Thursday, June 30, 2016

"Chloe and Poppie's Excellent Adventure"

By Jerry Zezima
The Stamford Advocate
When it comes to writers who are famous for turning real-life adventures into literary gold, Mark Twain and Ernest Hemingway had nothing on me. That’s because their idea of adventure was to go rafting down the Mississippi, prospecting for gold, deep-sea fishing or big-game hunting.

These pitiful excursions are walks in the park compared to spending two full days with a toddler.

That’s what I did recently when I was in charge of watching my 3-year-old granddaughter, Chloe, with whom I actually did go for a walk in the park and who has turned my life into one giddy adventure after another.

The latest one began at 8:15 on a sunny morning, when my wife, Sue, and I arrived at Chloe’s house, which later that day would become her old house because she and her mommy and daddy were moving into a new house. Sue’s job was to help coordinate a mission that turned out to be more complicated than the invasion of Normandy.

My job, for however long it took, was to watch Chloe. It took 11 hours. And the whole next day. Needless to say, but I will say it anyway, I got off easy.

The first thing I did was to take Chloe to one of her favorite places: Dunkin’ Donuts.

“D!” Chloe exclaimed as she reached for the letter-shaped door handle. “For Dunkin’ Donuts!”

I stepped up to the counter and ordered a bag of Munchkins, which I shared with Chloe, and a cup of coffee, which I didn’t. Contrary to what the surgeon general might say, sugar and caffeine are absolutely essential for any geezer who is about to spend an entire day trying to keep up with an active child.

Next we went to Safari Adventure, which sounds like something Hemingway would go on but actually is a children’s recreation center that would have knocked even him for a loop. Unfortunately, it was closed for renovations, although the new owners, Lindsey and Daniel, kindly gave Chloe a cup of ice cream with sprinkles on top.

It was 9:30 a.m. and already she had enough energy to power Manhattan. I figured she could burn it off at the playground. Instead, it almost burned me out.

For two hours, we ran around, going from slide to swing and back again. On the biggest slide, I took her up the stairs and hurried back down to catch her at the bottom. En route, I cracked my skull on a low-hanging bar that blessedly was made of plastic. If it had been steel, I would have bent it. If it was wood, I would have splintered it. Either way, I’d owe the playground a new slide.

Next we went to my house, where I made Chloe her favorite lunch, chicken nuggets, which I cooked in the oven without, somehow, burning the place down. Afterward, we went outside and spent the afternoon running around the yard. Then we came back in, where we ran around some more. I turned on Chloe’s favorite TV show, “Peppa Pig,” and caught my breath before making dinner (you guessed it: chicken nuggets) and playing with her until Sue came home.

That night, Chloe and I slept like babies.

The adventure continued the next day, when I set up her plastic pool outside and frolicked with her in the 6-inch-deep water. Then we ran under the sprinkler and, like Peppa Pig, jumped in muddy puddles. We also swung in my hammock, where I usually have a beer but refrained this time, even though I needed one because soon we were blowing bubbles and running around the yard again.

Around dinnertime, Chloe’s mommy and daddy came over to pick her up.

“Did you have fun with Poppie?” her mommy asked her.

“Yes!” Chloe chirped. “I had fun with Poppie!”

“Did you have fun, Poppie?” I was asked.

“Yes!” I chirped. “I had fun with Chloe!”

That night I slept like a baby again, outdoing Twain and Hemingway and dreaming of our next adventure.

Copyright 2016 by Jerry Zezima

Thursday, June 16, 2016

"You Have to Hand It to Him"

By Jerry Zezima
The Stamford Advocate
Whenever my wife asks me to tidy up the bathroom, I feel like throwing in the towel because I could never get it to look as nice as the porcelain convenience at a place like the Waldorf Astoria.

So imagine my surprise and delight when I met a guy whose job is to throw in the towel in the porcelain convenience at you guessed it the Waldorf Astoria.

I recently attended a dinner at the famed New York City hotel, which is ritzy enough to rival the Ritz but does not, to my knowledge, serve Ritz crackers, at least not in the bathroom, where I went to answer the call of nature, which called collect.

As I was washing up (according to some people, I have been washed up for years), I was handed a towel by a gentleman dressed to the tens, which is even better than the nines. He was nattily attired (if we were in the ladies’ room, he would have been Natalie Attired) in a white, pleated, wing-collar shirt; a black, crisply tied bow tie; a neat black vest; sharply creased black pants, and shiny black shoes.

I, dressed to the sevens in a wrinkled gray suit, took the perfectly folded paper towel, which was embossed with the Waldorf logo, and dried my hands, though not before dripping water all over my dull black shoes.

“Would you like another towel, sir?” washroom attendant Alex Giannikouris asked politely.

“Thank you,” I replied as he handed me one. “Now I can shine my shoes.”

I also took a shine to Alex, who has worked at the Waldorf for 32 years and, judging from the many visitors who stopped in to get tidied up themselves, is even more popular than the celebrities who frequent the premises.

“Alex!” exclaimed one gentleman (we were, after all, in a room marked “Gentlemen,” which made me wonder what I was doing there). “Como esta?”

“Muy bien,” responded Alex, a native of Greece who speaks about half a dozen languages.

The two men carried on a brief conversation in Spanish, at the end of which Alex said, “Adios!”

Another man, tall, handsome and bedecked in a tuxedo, greeted Alex with a handshake after, of course, drying his hands on the towel Alex gave to him.

“Are you a regular?” I asked the visitor.

“What?” he replied indignantly.

“A regular,” I explained. “Not irregular.”

“Yes,” said the man, who seemed relieved. “I’ve known Alex for years. He’s a great guy.”

That was the consensus among the other visitors, one of whom spoke with Alex in French and another in Greek.

“I even know a little Korean,” Alex said, in perfect English.

Then he regaled me with stories of the celebrities who have stopped in to admire themselves in the mirror.

“The best,” Alex said, “was Frank Sinatra.”

“Did he do it his way?” I asked.

Alex smiled and said, “Yes. He was very nice and very generous. A big tipper.”

“How much money did he give you?” I wondered.

“I can’t say,” Alex replied. “The IRS might find out.”

At least Alex won’t get in trouble with the Social Security Administration. That’s because Bill Clinton, when he was president, signed Alex’s Social Security card. Alex pulled it out of his wallet and showed me the inscription: “To Alex: Thanks, Bill Clinton.”

“Are you going to vote for his wife?” I asked.

“I don’t talk politics in here,” said Alex, who was happy to talk about George Burns (“a funny guy”), Al Pacino (“he washed his face in the sink”) and Ingrid Bergman.

“Ingrid Bergman was in the men’s room?” I spluttered.

“No,” said Alex. “I saw her upstairs. She was very beautiful. One other time, I saw Pope John Paul II upstairs. As he walked past, he gave me a blessing.”

But Alex said he feels especially blessed to be married to Maria, his wife of 39 years.

“One woman for all that time? Why not?” Alex said with a broad smile.

“Do you show your appreciation by tidying up the bathroom at home?” I wondered.

“No, she does it,” admitted Alex, who leaves the tidying up at the Waldorf to a cleaning crew.

He and Maria have three grown children and two young grandchildren.

“I’m a grandpa, too,” I said. “My granddaughter calls me Poppie.”

“I’m called Papou, which is Greek for grandfather,” said Alex, who is 63 and plans to retire soon.

“I’ve had a good career at the Waldorf,” he said. “I’ve met a lot of nice people. But one of these days it will be time to go. And then,” he added, “I’ll really throw in the towel.”

Copyright 2016 by Jerry Zezima

Friday, June 3, 2016

"A Traffic Ticket Hits Home"

By Jerry Zezima
The Stamford Advocate

Today’s Ridiculous Banking Question is: What’s the faster way to lose your house: don’t pay the mortgage or don’t pay a traffic ticket?

If you don’t know the answer, you are probably living in your car.

That’s the lesson my wife, Sue, and I learned during a home refinancing odyssey that took three attempts in as many years and was almost ruined by, of all things, a red-light camera.

The first attempt failed because my credit score was considered more important than my pulse, which before the housing bubble burst was pretty much all you needed to qualify for a loan.

The second attempt failed because Sue and I committed the unpardonable sin of actually paying both our mortgage and our line of credit on time each month. We would have been better off if we had fallen hopelessly behind and blown the money in Atlantic City.

Praying the third time would be the charm, I went back to the bank and spoke with Kim Delman, a senior mortgage loan officer who is so nice, so smart and so good that she ought to run the Federal Reserve System.

Kim, who worked diligently with us in our first two attempts, was determined to see us succeed this time.

In trying to combine our mortgage, which was at another bank, and our line of credit, which was at Kim’s bank, I went through the Process From Hell: countless phone calls in which I had to listen carefully because the menu options had changed (restaurants change their menu options less often than the average company); give the last four digits of my Social Security number and my date of birth, just to prove I’m a geezer; and come up with yet another seemingly irrelevant thing the underwriter wanted, which surprisingly did not include my high school transcript or my underwear receipts.

Then came the clincher: After we shelled out $455 for an appraisal, which valued our house at $315,000, Kim informed us that we were in danger of being rejected yet again, this time for a three-year-old unpaid traffic ticket worth a grand total of $75.

“There’s a lien on your house,” Kim said.

“Nothing’s leaning on my house,” I replied. “Not even a ladder, because I’m afraid of heights.”

“You have to get this cleared up,” Kim warned, “or the bank won’t let you close.”

I was put in touch with Leticia Glenn-Jones, a very pleasant home services specialist (“a fancy title for processor,” she explained), who said the underwriter did, indeed, want this black mark off my criminal record.

“Let me get this straight: $75 is worth more than $315,000,” I said. “Is this the new math?”

“I’m afraid so,” Leticia said sympathetically.

It turned out that a red-light camera caught Sue going through, yes, a red light. She received a notice in the mail in 2013 but forgot about it until the underwriter kindly noted that if we didn’t pay up, we couldn’t close. Sue sent a check for $75, plus late fees, which brought the total to $105 and, at long last, allowed us to refinance.

“It happens more often than you think,” Kim said afterward. “It’s those red-light cameras. Since they were installed, there have been tons of cases like this.”

In 21 years at the bank, she has seen just about everything.

“You and Sue may have set the record for the longest time it took to refinance,” said Kim, adding that her most unusual customer was a guy who applied for a mortgage  in 1995 and, under assets, listed a cow.

“He said it was worth $500,” Kim said.

“Was he trying to milk the bank for money?” I asked.

“I don’t know,” said Kim. “But believe it or not, he qualified.”

“I guess he didn’t have any traffic tickets,” I said.

I thanked Kim for all her hard work and promised that Sue and I would keep up on our payments.

“From now on,” I said, “we’ll pay the mortgage online. After all, we don’t want to drive to the bank and risk losing our house by getting another ticket.”

Copyright 2016 by Jerry Zezima