Such sweet sorrow

Mary and I took Natalie to the airport on Saturday after Thanksgiving, and she was sad again about leaving home, so we were too. I explained to her that everybody said it was normal for kids to feel this way their first year of college, according to my panel of experts, to wit, Leslie and Hilary. Natalie said she wasn't homesick at Yale, only when she was leaving home.

Then on Sunday she texted me and asked permission to apply for a trip to Peru over spring break to learn about environmental and oceanographic and other stuff. I of course said that would be cool. She used a number of exclamation points in her text, as is the style.

So I think that she is essentially in a pretty good place. She is basically happy where she is, be it home or college, and excited about going other places. I wish the same could have been said for me at that age.


Meanwhile, yesterday evening Graham suggested that, instead of starting Boardwalk Empire, that we should watch Twelve Angry Men, the 1957 film starring Henry Fonda, with a young Jack Klugman in a supporting role. We meant to watch just the first half of it, but watched the whole thing instead. We hope this may signal a turn towards more sophisticated content on his part. Lord knows he has the noggin for it.

Maintenance day

It is glum and rainy, so I have been doing things like

• Upgrading malware protection on my computer (why is the fan running all the time? suspicious)
• Deleting apps from my phone, including Facebook
• Checking some financial records, including bases in Roth IRAs (just cuz I saw them there in a folder on my computer) and report from Social Security administration
• Reading periodicals that are clogging up flat spaces in the house, including article on Long-Term Care and the survey on competition in the most recent issue of The Economist 
• I really need to 
• connect my new phone to my car using Bluetooth, although the weather makes me not want to go out in the driveway
• go to the gym
• challenge Graham to a game of chess
• figure out the next thing Graham and I will watch on Netflix or Amazon
• replace some burned out light bulbs

In a little while we will have lunch with Leslie and her family, and then I will take Natalie to the airport. Then there's the question of eating the Thanksgiving leftovers, which I presume will be a Sunday night thang with mom

After which it will be back to reality.

Relative humility

After five years or so of having the book, I finally made my way to the end of the complete Berkshire Hathaway shareholders letters, 1965-2012. There was much learning to be had about a variety of subjects.

Towards the end, the most interesting comparison probably is with the biography of Jimmy Clayton, founder of mobile home manufacturer (and finance company) Clayton Homes. Buffett praised the book in a letter from 2003 describing his acquisition of Clayton at the time -- a transaction that was part of the collapse of the manufactured home market due to crappy lending, an harbinger of the later housing crisis.

So I went out and bought Clayton's book and eventually read it. It was good for a while, though marred at the beginning by the obligatory chapters about growing up dirt poor in Tennessee and about how he and his parents weren't at all prejudiced against black people. Then it got much better, as he told stories of building his various businesses, together with his brother, of trials they went through together, clever things they did, how hard they worked, how they had good and bad partners, etc. All told, the middle of the book is quite good and full of learnings.

After a while, however, Clayton started believing his own press and talking about how he spent his money. He talked at reasonable length about "giving back", including a fairly detailed discussion about some Knoxville hospital he gave money too and how he wrangled with them about the naming rights. Like I could give a fuck.

Compare Buffett's giving. Yes, he has been very public about it, but he explicitly decided to give to the Gates Foundation as opposed to building a big competitor organization because he figured Bill and Melinda were doing a good job -- as they seem to be. But he has also been public so as to recruit more rich people to the Giving Pledge, which has to date secured pledges totaling $365 billion, which is non-trivial money.

It is clear that Buffett is not without ego, and that his public persona is pretty carefully shaped and crafted. But fundamentally he seems pretty much to be what he appears to be. I think he works hard to take care of other peoples' money and do good things, and that he husbands his time carefully and reads a lot. Which I respect.

Now I need to read Buffett's letters from 2013-2018 from the pdfs posted on Berkshire's web site. Then I'll be all caught up.

Rainy day, teen chatter

Grey morning, not really excited about getting out of bed. I was upstairs getting ready for the day when it occurred to me that I should really take Graham to the bus stop at the top of the hill and sit in the car with him till the bus got there. Because I can, really, that's all.

But I was behind the curve. Graham ran out into the street and then headed -- down the hill. WTF? Made no sense. In any case, I put my coffee in a travel cup and hustled out to the Prius, and then went down the hill to see what was up. He was down at Tyler's house, coming out of his front door with an umbrella. Seems he and Tyler -- who normally rides his bike to school -- had texted, and Graham was to accompany him up the hill to the bus, which Tyler had never taken.

So they hopped in the back and we drove up the hill, and I got to listen to them natter about goings on, homework assignments, clubs, what have you. It was lovely, again, a great luxury to be able to do it. When the bus finally arrived, the sisters who go to the bus stop about whom Graham had told us --citing them as the rationale for walking all the way to the top of the hill as opposed to waiting for the bus at the most natural spot on Markham -- got out of their mom's Odyssey, and Graham greeted them heartily: "Hello!"

We often worry about kids on the spectrum -- and even kids not on the spectrum -- these days. They seem to isolate in their rooms with their devices a little too much. So it's good to see them in their element, knitting together.

Probably we should consider switching off the wireless router for at least a portion of Sundays, as one family we know does, and as is the fashion in Silicon Valley.

Compost pile

Our compost pile has some good features, and some bad ones. On the good side, it's very easy to dump stuff into it, I just walk out onto my deck and throw stuff down. On the negative, it's hard to flip the matter that's in there, so it takes forever to break down, and gets really dense, and never makes it to the magical fluffiness that we achieved in Princeton in our composting wheel. Nor do I get the magnificent steaming of the pile when I flipped it with a pitchfork.

I could replicate what I had in Princeton, but it would have go out into the back of the yard, which would make taking stuff out there much more of an ideal.

But would that be so bad? There was something magical about taking the compost into the yard in Princeton. Probably it was bound up with the improbability of our yard, of having that much land (about a third of an acre) right there in town, particularly when the stand of trees was still there, before our legal tussles with the Barskys over their planned development, which eventually ended in the felling of all the trees and their building four McMansions across the fence from us.* Our yard felt like a mythical space, particularly if I had just come home from Manhattan or had flown back from Nebraska or something. Kind of like the great woods behind Glen Heights, but on a much smaller scale. And, in the back of my mind, I knew that both Sir Thomas Kuhn and Aaron Burr had -- at different times, obviously -- lived just on the other side of the woods, lending them a certain allure.

Don't get me wrong, my current backyard is also pretty cool. But the experience of it differs, probably by the fact our home is much more open to the natural environment here, so the inside/outside distinction is lessened. In general, we got more of it here in NC. New Jersey is really the Garden State only in its mind.



*This struggle is probably at some level narrated back in the 2004-2005 entries in the Grouse, but it is not easily keyword findable, and I don't have time to go spelunking for it.

Not atypical

I spent a good portion of yesterday -- beautiful fall weather notwithstanding -- working on Natalie's FAFSA and CSS/Profile (financial aid forms, for those of you blessed with ignorance of these acronyms). Partially because I need to lead a workshop on financial planning for college tomorrow evening and I figured it would help me get back down into those insect-rich weeds.

A week or so back Natalie had nudged me "shouldn't we be working on my financial aid application?", and I of course knew that the forms had become available for the upcoming academic year on October 1. But I had not looked at Yale's web site to see when they were due. I felt kind of certain that I was ahead of the game in getting them done in November.

But only kind of certain, not certain. And -- as I turned off the light to go to bed, I had this nagging suspicion that I should have looked to see when they were due. In earlier years this might have stopped me from sleeping, but I was tired from the day, which also involved getting up on the roof to push down leaves, running, watching crappy television with Graham, and a few pages of Knausgaard, quickly becoming the bane of my existence.

When I woke up and began my morning routine, the thought returned to me. What if I'm running late on the application? I went to Yale's financial aid site and saw that -- the timeline for financial aid forms for the upcoming school year will be posted at some time in the future. I was good.

So this is how I live my life.

One other detail of the zoo trip -- for the archives

So when I chaperoned Graham's class trip to the zoo a couple of weeks ago, I was in line behind Graham at lunch. I was waiting for my order to get ready, and I turned and saw that Graham had reached into his bag and gotten out his wallet so he could pay for his lunch.

No doubt the instructions for the trip had said that kids should either bring their lunch or money to pay for lunch and Graham -- ever the good rule follower -- had done just that. Never mind that his dad was standing behind him in line.

I squared it up with him and explained that there was really no need for him to have done that. Such a silly boy.

Shifting gears

With the elections in the rearview, it seems the holidays are pretty much upon us, but I am happy to largely take this weekend off to do battle with leaves, etc. And it seems the gods are smiling upon me. A soccer game scheduled for 9am that had been moved up to 8 was, blissfully, cancelled. I had already decided to sit it out due to some gimpiness around my left knee, and to go to my Saturday morning meeting. Turned out I had made the right decision.

For sure, there are tasks piling up around me: college financial aid applications, Obamacare enrollment, work, trip planning blah blah blah blah blah.

Today I will do my best to ignore that stuff. I need to do some reading, some napping, some leaf raking, maybe, just maybe, read something for Mary. I may convince Mary and Graham (both sticks deep in  mud) to go to a movie in the evening.

Off to my left, our cat Rascal is setting a good example for me. She has curled up in the sun in the reading chair next to my desk. I am headed there too.

But first, must schedule a tennis court for Monday morning...

Recovering

A few days out from the mid-terms, a few thoughts. Democrats are claiming victory where we can, and we made some progress, but it is tenuous and concentrated in that most slippery of places, the House. Yes we got some governorships, yes, Anita Earls to the NC Supreme Court, etc.

But it was not the wholesale taking back of our country that we thought it was, and Trump has clearly taken the shakiness of our progress as validating his position, and the next day fires Sessions and puts a half-assed lackie in his place. So last night some of us took to the streets and protested again.

I know what the Republicans are thinking right now: knock yourself out. That's sort of what we've done.

There's a Republican I am Facebook friends with, an older white guy (surprise surprise) who -- in the weeks leading up to the election -- was posting about the relaxing golf trip he took down to the beach, what a great time he was having. Wink wink nudge nudge. Meanwhile, we were canvassing, phone banking, text banking, virtue signaling, all in an effort to dredge up more votes from our core constituencies.

The Republicans just showed up at the polls. They didn't even have many yard signs out, relative to what we had.

Admittedly, we are working against a good deal of intentional, structural efforts to contract the franchise all over the country, Georgia first and foremost, but ND, NE, and here in NC (moving polling places and closing DMVs, etc). And gerrymandering. These are real impediments, they fly in the face of the spirit of democracy. They are just wrong.

We have marched, called, kibbutzed amongst ourselves, etc. What we have not done is figure out a way to have convincing conversations with those who disagree with us. And a large part of that is going to be accepting that they have valid concerns and that we do not have a monopoly on virtue or rectitude. For the most part, we haven't really tried. I tried a little just after the 2016 elections, but then I fell back into my silo of trying to make a living and be a good family member and community member, exercise, etc.

To go further, I think we need to do more.

On the hoof

Out canvassing on Saturday, I talked to one 65-year old man who was voting for the first time, an African-American guy. He was voting straight Democrat, but at the same time he said that the Democrats really didn't have a unified message except for "sticking up for the gays" or something like that.

The fact is, it is hard to argue with him. We do not have a clear, unified message like "Make America Great Again (ps. we are under attack from all sides by terrorists, gays, Jews, and people who want to take your guns and trucks away)." The problem is that complexity is a much tougher sell than simplicity, and we don't have a great message right now. Last time we did ("Yes we can") we had a beautiful leader, a beautiful moment, but Fox News organized around sniping and negativity and -- having a near-monopoly on the conservative eyeball, they wore us down.

It is also true that, two years after the election of Trump, we haven't done a good job crossing over and building bridges with the Trump base. He has done a good job ringfencing their attention, and we haven't done much to convince them that we are on their side. We have essentially doubled down on the "demography is destiny" and coalition of the disaffected thesis, while the Republicans work ever more aggressively to restrict the franchise. In NC, when the voter ID amendment passes, the Republicans will move aggressively to defund DMVs and make it harder to get voter IDs.

There's a lot of work left to do.

One other note from Saturday. I walked the same knock list I had walked on election day 2016, or at least 50 odd doors of it, and I was struck again by the amount of trash in the woods. Styrofoam cups from Popeye's etc. Going implausibly deep in the woods, 20-30 feet, further than can be plausibly thrown. It's as if somebody walked back in there to take a piss and then tossed it.

And this across the street from well-tended lawns. No ownership.

That's why I have to give credit to the Person County Democrats who led roadside pickup of trash days back in the summer. Nobody can fault people for picking up trash. It's just good citizenship.

Harvey Pitt, regulator redux

There's a story today in the NYTimes about how regulatory enforcement under Trump, especially the SEC, has seen a noticeable drop-off from the Obama era. It is a solid article, with appropriate and thoughtful caveating where appropriate, but its basic thrust seems well-documented and is not shocking.

What did surprise me is a quote from Harvey Pitt, who ran the SEC for a while under Bush before rolling out to start his own firm, which is now a consulting firm but back then was doing something around hedge funds. I saw him talk at a hedge fund conference in 2007, as I documented in this post. Back then, as I documented, Pitt didn't really envision the regulatory function of government as one that needed to be particularly proactive.

But today he is quoted in the Times as saying this: "The goal is really to instill in those who are regulated the illusion that the government is everywhere and looking over your shoulder. If you take away that threat, that could embolden some to keep breaking the law." I don't know what has occasioned this change of heart, but I for one ain't buying it.

Clumps of boys

Yesterday I chaperoned a trip to the NC Zoo with Graham's ECHHS Biology class. I got to manage a pack of ten boys, a couple of whom I have known through the years from Graham's birthday parties, etc. Graham isn't particularly tight with either of them.

Eight of the ten boys pretty much traveled in a clump, while the ninth held back and listened to music, but tried to fit in more or less. Graham kind of wants to, but just doesn't know how. Mimicking does not come naturally to him. He had a school assignment, and the strict instructions in the assignment were much more binding on him than what the other kids were doing.

Most of the boys were surprised that they had an assignment, and hadn't brought writing utensils. Graham had a stash of pencils big enough to lend to most of them.

At the animal exhibits, the boys would bunch together and comment and hoot and laugh: "Look at his ass!." "Dude, he's farting a big one!" Etc. This shit just doesn't come naturally to Graham.

I totally get it. I don't think it was entirely natural for me either. Mom recently said something to me about Graham being conscious of not fitting in. This is stuff I need to help him with, but it is very hard to coach. Except to have him hang with more guys more often. I think it is an area where he may just have to fake it till he makes it.

The creepy guy

On the way to his executive function coaching session on Sunday, we passed a guy in his 20s walking down Curtis. Pale guy, blonde hair. Graham said that he often saw that guy walking right about there when he left school to walk home from Phillips, that the guy never said anything to anyone, and that he was a little "creepy." As we went past he looked at our car with a faint smile of recognition.

Fact is, the guy looked like he might be neuroatypical in some way himself. Who knows what the guy's deal is, maybe he's slightly schizoaffective and on meds, maybe he's autistic himself, maybe he's... whatever. Certainly we have no evidence of him ever having done anything to harm anyone. All we know is that he walks around fairly regularly by himself, so the odds are pretty good that he's lonely.

I explained to Graham that "creepy" is a pretty strong word and that we really don't know much about him at all, but that these kinds of names were how the cycle of isolation and shame envelops people who are different. Probably we should talk to the guy sometime. But then you run the "friend for life" risk that sometimes can happen when you pierce that veil, as kind of happened with the autistic genius math triathlete who lived across from David and Carol in Princeton. He didn't know how to make small talk and move on, so I'd get trapped in a 20-minute conversation every time I said hello.

Life is complex.

Knocking on doors

Went canvassing in Roxboro yesterday. Knocked on 46 doors, all of them in an almost exclusively African-American neighborhood just up the road to Hurdles Mill from the off-site build housing community that we built in 1989. I say almost exclusively, because there was one white guy moving in, a guy wearing a cowboy hat and with a handgun in a holster on his belt. He was driving -- oddly enough -- a Mitsubishi hatchback with a sticker on the back that said something like "It's not the violence you are willing to commit that matters -- it's the distance you are willing to travel." Maybe that's why he had a smaller car instead of the regulation issue F-180, he needed better gas mileage so he could go get violent in places further away. I'm not sure how long he's going to enjoy his current neighborhood.

Other than that it was a good day of knocking on doors. A mix of conversations. I was working with a woman who was down from Brooklyn for a couple of weeks. She had worked as an editor at The New Yorker for a couple of decades under all the regimes -- Shawn, Gottlieb, Brown, Remnick -- and we knew a bunch of people in common. And she liked to travel to canvass, which is cool. She was a little shy about physically knocking on peoples' doors, not always best when you are calling on octagenarians and/or people who are watching TV in the afternoon, as many often are.

But we had the full range of conversations. There was the super-thoughtful guy who was taking a break from replanting a Japanese maple and said that he liked to vote the candidate and that he didn't like all the divisiveness of today's atmosphere. But then he said that Trump was an unbelievable asshole who was dragging us through the mire. There was the guy who was sitting alone watching a black and white TV in an incredibly overheated room eating something from a can, who had some sort of an intellectual challenge, perhaps from birth, perhaps from protracted subtance abuse. On his wall were magazine cutouts of the Obamas, but also Beyonce and women in bikinis. But he was deeply disaffected, talking about basic suspicions that all politicians were corrupt and how this guy would come in there and tell that guy to do this...  I talked to him about somebody sending a bomb to Obama's house last week and how I grew up next to Josh and he was straight, but I don't know if I got through. It was hot as fuck in there and I needed to get out and keep moving. There was the 60ish woman who was clearly a little tipsy at 4:30 and said "I done already went up there and voted, straight Democrat. That young man Quincy been coming by here looking to give people rides" (actually it's Quinton, Darryl Moss's campaign manager)

Most people didn't know much about the 6 amendments on the ballot. It was hard to present a cohesive case in the short time we had, and it felt manipulative to just say "the party says vote no," but in the end that's the nature of it, and that's the gamble the Republicans are making, that people are just so caught up in watching whatever the fuck it is that is on TV that their people will vote for the amendments while less-informed Democrats will be intimidated and say to themselves "well that doesn't sound so bad" and either vote yes or not vote at all.

Between Knausgaard and me

Grinding slowly through volume 6 of Knausgaard, particularly since I had to take time off to read Roger Lowenstein's history of the Fed (which I admittedly haven't finished), because I was on the road a couple of weekends ago and nobody is stupid enough to lug a book as fat as volume 6 on a plane.

I have assiduously resisted any and all commentary on the book, mostly because I don't want anything to come between me and it. For most books this is wise practice. If you have faith enough in your own opinion of what your are reading, it is better to let that opinion grow on its own, rather than be shaped by others. And for me the key thing is that I have confidence in what I think precisely because I understand full well that what I think really isn't important. This blog is read by maybe 15-20 people, so it's not really influential. On the other thing, that I think, the fact of the act of thinking, that is important, and it is what allows me to be effective in the world. Though, in the grand scheme of things, that too really isn't important.

In any thing, the reason it is important that relatively little come between Knausgaard, his narrator (basically himself), and me is that his is the most naked of voices. All is laid bare to the reader, or at least he makes as earnest an effort at bareness as any have made. Much of it, admittedly, kind of sucks as you read it, and I'm sitting there like "just speed it up Karl Ove," or "trim it down Karl Ove," but I have put myself in for the ride, so it must be done bare backed. Reading criticism would be like donning a condom, but there are no STDs to be had.

There is only the question of time.

"Fall break"

Natalie is home for Fall Break from Yale. I don't remember having one of those, but I'll take it. It has been a nice, quiet time.

Wednesday we had family dinner with granny, then Thursday I took her over to Duke where she, Susannah, and Eleanor had planned to spend the night with Dora. It was particularly nice to hear the excitement and glee in Natalie's voice when I dropped her off at Dora's East Campus dorm. As I''ve mentioned, the social transition into college hasn't been lightning speed for her, so it means a lot her her to hang with her besties.

Last night, with Graham in South Carolina at a robotics competition which granny was thankfully able to chaperone, we stayed home and had a good dinner (including meat! increasingly a rarity -- for good reasons) and then Natalie and I got under the blanket on the couch and watched some more of Ken Burns' PBS series on the National Parks, which is still kinda slow and deeply repetitive. But there are interesting anecdotes, for example the extent to which early efforts to bring together a National Parks Service within the Department of Interior were informal and privately funded by Steve Mather and whoever else he could get to donate money.

But we watched it nonetheless, and we were warm and shared footrubs, and then we went to sleep. While we were watching Leon came out and sat with us, which is something he only did because she was there.

Today she and the girls are headed to the State Fair, despite the rain. She seems to be making some progress cleaning out her room, which is soon to be Graham's room. For the time being, it is actually Leon's room, as it is the place where he is most at home and even somewhat receptive to being pet by me and Graham.

Subpar tennis

Z whumped me good at tennis yesterday, payback from the prior time, when I took him. My play wasn't as good as it had been last time, but mentally I held up. I accepted the fact that he was just flat out making his shots and wasn't making mistakes, whereas I was not and was, respectively. So I didn't flagellate and thereby handicap myself, which is a small but welcome triumph over the demons that befall me from time to time.

And there will be a rematch, oh yes there will.

A fine day to canvass

Yesterday evening, after we got home from dinner after power was blissfully restored to our home (knocked out by Hurricane Michael), I asked Graham if he wanted to come canvass with me in Roxboro. Surprisingly enough, he did!

So off we were in the late morning to my mom's hometown, and a beautiful fall day for canvassing it was. We were supremely fortunate to get a knock list which was entirely in downtown Roxboro, so we didn't have to get back in the car at all until it was time for lunch.

So we walked around knocked on doors. As usual, there was a range of types:

• The white guy, actually the only white guy we spoke to, who came to the door in socks but holding his shoes. Graham said he was a gamer based on the multiple screens visible from the front door. Certainly he was very resolute in saying the he did not vote, did not want to "get involved in all that."
• The young woman who had no idea elections were coming up but who looked sufficiently serious and grave when I told her that they were coming and that they were important. I think she got that the six proposed constitutional amendments were stupid.
• The older lady, whose apartment reeked of cigarette smoke, who very gladly took the materials I offered and promised to study up on the candidates online. I encouraged her to tell all her neighbors, and it seemed like she might.
• The young guy, atypically engaged for a 25-year old black guy, who was very appreciative, but whose friend who had just come up on the front porch as we approached, but who was not registered and largely couldn't be bothered. I gave him a gentle nudge to register, told him his vote was important, and as we were walking away I heard him say to his friend: "that dude was like your mom or something."
• Then there was Duane, an 8-year old who had a cold bottle of lemonade, who told me that "Grandma" lived in the derelict-looking house on Foushee Street, and that we probably shouldn't go up on her porch, where he had seen "green blood." But then he came up on there with us when we went up the stairs. Turned out it wasn't his grandma, and the house was probably empty, but he saw some spooky eyes come up to the window while we were up there, and he had lost a toy in her yard but then it ended up in his closet.

Then on the drive back I almost lost my glasses and was freaking out a little at the store in Hurdle's Mill that has the good slaw, but then Graham helped me find them. Whew!

Adjusting

Parents' weekend in New Haven was very nice. We had been looking forward to it immensely and it was beyond lovely to see Natalie and revisit the old town, to show her places we had gone and to see where she is settling in: the ultimate club team, the Branford Buttery, to hear about her classes, to visit art shows, etc.

And yet. When we left on Sunday she was rather sad and, on the one hand, that infected me. On the other, it made me feel good to feel so needed by her. But since then she has been largely unresponsive to my trying to reconnect with her, except a brief call when she was confused by an odd text that I had gotten but which seems to have been intended for her.

She is of course distancing herself because she needs to, it is healthy. She has gone off to college and lives over 500 miles away and needs to fully stand on her own two feet. My brain knows that perfectly well, but it is hard for the rest of me to accept it because the last couple of decades have been dedicated significantly to her. This is just a continuation of what began just before she turned 9 when she decided she would no longer snuggle with me "because I'm growing up" (a direct quote -- see here), and since then I've always looked for ways to stay close to her even as she separates. Parks and Rec, sushi, used book stores, hiking, theater, etc.

It's just hard.

The Port Authority Authority

Had to take a bus from the Port Authority terminal on 42nd yesterday out to Montclair, NJ.  I hate the Port Authority. It is a singularly confusing place, a veritable rabbit warren, though remarkable in its own way for how it routes thousands of commuters a day in and out of the city, like the tiffin-couriers of Mumbai. If not quite as cool.

But if you don't know the place -- and I don't -- it sucks. So on a Sunday, when the information desk was closed, it was doubly confusing. But the markets, in their ineffable way, stepped in. An older African-American guy, maybe not homeless, but not rich either, was there to help idiots like me figure out what bus to take. He knew how to operate the information screen and interpret it, and he kind of knew where was where in New Jersey (another arcane bordering on occult science, even for those who have lived there).

And in the middle of it all, I got a call from Mary saying I had sent her the boarding pass for the wrong flight (I hadn't).

So this guy helped me out, and I gave him two bucks. I could have given him one, but I also could have given him five. Then he went right back over to the screen to help somebody else. That is hustle.