Walking Without Rhythm

I talked about Ripples in the previous post A New Year. This blog of mine is supposed to be primarily my stories, so here is an example of the ‘ripples’ concept as it related to my life. Ripples are not really a cause-and-effect thing but more like gentle waves that reach far beyond the time and space they occur.

In December 1953 Dill worked for Mr. Wesnofske in Riverhead scheduling the trucks that delivered potatoes from the Riverhead farms. Long Island was a huge supplier of potatoes all across the country. Among other things, Dill kept the books both receivables and payables; essentially running the business. The boss had at one time, in front of a customer, blamed Dill for something which he himself had screwed up. Dill told him don’t you ever do that again. Well, wouldn’t you know it, on that cold, snowy December day it happened again. (( I never knew the particulars, only the story as I was told)). So Dill punched the boss, told him he quit, and marched out of the office into that snowy day. Only then did he remember that he had gotten a ride to work since his car needed some type of repair. He walked the 2 miles back to his rented apartment where his wife Pat and 5-month-old son (me) were and told them what went down. Soon after, Pat’s father came out, drove them back to Williston Park, and they settled in living with her parents. I never thought about it until now, but her father must have thought what kind of jerk did she marry? Or maybe he thought what a great guy for standing up for himself. I’ll never know. Anyway, very soon afterward, my father went to work for her father in a newly created Formica wholesale distribution business. In a few years Dill and Pat with their now 2 sons bought a house in Baldwin and raised their family there, adding two more sons along the way.

OK, buckle up here comes the fast forward part.

So I grew up in Baldwin from the late fifties, through the sixties and seventies. Pretty uneventful childhood playing outside mostly with a lot of neighborhood kids; very safe town where everyone looked out for everyone else. I was a pretty good student until about 7th or 8th grade. I had adventures and misadventures, never got into any real serious trouble, by high school would go out drinking with my friends on weekends, had a few ‘serious’ girlfriends, smoked a fair amount of pot (it was much milder back them), graduated high school and continued working at the pizzeria where I had been for a few years already. Met a high school girl named Lucy there. Spent a lot of time at the racetrack. Eventually got a job at Doubleday in Garden City, married Lucy, and about two years after that went to work for my father making Formica countertops and learning the business my grandfather had started 30 years before. This would have been the early 80’s.

Hope you are still with me, I’ll stop the fast forward.

By 2000 I was the owner of the business. I much later found out that my mother had begged him not to sell it to me. Oh well. It had never been a very profitable business and had much debt accumulated over the past years. Interest only payments, so fairly manageable but in hindsight was very much a ponzi scheme unless it became very profitable which, again with hindsight, was very unlikely. I guess mom knew. In October of 2008 the economy as we knew it collapsed. The great financial crisis we call it now. Credit dried up. Buy now pay later basically ended. My biggest customer was Home Depot and sales dropped about 80%. My loans with the banks went from interest only to 5 year terms. Long story short, I was losing thousands of dollars every month and had no money in the bank. I put all my savings in, all of my 135K IRA, sold my coin and silver collection, and about 40K of “our” money although it was always in Lucy’s name. By 2011 I went out of business owing, between banks and suppliers, about 150K. I was in my 50’s dead broke and unemployed. It took about 11 years to pay it all back. This situation defined my life for the last 17-18 years. It greatly exacerbated and brought to the surface a depression which had been mostly manageable for many, many years before any of this. This has been the overriding factor, this lack of money, my failure to prevent it and my often times very obvious depression, that has resulted in the ‘less of a man’ that my family knows. I feel like I did not become who I was supposed to be.

If you have hung in there and read this far, I greatly appreciate you. I hope it does not come across like a whiny ‘woe is me’ story. Wait. What? Oh, the ripples. I almost forgot. It occurs to me that my entire financial situation and all the resultant things that impacted my life and family never occurs if my father didn’t punch that guy a few weeks before Christmas in 1953.