You can Bank on it!

It's official. I now bank at Wells Fargo.

I didn't set out to bank at Wells Fargo. In fact, for umpteen eons I was a diehard Citibank user, and had been ever since I arrived in New York in 1978. And I stayed loyal to them, through thick and thin, until I finally had to give up when I fled the city in 1998 and landed in central New Jersey. Citibank hadn't arrived there yet. And they probably wouldn't have had me, even if they did. We didn't part under the best of terms when I left New York. I still owed them a chunk of change (which has been paid off, thankyewverymuch).

As I slowly recovered from alcoholism, and I got a crappy temp job which at least gave me a weekly paycheck, I opened up a pathetic little account at First Union Bank -- which had one of those 1920's type buildings right on Main Street in the sleepy little burg of Hightstown, NJ.

I loved that bank. Everybody knew me when I walked in to deposit my check on Saturday morning. They knew I didn't have much but, like small town banks used to do, they were friendly not because I was already rich but rather because there might be an outside chance that someday I would be.

Then, one day the unthinkable happened. Suddenly, First Union was no longer First Union. They'd been bought by a bank from North Carolina called Wachovia. I was leery at first, but they seemed nice enough and, in time, I was happy banking with them, too.

Now comes the stock market collapse, the demise of institutions I was sure could never fail and, amazingly, I am no longer a customer of First Union or Wachovia.

Now I bank at one of the finest and oldest of California's founding banks, Wells Fargo.

I feel like the Polish peasant who, upon hearing of his country's liberation from the tyranny of the Czar exclaimed, "WELL, THANK GOD! NO MORE RUSSIAN WINTERS!!"

Oh-ho the Wells Fargo Wagon is a-coming now, oh please let it be for me.....