Crazy Numbers

It wasn't that long ago that I sheepishly entered the senior partner of my law firm's office to ask for a raise. It was 1988, I was two years out of law school, and I was making $38,000.00 per year. Wifey was pregnant, and we knew we were going to lose her salary for awhile (she was making close to $50,000/year --little did I know that "for awhile" would come to mean "forever"), and I had been offered $45,000 per year by another firm.

I told my boss, Calvin F. David, that I truly loved my job, knew that I was making a good deal of money for the firm, and that the additional $7,000 per year would mean a lot as I supported my growing family. Cal, as he liked to be called, began a didactic that became legion among my friends. "Young man --you are at the equivalent of the Sorbonne. You have been offered a small raise to go work at the equivalent of a community college. Would you leave the Sorbonne for a few dollars?"

Fortunately, even at the age of 26 I had a highly developed bullshit and pompousity detector, and I left his office, immediately returned to mine, and phoned the other firm to take the job. Calvin, one of the Waspiest Jews of all time, married a rich divorcee, took the money he had made from years of frugality with his employees, and moved to Italy a few years later. I never wrote to thank him.

Anyway, that financial turning point flooded back into my mind yesterday as I opened my real estate tax bill for this Ponderosa Ranch where I live. The Florida legislature reduced property taxes, so this year I'll pay a paltry $22,000.00! How has this happened? How did I go from a guy worried and obsessed about a $7,000.00 raise to one who pays the County three times that amount just to live in my house?

It boggles my mind.

As I thought back to 1988, I recall being very happy. Daughter #1 would arrive in November, and we brought her home to our house, all 1400 square feet of it, in a neighborhood of rather colorful characters (a white supremacist small engine mechanic who said he had "no problem with most Jews," but "major problems with negroes and Spanish," a nightclub owner who commuted to work in Cincinatti, and brough home a gorgeous Asian stripper to live in his Miami house, and a Metro Dade fireman/ Vietnam vet who had to shoot his commanding officer in the jungle, and jumped out of bed at night and held a knife to his wife's throat whenever a helicopter flew overhead).

I remember gorgeous winter days riding my bicycle with daughter #1 in the baby seat, and I'd feel the gentle bump in my back as she fell asleep and slumped forward, having inherited her mother's habit of sleeping in all moving conveyances. I remember playing with her and our black lab Midnight, who burst with energy, along with his sidekick Alfred the cocker spaniel.

Today's a day like those in my cherished memories, dry and cool with dazzling sunlight.

In other words, the money's really NOT relevant. I'll just shut up and pay.