By Janice Lindsay
Contributing Writer
At a recent family party, we played a game where a game card asked a provocative question and each player gave a personal answer.
One thought-provoking question went something like: “How would your daily life be different if you were a billionaire?”
This inspired flights of fancy: mansions, private planes, big-business ownership, tropical islands. Billionaires seem very much in the news. We imagine that they do fabulous things all day.
But who cares? I like my little anonymous non-billionaire life.
Mostly.
If I were a billionaire?
I would spend more time doing the things I enjoy and less time doing the things I don’t. I could do this because I would hire somebody else to take care of the irksome details that now impinge on my time and attention.
Example: When some miscreant bashed my mailbox to an unusable state, I had to spend time and effort locating another mailbox and a person to install it.
Late on the evening of a winter holiday, when my well water’s radon-remediation system, which cycles on and off, refused to cycle off, I had to figure out how to make the water bypass the system, then how to shut the system off.
I don’t even want to think about trying to outwit the mouse tribe that decided to spend a cozy winter on my bulkhead steps and in my garage.
And housework. I like my house to be clean and orderly, but I dislike being the person who makes it so. If I were a billionaire, I would hire the person who would hire other persons to dust, vacuum, and polish.
And this person would pay bills; and balance the checkbook; and prepare tax documents for the accountant; and be at the house when the plumber says he’ll arrive between 1:00 and 4:00; and notice when woodwork needs painting and find people to do it; and know whom to call to re-caulk the bathtub; and keep track of when to refill prescriptions; and take my car for service and inspections; and many other et ceteras.
I have discovered that the person I want is a butler.
I recently read an article about butlers who work for billionaires. (The article in The Week magazine was excerpted from one by Will Coldwell in 1843 magazine.)
If you’re thinking of Mr. Carson in Downton Abbey, think bigger.
One butler related that a woman he worked for liked a pair of shoes that she saw in a photograph. She wanted a pair. There was no label, but the butler managed to trace the shoes’ origin to a Hawaiian boutique. He arranged to buy the shoes and fly them to Dubai on an airplane seat, first-class.
I don’t want Hawaiian shoes. Or a place in Dubai. But I want that butler!
Just think what I could do with my time if I had a butler! Read more books. Produce more fine art (truth: barely acceptable art). Convene more meetings of Crones Alone, the support group a friend and I started for older women who live alone. Take more classes. Volunteer in other places besides the library’s secondhand book shop. Spend more time tending to the needs of our ukulele group of which I’m the leader (truth: leader only because nobody else wants the job). Do more with, and for, friends and family. Watch the birds. I might even write something of some significance.
Alas, it will be many years (truth: centuries) before I become a billionaire.
For now, I have to stop writing and take out the trash.
Contact jlindsay@tidewater.net
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