missing days. Why, you do have to live in order to write, don’t you?
Snippets of this life: my mother, after having been hauled into the DMV to reconcile the mismatch between the name on her SS card and her driver’s license, wants to reconcile all her names into one common one. It’s entailed so far getting and translating her birth certificate from Greece, a trip into the city, and straightening out her driver’s license, marriage license and her SS. All that remains is her passport, which has the name she became a citizen with, her married name and her shortened first name, which bares no resemblance to her whole first name. Anyway, to wrap this segment up, I had wanted to go into the city with her again to the Passport Center but could not arrange an interview without first proving she had a ticket to leave the country within 15 days. In the end we went to the neighborhood Post Office and a woman there told us to just write a letter detailing all the name changes, from the divorce to her second marriage. Which I finally did, just today. Done.
We signed our end of the contract for the 5 bedroom house out in Oceanside. This is the third time I’ve written a check for such a large amount, and it’s never easy. Although I have to admit, that it has gotten tired. When we were going to go to contract on the first house we had wanted to buy in West Hempstead, our attorney, Bob Katcher, went over every line and clause, even took the time to go over the stuff that was crossed out. The second time, his partner, Alpa Sanghvi, summarized each section of the contract but I had forgotten to bring the check book. I brought the check the next morning. The third time however, all we did was initial and sign, breezed right through the contract not going over any of it all. There had been some concern over whether or not the sellers had certified the conversion of their garage into a den. I did not quite understand the concern considering that the converted garage should up as living space in the property�s tax records, didn’t the town after all, already know about it? Alpa had explained that when you filed for a building permit, the town right away taxes you based on the planned improvement, regardless of whether or not you submit the final work for a certificate of completion (which entails an inspection by the town). In addition, she pointed out, if I had never mentioned the converted garage or the second floor addition, as long as the survey the owners had was current, no one, not the bank nor the attorneys, would have raised an issue.
My brother-in-law Boris has come up to visit. He is intensely interested in our daughter Ioanna, which is not a bad thing, but there is something in his touch that strikes me as desperate, desperate for a child of his own. Currently he is involved with his first cousin, who claims to have divorced her husband in Colombia, and has brought her two boys with her to the U.S. She doesn�t want to have anymore children and I am surprised, given how Boris clearly is with children, that he has accepted this. Does he think he can change her mind? MZ and I broached the subject and despite our pleas, you could see he was becoming recalcitrant and uncomfortable. He even said at one point, “I came to visit Ioanna, not to be grilled…” We said to him, each of us in our own way, that he was much too special and giving to be with someone who could not give him what he so rightly deserved. The phone then rang, and he smirked, “Saved by the bell!!!”
And that what’s been going on, briefly, amongst other things for some other time.