Meals On Wheels – Month 11

         This month fellow Paramus Rotary Club member Mike Paisner wanted to ride along with me.  He called and said he wanted to see what this “Meals on wheels thing” was all about - maybe he wanted to get involved.  I really wanted to be alone, so I told him it was intensely boring and I am a dullard, but he has a suspicious nature and a Boston accent and this only piqued his interest and made him even more determined to find out for himself.  He insisted.  I did not want his company.

         I looked forward to his company, in the same way I would had I been an Antarctic penguin sex researcher shivering alone near death, in a small steel building amidst a howling mid-winter blizzard, cast off for days from the mother station on the thin edge of a storm tossed and drifting Ross ice shelf fragment, with power, phone, food and water all gone and then suddenly, after breaking a molar eating my last frozen Cheerio in the pitch dark, discovering I dropped my contacts on the crumbling ice floor just as my appendix burst and I now have to remove it, here in the middle of nowhere, with an oil soaked rusty box cutter dipped in slushy Clorox and then the thin metal door buckled under the weight of a huge pilot whale trying to escape a rogue Japanese whaling vessel as they prow-bumped the edge of the ice shelf my shack was hanging over, and misfired the exploding tip harpoon which ripped through the shed roof with a screeching roar and disappeared through the ever enlarging crack in the floor which was a dark watery porthole into the abysmal depths of hell where an immense leopard seal blew through and burst upwards into the now crumbling metal shed and landed on the beached whale which had pinned me to the icy floor in the open doorway with the howling end of the earth storm bearing in and blowing the shed away like a paper kite before the hand of God…

         I looked forward to his company, as I would had I been Bernie Madoff at his November 2008 family thanksgiving dinner in the south of France while the staff were serving crudités and Ruth, Mark & Andrew were each raising their glasses of Chateau Thames Embankment ’82 to my “exceptional investment acumen” and how it has made the Madoff family name the most trusted private investment house in Palm Beach and even the world and then were asking me for the 50 billionth time why it was that I was the only one who knew the inside workings of the firm and now Ruth says, “Really dear, you’ve done so much for us already - shouldn’t the ‘boys’ take over the business so you and I can have more time together in our golden years?”

         So, Mike and I met at Care Plus and we headed out to do my first Thursday route.  As we went house to house, I respectfully stayed in the car and relaxed while he jumped out and met each customer.  I found him generally to be of some small use and a fairly good conversationalist and was, in the end, somewhat happy to have him along in a small way.  He said he enjoyed it, but with that Boston accent it’s sure hard to tell if he means it.

Hope he decides to help out with MOW – we can use new drivers and I could use the solitude.