She said: "Here's a good one: Why doesn't money grow on trees? Seems to me that they've got all kind of other things growing on trees; why not money. Talk about your "life sustaining crops"! There ain't anything more important to life on Earth than money. You can't live here if you don't have money. They're growing stuff to turn into gas for our cars; they're growing stuff to make medicines with; they're growing stuff to make other kinds of things, like paper, all over the place. How come no one has figured out how to grown money? Come on! It can't be that hard. To quote my Dad: "They can put a man on the moon, but they can't get trees that will grow money". It's a damn shame. That's what I think anyway."

Stumble It!

He said: "It just happened one day recently. I hadn't thought about grade school or High School for years and years. But then, I couldn't get it out of my mind. It just seemed important to try and find out what happened to the people who used to be my friends when I was young. What happened to them? Did they still live in the area? Would I recognize them if I saw them on the street? Were they successful? Happy? Would they still want to be my friend? I missed them somehow, 40 years later. God, we had such fun; raised hell some. One guy in particular, Ronnie, was a good friend. He taught me how to fish. His family was from South Carolina, I think, but they had moved up here right after he was born. We would wade through the creeks and catch frogs and set things on fire. He helped me build a tree fort where there was a calendar of naked ladies nailed to the wall. "No Girls Allowed". My family moved a few miles away and I slowly lost track of Ronnie. We were in different schools them. I saw him a few times, and then I was in High School and then College and that was it for the old friends. I can't really explain what this craving for going back in time means. I "googled" a few names, but, of course, found nothing but other people with the same names; not the guys I knew when I was 12 or 14 or 16. I guess I just wanted to connect again somehow; connect with something that was real and good and safe, and then disappeared forever."

Stumble It!

She said: "I just found out that "Mother Mama" is now famous, having been included in a book about the 60's and 70's and stuff. The book makes her out to be this really out of control kind of person and I don't remember things like that at all. "Mother Mama" was first and foremost a business person. Sure, she was larger than life. Lots of people were larger than like then. She was literally "larger than life" because she was such a big woman. She had to be over 200 pounds back then. But she worked her butt off moving "product" from Florida to California on a regular basis. She would make the trip in 3 days, driving that broken-down VW bus 24 hours a day! And they said that the young people then didn't have any "work ethic". That's just a bunch of B.S.! We worked hard, played hard and only slowed down when we fell down. I'm telling you "Mother Mama" was something else. Everybody on the West Coast knew her. She was a hard worker who got the job done. And when it was time to party, she would stay for a short bit and then would quietly be gone, because, after all, it was mostly about business. A person could party anytime. But work always came first for "Mama". You just don't find people like her anymore. Those days are done. But I still laugh every time I think of her and that crazy bus."

Stumble It!

He said: "Did you even know anyone who tried to catch a falling star? There aren't too many out there who have. Mostly, I would think, because it is so darn difficult to do. First of all, you have about 3 or 4 seconds before it is gone and you've missed your chance. Secondly, falling stars are much bigger than you think. They're huge! I know from personal experience because I have been trying to catch a falling star, well, almost my whole life. It's a petty big undertaking, but I think it would be worth all of the trouble and effort to catch one of those things. I would die a happy man, I'm telling you, if I could just rustle up one of those falling pieces of sky. They say that a falling star is really someone's soul coming back to Earth. I tend to doubt that. Why would someone in Heaven want to come back here to try it out again? It seems to me that one time would be enough. No, I think a Falling Star is an angel coming down to show us the way back to Heaven. That's what I think; that's why it would be so worth it to catch one before it disappeared. It would be worth it to find out how we could all get back home."

Stumble It!

She said: "There was another newspaper story this morning about someone who got hurt because they were hit by a car going down the road. They were hurt because this person was walking in the road texting. Now, how stupid is that? For real! Texting and not paying one solid bit of attention to where he was going. How important could this Text be? LOL! Important enough to die for? What a jerk. The way I see it is that this is like Natural Selection. Remember that from school? Its like all the stupid people are being weeded out of the gene pool, one by one. You got a Texter over here, a brain dead iPod Hip Hop child over there; people yacking on their phones while driving on the Beltway. It's amazing to me. They're texting and Twittering and being oblivious all over the place. I wish them the best, because, you know what?, a lot of them aren't going to be with us real long. WTF!"

Stumble It!

He said: "I always liked the 4th of July because of the fireworks. I like the drama that the fireworks gives the July Holiday. My mother, when I was a small boy, used to tell me that my favorite television cartoon characters were parachuting down to us while the fireworks. exploded all around us. Talk about making a dramatic entrance! It was like being shot out of a cannon or something and I believed her. I like the color of the fireworks and the loud sounds and the flash and the glitter of it all. It's a little like Mardi Gras, but not as X-rated and with more clothes on. One year a dear friend of ours came to visit and we took her to the fireworks on the the Mall in Washington, DC. This is the best fireworks in the land. No expense is spared for the DC display. What we didn't know until later is that our friend hated fireworks; she hated the noise and the smoke and the loud booms and the crowds and the whole thing, basically. But she allowed us to drag her downtown and at the end of the display of fire and bombs and of all the noise and bother, a burning piece of something or other floated down to where we were sitting and caught her blanket on fire. You can't get more dramatic then that. The other thing I like is what you can make out of the abstractions of Red, White, and Blue fireworks. They can become anything because it's all so abstract. This year, I swear, I saw a likeness of Dolly Parton and Tennessee Ernie Ford. I guess I'm in a Southern phase at the moment, but, really, whatever is just fine with me as long as it's fireworks!"

Stumble It!

She said: "I always had a hard time talking to boys. I think it was because I was a bit of a Tom Boy myself and I wanted so badly to be accepted by them, but I think I ended up scaring them off somehow. I liked being with the boys better than with the girls. The girls were mean to me and the boys just sort of ignored the fact that I was even there with them, watching them just standing around, doing not much of anything except looking at the girls and saying mean things about them and about each other too. The boys smoked and cussed and ran real fast and liked to break things like glass bottles and stuff. The girls always looked bored to me. They wanted to be with the boys, but didn't want to do the things that the boys liked doing, so that didn't work out too well for them. Me, I was in between most of my grade school days; neither here nor there. It's better for me now; now that I don't have to think so much about the boys."

Stumble It!

She said: "It was just like coming home after all these years. San Francisco had always been my spiritual home anyway, but it had been a long time since I even visited. Life just went on without me being there or even, that much, thinking about the "good old days". That was way before all of the changes: women were "chicks" and we cooked and made the babies and life possible. We took care of the babies. We were the ones that held jobs because we didn't have to shave our faces. Remember when shaving our legs was a big deal Political Statement? What a laugh! Gee, it was fun, though, to be a woman and to have that freedom and not be put away into some box that the men made for us. We felt powerful and we were powerful. Most of the crazy stuff that went on in the culture then just didn't matter that much in the long run, but the becoming of a woman, a creature built powerfully and with purpose and who spoke in her own voice, now that was worth everything!"

Stumble It!

He said: "He used to talk about how hard it was to earn a living back then and how scarce the money always was. It was hard to have a family and to travel the way they did all the time. There wasn't really any place that was home because they never stopped in any one place long enough to even, maybe, remember the names of the places they passed through. He said that the kids were the ones who were the happiest, but it was hard on them. They didn't really get much in the way of schooling and they had to work just like everyone else. He said that his father had tried many times to find work some place else, but nothing lasted for too long, so them he's have to move on to the next place, just like he'd always done. Being a musician in a big band wasn't like being in a band now. It was more like being in the circus, but instead of the freak show, there was the bandstand."

Stumble It!

He said: "We had exchanged letters back and forth to each other for years. We rarely, if ever, spoke on the phone except for a very few times like when, say, her Mother died that bleak Summer and she didn't know what to do next. We had always been close and when they moved away to go back East, it was hard on both of us. But, we stayed in touch around Holidays and Birthdays, and times like that. I think we both thought the same thing over the years, namely, that neither of us had aged at all; that we looked exactly like we did in High School and in College. The mind is funny that way. It forgets to remember and lets ourselves fool ourselves. So, when the she became ill and I felt that I had to fly out to see her, I have to admit I was a little shocked because the person I saw was not the person that I had expected to see. It was the same soul, but a different person and I was surprised. I don't know why I should have been. And the funniest thing was that I could see that she was just as surprised as I had been. The voices had stayed the same, pretty much, over time. But the packaging, what we looked like, had become different. Isn't that funny?"

Stumble It!