Free at Last

 

The beaming woman above, about to enjoy her first sip of a perfectly prepared cosmo, is, of course, Nan, aka TLOTH, The Lady of Two Harbors.

At this point you might well ask, "Why is she smiling so broadly?"

The correct answer is listed below. See if you can spot it:

     1.The Red Sox are above .500.

     2. Joel just said something witty.

     3.There is a sale at Tommy Bahama.

     4.Nan just sold her Miracle Ear franchise.

     5.It's 2 for 1 cosmo night at Bijoux in Destin.

While it was quite easy to eliminate #2, the other choices were more challenging. It is certainly true that the Red Sox are above .500 and playing much better than expected; however, that fact would never elicit such an expression of joy from Nan. The following would be the expected expression for such news:

As you can see Red Sox success, as unexpected as it is, would be greeted by TLOTH with sleepy indifference. Choice #2 is so unlikely as to be laughable. While choices #3 and #5 are certainly possible, they would never cause such jubilation, just a determined reach for the closest credit card.

All of which leaves choice #4.

Yesterday Nan happily closed on the sale of her Miracle Ear franchise and her new retirement era has begun. Six years ago, when Nan was diagnosed with stage 4 lung cancer with a brain tumor kicker, Nan began pulling back from the day to day operations of her Miracle Ear business. She stopped seeing patients and restricted her activities to administrative duties. She and her stepson Chris kept the business afloat despite the challenges that covid and a rapidly changing hearing aid market threw at them. About a year ago, after consulting with Chris, Nan began the arduous process of trying to sell her business. It turned out that the Miracle Ear corporation was very interested in buying back Nan's successful franchise and a deal was struck. The first chunk of money showed up in Nan's account yesterday and a brilliant celebratory dinner at Destin's fabulous Bijoux restaurant followed.

As joyful as this development is, it stands in stark contrast to your lame blogger's experience. I'm still reluctant to talk about the unpleasantness that ensued when I tried to sell my teaching business back in June of 2000. 

I had started my teaching business in September, 1969. I was as raw a rookie as you could possibly imagine. But what I lacked in teacher training (everything) and techniques (everything), I made up for in enthusiasm and the uncanny ability to eat lunch quickly. After a few rough years (probably 10), I slowly but surely started turning my teaching business around. I managed to eat lunch even faster, sometimes in as few as 15 minutes, and mastered the teaching, appreciation, and wholesale distribution of prepositional phrases. I believe I am not boasting when I say that my 7th grade students cornered the prepositional phrase market for the entire South Shore by 1978. We were riding high, people.

We managed to weather the Possessive Pronoun crash of the early 80's. Corporal punishment for the improper use of apostrophes proved to be the only answer to the crisis. By then lunch had become a mere sip of milk and half a Snickers but who had time to complain? It was the 80's! Participles were starting to make inroads. Soon enough we'd be dealing with clauses. The entire business model was changing. There were even rumors that Shakespeare, Dickens, and Twain were not far off.

Yes, those were heady days in the teaching business. Of course not all my colleagues were as motivated as I was. Some of them took as much as 25 minutes for lunch. Others hardly ever took papers home with them. I tried to not be envious when I contrasted the multiple folders of papers I brought home each night with the phys ed teacher's air pump and two flattened basketballs. "That's OK," I told myself. "Some day I'll sell this business and that's when I'll reap the benefits of all this correcting. Heck, one day I might even be able to have lunch sitting down."

Well, dear reader, unlike Nan's sale, my own experience did not proceed as I had hoped. Despite 31 years spent building and nuturing my teaching business, despite thousands of red marking pens dried up from overuse, despite permanent yellow chalk dust stains on numerous ties and seven of my fingers, despite vocal chords frayed by the excessive shouting of the word "People!", and, of course, despite 5,580 hurried and harried  lunches, the offers I received were quite disappointing.

Thus it was with great sadness and some bitterness that in June of 2000 I finally sold my teaching business for less than I had paid for it. I even had to throw in several battered copies of  Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time to sweeten the deal. My only consolation that sad day was an hour lunch that included a complete sandwich, a pickle, and a beer.

In the 23 years following this unfortunate chapter, I have tried to find solace by playing thousands of rounds of golf with members of the golfing public who need sound grammatical advice. I charge nominal fees for this service resulting in conversations like this:

GOLFING MEMBER OF THE PUBLIC: Nice putt, Joel. Hey, what is the plural of putt? Is it P-U-T-T-S or P-U-T-Z?

JOEL: It's PUTTS, Putz.

or

GOLFING MEMBER OF THE PUBLIC: Hey Joel, should I say "I lie two" or "I lay two" ?

JOEL: No comment.

Anyway, it's proven to be a lucrative sideline, a good retirement gig.

Aaah, but enough about me. Let's get back to TLOTH. Now that she is FULLY retired, how will she be spending her time? Between adding and rearranging furniture in the Stockton Springs townhouse, beating your lame blogger like a drum (there's your simile lesson, folks) in numerous golf matches at the venerable Northport Golf Club, and planning dinner and sightseeing trips for upcoming Maine guests, Nan's summer promises to be quite full. 

By the time she returns to Destin after a trip with friends to Portugal and Spain in October, Nan should have retirement pretty well sussed out.

If not, I know where she can find a good teacher.

Ain't life grand!