing transaction. It was more than routine speed. It was record-breaking, Olympic-level, all-world speed. It was a level of speed that deserved asterisks and bold face in the record books, the ultimate in next- day service. You could almost build a company motto around it: “Our customers Always Leave Here With Glistening Teeth and Balanced Check Books.”
I should tell you that my dentist is well respected by his peers and is a friend of mine, stretching back to years when we routinely rode 100 miles a day on bicycles and both climbed the mountain Kilimanjaro, events which we rehash mercilessly. That takes up most of the time of my dentist’s evaluation after the technician has performed her small miracles and slipped peppermint toothpaste into my goody bag. None of this social networking time, I’m quick to tell you, finds its way into the bill. This is an honorable man who runs his dental shop amiably and badgers me only five minutes each visit to remove a disappearing rear wisdom tooth that he now claims he can find only with sonar equipment.
What worries me about that speed-of-light billing is that somebody in the administrative office may have taken a look at the latest actuarial tables, factored in my age, and decided that a good time to bill this guy is sooner than later.
This would sadden me. Yes, I have lost a step and the attendance at my annual high school reunion is approaching single digits. But I have just finished riding herd on 130 Type A personalities on a seven-day bike ride to Minnesota towns like Blackduck, Bigfork and Deer River with interim stops at outposts like The Hoot and Holler Rendezvous and the Gosh Dam café. Still I emerged in reasonably sound mental health and with my love for humanity intact.
But I have to think seriously about the implications of that hot-breathed billing in my mailbox. The average age in America is rising; it does tend to build a new realism among the golden agers. I know completely healthy older folks who routinely pass up big markdowns for jumbo packages of wiring and 65 watt flood lamps in the big box hardware stores and supermarkets. They tell me it’s all about using hard bark Yankee logic, because where they’re going in a few years they may have no use for wires and light bulbs, even at 40 per cent off. I’m not that smart or practical. What worries me more is that lightning fast bill from the dental clinic. The idea could sweep the country and become a model cutting across all age groups. You could get married in a full blown church ceremony with tuxes and gowns and a dinner for 250 guests, and three hours later on your wedding night find a bill for $20,000 on your I Pod.
For sure, this would not be an auspicious beginning for a love traveling through time.
The moral of my saga is that the very next morning after the bill arrived I put a check in the mail for the dental service, reasoning: the way we’re going, Washington could shut down the postal service tomorrow and the next bill might come with 33 per cent interest and immediate cancellation of my bonus tooth paste.
Be smart, America.
Start flossing.
About Jim Klobuchar:
In 45 years of daily journalism, Jim Klobuchar’s coverage ranged from presidential campaigns to a trash collector’s ball. He has written from the floor of a tent in the middle of Alaska, from helicopters, from the Alps and from the edge of a sand trap. He was invited to lunch by royalty and to a fist fight by the late Minnesota Viking football coach, Norm Van Brocklin. He wrote a popular column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune for 30 years and has authored 23 books. Retiring as a columnist in 1996, he contributes to Ecumen’s “Changing Aging” blog, MinnPost.com and the Christian Science Monitor. He also leads trips around the world and an annual bike trip across Northern Minnesota. He’s climbed the Matterhorn in the Alps 8 times and has ridden his bike around Lake Superior. He’s also the proud father of two daughters, including Minnesota's senior U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar.
Ecumen's Lakeshore Brings Generations Together Under One Roof
Senior living at Lakeshore in Duluth has become a little livelier recently with the addition of the Little Treasures Child Care and Family Center to its campus. Read more in the Duluth News Tribune's article about how this new opportunity is making a difference in the lives of young and old alike.
Join us: CLASS Act Call-In Tuesday, July 26
Please call Congress on Tuesday, July 26, in support of the CLASS Act.
Many of you helped pass the Community Living Assistance and Supportive Services Act (CLASS Act), the country's first voluntary public long-term care insurance plan. Please help keep it from being repealed.
Our nation does not have a sustainable option for financing long-term care. For many, Medicaid - which requires a person to be impoverished - is their only payment option for care and services. That's unsustainable.
Ecumen supports innovation in developing new solutions to fund the increasing health and housing needs of older Americans. The CLASS Act is a big step in creating a national long-term care financing system, but deficit reduction proposals are calling for the repeal of CLASS.
We must act immediately to keep the program moving forward.
CALL-IN DAY – TUESDAY, JULY 26
On Tuesday, our national trade association Leading Age will host a "Call-In Day to Save CLASS." We hope you'll participate by calling 1-888-785-9795 on Tuesday, July 26. The call-in is an opportunity to tell your members of Congress three main reasons repealing the program would be a mistake:
1. CLASS Helps Americans - The CLASS program provides families with an affordable way to plan for future supports and services. CLASS will allow more Americans the ability to remain in their homes while getting the care they need.
2. CLASS Saves Money - The Congressional Budget Office said CLASS will reduce the budget deficit by $83 billion over 10 years. The program also saves federal dollars spent on Medicaid by reducing the number of people relying on the program for long-term services and supports.
3. Americans Support CLASS - A Kaiser Family Foundation/Harvard poll found that 76% of Americans support the CLASS Act program.
ALSO E-MAIL YOUR ELECTED OFFICIALS TODAY
Ecumen's Changing Aging Network has already setup messages to send to your members of Congress. There is no need to wait until Tuesday to send an e-mail, simply visit our Changing Aging Legislative Center web page.
The reality is that CLASS repeal would increase the federal budget deficit. Not only will CLASS bring in revenues, but according to the Congressional Budget Office, it also will reduce Medicaid spending. CLASS will transform financing of long-term services and support, help America's workers and future retirees and promote choice and independence. Repealing it would reduce federal revenues and increase federal spending. It would be directly counterproductive to any reduction in the federal budget deficit.
Please contact your Senators and House members now and urge them not to include CLASS repeal in any deficit reduction legislation.
Make Your Voice Heard: Keeping Seniors Out of the Debt Ceiling Debate
The Ecumen Changing Aging Advocacy Network members are encouraged to contact their elected officials to oppose Medicare and Medicaid cuts being proposed by the Federal Government in the debt ceiling debate. Ecumen cares for thousands of Minnesotans through senior housing options and services. Massive cuts would threaten seniors' access to quality housing and services, and senior service jobs and job expansion at a time we have an unprecedented growth in our aging population. Visit Ecumen's Changing Aging Legislative Center to take action!
Great Video - Lip Dub from Clark Retirement Community and Grand Valley State University
Love this video from Clark Retirement Community in Grand Rapids, Michigan in conjunction with Grand Valley State University. What creativity!
Employee Wellness Programs, Workplace Innovation and the Bottom Line
What makes a great place to work? It’s an essential question in all businesses, but especially senior housing and services.
For insights into that question, we’ve turned to Robin Dunbar, vice president of human resources at Ecumen. Ecumen was recently named #11 on the Star Tribune’s “Top Workplace in Minnesota” list and the Minneapolis/St. Paul Business Journal has honored the company as one of its “Best Places to Work” consistently since 2005.
CA Blog: What role does innovation play in creating a great workplace?
Dunbar: It’s extremely important because innovations come from people who are highly engaged in their work, enjoy it and want to make things better. We strive to provide ample opportunities for people to share their ideas and create a culture of collaboration and courage to turn ideas into reality.
An example of this is our recent launch of an online social media tool called Ecumen Idea Box, which is designed for employees, most of whom are separated by geography, to share ideas and connect with each other to try new approaches or make existing ones better. Innovation is a contact sport, and through Idea Box and other venues we seek to foster connections.
We also keep our ears wide open because workplace innovations can come from employees, customers, vendors – virtually anyone that is connected with our work environments.
CA Blog: What new trends are you seeing in companies striving to create a better workplace?
Dunbar: More and more companies are realizing how valuable of a resource people are and designing workplaces differently. For example, you now hear a lot about companies and their wellness programs. Employee wellness wasn’t as big a topic 10 years ago. Our local business journal just recognized the top corporate wellness programs. That’s new.
We’re seeing more flexible work schedules, where people are empowered to work in the way they find best to get the work done, rather than be tethered to a specific schedule in a specific place. That’s not as easy to do when you’re providing direct care for someone, but I think in the United States we’ll find new ways to provide more flexibility in the direct care area, also. I’d like to see us lead the way in that.
Another changing area is more employers recognizing the role of the family in one’s work life. For example, more and more employees are balancing caregiving for children and/or adult parents. That reality led us to create a flexible leave package the provides caregiver leave when they need to care for a seriously ill family member.
CA Blog: How can companies create a pro-employee culture that also benefits the bottom line?
Dunbar: I think a positive financial culture and positive financial performance go hand in hand. Without people, there are no products, no services, no business. Employees’ well-being has to be part of the overall business equation. It’s human nature to want to work in an environment that values you as a person and contributor.
One way to create a good culture that also is financially successful is to measure employee engagement just as you measure financial performance. It’s critically important to have an engaged work force. Another aspect that’s important is to look at a company’s “brand” much deeper than simply as a logo or piece of collateral. To build a strong brand and culture, you have to have team members who are aligned with the company’s values. As human beings we just feel more comfortable and more engaged in a place where we feel we fit. Another essential to creating a pro-employee culture that is also financially successful is to create a relationship of trust. If, for example, you say you empower people as a company, you have to back that up by empowering people.
CA Blog: What “little things” make a difference to employees?
Dunbar: I think the “little things” are actually big things. Showing gratitude, for example, is critically important. Gratitude doesn’t cost money. It’s simply one human being expressing appreciation and honor for another human being. Employees tell us one of the most important things to them is having a leader that will listen to them and that acknowledges their contribution in the work place.
Listening is another important thing we’re all capable of. No one has all the answers. Listening invites collaboration. Listening opens the door to possibilities. It tells the other person “I care.” And it’s an essential building block to creating a great workplace.
Robin Dunbar can be reached at 651-766-4351 or robindunbar@ecumen.org.
Jim Klobuchar - The New Fountain of Youth
The miracles of modern high-tech can now take you to the moon in three days. In 30 seconds it can trace your family history back to the tree dwellers. It can change your sex life with one trip to the drug store and put you in conversation with 35 people on four continents with one click on the keyboard.
These are considerable improvements over the drab years of peace and quiet in America.
But all of this pales beside the transformations that take place thousands of times a day in the automobiles of America that are linked with the entertainment circus called Satellite Radio.
This is the 21st century version of the old vaudeville shows that featured ventriloquists, itinerant banjo players, talking bears and left-handed knife throwers. Today you have your choice of more than 250 frequencies that feature evangelists, the latest tornado warnings, the Marriage of Figaro, hard rock and soft soap. Undocumented oracles tell you how to get rich in the middle of the recession. You can hear intimate talk for truckers, screaming football experts, political quacks and daily Spanish lessons.
A lot of this can turn you into an immediate convert to the simple joy of undistracted driving. But a few days ago I found on one of my XM channels a service called Escape, subtitled Beautiful Music. This was not symphonic music, which is nice and often beautiful. This was not operatic music, which is nice and very often translatable. This was the music of my adolescence, and then a little later the music of my 20s, with those rites of passage that define our time, the roads we took, the fulfillments we experienced and the dreams and fantasies that recede.
And suddenly about the time I was making the turn to the fitness center here was the voice of Perry Como, 60 years earlier, singing one of the all time torch songs of the century, called “Prisoner of Love.” And I was back in high school years, listening to the family Philco, and Perry, the most melodious barber in history. He was crushed and grieving “what’s the good of my caring if someone isn’t sharing those arms with me…” and about now I was getting soapy and humming along to the part where he his voice reaches up into climactic dirge and cries “she’s in my dreams awake or sleeping, upon my knees to her I’m creeping, my very heart is in her keeping, I’m just a prisoner of love.”
Folks, that is true and uncontaminated misery.
In the face of all this grief one has to be respectful, of one’s distant youth if nothing else. And the tunes played on. “Oh, What a Beautiful Morning” from “Oklahoma,” Cole Porter’s “Begin the Beguine,” The Andrew Sisters singing “Drinking Rum and Co-Cah’ Cola” from the Caribbean during wartime. I sat in the parking lot for a few minutes and listened to Linda Ronstad re-breaking my heart with Blue Bayou, where the fishes play, and then to the guy telling me what happened by the time he got to Phoenix, and then to Albuquerque and I was now trying to imagine a road map to make sense of the geography..
It occurred to me about then that there might be diminishing returns in this soapy little exercise in reverting back to another time and another pace, and that the real moral in all of this was simply an innocent sense of gratitude for having experienced this other time, with its wins and losses and above all its gifts. I was about to click off when Ray Charles started to sing “I Can’t Stop Loving You.” How can you hang up on Ray Charles? It wasn’t just the music. This was, after all, part of the times we remember. And one of those times was a Monday morning after the first Minnesota Vikings had lost a game and the first year coach, Norm Van Brocklin, called one of the writers(me) inviting him to have some coffee in the morning to assess the calamity of it. It would have been impossible today. Coaches and writers don’t have and shouldn’t have that kind of connection. And no coach imaginable today could take a Monday morning off after a Sunday game and go anyplace but back to the pits—film, analysis, next Sunday’s game, injuries, a hundred checkpoints.
But Van Brocklin was a tempestuous guy who wrote his own time tables, a brooding, snarling man, combative, ornery and brilliant. We quarreled all the time. But he was also companionable. We met at a 3.2. beer joint in a suburb and drank coffee and coke. Van Brocklin mourned the game. He wanted to talk. But before we talked he went to the juke box and played Ray Charles and I Can’t Stop Loving You. “Can’t get enough of this guy,” he said. He put in four quarters and played it four times. And we talked and talked and for the first time in while we laughed at each other because he also put in a fifth quarter.
We didn’t talk the last four years of his life. Whose fault? Who knows? It was a time long ago, but one to remember. So this was not the music of escape. The music of what? Well, maybe reunion. And you really can’t get enough of Ray Charles. Some times don’t change.
About Jim Klobuchar:
In 45 years of daily journalism, Jim Klobuchar’s coverage ranged from presidential campaigns to a trash collector’s ball. He has written from the floor of a tent in the middle of Alaska, from helicopters, from the Alps and from the edge of a sand trap. He was invited to lunch by royalty and to a fist fight by the late Minnesota Viking football coach, Norm Van Brocklin. He wrote a popular column for the Minneapolis Star Tribune for 30 years and has authored 23 books. Retiring as a columnist in 1996, he contributes to Ecumen’s “Changing Aging” blog, MinnPost.com and the Christian Science Monitor. He also leads trips around the world and an annual bike trip across Northern Minnesota. He’s climbed the Matterhorn in the Alps 8 times and has ridden his bike around Lake Superior. He’s also the proud father of two daughters, including Minnesota's senior U.S. Senator Amy Klobuchar.
Three Salutes for Changing Aging in the World
- In an era, where pundits say most of us are going to have to work longer, the Florida Marlins on Monday hired Jack McKeon as their manager. The 80-year-old McKeon wasn't hired because he needed a job. It was because he's great at what he does, he enjoys his work, and team management is confident he'll gain the attention of the 20-something players and make the Marlins better.
- The world's oldest person Maria Gomes Valentim died on Tuesday. She was born in 1896 in Carangola, a city in southeast Brazil, where she lived her whole life. She was just weeks away from celebrating what would have been her 115th birthday. Who could have ever thought someone would live to 115? Use the Live to 100 Calculator and see your longevity odds.
- TedX (Technology, Education and Design) confererences are places you'll find cutting-edge, innovative ideas across the U.S. Changing aging recently took center stage when acclaimed geriatrician Bill Thomas spoke at the San Franciso TedX Conference. You can watch his presentation: Elderhood Rising: The Dawn of a New World age below:
Ecumen 11th among Minnesota's Top 100 Workplaces
The Star Tribune's "Top Workplaces 2011" recognizes the most progressive companies in Minnesota based on employee opinions about company leadership, communication, career opportunities, workplace environment, managerial skills, pay and benefits. We're thrilled to add this distinction to our six year run as one of Minneapolis-St. Paul Business Journal's "Best Places to Work" and our recent ranking by Minnesota Monthly as, you guessed it, one of Minnesota's "Best Places to Work."
Michael Graves New Design on Target for Changing Demographics
Just added a post at Minneapolis Star Tribune.com on Michael Graves, designer of those hip Target housewares, and his new designs that are focused on empowerment and a "new normal" in America.