Is Work Really Character Building... or What?

     

Memoirs of a Geezer!

Reflections and Observations -- A Bright Passage from the Fantasies of Youth 

to Illuminations of Advanced Maturity!

This Episode:    The Benefits of Labor -- Is Work Truly Character Building...  or What?

    I Hear America singing, the varied carols I hear;
    Those of mechanics--each one singing his, as it should be, blithe and strong;
    The carpenter singing his, as he measures his plank or beam,
    The mason singing his, as he makes ready for work, or leaves off work;
    The boatman singing what belongs to him in his boat--the deckhand singing on the steamboat deck;
    The shoemaker singing as he sits on his bench--the hatter singing as he stands;

    The wood-cutter's song--the ploughboy's, on his way in the morning, or at the noon intermission, or at     sundown...            
                                                                    --  Walt Whitman...   from:   I Hear America Singing     

What a load of...   Hey!  Is it true that work enriches us, builds character?  Do we work solely to enjoy our leisure time?  Are the "joys of work" merely a clever piece of propaganda foolishness propagated by the wealthy -- the "mine and factory owners" -- to keep the working classes plodding along?

As I stand atop the wobbly tower of Geezerhood," I tend to gaze back upon the many strange and wondrous occupations I've had over the years.  Examples...  

I'm moving a Hot Tar Kettle into
position at the roofing Job Site!

"Bobby L." had a flat-roof-hot-tar roofing business in which he somehow hypnotized the none-too-bright to enlist their labors, certainly not their talents.  He even paid us once in a while!  I was one of his "Kettle Rats" who struggled in the blazing heat of high summer, filling buckets of hot tar and hoicking them up a giant step ladder to the roof above where Bobby "mopped in" and sometimes mopped scalding tar over the edge and onto the tender backs and chests of his faithful if misguided Kettle Rats.  "Hot!" he would holler.  That was the signal to fetch more hot tar up onto the roof!  Sometimes the kettle became overheated and caught fire.  Then we had to stop for the day and go to an air conditioned tavern.  Such misery!  To have to leave the inferno for the cool of a gin house!  Of course our wages were often burned up in beer, booze and bar dice!!  (I no longer take alcoholic beverages internally, and I have a horror of ladders!!)  

Then there was window cleaning on relatively tall buildings, true high-rises too, sometimes working with belts, crossing from one window to another, unhooking one end of the belt, re-hooking on the other side of the window, reaching for the hook on the next window, stretching in terror to cross the gap...  "Don't look down," says Baltazar, my Greek co-crazy.  "Good hooks!  Real safe!  You shouldn't worry much!"  Once a dentist pulled me into his window when a hook came out of the wall!  Oh, the joys of gondola lifts or "elevator" lift platforms...  I think we also called them "slip stages!"  Sometimes they'd slip...  Working on them in high winds was real exciting!  As a young college student, I actually survived and made lots of money one summer; was able to pay a large portion of my tuition.  Played cribbage with the boys during lunch hours, when we had them!  (Now I'm terrified of heights!)

Fritz was our favorite tavern-keeper when I worked for a company he lovingly called, "Hair Felt."  The company had a more professional name; they made indoor-outdoor carpeting.  We unloaded box cars, lots of them.  I was smaller, shorter, and was treated to the joys of crawling into boiling hot, cramped spaces to shove 12-foot bales of carpeting out and down into the space between the two stacks of bales in each rail car.  The bales were then hefted onto specialized wooden hand trucks to be ferried into the warehouse.  Two men, one on either side, "walked" the bales onto their ends to stand in enormous stacks against the warehouse walls....  waiting for orders!   They looked like cigars for giants or concrete freeway bridge supports!  We sweat a lot...  buckets.  Eventually, after numbers of injuries to our fellow workers, including a 12-foot bale that fell down and landed on the head of "Carlos," we organized and started a union.  A great triumph!  A boon for the working classes!  (Today I prefer wood floors and small rugs!)  

Road crews!  What great fun!  "Jumping stakes," puddling in concrete, setting and pulling forms...  I did a lot of sewer cleaning on those jobs too; one had to keep the sand and gravel from clogging them, and there was often the bonus of traditional sewer content that had to be

removed along with construction debris.  I mean, you couldn't really separate the intermingled stuff while filling buckets to be lifted to the roadway surface...  could you??!!  (Recently, I tried to repair the mechanism of a toilet...  I removed a few parts, scratched my head, called the plumber!)  

Factories, foundries, shipyards, even a mine!  When I graduated from college and took to the road, I was able to find more elegant employment.  Hotel and restaurant labors in the absence of work in my chosen field.  Newspaper and radio jobs too.  But, back to the hospitality trade:  At a major hotel near Tacoma, Washington, I started as a lowly banquet bartender, then became a "bar-back" (schlepping cases of beer, re-filling coolers...), then a day shift co-bar-manager, then beverage manager, even ascending to catering management.  What a success; what a climb up a more prestigious ladder!!  (At my present age, once in a while I put pop in the ice box!)     

As a truck driver for a major metropolitan newspaper (like that guy on television with the blue long johns and red underwear he wore on the outside!), I was a mild-mannered news medium employee.  I made a great many "state runs" with the fat Sunday paper.  On one occasion I happened to be assigned a rental truck that had a canvas and chain tail gate.  Unbeknownst to me, all of the papers fell out of the back as I motored north.  A traffic cop rather easily followed my trail and made me retrace the route and retrieve all of the "jettisoned" paper bundles...  or pay a large fine.  I went back.  Oh, my yes, the character-building joys of work, the personal gratification and self-esteem enhancing glories of the workaday life!!  (These days I prefer to read the "free press," and discarded newspapers!)     

Oh well...  (this could go on far too long!)  I guess it must be true that work makes us better citizens, makes us appreciate the value of our labors and able to see the contributions we make to this great land.  My sweet and talented wife, for example, wrote manuals on "legal advocacy" and "child custody" while working in the domestic violence arena, manuals that, I'll wager, may still be the standards in use today!  My brother designed a couple of bridges -- one that serves dually as a runway -- and buildings that stand and function to this day!  Me?  I'll betcha the "electric blankets" I built when doing temp work at "Knot Labor Force" still melt ice on the bridge they were designed to serve.  I'll betcha motorists still silently praise my valorous effort as their tires gain purchase on what otherwise might have been a skating rink!! 

And so this, my friends, is my humble homage to work, labor and meaningful employment.  Today as I sit staring at a computer screen -- "sit" being the operative word -- I long for the fresh air of the gondola on a 70-story building, the sweet aroma of the factory floor and the lilting rhythms of the punch press, the ambiance of the sewers, the insults of drunken hotel bar regulars...  not to mention the angry growling of the dribbling, corpulent chef who'd holler, "No beverage host vermin in MY kitchen...!"  Verily, The joys and memories of labor echo in my skull, as do Whitman's elegant and elegiac * refrains  (* ...Walt's dead!  So are the "Singing Workers" of his verse, and so too may be the nation's respect for labor and ordinary working people)!  

(Special Note:   The perpetrator of this Blog wishes to make it abundantly clear that in no way is this posting intended to denigrate work or labor, or the value and dignity of work, in any of its multitudinous forms.  The objective is to poke a bit of fun at his "careers," and to make sport of the perhaps rather fatuous choices made over time by the writer...  who's kind of fatuous himself, sometimes!  The writer, by the by, is happy to have survived his many noble occupations!) 

Humbly Submitted 08-20-15 -- Joel K.          

      



      

         

                                                      

Grandparenting and the Illusion of Dignity!

Memoirs of a Geezer!

Reflections and Observations -- A Bright Passage from the Fantasies of Youth 

to Illuminations of Advanced Maturity!

This Episode:    Grandparenting in the Geezer Age:   Or, Losing One's Dignity?!...  
                                          Um...  If Indeed One Really Ever Had Any Dignity!!??

There are those abroad in the land who insist that human beings possess or should possess some actual dignity, a kind of dignified demeanor.  Especially, I suppose, those who strut about in expensive suits purporting to be your "Average Top-Flight Business Executives."  As for me, any pretense at having ever had any actual dignity was expunged at a quite early time of life.  Allow me to elucidate...

My elder brother was large and strong vs. my somewhat smaller stature, and only a year separated

This is a slightly exaggerated
image of one having been shot
with an arrow, causing the leaking
of one's complement of dignity!

our ages.  He punctured me with steel-tipped darts, once shot me in the leg with a blunt-tipped arrow and frequently "flipped" me into walls when practicing his jujitsu!  (Possibly the bloodletting that resulted caused the draining of ill humors, including any quantity of dignity I may have possessed!!)  My reward was a quarter a flip, if injured in the process (bruises and scars included with no additional fees paid!), and if I promised not to "rat on him" to mater and pater.  I'm not sure if those episodes constitute a "an early loss of any hope of a dignified persona," but there's more, and far more recently...  that is, here in the present, in the time of "GeezerHood."

During a recent trip to the warmer climes of the southern tier, I was cavorting in a swimming pool with my grandchildren, the issue of our elder daughter.  I was floating on an orange, buoyant noodle, having decided to assume the character of an adventurer.  I announced to the grandchildren, "I am Emilio de Leon, bold voyager, and I have just traversed the Atlantic Ocean from West to East on a Flotation Noodle.  Am I in Espana?  El gente de Espana," I proclaimed, "Estoy Aqui!"

In a swimming pool with
grandchildren, having been
pressed into service as an
elevator!  The image below
attempts to illustrate the
challenges of being an
elevator, and being choked,
 to the great amusement
of grandchildren!  

At which point, the children spat mouths full of water into my noble visage, and then commanded in unison, "Go back where you came from, you silly old goat!"  I of course demurred, and then tried speaking to them in French, in case I was mistaken as to my destination on the shores of the European continent.  

"Where are the cheering throngs?" I asked in my best accented French.  (Où sont les acclamations des fouls?)  More jets of expectorated pool water struck my noble countenance, once alight with victorious pride, now awash in mock rejection and humiliation!

"Go away," the children shouted gleefully!  "Go back to your own side of the ocean."  Finally, I "identified" the children as the fabled "Spitting Barracuda" of the Eastern Atlantic.  At that point their determination became unstoppable!  Oh my!  What fun we had on that lengthy and prune-skinned occasion!

During the previous year, with another set of grandchildren, progeny of our younger daughter, I was coerced into service in the self same pool as an elevator.  "Going down," I would announce as the children ordered me into character.  "Second floor -- foundation garments, ladies' frilly frocks, pumps, stockings, millinery..." the final words a choked and gurgling gasp as the "elevator-traveling" children pulled me under the surface.

Are all grandparents so employed by the offspring of their own children?  I've often been a horse -- to most an almost cliche grandparental role -- but also, and quite frequently, a helicopter, a robot, a fire-breathing dragon, a sword-wielding villain, a pack mule, a bovine...

As at least one of the grandchildren has grown older -- the eldest of four -- the expectations of grandparental interaction have changed appreciably.  He, now 11 years old, is a remarkably talented, self-taught juggler.  Though he craves an audience for his art, it is hardly a chore for the watcher, but rather a pleasure to witness his skill and talent.  Just as often, because he's a Harry Potter devotee and much attracted to the "Mario" electronic games, he urges his grandparents to sit with him as he displays his magic wand collection or translates the images in Mario books to the actions of the games themselves.  He also has recorded the musical "overlays" that accompany the games, has entire CD's devoted to "Mario Music."

And here's another example.  July 3rd has become a cherished family gathering day, all of us together to witness the spectacular fireworks show at Milwaukee's Lakefront.  There's lots of idle and play time between arriving in mid-afternoon until the skies go dark and then wild with loud and colorful explosions!  Our two granddaughters, ages 5 and 7, have developed a ritual of

The first-born grandchild
(at left) with his "Baba,"
the name he conferred
upon her even before he
could speak in sentences!

placing small stickers on my sunglasses until the lens are totally obscured.  At other times during the afternoon, they climb upon me, strike me with illuminated wands and other light-up souvenirs, and then all four of them sit on me, one 7-year-old on my throat, the others on various parts of my torso.  Unable to move, my groans of discontent and choked pleas of mercy drive the four of them into convulsions of mirth.  It becomes a prolonged source of glee (with a bit of pushing, jockeying for a better position!).

One of our granddaughters, the older of two, has a most remarkable gift for and sense of humor.  She has often placed a stuffed moose on my head; the moose has large floppy antlers.  She proclaims, "There's a moose on your head" or, "There's a flying moose on your head!"  The phrase has become so popular with the grandkids, my daughter made a T-shirt for me that sports the aforementioned legend, along with an appliquéd moose.  

I could go on, but it may be time to put this episode to bed, perhaps along with a pair of grandchildren who are spending the night.  I love my grandchildren with all that's in me, and my interaction with them may have nothing at all to do with dignity, or the lack thereof, but merely with my own devotion to absurd behavior, a kind of reversion.  So, what the hell, who says one cannot go on being a cow or an elevator, a robot, an aardvark, a reviled visitor to foreign shores.

Sometimes, one simply cannot resist the urge to misbehave, or to adopt various obtuse roles just to join in the fun, to entertain.  I mean, it isn't that long until the grandchildren enter their teenage years and beyond.  Then, when we grandparents behave like silly imbeciles, our grandchildren will look at us with self-conscious displeasure and announce, "OMG...  Why does he have to act like that...  and in front of my friends...  so embarrassing!"

Until that happens, I will endeavor to play the fool, to be myself and to enjoy the moment and

the silliness that pervades their youthful deportment until they, our grandchildren, become more "grown up" and dignified as adolescents and adults (I hope they never actually lose their senses of silliness!!).

Special Notes:  1.)  None of that which my sweet, wonderful grandkids do to me, as described herein, is mean-spirited or discouraged by the perpetrator of this post.  It's all in great fun, and actually encouraged, often precipitated by my own words and deeds.  I thoroughly enjoy their funny and guileless behavior.  Cards and letters, Email as well, may be sent in care of this medium, anytime!  2.)  No pelicans or other creatures were harmed in the making of this blog posting.  Thank You! 

(Special Note of Attribution and Gratitude:   The perpetrator of this blog extends unending thanks to our beautiful, talented and endlessly creative grandchildren, without whose support and silliness this writing would not have been possible:  C, age 11, almost 12; S, age 7, more than almost 8; L, age 7, age 8 in fewer than four months; S, age 5-1/2!  B and P, among many others, of course, are enormously grateful every day of our lives to have them in our lives!!)

Humbly Submitted 07-18-15 -- Joel K.

                





             

       

   

...Wait a Minute! ...Where ARE the Keys??!!

Memoirs of a Geezer!

Reflections and Observations -- A Bright Passage from the Fantasies of Youth 

to Illuminations of Advanced Maturity!

This Episode:    The Educative Power of Travel!  That's the Key!         

                           ...Wait a Minute!  Where ARE the Keys??!!...

This is a Story about a Geezer and Some Keys," but first one must set the scene, replete with shifting moods and geography, how the fleeting space of seven days can push the sun behind dark clouds, turning blissful moments into raging storms!  

A view of Playa La Ropa in "Zihua."

In the Sunshine!  We're seated at La Cala, a superb restaurant in Zihuatanejo.  Calm ocean waves tumble over a stony shoreline, arriving as the sound of crinkling parchment or the muffled crunch of tires on gravel.  Our waiter admires my camiseta auténtica Mexicana (authentic Mexican shirt), and asks if we could trade, his for mine.  I demur, insisting that I had just purchased the thing.  It had the color and styling I'd wanted, having searched unsuccessfully on previous travels to Mexico.  Dialogue on other beaches, in other locations, conducted largely in Spanish, leads to more conversations with native speakers, shared laughter, friendships.

The richness of travel vs. tourism is just that, building relationships with indigenous people, sharing stories, lifestyles, histories, in special cases visiting their homes and workplaces.  It "breaks ice." That, and being muy chistoso (funny), as we attempt to navigate in Mexican Spanish, stumbling over and misusing words and phrases, entertaining our hosts and the native Mexicans we encounter.  Return trips, however, can induce melancholy.  The beauty and serenity of a tropical setting vanish; ahead lies "real life"-- business, anxiety, frenzied activity, impatience...  

Coming home from one's travels -- specifically returning from a somewhat recent trip to Mexico -- is not always "uneventful."  If I were sufficiently fluent, I'd share the entire story of The Forgotten Keys with Mexicanos, with certain nuevos amigos including a school teacher, Maestro Blanco, who gave us a tour of his classroom and with whom we enjoyed our time, stories, meeting some of his students as well.  He was most welcoming and had a fine sense of fun and a willingness to engage.  I find it hard to lose the image of his picturesque pueblo, the pleasant adobe-style school, warmth, palm trees, the ocean, the Sierra Madres...  But I digress...  

The Tale of the Keys Misadventure...  In many fine hotels, rooms include a safe in which one can store valuables.  I placed my auto and house keys in such a safe...   I think...  

Downtown Playa del Carmen at dusk.  Strolling along
5th Avenida is a daily pleasure for us when there!

The Homecoming:    When the aircraft’s wheels kissed the runway with a pleasant squeak, my wife and I looked at one another and announced in unison, as if cued by an unseen director, “Dodged another bullet!”  (A little tradition!)  We had landed safely following a delicious week-long holiday in Playa del Carmen, Mexico, replete with sunshine, delightfully warm weather, anxiety-numbing ease, fresh limes and avocados...  There was nothing left but to get through customs, claim our luggage and then retrieve our car, happily and inexpensively moored in a protected parking garage, the result of a nearby hotel’s “Park and Fly” policy.

A heavy travel sack on each of our backs, we walked the long, sterile corridors to reach our

point of re-entry into the United States.  After waiting three hours or so in a seemingly endless queue -- 16 of 20 immigration officers having called in sick or stranded as a result of torrential rains in and near Chicago, O’Hare International Airport and their environs -- we collected our luggage and finally climbed aboard a van bound for our hotel and its next door parking structure.  

  

It pained us to leave 80-degree weather in the “Mayan Riviera,” but forecasters assured us we’d experience 60‘s in Chicago.  “Not that bad,” my wife conceded, “Sort of like exiting a steam room into a Swedish spring.”  We dragged our luggage behind us through puddles and a gentle but persistent rain, took the elevator to level three and then, blissfully, beheld our waiting vehicle.  “Ah,” my wife said, obviously relieved and happy, “we’ll be home in a couple of hours.”

Lockey Us!  That’s not exactly how things developed.  I set my backsack down, crouched beside it and began to rummage through its many pockets, one of which I was certain held a keyring containing our car, house, post office box, garage and other keys.  I searched until my face glowed red with frustration and anger.  No keys.  “I saw them on the hotel dresser, in a tray, where you always put them when we travel places,” my wife insisted.  

“I don’t have them,” I groaned.  “Did we leave them in a drawer, the safe, somewhere else?  Were they stolen?”  

“You must have them.  I saw the keys on the dresser,” my wife said with growing exasperation.

“They’re in Mexico!”

“What do you mean, 'in Mexico'?”

“I don’t have the damn keys,” I said, followed by a string of expletives.  “I’m certain I left them, or they were stolen, or they’re in that damn closet, in the safe!”  

Convinced I had lost the keys, been victimized by a thief or had “hidden” them somewhere “safe,” I roared with anger, aimed at myself for having done something so completely idiotic, adding selected curses hurled at the fates, nature, rainfall, climate, the jet stream...  

“I could swear I put them in the goddamned sack!”  I knew, of course, that nothing I could say or do or scream would miraculously reveal those miserable damn keys.  They were gone, irretrievably lost somewhere in Mexico. “Probably in the hands of some damn thief who, I hope, will roam endlessly through parking lots looking for a car that isn’t there!” I said, trying to convince myself and my wife, inanely, that we were the victims of a real or imagined bandit.  I couldn’t possibly be so careless, irresponsible or so outrageously stupid!   

    

Finally, my remarkable wife, exuding calm and reason, said, “C’mon, let’s go back to the hotel lobby and figure out what to do.  We can’t get into the car.  The keys are lost; they’re gone.  Today’s Thursday; we’ll come back early tomorrow, and you’ll still have Friday afternoon and the weekend to catch up on your work.”  Being self-employed, obsessive compulsive as well, I agonize over such things.  

We walked back to the hotel lobby, hauling our luggage though familiar puddles, rain and dropping temperatures.  The lobby was jammed.  My wife said, “We’ll get a bus to Milwaukee, and then come back here tomorrow with our spare set of keys.  Start calling bus companies.”  I did.  After several calls, I discovered the timetable of the last bus on the planet bound for Milwaukee.  I launched into another tirade condemning bus companies, commercial transportation in general, anyone who wears a stupid-looking uniform hat and may or may not be employed as a damn foolish unavailable snot-nosed jerk of a bus driver.

My wife, meanwhile, had struck up a conversation with a saintly young woman engaged in providing generous and loving care to her aging, needy, wheelchair-bound 80-plus-year-old father.  Wisely -- as my wife and I were both too agitated to think properly -- the woman suggested, “Why don’t you call a locksmith.  There’s probably one right here in Rosemont.  Probably cost you 75 bucks, maybe $100.00 at the most.”  

“Why the hell didn’t I think of that,” I silently raged within the confines of my addled brain.  I called a locksmith.  The dispatcher told me we’d see the capable young smith within a half hour.  Two and a half hours later, Iggy shows up, his little grey van proudly emblazoned with the name, “Lockey You.”   We hauled our luggage and ourselves back to the parking structure, met Iggy and his van and Iggy went to work on our vehicle.

“Iggy,” I said, “You’re like a genie popped out of a gold lamp.”  

“Huh?”

“I can’t tell you how happy we are to see you,” I clarified.

“You’ll have no problem making a new key, from the VIN number, right?” My wife asked of Iggy.  

“You kiddin‘, ” said Iggy.  “I can break into any vehicle and cut a new key, anywhere, anytime.  No problem; never had a single problem breaking in and cutting a key.”  We were buoyed by Iggy’s extravagant self confidence.  

Forty-five minutes passed.  Iggy was working away in his van, his aura of confidence vanished.  The temperature had dropped like an overly ripe coconut falling from a palm tree.  (Tropical images still haunted my musings -- probably a sanity and self-preservation mechanism -- as I shivered in the gathering darkness; my wife wisely wrapped herself in a blanket and sat in the van.)  Iggy finally broke into our car using a special secret device only locksmiths possess.  A working key was still nowhere in evidence. 

   

He somehow prised up the trunk release lever, then gained access through the trunk into the driver’s seat by means of the back seat release and his own youthful agility.  He cut a key, tried it; it didn’t work.  Tried again...  The headlamps began flashing crazily as the horn honked a staccato repetition of seemingly endless, irritating noise.  I was certain the Rosemont police would arrive and start shooting, or at least drag us off in handcuffs to the local lock-up.  They never arrived.  I uttered to no one in particular an inane comment about the obvious lack of protection afforded the local rustics. 

    

Iggy tried again, and then again and again.  The key would not work.  The lights flashed, the horn blared maddeningly, over and over.  The car battery was nearly dead.  Rage exploded in my brain like land mines.  The key didn’t work in the doors or the trunk or the ignition.  “What da...  This never happened to me before in my whole locksmithing life,” said Iggy.  “I don’t get

it.”  My wife and I dumbly smiled our encouragement.  I raised a thumb.  “I don’t get it,” Iggy repeated.  He squirted WD-40 into the door locks, into the trunk lock, into the ignition.  “What the hell,” said Iggy, “I don’t dig this.”  

Time passed; the cold remained, intensified.  Nothing worked.  Iggy finally admitted that something was seriously wrong with his key-cutting machine, or with our automobile, our karma, the machine’s karma.  “Hey,” Iggy said, shoulders shrugging, “Don’t know what the hell to do.  I’ll just have to come back tomorrow with a different key-cutting machine.  I’ll meet you back here at, say, 5:30 in the morning.  OK?”

We checked the time via cell phone, one of the few contrivances still alive in that cold and desolate parking garage, recognizing in horror that we had missed the last bus to Milwaukee, the 10:20 PM from O’Hare.  The hotel at which we had so recently planted ourselves to wait for Iggy was booked solid.  The nearby giant, popular chain hotel was booked solid.  It was nearing midnight.  “Oh well,” my wife said, “let’s just go back to the lobby.  I’ll start calling hotels to see if we can book a room for the night.  We’ll take a taxi.”  She locked and slammed the driver’s side front door of our useless vehicle.  I wanted to hit the thing with a lug wrench.  I couldn’t even enjoy that imbecilic, dubious satisfaction, the trunk being inaccessible.  And then we realized...  

  

“Oh shit,” I said.  “Iggy, we’ve locked your WD-40 inside our car.”  

“Oh shit,” said Iggy.  I need that stuff.  I got another job tonight.  Damn!”  He walked back to our car, our newly cut but apparently feckless key in hand, and stuck it into the driver’s side door.  It worked!  It opened the door, a miracle!  He tried the ignition.  It worked, but the battery had indeed died what with all that light flashing and beeping.  “I got a portable jumper,” said Iggy.  He started the car.  My wife and I would have leapt for joy if we’d had the strength.

“This is just great, Iggy,” I said.  “Serendipity.  If we hadn’t left your WD-40 locked in the car...  you might never have tried the key again.”

“Astonishing luck,” my wife said, beaming.  “WD-40.  You’ll buy some of that stuff first thing tomorrow,” she ordered me.  “It has healing power.”  

“How much do we owe you, Iggy?”  I asked.  

“Lemme see now.  If I’d a hadda give you a key -- been able to, that is -- with a locking and unlocking chip,” it woulda been a lot more than this.”

“How much?”  I asked again.

“This’ll run you $528.00 complete.  Not that bad, eh man?  I’ll send you a receipt by Email, if you want.  What’s your Email address?”

My eyes were poker chips.  Shock seized and held me in a gigantic, keyless vault.  I was temporarily rendered speechless.  “Uh,” I finally said, distractedly, “I’ll write it down for you.”  

“You should call your insurance guy,” said Iggy.  “Bet you’ll get all of this back.  I mean, it was real emergency.  Stolen or lost keys and all.  You’ll recover the dough.”  He gave us his business card and said, “Hey, you’re only two hours away, gimme a call anytime.  I’ll take good care of you.”  

I looked at the card in my palm, and quietly mouthed, "Lockey You."  If I'd had a match I'd have burned the card!  

  

We said our goodbyes, not quite as warmly as our hello, Iggy having dented the hell out of my debit card.  At last we were on our way home.  The journey north, back to Milwaukee started out well.  It didn’t end well.  We had to follow at least five detour routes owing to flooding and the consequence of closed roads and highways.  At one roadblock -- made necessary by a nearly drowned, impassable bridge -- a policeman instructed us.  “Go that way on Wiggin, left on Pitmore...  uh, try to follow that road...  uh, what’s it called?  Anyway, it parallels 294.  You’ll find it.  There’s probably a freeway entrance along that, uh... whatchacallit...  parallel road.”  It was almost 2:00 AM when we reached a truck stop just west of a Racine exit.  We were both starving after 15 hours without nourishment.  My wife’s burger and fries, my three-egg omelet and hash browns were like an aristocrat’s feast, sumptuous and satisfying.

*******************************************************

Friday in Milwaukee was about 40 degrees down the temperature scale compared to that of the Yucatan Peninsula.  We were gleeful, however, having searched for and found our spare set of keys, enabling us to begin the day’s activities, following a night’s sleep that was nearly comatose, uninterrupted and blissful.  We turned the key in the ignition.  It started.  Quickly the engine died.  We tried the key a few more times, repeatedly encountering the same engine shut-down, concluding at last that the new key, Iggy’s key, was the only one that had been re-coded to function properly.  I cursed technology, locksmithing, Iggy and the modern auto industry.  

We made an appointment with our dealership for the following Monday.  Approximately $140.00 later, we had two working keys, properly coded to open doors, operate the vehicle and even provide remote, keyless entry and locking function.  One exception; the trunk latch never worked again.  The service department found a nail in our tire and only charged us $50.00 extra to make the repair.  And Iggy was right, our insurance company came through.  Initially they offered us $28.00, the amount that surpassed our $500.00 deductible, finally handing over a whopping $50.00 reimbursement check.  Turns out we had added towing coverage to our policy.  “Gosh,” I said to my brave, smart and imperturbable wife, “We’re a couple of lucky stiffs, aina?” 

(Special Note -- Dedication with Gratitude:   The perpetrator of this Blog extends a special Thank You to Two among the people he loves best in the world, both of whom made their first appearances during the month of June, the 6th and 29th respectively, but some years ago!  You've brought great joy and humor into my life, and helped me maintain a healthy appreciation of absurdity and silliness!  Happy Birthday to you both!  My profound thanks for your love and understanding, for your generosity of spirit, your accomplishments, most importantly for yourselves!  With unqualified love, and hugs too!)

Humbly Submitted 06-06 / 29-15 -- Joel K.