Page 47 - To Family with Love

top of all these torments, I’m also getting shorter. I’m two mil- limeters shorter than yesterday. It’s damn true that misery loves company. Here I am shrinking before their very eyes, and the two of them aren’t even bothered by that, they’d rather continue arguing about money, as if money can buy me height.
And we always had plenty of money. Not exactly enough to buy a car or go for ice cream every day, but we were well pro- vided for, so we never really had to argue about it. Somehow, we would always find enough other issues to fight about, and most of the time the thing on the agenda would be my school. When we couldn’t think of anything else, it was enough for my pop or mom to ask how school was going and voila, there you have it, a good reason to argue. Money was never the reason.
My old man has golden hands that I will hopefully inherit from him once he dies, because for now I only have two left hands. There’s a saying: The eye sees, but the hand can reach, which I never mention in front of Blindy, because you always have to be careful about what you say, lest it result in a series of severe insults at someone else’s expense, regardless of your good intentions. Before my old man went to war, we would go around the neighborhood and constantly fix something. Our neighbor- hood was a terribly perishable commodity, you see, and every godforsaken thing would stop working every now and then. From cars to everything else, appliances, tools, services, and there were even a lot of people that needed fixing, which my ma would very often warn me about, but we never got into fixing them. And for such a neighborhood, a pair of golden hands was a gift from the heavens. We would even make a pretty penny on those endeav- ors. I was my old man’s right-hand man in that, in spite of me having two left hands, and an invaluable one nonetheless. I was certainly the best handyman in the whole neighborhood, and my job was called: fetch, take, prepare, hold, bring, take out, clean up. Since I was the best, my old man worked exclusively with
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