The Ten Best Days of My Life by Adena Halpern Read Free Book Online

because for me it was a lucky day, the first “best day,” if you will. Also, I think it’s going to give you a better picture of my life, what I did and why I did it and what was eventually going to lead to a fulfilled existence on earth (or would have if I hadn’t died so very young).
    See, I was a mistake, and a really good mistake if I do say so myself.
    My parents were told that they would never be able to conceive. Which one of my parents had the problem, I don’t know; no one would ever say. But if I were a betting woman, I’d go with my dad, and here’s why:
    In the late 1960s they didn’t have things like in vitro or test-tube this and surrogate-womb that. If you couldn’t have kids, you had two choices: adopt or don’t. By the time I came along, my parents had been married for about ten years, and in all that time it was the “barren couple” life for them.
    My dad, Bill Dorenfield, is a strong man. He’s a self-made man who started life without a dime. My grandfather, his father, was a door-to-door salesman who sold everything from pots and pans to children’s clothing. My dad used to say of my grandfather, “If he ever made a dime, somehow it would only amount to a nickel.” My grandfather wasn’t a drinker or a druggie or a gambler. Evidently, my grandfather was just really bad at making money (and if that’s hereditary, I definitely got the gene).
    My dad says that he can’t remember a time in his life when he didn’t work. My dad loves to work (guess that skips a generation) . He would tell me stories of how, as a young kid growing up in West Philadelphia in the 1930s, he’d get up before dawn with my grandfather and they’d drive deep into the farmlands of Pennsylvania or the opposite way through New Jersey to the shore and the farmlands and then work their way back to West Philly. Along the way, they stopped at homes and sold whatever my grandfather had to sell that day. This was coming out of the Depression and into World War II, and, as my dad tells it, bringing a young child along on the sales calls ensured “a couple of suckers” who felt bad for them. Sometimes my dad would play the part of the motherless child. Sometimes he would cough on cue, as the sickly kid who could get some medicine if the poor sucker would just buy the pot and pan set or the frilly little girl’s dress, even if they didn’t have a little girl. This was also the time that my grandfather gave my dad, as he put it, “the best piece of advice anyone could give.”
    â€œIt’s never going to be any of this crap we’re selling that’s going to make us rich,” he’d tell my dad. “When you get old enough, start buying land.”
    I know, so Grapes of Wrath . I think it’s safe to say, though, that neither my grandfather nor my dad ever picked up that book for pleasure. Therefore, even if my grandfather couldn’t sell anything and never read a book, he was still a smart man.
    Now, on the other hand, my dad said he learned early on that my grandfather’s way of selling—“Oh, you’re not interested? Well, have a nice day”—was not the way to sell. My dad figured out that the longer he pestered the people, the higher his success rate. Finally, the people would get exasperated and buy something. My grandfather called my dad his lucky charm, though to hear my dad tell the story luck had nothing to do with it. It was sheer perseverance. The selling with my grandfather went on for years, and in all that time my dad still got straight As in school. He didn’t really have any friends, at least none that I ever heard about; they came later with the money he made. He was never one to participate in sports. He was a strong-headed young man who refused to let anything get in his way when it came to making a buck.
    This is why I believe that it was my father who was incapable of