The family curse follows you always

I have the power.

I can bust the Florida land boom, make it rain for 40 days and 40 nights, then bring on $5 a gallon oil prices.

My sainted mother called it “the Twomey Luck.” The Twomeys came from Ballyvourney, and it is still said there that the rest of the Irish farmers were glad to see them go and said “good riddance and all their bad luck.”

I ignored recognizing all the signs when I went to Red Sox games (50 cents in the bleachers) for decades and they always, always lost. “You should leave them alone,” advised mother Julia. It took 50 more years for my personal curse to wear off.

I have always been a financial wizard, spending the equity in Cobb Manor almost as fast as it grows. After visiting Florida for 10 years and seeing the land prices there jump from $4,000 a lot to $40,000, I decided to borrow even more, buy some land, then sell it at an exorbitant price to pay off all debts on the Cobb.

Right.

With God as my witness, my very first day in Fort Myers this year, the local newspaper had a page one story on the land boom evaporating. The price certainly wasn’t going down, but the phenomenal price jumps were over. My real estate agent, a Bangor transplant, told me things were so bad that she was looking for a new occupation.

Figures.

To add grievous insult, the story blamed the “lunatic fringe” for driving up the prices so fast. The lunatic fringe.

The legend continues.

When I reluctantly came home from Florida to Maine in April, I made two unforgivable errors. I bought a new sit-on-top kayak. Then I put the deck furniture out, an optimistic month early. Talk about blunders. If there have been three sunny, warm days since then, it is a miracle. The kayak has been used twice, the deck furniture not at all.

Since college, I have driven one VW and eight Hondas. The least that these efficient vehicles got was 30 miles per gallon.

When the last Honda blew a transmission at 30,000 miles (an anomaly, the dealer promised), he gave me a beastly, four-wheel-drive, V-8 monster as a loaner. Naturally, I was hooked. I not only bought a huge Toyota Tundra, but I got the “tow package” in case I had to haul something cross country.

Right.

The heaviest things in the truck bed so far have been three weeks of “lunatic fringe” rubbish, the beer bottles from the annual Lobster Festival party and David Grima.

Now that gas has hit $3 a gallon and Gary Fowlie’s Camden forecast is $5 a gallon by Labor Day, it is costing me $50 a week for gas and I rarely leave Knox County. Last week I put $100 in the tank in a single day, with a trip to exotic Eastport causing most of the damage.

I am thinking of selling the truck since I use the four-wheel drive mostly to navigate the Camden transfer station – dump – and buy instead something like a Mini Cooper. The 13-foot kayak should look good on that 3-foot roof.

Then I will sell the Florida land for whatever I can get for it and pay off the loan.

Once the “lunatic fringe” is out of land speculation and V-8 trucks, the Twomey Luck will send Florida property values soaring once again and gas will go back to $1.25 a gallon.

Right.

Send complaints and compliments to Emmet Meara at emmetmeara@msn.com.