Tag Archives: inheritance

Cuckoo Clock

Cuckoo clock: (n) a wall or shelf clock, often carved and decorated, that announces the hours by a sound like the call of the cuckoo

For a very brief season, I had some money.

I did not earn it. The finance was acquired through an inheritance.

It was annoying.

Money is like a parakeet you invite into your house and no matter how hard you try to shut out the sound of the tweeting, it abides.

No matter how much I attempted to envision my money as having a station at the bank, I kept trying to bring it home for the holidays.

Yes.

I wanted to spend it.

I especially wanted to buy things I would not normally buy, but would show others that in buying them, I expressed my opulence.

In everyday English, I wanted my money to brag for me.

On some days, I sat in my small office and thought about items I could purchase that would make me seem prosperous, worldly and well-traveled.

On one such occasion, a cuckoo clock came to mind.

I had always been enamored with them. The idea of a mechanism telling time while also having a little bird pop out of a door on the hour, singing a song to let me know that sixty minutes had passed, enchanted me. How adorable.

I became obsessed.

I quickly found out that they were expensive. But hell—wasn’t that the point?

I learned that the best ones came from Germany, so I suddenly became very patriotic and decided to “buy American.”

I found the best American-made cuckoo clock that was available to be purchased by a mortal such as myself.

It arrived, I opened it up, it looked beautiful, I read the instructions, had others read them with me, so we could all come to a consensus on how to get our cuckoo clock to cuckoo.

After all this was done, we hung it on the wall.

It never worked right. Not even once.

Oh, it would cuckoo—but it would cuckoo like it was cuckoo.

You know what I mean?

It was a clock that had a whim. Apparently, it disregarded the importance of time, and the bird came out to do its show whenever the clock felt like it should.

It still looked beautiful, but if people visited for more than an hour, they became aware that I had purchased a clock with a wacko bird.

 

funny wisdom on words that begin with a C

 

Broker

j-r-practix-with-border-2

Broker: (n) a person who buys and sells goods or assets for others.

There’s a certain male body type, where there’s enough blubber in the belly to put a lot of pink in the cheeks.

Such was Mick. He was my broker.Dictionary B

Now, before you get all impressed and everything, it was a very temporary situation in my life, when an inheritance enabled me to have money to invest if I so desired.

I was intrigued.

So I went to see a broker. I happened to land in Mick’s office.

He was a delightful young man–straight out of college–and had certainly aspired to something larger than his six-by-eight-foot office space. I was never sure what Mick wanted to be, but was pretty darned positive it was not a broker.

I explained to him that I felt the benefit of this influx of cash was to be able to live off the interest of the money, therefore not needing, for a season, to “labor in the fields.”

Now, Mick was new at this–so I was fairly certain that he had no idea whether my request was plausible or not, but he also had no intention of having me leave his cubicle without choosing him as my “guy.”

So with all of his plump self and ruby cheeks, he said, “Sure.”

It was perfect. He wanted to lie and I wanted to believe him.

But the truth is, the monthly interest from my investments never quite covered my personal lifestyle. Even though I was not angry at Mick because of the shortage, after two or three months he stopped taking my phone calls.

The experience did help me come to the conclusion that money is only valuable when it’s working.

When it lays around waiting for opportunity, like everything else in life, it is soon unemployed.

 

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