MY SON THE BOOKKEEPER
Born with a shovel in his hand...

My father used to worry about the direction my life would take. He kept asking me if I knew where I was going. After seeing my report cards, he realized that I was not going into Law or Medicine. "Where are you going, son?" he asked me. “What will you do?”

An old trick used by fathers in his generation was to hand a boy a tool such as a paintbrush or a shovel and see what he'd do with it. When I was eight Dad handed me a hammer. "Carpentry is a fine profession," he told me.

Unknown to Dad my Uncle Ernie, who made his fortune in gold mining, had told me that gold could be found inside rocks. I leaped into action. It took me all day to take that hammer and break up every rock in the back yard. I was about to start in on the foundation of the house when Dad, although commending my zeal, took back the hammer. "Not carpentry," he said.

Next he thought maybe my future lay in professional sports. He handed me a baseball and took me out back to size up my pitching arm. "Blaze it in there, son," he told me. We spent a couple days on that before one of my pitches bounced up and hit him on the nose. My arm had given out by then anyway.

What Dad didn't understand was I didn't want to make a decision that would stick me in some rut for life. I wanted to be something interesting, like a lion hunter. Perhaps I would find myself in Africa. At this news, Dad bought me a Red Ryder lever action BB gun that cost $2.50.

Here was something I could really get into. I quickly became a dead shot. I could ride my bike no hands and ping those BBs off stop signs like nobody's business. I even got into a BB gun war with the rich Winship brothers who lived in the ritzy Crescent Park section on the other side of San Francisquito Creek. The Winships carried those expensive Benjamin pumps ($3.75). Didn't matter to me; I went into guerrilla warfare and they didn't know where the next shot was coming from. I got them to settle for a Mexican standoff.

"You’ve got to find yourself, son," Dad told me. He handed me a shovel and waited to see what I would do with that. I promptly set out to undermine the house. Encouraged by this demonstration of talent for civil engineering, he hustled down to the library and got me some books on tunnel digging.

Son," he prophesied, rubbing his hands, "one of these days they're going to dig a tunnel under the English Channel, and you could be just the little digger to do it."

This dream failed when he assigned me the task of solving the tunnel digger's eternal problem--what to do with all the dirt you dig out. Like so many young tunnelers before me, and since, I couldn't find a convenient place to put the dirt I dug out. A moment's thought presented the usual solution. I would dig another hole. This is the kind of thing that drives tunnel diggers mad.

My future, Dad said, did not lie in engineering.

A week later, after noting my fascination with games involving numbers -- games like pool which is played with numbered balls, and poker, which is played with numbered cards -- Dad seized upon the hope that my future lay in the pure science of numbers. Numerology was very hot in those days. Dad said you could figure out anything with numbers, even the future.

He rushed in the house to tell Mom that he had finally figured out which way my twig was bent. "That kid's a born bookkeeper," he told her.

Over the next weeks he taught me a lot about keeping books, how those columns of figures added up in terrible, irrefutable logic to The Bottom Line, showing profit or loss. He even told me stories about the high drama of keeping books. It seems there was an embezzler who got caught with his books $310,000 short. "Where are your substantiating documents?" the police asked him. He had lost all the money on fast women and slow horses and couldn't come up with any substantiating documents. The police love to ask for substantiating documents. They nail everybody with that one.

The problem was I never could see the use of Dad's instruction. What I wanted to know was, where he got all those figures he was teaching me to add up.

"Oh, that’s another story," he told me. "Now you’re talking about paper trails, which is accounting. You don’t want to know all that."

I knew one thing — I didn't want anything to do with a profession that required substantiating documents every time you turned around. If Dad had seen those love notes I stuffed in Jean West’s inkwell he would have known for sure I was no bookkeeper and that my talent lay in writing flaming prose.

Many years later, raising a family, I finally saw the reason for bookkeeping. It is used to find out where the money went.

Today, being an old hand at keeping track of my checking account -- by guess and by gosh -- I know very well how embezzlers get started. First they get impatient with documenting everything. They devise a scheme to eliminate those troublesome documents, so they can engage in what they call dynamic executive action.

But eventually there comes a day of reckoning when all that dynamic executive action comes under the auditor’s eye. Auditors have no sympathy for dynamic executives. The first thing auditors always do is start rummaging around looking for those blasted substantiating documents. It is just maddening!

I’ve seen it happen on a small scale. Years ago when I was managing an industrial cafeteria, the district manager dropped into my office and wanted to look over the books. I was horrified to find that my petty cash was ten dollars short. I told the district manager I didn’t know where it went.

"Oh," he said, "that’s all right. Just put in a chit for ten bucks."

I said, “But what do I use for a substantiating document?"

"Huh?" he said. "Oh hell, just make out a chit saying you bought a sack of potatoes."

That’s one example of bookkeeping.

When my first wife overdrew our checking account. I leaped into action to demonstrate my profound knowledge of bookkeeping.

"Listen, Bubblehead," I snapped, "according to my infallible system of checks and balances we had plenty of money in the bank. What happened to it?"

"Household expenses," she replied airily.

I gave her my best Perry Mason smile and thundered out the killer question: "Where are your substantiating documents?" When Perry hits ‘em with that question their tissue of lies always falls apart. I sat back and waited for her to collapse and admit everything.

"I don't need any documents, Mr. Accountant," she replied, "so you can just take that infallible system of yours and stick it up your nose."

This sweet reason led me away from a life devoted to numbers and into the slothful life of writing, where I don’t always have to be rummaging around looking for a bunch of substantiating documents. Hah! If I need any I just make ‘em up. ##
That's all, kids.
www.vincejohnson.net
vgjohnson@wizwire.com

INTO THE SAUSAGE GRINDER WITH YOU!
The Case of the Extraordinarily Suspicious Cat

I don’t know what’s the matter with Tommy. After two years of coming to my door every morning for breakfast, he still hangs back a safe distance and spits at me when I fill his bowl.

He won’t go near his bowl until I’ve left the deck and retreated inside my office. Then when he’s made damn sure I’m not gonna leap out and shove him in the sausage grinder, only then does he belly up to his bowl and begin feeding warily, while keeping one eye on the door to my office -- in case I’ve spent two incredibly patient years setting him up for the kill.

This two-year-old cat -- looking a little ragged lately -- is the only survivor from the original litter of six feral kittens and their mother who took up housekeeping in the bushes out back after I made the mistake of feeding their mother. The rest all died or disappeared. Mom too.

His yellowish orange coat doesn’t shine like it used to, isn’t fluffy at all. Probably needs shots, or maybe he’s been eating lizards. I don’t know.

I think he’s lonely. Since he won’t have anything to do with me, his only companion is the next door neighbor’s pug. Somehow they’ve become pals. Though the pug tends to play a little rough. Still, a pal is a pal.

Vince
www.vincejohnson.net