Money

We had dinner with a friend the other night. He's an insurance salesman, but we try not to hold that against him. For some reason, we make friends with insurance guys; one of our oldest friends is someone we met across a sales desk. (It was actually a bar, but that doesn't sound as respectable.)

Anyway, this guy, I'll call him DavidCampbell, is a good man, sensitive and slightly depressed in the best of circumstances, morose in the worst.  He's a voting member on the board of Friends Who Worry About Us, and who could blame him? Art is 62 and I -- well -- I am the right age to have a 62-year-old husband. We're the "older couple" on our block (some might add "crazy" to that description), the ones playing at youth one final time. 

But DavidCampbell worries about us with class and finesse. You won't catch him wondering about how many kinds of spiders might kill us with just one bite or how far we should we keep from a mother elephant and her new darling. Oh no, when DavidCampbell worries for us, he worries about money. How we'll get it in the first place, how we'll spend it (or not) and how we'll get some more. Budget, that's the answer, a magic word full of intrigue. Oh right! I know nothing about keeping a budget....and i do not want to learn. DavidCampbell is a thoughtful man--the only person I know who ain't afraid to use his MBA for something other than wallpaper. He tries to make us smarter; he succeeds in making us braver.

Money. That's what life's all about, enit? For us, however, money's more like what it isn't about. We don't have any, but that's not stopping us.

The insurance part of  the dinner discussion didn't last long, but the part about red wine went for hours. And hours.

(I miss you, John Boy)