Take the Money and Run

After more than half a year on the market, it looks like my parents' house will be sold.  It's about time.  The house needs a young family.  Also, considering the American economy, waiting for a better price may be a futile waiting for Godot.  My parents need the money now to fund their "final years" in a senior citizen facility in Arizona.  When you're as old as they are, today is more important than tomorrow.

I mentioned it to a friend who went through a similar house-selling after his parents died.  Like me, he told his siblings to just take it.  Don't wait.
From our vantage point in Israel, things in the United States don't look all that rosy.  Manufacturing is down. 

"Maybe it's our Israeli mentality.  They kept insisting that things were bound to get better."

The US Government sneakily subsidizes its military industry by handing out "shopping coupons" to countries like Israel, calling them "foreign aid."  Properly defined, it's foreign countries aiding American industry by weakening their own local industry in the process.  That's what happens to Israel.  There are products we can no longer produce, because we're caught in a self-destructive economic relationship with the United States, yes, to our detriment.  And of course, any product we manufacture with an American component can't be marketed and sold without American approval.  That's bad business for us Israelis.

There are always strings to deals which seem too good to be true, like "foreign aid" from the United States.

Back to the real news here.  A very long chapter, forty-eight 48 years, is closing on my family.  When someone asks me:

"Where did you used to live?"

I won't be able to give my old unclear answer:

"My parents live in Great Neck."

I'll have to say something else, accurate, of course, but...

I guess I'll answer either "New York" or "Long Island"  and hope that they don't ask for details.  Most people don't really want to know.  Does it really matter where I lived one third of my life?  We're celebrating forty 40 years in Israel, almost exactly two-thirds of my life, and of those forty years, almost three-quarters, twenty-nine 29 years have been in Shiloh.  That's what's most important!