Plan B

It's probably not a bad idea, we being in bankruptcy and all that, to be thinking about things like skill sets. Like, what do I want to be when I grow up?

And the problem, as I see it after careful examination, is that I don't have a skill set.

Outside of journalism, I could last about 15 minutes in the wild.

I took a look on Craigslist the other day to see if they needed someone who could write down what people say and turn that into something people would pay money for (or read for free on the Web), and there weren't a lot of openings out there.

In truth I identified two talents I might have to work with in today's bananas-and-cabbage, all-offers-considered economy.

I can usually find the right music to put on for the occasion. (Here we cue up, Yip Harburg's "Brother, Can You Spare a Dime.")

And I can make keys. Or at least I could.

Key making is an old skill of mine. This picture is from 1965, when I was about nine, and I'd drive into Dorchester with my dad and spend the morning killing time at the family hardware store until lunch at the sub shop down the street. (Another talent discovered: I could spend money.) The only thing my grandfather trusted me with was the key machine, a wheezy,  belt-driven contraption that let you carve new keys from blanks, then file the rough edges with an electric-powered wire wheel that could also peel away a few layers of skin if you happened to be thinking about something else.

We charged the customers 25 cents for a key back then and the blanks cost less than  a nickel each, so my learning curve didn't cost the family that much money.

Nowadays, few use these kinds of machines - it's all automated and idiot-proofed at the Home Depots that crushed the family hardwares stores.

Aren't there some other skills, you might ask? It was at the end of college, when I found journalism, and realized that I could put to good use my knack for finding where my roommates stashed their Playboy magazines. Journalism was the most socially acceptable way of laundering my somewhat sociopathic tendencies of finding hidden secrets, forever measuring the distance between what someone said and what they actually meant.

That was about 30 years and thousands of stories ago, Peter Pan work of starting each day with a blank piece of paper and filing them with people's fears and foibles, their scams, their scrapes, their dreams.

The problem is, years of this work has spoiled me. You don't have to dress up, you don't have to sit still. Your impatience is nurtured, your irritability overlooked -- if you can deliver the goods, time and time again.

And a newspaper life has allowed me to ignore cultivating some useful abilities.

You'd think a hardware heir might know his way around the toolbox. You'd be wrong. I can talk a good game - I know the difference between paint thinner and turpentine, I can tell a three-penny nail from a brad.

And I have been known, when pressed, to perform actual repairs around the house. I sometimes even get into the work, throwing down drop cloths and setting up ladders, donning painters caps and plastic goggles and,  of course, putting on the right music. (Cue up: "This Little Light of Mine.") My signature work with spackle and blade is the sort that makes you want to lower the wattage in the room.

Part of the trouble is spatial, part is attitudinal. I tend to get lost, even in the kitchen. Perhaps, especially in the kitchen. My wife marvels how each time I load the dishwasher I tend to do it a different way. Apparently the dishes must be ordered in a way that exposes them to the jet of water.

"He's very busy!" she'll say, in that sweet teacher's voice that's freighted with faint praise.

What do you do when telling people's stories is all you've wanted to do?

There's got to be other good work out there, something to pay the mortgage and the two tuitions and supply the wife and giant dog with chow.

I noticed from the filings in our bankruptcy case that the papers have hired some lawyers to work out the reorganization and restructure the debt.

One,  from the firm of Proskauer Rose, charges $975 for bankruptcy work. Per hour.

Pretty soon that could add up to some real money.

Wonder if they could use someone to play some tunes while they work?

(Cue up: "Gone, Daddy, Gone.")