Mom's Money

 

Mom’s Money

My wife and I always wanted to travel, but never had the time or money. Then, lucky for us, Mom died. She and I were never close because she travelled a lot, leaving me behind with a nanny. Loved that nanny, hated that mom. But now, for some reason, Mom left me her entire fortune, with the stipulation that I take care of her dog for the rest of its life. No problem, if it has a short life. When the funds arrived, we quit our thankless jobs and decided to travel.

“Where should we go first?”

“How about the Grand Canyon. We’ve always wanted to see the Grand Canyon.”

So that’s what we did, at the drop of a hat. The kids went to camp, crying the whole way. The dog went to a pet hotel, whining the whole way. We raced to the airport, laughing all the way. We flew to Las Vegas, lost $50,000 in the airport casino, rented a chauffer-driven stretch Corvette, checked in to the new Wynn World mile-high penthouse, caught a stretch Hummer to the South Rim’s new skybox, and prepared to take selfies on our iphone 20 using the Grand Canyon as a mere backdrop to our fabulous selves. But hard rain and low visibility made it all just a gray and fuzzy image to be stowed away in our cloud storage forever. No matter, we could still watch the Grand Canyon episode on the travel channel in our penthouse’s iMax theatre..

“Where to next?”

“I’ve always wanted to walk the beaches of Hawaii.
“All of them?”

“I don’t know. How many are there?”

There are more beaches in Hawaii than you can shake a stick at. Or palm frond. So we booked a helicopter, hoping to see them all in one day and get it over with. By then, summer camp was over, so we had to stick the kids in boarding school for the fall semester. We had to move the dog out of the pet hotel and put it in a kennel because the hotel expelled all whiners.

We chartered a private jet to Oahu and rode in a rock star bus with a full bar to stay in a fifty-star hotel overlooking a millionaires-only nude beach. Unfortunately, it was hurricane, volcano, and labor strike season, so the helicopters were going nowhere. So instead we spent the week dining at gold-plated restaurants, drinking 2000-year-old scotch from goblets once owned by Captain Cook, and sipping endangered sea turtle bisque. Ultimately, it didn’t matter that we didn’t get a chance to see all the Hawaiian beaches, because we got to see all of them on video on the flight home on the Nature Channel Plus on the jet’s iMax Jumbotron.

After all that stress, we needed a vacation.

“We should go on an around-the-world tour.”

“Great Idea. I’ve always wanted to see Europe, Asia, Australia, Africa and the poles.” It was now winter. The kids were paroled from boarding school for setting a cop car on fire at a mostly peaceful rally in the quad, so we sent them to a luxurious, exclusive, celebrity drug rehab facility in the hills overlooking Malibu. The dog had chewed all the fur off its back half so we moved him from the kennel to a shelter. Then we signed up for an all-inclusive, adults only, bottomless around-the-world-twice tour. Just before take-off, all air travel around the world was grounded by a pandemic, terrorism, mechanical difficulties, and a baggage handler strike.

“What do we do now?”

“What’s left? How about another planet?”

A conglomerate of several twenty-something billionaire social media influencers were booking trips to Mars for a hundred million per head. We paid the deposit and got ourselves on the two-year waiting list. By then our kids had gone off the grid and were living in an anarchist tent village occupying Bel Aire, and the dog had been sent out to the proverbial farm for eating a cat. When the Mars trip was cancelled by a TikTok hacker squatting in a Seattle Starbucks, we had to return to our humble homes in the Hamptons and Seychelles while our own private island was still being built by Epstein’s former child slave laborers in the West Indies. But, despite the space voyage cancellation, we did enjoy seeing Mars in a Mark Burnes Hubble Telescope Netflix documentary special produced by Michelle Obama and Tim Burton.

“Where should we go next?”

“I’m tired of travel.”

“Maybe there’s more to life than riches and luxury.”

“I’ve heard that the most important thing in life is family.”

“We should probably text the kids.”

The kids couldn’t return out texts because they’d destroyed all their devices and joined Snoop Dog’s organic wholistic atheist CBD farm and spa commune retreat in a newly gentrified South Central over-55 community. Kids will be kids.

Burnt out by the high life, it was time for us to downsize and simplify, so we sold off the yacht fleet and built a log cabin homestead in Stephen King’s brand-new Maine survivalist’s compound.

“What do we do with all this extra money?”

“Maybe we should we leave it to the kids.”

“But they hate capitalism and material possessions.”

“That’s the whole point. If we can’t win them back, at least we can ruin their lives.”

“That’s what Mom would do.”

“Yep. Pay it forward.”