Henrietta, Texas, 1948: Mrs. Miller started a dayschool, and off I went. The first day, my mother walked the four blocks with me, to show me how to get there and back. We lived behind Uncle Doc’s medical office, and she worked there as a nurse.

During that first season, I learned about coloring books, and naps and cookies, and how you don’t run while playing a trumpet because falling down can hurt you. I was warned not to eat the castor beans growing beside the house.

In just a few months, Mrs. Miller seems to have learned her dayschool lesson. The dayschool was closed. No more herd of children in her home and backyard.

But my mother made some special arrangement, and though the mob of children had gone, still every day I walked to Mrs. Miller’s, and played with her sons Rex and Mike, until their father came home from work. He’d swing them up and down. He didn’t swing me up and down, which seemed a great disappointment. Then I went home.

That summer, the vacant lot beside their house had grown weeds as high as us boys. A man on a tractor came and mowed the weeds, and a vast torrent of grasshoppers came flying from the devastation.

Quickly we grabbed jars, and captured hundreds of them.

There was then the question of what to do with them, but Rex, the older one, knew just what to do. And so we went around the neighborhood to houses where nobody was home. Doors were generally left unlocked, so it was simple to open the door, shake out a jar full of grasshoppers, and then leave.

I suppose our belief was that, this way, everybody could share our joy.

Sure, that’s what we thought.

Us rascals.

Lyon Street, San Francisco, 1990: I’d been playing keyboards, and I found the strange instrument in the keyboard magazines. It looked like a black board about four feet long, with lots of strings. It was kind of like a guitar, but more strings.

You played it by tapping the strings to the frets with both hands. Though it was expensive, I was intrigued. I called up the company and asked if they had any used ones. No, they didn’t. I scouted music stores. I found one, and bought it, then set to learning to play.

I was lousy.

On a week’s vacation, I practiced. After a week, I could play the song “Just in Time”, and felt very proud. A year later, I had some time off. I’d just sold my business, and had my first vacation in many years. For several months, I practiced daily, and then I was ready to play in public.

I was terrified, so to get over it, I’d drive to San Francisco where I’d put out a hat and play in Ghirardelli Square with a portable amp. I wasn’t very good, but some people liked the music. I made gas money, and got over being scared.

Ready for the big time, I learned 30+ songs, and arranged them in a binder. I bought a tuxedo, and had studio pictures taken, then made up a kind of program, with a story (somewhat dramatized) about my musical past, and a big list of songs in the middle. It was like opening a menu at a restaurant, but it was a menu of songs.

With a little tape of my songs, I talked several restaurants into letting me play on certain nights, for tips and a meal. Since I didn’t know many songs, I’d play a bit, then walk around and hand my menu to folks. They’d choose tunes, I would go back and play them, then they would put tips in my tip jar. This way they never requested other songs, because I didn’t know any others!

It was a lot of work, hauling the amp and setting up. From these jobs I got a few paying jobs: a corporate meeting on the Embarcadero, a wedding in Tiburon. But I never got even close to making a living.

As my money drew near its end, I had to choose: get a job, or start another voicemail company. I had a voicemail machine. I started another voicemail company. It quickly grew to provide a living, but the time spent playing in public dwindled and dwindled, until I stopped doing it.

Yes, the career of a musician is an exciting thing. Yup.

Near Hurnville, Texas, 1952: My grandfather had false teeth, but we children didn’t know that. He’d taken us fishing at the tank, and we’d caught several catfish. At the faucet in front of the washhouse, he was cleaning the fish. “Ugh!” we said.

In reply, he moved his jaw in such a way that his false teeth moved free and jutted from his mouth. “Wow!” we cried, “How did you do that?”

“Can’t you do it?” he asked. We were then quiet for a very long time, contorting our faces, attempting to get our teeth to jump up like his did.

Some years later, now wise to false teeth, we were riding in Uncle Esty’s car from the farm toward Henrietta, late at night. As we drove along the flat, a car was coming distantly, when suddenly, on his instruments, a little green light went off. “What’s that?” my cousin Bob asked, pointing to the little light. Uncle Esty was silent for a moment as we passed the other car.

“That light?” he said, “That means there’s a cow in the road.” And just then, the little green light went on again! Knowing nothing of high-beam indicators, we spent the rest of the journey peering into the darkness, trying to see the cow in the road.

Adrienne tells a story of driving through hilly country one late afternoon, her girls watching the cows wandering narrow paths on the hills. “How do they do that?” they asked.

“It’s simple,” their father told them, “Cows that live on hills have legs on one side shorter than on the other.”

“Really?” asked the girls.

“Sure,” he said. “If they were the same length, the cows would tip over.” This made sense to the girls.

This willful misleading of innocent children is certainly fun,

but it has to end somewhere. I tried it on Lori, then my wife, when we’d just bought the yellow MGB. With new tires from the shop, I was showing her how to drive the stick shift, and she caught on right away.

“Now the one thing you need to remember,” I told her, “is that on a sports car you need to equalize the left and right turns. For example, if you’re driving and you have to make a lot of right turns, then you want to make some left turns too.”

She stared at me in consternation. I continued.

“That helps to keep the tires from wearing unevenly,” I said.

She believed it for a minute.

Well, nearly a minute.

Austria, 1743: A young man wrote to Mozart and said: “Herr Mozart, I am thinking of writing symphonies. Can you give me any suggestions as to how to get started?”

Mozart responded, “A symphony is a very complex musical form, perhaps you should begin with some simple lieder and work your way up to a symphony.”

“But Herr Mozart,” the young man said, “you were writing symphonies when you were 8 years old.”

“Well, yes,” Mozart replied, “But I never asked anybody how.”

Fairfax, California: A former client (of my voicemail company) asked about current rates. After I’d quoted prices, he wanted them cheaper, which I declined simply as unprofitable.

His email today said: “I can understand your rationale that they are not profit-generating packages, but at the same time, aren’t they pretty minimal to maintain? What’s wrong with a bunch of bread & butter stuff that takes little effort? I could get a $7.95 voicemail from Pacific Bell for less.”

He’s not counted his costs. For the PacBell home voicemail, he must provide the phone line. Including the phone line cost, the PacBell voicemail costs $31 monthly, lots more than ours at $9 to $13.50 which includes the phone line.

But the interesting part is his suggestion to run “Bread and Butter” accounts, even if they are not profitable. I’d ask: how much butter would zero money buy?

To me, that seems like no bread, no butter.

I am reminded of the two cowboys who decided to make some money.

They’d buy produce from the farmers, carry it to the town square on Saturday, and sell it from the back of their pickup truck. They did so, that first Saturday, and sold all the produce. The only problem was that they sold it for the same price they bought it. Adding up their profits at the end of the day, there were none.

“Well,” said one to the other, “We’re just going to have to get a bigger truck.”

Ulloa Street, San Francisco, 1972: I’d flown my MGB across the desert between Christmas and New Years, to start a Masters at San Francisco State, and I’d found a room atop Mrs. Douglas’s house on Ulloa Street. From the windows of this single, high room, I could see the land fall away for twenty blocks to the ocean, and on the hazy ocean horizon, the Farallon Islands.

Dim steamers crept across the edge of the sky, the gulls wheeled and circled around the houses, and the night breeze from the ocean chilled to the bone.

But I ordered a hi-fi stereo receiver and powerful headphones that weighed a ton. I listened to new radio stations, and then sat at my IBM selectric, filled with cheap yellow paper, beside the window gazing to the ocean, listening to the foghorn warning the ships passing by. And wrote stories.

But one day I felt bad. Real bad.

By nightfall, I was doubled over with a pain in my guts. I awoke from troubled dozing to find all the covers heaped high, while I shivered with chills. Clearly I was freezing.

I had a thermometer. Puzzled and dim-witted, I checked it twice. It did indeed claim I was running at 104 degrees. Because my mother claimed that brain damage begins at 105, I called a medical emergency number. I described the pains. Appendix, they said. They said to take off the covers, to open the windows, to douse myself with cold water.

Mrs. Douglas, awakened, kindly gave me ice, and I spent the night pacing naked in that high room, in the dark with the cold ocean breeze flowing into the west window and out the east. Now and again I doused myself with ice water. My mind was blown, and I felt not warm but freezing. I felt like a penitent in torment.

In the morning around five, my fever broke, and I slept. A few hours later, my alarm reminded me to hie myself for medical attention. Diagnosis confirmed, into the hospital, and by three o’clock appendix gone.

During the night, I gained a roommate in the next bed, rather an old gentleman, still out from the anaesthetic. The next morning, I spoke to him. He replied briefly, but something was wrong. We fell to conversation. Here’s what had happened:

He was German, very German. In fact had served, a lieutenant at age 22, as communications officer for Rommel, the desert fox. I didn’t ask much of those days, for I knew nothing about the war, and he was preoccupied.

His story emerged. He’d had an operation on the spine. And this morning when he awoke, he was mostly paralyzed, and he was blind. He was waiting for his doctor, but doctor had gone out of town.

Off and on, we talked. We were in limbo, lives in abeyance, entrapped by the body’s failure. How did it turn out? The good news is that doctor did show up, and reassured the lientenant that a temporary swelling had caused the problem, and that it would pass. He would recover from paralysis; he would recover from blindness.

Did he? I think so; he seemed to be recovering when I left. I wish I could describe the flow of conversation, the way it unfolded in dramatic bits and pieces. But I cannot. I was drained and loggy for sleep, and the ache in my belly seemed far more important than the man next door and a war in a desert far away.

Within three days I had healed up, and things were back to normal. I hardly remembered my days in the desert.

Henrietta, Texas, 1953: The television show “Winky Dink and You” was a big hit. I bugged my mom until she sent for the magic screen and crayons. On Saturday morning, you stuck the screen on the television, then drew from dot to dot, drawing for example a ladder which saved Winky Dink from the bad guys.

Out in our back yard, my dog Bullet was largely ignored. The television was pure magic. Weekdays after school Howdy Doody and Pinky Lee cavorted until godawful country music and boring weather reports. Saturday mornings, Boston Blackie, Superman, and Winky Dink paraded in sequence.

Bullet, whose heart beat with love, was forgotten.

I am making no excuse. I have none.

When we’d moved into our little house in the north of town, my mother bought aluminum siding in a pale green. I see Bullet against that green, nosing about the back yard, peering through the fence. Laundry day was big for Bullet, because I helped my mother hang clothes on the clothesline. Lots of company, for a while.

I was in charge of feeding Bullet, and in my minds eye can still see my mother doing it. I made a rope for a Cub Scout merit badge. Then Bullet helped me test the rope. I wonder now: was there any other time in my life that I played with him?

Eventually, I talked my mom into letting Bullet run loose around the neighborhood. Or maybe I just left the gate open. This gave him more to do; he could roam around.

When my mother the nurse married Doctor Strickland, we moved to larger quarters, and Bullet retired to a new, larger, fenced back yard. He helped me to build a trapeze. He helped me attempt to throw knives to stick into a tree. He visited while I read Dracula, old gun catalogs, and Rosicrucian literature in the back yard.

At fourteen and a half, I got my license and bought a green 1951 Chevrolet. I used to take Bullet riding with me. He loved sticking his head out the window, and didn’t mind waiting if I went into the stores downtown. That is, until one day at school, when Marie Spikes commented on my habit of including Bullet, “What’s the matter?” she said. “Can’t you find a girlfriend?”

It shames me to say it, but that was the end of the rides for Bullet.

I did get a girlfriend, and later another car, and in due time drove that car to college. A couple of years later, on a visit, I asked my mother why Bullet was walking so stiffly.

“He’s old,” she said. “He’s got arthritus.”

I petted him, and he looked at me with his eternal, loving brown eyes. Always a constant. My mother said he had lots of pain. Since Doctor Strickland had a drug cabinet, now and then she gave Bullet shots of morphine, or something like that.

“Sometimes he comes and asks for a shot,” my mother told me.

I just stared at her.

Two weeks later, after finals at school, I visited again.

Bullet was gone.

He’d grown ill, and they’d put him down. I hadn’t even known it. I was hurt, and angry that I’d not been told. He was my dog, I thought, in spite of eternal neglect throughout my entire life. I fussed and complained. Then I went back to school, and, caught up again in my new life, again forgot about Bullet, my dog.

Forgot about him? Then why, forty years later, do I miss him so?

San Francisco, 1982: At Network Answering Service on Geary Boulevard, the Operator was the key to our business. Training was extensive, they were called ‘OPs’, and there was a huge sign painted on the wall saying “Network OPs are Tops!”

But once you’d mastered the OP job, it can become boring. So when new jobs opened up, we cross-trained an OP, so they could have more variety, and expand their skills.

Emelia comes to mind. She sounds like a sweet and retiring kind of woman, doesn’t it?

Well, actually, she alternated working for us and smuggling cars into Nicaragra. Not guns, but cars. Why cars? I never understood this, but I’ve always been stupid at politics. How were the cars smuggled? I don’t know. What I do know is that Emelia looked pretty, but she was tough.

We thought immediately of Emelia when a position opened for the job of “Collector”, meaning somebody to call slow-pay clients, and bug them to pay. Emelia learned it quickly, but the next week she complained, “I can’t seem to get these folks to take me seriously.”

We decided to give her a tougher-sounding name; she became “Barbara Thorn”. Barbara Thorn had no further difficulties. Emelia said the same words, left the same messages, but got better results. Because of her new name, people responded differently.

Now … about bookkeepers. When a bookkeeper left, it took two months from placing the newspaper ad, to getting them interviewed, started at work, and trained on the job. I was the backup, so I was really glad when I could return to concentrating on my own job. But when I’d returned to my own job, clients would still ask for me. They wanted bookkeeping assistance, and remembered me from last time. Bummer.

Then one day, our new bookkeeper, Ron, vanished. (We found out later that while smoking grass and dancing in a club, he’d become highly paranoid, and so he took some LSD on the theory that it would calm him down.) At the time, we didn’t know where Ron was, only that he was gone. So I placed our newspaper ad, and, groaning, opened up the bookkeeping phones. “If you get any calls for Ron,” I told the OPs, “just put them through.”

A client called. “Ron?” he said.

“Yep,” I said.

That is how I became Ron the bookkeeper. A couple of months later, with a new bookkeeper trained, when people called and asked for Ron, they were put through to bookkeeping, and not to me. Everybody happy.

When the salesman, Henry, left San Francisco, I became Henry in sales. Over the years, I became several different people, because it permits you to stop being them later. When we sold the answering service, I kept the voicemail business, and used the identity of Harry, the manager. Customers wanting special deals would ask for the owner. “He’s not in,” I said, and returned to our standard terms. Life was good.

These days, I use my manager name (Harry), my legal name (Arthur), and my stage name (Traktor). Whenever a caller asks for one of these guys, it’s immediately clear whether the call is about voicemail, or personal, or about music.

Someone asked me recently, “How do you get so much done there, with only the three of you?”

“It’s easy,” I said, “We three have worked together so long that we act as one.”