Not to Worry--Her Check’s in the Mail

“April is the cruelest month” is a silly thing to say, even if it was mouthed by that eminent grump, T. S. Eliot.

Everyone knows the cruelest month is March. The only thing good to be said about March, besides the jubilant observance of St. Patrick’s Day, is that there is the occasional smog-dispersing breeze. For the rest of the month, it’s hair shirts and ashes and prepare your income tax.

For the past couple of months, I have been receiving little bits of paper telling me how much money I have made during the year. Obviously, as usual, the IRS has my records mixed up with someone else’s. I certainly didn’t make all that money. Not that it’s so much, but if I had I would be spending the winter in a white villa on Mykonos, or, maybe, the Smeralda Coast. I certainly wouldn’t be sitting in Pasadena watching the begonias freeze.

My accountant is a tall, good-looking man with a shock of white hair and his name is Richard Martin. I don’t have enough money to need an accountant and if I had the mathematical aptitude of a newt, I wouldn’t have one. But I don’t and I do.

Dick has worked out a grand little system for me to keep track of things and if I did it throughout the year instead of starting March 14, it would probably work very well.

I want Dick to know that I speak grandly of my accountant when I am with the smart people, just as I speak very largely of my stock broker, Chuck Waterman. Chuck is also broker to a number of people who never have had to ask, “How much?” in all their lives. I think he keeps me as a client just to stay humble.

They are both, Dick and Chuck, kind, patient and long-suffering and I never know one word they are saying. Through the years, I have worked out a method of leaning back in the chair, gazing at them, and nodding my head rhythmically, like one of those Oriental birds.

Then I thank them and get up and go out and they do whatever they do.

This is what I do for Dick’s system. He has numbered every category of possible expenditure for me--utilities, medical, travel, entertainment, business, miscellaneous. The last category is always the largest.

I go through my check registers and write the appropriate number on every check notation. There are always several notations of quite large amounts of money made to people whom I don’t know. Names like Farquarson Brothers. These checks will be in amounts as large as $300. Unfortunately, there is never a notation to remind me of what the Farquarson fellows did for me.

Now, this is obviously the result of secret hypnosis or mind control. I would certainly remember writing a check for $300. Right. That’s more money than I ever saw at one time until I was 23 and my husband came home from World War II with $1,000 in cash in the bottom of his duffel bag. He had won it in an extended crap game coming home on the Queen Mary. (We used it to put a down payment on a house, in case you’re wondering.)

There are usually six or eight of those checks for large amounts that I do not remember. I am sure these renegade hypnotists operate in your checkbook too. Surely, I am not the only one singled out for such chicanery.

I take the check registers to Dick, and he looks at them for a long time, saying nothing. Then, he gently suggests that I read the contents of my check registers into his tape recorder so his assistant can “punch them in.” That’s because his assistant can’t read my impeccable Palmer method handwriting. When he says “punch in,” I have enough sense to know that we are moving into the computer area, and it is time for me to leave before he asks any penetrating questions.

Then, in a few days, I get a great heap of neatly printed pages and two stamped envelopes. Then I send two checks, one to the feds and one to the state.

In a few weeks, many of my friends are nattering happily about their income tax refunds and what they are going to do with the money.

I either don’t get any back or I already owe it to the Farquarson Brothers.