Fitz

Fitz

Copyright Catcher78 all rights reserved

Author's notes: All applicable copyright laws for this site as well as those that apply for me are in effect.

This is a story of loss that is set in the late 1990s.

It was an unusually warm night in late September. My skin had started to turn that ghostly pale white, which shines forth from most white people in Seattle. I used to say Caucasian, but since Perestroika and the fall of the Soviet state I've met Russians who exclaim that I don't look like I'm from Georgia, Armenia or Chechnya. Did anyone ever hear of Chechnya before 1995?

It hadn't started the annual nine month long rainfest yet, in fact, it had been unseasonably warm, into the mid-eighties during the day and only into the sixties at night. The maple and alder leaves were still green. I had decided it should be fall after labor day and began to focus on stuff indoors and my meager tan had faded like five year old newsprint.

It was very calm outside with no breeze to stir the cedar boughs outside my open window. I could hear the squawk of herons, cormorants and geese down by the mud beach that fronts my yard. Everywhere was green from the ground to the horizon. I have this old leather bound swivel chair at my desk by the window that I got from a used furniture store.

The leather is starting to crack. I love to sit in the chair and read. I prop my feet on one of the desk drawers which I pull out and occasionally I rock in the chair. This evening found me in my chair reading a Nero Wolfe mystery with a mason jar full of ice and Evan Williams 10 year old Bourbon and a Cuban cigar fired up. I get a guy up in Vancouver to mail me the cigars, unwrapped and labeled as Dominicans. My radio is on with the whisky and cigarette cured tones of Dave Niehaus emanating from my radio describing the course of the latest Mariner game.

The noise from the radio was just loud enough to make it to my ear. The big old wooden house was empty. I enjoyed the solitude with the book, whiskey, cigar and ballgame tickling my senses.

In my mind having heard Vin Scully, Harry Carry, Joe Garigiola, Red Barber, Mel Allen and Tony Kubek, Niehaus is in a class by himself. Baseball by radio, to the uninitiated is the greatest theatre in America delivered on a serial basis night after night for six months each year. One witnesses comedy, tragedy, conflict, despair, hope, triumph and miracle. Niehaus conveys this to us denizens of the green, rain soaked, mist-bound Northwest from the midst of the fray, he is not above it or apart from it, he is there suffering and exulting with us. He punctuates denouements with his tag line of "My oh my" delivered softly, sadly or screamed. As required by the drama.

Much as Bill Maudlin conveyed, in cartoon form, the soldier's reality of World War Two for the reader, Niehaus weaves theatre with his words. We know from the tone of his voice how the team is doing. Sometimes he'll let us know the club is not any good talent wise, without him explicitly criticizing a player or coach. I prefer to see games in-person rather than listen, but prefer to listen rather than watch on television because more of the fullness of the game is captured on radio.

My two dogs Einstein and Macarthur, Belgian Shepherd and Blue Tick Coon Hound, are both fast asleep on the throw rug close at hand. They had a good exercise earlier in the evening chasing after tennis balls that I threw across the sloping grass field in front of the mud-bay. Its beauty twofold, at low tide there are oysters, Quilcenes by species, and at high tide it was gorgeous to the eye. I paid for both by enduring nine months of rain, mist, grayness, the occasional pneumonia and the seasonal depression that comes in February after not seeing the sun since October.

I am fortysomething, widowed with grown children. Two boys and a girl that are in their twenties. My wife died needlessly from the complications arising from a routine back operation about three years ago. A pulmonary embolism, fancy words for blood clot to the heart. Three years, two months, four days and a few hours and minutes ago.

For anyone that has lost someone that you love its silly to describe the absence and despair and emptiness. I drank a lot that first year and avoided people, because they'd just poke me where it hurt without helping much. What remains of me is sort of like Niehaus's voice, a little worn with not quite the range that used to be there, and raspy at the edges. I still have and can summon the different emotions but they're not quite like the brilliantine ones that once coursed through my body.

As BB King said so eloquently, 'The thrill is gone...' I enjoy time with friends and my children and their families as much to watch them experience life without any desire for newness myself. It's sort of like waiting in a greyhound station knowing that you missed the last bus out of town.

My memory is sort of laid out like an art museum and those memories of Anna are in this darkened alcove. I can see there's some paintings on the wall but I don't want to turn the lights on for more detailed examination. Pain without physical source is hard to treat and something that is a by product of a life lived. One adjusts. I think mostly of the early years, growing up and going to school together and then when love happened for us. She and I knew each other as kids in church school. We could talk at the age of ten with no silly boy girl exchange. I was eighteen or so when I saw her at a high school basketball game with another boy, we weren't going out, we were just and always had been friends. She was her typical self, kind, funny, direct and shy and so pretty. Her dark hair shown and her eyes, oh boy. The boy seemed like a nice young man, but I felt panicked at the sight, that she was slipping away from me, and I thought that I was such an idiot. I tried not to stare at her but she caught me and waved and then came over to say hi. And now I was a veritable cauldron of fear, uncertainty and jealousy.

When she sat down I asked her if she wanted to go to the movies after Church on Sunday. And she says to me smiling, teasing me, "Is this as friends?

I swear I was as red as a strawberry, but I looked her straight in the eye and said, "No, never again."

She looked right back and said, "Good. Mama asked me when you were going to wake up." She kissed me on the cheek and went back to her seat. I wanted to dance sing, scream and shout, but, I was patient until after the game, outside when I vented some loud yahoos. Every thing for me went smoothly after we found each other. It was like we always knew it, even at ten years old.

But once we committed it was like we jumped into a deep emerald pool of water and we swam deeper and deeper. I have made mistakes in this life by only not listening to her wisdom. It is so limiting to write of our love when having lived it I know how inadequate the words describe. I would sit and watch her when I was home doing the stuff of our life as husband, wife, mother and father enthralled over my unbelievable fortune. She was loving, funny, smart, passionate, beautiful and sometimes not perfect, which made me love her more. As the years went on it only got better. And then it was gone and I was alone.

My oldest Katrina is married and has two little boys. Her husband Serge (Sir'-gay) is a priest in the Russian Orthodox church. Her boys are named Josef and Patrick.

Katrina and her brood, my sons Sean and Nicholas, perfunctorily troop out on Thanksgiving, Christmas, Theophany, Pascha, birthdays and name days and transform this big old barn into a replica of what it once was and we celebrate as the occasion calls for it. For me though, it is not bittersweet. Rather, it is a life lived with someone that is now gone. The special rabbit stew for my name day which Katrina makes for me now while made correctly does not taste right any longer, although Sean and Nick and Serge like it better. I

I have been counselled to let go, but such advice misses the point. If everyone is a combination of genes and experiences almost every experience as an adult that I have has been filtered through the eyes of Anna and myself. My life was her and now it is a part of me like my bad shoulder, for better or worse. Every time I light a cigar, I see her scolding look and hear her admonishment to not do that in the house and while I'm at it to not do it at all. Life goes on. See just thinking about it causes me to go off on reveries like this, its better to leave the light off in that room.

My name is usually a point of confusion or consternation depending on who's reacting. It is Vaclav Fitzgerald. The odd combo of Celtic and Slavic stems from the fact that my father William Fitzgerald of Irish descent married Ekaterina Progrebniak whose family hailed from Novgorod, by way of Harbin. In 1942 my father had not been inside of a Roman Catholic parish since his baptism, and the only way my grandfather Vladimir would sanction the marriage was if my father became Orthodox. At that time, the ceremony, called chrismation (conversion), was very rare in practice, the priest at St. Spirodon's Russian Orthodox cathedral in Seattle had to find it in his service books, but he did and the deed was done.

My grandfather recognized my dad's sincerity and urgency given the reality of World War II. So I am half Irish and half Russian. Vaclav is pronounced Vots-loff. It is translated as Wenceslas, as in the Christmas carol. My dad thought that Vaclav was a mouthful as was Wenceslas or Winnie so he started calling me Bill at the age of three months and it stuck.

My Irish grandparents lived out their life in Dublin. My father, God rest his soul, was a reporter in Seattle and worked for both surviving dailies, The Times and the The Post Intelligencer, and started on the old Seattle Star. He was trying to learn how to use a word processor at the age of sixty-five when he passed on at his desk writing a story.

My mother felt that it was fitting but sad. He had like most reporters and observers of life grown cynical, she said, to the end he wanted to get the corrupt bastards and she would try to mimic the very lyrical way he would say "the corrupt bastards" and we would both laugh till we cried. She lasted nine months after his death and stopped breathing one night with a smile on her face while sleeping in her favorite chair.

I considered myself lucky to have had them for parents. They had a wisdom and outlook on the world that I thought simple and naïve until I aged some myself. They realized that personal commitment to family and community, church or civil, was the only thing which held us together, soul and society.

They distrusted large accumulations of money and the people that controlled the money. It was not that the money was bad, more that the people thought that the money made them smarter or more entitled. It's weird that notion of entitlement, whether it's the income from a trust fund or welfare, people believe its their right. If an antelope could talk or articulate argument I wonder if he'd say he was entitled to his grass. That dribble or torrent of cash becomes the thing then, not life.

Papa always said whenever there was corruption or scandal he was covering, that if he followed the money he would find the answers. My own appreciation for their wisdom has been paid for with pain and scars.

So I am an American, a product of three very distinct cultures, I cling to traditions of both of my heritage, yet I am less the byproduct of them than being American. Being Orthodox has taught me a view of life that is not western, yet it is similar to an Irish viewpoint, as well. That is, the world is not necessarily a good place with good but misguided people, rather there are very bad, ruthless people abounding in the world and there always has been. Individuals may be redeemable and the elements of the world are not bad, but that people, bad people, most people, all people misuse, overuse and abuse those elements to their own and others distortion to one degree or another.

Humanism is a concept that both attempts to deify and deny the individual. Kurt Vonnegut told a story about a society where everyone was made equal either by wearing glasses which blinded them or by having bells implanted in your ear to ring every five minutes so you could not concentrate. In other words somebody in that fictional world thought it correct that everyone must be equal or the playing field must be level. People want what's best for them and theirs and if you remember that and you can figure out all of those elements you usually figure out what's going on.

My father easily fell into believing in cabals and conspiracies of a grand order to take money from the people. I on the other hand do not worry of capitalists seeking to make money because it is the way of the world. I would rather it be in the market-place than it be done by political "leaders" who feel it their due for their hard efforts of "leading" us and who get their due by taking it from us in taxes.

Always, I tell Sean and Nicholas beware of someone who wants to help you in the name of the people, or who wants to tax the rich and give to the poor, because the poor never get it, the maker of taxes does. Follow a reluctant leader, someone who leads because he is called, not because he wants to lead. Harry Truman would be an example of the former and Bill Clinton the latter. Beware of people who feel that they should serve the people, as if they were coming down from Olympus to mix with us in the rabble.

I go on too much sometimes but if I don't tell them, who will. Plus there is no one to tell me to shut up. America was a land of orators. We have become dwellers of an electronic Byzantium where confusing nonsensical messages conveying potential policy are released to television, radio or the Internet by unnamed sources to test the acceptability in the eyes of the voters and the money raisers for the next election.

This is a republic where, by design, we chose to have the best among us to lead us, to do right, to pick the careful but correct path. Abraham Lincoln and Harry Truman would not make it in this environment, but, Warren Harding would and Bill Clinton and George Bush before him have.

The Mariners have improbably won another game, Niehaus's voice has snatched me from my reverie. We will always have baseball.

There is a rap at my door, "Come in, its open," I say as I turn in my squeaking chair and get up.

"Oh, Bill?" in a lilting voice, "Do you want some plum cobbler?" A middle age lady in a flannel shirt, jeans and Birkenstocks comes in followed by another lady in a corduroy jumper and Birkenstocks. They are Hannah and Mickey, a couple that live about a quarter of a mile away with their two sons, Tim and Ben. Mickey is the stay at home one, while Hannah is an investment banker. Mickey had her two boys via invitro fertilization.

My priest Father Joseph would take a dim view if confronted with the choice of blessing such a union and its product. However, they did not ask him nor do they come to liturgy nor are they orthodox. They are my neighbors and have been for fifteen years.

Their boys are good and intelligent, and struggling as all adolescents do. I have tried to be available to answer questions they might have. We usually talk during the occasions I bring wood for their woodstove or when they help me harvest my fruit trees and my berries.

They work hard, a rare quality in adolescent boys. Both Hannah and Mickey have been kind since Anna has been gone, looking in from time to time and they have the touch with fruit pies and cobblers that can not be found in a restaurant. Take plums for instance, you can't buy a plum pie, apples for sure, maybe peach. But plum, sweet to the point of too sweet must have someone who understands how to use lemon.

They trooped in and I went to the cupboard and got down three glasses. I poured Mickey two fingers of slivovitz, a plum or cherry brandy which if drunk slowly is delightful and everything brandy should be, flavorful with a bite. Hannah and I also had two fingers, but our tastes were sour mash and my preference was Evan Williams a ten year old Kentucky bourbon not as famous as Jack Daniels or Wild Turkey but to my mind better.

Mickey had already cut three pieces before coming over and she took three plates and forks from the dishwasher from their last visit last week. They were clean. I use pretty much the same things over and over and leave them in the dishwasher till I need them. Some things get washed a time or two between usage. It seems more efficient to me.

"Who won the game?" asked Hannah.

"The Mariners. They were down by one in the ninth and Mike Blowers got a single and Buhner scored from third and Martinez was out at home but the catcher dropped the ball for the Royals. They are winning in improbable fashion. They have extraordinary confidence and some talent. I think they might win, finally."

"Hope so", said Mickey, Timmy and Ben will be heart-broke if they don't. We're going to see a game against Texas next week. Its all they are talking about."

"Say Bill, do you know a Josef Vronin? He works for Boeing, in their Aerospace group."

"Yes. Anna who was good friends with his wife Helena. They grew up together. I knew her, too, but they were several years younger when we were growing up so I was not friends with her like Anna. He is from Georgia, in the old Soviet Union, and sought asylum here in the 'sixties. He escaped from a crew team that was competing against the University of Washington. He's a math genius, very family centered, religious, strict but fair to his kids, quiet not the life of a party sort of guy, but ok to talk with."

"What's a crew team?" asked Mickey.

"You know that scull that I row around the bay in?"

"Yes"

"Well, you know where they have six or eight guys rowing with a coxswain. Before you ask, a coxswain is a fellow the size of a jockey who serves much the same purpose as a jockey, he steers and goads and encourages the muscle to go faster. Josef was the stroke in the crew, which meant that he was the strongest and most enduring rower."

"Bill", said Hannah, "I knew that you played baseball. Did you row, too?"

"No. I had a doctor who suggested it as an enjoyable way to strengthen my back and my abdominal muscles, as well as get the heart rate up. My new doctor says its ok for my abs, bad for my back and not enough for my heart. I don't do it as much as I did before, just a couple of times a week. And I walk for an hour three times a week and split wood for the woodstove, which all keeps me right where I've weighed for the last twenty-five years."

"How much is that?" asked Mickey with more than a hint of coyness in her voice.

This was an old game, as many large men with a tendency towards fat will tell you, there is a political correctness towards weight and appearance. I am six foot tall and weigh two hundred forty five pounds. I would weigh after six months of daily strenuous workouts two hundred twenty five pounds. This is the weight which my body gravitates to and according to my doctor my cholesterol, heart and blood pressure are all fine. Anna saw me as a 175 pound model waiting to break out of a larger shell. It was an issue which we never resolved. Consequently, when asked, sweetly or not I don't play. You know and I don't really seem to care any more. I mean I work out to feel good but I don't really think about how I look in terms of my weight and whether I 'm attractive. I mean I don't want to attract anyone, I have my patterns of life and my friends and my children and grandkids. It just seems like a complication. I mean, I keep saying that even to myself, some well meaning friends had engineered a meeting between me and some nice women, one at a time, at different events. And my reaction was mortification, and sadness and embarrassment for the ladies. There was nothing wrong with them. They were nice in all respects. I am content to live my life. There was Anna and no body else. I mean she had me when no one but her saw the possibilities.

"Bill? It was Mickey, "Where are you?

"What do you mean?'

"Well I asked you a question and you've just been carrying on a silent conversation, your lips were moving, but no sound.

"What was the question, I'm sorry."

"It was how much do you weigh, but are you alright?

"Yeah, yeah I'm fine. I just got to thinking about old times. Anna would ask me that every morning. I'm sorry I haven't um had that happen in a while. But as to the weight I'm right where I want to be."

"I won't ask what that is, Bill do you think I could drop your name with Josef Vronin? I have a client that is trying to win a contract with Boeing for a guidance system for a cruise missile to update the original system," asked Hannah changing the whole direction, which caused Mickey to give her a stern look.

"Do you sell electronics now?"

"No, but if they get the deal, I will be able to secure another round of financing for his firm and ultimately they will go public and we'll all retire rich and fat."

"Careful."

"No offense Bill."

"Just kidding, sure go ahead, I saw him at the parish several weeks ago. Who's your client?"

"Its a Chinese guy, he's American born, named George Yee, little tiny fellow, maybe the smartest most driven man I've ever met. He works and sleeps at his office. Goes home once a week to get five new sets of clothes."

We finished the cobbler and had been slowly enjoying our drinks. "Would anyone like a refill?"

"No thanks, Bill. Don't forget Sunday afternoon at the community center is the picnic. Are you bringing anything?" Mickey asked.

"Well, I thought about making a salmon piroq."

"What's that?"

"Sort of a giant piroshky, a meat pie, filled with salmon, dill, mushrooms, chopped hard-boiled eggs, rice. Its my mama's recipe, very, very good. Maybe some caviar and vodka. I don't know. I'll think it over." I'd discovered a talent over the last ten years for catering. I covered well about two dozen cuisines from Northern European such as Swedish and Danish to German and Irish down through Central and Southern Europe and Russian, Mediterranean (the full circle) and some African, even Kosher, Thai and Cantonese. With the proliferation of shows, books and the internet it was very easy to get backgrounded in the cuisine with a little effort and working with the clients. I did large weddings, anniversaries, bar mitzvahs, award events and some special events.

I have one group, a repeat of about ten times that would put me and my gear into a float plane and fly me up the inside passage between Vancouver Island and Canada's mainland to an isolated fishing camp, a nicely appointed log home I might add, every August in the first two weeks. My job for two weeks was to be creative with chinook salmon, sockeye salmon and Coho salmon with the odd chum salmon and occasionally halibut, sable fish, steelhead, rainbow trout, oysters, abalone, clams, blackberries, huckleberries, crab. Even an octopus once. Over that time they've been skunked a half dozen times, then in the walk in freezer there is venison (deer and elk), moose and bear. Last year I had surprised them a ravioli with a stuffing of smoked salmon in a blackberry reduction. Once they ate it they all liked it.

That was a little bit out on the edge for this group of fishing buddies. Wealthy fishing buddies.

After Hannah and Mickey trooped out the door to walk across my yard to their home some 500 yards away I was ruminating about the reveries I was having about the world before they showed up. I was struck about how redeeming people can be by their presence and love however imperfect it is.

Einstein was licking me in the face, punctuating the type of dream I hadn't had in some time. A perverse part of me asked the question of the rest of me as to whether it was Hannah or Mickey that had triggered the subconscious roiling amidst the sheets of my mind. Thank God it was neither of them in the dream. Then a dialogue with the pieces of my mind might be in order. I was aware of the child within, but not necessarily the lesbian in there.

Einstein was more interested in being let outside to begin peeing over the pee the coyote deposited on the cedar trunk. In the dog world, at least for male dogs, its he who pees last pees best.

The clock said 5:45. I congratulated myself on wearing wool socks to bed as I crabbed to the kitchen door and let Einstein out. Macarthur, although eyeing us both showed no inclination to join either of us, outside or inside, in moving about. My legs were very stiff from the previous day's activity of rowing and cutting the grass. I resisted the urge to take ibuprofen and went over to the receiver/tape player and put in a tape of "Finlandia". I started gingerly to work out on my stationary bike. My legs hurt. The music was fitting to the dark and cold about me. Macarthur had gone back to sleep. It was 6:00 a. m..

My butt had started to fall asleep on the bike by 6:30, I guessed it was a sciatic issue or something so I got off the bike and put on my half boots and hooded parka and nudged Macarthur awake. He wanted nothing to do with me.

"Now get up you old coot." He didn't say anything but glowered at me. "If I leave I know that you will find enough energy to walk over to my desk and take a dump on the rug and frost it with your pee. Now get up."

He heaved himself off his rug with a groan and started his PR spin by wagging his tail at me. "Don't start that with me now, I remember that dirty look." He moved against my leg and nudged my hand with his nose and face. "Have you washed those jowls yet this morning, I seem to remember some rather disgusting ablutions last night?" He seemed to be conveying a look of betrayal and disbelief at me for my tone and the content of my remarks. I opened the door and out we went onto the porch and down the stairs that led to the field which led to the bay.

Einstein was nowhere to be seen. This turn of events was fine with Mac who tolerated his living mate at my request. He stopped to deposit a large load, "The idea is to do it in the woods or at the neighbors, thank you." I walked around the perimeter of my property, bay to lane for an hour. Five laps equated to about one mile. One mile took about seventeen minutes. I was prone to sweating from exercise and actually enjoyed the sensation.

I returned to my back porch and took off my boots and hung them on the drying rack, they were covered with grass clippings and mud. I went into the kitchen and got some Italian roast coffee beans from the freezer, they keep longer there, and ground them. I set a teapot on the burner and set the gas at high. I shed my coat and went to the bathroom and started the shower, it usually took about two to three minutes to get hot. Returning to the kitchen I put the ground coffee in a drip filter over my glass pot and took the now boiling water and poured it over the coffee. I went to the office and selected an old Arthur Fiedler tape of the Boston Pops playing John Philip Sousa and punched it in and turned up the volume. I went in to the kitchen and poured a cup of coffee. I took the coffee carafe and poured out the dregs from yesterday and refilled it with the freshly brewed. It would stay hot and not cook any further like it would on a burner.

I took my cup and moved with speed to the shower and put the cup on its spot in the shower and shed my clothes and got in quickly, the house was cold. I lathered lazily from the tip of my cropped scalp to my toes, taking sips of coffee frequently. I have a mirror in the shower which doesn't steam up as I shave. The whole experience takes about fifteen minutes until I turn off the water and towel off. I enjoy it thoroughly. I don't always play Sousa in the morning but this seemed like a rousing kind of day.

Before I cooked for money, I found things. Misplaced things, taken things, lost things. Things whose ownership is in question things. Sometimes its important that the people that have the lost things in their possession get found as well. I do that too, but, I prefer the finding of things rather than people. Its an obscure talent. I can get to know people from a little research into their background and by examining their former nests and from there, I start a process which usually leads me to the collateral or merchandise as Edward G. Robinson used to say. Finding people is nearly the same process, but, the taking of them is somewhat harder than repossessing stolen diamonds.

Because, although people will lie, cheat, steal and inflict harm on others when it comes to the repossession of things, when you attempt to cart them along as well the level of the game gets a little higher. They play harder, so to speak, or harder to get. I have marks on my hide which reflect this truth. There are a few scars from when I was just taking something back, but seventy five percent of the scars came from people trying to dissuade me to bring them back, too. I have gotten more efficient about this with age. I avoid those localities where I can not easily use the local authorities as my proxies.

I started out working for a bank. I would go out and get cars from deadbeats who wouldn't pay their loans off. Probably, the most consistently dangerous thing I have ever done. I was shot at more than five times, three successfully. I had people try to run me over, attack me with knives, tire irons, bats and high heels. I graduated to other types of collateral. Collateral is what banks call assets securing the dollars they've lent to people. The most fun time was when I retrieved a seventy foot sailboat in Nassau. I had to hire a crew, tie the guy up and put him in the bilge. We sailed to Hilton Head, which took about ten days. We avoided Florida because he had a lot of family and friends who were very mean. The most obscure has been retrieving stolen software.

I left the bank that employed me about fifteen years ago. It had been bought by a New York bank, which was then bought by an Ohio bank. The New York people were very small town types from Albany, and didn't really understand my value until I left. I tried to demonstrate it to them several times and finally I got tired of talking. Since then I do the same thing on a contractual basis for banks up and down the coast when it fits into my other business.

While I don't speak Californian fluently, I do understand it enough to transact business. Even though I enjoy it more than retrieving items, I don't trust in the catering business to survive enough to let go of this activity. Bankers are very similar to the people I talked about earlier that are hung up on their entitlements, its just that the bankers are a little confused about who owns the money in their bank. They are very much like the group of bankers in Mary Poppins, the Dick Van Dyke sketch is very much on the mark.

I have added a couple of associates during the last fifteen years I've been doing this. One Miguel Ceniza, is an expert in information systems, both software, hardware and all the networking and connectivity changes which have entangled our world. He helps me understand aspects of data transfer, hackers, security and theft. This has opened up my business beyond banks to issues of corporate espionage and theft. He started out as a juvenile hacker.

He tells me frequently that he is related to Philippine royalty. His mother was Imelda Marcos' shoe steward and his dad is descended from an island chief or thief. I'm not sure. I get confused sometimes, generally, because I don't listen to him too intently, so I may have the lineage mixed up. Its hard to listen to anyone twenty three years old because very little issuing from their mouth is from experience. Mostly, he figures out how someone came in through an electronic opening and has left with valuable data or a program.

Its been kind of funny, because I usually get brought in as a very last resort. I thought when I started this business that my experience would convince people to help me design their security systems. And while I do have business like that as well as ongoing reviews of systems, all of those clients are people that have lost something that I have been able to return. They had initially used much, much larger firms. National ones such as the firm owned by the goofy guy with the big ears that ran for president, or they pick an accounting firm. It slays me, it really does.

The other fellow working with me is a few years older than Miguel at thirty three. He is not particularly good looking, but he is an athletic sort, dresses well and as an affinity for patter which disarms women, which is useful in getting information for us and for him as well. This despite a beezer which if filled with hydrogen would have Nazis flinging their arms skyward for a glimpse of the neo-Hindenburg. His name is Jacob Vreeman. A beezer is a nose of renown, usually size, but it could be shape as well. He is unmarried, nominally Jewish, lives in a studio houseboat on Lake Union where he entertains and monitors his investments. He eats takeout or is able to get women to ask him if they can come in and cook and clean for him. He assures them that this arrangement offers no relationship opportunities. He is completely serious and they believe that he is being coy. It seems to work for him, although I prefer not to know the details. He is an old fashioned investigator who is a marvelous tail and who can smell lies.

We have a number of business relationships which require us to monitor the data security and to monitor the enterprise for potential espionage. This requires most of Miguel's time and to a lesser extent Jake's and mine. We interpret Miguel's work and periodically meet and talk with executive management and senior staff. One of the things that we request that the companies implement is a written review process of employees.

Since most of the companies we do this for use their employees to fulfill government contracts, we have access to to various governmental databases to glean data about the employee. We think that the review of such documents tells a lot about the writers of the reviews as well as those reviewed. It can also illustrate a climate where someone might be tempted to take something and steal it. This kind of work is very lucrative for us. Jake and I spend about twenty five weeks a year doing it between us.

Nonetheless, I've grown more enamored of the catering. In a way its like performance art. Even if its something I've done dozens of times, the people deserve the best execution and the best quality of product for what they pay. I can not mess up, I'm bound by time to get it perfect, as well as the realization that the event is frequently a once in a lifetime event for the person. It's a curious dynamic as opposed to cooking in a restaurant. The client is acutely aware of my performance and whether or not I've done well. For the guests at a wedding or anniversary or bar mitzvah the food's not the thing. It's a lot like being a piano player in a lounge, you're noticed only if you're terrible. There are a few exceptions like my group in August. I've been asked often why don't I open a restaurant. In the early years Anna wouldn't hear of it, "Too much work, dawn to dusk!" She'd say, "We're raising a family." I often felt unarmed in that argument, part of me yearned to say but I have to do this I crave it.... I never spoke the words though. I have settled into a routine where I do roughly twenty weeks of catering events, and about twenty five weeks of recovery work and then the rest of the time gets spent through out the year aimlessly on reading and research a bit of travel.

Jacob thinks that I've compromised the business growth opportunities by not committing more time to it as opposed to the catering. If we had more business then I'd need more people and I'd have to manage them. Anyone that tells you they like to manage people is a liar or a fool. For me it ranks up there with dieing from a toothache. We make enough on the way we do things that Jake and I make very comfortable money, enough to live like we prefer and still put money away. All of my catering returns go into savings or new gadgets to cook with, new knives and that sort of thing. I don't need that money to survive. So I make enough in working half a year. I don't need more money, its enough.

My office which I might visit a couple of times a week or as needed is located on the western shore of Lake Union in the heart of Seattle in an old complex next door to a Seattle restaurant institution called John Franco's Hidden Harbor. John Franco is either retired, dead or both, but the bar used to be a place where Seattle reporters would congregate, along with the characters of the World War II generation which shaped Seattle's current configuration. My dad spent my inheritance there.

Seattle is very button down and corporate now. The political scene is dominated by Asian and Black politicians. White families en masse moved out of the city twenty five years ago when the bussing decisions caused neighborhoods to be broken down. With all the folks from Dubuque and Orange County who moved here between now and then they have inflated Seattle and its suburbs overall population from maybe 650,000 in 1970 to 2,000,000 or so now. Other than one more floating bridge across Lake Washington which connects Bellevue to Seattle, no additional meaningful accommodations to the traffic have occurred.

It is a pain in the ass to have to commute in Seattle. My home is due west across Puget Sound from the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle. To get to Seattle I can travel by speed, sail or ferry boat or by float plane. The first two options are not viable given the variability of the weather and the need for timely travel and if I need to take a car on the ferry I may miss one or two sailings before I get on, particularly in tourist season.

So I leave a vehicle at work and fly a Dehaviland Beaver to and from the office. It is a two seat radial engined plane which is often seen in Alaska and Western Canada. I acquired mine as a repo from a dead charter airline for $12,000 fifteen years ago. It is a timeless piece of machinery which flies about 85 miles an hour comfortably and can go faster. When in the city I pay for storage for the plane at a flight service next door to my office. It is very convenient.

I went through the preflight after putting on some jeans, a sweater over a white shirt, and some topsiders and my green field jacket from China. It was clear and forty nine degrees. It would warm up to seventy-five later, at 2,500 feet it would be fifteen degrees, I was prepared. After firing up the Beaver, I climbed out of the cockpit and untied it from my dock while standing on the float, pushed off with one leg, clambered into my seat, floated forward for a few seconds, pushed the flaps down and pulled the throttle down. Soon after bouncing down the bay we were up in the air, the Beav and I with apologies to Jerry Mathers and Mick Jagger. It was 7:00 a. m.

Aloft I notified Seattle control of my destination of Lake Union Air and was assigned 2,500 feet. I flew at a southeasterly direction which took me over the fisherman's terminal area on northwest Queen Anne Hill, across that hill and then down to Lake Union where I banked to the north and landed on a very smooth surface and then taxied over to Lake Union Air and tied up. It was 7:25 a. m.

I walked the block and a half to my office and went to unlock the door but it was open. Randi, the office manager was in early. "Hi Bill. What brings you in so early? In fact what brings you in at all?"

"Jake and I have an interview with a candidate for the job at Precision Graphics,."

"Why do they have a security issue?"

"I guess the computer game world is very competitive. With the latest break throughs potentially being worth a great deal of money. They want to know if their candidate's show any weakness to a high pressure environment."

Randi came over and reached up and began straightening out my shirt collar from underneath my sweater and coat. The process caused her to press her ample superstructure into my front as well as make thigh to thigh contact. She is an attractive redhead in her late twenties, divorced with two small children, who will demonstrate her availability and wares in a not so subtle fashion to me whenever she has the opportunity.

I would probably enjoy an affair or relationship with her because she is a nice, intelligent person. I have virtually no interest, except for when her warmth is pressed against me like now. Because she knows my financial circumstances and I hers, I will always suspect it is an issue in her interest, whether true or not.

And so it goes. Life always moves on.