Vince the Prince

This appeared on Sunday, Feb. 11, 2007

A friend and I were talking at lunch a few days ago about the mystery of how random thoughts or occurrences sometimes join together in mysterious ways.

The conversation started when I mentioned that the two of us should seriously consider dying our gray hair back to their natural colors — brown for me, red for him. It would be a way, I said, of recapturing our youth, proclaiming our vitality, and warding off the frightful experience of looking in a mirror and seeing your grandfather.

And, as male mid-life crises go dying your hair is a lot cheaper than buying that Maserati.

Zounds! Without hesitation, he excitedly told me how he had discussed, just one day previous, that same idea with his hair-cutter. How mystical and marvelous, we thought, that the two of us could have the same notion — however mundane — at virtually the same time.

You‘ve had the same thing happen yourself, I‘m certain: You wake up humming ”Yesterday“ and the first thing you hear when you turn on the car radio is Paul McCartney‘s voice. You think of an old friend you haven‘t seen in years on a Thursday and on Friday, there he is on TV proclaiming to be the father of Anna Nichole Smith‘s baby. Mirabile dictu!

Is this phenomenon a result of cosmic energy that connects us all on a whim? Or is it a form of Jung‘s conception of a collective unconscious, a ”meaningful coincidence,“ or synchronicity? Whether fate or kismet I can‘t say, but I believe it makes the world a more exciting, wondrous, thrilling place to live.

Which brings us, of course, to Vince Fumo.

State Sen. Fumo, D-1st, of Philadelphia, Pa.; Harrisburg, Pa. Margate, N.J.; Ventnor, N.J., Florida; and soon maybe the Minimum Security Prison at Alderson, W. Va., was recently indicted by a federal grand jury for a variety of alleged crimes, including using taxpayers‘ money to spy on ex-wives, girlfriends and future state governors; ordering members of his staff to drive his daughter to school; and using charitable funds to keep a sand dune from being built in front of his ocean-front home.

Nice work if you can get it.

What leapt out at me as I read the indictment weren‘t the sordid details of those alleged crimes. It was the vacuum cleaners.

Sen. ”Put It On The Other Guy‘s Tab“ reportedly spent $6,556 in public money to buy 17 Oreck home vacuum cleaners — allegedly one for every floor of every home that he owns.

Presumably, this was done out of an overwhelming sense of cleanliness, plus a concern for the back strain on whichever legislative researcher may have had housecleaning duty that week.

Zounds! The hair on the back of my neck stood up straight up. There was that eerie, binding energy again.

You see, I too have an Oreck vacuum cleaner for every floor of my house, just like Vince. You may argue that I only occupy one floor of the apartment building I live in, but facts is facts, as they say.

So Vince, call me. We‘ll talk, we‘ll connect, we‘ll marvel at the mystery of the world. And we‘ll sing: ”Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away …“