As Luck Would Have It Read Free

loved to cook for us and impress everyone with her perfectly hone d culinary skills.  But what was this kosher thing about?  Was a cheeseburger seriously off limits?  I kept screwing up by requesting a glass of milk when beef was on the table or asking if Mrs. Klein had ever tried sausage with her otherwise delicious pasta.  That got a good laugh out of the whole family, but how was I supposed to know that sausage was what they referred to as treif ?  Joseph tried to explain the laws of Kashrus , but I didn’t get it.  How come you can’t eat oysters?  They don’t have fins and scales.  And what’s up with the milk and meat thing?  It says not to mix them in the Torah.  The more I tried to make sense of it, the more puzzling it became.  But my lack of understanding of the law did nothing to diminish my appetite for enjoying the wonderful meals with the Kleins, kosher or not. 
    I look back on those days with such happiness now and think of the good fortune I had when the Kleins moved just three doors down from us.  Maybe that signaled the beginning of my long streak of good luck, who knows, and things certainly seemed good for me now.  But being 13 meant that we were just one year away from the events that were to shape the rest of my life.  When you are young, it is relatively easy to measure time and mark events by the year.  It's much more difficult as you age because the years blur in the distance, like dust kicking up behind you as you drive through it.  And the increment of a year, a huge expanse of time for a child, becomes a progressively accelerating period as you grow older.  A year for a 13 - year - old may seem like forever, but for a centenarian, it may seem hardly worth mentioning.  But all things considered, a year could not now, in hindsight, be very far off at all.  How were we to deal with what was coming with just one more flip of the National Geographic calendar?

Two
I Don't Deserve This
    I have been working with the same company for the past 27 years, and if you think by now I am looking forward to retirement, you are completely correct , but it occurs to me that my employer may be counting the days faster than I am.  I should have been able to call it quits by now, but economic conditions of the past decade and a half have not kept pace with my somewhat over-optimistic financial planning.  The truth, a topic that we can discuss in much greater detail later on, is that my job is quite easy in most respects and maybe I should not be in such a hurry to give it up. My boss, Mr. Finnernan, is a somewhat weak-spirited man, nearly ten years my junior.  He is clearly not competent to do his job, but he is way ahead of me in a lot of ways. 
    Most of the serious responsibilities are delegated to the associates at Flanders and Associates.  I was now technically considered a consultant, though no one has ever been able to tell me what the difference is exactly, other than they trust the younger associates with work that might actually matter and trust me to do meaningless and mindless work that a reasonably intelligent 15 - year - old could quickly master and that nobody is very likely to screw up.  For these younger employees to show or even fake respect for people like me would be a lot to ask for, so they normally don't make the effort.
    I’d recently been given an assignment that I didn’t want to do and had no interest in completing.  It was actually going to require some research and analysis, something that I rarely attempted since most of the work that I did required minimal effort and even less creativity.  Now the boss was going to have to get on my case because he had a deadline.  What I should have been doing for the past couple of days was reviewing the financial statements of a company that a client of ours was considering acquiring.  Although this was a rather small client with relatively insignificant financial impact to us, common business sense and professionalism