You'd think that finding out you have a claim for money listed on the state's unclaimed property list would be a dream come true.

Guess again.

As with any bureaucratic process it is a lesson in mind torture, or as our own Laurie Ritger in the newsroom calls it, one of those "snowballs from hell," doomed to grow to enormity as you stand in it's path....

Although most of the time, at least in lucid moments, I know who I am, it's a whole 'nother story to prove it.

It's been three months now and I'm still waiting for a whopping $39.50 in interest left over from an account my mother had 12 years ago. Because my sister's name and my brother's name are also listed on the account, and all three are dead, I have to submit what seems like a unedited biography of our family history.

I wouldn't have bothered with the pittance of an amount but it seemed like a sentimental thing to do, the last vestige of Ruth Roznik's existence as a citizen on this planet.

I must have spent double that amount in time and effort digging through boxes in the basement for last wills and testaments, old bank accounts, birth certificates and death certificates, social security numbers and whatever else I needed as proof I am the kin next in line for this windfall.

Yes, due to unforeseen circumstances at age 49 I am the matriarch in our family, which is a freaky thing to be because my grandmothers, my aunts and uncles, survived until their late 80s, some well into their nineties.

It was only my family who had the curse and exited this plane of existence, one after the other, but that's a story for another time. It's phenomenal I am this old.

Because of the circumstances surrounding my family I have a house full of stuff everyone else owned, some kind of reciprocity of ancestorhood, I guess. In other words, whatever my siblings took when my parents died came back to me two-fold when they died.

Here's just a sampling from the boxloads: My mother's girlhood curling iron, the kind you heat up in a flame; her red plastic rhinestone sunglasses from the late 50s; my father's selective service card and dog tags; miscellaneous pocket watches from the old days and I no longer know who owned them; my brother's set of the Chip Hilton sports series; initialed cuff links in a jewelry store box from the old country; a Milwaukee Braves program from the year they won the world series; my grandfather's homemade hog-butchering knife; ration books from World War II; a metal band-aid box full of keys from every house and car my parent's ever owned; velvet dresses from the 1920s and chiffon and lace nightgowns from wistful wedding nights of long ago; my grandmother's scrub brush, the soft bristles bent sideways from wear; a rusted meat grinder; various cameras from a Kodak Brownie to a 2 1/4 Rollieflex; a 1963 hospital bill from when I had my tonsils out; hankies and doilies and gaudish pins with fake jewels.........the list goes on and on.

Somehow in all the memorabilia I can't find my father's death certificate so I had to send for it, and pay more money, LOL.

My sister-in-law sent me a copy of my brother's death certificate, which I'd never seen. He died at age 40 in Minnesota, running through an airport. It was weird to look at it, wondering what he thought those last seconds, being in a strange place, probably surrounded by strangers when he collapsed.

He was a federal corporate auditor for the IRS and I loved to tease him about how he was the dreaded tax man capable of making CEOs cringe...you know, me the flower child and he a government man.

A steady stream of corporate executives showed up at his funeral to honor the man that had shown their companies how to save money. He was surrounded by bouquets that told how honest a tax man he really was.

The girls that worked in his office at the federal building in downtown Milwaukee sobbed while telling the tales of his merciless taunts: how their mittens were often found tossed up into the ceiling light fixtures.

How could they go on, they wailed, knowing there would never again be an errant mitten?

I know it's you, dear brother, behind this accounting nightmare, just like I know it was you who put a can of N/A beer in my purse at every family gathering, in the glove compartment of my car, in the medicine cabinet.

And, as for that age old question you always posed to me "I know you are but what am I?"

I can finally answer that:

You are such a part of me......................


Now help me get the damn $39.50!