St. Peter of The Numbers

I'm back after while.  It's been a long and demanding year.  But that's not what I want to write about right now.

I am a recovering Catholic.  Have been for decades.  But when I was growing up, it seemed that there was a special saint assigned to just about everything in life: fire prevention (St. Florian) ...  animal protection (Saint Francis of Assisi) ... Saint Blaise (who wards off throat ailments) ... of course, the poor beleaguered Saint Anthony (whose job is to find everything one could possibly lose, from keys to umbrellas) ...  and, last but not least, when southern Catholic mothers are at their wit's end in the Winn-Dixie parking lot, "Hail Mary, full of grace, help me find a parking place."

The Catholic Church fired St. Christopher, patron of travelers, some time ago, which suggested to me that there just might be something to him that they're not willing to admit -- the Area 51 of Heaven, if you will -- so I hung onto my St. Christopher medal just to be belligerent.  Besides, my granny gave it to me.

But in my adult years I've met a real, live, in-person saint.  His real name is Peter Barrios, and if you need a real CPA I recommend him in exactly the same way  that those passengers  on US Airways Flight 1549 who landed safely in the middle of the Hudson river would recommend Captain  Chesley Sullenberger to fly the next plane you are on.

I call him, "St. Peter of the Numbers."  Lisa named him, I kept it, and it works.

Peter does our taxes every year.  For 2012, I had to ask for a deferment until October 2015, simply because last year was more than I could possibly manage well, what with closing my knit shop for once and for all, juggling three part-time jobs, battling with health insurance companies, managing my Mom's rental property, running errands, keeping both our house and Mom's  house reasonably clean (or at least not at risk from being condemned), buying groceries, filling prescriptions, taking cats to the vet, paying most of the bills on time, keeping my old car running all last year until it couldn't run any more, and keeping track of endless streams of paper entering through the mail slot.

Whew.

I am in possession of an awful lot of skills, and I am grateful for that.  Real skills -- good, solid ones. I can manage an animal shelter and perform every task I supervise, and perform it well.  I can manage a budget for a shelter.  I can write a grant.  I'm a good veterinary technician.  I can knit, spin, and dye fabric and fiber, and I can both sew and  weave reasonably well.  I can write, paint a house meticulously, grow a garden, can vegetables, preserve foods, and cook from scratch like I mean it.  I can make bread from scratch (hand-kneaded), start a fire with a handmade bow drill, dry twigs and kindling, survive in the woods if stranded, fix a fair number of things on a non-computerized car.  And I am the queen of traveling well while packing as little as possible.  I can fix a lot of things if they break. Importantly, I can tend bar -- an essential skill for Zombie-apocalyspe, if you ask me, and I can make basic beer and wine.

I can manage a budget for an animal shelter serving half a million citizens, and I am very, very well organized in almost every other aspect of my life: ask me for a screwdriver, a flashlight, a leash, a tape measure, a Bruce Springsteen CD,  chopsticks, sunglasses or a shoelace and I can always put my hand on the requested object in three minutes or less. Our closets, kitchen, clothing drawers, bathroom and cupboards are organized.  I almost never lose a sock.

But, somehow, managing our own finances always seems like an insurmountable and amazingly tedious task.  When I am done, it is always a photos finish -- always! -- and breathlessly close to the due date, giving our poor accountant and his two equally saintly assistants high blood pressure and turning their hair white at far too early of an age.

But I am the sort of person who gets that "deer-in-the-headlights" sort of apoplectic panic when faced with two boxes jam-packed with paper ... when facing off the daunting task of sorting through my own two Rubbermaid tubs full of medical bills, bank statements, W2s, 1099s ... and the insane number of itsy-bitsy receipts generated by running a small business,  paying for prescriptions, and buying medical supplies.

And when I finish, I always feel as though I just, somehow, managed to pass all my classes if I'd had a school semester in which every single subject was something I both abhorred and also totally sucked at.

It does not help that we are the sort of people who let our cats sleep in the mail bin and eventually sort the rumpled piled into a bin (or two) marked "BILLS AND TAX STUFF."

My dear friend Lisa tries to soothe me with the notion that it is just "not my skill set," and I agree. It is not my skill set ... in exactly the same was that resisting the urge to murder women was not in Ted Bundy's skill set.

But Peter?  I've presented him with dozens of Ziploc bags full of rumpled receipts and he has just smiled.

I have finally realized what Peter's gift is -- and his staff, too.

He respects paper.  He makes it feel appreciated.  He loves it and cares for it.  When I get our taxes back, all the receipts have been lovingly straightened (I strongly suspect that he actually irons them), and put in perfect order, precisely aligned and neatly stapled.  I sometimes wonder if these are the same papers I gave him to begin with.  Could this compact and orderly sheaf of paper be them same unruly and rumpled pile I presented him with?  Could it possibly be the same crumpled, folded, and paper-clipped mess I handed him the previous week, desperately scrawled-on and rudely highlighted with yellow marker and bold red pen? (Can this be deducted? LOOK, A BIG MEDICAL EXPENSE!!!!  Oh, and don't forget I didn't get my deposit back on the shop rent!)  

When I get it back, it looks like the paper version of Cinderella going off to the ball.

And I am certain that the original mass of paper wass slipped into his mail slot, under the cover of darkness, in the wee hours of the night, in an absurdly large number of gallon Ziplock bags with the type of information or papers contained therein scrawled across the bag in black permanent marker with extremely businesslike and helpful titles like "BANK STATEMENTS!" "PAY STUBS!"  "MEDICAL DEDUCTIONS!"  "OTHER MISC,"  "DEDUCTIBLE STUFF!"  "SHOP EXPENSES," "NOT SURE" and "DO YOU NEED THESE?" 

And there is always one last bag, slipped into the door slot so late one night that it's almost early, during the most shadowy of the wee hours, at the last possible minute, labeled: "Here is some more miscellaneous stuff!  Is it deductible?"

Warning to readers: If you ever get a gallon ziplock bag from me full of receipts and marked "Miscellaneous Stuff?"  Run.  Run like hell.

But Peter and his crew?  Nah, they're like Daniel in the paper lion's den.  It's truly inspirational.

Anyway, if you live in the Baton Rouge area and you want an excellent person to do your taxes and help you with general investment advice and money-related things, I highly advise that you call Saint Peter.  His number is 225-924-3031. The best appreciation, and his staff, I can offer him is free advertising.

See y'all soon and we can talk about knitting again.

Dez

Back, After A Long Hiatus, 

With A Few Non-Knitterly Thoughts About Hoodies

A lot has happened -- and by a "lot" I mean a staggering amount of stuff -- in the last year, since I closed the knit shop entirely.  Some good things, some less pleasant, a new job, and mostly, just time-consuming things. I will catch you all up on that later.

But today I am thinking about hoodies.

I have a handknit hoodie -- my own version of the "Wonderful Wallaby" by Cottage Creations.  I also have a couple of basic athletic hoodies, in exciting shades of navy, grey and charcoal, for brisk morning walks on chilly days, or a quick chill-chaser on a damp, rainy day -- you know, just something to pop over my uniform on my way to work. 

And, I can remember, some years back, not long after the Unabomber was caught (Google him if you are very young or if your memory is short), causing a bit of concern in the local post office when I completely and entirely forgot that I was wearing a hoodie on a drizzly, chilly day, and that I was also carrying a stack of packages and wearing black aviator sunglasses.  I'm certain that I looked exactly like the Unabomber's long-lost sister.  It was spectacularly not a good idea at the time-- truly inconsiderate, actually -- but I just didn't think.  I wear hoodies with jeans quite often when it's chilly and drizzly and not cold enough for a proper coat.

A few people peered at me suspiciously.  I think, at that particular point in time, that my local post office employees in particular had every right to be a bit edgy about bespectacled, hoodie-clad people with armloads of packages to mail. I can't blame the other customers for looking at me nervously either.  I might even have been a bit concerned if I'd seen myself in a mirror.

But even with all those perfectly legitimate reasons for postal employees and patrons to be put ill at ease by my attire at that point in time, nothing happened.

Specifically, no one followed me out into the parking lot and shot me dead.

And today, I finally understand something.

When I was in college, I used to kid around with my African-American friends for taking so long to get dressed to go anywhere -- out for a pizza or burger, going to study at the library, even walking over to the A&P grocery to pick up some beer. "Come on," I would say.  "We're not going to a fashion show. We're just going to the library to study, for Pete's sake!"

I was a white hippie kid.  Jeans, Birkenstocks, run a comb through my long black hair, toss on a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, and I was ready for anything: class, happy hour at the pool hall off campus, a casual date, going to the mall or to a movie, or hunkering down over chemistry books at the library. 

I always thought my black friends (as well as some of my white friends who didn't step out without makeup) were still a little too tethered to Establishment ideas as to how women should look, or maybe a little too eager to look overly glamorous in case a cute guy strolled by.   

But now I understand.

It wasn't about being far too fashion conscious, or a bit frivolous, or a little too silly about how guys might perceive them.

It was about having the bar raised higher -- much higher -- in order to enjoy the same privileges I could enjoy in jeans, Birkenstocks, a ponytail and a T-shirt.  

I could walk into the A&P dressed like that and not have the manager follow me around -- just because I was white.

I could walk into the bookstore and not be eyed suspiciously in that attire -- just because I was white.

I could walk down the street in that attire and not be considered "up to no good" -- just because I was white.

But even in the middle of a college campus, a HUGE state-university campus throbbing with students of all colors and ethnicities dashing to and fro at all hours, wearing all sorts of clothes, my black friends still felt the need to sport an appearance standard several rungs above my own choices on the fashion ladder, simply in order to be perceived as "normal."

Which primarily translates to being perceived as non-threatening. 

I didn't understand it at the time.  I got along with just about everybody, so I thoughtlessly bought the casually tossed-off explanation of "it's a black thing, I just can't go out anywhere without looking nice." Different strokes, different folks, I thought. Like, whatever. I rarely dress up; they do ... I don't wear makeup; they do ... whatever makes people happy.  To each her own. 

Now I realize that perhaps it didn't make them happy.  Not at all. 

Man, was I wrong.