A SHPOTZIR, IN CASE YOU DON'T SPEAK YIDDISH, IS A BRISK CONSTITUTIONAL WALK
Every Tuesday, I like to take a little shpotzir in the woods with my friends, many of whom are in semi-retirement. We discuss our deteriorating health, what would be a good investment, the private lives of the people we know and a variety of stimulating topics, like which videos you can rent that have dirty parts. Then we go to a restaurant to eat an enormous meal of veal parm. There are other shpotzirs out there, mostly little pishers, who have taken on the name shpotzir for their various societies and breakfast clubs, but this one was the original and is still the best. It is true many of the shpotzirniks in my group have to pee more often than some younger folks and we don't have a four color newletter with the cutting edge eurudition of certain now defunct chapters of one of the more notable youth shoptzirs, but we have life experience, and you can't buy that with your platinum card. That is something those little bastards just won't understand, with their e-mails and call waitings and cell phones and whatnot.


In order to understand the fundament of my need for aquisition, you must realize, I am a product of a different era, where it was not always a certainty that food would be on the table each night. Now, I am successful, in that I own many ropes and many things. All my free time is spent buying more things. I don't like to sell things, whereby I find I can accumulate an unprecendetly number of items. I like to call up my amigo, Mike, AKA #2, and roam around the four counties surrounding my house every Saturday for about six hours, systematically hitting every garage sale I can find, which I circle in the classifieds in the paper the night before. Me and #2 never clash, since he only buys things I would never want, like old 78 records and I buy things he would never want, like unidentifiably smashed up croquet sets.


I have many houses and barns and garages and attics, and they are all so full of stuff you can hardly walk through them, which I enjoy so much I don't like it if anyone looks at them, because it makes me fearful that they may get some ideas about trying to rob me. If you have any kind of sense, I suggest you aquire as many things as you possibly can, but I would warn you that you will never catch up with me, as I have been at this for many decades.

In order to understand where I am coming from, you must grasp that I was born on the wings of the Great Depression.
I think many items are highly collectible. Once or twice, I have guests on my garage sailing. Depending on who is in town, some novices sit in as a navigator, which is position #3 in the heirarchy of garage sailing. Sometimes this is my extremely fearful wife, who likes to buy Japanese bisque dolls and keeps her hair in a bun. Sometimes a spiky haired friend of my son who has a rubbery face and a somewhat big nose came garage saling with me. He bought Americana. I consider that type of 20th century stuff crappy, but I didn't tell him so. I did manage to talk him out of buying a clock, which I then deftly bought after he put it down.T