Do You Buy Hot ?

I remember it as if it were yesterday... well... maybe last month.

I had a junior high school friend whom I saw daily. Went to his home in the morning, rode the bus to school together, then spent a little time with him after school before going to religious instruction or the scouts. Both of his parents worked in the city and both of them drove very large two-door FORDS.

His father was an electrician and his mother worked in the fabric district. It would be years later when I would learn that their marriage was on the rocks; he was sleeping with the next door mailman's wife and she was sleeping with the president of Ready-ware bolts. But I digress.

One day when the mother was home and was in the process of fixing dinner (some form of steak that looked as if it had been cut from the rib of a dinosaur) I noted that she was sporting an emerald ring on her pinkie. That ring could have paid rent for the year! She noticed that I was noticing it.

"You like?" she asked. The woman had no filters and talked to me as if I were an adult at a poker table. She wore black stockings to work (no, she was not a Sicilian widow) and spoke freely about sex, food, travel, and her desire to learn French some day.

"Yes. My Mother was born in May. Emerald is the birthstone." I kept staring at it. I finally worked up the courage to say something bold. "Once, when my parents had had a loud shouting match that never quite got resolved, my Mother was more quiet than usual. She did all the things that she'd normally do, but she was noticeably distant with my father. One day my father came home with a gold ring that had six emeralds in it. He had gotten it from a clothing merchant who worked on the Lower East Side."

The story sounded weak and she was waiting for something to happen, so I said, "My Mother asked, 'Is it hot?' and dad said, 'Probably lukewarm.' She was so angry at him that she said, 'Buy it!'"

My friend's mother looked at me with questioning eyes. "So?"

I said, "We were taught never to buy hot. When you buy merchandise that's hot, it encourages thieves to continue stealing."

She smiled as if she were listening to some old wives' tale. "When you buy something you look at the product, the value, and the price. If you know it's VAHreh (Yiddish for value) and the price is right, you snatch it up. If you don't, the GAHniff (Yiddish for thief) will go to someone else. And someone else will buy it and you'll feel like a putz (Yiddish for ____) because you could have gotten a piece of gold for the price of borsht and you let the chance slip through your fingers."

My friend died in jail in his late 20s or early 30s. His parents divorced and moved to Florida separately from one another. His mother died of cancer in her mid 60s. The father--as far as I know--is still alive in his mid 90s, living in Boynton Beach. Not sure if the mailman's ex-wife is still alive though.

PS - I don't buy hot.