A silly little anecdotal entry, as I've been neglectful
lately...Mother's Day with the fam. I was in good spirits for once, and
could
actually appreciate my family's quirks. My father, now in his 70's, is
often the innocent straight-man comic relief, and earnestly launched
into one of
his college stories, to my great amusement.
My dad's life in WW II before coming to the U.S. alone at 18 to put
himself through
Berkeley,
will fill the current book I am writing. But
I have a bottomless well to draw from for for part deux: his
college-year
experiences as a naive foreigner, ending up in various Lucille Ball
type scenarios at one of the dozens of bizarre jobs he held during
those years, working on chicken farms, hitching to Alaska with (it
turns out...oops!) escaped felons to work the canneries, driving
delivery trucks, etc. One of which I was privy to today:
"You shouldn't tell people about your ideas," he said today,
"Take it from me, I learned
that the hard way." He told us, quite straight-faced, about when he
worked near the
railroad tracks in Berkeley, and often ate his lunch with two brothers
named
Jacuzzi. These brothers Jacuzzi worked nearby at their small pump
operation, Jacuzzi Bros. pumps. So my dad gets to talking with one of
those Jacuzzi brothers, and tells him about how the plumbing isn't so
good in Europe, about how Europeans don't enjoy very good baths. He
tells a Jacuzzi brother that he thinks people would enjoy having
numerous sprays of water directed at their bodies, like a massage, like.
And damn it if that Jacuzzi brother didn't make a million dollars
ripping off my dad's idea and change the course of history. Curse you,
evil Jacuzzi brothers! A pox on your Jacuzzi house! That should have been ours, all your dirty Jacuzzi money! Perhaps without my
father, we would not be enjoying massaging hot-tub jets today, from
coast to coast, from shore to shore. Who knows how our lives might be
different today, if not for that historic lunchtime meeting, just how many
Real World episodes may not have happened without my father's fated words. Just try to imagine that. It will blow your mind.
