I will be the first to say it and it might come as a shock to those who think otherwise, but life is not fair. I’ve always believed that and now I have more proof that it is so.
When he was three years old, Donald Trump was earning a salary of $200,000 a year. I am not sure what it was he was doing to bring in a haul like that but when I was three, I was struggling to learn to tie my shoes. My vocabulary consisted of about 50 words and as far as I can recall, I had no money. None. I struggled every day to make ends meet. It was not easy for me. I still bear the mental scars of those tough times.
And when Donald was eight years old, he became a millionaire. This really fries my bacon because it took me till I was 14 to earn my first million. When I was eight, I was still being swindled by my school’s designated bully out of the best National Hockey League hockey coins I had gotten from boxes of gelatin and potato chip bags and which I made the mistake of showing the bully, hoping to impress him and reduce the daily beatings. I think he gave me Al Arbour for Gordie Howe, Stan Mikita and Frank Mahovlich. Or he just stole the coins and ran off. The beatings have left me with a faulty memory.
My parents were always very good to me and they left me with a nice sum when they moved on to the next dimension, an amount that has helped me through the years. But looking back, and comparing them to Donald Trump’s parents, they were not as generous as I had always thought. By the time Trump’s father Fred left this realm, he had given his son $413 million. Mom and Dad left me with less than $413 million and I am not sure why they did that. I don’t think any of my six brothers and sisters got $413 million either, though I’d have to check the paperwork on that. Which begs the question, where did the rest of the family fortune go?
And while life is not fair, it sometimes has a way of balancing the scale. Poor though I may be, I have not been sued 3,500 times, 95 per cent of the people in the world don’t hate me, I have no ex-wives wandering around writing books about me and I have never met a porn star let alone paid one to keep quiet. I wouldn’t know what to do with a porn star if one knocked on my door and insisted on coming in. Like my cats, I’d probably run downstairs and hide behind the water heater.
Eventually, plowing through lots of potato chips and gelatin desserts and when I got older, learning how to swindle the younger kids, I got the plastic coins with the pictures of Gordie Howe, Stan Mikita and Frank Mahovlich on them.
So I’m good.
©2018 Jim Hagarty
