Irish Wisdom

The other night I was reading a book about the financial crisis. The topic shifted to Ireland, where the banks basically blew themselves up by over-lending to property developers who over-built homes and office towers. But the best part of the story involved the Irish Prime Minister. In seeking to explain the cause of the crisis, he said “Lehman’s was a world investment bank. They had testicles everywhere.”

The Irish are totally loveable, especially when they mess up.

My dad once told me a story about his father (my Grandpa Bob) who was second-generation off the boat from Ireland. Grandpa Bob was a metal polisher who worked in a thermos factory in Norwich, Connecticut. Hard-working with deft hands, he always made his product shine.

But Grandpa Bob was apparently less gifted when it came to his feet. One afternoon my dad was sitting behind the family home. The house sat up by the road and the rest of the property sloped down a fairly steep hill. Near the bottom of the hill sat a detached garage. So, my dad is reading a newspaper when he hears a car engine suddenly rev up. He looks over and sees Grandpa Bob flying down the steep driveway, heading for the garage. His arms are locked straight and his head is tilted back in an open-mouthed expression of pure fear. Intending to hit the brake, Grandpa Bob has instead stomped on the gas.

Grandpa Bob and his car zip through the open garage door, blast through the back wall, and exit, catching air. The car lands and grinds to a halt in a thicket of shrubs. Grandpa Bob gets out, walks into the house, and never drives again.

But before you deem this man to be just some Irish rube, consider this fact: The back wall of the garage was made from wood, but covered with that fake-brick linoleum. It looked tacky and the wood was rotting, so the Mrs wanted Grandpa Bob to replace it with real brick to match the rest of the structure. But he didn’t do it, which saved his life.

Which leads us to two conclusions. First, avoiding home improvement projects not only saves you from unnecessary hassles, it might also save your life. And second, that Irish Prime Minister could be onto something. Lehman’s was willing to sell anything that made them money, so who’s to say there’s not testicles sitting in vaults all around the world, quickly losing their re-sale value?