Thanks to genetics and upbringing, we all wind up resembling our parents in welcome and unwelcome ways. I’m pleased to be my father’s son when it comes to appreciating theater, crosswords, puns, corny songs and spoonerisms (he used to call me a gilly soose); I wish I’d fallen farther from the tree when it comes to personal finances.
‘Money talks,’ my dad says, ‘but it just says goodbye to me.’ Alas, money and I have similarly terse exchanges.
About 20 years ago, my sisters and I devised a plan to ease our folks through their golden years. We would buy them a condo in Florida and aside from doing a mitzvah – a Jewish word that weds good deeds to sacred obligations – we would eventually get a return on our investment. Win-win!
Well, you can guess how this story turns out.
Between the collapse of the housing market and the great Florida condo glut, our little real estate investment was worth less when we unloaded it this year than when we bought it two decades back. Instead of reaping a nice little windfall to see me through the rest of the tuition-paying years (seven down, five to go), I have to remit 6,000 smackeroonies to the lender. Ouch.
Why, you may ask, didn’t we just hang onto the condo in hopes of an eventual real estate rebound? The short answer is: monthly condo fees. If the place had been close to the beach, we might have used it as an antidote to seasonal affective disorder, fees and all. But it was inland, among the soul-crushing strip malls and vast boulevards of South Florida.
Alternatively, we could have gone the property-manager-and-renter route. But we decided to cut our losses. Farewell, lovely beaches! Adieu, little windfall!
Now how else can a mug like me generate a little extra green? At various times over the years I’ve thought: I’m a smart cookie. With all the cash coursing through America’s circulatory system I should be able to figure out a way of channeling some of it into my bank account. As a word guy and a retainer-of useless-information guy, I considered two possibilities: writing a bestseller and becoming a game show contestant.
My problem with trying to compete for fabulous prizes was that I heard they were partial to super-sized personalities – contestants who would react to winning with shrieks, megawatt smiles and hugs for the host. I feared that I had spent too much of my life cultivating coolness to carry off such public displays of enthusiasm.
Plus, a friend of mine had gone on a quiz show and hadn’t fared too well. When asked to identify the three Baltic countries, he came up with Latvia but drew a blank on Lithuania and Estonia. (This was one of those shows where you could call on a friend for help. Alas, his wife froze also. ‘Latvia, Matvia and Tuchus!’ she vamped. That’s tuchus as in tush.) Home version of the game for him.
As for the bestseller idea: Anyone who thinks of himself as a serious writer feels like he ought to be able to crank one out. If we undiscovered geniuses deign to read a blockbuster, we invariably find the plot contrived, the characters wooden and the literary flourishes klutzy and overwrought. We’re convinced we could do better, then conclude that our ability to do better is precisely the problem: We’re too sophisticated to write a book with mass appeal! We have too much integrity to dumb ourselves down! The muse would abandon us if we sold ourselves to the highest bidder!
That’s all snobbery and sour grapes, of course. If we ‘serious’ writers could produce a book that sold sixty bazillion copies and then got made into a movie, we surely would. After all, one deal with the devil of crass commercialism could fund decades of obscure literary experiments. We must therefore accept that we are no likelier to become the next Stephen King or J.K. Rowling than we are to become the next Steve Jobs or Bill Gates.
So what’s left? My dad used to buy lottery tickets every week, which surprised me, given his ‘money talks’ motto. ‘Somebody wins,’ he’d say when I asked him why he bothered. ‘Why not me?’
In this respect, the old man and I aren’t so alike after all. He inculcated this pessimistic view of money in me, but he didn’t entirely believe it himself. Despite a lifetime of goodbye, he still hoped he could charm money into flinging itself into his arms and saying, ‘Baby, I’m yours.’
Then again, I’m the sap who invested in Florida real estate. But I am not a greedy man. All I ask of thee, O Muse, is to let me get through the next five years of tuition payments without taking up residence in a refrigerator box.
