Rebirth of a Salesman

Birthdays…these things happen, if you live long enough. I just had another one to celebrate my 24,455th day on this planet and this one happened in Atlanta.

Within these days I’ve spent somewhere close to 15,060 days buying and selling real estate, less, of course, the nights in sleazy bars over beers embellishing epic exploits of financial legerdemain with others of my ilk.

In “the old days,” as we like to refer to these days before we had responsibilities (you know, up to the age of about 12 before zits became problems), we looked excitedly towards these milestones. (They are now only mill stones!). Lots of presents, ice cream, cake…a special day for the “birthday kid.” They even sang in the school classroom, and we boasted all day long, “Hey, it’s my birthday.” People seemed to actually care in those days.

But times have changed, and times are hard. Presents mean less today, and people just utter, “Oh?”, when you say to total strangers on elevators, “Hey, it’s my birthday.” The look you get? “Get lost, you idiot!”

It’s particularly hard to have lived 24,455 days and realize that there are no more escapes from the reality of time…tick, tick, tick it goes in its endless cycle. No way to slow it down. As it’s said, “Life is like a roll of toilet tissue – the closer to the end, the faster it goes.”

But it’s not all bad to have birthdays. Yesterday James gave me an expensive bottle of Mac 18 scotch, my favorite, with a note, “The Final Solution.” Later in the evening I agreed!

My daughter gives great gifts of art for my birthdays. This time she gave me an interesting pastel representative more of reality than she knows. It’s a diaphanous drawing of a magnificent wild stag that had strayed from the safety of its forest home to eat the low-hanging fruit in someone’s garden. It was being attacked by wild dogs as its punishment.

Perhaps she’ll do a sequel for me depicting the stag’s escape from its error. I hope so.

But the tableau did strike a nerve. For years real estate careers have succeeded ~ we foraged in the finest of gardens with seeming impunity. But things have gone sideways, and it’s a dangerous world out there now.

What fruit remains is in short supply and competition for it is cut-throat. Wild dogs ~ bankruptcy lawyers, crazed bankers, heartless bill collectors hounding the unfortunates ~ have threatened anyone who strays from the safety of the forest. Whole companies of real estate brokers and developers now greet at Wal-Mart, or dine in soup lines. Overnight the “best minds of our generation” have become relics.

And birthdays continue to show up. Don’t get me wrong ~ there is opportunity among chaos. As the bumper sticker says, “Old age and treachery will always overcome youth and vigor!” Yes, times are hard for folks, and the new “world order” has not yet emerged ~ but it will.

While I wait for it, assured of its advent, I intend to relish my 24,455 days, and look forward for a few more. Meanwhile, I think I’ll just have another nap in the sunshine and sleep off the remnants of the Mac 18 anesthetization of last night!

Bud Hearn
March 5, 2009