What Killed Creighton McGregor?

Creighton McGregor's immediate cause of death was an aneuyrsm. At only fifty years of age, he was relatively young to have passed, and while it was certainly possible that the offending blood vessel was congenitally destined to give out well before Creighton reached old age, the fact that he was the youngest of four siblings, all seemingly in decent health, and that he was, more importantly, a severe alcoholic, did not lend itself well to the notion that Creighton's sudden, fatal, collapse was simply the result of a bum artery. After years, decades, in fact, of heavy drinking, it was more likely that he had let his body down and, as a result, allowed his system to become fatally vulnerable.

And what of his alcoholism? If, in the face of many years of excessive drinking, the idea of Creighton's deadly aneuyrsm occurring as the result of just a bit of bad internal hardware could be plausibly dismissed, what of his addiction to alcohol itself? Might that be nothing more than a genetic weakness for, say, Scotch, which was Creighton's preferred substance when seeking transit from sobriety? This was, of course, unknowable, and yet there were clues that suggested such a tidy and benign explanation left more than a little to be desired.

C'est La Vie

All realtors are the same. Or they all have, more or less, the same irritating effect on me. Ours happens to be French, with an Irish last name acquired through marriage. More strange and unusual than the French Irish symbiosis is that this is the second French expatriate realtor I've worked with in the Boston area. How many Gallic realtors can be operating in this part of the world, and why are they here? Never mind. I don't want to know.

Both progeny from the land of the Fleur de Lis were barely able to hide their zeal to sell our condo as quickly as possible. In this regard the French brand of realtor are no different from their American cousins who are always in a hurry to immediately make whopping sums of money in exchange for providing only modestly useful middleman services. Delphine, who has been as spectacularly wrong about pricing the place to sell (we've had one offer so far, made by some wishy washy suburban attorneys who pulled their bid literally ten minutes after I signed the offer sheet) as she has been about how quickly it would sell, is trying to nudge my wife and me to lower our price after the property has been on the market for just a little over a month. As we don't need to sell-a fact which she has conveniently forgotten- I have politely told her non. Were I more put off by her apparent avarice, I might instead advise her to kiss my derriere.

I understand that she is eager to make the better part of fifty thousand dollars for what I generously estimate has been about thirty to thirty five hours of "work", but before I hand over to her a sum equivalent to a year of college tuition, she is going to have to put in a lot more time standing around suffering the slings and arrows of nitpicking, impecunious twits who scuff up the wood floors, make insipid and asinine comments such as, "if this room had a fireplace I'd buy the place today" and ask questions that betray either their ignorance and/or disingenuousness.

In sum, I fully expect that in a little over two months time, when the final bell rings on our attempt to sell our home to some hoped for greater fool, our dwelling will not have a buyer lined up. Alas, times aren't great, the bottom feeders are out in force, and as a result, almost no one is making bids-well, except the kind that are rescinded an instant after they are made-even for newly constructed, rare, upper triplexes, in fashionable neighborhoods such as The South End of Boston. C'est La Vie.