My name is Astrid Engebretson. I am seventy-nine years old and I live in St. Cloud, Minnesota, in the house my husband Gunnar and I bought in 1953. I taught the fourth grade for thirty-one years. Gunnar died in 1994. I have two children, three grandchildren, one hip that works and one that doesn't, and five prescriptions that Medicare will not pay for.

So I write letters. This is where I keep them, and whatever else I think of while I'm at the machine.

Church this morning, then coffee in the fellowship hall, then home to put my hip up. Pastor Dave preached on the widow's mite. I did not take it personally, though I considered it.

Last night was the harvest moon. I sat on the back step in Gunnar's old chore coat and watched it come up orange over the garage roofs across the alley. He always said a harvest moon was the only thing in Minnesota that came up on time.

I have put my name on the list for the October bus to Winnipeg. Marlys next door is saving me an aisle seat so I can stretch my bad leg out, and I have found the stadium cushion Gunnar carried to every one of our son Erik's football games. The organizers say to bring a lunch, your pill bottles, your Medicare card and a letter from your doctor. Dr. L. wrote mine on Friday. He did not say it was a good idea and he did not say it was a bad one. He said, "Mrs. Engebretson, I would not stand between you and a bus."

I do not know yet whether this hip will make it to Canada and back. Seven hours each way. I intend to find out. If it doesn't, I will write a letter about that, too.

Erik called tonight and asked if his mother was turning into a radical. I told him I am seventy-nine and a Lutheran. We don't turn into things. We just get more so.

Weather: Clear and cold. First frost warning.
Reading: Tuesdays with Morrie, for circle. It made me cry, which I resent.

The first day of autumn. Day and night are the same length today, which is more balance than I can say for my checkbook.

I wrote to both of our Senators this afternoon. Same letter, two envelopes, sixty-six cents. Here it is:

My granddaughter Sonja read it over the telephone and said the last line is "passive-aggressive." I told her there is nothing passive about it.

Mood: Stamped.

Marlys got off the bus in the church parking lot at eleven last night and knocked on my back door at eight this morning with a grocery sack full of little white pharmacy bags. She set them out on my kitchen table one at a time, like a girl showing off her Halloween candy.

She had written every price on the back of a church bulletin, the Canadian price in one column and what she pays here in the other. Her heart pill: less than half. Her water pill: about the same either way, which she says proves nobody up there is giving anything away. They just aren't gouging.

She told me the whole trip. They left at five on Wednesday morning. The bus had a lavatory the size of a telephone booth, and somebody's husband led "How Great Thou Art" somewhere past Fargo, and they sang it twice because the first time was so bad. A young lady doctor up there looked each of them over and read their bottles and wrote everything out again the Canadian way. The pharmacy had coffee waiting. At the border, the man asked Marlys what she was bringing back and whether it was for her own use. She said, "Who else would want it?" and he waved her on.

I held one of her heart pills up to the light over the sink like a jeweler. Same color. Same shape. Same letters. Seven hours north.

I am not proud of how angry I got this morning. Well. I am a little proud.

Mood: See above.

The hip doctor today. Marlys drove me, because she drives like a Lutheran: exactly the speed limit, and she signals a full block ahead so everyone has time to prepare.

X-rays. "Bone on bone," he said, which is the phrase every person over seventy hears sooner or later, like the bell at the end of recess. He says within a year or two I will want a new hip, and that Medicare will pay for most of the operation and the hospital stay.

I asked him whether Medicare would pay for the pills afterward. He looked at the nurse. The nurse looked at the floor.

So. My government is prepared to spend a great many thousands of dollars putting a new hip in me, and not one penny keeping the rest of me running so I can use it. That is going in the October letter. I wrote it on the back of my appointment card in the waiting room so I wouldn't lose the wording.

He gave me a better cane than Gunnar's old one. I will use it on the icy days and on no others.

The hurricane is on the news tonight. The whole coast of Florida and Georgia seems to be trying to leave at once. They showed the interstate from a helicopter and it was cars as far as you could see, barely moving, in that heat, with children in the back seats. I sat here with my feet up and my hip complaining and felt ashamed of complaining. I prayed for them at supper and again just now.

Weather here: Warm and dry. Nothing to complain about, so I won't.

Sonja drove back to the Cities Monday night. The house is very quiet. I keep hearing her radio when it isn't on.

I refilled the bone pills this morning, as promised. I did not enjoy writing the check, and I wrote it anyway, and I told her so by e-mail, which I can now do without telephoning her first to ask how.

She left me a book about a boy wizard. I have read forty pages. He lives in a cupboard under the stairs with relatives who don't deserve him. I taught a few children like that over the years. I will keep going.

That's all for tonight.

Sonja came up Friday with a laundry bag the size of a calf and went home tonight with it washed and folded and a pan of bars wrapped in foil on the front seat.

Friday she fixed the e-mail properly and taught me to "attach." Saturday we bought Haralsons at the farmers' market and made apple crisp, and she asked me how I met her grandpa. A street dance, summer of 1946. He had been home from the Navy two months and he stepped on my foot twice and apologized both times in Norwegian, which I don't speak, so I said yes to the third dance to find out what he was sorry about. She wrote it all down on a napkin. I didn't know she wanted to know.

Sunday she stood beside me in church and sang alto. Then, back at my kitchen table, she found the drugstore receipts where I keep them, in the napkin holder, and did the arithmetic. She is her grandmother's granddaughter. She found that the bone pills hadn't been filled since July.

She asked me why. I said bones can wait. She cried. Twenty years old, at my kitchen table, over her grandmother's Fosamax, the one you take first thing with a full glass of water and then stand up straight for half an hour like a schoolgirl at assembly. I have made children cry over long division and slept fine. This was different.

I promised to refill it Wednesday. She made me put it in writing, so I wrote it on a recipe card and signed it in ink. She took it back to the Cities in her billfold.

Today she read all my letters and laughed at the grade I gave the Congressman. She says she's going to show them to her political science professor. I said tell him to write some of his own.

Mood: Outnumbered.

The Congressman wrote back. That is, an envelope came with his name printed in the corner and a letter inside with his name at the bottom, signed by a machine. I held it up to the kitchen window. Ink from a machine sits on top of the paper. Ink from a hand goes in. Thirty-one years of report cards will teach you that.

I have graded it.

I asked what he intended to do. The letter told me that he shares my concerns and that the issue is a complicated one. I know it is complicated. So is long division, and I never once let a child hand me a paper that said "I share your concerns about this problem." Also, I said no pamphlet. There was a pamphlet. I was generous with the overall grade because the envelope was nicely centered.

Of the Senators, one sent a postcard thanking me for my views. The other has not replied. I will give him until Labor Day.

Letter number two went out this afternoon. It is shorter. It says, in part:

Mood: Red pencil.

Circle met in the church basement this afternoon. Egg coffee, lemon bars, the business of the Lord, and then the business of our pills, which took longer.

Marlys announced she has signed up for a bus trip to Winnipeg in September. A seniors' group down in the Cities is running them. You bring your bottles and a letter from your doctor, a doctor up there looks you over and writes it all out again the Canadian way, you buy three months' worth, and you ride home. Half the circle had heard about it. The other half thought Marlys was going to be arrested and asked who would take over the coffee.

I had my own news. I bought a pill splitter at the drugstore for $3.49. Dr. L. says I may cut the cholesterol pill: the big ones cost very nearly what the small ones do, so I buy the big ones and cut them in two. I asked him about the others, one by one, and he said no to every one of them, and I listen to my doctor. Mostly.

Troy, the pharmacist, showed me how to line the pill up in the little groove. I had Troy in the fourth grade in 1976. He could not sit still for five minutes then. Now he stands behind a counter all day handing old women bad news in paper sacks, and he is very gentle about it. I told him I was proud of him and he went red to the ears, exactly the way he did in 1976.

I asked him whether he thought the bus trips were legal. He said he isn't supposed to have an opinion. I told him that was a fine answer for a Congressman and a poor one for a former student of mine. He laughed and gave me my change.

I did not sign up for the bus. Seven hours each way, and this hip won't sit still for seven minutes lately.

Mood: Split, like the pills.

Gunnar would have been eighty today. I made his burnt-sugar cake anyway, and took half of it next door to Marlys and the other half to the men at the fire station, who never say no to anything.

He cut granite for thirty-one years, headstones mostly. Other people's names, in beautiful letters. When he died in March of 1994 I picked out his stone myself, and I made the men at the works show me the lettering before they cut it, because he would have. I'm told I was "particular." I was.

He had one piece of advice about Washington, which he gave me whenever I got worked up over the evening news: "Write it down, Astrid. They can hang up a telephone." So I do.

Here is my first letter, which went out last Tuesday, with copies to both of our Senators:

Happy birthday, old man.

This is my first entry. My granddaughter Sonja tells me that a diary kept on the World Wide Web is called an "online journal," and that people read them, strangers, in Ohio and Australia and heaven knows where, the way people read Ann Landers. I told her nobody wants to read about an old woman's pills. She said, "Grandma, that is exactly what they want."

So. Here is how things stand.

I take five prescriptions: two for blood pressure, one for cholesterol, one for my bones, and drops for the glaucoma in my left eye, in a bottle the size of my thumb that costs more than a good pair of shoes. On the first of the month I go to the drugstore and hand over about one hundred and eighty dollars. I will not tell the whole world what my income is, but I will say that one hundred and eighty dollars is more than I spend on groceries.

Medicare pays for the doctor who writes the prescription. It does not pay for the prescription. I taught nine-year-olds for thirty-one years and not one of them would have accepted that as fair.

I have decided to write to my Congressman once a month until something changes or one of us dies. I will put the letters here so there is a record. I type them on this machine and print them out and sign them in ink, because a letter ought to be signed in ink.

My first one went out today, with copies to both Senators. I will put it here next time. My hip says that is enough sitting for one evening.

Mood: Determined. (Sonja says I should have a mood.)

Other letter writers on GeoCities.us that Sonja found for me:
Letters to the Editor: A Citizen's Notebook
Vote 2000: A Citizen's Guide