February 7, 2008--Snowbirding--Money, Money
Yesterday, at the Owl, while sitting at the counter waiting for our breakfast orders to arrive, while still attempting to distill meaning and direction from Super Tuesday’s election results, slipping onto the stool to Rona’s left was Danny ____ , Delray Beach’s most successful optician. Which means that he makes lots of money from his eyeglass store in the Delray Plaza Mall.
Without even a nod of hello, he launched into a monologue about his frustrations. “Look,” he said, “you think I like what I do?” Without waiting for a response, which for us was fine since we hadn’t yet inhaled much caffeine and were half asleep after having stayed up half the night to get the results from New Mexico, “I hate it. Sure I’m makin’ lots of money. I have a nice four bedroom house on the Intracoastal, three kids in private school, I pay for my father who’s in the old age home, and my wife doesn’t work.”
He was all sweated up at 8:30 in the morning he was so agitated. Rona tried to get an empathetic word in edgewise, but he ignored her gesture and ranted on. “What am I doin’ this for? So I can be the richest guy in the cemetery? And, by the way, that’ll never be me. Though you can make good money selling eyeglasses to old ladies, you never can do as well as those hedge fund guys with their mansions over there on the beach. Why there’s one guy buildin’ a palace, 20,000 square feet or whatever, just north of Atlantic Beach. But don’t get me wrong, he’s a nice guy. Coaches my son’s baseball team, bought all of them uniforms, and the best equipment. If he was sittin’ here on this chair right next to you,” he gestured toward me, “you wouldn’t know he’s worth, what, $200 million.”
I whispered, “That sounds like how much he made this year”; but Danny ignored me too.
“Can you believe it? If you got the time you’ll understand in a minute what I mean and why I’m so crazy that I could move in with my father who has dementia, or whatever they call it. The lucky bastard. He hasn’t a clue as to what’s goin’ on in the world. To tell you the truth I could use some of that.”
Our orders had arrived and both Rona and I took to trying to ignore him. We like to think of ourselves as sympathetic people, but we didn’t want our food to get cold. He didn’t seem to notice or care. Ignoring our new focus on the poached eggs on toast, he pressed on. “What I mean to say is that I’ve had it with these people.” I wasn’t sure if he was referring to the Owl’s regulars. If so, we would not want to be seen to be too sympathetic to this blanket condemnation. Thus we, as if choreographed, simultaneously lowered our heads even closer to our plates and stared directly into the yokes of the eggs.
“Let me tell you something.” He leaned close to Rona so he wouldn’t be overheard though he had been speaking so loudly that all other conversation at the breakfast counter had come to a halt. All eyes, I suspected, were riveted on Danny.
“Yesterday, just yesterday, I had a store full of people, all of which were complaining to me about why sunglasses have to cost $300, and I was tryin’ to explain to them about how well made those are that come from Italy and how the dollar has declined and it costs me more to buy the frames. I’m halfway into convincing this fat guy from one of the gated communities, when this hundred-year-old woman with her walker pushes her way up to me and breaks right into my pitch as if I’m not talkin’ to somebody.
“She whines in my face, ‘My husband died last week and we just buried him yesterday.’ This I need to hear when I’m working on a big sale. ‘You remember him, Phil Wallace? He was such a sweet little thing.’ To tell you the truth, they all look alike to me. So I just ignored her hoping she would wait her turn, or better go away. I didn’t need to hear any of the gory details. She just planted her husband in the ground and I knew she wouldn’t be buying sunglasses for herself. Believe me, I know these people.
“‘I see you don’t remember him,’ she wouldn’t go away, ‘but he was in here less than three months ago, just before they took him to the hospital, and he bought these eyeglasses from you.’ She pulled a pair from her pocketbook. They were a cheap pair, maybe I charged him a hundred and a half for the frames.
“‘He hardly ever used them. He was so sick before he died. We didn’t even take them with us to the hospital. With a stroke like the one he had he wouldn’t be doing too much reading. Oh, how he loved the New York Times,’ she said as if I new or cared.
“I was growing exasperated with the whole thing and knew soon I’d be hearing his whole life story. I thought I’d throw up if she pulled out pictures of her great-grandchildren. I’ve sent hem all. So I said, to tell you the truth to get rid of her, ‘OK, what can I do for you, Mrs. Walters?’ ‘Wallace,’ she said, correctly me all school-teachery. ‘Walters, Wallace. It’s all the same to me.’ I was getting fed up with her already. My customer, when he heard about the stroke and the hospital and the cemetery, he drifted away from me and I thought in a second he would be headin’ for the door and then stumble around in the parking lot for hour tryin’ to find his car. Let me tell you, he wasn’t in the greatest shape either. I got a big monthly nut here, what with my three kids and crazy father and a wife that trolls the malls all day. I can’t be runnin’ therapy sessions.
“So I said to her, ‘Tell me, then, what can I do for you?’ ‘I want to return Phil’s glasses.’ ‘You what?’ I think I musta screamed that. I was besides myself. She wants to return this dead guy’s glasses? What was I supposed to do with them? Sell them to another half-blind hundred-year-old? ‘I want to return them and get my money back. Look, I have the receipt. He bought them back in November, right before Thanksgiving. They cost, let me see, $242 with the tax.’
“She was lookin’ to get her money back from her dead husband’s reading glasses! My store was emptying out. I had all these bills to pay. I was having this nightmare that the word would spread around all the condos in Delray and Boca and I would be out of business because all these cheap old folks would think I’m sellin’ them glasses offa cadavers. I’d have to put my father out on the street or move in with him.
“So I said, loud enough for all my customers who were still there to hear, ‘I’ve never heard of such a terrible thing. It’s against the Health Department rules,’ I made that up—down here you could probably get away with selling the cadavers themselves if you know the right people. If you know what I mean.” He jabbed me in the ribs and winked. I kept shoveling the eggs into my mouth. But did glance over to the table where the mayor and his cronies always sit with their coffee to see if they heard that. Like all the other customers they too were starring incredulously over at Danny.
“You know,” Danny was now confiding to me all of his accumulated mercantile wisdom, “down here in Florida, no matter how much money people have, they want to keep every penny of it. What with two-for-one sales, early bird dinners, and always clipping supermarket coupons. To tell you the truth, the biggest millionaires are the worst. I could tell you a hundred more stories if I had the time; but I gotta go. I have to open early today. We’re havin’ a sale. If you’re lookin’ to replace those Ray Bans of yours, come by later today. I can take real good care of you. And I promise, they never belonged to nobody else. Living or dead!”
He roared with laughter at his own joke as he pushed his way out onto the street.
And, to tell you the truth, he’s more or less right. Why just the other day when Rona and I were in Publix because we needed hotdog rolls for our Super Bowl dinner when we saw that if you bought one package of Arnolds new whole-wheat frankfurter rolls you get one bag of their soft sandwich rolls--for free!—we didn’t hesitate. Who could resist that! So we tossed both packages into our shopping cart and all this week have been trying to figure out what to do with all our rolls.
We are making progress. The last thing we want to do is not use all of them. After all, we did get them for a good price.
Without even a nod of hello, he launched into a monologue about his frustrations. “Look,” he said, “you think I like what I do?” Without waiting for a response, which for us was fine since we hadn’t yet inhaled much caffeine and were half asleep after having stayed up half the night to get the results from New Mexico, “I hate it. Sure I’m makin’ lots of money. I have a nice four bedroom house on the Intracoastal, three kids in private school, I pay for my father who’s in the old age home, and my wife doesn’t work.”
He was all sweated up at 8:30 in the morning he was so agitated. Rona tried to get an empathetic word in edgewise, but he ignored her gesture and ranted on. “What am I doin’ this for? So I can be the richest guy in the cemetery? And, by the way, that’ll never be me. Though you can make good money selling eyeglasses to old ladies, you never can do as well as those hedge fund guys with their mansions over there on the beach. Why there’s one guy buildin’ a palace, 20,000 square feet or whatever, just north of Atlantic Beach. But don’t get me wrong, he’s a nice guy. Coaches my son’s baseball team, bought all of them uniforms, and the best equipment. If he was sittin’ here on this chair right next to you,” he gestured toward me, “you wouldn’t know he’s worth, what, $200 million.”
I whispered, “That sounds like how much he made this year”; but Danny ignored me too.
“Can you believe it? If you got the time you’ll understand in a minute what I mean and why I’m so crazy that I could move in with my father who has dementia, or whatever they call it. The lucky bastard. He hasn’t a clue as to what’s goin’ on in the world. To tell you the truth I could use some of that.”
Our orders had arrived and both Rona and I took to trying to ignore him. We like to think of ourselves as sympathetic people, but we didn’t want our food to get cold. He didn’t seem to notice or care. Ignoring our new focus on the poached eggs on toast, he pressed on. “What I mean to say is that I’ve had it with these people.” I wasn’t sure if he was referring to the Owl’s regulars. If so, we would not want to be seen to be too sympathetic to this blanket condemnation. Thus we, as if choreographed, simultaneously lowered our heads even closer to our plates and stared directly into the yokes of the eggs.
“Let me tell you something.” He leaned close to Rona so he wouldn’t be overheard though he had been speaking so loudly that all other conversation at the breakfast counter had come to a halt. All eyes, I suspected, were riveted on Danny.
“Yesterday, just yesterday, I had a store full of people, all of which were complaining to me about why sunglasses have to cost $300, and I was tryin’ to explain to them about how well made those are that come from Italy and how the dollar has declined and it costs me more to buy the frames. I’m halfway into convincing this fat guy from one of the gated communities, when this hundred-year-old woman with her walker pushes her way up to me and breaks right into my pitch as if I’m not talkin’ to somebody.
“She whines in my face, ‘My husband died last week and we just buried him yesterday.’ This I need to hear when I’m working on a big sale. ‘You remember him, Phil Wallace? He was such a sweet little thing.’ To tell you the truth, they all look alike to me. So I just ignored her hoping she would wait her turn, or better go away. I didn’t need to hear any of the gory details. She just planted her husband in the ground and I knew she wouldn’t be buying sunglasses for herself. Believe me, I know these people.
“‘I see you don’t remember him,’ she wouldn’t go away, ‘but he was in here less than three months ago, just before they took him to the hospital, and he bought these eyeglasses from you.’ She pulled a pair from her pocketbook. They were a cheap pair, maybe I charged him a hundred and a half for the frames.
“‘He hardly ever used them. He was so sick before he died. We didn’t even take them with us to the hospital. With a stroke like the one he had he wouldn’t be doing too much reading. Oh, how he loved the New York Times,’ she said as if I new or cared.
“I was growing exasperated with the whole thing and knew soon I’d be hearing his whole life story. I thought I’d throw up if she pulled out pictures of her great-grandchildren. I’ve sent hem all. So I said, to tell you the truth to get rid of her, ‘OK, what can I do for you, Mrs. Walters?’ ‘Wallace,’ she said, correctly me all school-teachery. ‘Walters, Wallace. It’s all the same to me.’ I was getting fed up with her already. My customer, when he heard about the stroke and the hospital and the cemetery, he drifted away from me and I thought in a second he would be headin’ for the door and then stumble around in the parking lot for hour tryin’ to find his car. Let me tell you, he wasn’t in the greatest shape either. I got a big monthly nut here, what with my three kids and crazy father and a wife that trolls the malls all day. I can’t be runnin’ therapy sessions.
“So I said to her, ‘Tell me, then, what can I do for you?’ ‘I want to return Phil’s glasses.’ ‘You what?’ I think I musta screamed that. I was besides myself. She wants to return this dead guy’s glasses? What was I supposed to do with them? Sell them to another half-blind hundred-year-old? ‘I want to return them and get my money back. Look, I have the receipt. He bought them back in November, right before Thanksgiving. They cost, let me see, $242 with the tax.’
“She was lookin’ to get her money back from her dead husband’s reading glasses! My store was emptying out. I had all these bills to pay. I was having this nightmare that the word would spread around all the condos in Delray and Boca and I would be out of business because all these cheap old folks would think I’m sellin’ them glasses offa cadavers. I’d have to put my father out on the street or move in with him.
“So I said, loud enough for all my customers who were still there to hear, ‘I’ve never heard of such a terrible thing. It’s against the Health Department rules,’ I made that up—down here you could probably get away with selling the cadavers themselves if you know the right people. If you know what I mean.” He jabbed me in the ribs and winked. I kept shoveling the eggs into my mouth. But did glance over to the table where the mayor and his cronies always sit with their coffee to see if they heard that. Like all the other customers they too were starring incredulously over at Danny.
“You know,” Danny was now confiding to me all of his accumulated mercantile wisdom, “down here in Florida, no matter how much money people have, they want to keep every penny of it. What with two-for-one sales, early bird dinners, and always clipping supermarket coupons. To tell you the truth, the biggest millionaires are the worst. I could tell you a hundred more stories if I had the time; but I gotta go. I have to open early today. We’re havin’ a sale. If you’re lookin’ to replace those Ray Bans of yours, come by later today. I can take real good care of you. And I promise, they never belonged to nobody else. Living or dead!”
He roared with laughter at his own joke as he pushed his way out onto the street.
And, to tell you the truth, he’s more or less right. Why just the other day when Rona and I were in Publix because we needed hotdog rolls for our Super Bowl dinner when we saw that if you bought one package of Arnolds new whole-wheat frankfurter rolls you get one bag of their soft sandwich rolls--for free!—we didn’t hesitate. Who could resist that! So we tossed both packages into our shopping cart and all this week have been trying to figure out what to do with all our rolls.
We are making progress. The last thing we want to do is not use all of them. After all, we did get them for a good price.
posted by Steven Zwerling at
7:45 PM
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