the little league of life
Well, down in the recesses of the Great Recession, the South End always welcomes new biznesses, fresh entrepreneurial risk takers and innovative fiscal strategies. The Chamber of Commerce could use some substitutes for those vacant storefronts and failed capitalist endeavors. Marty Robemblind, the current President of the C of C, whose own real estate practice has slid off the fiscal cliff, likes to tell the membership in their monthly meeting in the conference room of Windy Rear Realty’s south office, that times will pick up …. but first we have to pick ourselves up. Marty talks like this after a couple of bourbon pick-me-ups. And by the time the gavel calls the meetings to order, Marty has had a couple. By the end, it’s a question of whose going to pick Marty up.
This last Chamber meeting he introduced our newest member, Brenda Livingood. She had recently opened an office in the old art studio behind her house now that her husband Ralph had burned every last watercolor he had stacked in every nook, cranny and corner out in the burnpile in the nettles before the woods took over the lawn. A ‘breakdown’, the more sympathetic neighbors clucked. ‘About damn time,’ Linda reckoned, and then moved in to the nearly empty studio with a desk and a cellphone and enough energy to move mountains. Life coach, she proclaimed herself. New career , new identity, new Me …. and once she’d rearranged her own mental furniture and Ralph’s too, she figured she could do for others what she wanted done to herself.
The Chamber membership heard her business plan and her sales pitch and each and every one of them took her brand new business card, the one with her name and the name of her new outfit: Brenda Livingood LIFE COACH ‘You can live good too!’ She took their cards in fair exchange. Shelly Robinson made the mistake of inquiring into fees, somewhere in the neighborhood of a dinner out for herself and her husband Jerry at a restaurant too expensive for their lunchbucket budget for an hour of life-altering suggestions. ‘Call me,’ Brenda insisted, not detecting the sticker shock in Shelly’s voice, ‘we’ll find a new you.’
The South End, sorry to say, Shelly, kind of likes the old us’s. Kind of like our cars. The new models are nice, we’ll admit, but if all you can afford is the old jalopy, we’ll learn to love them, even if they’re slowly bankrupting us. No point hurrying.
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