(The joy of) approaching Medicare

With the coming year I will be fully engaged with Medicare. Ive had Medicare A for the past five years. On January 1, 2022, I will commence with Part B and D, plus my Aetna supplemental plan. If all goes as hoped, my annual medical bills will be fixed and capped at about $3,600 a year, eye care and dental care notwithstanding.

It is hard to recall how I must have thought about this stage of my life, back when I was sitting in my Harpur dorm room, well into my junior year and still unsure as to what I wanted, needed, or would do in the next year and a half. I do know that I was over my head in physical chemistry and at least considering alternatives. By the disastrous final the die was cast; it was time for me to look elsewhere. Even then, an academic career was not in my planning and certainly there was little if any thought about fifty years later. My planning time frame was usually no more than the coming semester. By this time I probably was giving thought to having to add a fifth year to those Binghamton days.

This was my third year in Lehman Hall. Senior year I'd move to Higher, in the basement, and for the first year of graduate school I'd be in Smith Hall. The good news is that most if not all of those last three years on campus were single occupancy, a luxury I enjoyed even if I never really appreciated. The Hughes single was particularly interesting in that senior year, with Mona Margarita, Marcie Maid and Nancy Galli capturing my attention for serious periods of time, along with Janine Snow. In that same senior year (1972-73), Karen Madsen was still a strong presence, as she had been for some time.

My intramural franchise -- M*A*S*H -- had established itself as a force, at least within Hinman. A 'farm team' or 'B team' of sorts arose -- Patton -- and created some good-natured rivalry, just as co-rec touch football started to blossom as well.

Fall in Binghamton was not unlike fall in Wisconsin, once it arrived it held on with a fierce grip until Father Winter came through and replaced a windy, gray world with a bone-chilling world of blue skies and a snow-covered campus, with the occasional blustery winter storm, dumping inches if not feet of snow on the southern tier.