Rant #3,179: Peace, Love and Understanding

This past weekend was an exhausting one, even though I didn’t do very much of anything.

What I did do is to watch my mother the entire weekend, and while she appears to be able to do more than she had been able to do a few weeks back, it remains an exhausting task.

She gets up, eats the breakfast I prepare for her—juice, coffee and usually some cake or cookies, because I have been told that at this stage of her life, to give her whatever she wants—and then she goes into the big chair in her living room and sits there basically for the entire day.

I try to engage her in conversation, which sometimes works, sometimes doesn’t.

I asked her several times if she wanted to play Scrabble, or go out on the deck to catch some rays; she declined each time.

She complained about the room being too cold, and sometimes, it has to do with the air conditioner being on—which I shut off because she wanted it shut off—or it had to do with the sliding door in the living room being open to let in some fresh air—which I shut if she wanted it shut.

All the while, the other day, it was 83 degrees in the house, and while she was cold, I was so warm that my sweat impaled me to the couch I was seemingly sitting on the entire day.

A lot of times, when I could engage her in conversation, it was fun, and we spoke about everything, from the stage of the weather to the type of monitor I use to watch out for her at night.

On the latter subject, it really is a miracle device.

Where once you could only hear the person you were monitoring, now, these devices come with a visual monitor, so you can not only hear them, you can see them—and you can also talk to them simply by pushing a button on the device.

My mother was up and down a good part of Saturday and Sunday evenings—which I saw and heard through the monitor--so I did go down to her several times to try to get her back in bed at night.

She sometimes has a hard time in discerning what is daytime and what is nighttime, so I have to direct her back to the bed when it is nighttime, whether it is 8 p.m. or 10 p.m. or 4:30 a.m. or 6 a.m.

On Saturday night, I saw she was not in the bed, and I went to look for her in the pitch black of night.

“Larry, I am here,” as I turned around, startled, and saw her sitting on the couch, the one that I called home for a good part of this past weekend.

“Mom, it is the evening, and you have to go back in the bed.”

“I am eating cookies,” and I saw that, in fact, she was eating Oreo cookies when she should have been sleeping.

“Mom, when you are done with the cookies, you have to go back into the bed,” which she did, and while she didn’t sleep through the night—she got up pretty regularly to go to the bathroom, which at this point, she can pretty much do herself—she did sleep a good part of the night.

Last night, as I was dozing off myself, she was up and down and up and down some more, necessitating me to steer her back to the bed.

But the days were OK, highlighted by my family and I eating dinner with her in her part of the house.

It was only fast food, but my mother really enjoyed whatever I brought in for her—Arby’s and Taco Bell—and she chowed down on the food as if it were 1999.

At this stage, my mother sleeps away a good part of the day, but on the other hand, she really has progressed, physically, since coming home from the hospital a month or so ago.

Her vital signs are excellent, she can move around a little bit on her own, and she is quite cognizant at times.

We have help for her coming in during the week, and she really has a good team of three women who absolutely know what they are doing, having many years of experience of working with the elderly.

But it becomes a little dicey on the weekends, as we have no help coming in, and it is up to us to care for our mother.

I have to say that my mother is in good spirits, but she does often ask us, “Why did this happen to me?”

And honestly, I have no answer for her.

God often works in strange ways, but with help, my mother can almost rise above it, or at least deal with it, as best as she can.

It is a difficult time for her, but I see how she has progressed since coming home from the hospital, and she really has been doing so much better in her own and familiar environs.

Honestly, I do not know what the coming weekend will bring us, but whatever happens, we will be there at the ready to help her.

She helped us when we were babies and not able to help ourselves, and it is now our obligation to help her when she can’t help herself.

Life is cyclical, and we are more than happy to do what we do in her time of need.

Rant #3,178: Baby, You Can Drive My Car

Television is a wonderful medium.

Decades before the Internet, this was our go-to electronics device to learn about our world, to be entertained, and to engage us as a nation, and sometimes engage us as a world.

But television can also be a dangerous tool when not used in the correct way.

It can hypnotize us, babysit us, and make us into walking, talking robots if we believe everything we see and hear on television.

Remember, television is also called “the boob tube,” and there is often good reason for that appellation to stick.

And that is what I am going to talk about today, when television — this wonderful device — becomes not only stupid but downright dangerous.

Has anyone seen the latest commercial from Lincoln, the one that shows the young mother with the young kid in the back of the car?

The theme of the commercial is that you can relive the joy you had as a kid when you rode your bicycle by driving a Lincoln car, which has been taken to ludicrous—and dangerous—levels within this commercial.

The young mother is driving her Lincoln, and then she daydreams about her younger days piloting her bicycle.

(Daydreaming is bad enough when you are driving a car, but it gets worse.)

Flash back to her time as a kid riding her bicycle … and she is joyously having fun, and then—

She rides her bike without having her hands on the handlebars, doing so without a care in the world.

OK, a lot of kids do this, but then the commercial gets into the ridiculous mode as it flashes forward to the woman not as a child, but as a parent driving her car with her daughter in the back seat.

She then puts two and two together—her riding her bike as a kid and her piloting her car as an adult—and she lets go of the steering wheel, and the car goes just wherever she wants it to go without her holding onto the wheel.

So the kid in her and the adult in her have coalesced, because not only don’t you have to have your hands on the handle bars to guide your bike, but you don’t have to have your hands on the steering wheel to guide your car!

This is an insipid assumption because it gives the appearance that the car goes by itself without the driver’s absolutely necessary participation.

Of course, anyone with a brain knows that so much more can go wrong with a car when the driver is not fully engaged as compared to riding a bike without your hands on the handlebars—

Including the fact that you have a young child as a passenger in the car—it is only you with the bicycle.

This commercial is totally irresponsible, trying to interest younger, female drivers in a car make that has been geared to older male drivers for generations.

And it can be a deadly commercial if anyone tries it and gets in an accident because they were not fully engaged in driving their Lincoln car.

The feature is in the car not as a “fun” device, but to keep drivers in the correct lane of traffic; it has nothing to do with driving your car without holding onto the steering wheel, as it is portrayed as in the commercial.

Look, I have the same navigation tool in my “new” 2020 car—no, this tool is nothing new, so why trumpet it now?--and it has the potential to be a dangerous feature in your car if not used correctly.

I have tried it on an open road, and yes, it does keep you in your lane, but the question is greater than what it can do—

Why use it in the first place as a “fun” feature?

In what circumstances would you use such a feature for “fun?”

I mean, you supposedly have to keep your eyes on the road—and your foot on the gas—when you are using this feature, so what are the plusses of having such a feature in our car to use for “fun?”

Why is this feature being marketed for “fun” purposes, rather than as the safety feature that it really is?

Not used correctly—for example, as the woman in the commercial is using it—it can be a “deadly” feature, and somehow, I doubt its developers had that in mind when they came up with the technology to support its inclusion in cars.

I don’t get it.

Are we now marketing cars like toys for children?

A car is a great convenience to have, but used incorrectly, it can be a deadly one.

Why play up such an inane use of this feature over other features that are in there for the safety of the driver and his or her passengers?

This is the world we live in today, where irresponsibility is accepted and rewarded.

Something to chew on as we go into another steamy weekend.

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

And please keep your hands on the steering wheel of your car!

Rant #3,177: Time Is On My Side

… And now Mick Jagger turns 80 years of age …

It is like I said the other day, we, along with our past icons, are all growing older, and we are all growing older together.

But Sinead O’Connor is not growing older with us.

She died yesterday at age 56, and with her, you almost have to wonder why she died at such a relatively young age.

Her immense talent was overshadowed by the fact that she had severe mental and psychological problems, and since no cause of death has been released, you really have to wonder.

The current hot phrases when someone dies are “died suddenly” and/or “no cause of death was given.”

When you see those phrases attached to an obituary, with no further details, it leads me to believe that there is a bit more to their death than we are being told, and I don’t have to spell out those details to you; I think you can figure them out yourself.

Let’s talk about life …

My mother is doing better, at least physically.

Whatever scars she has from her stay in the hospital are either healed or getting there quickly, and she is moving around quite a bit better than she had been just a few weeks ago.

But her dementia has gotten noticeably worse, and if anything gets her, I think it is going to be that, not whatever is rolling around in her body.

Yesterday, she was dancing with her attendant, who also takes her outside to do some walking.

At the suggestion of a counselor, we have gotten my mother a book to write her thoughts in, and I have read some of them, and her memory is pretty much intact when it comes to things from 50 or more years ago—

Anything current, she cannot remember a thing.

She often does not know when it is daytime or nighttime, when to sleep and when not to sleep.

It is sad, but she is doing the best she can—and she has told all of us, flat out, that her time has not come yet, she has plenty of life left in her, and that she believes that she can live to 100 years of age.

Knowing my mother, I would not put it past her, I really wouldn’t.

She is not the mom of, say 1976, but she still has a lot of vim and vigor to do exactly what she said she wants to do, and that is to really defy the odds and reach her age goal.

I know that toward the end of his life, my father had just about had enough, and he passed away when he had reached his limit.

My mother is quite different; she does not feel that she is done yet.

She often asks me, “Why did this happen to me?” and quite frankly, I don’t have an answer for her.

We now know that it was a progressive decline, one that took many months to fully come out and show itself, but again, if former president Jimmy Carter can live in hospice with brain cancer for more than five years, I would not put it past my mother to be our very own “Jimmy Carter.”

Sure, that is a lot to ask of her, but if she feels that she still has a lot to live for, then why not?

So much of our population is living to 100 years of age and beyond, that it is not that unusual to hear of someone who is 102, 107, even 112 years of age—so different than it used to be when people generally died in their 70s and 80s.

Of course, living to such an age must come with a good quality of life while getting to that age; if the quality of life is not there, why live so long?

But while my mom might not be as sharp as she once was, with the right people around her, her quality of life is high, so why shouldn’t she live as long as she wants to live?

Can you imagine Mick Jagger living to 100 while he sings “Time Is On My Side?”

Well, my mom can do it too, if that is what she wants to do.

Rant #3,176: Cool It Now

This has been one hot summer, and I think I read that July has a chance to be the hottest month on record.

I can pretty much take the heat, but the humidity is what gets me every time.

It greatly impacts my allergies, and once my allergies are all over the place, so is my entire body.

Thank God for the air conditioner, which I think it one of the great inventions of the modern age.

(Now here is my segue way to what I really want to talk about today … )

I wonder if the accused Gilgo Beach mass murderer had air conditioning in his house?

He certainly had other things in there besides air conditioning, as we have heard that he had some type of underground vault where he stored some 200 guns.

The sound-proof room—which was discovered earlier this week as authorities were digging up the accused murderer’s home—was a walk-in vault with a thick iron door.

This discovery leads to a load of questions.

One obvious one is that how did authorities not know about the cache of arms that this guy had in his house?

Was this group of arms not registered?

Earlier, they had found 90 firearms in the house that apparently were registered and legal—shouldn’t anyone having that number of firearms in his possession send up a red flag to authorities to begin with?

And the next one is also an obvious question—

How could his family, and primarily his wife, not know anything about this?

I am not saying that she and the kids are culpable in whatever this guy has been accused of doing, but you live in a house, his wife is married to him for a number of years, and you have no clue that there is this massive area in your house where guns are being stored?

Either she is the dumbest woman alive, or there is something fishy here.

Look, the accused murder had lived in this house his entire 59 years. He had been married once before, and divorced.

Perhaps he built this thing in the time between the first marriage and the second, but something is just eerie about someone living in the house and not knowing what appears to be anything about the very house she lived in.

Of course, she evidently didn’t know about her husband’s predilections, either, so maybe it isn’t too surprising that she didn’t know about this secret room.

I just don’t get it, though, for whatever that is worth.

And now we have this poor house, which looks like a bomb hit it—and looked that way before anything of this unfurled—just sitting there, in the possession of his numb wife and kids.

I said right away that this has a chance to be a modern “Amityville Horror” house, one that gawkers visit, leading to e neighborhood that is destroyed by its presence.

I guess I wasn’t the only one thinking this way, as Nassau County has now put police around the house, trying to keep away people that have nothing better to do than gawk, throw garbage and destroy the neighborhood when they “visit” this house as part of some type of eerie sightseeing tour.

Such behavior destroyed the house in Amityville to the point that not only was the house rebuilt, but the street name was changed so people could not locate the house … but that was only done years after the presence of the house changed the neighborhood forever.

I remember all the times I was walking on Merrick Road before I got my driver’s license in Massapequa Park—located right next to Amityville--and being stopped and asked directions to the house in Amityville.

I darn well knew where the house was—it was literally a few minutes or so away from where I lived--and I always gave people who stopped me on the road the wrong directions, because I always thought that this exercise was so stupid and such a total and complete waste of time that those fools who asked me for directions deserved to be pointed in the wrong direction.

And when I went to college, I knew a few people who actually went to school with the Amityville killer, and they said that if you had asked them years earlier about who they thought the most likely person to do such a horrible thing was, they would have told you that it was the guy who actually did it years later.

Now that I am all riled up talking about all of these murders, I think it is the right time to get back to the air conditioning—

To cool down a bit …

My body, my mind, and my soul.

Rant #3,175: Easy Come, Easy Go

We are all getting older, and that goes for all the generations, in particular the Baby Boomer generation that I am part of.

Us post-World War II babies are getting up there in age—at the high end of the generation, we are in our 70s and at the low end, we are in our mid-60s—and we are now all moving into Social Security and retirement age.

And while each generation has had their own idols to swoon to, Baby Boomers look at those that our generation put up on a pedestal way back when, and some are growing older with us.

This entire Rant was inspired by the birthday of one of those teen idols … whether you loved him or you hated him, he was there, he was ultra-popular in his time period, and, well, he just turned 80 years of age on this past Saturday.

I am talking about Bobby Sherman, who had a multitude of hits in the early 1970s … and probably the best head of hair on the planet.

Sherman had been toiling as a singer about a decade prior to his teen idol years with little success. He was the house singer on ABC’s “Shindig” music program, and even when that failed to ignite his singing career, ABC knew that they had something there … they just had to match the material with the singer and most importantly, with the right TV show.

So in the late 1960s, Sherman took his talent and his now long hair to the network’s “Here Come the Brides,” and he was on his road to success as one of the top three teen idols of the day—

Davy Jones and later David Cassidy—also products of television exposure and over-exposure—were the other teen idols of the time, but Sherman was a little older than the other two, had been around the block more than Jones and Cassidy, so he easily competed with the two younger upstarts.

During the post-Beatles period, Jones had been the top teen idol while with the Monkees—along with his own two other major stars of the time, Mark Lindsay of Paul Revere and the Raiders and Peter Noone of Herman’s Hermits—and his solo career never really took off—his “Brady Bunch” period aside--so it was Cassidy versus Sherman in the early 1970s, with no clear-cut winner.

Based on my sister’s wall in her room—where she hung pictures of her faves from all the teenybopper magazines of the time—Cassidy was the clear-cut winner, but personally, I never got into “The Partridge Family” thing … as a young teen growing up during that time, beyond Jimi Hendrix and the other “hip” acts that I liked, if I had to listen to Top 40-geared music and acts, it really had to be Bobby Sherman.

And look at his bevy of hits that he had during that time period:

From 1969 to 1972, he placed 10 Top-40-ready tunes on the Billboard Hot 100 chart, including “Little Woman” (#3); “La La La (If I Had You)” (#9); “Easy Come, Easy Go” (#8); and “Julie Do Ya Love Me” (#5), earning him several gold records with picture sleeves highlighting his good looks, and his hair.

After “Here Come the Brides” was canceled, Sherman was on just about every variety show that there was, and starred in one or two forgettable TV series.

But after 20 years in the business, Sherman had his sights on other mountains to climb and to conquer.

The first time that he put his other talents and interests on display was when People Magazine had a feature on him in the early 1970s that did not concern his musical career, but that he had built by himself a miniature replica of Disneyland, something that took him years to complete.

And then later in the decade, he shocked just about every teenybopper who had his picture on their wall by leaving show business altogether—and becoming a certified emergency medical technician based in Los Angeles.

This was no joke, no try for extra publicity … Sherman simply had had enough,
and left to pursue his dream job.

And since that time, while he has occasionally performed—he was front and center in the “Teen Idols” tour with Davy Jones and Peter Noone in the 1990s—he has pretty much left show business behind.

So now, for him to turn 80—and the only one of the three teen idols he was up against to still be with us—really is an extraordinary accomplishment, and it received a lot of coverage on social media.

We are all growing older, and so are the people that we admired when we were kids, so for Bobby Sherman to turn 80 years of age is certainly a benchmark for all of us, and particularly the Baby Boomer generation.

Yes, somewhere down the line, if she is lucky enough, Taylor Swift will also turn 80 years of age, and that generation that adores her will probably say the same thing that I just did about Sherman, that reaching that life milestone definitely shines on all of us, reflecting that we are all getting older as time goes on.

So happy birthday to Bobby Sherman, a guy with a lot of talent, perseverance and patience who ultimately did exactly what he wanted to do with his life, and is sill with us to grow older in parallel with us.

And yes, I saw a recent picture of him, and while his hair is shorter--and whiter--than it was 50 years ago, he still has THAT hair!

Rant #3,174: Same Old Song

I hope you had a nice weekend.

I pretty much did, with one incident kind of putting a fork in the weekend for me, but more about that later.

It has been pretty warm in these parts—not like it has been in other parts of the country, but hot enough for me, with every day in the mid 80s to mid 90s—so this weekend, we did what you do on hot summer days, we barbecue and we swim.

We did not do the barbecuing, but my brother-in-law did, so we went to his house and had a pretty relaxing afternoon and early evening.

The food was good, the company was good, and although I was really tired after a previous night where my mother was up just about all evening, I stuck it out and had a good time—

Helped by the fact that I took a nap before we left, which was nothing but a short snooze after my sister took my mother for the remainder of the weekend, but it did help.

I was bushed by the time that we went back home in early evening, but I made it through the day pretty well, kind of on fumes by the time we returned back home.

And then yesterday, before my mother arrived home from my sister’s house, my wife and I were able to go swimming in the backyard pool, something we have been able to do this summer with a bit of regularity.

After last year’s complete fiasco with the pool—where we could not get the green out of it no matter what we did and how much money we pumped into it—this year has been much better—not perfect, but much better.

Changing over to salt water, the pool is much cleaner, and the upkeep is much easier.

Again, I am not going to say that the pool is perfect, but it is as clean as it is going to be, which means clean enough so we can use the pool as a big bathtub outdoors, no scrubbing but we are able to sit in it and take in the rays—with sunscreen, of course.

The incident that I referred to before that was the only negative of this past weekend was another situation at the local Wendy’s drive-thru, the most incompetent spot on the planet, or at least in my neighborhood.

I went to get food for us on Sunday evening, and my wife and son wanted Wendy’s, so there I went.

I got to the drive-thru, placed my order, and I thought everything, for once, was going to be hunky dory.

The woman manning the drive-thru told me how much the order cost, and I got out my money, plus as exact change as I could do with the coins I had in the car.

I went to the window, and that is where the “fun” began, as it always does at this particular site.

The assistant manager—or who I think was the assistant manager—read off what I ordered as I prepared to give them my money—with as exact change as I could give them with the change I had in the car.

He read off the order, and the woman taking my order had left out one order of chicken nuggets, so although I was ready to give my money to the cashier, I had to recalibrate a little bit now that the order was corrected.

The woman who originally took my order took my money—I gave her $40 in two $20 bills plus 50 cents in change for an order of $34.49—and that should have been that.

But then the cashier gave me back my change, and only gave me the coins—and to many of them—and not the paper money that I was due to get back.

“Where is my full change?” I asked, and there was no answer. “Where is my money?”

No answer, and then I admittedly got a little angrier, but for good reason.

“You know, every time I come here there is a problem with the order, a problem with the change, and why do I have to go through this every time I come here?”

Another woman working there came to the window, and flat out asked me, “Why do you come here anyway?”

“Because I live near here,” I replied.

“You should go somewhere else!” she chided me, which really infuriated me, because that is very bad customer service.

I still did not have my money, and the manager came to the window.

“Look, every time you come here you are nasty … you have to work with us,” she told me. “Did you get your order yet? Once you get your order, you will get your money.”

“But why was I just given the change? Where is my money? I would not be so nasty in your words, if I would have gotten what I wanted, and then I could already be home.”

The manager walked away from the window nd the restaurant proceeded to take their time in bringing me not just my order, but my paper change … and they were making comments inside the restaurant about me, very nasty in nature, which I replied to from my car, until they shut the window on me so I couldn’t hear anything … and during all this time, a line had built up behind me of at least 10 cars, so their taking their time bringing me my order was only creating problems for them once I left—

But I wasn’t ready to go, as they still had not brought me my order or my change.

Finally, after about 10 minutes, they brought everything out to me, including my change.

The manager greeted me at the window.

“You don’t have to report us each and every time you come here.”

(I have filled out the online form about their service on numerous occasions because they have forced me to do this because of their lack of service.)

“Well, I would not have to fill out that form if your staff wasn’t so inept.”

“Here is what we are going to do for now on—when you drive up to the window, you ask for me, the manager, to take your order. Do not give your order to anyone else but me.”

“Sounds good to me, and I will do that … and I am not going to report the restaurant today for what happened.”

She then apologized for the worker who told me to go to another restaurant, which I thanked her for, and I guess now we are on some sort of truce—but don’t tell me that I am the only one to report them for their inept behavior—those reports do get to the higher ups, and I do see new workers in the restaurant each time I come there.

So, the solitude of a nice summer weekend was brought down by this one incident … but I kind of brushed it off, listed it as complete and total incompetence on their part, and simply cherished the time I had at the barbecue and in the pool as making this a good and relatively relaxing weekend for myself and my family.

Now, the work week begins, and everything resets with my mother back home and me on the spot for seemingly everything.

Tally-ho, and away we go!

Rant #3,173: Three Lock Box

I did something very interesting earlier in the week, a process which should have taken maybe 20 minutes that stretched through almost an entire morning, mainly because of complete incompetence doled out by a certain major bank that will remain nameless.

I emptied out my mother’s bank safe deposit box, which I don’t think she needs anymore.

This entire exercise was prompted by a letter we received in the mail attesting to the fact that she owed more than $500 on the box rental, even though she originally opened the box under a special plan for certain customers that gave her the box for free in perpetuity—a decision since rescinded by the bank on seemingly unknowing customers.

Anyway, I went to the bank branch that I thought the box was in, but it was the wrong branch, so I had to go to another branch—not anything terrible, with this other branch basically cross town.

When I got to the branch containing the box, the bank was busy, and I had to wait for someone on the floor to call me into his office to explain what I needed to do.

A bank associate called me into his office, but as I was getting out the letter that I had received about the box, he picked up the phone and started talking to someone, then he hung up the phone and said he would be right back, “because I am the only one in the bank that can do this,” whatever “this” was, I have no idea.

He then literally vanished.

After about 10 minutes of waiting, I stood up and peaked over to an adjoining office, where another bank associate was on the phone,

I sat down in total disgust, and I figured I would give the original bank associate another five minutes to return—which, by the way, he never did.

Finally, the other associate was off the phone, and he stood up and told me over the office divider that he could help me, that the other associate “got busy.”

So I went over to his office, showed the associate the letter, and told him that I wanted to close out the box and that I would fight the fees addressed in the letter.

He looked up the account, and to my surprise, my name was actually on the box account—something I did not know—and that this should speed the closing of the box.

“Do you have the keys?” he asked me.

“What keys?” I replied.

Evidently, the box had two keys used to open it, and I had no idea that keys were needed to open the box.

(I once had a safe deposit box in another bank, and all I needed to open it up was a code—nothing to do with keys at all.)

“You need the keys to open the box up,” the associate told me. “If you don’t have the keys, you are going to have to go to court to get an order to open up the box, and we are going to have to get someone in here to break open the box.”

I was perplexed, but I told him that I would be back with the keys, even though I had no idea where the keys were in the house.

I went back to the house, and gingerly asked my mother if she knew where the keys were—and Jiminy Cricket!, she had not forgotten, and knew exactly where the keys were!

I rushed back to the bank, had to wait again to speak to someone, and then, after about 20 minutes, someone came to help me—

Or so I thought.

She determined after about 15 minutes of trying to get her computer to the account that the machine was not working, and that we had to go up to the teller area to complete this action.

She took my two forms of ID--my drivers license and a debit card—and I didn’t see those two forms of ID for the next hour or so.

She admitted that she needed help in opening up the account, which involved getting the bank manager over to assist—and then I asked them again about the letter I had received, and that I was not going to pay the amount it said that the account owed.

“Oh, you don’t owe us anything, we owe you!” the bank manager said as she fiddled around with the computer.

“Then why does it say that I owe several hundred dollars on the account?” I asked.

“Don’t pay attention to that, we owe you money.”

“Then why do you send out such a letter?”

“Oh, I didn’t send out the letter. I admit, the letter makes absolutely no sense.”

“I am not accusing you, personally, of writing the letter, but how does a major bank like this send out such a letter?”

“I don’t know … why don’t you write your own letter and complain about it?”

“Because, I don’t have the time to write such a letter, that’s why … and how about the box and my two forms of ID?”

The bank manager told me that everything would be taken care of in a minute, which really meant about an hour from that point—and in the interim, she gave me the cash for what the bank owed me, and I still have no idea why both the letter was sent nor why they owed the account money.

Anyway, everything was finally completed on the computer, and now the moment of reckoning had come … to finally get the box, open it, and see what was in there.

We went to the area where the boxes are held in the bank, and I was told to wait there until the associate could open the door for me—

The problem was, in the interim, the associate decided to get some other work done, and the minutes ticked away as I was waiting.

Tick … tick … tick …

Finally, after about 15 minutes of waiting, she finally opened the door to the box room, and we entered—

The first problem was that she could not find the box number. She looked and looked and looked, and could not find the number.

Finally she found it—it was on the lower level of where the boxes were—and then she put in the keys along with a bank key, to open it up.

It would not open.

No mater how she put the keys in, the box would not open.

This went on for at least 10 minutes, and then she said that she had to get the manager again to help us.

I was so frustrated at this point that I plunked my butt down on a portable stairs that they used there to get to the higher boxes, taking both the weight off my feet and off my brain as my frustration was building.

Finally, the associate and the manager came back, and lo and behold, the manager could not get the box open, either.

But after a lot of jiggling the keys, she finally got it open, and I was given the box to go through and take out its contents.

That was the fun part of this entire escapade, as I found in the box no valuables, but what I would call “family heirlooms,” like my grandparents’ citizenship papers and a certificate my father received when he completed a cooking course—in the Marines probably more than 70 years ago—

And a mysterious key … more about that later.

I took out everything, pushed a bell so the associate could come back and take the box from me.

She finally handed me back my IDs—they had not been in my possession for about an hour, exposed so anyone could see it on a desk in the teller area—and I walked out of the bank, finally, with a ton of paper and a key that I had no idea what lock it was designed for.

I went home, and showed my mom the key … and she also had on idea what it was from, either.

It is sort of an old fashioned key, a key that was probably made decades ago.

Since I have no idea what lock it opened, I surmised my mother kept it in the box as a memento … I do believe it was a key that was used in my father’s old butcher store on Delancey Street in Manhattan, a store that closed about 60 years ago or so—

Or at least that is the story that I am going to tell others when I show them that key, and it is truly a family heirloom no matter what lock it actually opened.

So there you have it … a supposedly easy exercise that once again, unnecessarily turned into torture for me.

I must have that perpetual black cloud over me, and I just cannot get rid of it, no matter what I do.

Have a good weekend, I will speak to you on Monday, and hopefully, there will be no more boxes to befuddle me now or in the future.