A SHANDA

 Since it’s common knowledge who my first lawyer was, I’ll now use his name – Stewart A. Rosenwasser. Google him. I first met Stew in high school. In my day that meant seventh grade. A 1960’s centralized school system (Valley Central) had thrown together the teens and pre-teens from the old Wallkill River Valley villages of Walden, Maybrook and Montgomery in a kind of forced socializing in a cow field experiment. A mix of hardscrabble farm kids hobnobbed with the more button-down suburban sprawl of the ambitious middle and merchant class. Blue collar and white color mixed quite nicely. A mostly white and Christian community, Stewart Rosenwasser’s Jewish parents ran a small coffee shop in Walden. Neither post World War II assimilation nor antisemitism was on my radar in 1964. That was the year I first saw numbers tattooed on a person’s arm.        

 

Stewart was a leader, a good talker, personable to a fault. If he hadn’t chosen the law/politics, used car salesman would’ve been a good fit. In Walden the Rosenwassers were respected, upstanding citizens, members of the community in good standing; not quite on the level as the Houghtalings, but their kids would be - if they had anything to say about it. From your google search you can see how Stewart fared all his life…. before the indictment was issued and the FBI came knocking. Fucking “upstanding” as fuck! No blemishes. His brother Mel is a topflight orthopedic surgeon, a consultant for the New York Yankees on hand injuries. A doctor and a lawyer ferchristsake. Mr. and Mrs. Rosenwasser could be proud.

 

This is where my great grandparents’ divorce and recent events collide in the telling of the tale.

 

The only way that my grandfather could get redress for his mother from a father who had packed his bags and moved to the Velie farm, and was rumored to have become intimate with Mrs. Velie, was to drag his father into court AND SHAME THE HELL OUT OF HIM. That set off a chain of very public events that painted Andrew as a drunk and philanderer who abandoned his wife and seven “kids.” It must have been the talk of the town. Today it’s the late Stewart Rosenwasser who has been accused of accepting bribes, wire fraud, firing upon the FBI, and ending his life (possibly by his own hand) etc., etc. Would I care if it was just a suicide by a depressed lawyer? I doubt it.

 

Shameful as this all reads, we live in a world that’s coming apart at the seams – Gaza, Lebanon, Iran. Presidential elections are around the corner. Uncle Joe is gone, but Trump is still a nasty co-morbidity that should concern all of us. And today (insult to injury) Instagram removed my HOT GIRL BENDING OVER post and even “blogger” hit me with a warning for the Kern photo. What the fuck is this world coming to? Since Butch is still in the halfway house I did a little recon in his fields, hoping maybe that buck would show himself. No such luck. The same six turkeys and a field full of deer by Butch’s driveway. Three little bucks and a dozen does. They know where they are safe.