Tuesday night personal

Did my bit for the cause and, first thing this morning, closed my checking and savings accounts at one of those big national bailed-out banks. Mine is going to start charging $5 a month to use my debit card (unless I use it only at the bank). $5 isn't much, but I can envision all the millions of $5 charges being sucked right up into the penthouses of Manhattan.*

Aside from that, my new bank (a local-grown bank where I opened a checking account last week) is right across the street from my condominium and has an ATM outside (of course). I told this to the bank people this morning, since the first thing they said when I told them I was closing my accounts (except for an IRA) was that banking with them was so convenient because they had branches everywhere. That may be true, but this new situation for me is much more convenient. (I then told them that their branch closest to my home - and it wasn't even that close - shut down after the building got damaged in Hurricane Wilma [never to re-open].)

So I gave the bank both reasons for leaving them: the convenience and the $5. They were very nice about it, and of course so was I. They said I was the first customer they'd had who's closed an account there giving the $5 charge as a reason. (I suspect there will be more, if not at that branch, which is in Miami's own "financial district.")

Then, as I was in the last stage of closing my accounts - at the teller window - they said there would be a $10 charge for a cashier's check. No thanks, I took the cash. So that cash goes into the new bank account tomorrow morning when they open (at 8:30). This place is just feet away from my bus stop, by the way. How convenient is that. I'll catch my bus after I make my deposit.

*   *   *

*Speaking of Manhattan, one of my step-grandfathers was from there. (I had two, since both my grandfathers died while my mom and dad were children.) He ended up in DC and owned a big hotel there, which my mom told me became an embassy. He lost his shirt in the Great Depression and then ended up in Miami, where he built cute little houses in Coconut Grove.

My grandmother had met him at the downtown train station (long gone). Wonderful guy. But both he and my grandmother died when I was little - she first. (We called him Papa - remember the song, "Oh! My Pa-pa" - "to me he was so wonderful"?)

As I recall, he was a diabetic and to sweeten his coffee used saccharin. I'd never heard of it. It came in tiny pills from a small brown bottle. Once he gave me one to taste and I remember how bitter it was. He also drank - as I recall - a fifth of Imperial a night. And I think he also smoked cigars, since I remember he had a wooden smoking stand with a humidor.

Time to chill. A new "Off Limits," about the Boston subway, the first in America (1895), etc. They were imitating the London tube.

P.S. Lucas is back to using the cat door again (on a limited basis).

Don Wildman of "Off Limits"

P.P.S. I love FDR's choice of words "the new economic royalty" and "[t]hese economic royalists]." So apt for our own time.