An old lady lived in a large decaying mansion on the other side of a small urban forest backing on to our home in North Vancouver. Rumor had it she was a genuine witch.
As a five year-old boy, I responded to a dare to test the neighborhood gossip and soon found myself leading a small squadron of boys, creeping up to her back fence to take a peek at what might be brewing there. On arrival at her property line I worked up my courage and lifted up my head over the planks to see first-hand into her mysterious realm.
At first my gaze was captured by the cement birdbath in her back yard, which presently had a customer in the form of a red-breasted robin taking a springtime dip. The top of the bath sported a statue of a small cherub, with a tangible water flow, peeing down on to the larger dish-shaped bowl just beneath it. The bird was taking advantage of the water to wash itself. To a boy of five, urine seemed a strange fluid for cleaning oneself. But then again, what should one expect from a practitioner of magic?
Sometime around then, the witch herself appeared in the yard. Keeping her face hidden she turned her back to us and feigned a studied preoccupation with some gardening tools, not fooling us for a moment. We crouched down; attempting to hide ourselves from what might come, fearing what transparency her magic might put to the fence planks we hid behind.
At her apparition, one of my accomplices quietly began slinking in to the forest, and just then the other turned to me, holding back the tears and looking as if he were facing a certain death whimpering frantically: "What are we going to do?"
In his muffled cry, a squeak snuck through, alerting the old woman. She turned slowly, gazing at the would-be intruders, and allowing us a full-on view of her face. She grimaced at the site of us, as if in some sort of tortured pain. And there it was. Her face was GREEN! Scarred, wrinkled, and terrifyingly green!
There was no more practicality in silence. We both let out our biggest girly screams and sprinted through the buck brush all the way back to the safety of my friend's house, where a large brown dog stood guard against any evil intenders who might have followed. Inside we found his mother, who shepherded us inside their comfortable home. Safe again, our fears quickly gave way to the bliss of afternoon cartoons, cheese sandwiches, and juice.
We avoided the witch's property for literally years afterward, but the older neighbor kids still pumped up the rhetoric of the haunted house on Mountain Highway. Cruel teenagers broke her windows repeatedly, and she eventually abandoned the home, taking shelter elsewhere.
After some years we learned that she was in fact not a witch, but a genuine hero. She had once had a beautiful family, but lost them all in a house fire. When she and her husband had tried to rescue their three small children, he was killed along with them, and she was badly burned. The green I saw on her face as a small boy must have been some sort of ointment, soothing the surface of her skin while her heart ached inside at the sight of us three little children haunting the edge of her back yard.
Insert awkward segue here: Truth is too often skewed by scary stories.
Here's a frightening question: "What is for sale in the TV business?" Let's say you are a fan of a stock market news channel. What is the product? Is it mutual funds? Perhaps a bank? A car? The answer might just scare the Scooby doo right out of you. The big money accruing from a TV ad is exchanged from the marketer to the broadcaster. What they purchased was you. Mwa ha ha! That's right my pretties! Your eyeballs are for sale!
When the surveys come around measuring the effectiveness of advertising, they don't ask how legitimate the TV advisor was. They just want to know if you were watching.
Big hairy headlines sell ads. Nobody comes to work Monday morning and invites the staff for a chat around the water cooler to announce that their weekend was 5-7% above-average. Legitimate financial news and education is boring. That's why most of my readers have already stopped reading this column by about... now.
My advice is that you keep this all in-mind when you are watching Dragon's Den, or BNN, or what-have-you. Be like Scooby-do and his friends, and dig through the rubble to the real story. There are real-life financial rewards for the studious.
Mark Ryan is an advisor with RBC Wealth Management, Dominion Securities (member CIPF) and can be reached at [email protected].
