Medicare, Long-Term Care, Childcare: Welcome to Our Sandwich

Hold the Mayo Clinic

By Ed Goldman

Even though I’ve missed being part of the so-called Sandwich Generation, I still wonder what kind of sandwich I’d have made. Or been.

As you may know, the term “Sandwich Generation” applies to people lucky enough to have (but are possibly burdened by having) elderly parents as well as children to take care of. They’re stuck in the middle: ergo, the inexact sandwich sobriquet.

Failure to lunch

I say “inexact” because if you found yourself in the middle of a sandwich, you’d actually be a member of the Bologna, Salami, Ham-and-Cheese or PB&J Generation. Those outside your cohort would constitute the Ciabatta Generation. Is anyone else getting hungry?

Roughly 80 million Americans are taking care of their children and their elderly parents at the same time, CBS News reports. “Between now and 2030, about 10,000 Americans will turn 65 every single day, highlighting a growing concern about the nation’s preparedness for elder care often falling on the shoulders of their adult children.”

I’m not really sure how our “nation’s preparedness” got tossed into this mix, unless we’re simultaneously talking about Medicare, long-term care and childcare. I suppose you could even add dental care, car care and hair care if you want to create a fuller list of anxieties.

In times past, it was normal for families to have three generations under the same roof. Now, even living in the same city as your kids or folks seems burdensome for many of us.

To me, this is a damn shame. But as someone whose parents left the Department of Earth years ago, and whose only kid is 38 years old, I have no room to fulminate (a word that sounds like something no one should ever do in public; “masticate” and “matriculate” should also be used advisedly).

When I was a kid, I thought it’d be great if my Grandma Molly and Grandpa Max lived with us. In fact, for three summer months, we all lived with them when we first moved to California from New York City, in 1958. They owned a courtyard apartment house so we had our own space, more or less, but we still ate all of our evening meals, watched TV and played games together.

Grandma Molly was a great cook and seemed to thrive on prepping dinners that could feed a Russian army—the existence of which is in part what brought both Max and Molly to America in the early years of the 20th century.

Meanwhile, Max was a superb card player, as was his son (my Dad), so I spent many a balmy night in the town of Elsinore playing gin rummy for pennies.

I didn’t do too well—we played the 10-card version of the game and at not-quite eight years old it was difficult for me to hold that many cards in my hands at once without slightly tipping a few of them forward. This gave my grandfather and father an excellent opportunity to see what I had in my hand and plan their game strategy accordingly.

But at the end of any game I lost, which was every game, I’d somehow end up with three times the number of pennies than I’d had at the start. This is how I could easily have become a compulsive gambler: I would have grown up assuming that if I lost money at a casino “the house” would return it to me in triplicate. But years later, I’d have learned a painful lesson: “the house” was not my home.

Finally, in answer to the question I posed to start today’s column, I’ve decided I’m more of a tuna wrap than a sandwich. Regardless, please pass the Mayo.

Don’t forget! A new Goldman State Podcast drops every Friday!

Ed Goldman's column appears almost every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. A former daily columnist for the Sacramento Business Journal, as well as monthly columnist for Sacramento Magazine and Comstock’s Business Magazine, he’s the author of five books, two plays and one musical (so far).