Where was I? The I.R.S. keeps sending me refund checks. I don’t want these refunds. I am working to attain 40 Social Security credits toward Medicare. I don’t want the I.R.S. reducing my earned income for the year and returning me money. Most people want the money. I just want to pay my taxes!
I go to my bank to get a larger safe deposit box. My Senior Account gives me a free box, but it’s only 3” X 5”, although all the boxes are a glorious 18” deep. The only things I can imagine keeping in this rectangular metal box…
“Oh, and no explosives,” Margaret, my personal banker, tells me wryly.
“What?!” I complain, “I can’t store my collection of ammunition clips and hand grenades?!”
She is such a mind reader.
Since the box has been sitting empty for almost a year, I decide that here, finally, is a bank service I can really use. A really big box to store all my drug money! No, actually, my unpublished book manuscripts. If the neighbors burn down our house (see below), I don’t want to lose my scribbling.
Gunhilde, the icy blonde bank clerk from Iceland, looks through their inventory online. “How big?”
“This stack of papers is 4” high, 8½ X 11 inches,” I tell her, pointing. A mix of spiral notebooks, CD-RW discs, printouts and old-fashioned hard leaf binders, it sits majestically on the corner of her desk in her cubbyhole of an office.
This is a distractingly beautiful woman! “All I have is one box that is 5 inches by 10 inches. Maybe that will do,” she tells me, raising my hopes. “For some reason, it’s not available,” she adds, dashing my hopes. The girls of Iceland are such heartbreakers!
It turns out the box is on the reserved list for internal use by the bank. Being an incredible bank, Gunhilde gets on the phone and has them make the box available to me.
“Only problem is,” she explains, “it takes two days to complete the transfer. Can you come back in two days? I’ve got the keys. I won’t let anyone else rent the box!”
Somehow I knew this process was not going to get done speedily. Margaret would have found a way to get me the box within the hour.
This is a bad air day: Since early this a.m., my mom has been chasing around the house with her smelly vacuum cleaner. I go out back to cut branches and have to don my dust mask for the pollen. I drive down the street and an old geezer helpfully waves the nozzle of his weed killer canister at me. I go into the drugstore to buy a spiral notebook and a two-man crew is boring holes in the wall, raising pounds of concrete dust, in preparation for installing an ATM machine. Thanks, guys.
Ms. Anna Bola, candidate for elective office, on whose state-wide campaign I labor as a volunteer, tells me, “You may also get called before the State Elections Board and grilled—I mean grilled—about my campaign. Please explain to them that there is nothing devilish or tricky about a campaign being run from the kitchen of my home.”
In an effort to maintain love forever, my mom has me go to the local Post Office and purchase 20 of their “Love” stamps and 20 “Forever” stamps. This is a woman whose husband abused her and whose parents abused her. Guess if she argues with me night and day about anything and everything. Sulking, worried that her life is making too small an impact as she approaches “four score and ten,” she monopolizes the kitchen and washing machine. If I start to enter a room, she hurries there first, a defiant look on her face. Since I hate arguing, I ignore this erratic behavior. The silence is deafening!
Mom and her bridge cronies, this coterie of little old ladies, keep congratulating each other on having air conditioning in their cars. Where are we living, Cuba?
Our next door neighbor Tracie Sherer has left a message on the answering machine. “Hi! I’ve got a little something for your mom since it’s her 90th birthday and all. Call me and tell me when to bring it over!”
This has nothing to do with us. This is Tracie trying to feel good about Tracie. This Madwoman of Chaillot is demanding that the Town Council put in speed humps. Busy with her knitting, she wants speeders guillotined; she wants to watch. Not your friendliest of spirits. Since I oppose speed humps, she has chewed me out at public meetings. That neighbor. Single-handedly, she has destroyed our peace of mind, ruined our sense of community, and left us seething at our neighbors. Thanks to Tracie and her husband Skip, we are going to end up with speed humps, nubs and multi-colored crosswalks on our residential street. That Tracie.
What do you mean you want to come by and give us another $8 plant?! I’m still watering the cactus you gave us on Christmas.
Mom listens to Tracie’s message. She doesn’t say a thing. I see the “1” on the display and listen to the message. We don’t need to discuss this. You know where Tracie can shove her $8 plant, folks.
So when Tracie comes knocking at our front door, keening “Kevin! Kevin!”, mom goes deaf. I ignore the brouhaha. Eventually, she goes away. Though she’s so peculiar, I can’t tell if she’s getting the message.
It’s the ‘burbs, for God’s sake, walk around the side of the house and beard us on our back porch. Tracie no can do. Paranoid, she’s afraid we’d take her to court and sue her for trespassing. Even our least auspicious neighbors, to our chagrin, come around the back. Not Tracie.
I am delighted not to have another of her plants to water!
Let her go to church if she wants absolution.
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