WE WERE DINING OUT at a well-known Chinese restaurant that came highly recommended—despite being rather old and in need of some attention. This was one of the few excursions we have made recently and were looking forward to the food, which was rated among the best in the Pacific Northwest.
After we were seated and the waiter had brought us menus and taken our drink order, I pointed to another couple across the room: an old man and woman who reminded me of my parents.
And I said, “You know what? That’ll be us in ten years.”
And Berni said, “That’s a mirror. It’s old, and it’s cracked. Like you. And I told you you need new glasses . . .”
Mystically liberal Virgo enjoys long walks alone in the city at night in the rain with an umbrella and a flask of 10-year-old Laphroaig who strives to live by the maxim, “It ain’t what you know that gets you into trouble; it’s what you know that just ain’t so.
I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, and a college dropout (twice!). Occupationally, I have been a bartender, jewelry engraver, bouncer, landscape artist, and FEMA crew chief following the Great Flood of ’72 (and that was a job that I should never, ever have left).
I am also the final author of the original O’Sullivan Woodside price guides for record collectors and the original author of the Goldmine price guides for record collectors. As such, I was often referred to as the Price Guide Guru, and—as everyone should know—it behooves one to heed the words of a guru. (Unless, of course, you’re the Beatles.)