Herbie and I were discussing why we write.
“I want people to say, ‘That Bob sure is cool,’” I said.
“I want people to say, ‘That Herbie sure is smart,’” he said.
Maybe everything people do is to deliver a message.
Like, why would anyone drive a Tesla, except so people would say, “That guy sure is rich.”
We were in L.A. a couple decades ago and on the freeway from the airport we were passed by a Rolls Royce convertible. I had never seen anything like it. Before we got to the hospital, I saw three more.
A few years ago, a Rolls showed up three blocks from our house. It was the only one I’d seen in Berkeley in 40-years. I kept hoping someone would fire bomb it. The fucker’s license plate was MYDOCRX.
Which wasn’t as insufferable as the Porsche Carrera Adele spotted: EATCAKE.
xxx
In 1965 my parents bought a two-bedroom, one bath cottage in Longport, at the other end of Absecon Island from Atlantic City. “The Irish Riviera,” people called it.
On their street, the island was one block wide, ocean on one side, bay on the other. Whether my father fished from the jetty into the ocean or crossed the dunes and cast into the bay, he was not five-minutes from my mom and the rose bushes she was tending.
In 1976, New Jersey legalized casino gambling within A.C., and property values sky-rocketed. Developers filled the vacant lots, flattened the dunes, and filled in the tidelands. People bought houses and tore them down to build mansions and newer people tore their mansions down to build bigger ones. The two-story house at the southernmost point of the island, a former Coast Guard station, was built from logs, like a turn-of-the-century hunting lodge, and the couple who lived there had an orphaned seal which they had nursed to health after it washed ashore. The house was one-of-a-kind and provided the area with as much quirky character as Lucy the Elephant. You can see it in Atlantic City, when Burt Lancaster visits Susan Sarandon there, its disarray attributed to it being under renovation, though in actuality, at the time of filming, developers were tearing it down to put three new houses on the lot, and the couple with the seal had moved to Maine.
On one of our last visits, Adele and I took an after dinner walk. One beachfront mansion had its own pool. Fifty yards from the ocean and they needed a pool. Another had a four-car garage in which the least expensive model was a Lexus. And these were homes whose owners lived in them three months of the year.
xxx
All good reasons to vote for Elizabeth Warren.