You really don't

This is the kind of house your salary affords you when you're Don Geronimo (please see the final of the four things on my mind in that entry.) Or, when you were Don Geronimo.





The lovely house with privacy gates and wooded surroundings was the dream home of radio's Donnie G, who along with sidekick Mike O'Meara brought the Don and Mike Show home to weary afternoon commuters and guys who got home before their wives for over 20 years. This is a doggone fine and fancy house - notice the tanning bed room, the game room, the outdoor fireplace and so forth. It's how you can live when you're making well over a million semolians a year by cracking wise on the radio.











It's where Don and his beloved wife Frida lived, along with their son Bart.



But Frida died in July of 2005 in a stupid senseless head-on car crash not far from their weekend house in Ocean City MD. A young man was in a hurry so he pulled out to pass on a two-lane highway, running right into Frida's SUV. And Don, for all he was worth, stopped living then too.






He tried to go on with the show - the witty banter, the rants about people who talked in movie theaters and his birth mother who gave him up for adoption, the pranks and silliness that made sitting in traffic or mowing the lawn or layering a lasagna a little less bothersome - but he never really could get back in the groove. And so he found he couldn't live in that house any longer either: too many memories of Frida.




So, he walked away from the radio show and drove to Ocean City, where he lives today, probably living only as Mike Sorce (his real name) and not so much as wiseacre Don Geronimo.



Don Geronimo as he left the radio show. Notice the picture in his copy book.




I thought of all this over the weekend, first when I saw the real estate listing for his and Frida's dream home, and then when I saw this story on the tv news, I saw a parallel. A woman and her son are dead, and her husband is in critical condition; their other son was released from the hospital. I wasn't there; I didn't see what caused the accident and even though witnesses reported that the man driving the Jeep was driving on the shoulder of the road in an apparent hurry, I can't lay blame. This all took place just up the road in BelAir; here is a picture from the scene:








I do know that life is short enough already. Why we risk shortening it even more is something we can discuss when we get up to Heaven, where Frida surely is now.



By the way, she was an animal lover, and so Don directed the mourning listeners of his afternoon show to send money to the Worcester County Humane Society, where Frida's love is perpetuated in better care for four-legged critters.






Please, do me two favors if you read this: slow down when you drive, and when you do get to where you love someone and they love you back, please tell them so. You just never know.