Rant #3,162: America

I wasn't going to post an entry today, as I had mentioned in Friday's Rant that I was going to take a couple of days off and return on Wednesday ... but then I thought to myself, "I have the perfect column for today, so why waste such an opportunity?"

So here it is ... pretty much what I said last year at this time, with a few updates.

We can celebrate what we want to celebrate, honor or not honor our country, but let's be honest about it: no matter what some people say, there is only ONE real Independence Day for our country, and it is tomorrow on July 4.

It is an independence day for everyone, a day everyone can enjoy, and basically do what they want to do on that day.

So here is a repeat of last year's column about July 4, with a couple of updates, Rant #2,929 from July 1, 2022.

And I will definitely speak to you again on Wednesday.

Have a great holiday!


"We are right smack dab in the middle of the Independence Day pre-holiday rush, leading up to July 4, Independence Day, on Tuesday.

This is not any fringe “independence day” that we are celebrating here; this is the REAL DEAL.

We will be celebrating this great country’s 147th birthday, and even though there are some who want to poke holes into the very fabric of our nation, the U.S.A. remains the greatest country in the world, perhaps the one country that seemingly the entire world wants to emulate..

Sure, you are going to have your detractors, and you are going to have people and groups who say and do things that are contrary to what this country stands for, but where would you rather be right now at this point in the world’s history?

I am going to rerun an edited version of Rant No. 996, July 3, 2013, because I think it gets to the essence of the holiday for me.

So here it is, in edited form.

"What are you doing on July 4?

Well, what I can say is that I am doing next to nothing, which I think is pretty good, at least for me.

I can get off that hamster track for one day.

I can sit at home and do little or nothing, which is exactly what I plan on doing.

Anyway, I will probably watch some baseball on TV.

Baseball and July 4 go together like peanut butter does to bread.

You thought I was going to say "and jelly," but I hate jelly.

Anyway, we will have a barbecue.

Barbecues and July 4 go together like ... well, like peanut butter to bread.

We always have a barbecue on July 4, because it is the traditional thing to do.

My wife, who doesn't eat much red meat but is not a vegetarian, eats her one beef hot dog that day.

Hebrew National, of course.

I like Nathan's hot dogs, but Hebrew National is my choice for the best commercial hot dog on the market today.

It simply tastes better than other hot dogs.

And it is kosher, supposedly, so it is held to a higher manufacturing standard.

Later that night, we will hear fireworks all around us, and we might watch fireworks on TV.

I am not as excited by fireworks as some people are.

To me, it is little more than a lot of noise.

And then, that will be July 4 for me.

Then, we will all go back to our normal activities, and it will be as if July 4 never happened."

Yes, that is pretty much the holiday for me, a holiday where we celebrate our history the way we want to do it—which our country’s forefathers would have wanted us to have the right to do.

And July 4 is for ALL Americans, and thus, it is the country’s only REAL Independence Day, because it defines the current buzz world of “inclusion,” with everyone invited to the party of their own choosing.

This country is often divided over issues and over nonsense, but July 4 is the one day that we can all get together and celebrate this wonderful country that we live in, and do it on an equal plane.

And let’s not ever forget that, as we inch closer to the 250th anniversary of the existence of the greatest country in the world.

Have a great weekend, a great Independence Day celebration, and wave your flag proudly on July 4.

The Stars and Stripes continues to mean the world to all of us ... U.S ... get it?"

Rant #3,161: Making Every Minute Count

Short Rant today.

I have been tending to my mother, and unlike yesterday’s Rant, where I began typing things out at like 2 a.m. in the morning, today, I only started typing this out at about 7:30 a.m.

First off, thanks for all of the suggestions and other good words you had to say yesterday to me after that historic, bombastic and quite frankly, overblown Rant.

I went on and on because I needed to go on and on, and every word that I wrote I stand by as 1,000-percent truth—and I have absolutely no regrets for putting it up for all to read.

My family and I are in a real pickle here, with different thoughts going through my head at all times of the day and night.

As an example, I did not finish my day yesterday—meaning writing, working, taking care of my mother’s needs, helping my son and my wife as much as I could, speaking to medical personnel and even managing to do food shopping—until exactly 9:59 p.m.

I know that that was the time because I looked at my watch, it was that time, so I watched TV with my son for exactly one minute ,,, for the three hours before that, I ate dinner, chug-a-lugged soda like it was water, and tended to the mail—a lot of it having to do with my mother—and phone calls and many other things.

Top to bottom, it was one of the worst days of my life, but I did get things done that needed to be done.

Right now, I have no life, little time to relax, and I so wanted to watch the Yankees’ afternoon game from Oakland yesterday, but I missed doing that by several hours.

This holiday weekend might be a time to slow down a bit, as my sister and her family will take over the responsibility of caring for my mother starting on Saturday over to Sunday, so I will frankly have one single night of peace.

Today, while my mom and I both slept through the night, she got up at about 5:30 a.m. and I tended to her needs until about 7:30, and then I snuck in a little breakfast and then I started to type this all out.

So I am already pooped, and I have a busy day ahead of me.

My sister and I have opted for at-home hospice care for our mother, and we do have in some women who take care of my mother during the day on weekdays.

But when they leave for the day, it is pretty much all on me to get my mother ready for bed, and it isn’t easy.

And we have the monitor by my bed, so I am literally at the beck and call of my mother overnight, and as I said, it is not easy.

I am still coming the grips with the double-edged sword that is hanging over my head now—my mother is very sick, and my home situation might actually be in a worse condition.

Everything is intertwined, as my mother’s longevity is tied in with the longevity that we can stay in our home … and that bothers me to no end.

My family and I are in a horrible position on both ends of that sword, but I have to push on, because that is the way it is—

And even more importantly, that is the way it absolutely has to be.

Have a great weekend, have a great July 4, and I am going to take a couple of days off to breathe a little bit, so I will speak to you again on Wednesday.

Rant #3,160: Ain't Too Proud To Beg

“Sometimes, you have to do things for yourself. … We will cross that bridge when we come to it.”

This is pretty much what my mother said to me all those years ago when she decided that a reverse mortgage was the only way that she and my father could stay in their house and continue to live the lifestyle that they had been accustomed to.

My father had literally worked his entire life, and then in his 70s and still working as New York City medallion cab driver, the 16-hour days were starting to get a bit too difficult for him to maneuver.

My mother’s heart was in the right place when she decided to go the reverse mortgage route; she wanted to cut down on my father’s working yet keep their house and lifestyle intact.

There was one problem, one possible fly in the ointment here: they had a “tenant” in their house who lived upstairs in what became a legal, two-family home, and the “tenant” was my wife, my son and myself.

My mom figured that employing a reverse mortgage on the house would not only allow her and my father to live out their lives comfortably, but keep us as tenants as they aged gracefully.

They originally built up the house from a one-story to two stories to accommodate my then family—my then wife, my then infant daughter and myself—because we had been in several apartment rental situations during our couple of years of marriage, and they simply did not turn out well for us.

In fact, the last place the three of us lived was run by an acknowledged “slum landlord” who was being investigated by Nassau County for running not only the place we lived in as an illegal two-family dwelling, but also for running at least two other places as such.

My parents saw the situation that we were in and graciously did all the leg work to initiate the long path that they needed to take to add an extra apartment to their home, and to do it legally.

As they were doing this, my marriage was breaking up, and within a few months, my then wife had moved out, taking our daughter with her.

That part of this story is one for another time, but over a period of time, I was able to pick myself up and move on, as we divorced, shared joint custody of our daughter, and I continued to live in the upstairs apartment, eventually meeting and marrying the girl of my dreams and later, having my second child, my son.

But going back to what I originally said, the arrangement was working out fine … until my mother broke the news to me that they were going to pursue the reverse mortgage route.

I read up on reverse mortgages as my parents attended one seminar after another about this potential situation that they were looking into.

My mother, who handled the finances between my father and her, said she completely understood what having a reverse mortgage meant, and they finally decided that this was the only way to go, the only way that they could keep their home and their lifestyle intact but again, the fly in the ointment was my family—I had to legally sign off on this too, and that is where the answer to the question I had about my family’s future came up, and that answer at the top of this entry was my mother’s reply.

At that time, however many years ago it was, my wife and I were both working full time, making decent if not outstanding salaries.

In hindsight, what should have happened is that my wife and I should have bought the house from my parents for $1 and we would have reversed the situation: we would be the home owners and my parents would have been the tenants … much like the later “I Love Lucy” episodes, where the tenant Ricardos moved from Manhattan to the Connecticut “farmlands,” and the landlord Mertzes followed them to God’s country, with the two couples reversing the roles they had while living in New York City, and the Ricardos became the landlord and the Mertzes became the tenant.

It could all have worked out, but that is not a situation that my parents wanted, and quite honestly, it was never pursued as it should have been.

They literally begged me to sign the paperwork so they could obtain the reverse mortgage.

I begrudgingly signed the papers, because I felt that if my parents absolutely needed to do this, then as their son, it was my obligation to sign off on it.

Heck, these were my parents; I loved them each dearly, they had helped me out of rough spots in the past—my divorce for one—and now, they were in a rough spot and needed my help, so I gave it to them.

The situation worked for all these years, My parents were able to keep the house under their name and keep the lifestyle they enjoyed with the money they received each month, which they were under no obligation to pay back … and consequently, never did, not one cent of it.

My family enjoyed being right there with them, even though this thing continued to gnaw at me over all these years, even though I rarely talked about it—

Until my father got sick, and I saw unfolding around me a ball of confusion with this reverse mortgage that I never knew existed.

My father went to his grave firmly believing that my family and I would be entirely taken care of when he and my mother would leave this earth, as he was led to believe that there was plenty of money in the bank for us to live at the home for as long as we wanted to.

Unfortunately, this was an untruth, perpetuated by my mother, who my father trusted with not only his life, but his finances.

I later found out that my parents’ finances were in shambles, even with the reverse mortgage, and they had little in the bank to not only sustain my family and I, but also themselves.

I got wind of this situation during the final months of my father’s life, but my father kept on with thinking that everything was copacetic, so although I brought this situation up on occasion, my father was too set in his ways to really comprehend what I was talking about, and my mother kept mum on it, pretty much perpetuating this financial myth.

And my mother still was as sharp as a knife in her own life as my father’s was reaching its end point, and he trusted her entirely with their finances.

My father passed away a few years ago and sometime after, my mother showed signs of dementia, which we first discovered when she decided to throw out family heirlooms for absolutely no reason, some of which I was able to retrieve form the garbage and others which were lost to eternity.

We later found out that for months, she had not paid a single bill, and I eventually took over her finances and paid off everything I could. and I still do that to this day.

And yes, I did speak to my mother about the reverse mortgage while she still had all her faculties, before and after the dementia set in, and she later admitted to me that yes, this was pretty much a quick fix to ensure that she and my father could live out their golden years with splendor, and yes, she really had no idea or understanding what she was getting into.

Many months have now passed, and as regular readers of this Blog know, my mother just got out of the hospital, and she is a shell of her former self, with her body wracked by several cancers that are eating away at her like termites eat away at wood.

We have no idea how much time she has to go on this earth, and when you see how much my mother has deteriorated—from a vibrant women to one who cannot walk or do much of anything now but sleep—it just breaks your heart, and my heart is in pieces right now—for the right reasons and the wrong reasons.

My mother is 92 years old, She has had a great life. She was married to my father for nearly 65 years. She raised two successful children and has five grandchildren who love her with all of their hearts.

But as she sits here deteriorating in front of my eyes, I know that when she goes to heaven, my family and I will have to go too, not to heaven, to a life of hell.

We cannot afford to continue to live here because of the tenets of the reverse mortgage, and we cannot ante up the hundreds of thousands of dollars that my parents received from the lender as they went through this situation, one they never really fully understood.

So where does that leave my family?

Pretty much nowhere, to be honest with you.

When her life expires, it will set us on an apparent six-month journey to pack up literally the past 30 years of our marriage—and for me the last nearly 50 years of my life, less the few years I spent not living in the house in my first marriage—and find another place to live.

Whatever proceeds of the eventual sale of the house has to be split with my sister’s family, so whatever we get from the house will be minimal.

I have started to get re-acquainted with the rental housing market to see what is out there, and even research the local town benefits for seniors, but they are scant, and clearly define what everyone already knows, that the term “affordable housing” clearly is defined by how you want to define it: either destitute housing for those who literally have less then nothing, up to premium housing of $150,000 or up.

My family and I cannot move from where we are, simply because my son gets a wealth of services that he cannot get anywhere else from living in New York State and Nassau County.

As a developmental disabled adult, he is better off here than probably anywhere else in the nation, so we really cannot move from where we are, and he is working in a part time job that he loves and where his employers love him, and I do not want to upset that apple cart, because about 75 percent of people in his position can’t get hired and do not work.

So this puts my family and I in a pickle not of our own design.

My mother is deteriorating, and while our full focus should be on her health and quality of life at this time, we almost have to look past that, to the inevitable, and concurrently focus on what the future holds for my wife, my son and myself.

It gnaws at me that I even have to think about such things as my mother lays there, feeble and frail, but I have to do this, because very selfishly now—and I am very guilty about this--life is for the living, and when my mother goes, we don’t have a leg to stand on.

We recently had the house appraised, and my thinking was right about the worth of this house, and with a ready housing market that has more demand than supply, this house will sell pretty quickly.

I spoke with the appraiser, and the house could be marketed as one which has a ready-made tenant who would help to pay for the mortgage with our monthly rent payments, but the likelihood of anyone wanting to enter into such an agreement is unlikely.

I have tried to interest my daughter in the house—the most likely successor to my parents as the next family-related owner of the house—but I can’t rely on her to do this, and I won’t ever blame her if she turns us down.

So the whole ball of wax here is that with al the research I have done on the situation, all that I have been told, and all that I know from the lender, my family and I are screwed every which way.

We literally have nowhere to go, as everything is dependent on how long my mother has on this earth. Her life—and death—is fully intertwined with our future, and our situation clearly stinks.

My entre family gets Social Security, as my wife and I retired—me forced to, my wife had to because she had had enough of the grind—and my son gets Social Security disability.

Due to m wife’s recent injury, she has not worked in more than a month, and has a Workman’s Comp hearing coming up next month.

She has no idea what is going to happen with that hearing, but she does know that she cannot do the job that she was injured at anymore … but she was never fired from her job, and cannot quit, because then her hopes of unemployment will go up in smoke.

Me, I lost my job—and virtually, the life I have led for decades—when the company I worked for went out of business in October 2019, and although I have applied for other jobs—full time, part time, freelance, both in and out of my specialty and expertise—no one wants a 66 year old as much as they didn’t want a 62 year old, the age I was when I lost my job.

The pandemic did not help, as the lack of hiring during that roughly two-year period naturally aged me even more, from 62 to 63 to 64, and eventually to 65 and to the current 66 as we went into the endemic phase of the existence of this virus.

I am very proud to have a freelance job, but let’s be honest about it, at this stage of the game, I should be making at least three times what I am earning from this job as a full-time worker, but beggars can’t be choosers.

My wife and I both had meager 401ks that currently sit in investment, but even if you put everything we have together, it doesn’t amount to much more than a hill of beans in today’s world.

As you know, I was forced to get a new car when the other unexpectedly gave out, and I can’t even enjoy the car, because it has presented me with a new exorbitant bill that I now have to pay off each month for the nest 72 months.

So right now, we have nothing, have no idea how things will turn out or when, and we sit in limbo.

And that is pretty much why I am typing this entry to you starting at 2 a.m. and finishing after 4 a.m., as I cannot sleep from worry, and I am typing this out with my mother’s monitor at my side, taking peaks at her as she sleeps away another night—or needs me to help her for a variety of reasons that I don’t have to spell out for you.

I am in a quandary because I have such mixed emotions about everything that is going on.

It is almost that I am hoping that my mother defies the odds—like former President Jimmy Carter has done—and actually survives in home hospice for not days or months, but years.

That would give my family and I a little time to breathe as far as looking for new living quarters, to assess our options, and to do what we need to do to firm up our own situation.

But on the other hand, that is just so selfish to think about right now, a my mother lays in her bed withering away to nothing.

I will continue to do research on this situation however long my mother has to go, but I do think of miracles, things that perhaps can be done to make the situation a better one for my family and I.

Of course, I could win the lottery, because someone always wins the lottery, but to be more realistic, there must be something else I can do to make my family’s future a much better one.

I could open a Go Fund Me account—or someone else could—to help raise money to keep us where we are, or at lest provide money to make it easier for us to afford another place where we can live.

Yes, it is begging, but like the song title goes, in the situation my family and I are in, we “Ain’t Too Proud To Beg.”

I could devise a plan, where I throw myself at the mercy of the world, declaring that I will do anything—within reason—to get a certain amount of money to help my family and I out of this mess.

Honestly, I don’t know what else I could do at this point.

So, I am throwing myself at your mercy.

Do you have any ideas?

Do you know anyone who might like to move into a beautiful house in a great neighborhood with all the amenities and have a ready-made tenant to help them pay off their mortgage?

At this point, I am willing to listen to anything.

Thanks for reading this long Rant, but everything is starting to come to the fore now, I can’t sleep, I am worried about my mother,, and I hate to say it this way, but I am actually more worried about my family’s future …

I know that is an absolutely horrific thing to say,, but I have to be realistic.

My wife and I are both 66 years old, my son will be 28 years of age in a few weeks, and we are in an abyss that we didn’t create but will engulf us if we don’t do something about it, and do it soon.

Any ideas you might have will be appreciated.

And again, there has to be more to retirement, because I have had the worst retirement possible.

There has to be something better, there just has to be … .

Rant #3,159: All I Need

How many more days are left in June?

When will this month finally end?

I keep asking myself that, because the worst month of my life still has a few days to go—

And I am wondering what else is going to happen to me, will fall apart, and will not work anymore.

The latest item on the June 2023 casualty list is my computer printer, which gave out yesterday afternoon as I was printing out a story that I had just edited which I will probably send to my work today.

The printer took in one page after another, and after printing out the first page as it always does, it wouldn’t print anything out afterward.

I changed the ink cartridge, plugged and unplugged the printer several times, but lo and behold, the printer apparently does not work anymore, so I sunk about $100 into a new one, and it is on its way.

Hopefully that one will work, but at this point, who knows?

(Incredibly, the computer itself, which I thought was a goner a long time ago and still shows signs that it will be leaving us soon, has withstood this month, and actually started up fine today.)

What more can go wrong here this month?

I have no idea, but there is definitely a black cloud over my head and over the heads of my family that simply won’t go away.

We hired a plumber to fix the downstairs leak, and he will be coming on Thursday to do the job … so another several hundred dollars will literally be going down the drain on this job.

(And as an aside, do not use that fixit site that they advertise on TV, which is named after a woman’s name and starts with an “A.” Very highly priced, as far as I am concerned—use local people to fix your home problems.)

So I see that today is June 28, and then Thursday will be June 29, and then Friday will be June 30, and then this month will be in the rear view mirror for good.

What a horrible month this has been for my family and I!

My mother is doing as best as he can with the situation that she is in, and she is in the “comfort care” portion of her life now, where we, the nurses and the other people we have coming in each day are simply trying to make her comfortable.

It is a tough job, but she is not ready for any hospice care.

Her vital signs are those of someone half her age, and she just keeps on ticking and doing what she can do, which isn’t much, but it evidently could be a lot worse.

She sleeps a good part of the day, but her heart is healthy and everyone says that she is really doing quite well under the circumstances.

She eats, she can handle short conversations, and she is generally friendly to everyone who comes into the house to help her.

It is tough on me monitoring her as if she were an infant—and helping her when she needs help, from giving her a drink of water to I think you know what—but it appears to be working to the extent that it can work with someone at this stage of their lives.

I have no idea how long this can and will go on, but right now, at least, everything seems to be OK—not great, but OK.

My wife is progressing nicely from her head injury—the incident that kicked off this month of horror—but she does get frustrated that she doesn’t feel 100 percent herself on most days … but she is doing quite well based on what could have been.

My new car is something I really cannot fully enjoy yet, because of the circumstances surrounding my getting it … and the 72 months of exorbitant bills I will have paying it off.

It is just another bill added to the load my family and I already have, and since I just have this at-home job and Social Security—and my wife hasn’t worked in a month due to her own injury—it is really, really difficult to survive, but we are doing it, because we have to.

Everything is on our heads, but we have strong shoulders, so we can bear it all … but up to a certain point.

When we will get to that point is the million-dollar question, and I wish I had a million dollars to answer that question for myself, but honestly, I not only don’t have that type of money, I have nothing—

But I do have a very strong and caring family, and maybe that is all we will need to get by one crisis after another.

Rant #3,158: Don't Let the Rain Fall Down On Me

When it rains it pours, and it is literally that way at my house right now.

With all the commotion going on with my mother and everything else on top of it, now we have a new challenge to deal with, and it is probably going to cost us a lot of money to conquer.

The other day, one of the women watching over my mother told me that while she was doing the laundry, she discovered that there was a leak coming down from the ceiling near the washing machine onto the floor.

I have called in two plumbers for pricing, and the leak is extensive, and they may have to take down part of the wall in my mother’s bathroom to fix it—

So we are talking about a whopper of a repair.

The house itself is probably around 70 years old, and our family has lived in the house since 1971.

Consequently, since this is an old house, my parents fixed things here and there when they needed to be fixed, and there are some relatively new pipes in the house, but just on a visual inspection, most of the plumbing in the house appears to be older than I am, and after a while, those pipes are not going to be able to do what they are supposed to do due to age.

The leak appears to be coming from the bathroom and from the sink, the bathtub and perhaps even the toilet, so whenever any of these appliances are used, yes, Houston, we have problem.

So this problem is gong to have be fixed, no matter the cost—but perhaps we can get the cost down by literary pitting one plumber against another.

So far, I have gotten a quote from one plumber, and the second plumber would not provide me with a quote without doing a thorough diagnostic of the problem, which would cost me more than $300 alone, and after doing the diagnostic, only then would he give me a quote.

Maybe that is the right way to go due to the potential costs involved, but right now, I am not paying for a diagnostic on top of what I am going to have to pay for a repair.

I am mot made out of money, but these plumbers also know that I am at the mercy oft them, because there’s no way I can possibly fix this problem myself, less a Three Stooges situation where I would muck things up even more than they already are.

With everything happening one thing on top of another, I am getting the impression that a higher being is testing me—or perhaps punishing me—but somehow, we will get through all of this an emerge victorious—

Or at least I keep telling myself this, because what else can I say, what else can I believe in at this point in time?

Yesterday, my remote work job asked me to provide them with some charts that I had created related to sales of the various entities in military resale—basically store sales—and they seemed pretty desperate to get them.

Within minutes, I sent the material to the person who asked me for them, and when he received them, he sent me back another email and described me as “You are the best!”

Perhaps that is true, but I am having a hard time living up to that accolade during this major crisis time in my family.

This past month has been probably the worst month in my life, top to bottom, and there are so many things to do that I simply cannot relax.

Even when I am supposed to be sleeping, I am not, and when I finally get to sleep, I am awaked, like I was at about 4 a.m. this morning.

We have a monitor in my mom’s bedroom that is hooked up to my bedroom upstairs, and all my mother has to go is call out and we can come and help her.

So early this morning, while I was finally in a deep sleep, she called out, and I ran out of my bed and seemingly did not touch the floor as I got to her bedroom downstairs … she had soiled her adult diaper, and needed to be cleaned and needed a new diaper put on.

I give my mother credit, as he was able to be most of the work herself, but I did help her as best I could, and when I was done, I helped her back in the bed and she went right to sleep.

I went upstairs to my bedroom, and it probably took me at least an hour to get back to sleep.

I woke up late, thus the lateness of this Rant, and even when I was ready to start to write this, my mother’s attendant came to the door and had to be let in, which is no big deal, but then I had to speak with her, she had to speak with me, so it took some time before I could actually get down and start to write, as before that, I had to send out a story to my work that I had edited.

And today, I have to take my son back and forth to work, we have at least two plumbers coming to look at the leak, we have two nurses coming to the house to talk about my mother’s further care, and we have an appraiser coming to the house to determine what its worth actually is.

And I have my work to do, too, and hopefully, my wife will continue to improve with her head injury. She has had a few tough days Sunday and yesterday, but hopefully, she will be better today.

It is raining, it is a downpour, and whatever umbrella I am trying to use to dodge the raindrops isn’t working.

But I have to be strong about this mess, even after it seemingly gets bigger each and every day.

What alternative do I have?

Rant #3,157: Written In the Stsrs

Everything has a beginning, and as I have learned in my recent period of discontent during the past nearly four years, everything has an end.

Kids start to play Little League when they are five years old, and there are a select few that can make it from Tee Ball to the major league level, and even they cannot play forever, and are forced to hang up their spikes.

My late father started to drive at probably age 12, because the butcher shop that the family owned needed my father to work and do whatever he could to help his father, my grandfather. My dad finally got his license legally, and through one thing to another, he eventually became a professional and legal yellow medallion cab driver in New York City, and after more than 50 years behind the wheel, he had to give up the job he loved because he simply could not do it anymore.

Me, I have been writing all my life.

As a kid, I would create these little newsletters, and I seem to remember that I would sell these things to my paternal grandmother when I was at her house for $1.

I was always writing, whether it was for school or just for fun, and I knew that somehow English—certainly my best subject in school from day one—was going to be my path to success, whether as a teacher or something else related to the written word.

While I never wrote for the high school newspaper—even though I finally did get something printed in the Massapequa High School newspaper a few years after I left there, a remembrance of a teacher that I had there who set me on the course I took, and who had suddenly passed away—I moved on to college, and my writing experience blossomed as a member of the staff of the Dowling College newspaper staff.

During my four years at the school—1975 to 1979—I was the only constant on that newspaper, the only staff member to serve during the entirety of that four-year span.

(As an aside, during my freshman year, the editor only allowed me to join if I gave blood during a blood drive, and I did just that—that was how determined I was to be on the newspaper staff.)

And I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote—and edited—literally from 1975 to October 2019, when the company I worked for collapsed and I was left with nothing.

Happily, I am still making a living—not really “a living,” but as close to it as I can get right now—as a freelance writer for an Washington, D.C.-based association serving “military resale”—military stores—a job that I filled full-time for nearly a quarter of a century in my last full-time job.

But really, all of this began in college, on that Dowling student newspaper, and for years I have been looking for the scrapbook of my work from 1975 to 1979—the genesis of what became my career—and I came up empty.

I knew my scrapbook was somewhere in this house, as I was able to find my scrapbook of stories I did afterward for the late and lamented Island Ear newspaper—another stepping stone to my career--but those college writings were lost and/or misplaced … but I just knew it was here, and would not go down the tubes as Dowling College did, a school that went out of business a few years back.

With everything going on now, I figured it was a good time to start to clean out my house’s basement—at the prodding of a few people, actually—and lo and behold, as I was filling the third garbage bag with trash, I found my college newspaper scrapbook, and while it was musty and murky looking, it was fully intact!

After breathing a sigh of relief, I thumbed through it a little bit, but the pages were kind of brittle, as the scrapbook probably was in the basement for at least a decade or two.

I laughed, I cringed, I remembered a lot of different things related to what I had written, and I also felt a sense of pride … this was the real beginning for me as a writer, and no matter how cringe-worthy or bad what I did was, this is literally where it all started.

I guess those in other fields can point to similar things that they might have in their possession that they can say was the beginning ot their career … for instance, maybe an accountant can point to a list of long-buried baseball statistics he compiled years ago by playing his Strat-O-Matic baseball game as the first inkling of what he would be doing for the rest of his life.

But for me, this old and ragged scrapbook is a real time capsule of what I was doing and thinking way back when, the real and actual stepping stone to what I eventually did as a professional to put bread on my table to this day.

Yes, my full-time career ended abruptly just about four years ago, but I have carried on as best as I could as a writer—and an editor—and this scrapbook was the very beginning of that odyssey.

I am just so happy and fortunate to have finally found this thing, and while I do wince at some of it, I also laugh at a lot of it, too …

That scrapbook literally is my origin story, and boy, have I come far!

Write on!

Rant #3,156: A Little Bit of Soap

I went grocery shopping yesterday morning, and yes, the prices are horridly high, and based on these prices, I cannot understand why the government doesn’t just give in, admit that we are in a recession, and move on from there.

So anyway. I am shopping around, using a list prepared by my wife, getting items that we need and mentally checking off one item after another on the list.

I got to the cereal aisle, and my wife listed “Fiber One” as the cereal that she wanted.

I looked around, and they did not have it, so I texted my wife, “No Fiber One.”

She wanted wheat germ, but they did not have it, so I texted her, “No germ.”

My wife wanted decaffeinated coffee, and the shelves did not have any decaf at all. I texted my wife, “No decaf.”

She got back to me and texted, “What else are they not going to have?”

I texted back to her with what I thought was a clever response, “No soap, radio.”

She texted back to me, “What does that mean?”

After thinking about it a little bit, I texted back to her, “Oh, I guess it is an old ‘Rochdale’ thing, forget about it.”

(When I use the term “Rochdale” here, it does refer back to my old neighborhood in Queens, where we used different phrases and expressions that I think were unique to where we lived … a “Rochdale thing,” thus, refers to one of those phrases and expressions, but read on.)

When I grew up in the aforementioned Rochdale Village in the 1960s and early 1970s, there were lots of expressions and catchphrases that we used that might have been unique to the community, or at least we thought they were.

You have to understand this community at the time, which was a mix of black and white, Jew and non-Jew, Hebrew and Yiddish and ghetto slang and all of that mixed into one … so yes, there was going to be a unique set of expressions that were entirely germane to this neighborhood, or at least that is what I thought.

I know that one was “sike,” which basically meant “gotcha,” when we exposed somebody’s ineptitude in one ways or another.

We would not just say “sike,” but we would put our finger under our eye and push the skin down when we said this.

To this day, I have no idea why.

Another “gotcha” thing was “No Soap, Radio,” but even though I might have thought that this was a unique phrase to Rochdale, it really wasn’t.

Here is how it went:

Two elephants were sitting in a bathtub together.

One said, "Pass the soap."

The other replied, "No soap, radio!"

That is the all-time sucker joke, used to see if you are paying attention.

It isn't funny, was never meant to be funny, and quite frankly, it makes no sense.

But that is the point of the whole thing.

This “joke” began in New York City in the 1950s, and somehow as a kid in Rochdale, it got to us, and we used it to make sure that someone we were talking to was paying attention to what we were saying.

The way it is supposed to be played out is between three people: the joke teller, an unassuming person, and someone who is in on the hoax of a joke.

You tell the joke, your accomplice laughs his or her head off on it even though it is not funny, and the third unwitting person just sits there, not getting the joke—since there isn’t one—and finally, since he thinks they missed something, this unwitting soul begins to laugh too, because they feel they will look foolish if they don’t.

But there isn’t anything to really laugh about, so it makes the unwitting person look foolish when he finds out that he has been duped.

Sike!

There is actually an entire Wikipedia entry on this “joke” (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_soap_radio) that goes into all the social, psychological and other ramifications of pulling off this scheme, offering sides to this thing that I never knew existed.

Kind of strange, but I never knew that this “joke” had such implications.

I know that my friends and I used this joke to make others look silly, to demonstrate that they were not paying attention to what we were saying, and for no other reasons.

One person I knew who fell for this joke constantly was a guy named Bradley, who was duped so constantly by this joke that I wonder if he ever listened to anyone but himself.

Sorry, Bradley, for making you the pawn so many times using this “joke” on you.

I hope I did not harm you for life by using it on you so many times.

As for my wife, I guess “No Soap, Radio” never got to the Rockaways where she grew up way back when.

Have a great weekend, and I will speak to you again on Monday.

But please, do pass the soap!