Investment advice from the fifth dimension

I got an email from my sister who’s not really my sister the other day, which is a relationship sufficiently out of the ordinary to call for some explanation. Barbara and her family lived next door to us in the Bronx, back in the days when Ike was the President of this our Great Republic and all was right in the world, except for the usual suspects like the Middle East, which was as intractable then as it is now. Barbara was a teenager then and whenever Mom and Dad had to go out, she’d come across the hall to baby-sit my brothers and me. Her own mother was in the last stages of lymphatic cancer then, so Barbara and my mother became very close during what had to have been an incredibly trying time.  Barbara always called our mother Mommy and we (my brothers and I) always thought of her as our cool older sister. She took us to the park and the playground and to the movies too; I still remember seeing Goldfinger and Thunderball—I was big on James Bond then; I had the action figures and everything—and Barbara took us all to see Mary Poppins when it opened at Radio City Music Hall in 1964, a year, I should point out to the younger readers, when there were no dinosaurs living in the New York City sewers or anywhere else on Earth, except for Philadelphia, Mississippi, where the shock wave from the asteroid hadn’t arrived yet. 

As time passed, Barbara’s fate was the fate of all cool older sisters: she went to college, she got married, and then she moved away and started a family of her own. We stayed in touch, though; she called her Mommy at least once a week, no matter where she was, and when we needed advice, we’d call her and talk to see what she thought. And we would listen to what she had to say, because her advice was always sound and because she was our big sister, and we loved her and her good opinion was important to us. 

So, it shouldn’t have surprised me that I got an email from her the other day advising me to invest in hotels in the greater New Delhi area.  Like my mother, Barbara was always on the lookout for a good deal, although the sudden interest in foreign real estate puzzled me. She’d never shown any interest in the subject before she died last year of the same kind of lymphatic cancer that killed her mother in 1959 and I wondered why she’d developed such an interest now. But I suppose being dead broadens one’s horizons in much the same way that travel does, and getting investment advice from one’s dead relatives via email certainly makes more sense that having to go to séances run by Madame Griselda, who tells her customers that she is a Hungarian Gypsy and who is, in reality, a third generation Italian American from Secaucus, New Jersey, or cracking out the old ouija board and wondering what the spirits are trying to tell you. Email is a much more efficient form of communication than mediums, ouija boards, or even the occasional burning bush, even if burning bushes have a really good spam filter.

And getting investment advice from the dead certainly makes more sense than getting advice from some Wall Street financial type. With the latter you have to spend a good amount of time wondering if they are trying to get you to invest because it’s good for your portfolio or whether they want you to invest in one thing or another because they intend to make a fortune shorting the stock once they’ve gotten enough suckers to take the bait. With your dead relatives, on the other hand, you can rest assured that they have your best interests at heart, assuming, of course, that they weren’t organ donors and their heart is now in some checkout clerk at a Wal-Mart just outside of Boise, Idaho. It’s not like the dead have any interest in earning sales commissions or shorting stocks or have someplace to spend the money once they’ve earned it. There’s a good reason why there are no good delicatessens or Citroen car dealerships in American cemeteries and the steadfast immobility of the deceased labor market probably has something to do with that.

Now, I know what you’re probably thinking. We live in a cynical age and I know that you’re thinking that the person on the other end of those emails is not my sister who’s not really my sister, but some subcontinental digital goniff who hacked into her account and does not know that I am on to him and his thieving ways. I would be a terrible person if I even considered this idea for even a moment. If I did, then I would be the kind of person who thinks that someone who did something like this is the verminous spawn of a syphilitic latrine cleaner of the Bhangi caste and a leprous sow, a piece of filth who enjoys inserting razor blades into his own penis in order to alleviate the pain of his baseball-sized kidney stones and telling people that if they like their doctor, they can keep them. Well, maybe that last one is an untruth too far, but you get my point. We may live in a cynical age, but I refuse to allow this to affect my happy and joyous outlook on life or to wish my older sister who isn’t my sister all the success in the world in her new career in finance and real estate.

BAD TIMES IN THE HALLS OF POWER: Scandal, yes, loathsome and always dreaded scandal has come to our now not so happy little burg, and I find it shocking and more than a little distasteful to have to report such reprehensible goings on to the public. But truth will out, as Thomas Edison didn’t say either before or after inventing the electric light bulb—he didn’t even say something vaguely similar to that, if you want to know the truth, although he was heard complaining about an intense case of flatulence that made his intestines sound like an amateur tuba quintet playing something by Vivaldi for the better part of a week—and if you do not hear such news from an impartial observer like myself you may hear the news from scandalmongers, gossips, and possibly even such vile creatures as life insurance salesmen, and who knows what type of spin they will put on the story in order to make it sound even worse than it is.

I will grant you, however, that it is difficult, at best, to imagine a set of circumstances in which someone could make the police arresting the mayor of our fair micropolis for assaulting a real estate developer with a fully charged fire extinguisher during a meeting of the City Council sound worse that it really was, but I am sure that someone with enough imagination could do just that if they really wanted to. And I would be remiss in my duties here if I did not point out that the mayor was provoked almost beyond the limits of human endurance, and that, frankly, both the developer and the nuns had it coming. The facts of the matter are these: last Thursday, at the semimonthly meeting of the solons who govern our fair community, the question of what to do with the nuns came up for the millionth time. The good sisters are leaving us—their order has decided to sell their convent and move them to another house further upstate—and so the question of what to do with the land the convent now stands on has turned the usual placid flow of municipal politics into a raging torrent of hatred and recrimination. One faction is for turning the whole area into a park, another wants to sell the land for development. I will not bore the reader with the ins and outs of this dispute; suffice it to say that the mayor wanted a new city park and the rest of the board wanted development and the mayor lost this argument big time, and I mean big time; he lost this vote by a wider margin than we denizens of the egregious mold pit lost the vote for a new library, and I didn’t think that was possible in any city-wide election unless the dead voted too, which they are sometimes wont to do in this neck of the woods. Our happy little burg is a very inclusive community, unwilling to damage the patriotic self-esteem of even the most deceased of our citizens, and so we are one of the few places in the United States that can boast that many of the same people who voted for John Quincy Adams also voted for George W. Bush twice; family is just that important to us here.

Defending the honor of his family was, in my opinion, the root cause of the events that marred the civil calm our citizens have grown accustomed to. At last Thursday’s meeting the developer, a thoroughly unlikable man with pretensions to obnoxiousness, if not outright swinishness, brought up the fact, as if we didn’t already know it, that he had bought the convent and wanted to start building his cookie cutter McMansions right away, and would the mayor therefore stop throwing legal obstacles in his way at every opportunity? The mayor denied right away that he was doing this, which, I must point out in a spirit of fairness, is codswallop piled on poppycock topped with balderdash. The mayor may have lost the vote over the land’s fate, but he’s been strangling the project in so much red tape ever since that everyone knows he’s just waiting for the developer to give up and move on to other projects. Most people either know or can find out for themselves that the German Army shot the last extant aurochs on this planet during the invasion of Poland in 1939, no doubt finding the beasts a welcome change from a diet of sardines and bratwurst, and as a result the developer should not have to provide an environmental impact statement detailing his project’s impact on the aurochs’ native habitat.

The developer, who along with being disagreeable in the extreme, is also a fairly excitable guy, lost his temper at this bald-faced departure from the facts as everyone knows them and began shouting at the mayor, liberally peppering his threats of legal action with a stream of invective that veered wildly from the merely libelous to the scatological, the profane, the blasphemous, and the obscene, sometimes combining all four at once. The mayor took the abuse with the stoic aplomb that more than one opponent has commented on, and then the developer brought up the mayor’s wife. Doing this is always a mistake. The mayor’s wife is a very nice woman these days and it does no one any good to bring up events from thirty years ago that really weren’t anyone’s fault; it’s not like anyone involved died as a result, except the goldfish; but the mayor is understandably touchy about the subject and those of us who live here understand his feelings and never bring the matter up amongst ourselves except when we are really bored and have nothing else to do. Having some smarmy loudmouth developer from out of town bring the subject up, and in a public forum, no less, was just too much for the mayor to bear, and he went sailing over the table and into low earth orbit to defend his wife’s honor, such as it is, in what was probably not the most graceful leap in the long annals of local politics.

Having gone up, the mayor then came down, and many witnesses told the reporters the next day that it was a good thing the mayor landed on the nuns sitting in the first row or he might have really hurt himself; the sisters are doing well, except for Sister Mary Margaret, who bore the full impact of the mayor’s nearly three hundred pound carcass landing on her lap. She is still in intensive care, but on the whole she held up much better than you would expect an eighty-five year old woman would to such an impact. The mayor pushed the developer up against the wall and then grabbed the fire extinguisher off the wall and tried to bash the real estate reprobate over the head with the thing. At this point, some members of the local gendarmerie came rushing into the City Council chamber in the not so nick of time and pulled the two men apart, arresting the mayor for assault and battery. They may have arrested the developer as well; I haven’t heard of any charges against him, though; being a first rate jerk is not yet a crime here in the Vampire State—if it were the state would as empty as Montana.

And that is all there is to the matter. I find having to recount such vile tales disagreeable in the extreme, for if those who lead us think so little of themselves and their obligations to the people who voted them into office, what hope is there for the ordinary citizen who only wants to lead a simple life free from civil strife? But in a democracy, the public must have the unvarnished truth, so that it can make wise decisions about the issues of the day and the people they send to the halls of power to represent them. If this screed helps the ongoing American experiment in democracy advance in any way, I will be satisfied. And no, I am not going to tell you about the damn goldfish.