Which is pretty good, really.
The niece put me up and my nephew got to deal with two of my sisters that came up for the weekend to attend my grandniece's graduation party which is the excuse I used to visit.
Seeing I was there the longest I rented a car and hauled my sisters around for a day trip down memory lane.
My nephew's sailboat was interesting. He'd bought a Cal 33-2 and originally I thought he had over paid for it but when I got aboard and we started going through things I saw he got a fairly good deal.
It had a ton of useful spares as well as a large number of sails. It's a racing cruiser but not a true offshore boat. He ain't going to Egypt in it but is should serve him well for coastal cruising and things of this nature. It's big enough to be comfortable with his wife and 2 kids for weekends and maybe weeklong whatevers.
In the center of town someone recognized me and asked me what I have been doing since I got out of prison. When they asked me that I instantly recognized them. One of the class busybodies.
When I had met them about 10-15 years after graduation they had asked me what I had been doing and I told them I had just gotten out of three years in Atlanta for knocking off an armored car along with two other guys to give her something to talk about.
I told her I had been retired since I got out of the joint because the feds never recovered the money and that I did and invested it in Apple, Microsoft and a few others and the stocks went wild over the next several years. When they peaked I sold and invested in blue chip.
I also ran into a couple more classmates still in town. One of them knows about my career and keeps me in the loop.
I managed to bump into one I had not seen since graduation and when he asked me what I was doing I told him I was retired after about 30 years in porn. He was aghast. I made my first communion with the guy when we were 8. He was and still is a goodie two-shoes.
"Hey, porn is a multi billion dollar racket," I said. "I just jumped in and grabbed a pretty good size piece of the pie and bailed out. I'm pretty comfortable."
It's something I've done over the years and my friend tells me when it gets back to him which it generally does.
Years ago I told someone I had found a lottery ticket in a drawer of a house I was helping someone flip and it had two weeks left before it became null and void and when I checked it at a convenience store I found out I had won six million bucks.
It works like this. If they were normal they get the truth but if they're busybodies they get some outrageous story.
High School Reunion 40 which I missed was supposedly hilarious because my friend told me that when 'what happened to Piccolo' came up it was a mess of 'I heard...he told me...somebody said, usually followed by something outrageous.
Reunion 55 is coming up and I wonder what that's going to be like. I might attend that one.
My grand nieces and nephew are doing reasonably well and the one that just graduated is smart enough not to jump into college without a plan of some sort. She's going to work for a year.
Housing in MA ain't cheap and my niece told me it looks like the kids are not going anywhere soon. The old days of the $100/month starter apartment are LONG gone. My niece is good with it and understands. It's not 'failure to launch' anymore so much is it is financial inability to launch.
Unless they get the hell out of MA they are going to have a real rough time.
Housing here in Pittsburgh is still semi-affordable, no matter what the locals say. Most Pittsburghers don't get out much.
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