About two years ago I took a short vacation to the Blue Ridge Mountains just west of Asheville, North Carolina. The excursion was entirely spontaneous and greatly needed as a respite from my daily grind. I managed to get a room at the Pisgah Inn on the Blue Ridge Parkway where my accommodations included a patio with a rocking chair and an unobstructed, panoramic view of the peaks and valleys of the Blue Ridge Mountains, all from a lofty elevation of about 4,000 feet above sea level.

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I remember one time when I was in the second or third grade, I was sitting in a swing in the Colvin School schoolyard during recess when one of my female classmates approached. At this age, I had only a blurry vision that girls were good for something, but had not yet put my finger on exactly what that might be. This young lady, who, as I recall (you’re believing this, right?) was wearing a short little skirt and had barrettes in her sandy blonde hair just above each ear. She had been following me around the whole school year for reasons unknown to me. I might mention that incidents of this nature ceased immediately upon my eventually learning what girls were good for. They can sense that, I suspect.

Anyway, with hands clasped behind her back, she leaned forward and whispered in my ear, “I know a secret.”

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My son was recently seeking a “cleaning savant” on Craig’s List. He decided that he had had enough of Saturday housekeeping chores in his apartment. Interestingly, he received a response from a young lady, Donna, who explained that she would be more than happy to provide housekeeping duties. Here is her price list: Fully clothed – $100; Lingerie (costume/bikini, etc.) – $125; Topless – $150; and nude – $175.

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I learned recently that Edvard Munch’s painting entitled The Scream (1893) sold at auction for $120 million, give or take $20 thousand or so. The most ever paid for a painting, I hear. Amazing. Have you seen this piece? Well, pardon my bourgeois opinion, but that painting looks like the work of a second grader using finger paints while off his ADHD meds. This is how USA Today describes it: “The image of a man holding his head and screaming under a streaked, blood-red sky.” That’s pretty much spot-on. Granted, it is genuinely famous. Many of you are probably aware that this painting was the inspiration for Ghostface’s mask in Wes Craven’s similarly titled horror movie Scream, back in 1996, among other things. That should push up the price, ay? These art auctions often remind me of the “The Greater Fool” theory, where an investor will pay a certain price for an object, not because he or she thinks it’s actually worth that much, but because he thinks he can sell it later to someone else for even more.

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My mother and her immediate family moved about frequently when she was a child. But the last place for the clan to call home was an old country farmhouse on Glendora Road near Buchanan, Michigan. I’ve mentioned it many times before. It was a two-story frame structure standing on the crest of a hill overlooking an adjacent grape arbor and a stand of virgin woods beyond.

On any given summer day my Uncle Max was inclined to sit in the yard and, using a small penknife, carve whistles from the branches of a nearby willow tree. One afternoon, after crafting one, he took the remaining branch and simply stuck in the ground. And that was that.

For those of you who may not be all that familiar with the weeping willow tree, it is easily rooted. All one needs to do is insert a branch in the soil, as the young Max did, and make sure it gets plenty water.

And then Max shipped out to the U. S. Navy.

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