Put two and two together and you come up with
cuckoo cuckoo cuckoo.
At least, that’s how I feel about the last 20-odd years of Ron’s life in Berkeley.
It’s about giving up pay and service credit to act as chauffeur for a patronizing snob on long, unnecessary road trips supporting a very expensive hobby.
It’s about a “best” friend who so distrusts Ron’s judgment that he won’t allow me, his wife, as an overnight guest in his home.
It’s about Ron’s insistence – at age almost 65 with a bad leg and a bad back – that he can drive his 2-wheel drive, 14-20 mile to the gallon GMC Safari van 3,500 miles across country in five days rather than pay a company to transport it. For essentially the same money. Or wanting me to fly to Berkeley and put us up in a motel for a week to help him pack and clean his place instead of hiring the movers and Merry Maids for the purpose.
It’s about a Worker’s Compensation bureaucrat who is delaying Ron’s move to the East Coast and preventing him from getting appropriate medical care – but hasn’t approved paying him a dime in over a year from the date the claim was accepted!
I started listening to Ron’s tales of the otherworld known as Berkeley, California, at the end of September. He relates these things so matter-of-factly that it’s only last night, when he told me about the Worker’s Compensation gambit, that the insanity of all of it hit me for the first time.
There’s got to be something about California.
I’m recalling Donald’s Nabeena days, when he was snookered by a fast-talking Nigerian huckster who convinced him that he was a prince. Donald was mesmerized, half out of his mind, dazed, babbling.
California is beautiful, to be sure, and the climate is temperate in the Bay Area and Orange County, but it seems to knock some people off-balance.
Then again, after investing tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours in her house, my neighbor has just sold it because she doesn’t like the way the people across the street keep their yard.
Maybe insanity isn’t a singularly West Coast phenomenon after all.