My Life In Two or Three Short Chapters. Part Two

          Part One of My Life.


      In  a few years I'll be gone. Dead. Kaput. Finito.   My body will be cremated and my ashes - I hope- will be scattered along the shores of Spanish Banks.
      Of course, I won't be here to see this. Every year 50 million people die and so for once I'll be part of the vast majority, the 27 billion people who once lived but 20 billion of whom are now gone.
    "Are you married?" people often ask me, a 73 year-old bald old man. "Do you have any children?'.
     I reply in the negative to both questions. Then I'm often asked what did I do in my life. "I'm an ageing impoverished artist," I reply. I painted pictures I say that only half a dozen people ever saw and before wrote news stories that only a few hundred people ever read.
     My life splits into three or four distinct parts. The first part begins when I first came into this world in May, 1942. I was born in England as German bombers scoured large parts of Britain bombing and killing. At first I was lucky. My family wasn't poor and my father owned two businesses.
    Yet then disaster struck. When I was eight or so, my father lost both businesses, and spent money he didn't have. Plunged into disgrace, me, my two sisters and my mum and dad left for Canada to seek a better world.
     At first it was not to be. From about 1953 or 1954 my family fell into poverty. My father an intense working class Londoner, Montague or Monty Jaffe, was a fanatical Orthodox Jew though he never wore the long sideburns or black suits of the really devout Jews. My mother, Lillian Bolloten Jaffe was a declassed formerly upper middle class woman who ended up working in poorly paid claerical jobs in Montreal offices.
    My father started endless businesses in Montreal that just like the ones he'd founded in Britain, all went bankrupt. "Your father wasn't a business man," a man who knew my father well said. "He just didn't have street smarts or know how to save money."
    In Montreal my family moved from one ill-furnished apartment to another, barely ahead of yapping bailiffs and landlords. My dad ended up selling aluminum sidings to poor French Canadians. At this stage of our life say about 1960, we were losers pure and simple.
     Yet slowly life improved. My elder sister Sylvia was the first to escape. She moved to California in 1960, got married, divorced and then married again. To-day she's a wealthy woman who lived in suburban Chicago and is a strong Republican.
     My younger sister Valerie and I stayed behind. Along with our parents we first went nowhere, sweltering in Montreal's broiling humid summers and freezing through its endless winters. But then came deliverance.
          (Continued in next part)