$1.98 (And Free Samples!)

ProetryPlace Blog 13 $1.98 (And Free Samples)

    I called old friends a few days ago. They live in the North, and we have not seen them in several years. Just an occasional email or late night phone call, but we hadn’t heard from them recently. At our age you start to worry when the risqué humor or political commentary doesn’t arrive for a few weeks or months. Did I say something offensive last time? Are they out of town? Is he in the hospital again? With a few old friends that has been the end of it. No further contact. No forwarding address.

    Turns out my Yankee friends are fine. They had been at their summer cottage. He said he had just resigned his position as secretary/treasurer at the annual POA meeting. He had been elected once and re-elected 13 times to the one-year job. He said for the first time in 14 years he was short on balancing the books. $1.98. Kept him up at night rummaging records, recalculating, cranking up computer files.

    I have managed the family finances for years, since long before PCs, online banking and even electronic calculators. The first calculator I bought was from Texas Instruments roughly 50 years ago. It was the size of a small shoebox and plugged into a wall outlet. It cost $99.95 and could add, subtract, multiply and divide. Amazing, but  I didn’t always trust it and often checked the results with my own manual calculation. In the end, the numbers agreed to the penny, no matter how long it took.

    As to my friend, I know he is an excellent record keeper. We worked together once in research. My forte was designing and analyzing experiments. My weakness was keeping good records. I relied on him to carefully record our work in his notebook, and it was always there.

    Then I would scrutinize the data to draw some meaning from it—enter it into a spreadsheet, plot it on a graph, subject it to statistical analysis, design equations or macros to look for correlations or dependencies between variables. The data didn’t always yield to my analysis, and I would rely on qualitative descriptions in my reports. That’s when my writing skills got a boost, but I liked messing with the numbers best.

    I still do our books and taxes at home. Even with Quicken and TurboTax, balancing the family check book each month and computing our annual contribution to the Federal Treasury have become odious agonies. A fairly competent theoretical mathematician (Albert Einstein) once said that the income tax was the hardest thing in the world to understand. I still make sure the numbers add up exactly on our tax return, but if I am a few cents off from the checkbook bank statement, it is not worth my precious time or tranquility to resolve the error. A quick note—balance adjustment—solves it in seconds.

    My friend’s $1.98? I was thinking of sending him a check for $2.00 and telling him to keep the change, but he found the omission and is sleeping nights again.

    That’s my two cents worth for now.

Now here are your free samples from Another Season Spent, the poetry of Richard Allen Anderson,

available online from Amazon, Barnes and Noble and Vabella Publishing.

April Anathema

The taxman cometh each spring of the year

demanding cruel tribute. (For what? I’m not clear.)

I’ll give up my share—but not one cent more—

enticing deductions like a skilled matador,

while crunching the numbers like a financier.

I’ve read the 1040 instructions, oblique and austere,

completed all worksheets—incredibly queer,

plugged in numbers ten hours or more

till blood pressure readings staggered and soared

like the national debt.  The taxman cometh!

Forms, schedules and records litter the floor—

one big I-R-S pain in the pos-ter-i-or.

Ignoring one detail would be cavalier,

Sure to be found by a tax scrutineer

sniffing deep in a mainframe like a Black Labrador.

The terrible deadline draws crucially near

and thoughts of an audit send shivers of fear.

Maybe I need some professional help

to fend off or deal with that Labrador’s yelp

when April is here and the taxman cometh.

Address Book

A ragged paperback,

four and a half by seven, divided alphabetically

with space for names, addresses and telephone numbers,

a palimpsest of frequent change, notes and cruel cancellations.

Some faded entries,

used for regular communication

or even just at special times,

come readily to memory’s recall.

With others, we take some moments pause

to think—now who on earth was that?

Too many are neglected and unused.

Marginal reminders on scarred and blemished pages

signal bridges and crossroads—the Rubicons of Life—

birthdays, anniversaries, weddings and divorce.

Turning page to tattered page

a special sign appears, prompting

a quiet utterance or a sharp intake of breath—

the thin and poignant pencil line that deletes

without erasing: out of service, due to death.

Or we might laugh.

“We should replace this book, this paleography,”

we say, “start a fresh one, clean and new.”

Then slowly, like the reluctant fading of the light

at eventide, we fold the covers closed, once more.

Richard Allen Anderson     < : - )>     Http://richardandersonblogs.blogspot.com