by starroute » Thu Sep 29, 2005 1:37 am
I hadn't thought about this for years, until I was reminded of it by something I was posting in the blog comments, and I never used to think of it as anything more than a family anecdote. But after a few months of hanging out at this board, I'm not so sure.<br><br>I must have been about 10 or 11. My dad had accumulated enough spare cash to try investing some of it in the stock market, which he did, characteristically, by studying the matter carefully and attempting to develop his expertise. While he was doing his studying every evening, my mother also became interested, but she had her one way of approaching these things.<br><br>One evening after dinner she called me over and asked me to sit on her lap and hold her hand. I was way too old for lap-sitting, and also far too big, but I could see she had something special in mind, so I perched rather uncomfortably on her knees and waited to see what would come next.<br><br>She said she had the names of five stocks she was thinking of putting a little money into and she wanted to read them out and have me tell her which one to invest in. None of the names meant anything to me, and I wasn't getting hot psychic messages about any of them, so I did the next best thing. "I like the sound of Ang Wup," I said. "It's funny. Invest in that one."<br><br>The more I think about this incident, the stranger it seems in retrospect. My mother had her small magics, like the ability to reach into a bag of Scrabble tiles and pick out the one she needed to make a seven-letter word, and she would sometimes haul out the Ouija board when I had a cold and was bored with being in bed, but she wasn't particularly given to mumbo-jumbo, and certainly not to hauling me in on it. And yet it did happen.<br><br>So my father put a couple of hundred dollars on her behalf into Ang Wup -- which turned out to be Angostura Wupperman, the people who made Angostura Bitters -- and, amazingly, the stock started to go up. And up. It went from something like $9 a share to something like $15 in just a few days.<br><br>At that point, a representative of the stock exchange called the president of Angostura and said, "Can you tell me why your stock is going up like this?" The president of Angostura replied, "I haven't a clue." And the stock started falling back again, but not so quickly that my mother wasn't able to make a nice little profit when she sold. We all laughed about it, and Ang Wup became a family joke.<br><br>My mother didn't stick with the stock market, though my recollection is slightly fuzzy here. She may have tried the same trick again and had it not work, or she may just have figured once was enough. Either way, I think she was a little scared -- though she would never have said so to me. She went back to winning quarters off her Mah Jongg ladies (and hoping they wouldn't notice), and my father kept studying the market and managing his investments with all due prudence.<br><br>But I think that something really did happen that one time -- and it wasn't coincidence and it wasn't me being psychic (because goodness knows I'm not.) I think my mother hoodooed the stock market and then wasn't willing to admit what she'd done.<br> <p></p><i></i>
