MY LIFE© - Chapter 45–
Colorin, Colorado, este cuento se ha acabado (or has it?) ……

This week has been eventful for me. I have been fortunate enough to have my 74th birthday. 
Who would have thought …..??? I once wrote a saying:
“The days drag on, but the years fly past!”
The more I think about that, the truer it gets. We work for so many years ….and not always in the best or happiest circumstances, day after day … another day … and another drags on till we get a mini-break of a weekend … then another day and another….and when you look back, so many years have zipped by and you are no longer as young, or as healthy, certainly not as physically capable and in your 20s, 30s …or even 50s and 60s!
Where did the years go? Seems lake but a few years ago I was in my 40s!

The body takes its toll, and suffers our indiscretions, but one thing that does ….or should… improve and increase is our knowledge about LIFE.
While the body deteriorates with the years, knowledge can and should increase, whether through study or through the harsher teachings of experience. In my case it has been mostly the latter.
This chapter may seem very different from previous ones, but I believe the better readers will read it through since, apart from the rather explanatory introduction that follows, it is about …. MY LIFE too.
Along with the years, I became an avid reader of the books and talks by the late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks who passed away just a month ago. I am not a particularly religious man, but what appeals to me is his vast secular knowledge which he quotes often and brings into his writings and lessons. I really do not know where he found the time to read so many hundreds of books on philosophy and politics and many other non-religious subjects. He quotes so many of them to show that there is indeed a link between the secular and the religious. Perhaps to my shame, I may well be among the least religiously knowledgeable in my tribe.
I do not like sermons, least of all those that give you a guilt feeling inside. This is why I find his writings so interesting. They EDUCATE, there is no “fire & brimstone” in them.
Why am I writing all this now?
Because it is also during this week that I read one of his essays in which he quotes French theorist Rene Girard in his book “Violence and the Sacred”. He explains something called “mimetic desire”, meaning when we want what someone else wants because somewhere inside us we want to BE that someone else.

Fast rewind to when I was 16.

I was an only child brought up by loving yet strict parents. My mother was a quiet woman,

content to be the home-maker and the main upbringer of her son, as well as a loving wife. My father was a very hard-working man who always found time to foster a wholesome father/son relationship.



Despite being an only child, I had many cousins and we were all quite close. The closest, though not the eldest, was Isaac (Isaque) Abudarham. He was like an older brother to me and though he passed quite a few years ago I cherish his memory and the many sage words of advice he gave me.
He as an admirer of my father and hated how stupid I was at that age, disparaging my father’s efforts especially in business. If you have read a previous chapter you will know that at one point, my fanciful ambition was to be a bullfighter!
Isaque wanted to shock me or challenge me out of my idiotic ideas. Personally I thought it was very romantic to be a bullfighter … those were the days!
“David, tu NUNCA llegara ser tan bueno en la vida como Tito Pepe. Ni vestiras con la elegancia como tu padre, ni seras tan buen trabajador ni businessman como el!
(David, you will NEVER be as good in life as Uncle Pepe. You will never be as elegant a dresser as your father, nor will you be as hardworking nor good businessman as he)
Even as I write these words, I feel the challenging way he said all this to me. I was hurt, yes! My favourite cousin, my mentor, Isaque, whom I hero-worshipped and loved, thought so little of me?
“Que no? Ya vera, Isaque…. Te vas a enterar!”
(I won’t?
Just you wait and see, Isaque ….You’ll find out!)
It had had the desired effect.
If I hero-worshiped my cousin, I also hugely admired my Dad …but not in such a conscious way. Like, I knew he worked a 12 hour day …I knew he was very canny and brave in business, he was very well liked by his peers …. while I was just a… “mocoso, niƱo enterao”… (a snotty, know-it-all kid) but I would show him, I would show them both!
From that day on I changed.
My abject failure at school notwithstanding, I started learning about running a shop. Dad knew nothing about this, but I would look at what he did and how he did it and learn.
If Dad worked long hours … so would I.
If Dad was good at window-dressing, I would be even better.
If he was a good salesman … I would be a great salesman.
And … I had an ace up my sleeve.
Fashion was starting to revolutionise the clothing industry.
As happened to me many years later in my own career, he was losing touch with what the younger clients were seeking. I was devouring fashion magazines, trade issues, reports on trade shows ……
However, I never was as canny as Dad in day to day things.
When days were slow, he would say to me:
“David, bring out those empty boxes from the store and scatter them about in the shop”
“But Dad, just two days ago you made me empty them, stack the items on the shelves and put the empty boxes in the store….!”
“Just do as I say … you’ll see”
Sure enough, the sales that day would pick up.
Why?
“People are always curious. When people see boxes on the shop floor they think we have received fresh stock and will come in …and once in, we can sell to them!”
Old dog expert on old tricks.
On another occasion, I was determined to clear old stock from past seasons …if not years! In those days, when a season was ending, we’d put on SALE only the left-overs, the broken ranges and last items of a range. The rest we would fold nicely to bring out again the following year. This worked great when men would buy grey trousers and white shirts year after year. Men’s fashion was rather static then. But inevitably, some stock had the uncanny ability to … NOT SELL …year after year.
We had over 100 shirt of the old brand “Summit”.

The fabric was excellent poplin, far better than mere cotton of later years. These had survived SALE after SALE and were marked down to 5/6 each (five shillings and six pence, or 25.1/2p of our money now). I decided to get rid of them at whatever price. Down went the price, from the very original £2 & 10shillings ….I finally marked them all the way 2/6 (two shillings and six pence, or 12p today).
“Que haces? Estas tonto?” Dad said (What are you doing? Are you silly?)
“Dad we have not sold these shirt in the last 10 years …. No one wants these old fashioned shirts anymore!”
“You have no idea …. These are the best quality poplin ever …. Put in new price tags on the … mark them at £3.00 each now.”
“Daaaad….”
“Ya vera” … (Wait and see)
I did as told me and he made a nice window display of them.
The next day, older clients who loved these shirt ….but could no longer find them anywhere (the factory had shut down) started coming in for them, delighted to see the selection we had. Word spread among that age group and … just as Dad had predicted, we sold them all.
Each time he served a client and sold one, he would call me over to wrap the shirt up while he cashed it, giving me that look which wordlessly let me know he was THE businessman, not newbie me!

I could go on and on writing about these real-life lessons he gave me … and each time my determination to better him grew …almost to the point of hating him in a competitive way.

Actually, come to think of it, he slam dunked me again years later, when I was almost fully managing the shops we had.
I bought the lease of a shop in Main Street and had to take over the stock of cloths to make suits from as part of the deal. In fact it was the original shop Dad had years earlier at 63/65 Main Street, the very shop he had had to vacate many years earlier, and I proudly handed
him the new lease on his old shop premises, on his birthday, 17
th September
, symbolically showing him (& myself??) that I had completed my own challenge.
We called the shop “de REYES”.
Later it became Benetton and now it is Liberty.
Back to the stock of material. I contacted a rep for a UK suit factory, Maple, a Mr Harold Weisfogel, a true gentleman if ever I met one. We organised to send the cloths to Maple in the Midlands and have them made into suits so we could sell in the shop. However, in the mix of cloths there were several piece lengths in grotesque wool plaid combinations of orange and pink, brown and lilac and other hallucinogenic combinations. Being only 1.1/2 yards in length, Maple made them into trousers…. genetically unsellable!


As expected they were so unsellable that I’d have had to pay someone to wear them … but you learn to roll with the punches in business. They were predestined SALE items, no doubt about it.
I priced them at £5 each just to give them a value … but I kept them where they least could be made fun of, awaiting the usual end of season SALE … though even at £1 they seemed destined to be my bane for a long time.

February came along and we started preparing for the organising of the winter SALE.
Dad walked in:
“David, where are those “mamarracho” (awful, ridiculous) plaid trousers?”
“Down there, on the bottom shelves. Why?”
“What’s the price?”
“Dad, I had them at a fiver but I am marking them down to £1 or even less….”
“Listen to me Son. Re-mark them all today at £15”
“Daaaad…..what are you talking about?”
“I am still the boss, no?”
“Yes … of course you are”
Whatever internal competition I was in against him did not detract from the reality that he was El Jefe.

“We’ll talk about this on Friday”
This was a Tuesday. By closing time we had taken all the accursed plaid trousers out, re-marked to £15 and ready for the next day…….
The Next Day ….. a ship docked in the north mole bound for Nigeria. The crew and several of the passengers came on shore to do a spot of window shopping, they were not well off punters by any means.
Somehow Dad had found out about this.
As soon as some of the saw the plaid trousers …it was like candy to a child! They fought between themselves to get this colour or that one, plus another for a friend …and at £15, why not anther one too?
Eso era una feria! (It was like a fairground!)
Half naked black guys trying on trousers in the middle of the shop still holding a second pair in the other hand, or tied like a scarf around the neck so none of the others could nick them.

Where was Dad?
Opposite, at the Cable & Wireless shop,

sitting by their plate glass front window with a smile that said:

“Te lo dije!” (Told you so)
Needless to say, we sold them all and could have done so twice over.
But back to the start of this chapter…..

Without my realising it, I had been in constant competition to be like Dad, or better than Dad, to prove Isaque wrong, to show everyone that I was no longer just “el hijo de Pepe Bentata” (the son of Pepe Bentata) … no, I was David Bentata, me, myself and I, standing on my own two feet and my own achievements … such as they were.
It was a few years after all that, when we were celebrating Dad’s 80th birthday that he took me aside, gave me a wonderful hug and said:
“David, I wish I had been younger when I started TEO, because you and I working together, me with my experience and you with your ideas and energy … we would have been an unbeatable team!”
It was then I realised I had never had any need to compete with him, to try to emulate him. He, with those words and that embrace, made me see I was a worthy person in myself. I never had any need to be better than him, to compete with him.
That day I became complete within myself.

I have called this chapter “Colorin, Colorado….” because this phrase is used in children’s Spanish stories to end the tale.
MY LIFE is not finished (I hope) but whatever I have not told you about is because discretion and good manners prevent me from writing any more incidents; ‘noblese oblige’ as the saying goes.

I hope you have enjoyed these snapshots of an era that no long exists other than in our memories.

I thank all who have followed this journey with me on Facebook.  Your “Likes” have been a joy to see; your “Comments” a wonderful, if brief exchange that gave me the energy to continue writing them. This has been both the week of my birthday, and the anniversary of the passing of my father. There are no coincidences, I am told. Reading that essay from Rabbi Sacks this week is what triggered it all off….. the stars were aligned and all that …

Who knows if there will be a sequel … maybe in about the next few years …may they be healthy and fruitful ones for us all.



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