The $3500 RABBIT - CONCLUSION

For a creature that naturally gets by in the wild, everything you read on rabbit pet blogs (and yes, there are a ton of them) point out what a fragile creature a bunny is. They can’t stand direct sunlight, they can’t stand extreme variances in temperature, and a sudden shock can kill them. It was like keeping my grandmother as a pet.[1] So you had to be careful, especially with stories flying around of prize-winning super-champion dogs dying in cargo holds because they froze to death or someone didn’t get them water or they got their rhinestone collar mysteriously magnetized to the propeller or something.

So you have to choose carefully. You have to ask them what experience they have in transporting rabbits – no matter how embarrassing it is.[2]

I finally settled on the company that said they had just transported a rabbit to Germany from Los Angeles for a family where the father had been transferred by the army.

Well, not only did they fly rabbits, but they flew them for the United States Armed Forces! The First Airborne Lepus Brigade! That was for me!

How much?

Well, let’s not get into dollars. I mean, really. What price can you put on a family pet[3]? Lauren had thought briefly of getting another bunny that she could cuddle, but she really couldn’t give Gravy up. She’d tear up at the thought[4]. Plus, the bunny had had a good life in the classroom, but after a year he accepted us as his – yes – family. If you take a pet, you have a responsibility for it’s well-being. Even if it was a fat lazy rabbit that was ungrateful and…

But I digress…

In order to transport him we needed to provide and FAA approved pet carrier[5], water, food, bedding and a certificate of health.

Yeah. A certificate of health. I guess to insure that if he sneezed he didn’t infect any other pets or if he got loose he wasn’t rabid and didn’t attack anyone. You know that the incidence of rabbit attacks is on the rise. Need to look out for that.

So we made the arrangements. Patricia took him to the vet for a check up. I think Gravy was grateful to come home with all his pieces – or at least all he had left the house with that day, anyway.

He was good to go.

As were we.

December 30th the man came to the empty house to pick up Gravy. He was in his carrier, his water bottle zip locked to the cage opening of the carrier. His food was packed away in ziplock bags and he had treats. The pet carrier was stuffed with two towels[6]. Gravy doesn’t really like his carrier. It was a gift from a friend and it was originally purchased to transport his two cats to the vet. There was a lot of room in there. But it wasn’t his home. His home was his cage or the living room floor and being put in the carrier, to him, meant his cage was going to be cleaned and he’d have to spend a lot of time pooping it up again.

Gravy also hadn’t been acting himself. Rabbits are not the brightest creatures[7] but he knew something was going on. You had to know, even if you were a rabbit, when a bunch of strangers came in and took all the furniture. I thought he’d go crazy with happiness when he saw all the room he had to run around in. I know Connor did. No one to yell at him to be careful not to bump into anything.

But Gravy didn’t like it. He didn’t want to come out of his cage. I tried to explain to him that he should grab the exercise while he could, but he wasn’t listening.

So when the man from the pet movers came, we were prepared to have to grab him out of the cage and put him in the carrier.

We opened the cage.

He peeked out.

He saw the towels.

He was in the carrier before we knew what happened. Ready to go. He got in and started pushing the towels around to get them just so.

We closed the door. The man took Gravy down the walk. And he was gone.

ENTIRE CONTENTS COPYRIGHT 2009 by Shaun McLaughlin

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[1] But without the drinking.

[2] And it is.

[3] Other than, you know, the title of this chapter.

[4] And maybe a little guilt.

[5] Which was not the one Patricia bought that matched the harness and leash, but a large plastic carrier with a cage door and food and water dishes.

[6] And there are few things a rabbit likes more than towels. They can chew them, throw them, dig in them. After you’ve been spayed, I suppose this is about as good as it gets.

[7] Yeah. Send me letters telling me how smart your pet rabbit is. Then get on to fetch in less than a year of training. Go ahead. Impress me.

The $3500 Rabbit - Part II

Gravy was a part of the family. A fat lazy part of the family who would cuddle up next to you, would assassinate me if it meant more time with my wife and was a total whore for a piece of banana, but a part of the family[1]. After re-reading that description, he actually sounds like my brother.

And you can’t leave a part of the family behind.

No matter what Connor thought.

“If we give Gravy away,” he said, “We could get another bunny. Or a dog. If we got a bunny and it was young, it might let us hold it.”

“YEAH!” Lauren said.

I confess, that I started this in a playful manner saying, “You know, if we gave Gravy away…” never dreaming that they’d bite.

See, the BIG problem with Gravy was the holding, lap-sitting issue.

He’d come up next to you. He’d snuggle himself up close. He’d nudge you. But he did not like to be picked up and he didn’t like to sit on anyone’s lap.

To be sure, part of this is God’s fault, because he made rabbits prey and therefore chances are when you start to pick them up, every instinct inside of them says:

“I’m being eaten! Feets, do your stuff!”

If you have them from when they’re kittens[2] you can mostly get them used to handling. Right now we’ve had Gravy for almost three years and he’ll submit to a lap sit for maybe two minutes and if Lauren picks him up, you can see him silently suffering the indignity for the kid who brought him home. He doesn’t like it, but he’s grateful to her.[3]

So the problem, as soon as we put the house up for sale, became: What to do with Gravy?

He won’t let us hold him on a consistent enough basis that we would be comfortable carrying him through security to get him on the plane and rabbits, in struggling to get away, have been known to break their backs. And that’s what you want for you kids:

“We’re moving away from the only house you’ve ever known, pulling you away from your friends and your school and your church and your Godparents, and we killed your pet getting on the airplane. Shall we just skip the interim and go right from the airplane to the mental hospital?”

Patricia came home from the pet store one day with something she thought was darling. A rabbit carrier with a matching leash and harness.

“See. It matches!” she said triumphantly.

“He’s a rabbit,” I said. “We’re not even sure he can see color.”

“But we can get him through security with this. We can carry him on the plane with that,” she said, pointing at each of the items.

Well, it was a good idea.

It’s just that Gravy didn’t agree.

The harness fit around him like a vest, with Velcro and snaps for extra security. Rabbits are a bit like cats and can slip into small areas so when you snap ‘em in, you’d better snap ‘em in good. How they can have this kind of cartilaginous skeleton and still break their own back trying to escape, I don’t know. Ask Jack Hanna. I only own the damn thing. At least a rabbit doesn’t try to claw your eyes out or pee in your bra cups like a cat.[4]

We put him in his harness to get him used to it. For this to work[5], he’d have to not only get used to it, but tolerate it as we’d have to get him in his harness, put him in the carrier[6], get to the airport (which we, as yet, were not clear on how we were going to do) and then hook the leash up, get him and the carrier[7] through security[8]. The easy part would be the flight as it’s not like he was a terribly active animal. If he didn’t freak in the plane, he’d likely sleep only waking to get pet and, sadly, probably have some baby talk from Patricia. And then as soon as we got there, first thing we’d have to do would be get a new cage for him since his old one would be in transit on a moving truck.

So when we let him out that night, we put him in the harness. He hopped around a couple of minutes and then looked at me with an expression that is the soul of disgruntled.

Every time we tried it after that he would struggle to get away and chew at the harness.

I didn’t think he was liking it.

There had to be an easier way to transport one’s pet.

I took to the Internet.

There are, indeed, firms that specialize in moving animals. Mostly dogs and cats. Many had drop down menus listing the animals they moved. There were dogs and cats. Fish and gerbils. Hamsters, snakes, iguanas, various reptiles. But no rabbits. Not even “rodentia”.

So I had to email them to see if they moved rabbits. Then I had to find out how and if they had experience.

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[1] None of these qualities, historically, would have disqualified him from being born a McLaughlin.

[2] Which is what Wikipedia says is the proper phrase and not “widdle bunny wabbit” – and I’m not saying who in the house said this, but I sleep with her.

[3] And she’ll probably give him a piece of banana. To be fair, he does buss her whenever she asks for a kiss.

[4] Not my bra cup, anyway.

[5] And believe me, I know explaining this sounds kinda like the lamest James Bond plot ever.

[6] That matched the harness. Very important. Please remember.

[7] Which would likely have some kind of – um – detritus of the poo variety as you could hardly expect the rabbit to hold it cross-country.

[8] Wonder how they would handle the poo on X-Ray?

ENTIRE CONTENTS COPYRIGHT 2009 by Shaun McLaughlin

The $3500 RABBIT - PART ONE

Lauren was in Seventh Grade when we moved. Middle school starts in sixth grade in Los Angeles. So Fifth grade was her last year in elementary last year at the Magnet School she’d started in second grade and it was the year she met her first true love.

His name was Gravy[1].

Gravy was a bunny.

The fifth grade classes all had pets. Lauren’s class pet was a little bunny named Gravy because he was gray over white. It was a color thing. Gravy had a brother who was brown over white and he was called Caramel. He had another brother named Harvey that had nothing to do with color, but was, of course, the character in the Marcy Chase play and movie adapted from it.[2]

Each weekend and on holidays, one of the children in the class would get to tote Gravy, cage and all, home. The rest of the time he stayed in the classroom, in the cage and, I guess, learned fractions.

Early on, we were plagued with requests to let Gravy come home on the weekends and holidays. We acquiesced, though we were told that rabbits were smelly and chewed on everything and pooped everywhere.

Such was not the case with Gravy, something I attributed to the excellence of Lauren’s fifth grade teacher who must have been an inspiration to the little fellow. He was neat as a pin, only pooped once and would occasionally nip at the carpet, but for the most part[3] quiet and non-smelly. He’d watch me do yoga. He’d grunt. Sometimes he’d grind his teeth[4] and he was, really, pretty fun.

Oh. And whatever feelings Lauren felt for him, he felt for Patricia. He doped out the house pretty quick and he would put his head down for me[5] he’d like getting pet by Lauren and Connor, but for Patricia he had a love like for no other. He would literally dance around her feet, jump and prance and just generally make a fool out of himself much the same as I had when I first met her[6].

He was in love.

And who could resist his face?

Somewhere along March, Lauren let us know that SOMEONE was going to bring Gravy home --- TO KEEP.

FOREVER!

LIKE A PET!

Patricia and I discussed it. You know a pet is a lot of responsibility, but you never really know how much until you don’t have one and then seriously contemplate getting one. Patricia and I had both had dogs growing up, but that was growing up and you knew Mom and, very occasionally, Dad would be there to pick up the slack. Now we were adults and we would be the slack picker-uppers.

Being a slack piker-upper is not an attractive proposition.

Also, we vacationed once in a while and had no family around – one of the reasons we didn’t have a dog yet.

And speaking of dogs, we’d always wanted one of those. In fact, when I’d gone back to working at home, Patricia had given me a Dagwood Bumsted-like list of jobs to do around the house[7] and top of the list was “Prepare house for a possible pet”.

I knew what “pet” meant. Neither of us were fond of cats, snakes, iguanas, she was okay with birds and fish were just plain boring. By “pet” she meant “dog” and I had done what I could about the fencing and figuring out where to put a kennel if we wanted one outside[8].

But we had never considered a rodent of the leporidae family[9].

But Gravy grew on us and when Lauren called, excitedly, from the office one day to say “Mrs. Metson says I can take Gravy home if it’s okay with you!”[10] We all knew Gravy was coming to live with us.

He became king of the living room. And he knew it. A large part of family life revolved around letting Gravy out to play every night. We’d close the doors and watch him to make sure he didn’t get at any electrical cords[11]. He would kick his heels up and tear around, kind of like a cat with the tears.

Then we had him fixed.

It’s recommended for rabbits if you’re not going to breed them.[12] It lengthens their life.

That doesn’t mean they like it.

When we brought him home from the vet, Gravy sat in the cage and stared at me for a full twenty-four hours. I swear. He blamed me for what had happened to him.[13]

He was much less active after that. As I would be, I suppose.

But he still ran to Patricia and danced around her legs.

And she loved him.

Honestly. I liked the rabbit and it made me want to throw up.

“Are you my little buuuuuunnnnnn---eeeeeeeeee.” She’d say.

I’d have to leave the room[14].

Lauren adored the bunny. Connor liked him too. He’d come out and hop around. He’d lay himself out at the door or in front of the coffee table and relax. If he wanted attention, he’d come up and nudge you with his nose. You’d be surprised how hard a little animal can nudge. The first couple were nice and mellow Californian “Hey! Hi! I’m your pet! How about a little scratch, please?” But if you didn’t get right to them he was like a nut in the subway shoving you until you paid attention. “Listen, human scum. I don’t like our relationship any better than you do. I didn’t ASK to be born at this point on the food chain. You COULD make my life a LITTLE less miserable if you scratched that point between my ears that makes me grind my teeth in joy. You know. If you aren’t TOO busy ruining the planet. Thank you.”

So funny I was going to put so much time and effort into bringing him with us, huh?

---

[1] No Wavy, but it’s sort of a litmus if people make the wavy comment or the food related comment.

[2] And God help me that I know the rabbit’s family tree.

[3] And I was usually home with him.

[4] Which is the bunny version of purring.

[5] A sign of bunny subservience, i.e., I was the head bunny.

[6] Sans the dancing. I did prance a bit, though.

[7] “Couldn’t you put them on little slips of paper? In a jar? Like in ‘Blondie’?” I asked. She just shoved the pad at me without a hint of a smile

[8] Though I am a proponent of house pets, largely because of the phrase “house pets” and anything that’s kept outside most of the time is “livestock”.

[9] Not that I knew his surname.

[10] And what school lets a kid call from the office like that? Over something like that.

[11] Rabbits can chew on them and fricassee themselves. I don’t think there are any rabbit suicide prevention hotlines, so they just go on with the self-immolation.

[12] And I loved reading the phrase “if you are going to breed your rabbit”, knowing that breeding was something they did really well on their own.

[13] And I wasn’t even the one who’d taken him TO the vet! My crime was picking him up and having some sliced apple for him when he came home.

[14] And it was only 1000 square feet, so where was I going?

Entire contents COPYRIGHT 2009 by Shaun McLaughlin

A "Lesson Learned" Interlude

If we’d had a stand-up guy like Tripper from the start, not only would we have been out of there much sooner, the family would have been under a lot less stress for a prolonged period of time, the kids would have started school at the beginning of the year, we would have had a decent amount of time to look for a home, we would have been able to drive across the country…

AND we probably would have done all that with a hundred thousand dollars more in our pocket.

Seriously.

The first week the house was up someone offered a five hundred and Ingo laughed it off. The house was RIDICULOUSLY over priced for seven months. I have a part of that. Patricia has a part of that. The SoCal real estate market has a huge part of that.

But no one owns a bigger piece of that than that piece of feces Ingo.[1]

To begin:

We’re not freakin’ Realtors. It’s not out job, our career, our expertise to know how to price and get houses sold.

Now, more than a year later and able to watch “House Hunters” and “Property Ladder” without hyperventilating, I know that if a house doesn’t sell in a month, at the outside two, you have to do something with the price. If your traffic drops, you have to do something with the price. If you really want to move, you have to do something with the price.

I had asked him, Mr. Realtor Ingo:

“Is it time to look at the price?”

“Oh, not yet.”

Yeah. Right. And he did this to make money.

I said it before. I’ll say it again.[2] We got away okay.

I mean we made a profit and that’s good.

But we went through hell. Patricia tells everyone that it was the worst year of our marriage and I’ll agree with that to the extent that I won’t even attempt to make a joke about it.

Proof positive of what a fuck-up Ingo was is that Tripper was able to do in less than thirty days what Ingo couldn’t do in seven months.

And it’s not his fault. It’s mine for putting up with it. For not educating myself more on the home sales process and for thinking he knew something I didn’t when it came to selling houses [3].

Lesson learned.

Money gone.

Me Pissed off.

Stop writing like Tonto now. Me part Algonquin. Offend self.

ENTIRE CONTENTS COPYRIGHT 2009 by Shaun McLaughlin

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[1] And I say that with all sincerity.

[2] I say it every night when I’m going to sleep in the hopes I won’t wake up and want to kill someone.

[3] Because, you know, it was what he did.

The Characters So Far...

Patricia: My lovely, talented, indulgent and patient wife.

Lauren: My 12 year old daughter (now 13) who, like, isn't a valley girl, okay? (Yes, they talk that way). Lived in the same house her entire life. Saw snow once. Drove away from it.

Connor: My 9 year old (now 10) son. His heros are Dr. Who and Roy Rogers. Could I be any more proud?

Ingo Inept: Our first realtor who gave us advice on how to set up the house, how to take pictures, what needed to go and how to price it. He was almost always wrong. My best guess is that he cost us a whole pile o' money.

Tripper: Our California Preppy second realtor who took over selling the house, dropped the price and got it sold in less that 30 days. We consider him a genius.

St. Joseph: A statue buried in the front yard after 30 days on the market. Didn't do squat.

Mr. Fifteen Percent: A recently divorced man who wanted to buy the house for his ex-wife and their daughter. Came through the house four different times at four different prices. Each time he said that the price needed to be fifteen percent lower than it was.

Gravy: A really lazy pet rabbit.

Me: A freelance television producer with a lot of credits and too much time on my hands while all this nonsense was going on.

Home Inspection -- The Final

“Well, she’s worried about this beam…”, Tripper said, continuing on about the apparent danger in the garage.

“Stuff’s been up there since before the Martin Luther King Day Earthquake, Tripper,” I said. “The only time I went up there was to pull a door down to see if I could fit it on to take the kids’ door with us.”

“What?”

“We’ve been measuring their height on the door since they could stand. Seemed like a good thing to take with us.”

He looked through the papers on the house sale agreement.

“I don’t think we have an exclusion on that.”

“It wouldn’t work,” I said. “The door didn’t fit and it started to seem like too big a thing. But the point is, I pulled the door down and nothing fell.”

“Well, we’ll have to get it looked at.”

“The agent’s trying to screw us, isn’t she?”

“Well, she’s…”

“It’s okay. Just say it. We’re in a corner and she’s trying to take advantage of us.”

“They’ve got someone coming out to look at the garage. Okay?”

I knew he was serious, because he didn’t say “right?”

The next morning I went out and looked at the garage. Not only was it not dangerous and not a part of the frame, what was there was something someone had clearly added later as part of an elaborate[1] network to increase storage space.

All the guys who came by to do the work on the house[2] were really nice and efficient. The guy who was replacing the toilet seemed to have a little trouble fitting the new one on, but he did it.

As I mentioned earlier, it was a low-flow toilet, necessary in a city that was built on a desert in a state with little naturally occurring fresh water sources and in the midst of a ten-year drought --- you can’t waste a lot of water on poo. But still, no comforting “flush, gurgle-gurgle-gurgle, whine whine whine (as the water re enters the tank), THUMP”. No. Now there was a super-efficient “Whhhoooopsh”, like an airlock opening in a sixties sci fi movie follow by an ultra-quiet “fooooooo” of the water refilling which then just --- stopped. The first few times I had to go and check to make sure it hadn’t overfilled onto the floor because I was used to the thumping noise. The first time I checked, I noticed the hole.

There were a lot of wacky things in the house. The bathroom counter had been done in a heavy white tile with a shelf running the length of the wall. I think this had been done for --- well, I actually have no idea why anyone would do something like this. It was a great place for geegaws and knickknacks --- maybe that scented candle you kept in the bathroom to mask --- you know. But it was right under neat a towel rack that was right underneath a linen cabinet, so that seemed to be a perfect prescription for combustion.

The toilet itself sat right below that and after they put the new one in I noticed the hole.

Yes. The hole.

About three feet long and maybe six inches high. A hole that led into the space between the walls and down into the crawl space below. Apparently, when they had put the original toilet in, they had cut into the wall to fit the toilet in[3]. And that had been two toilets and several droughts ago.

So the new, ultra-low flow toilet with pressurized flush-o-matic airflow[4]left a hole in the wall.

Well, the buyer would have to hear about that.

Then the guy came to look at the “very dangerous” situation in the garage. I can’t testify that he giggled, but I can say that he made two hundred dollars for some pretty easy work. And I left the old doors, carpet remnants and brass bed up there. Never had to move them.

Arrangements to move all the stuff were surprisingly easy. Made three calls. One gave me a quote over the phone[5]. Two sent people out. One was a woman celebrating her thirty-fifth year of estimating moves. All of them gave me prices about one-third of what I was expecting to pay. I hired the company with the woman celebrating her thirty-fifth year. She was the nicest, the most interesting and could really use the skin resurfacing I think the commission would get her. She looked like leather, which is what thirty-five years of driving around in eight to ten UV status gets you[6].

Two calls got the cars taken care of. Again, for much less that I expected, but I did cheap out on the delivery. They WOULD bring it right to your new home, but I opted to save a couple of hundred bucks and go pick it up at the local transit station.[7] Not only would they come to the house and pick up the cars, but also if you had the tracking numbers you could actually trace their progress across the country.[8]

So there was only one more moving arrangement to be made. We had to take care of…

THE THIRTY FIVE HUNDRED DOLLAR RABBIT -- NEXT

entire contents copyright 2009 by Shaun McLaughlin

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[1] And by “elaborate” I mean “amateurish”

[2] And they WERE all guys. I mean, really. Where’s feminism in the contracting arts.

[3] Or something. I really have no idea.

[4] I am making that up.

[5] Based on the size of our house. Which I thought was bizarre because we could be total hoarders. Well. Okay. We WERE total hoarders.

[6] But she didn’t have any brown spots on her face. I did. Time to go.

[7] Please resist skipping ahead to find out what the local transit station was. Some things are worth the wait.

[8] Yes. There will be humor growing out of this.

Home Inspection, Part Two

Tripper and I went over what the inspector had found. Nothing huge. But it’s continually amazing how different people in the same profession can find different things wrong with a house that you’ve been living in for twelve years and you never knew.

We knew that the plumbing was part copper/part galvanized. This was common in L.A., especially in houses that had been remodeled once or twice. You want copper plumbing, but you don’t want to rip the walls out. The problem is that if the correct connecters aren’t put on, it turns into a chemistry set and REALLY starts to corrode in a process called electrolysis – which I thought was hair removal.

We also knew that the crawlspace attic was clean – because we never went up there and it hadn’t been opened since the last house inspection. The guy who’d inspected before we bought told us it was a great storage space --- which we could have used, but with an opening in the ceiling the size and shape of a box of corn flakes, I couldn’t see how you could get much in there.

He found two leaks in the plumbing under the house, both near the washer/dryer in the kitchen and he said those were attracting termites to the old wood and cardboard stored in there.

Tripper looked at me.

“You know,” he said, “the stuff you have down there.”

“I don’t have shit down there,” I told him. “You couldn’t pay me to crawl around under there.”

“Oh.”

He looked like he didn’t believe me. I didn’t care. I just cared that this mean I needed a plumber AND an exterminator.

Visions of dollar bills with wings on them, all of them flying away, filled my head.

We’d had to have the place fumigated for termites when we’d bought it. It was on the borderline of just shooting them with some kind of electric gun[1] and tenting the whole house. I was kind of excited when it came to tenting. You have to understand that coming from Western New York, “tenting” was something you did on a camping trip, or, if you were ambitious, at a circus. When I’d first moved to California, I’d seen houses completely covered in what looked like canvas for days on end and finally figured out it was for cockroaches or termites[2]. When I was getting the house ready for sale, I found a couple of the sings they’d posted around saying, basically, “This house has been filled with really dangerous shit and we think we got it all out.”[3]

This time the only problem was some termites under the washer and they could be taken care of with some liquid. Or some powder. Or their mothers would be threatened. Something like that. No biggie.[4]

There was some dry rot – we knew that. Once again, I’d not heard of it in New York, but I guess that may have been because I wasn’t’ paying attention. Dry rot was as much a part of life in SoCal as sunscreen. We’d had some taken care of, but there was some more the inspector found.

The roof we knew had been re-roofed and would need a new roof in a few years. We knew that.

The air conditioner/heater was exactly what we knew it to be. Damn thing never broke when we had a home warranty.

But there was one thing…

A beam in the garage ---- THAT WAS ABOUT TO FALL!

OH.

MY.

GOD!

Danger! Danger!

“What?” I said.

“Yeah. She called me really concerned about this. Right? She said there’s a beam in the garage that’s cracked, part of the frame. And there’s stuff stored up there and that there shouldn’t be stuff stored up there because it’s putting a strain on the frame and that’s probably why it cracked.”

I just stared at him. I was hearing what he was saying, but it wasn’t making much sense.

“Do you know what they’re talking about?” He asked.

“Yes.”

“She’s really worried about it.”

“She’s nuts.”

“I don’t know. She thinks…”

“Tripper, that’s been like that since we bought the house.”

“Well, do you have a lot of stuff stored up there?”

“There’s stuff that’s been up there since the original owner. There’s scraps from this carpet,” I said, pointing at the floor. “There are the original interior doors and the doors that originally went on the kid’s closets. From BEFORE we owned the house, in case you think I’d pick out that horrible faux wood door. There’s a brass bed frame. When we moved in there was a ton of stuff in the garage. When we bought it, it got left. There was a cheap black lacquer vanity. There were old family pictures of a 1964 T-bird and someone we had no idea who it was. But the pictures were cool, so we kept those. There was also a torah and Tefillin in there.”

“What?”

“A torah and tefillin. Do you know what those are?”

“I’m Jewish.”

“You could be Reform.”

This didn’t get him to crack a smile.

---

[1] Which seemed very “Captain Video” to me.

[2] I guess I may have seen buildings in Manhattan tented when I was living there, but I was drinking a lot and it was the heyday of performance art. I may have just thought it was Cristo’s house.

[3] Liability insurance. What can I tell you?

[4] More dollars flying away, though.

Entire contents copyright 2009 by Shaun McLaughlin