I love my mother to pieces. Not only did
she give me my life, but she saved it many times along the way.
But mama almost done me wrong, in a real
bad way. She did it out of love, but nevertheless, she almost done me wrong.
Mama wanted me to be an accountant. She
was fooled back when I was a little baseball freak and I’d just discovered the
joy of learning how to calculate battling averages and earned run averages. She
saw the pages on which I did numerous calculations and I guess to her it looked
like some elaborate equation on a blackboard at MIT.
So my mother said to me, “You have a way
with numbers,” and she suggested I become an accountant. My mother was wise.
She knew that being a crippled adult was going to be expensive for me. She knew
that someday I'd probably have to pay for people to do the stuff she was doing
for me for free, like dragging my crippled ass in and out of bed. So I’d better
have a damn good job.
I was only about 10 years old at the time
so I was too young to have thought much about what I would do when mom couldn’t
do all the things she did anymore. But I wasn’t too young to feel that I’d rather
be drawn and quartered by horses and have my eyes poked out than become an
accountant.
And as I’ve gotten older, that aversion
has grown stronger. I hate keeping track of my own money, let alone anyone
else’s. I don’t care how much money they want to pay me to keep track of
theirs.
And even if I had been capable of
rationally weighing my future options at age 10, it probably wouldn’t have made
any difference. If I would have considered the proposition that I could well
end up broke and homeless with no one to drag my crippled ass in and out of bed
if I didn’t become an accountant, I probably still would’ve decided to take my
chances and hope for the best.
And that’s what I did. And I’ve gotten by
pretty good so far. Mama was right that being a crippled adult would be very
expensive. But the answer was the opposite of becoming an accountant. The
answer was socialism. Yes, over about four decades now I’ve had to pay a bunch
of people to do all the stuff for me that mama used to do. But the wages of the people I hire are paid
by public funds through a state program. I just submit to a state agency a
record of the hours my workers spent dragging my crippled ass in and out of bed
and doing all the stuff for me that mama used to do, and the state sends them a
payment every two weeks.
And here I am today, still going. And
I’ve managed to do it without becoming an accountant. I’m quite proud of that.
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