This is a simple law of nature, but one which is very handy:

Saving means NOT SPENDING.

That’s it.

If you don’t save, you will never in your life have anything, because it all goes away.

Saving means NOT spending. If the proposed “savings” are spent, then they are no savings at all.

Of course, there is no value at all in savings all by itself. And so your mind will find urgent reasons why the proposed “savings” need to be spent. After all, your mind isn’t stupid. It will be obvious that a flashy sportscar is lots better than some money just sitting in a bank, doing no good for anybody.

Therefore use “Mental Judo”. From the beginning, your savings should be for a specific purpose. For example, save some to own a home. Save some as insurance that medical or unemployment emergency won’t make you a beggar. Save some for when you’re old, or just for when you’d like to stop working and concentrate on raising tulips and going fishing.

If you are saving for a particular thing, then your mind has a chance of perceiving that it is important, and you’d rather not jeopardize your grand plan for a moment’s flash in a sportscar. Later, when you’re rich, and the cost of sportscars is trivial, at that point you can actually afford a sportscar. Maybe two.

Saving means NOT spending. If you are truly saving, then you have the money in your possession. It has not vanished.

Knowing this important secret of the universe, go forth and prosper.

This is a simple law of nature, but one which is very handy:

When you move to a new place, you have a window of expanded freedom.

That’s it.

Somehow, when we move to a new place — a different city, a different apartment, a different country — a window of time opens up in which it becomes more possible to make changes. It will be, for a time, easier to do new things or to do things in a new way.

This window of time is not forever, but it’s as if for a time you leave your emotional baggage behind. For a time, you’re less constrained by your past habits. For a time, life is again new, more as it appeared when we were children, fresh and with infinite possibilities.

Do you think that, by moving, you will escape your present difficulties? You do? Well, for a time, it’s true.

Knowing this important secret of the universe, go forth and prosper.

Henrietta, Texas, 1958: Eddy Frank and I were wandering in the halls of the courthouse. The ceilings are perhaps eighteen feet above us, the smell of old varnish and smoke clings to the walls.

There are two bathrooms. One says ‘White’ and one says ‘Colored’. The White bathroom is floored in tiny white hexagonal tiles, with ancient cracks across the floor. I do not know how the Colored bathroom is floored.

We had a reason for being there. A good reason.

However, now at 62 I cannot tell you the good reason we had at age 12, but I assure you that we had a darn good reason to be there, probably.

Perhaps it was the fire escape. This long metal tube was a wonderous slide. There was no ladder of course. Clasping the upper edges in your hands, step by step you ascended. Far taller than the kiddie’s slide at Lulu Johnson Grade School, at the top was a metal cage, just outside a lady’s window. Behind this window one sometimes found adults with angry faces; they yelled at us to get off the slide.

Slide down we did. Then labored again to the top. Standing in the metal cage, high above the courthouse lawn, you could see the death ledge clearly. A sandstone decorative ledge upon the outer face of the brick walls, with a great triangular chunk missing, about six feet away from our cage. The broken part was right above the metal-edge courthouse steps, so far below. Legend had it that a boy, perhaps like ourselves, had tried to walk along that ledge. Naturally, the ledge broke, throwing him to a horrible death on the steps below.

I know of no boy who decided to try it, though it was tempting.

So perhaps our good reason was the slide. Or maybe we were just taking a short cut. Or looking at the doors. Or visiting the White bathroom.

When we saw the key sticking out of a door, we stopped in our tracks.

Eddy Frank looked at me. I looked at Eddy Frank.

“What do you think we should do?” I asked. Eddy Frank, more thoughtful and less impulsive than myself, pondered.

“We could take it,” he said. I nodded quickly. By taking this key, we could make a smoke bomb of gunpowder. We could set it off in the middle of the night. Well, after dark, anyway. Wouldn’t that be a funny joke? Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha!

We resolved to take the key. Eddy Frank pulled it from the door. We high-tailed it out of there. Our plan was go to the Western Auto store across the street. We would have a copy made. We would return the original key to the doorway where we’d found it.

But no sooner inside Western Auto when Eddy Frank, looking over his shoulder through the big window, said, “Uh-oh.”

A woman and two men had come from the courthouse door, and, standing on the steps, were looking in every direction. Somehow, they were on to us!

Evading the salesman, who was drinking coffee anyway, we slipped out through the back door and into the alley. For the moment safe from prying eyes, we paced. What should we do?

We could be jailed. Fined. Thrown out of school. We could get spankings. We were in a world of trouble. Eddy Frank stopped.

“We’ve got to take it back,” he said. Frantic, I argued.

“No, no!” I shouted. “Just throw it away. Hide it in that pipe!” But Eddy Frank was stubborn. In the end, we marched back into the courthouse. Nobody now seemed to be looking for us.

We found a room with large musty books and a counter. Eddy Frank walked up, placed the key on the counter, and said to the lady who peered down at us.

“We found this key in the alley over there,” he said, “and we’ve brought it back.” She glared cruelly at us.

“Uh huh,” she said. “That’s the ladies room key. Someone was inside, and heard the whole thing.”

“OK, then,” said Eddy Frank.

Then we left, while the leaving was good.

Somewhere in Kansas, Summer 1960: I was a truck driver on the wheat harvest, working for the Moser family. We cut the grain and hauled it to the grain elevator for the farmers, and we moved north as the grain ripened.

On this particular afternoon, Jake, Old Man Moser’s son, was driving his pickup, and myself and another driver riding along, returning from the town. Somehow in the conversation, the other driver mentioned snipe hunting to Jake. Jake picked up his cue.

“Yeah,” he said, “I’ve heard they have snipe around here. In fact I think I heard some the other night.”

“What’s a snipe?” I said.

Now, here I was just acting. I had long ago heard about snipe hunting. Although perhaps some such thing as a snipe does exist, somewhere in the world, there are none around these parts. In fact, taking somebody on a snipe hunt is just a way to play a trick on them.

You get somebody who knows no better than to trust you, and you give him a sack and place him out in some desolate place, and then you go home, laughing to see how long he’ll stay out there in the middle of nowhere with a sack.

But in this conversation, just for fun, I pretened to know nothing and asked what a snipe was. Jake and the other driver exchanged a quick look.

“It’s a kind of bird,” Jake said, “They’re mighty good eating, and they’re easy to catch, too.” That was my cue.

“How do you catch them?” I asked. Strangely enough, I was told that these snipe were caught in a sack, out in the empty fields, at night. I played along like Mr. Dummy.

When we got back to our camp beyond the farmer’s buildings, Mrs. Mosier had cooked up another great dinner for all the hands, and we fell to. Afterward, as the light was failing, we sat around, smoking and talking. And somehow the snipe hunt came up again. Jake mentioned that I had never been on a snipe hunt, and all my very good friends chimed in that it was so fun, and they decided to take me snipe hunting that very night.

Jake got some burlap sacks from the farmer, and in a short time we were barrelling along a dark road past deserted fields. As expected, I was taken to a low-lying gully in the field and given some sacks. The others said they’d go up past the higher ground and they’d drive the snipe along the gully. All I had to do was bag the snipe as they came running along the ground.

Off went my good friends.

Under the half-moon, the dark field was vaguely visible into the distance, and my friends soon vanished, and from a distance, began making various kinds of sounds. But as soon as they were out of sight, I’d crept along the gulley until I came to the fence, crawled under the fence, and then walked along the drainage ditch until the field was left behind.

Trotting up the empty road in the fresh moonlight, in a quarter hour I was back at the camp, and lay in my bunk, reading for about an hour. Mr. Moser asked me where Jake and the boys were, and I told him they’d gone snipe hunting.

Jake and the boys showed up soon after, glowering. Somehow they’d not enjoyed the snipe hunt all that much, and they had no snipe to show for the night’s outing.

San Anselmo: Yesterday, Adrienne and I packed our household into boxes. She groaned and complained, claiming she was near wit’s end. Adrienne hates clutter; in fact it makes her crazy.

But just when I feared that she might self-destruct, bursting into flames like those cases of spontaneous combustion, she hit her stride for an excellent flying finish. Kitchen, bath, dishes, and clothing. All in boxes.

In the kitchen, remaining to us we have some cans on a shelf, two plates and cups, two pans on the stove, and a spoon to share. I kind of like it. Life seems simple.

Henrietta, Texas, 1960: Once upon a time, Adrienne tells me, her parents packed her and her sister into their Renault automobile, for a month-long jaunt from New Hampshire to American landmarks like Gettesburg and tobacco fields, all on the way to Florida.

In order to satisfy the school, she agreed to a science project, where she collected soil samples from each location, and then gave a talk to her class. She remembers Chesepeake Bay and these other places, but she mainly remembers packaging the soil samples: the red color of this one, the gravelly texture of that one.

My own science project shines clear in memory, because it wasn’t. It wasn’t actually my project. In fact, it wasn’t really a science project at all, but rather a fraud disguising a speaker cabinet.

Let me explain …

My cousin Bobby is a sharp guy. He’s younger, as are all my cousins. He tended to be rotund as a child, an earnest kid who took life seriously. In college he did something smart: he signed up for a “co-op” program with Conoco Oil Company. He’d attend engineering classes for one semester; then he’d work at Conoco for one semester.

It took longer to graduate, but he learned what engineering was all about, and already had a good job from which he rose rapidly, becoming a vice-president at such a young age that he took to wearing granny glasses and dressing in a stuffy manner so as to be taken seriously by the other vice presidents around the place.

He’d showed promise years earlier, winning the Wichita Falls science fair with his Electronic Level. It was very clever.

In a normal carpenter’s level is found a glass tube slightly curved, filled with a clear liquid and one bubble of air. Mounted onto a straight board, when the board is lying on a level surface, the bubble of air is nicely centered between two marks on the glass tube.

Bobby took this glass tube and shined a light through the bubble onto two tiny photo-receptor panels. Then, with a circuit that measured the light output from the two panels, he operated a needle on gauge to show the bubble’s position with extremely high accuracy. Presto! He’d created an electronic amplifier to make the common level more precise.

Nineteen miles away and a year later, in my school in Henrietta, I had to do a science project.

I didn’t want a science project.

Instead, I wanted to build a speaker cabinet shown in Mechanics Illustrated: Into a plywood box of a certain shape, you mounted an 8-inch speaker. Because of the odd shape and an adjustable lid placed at an angle, the sound from the back of the speaker wove its way all around and then emerged in such a way as to obtain surprising hi-fi sound from such a simple speaker, it said.

So I pulled a con.

First, I made arrangements to borrow Bobby’s Electronic Level to represent as my own. I confess that being a crook and a fraud bothered me not at all.

Next, I got permission to attend the Shop class in my high school during my normal study hall period.

Last, using the shop tools I designed and built a fancy wooden exhibit, with a back panel to display the sign explaining the device, and two side panels across the front edges of which I placed a board. Upon one side of this board was an off-center wooden wheel which you could turn with a knob. This raised and lowered one side of the Electronic Level so that you could watch the device working.

I won a ribbon at the Science Fair with my most excellent fraud. Hooray for science!

But more important to me, after the fair, I disassembled the display. The display had been designed so that the wooden parts just happened to be cut to the exact same sizes as were required for the speaker cabinet. I took the display apart, then screwed the pieces back together in a different way. Presto! A Mechanics Illustrated speaker cabinet!

My wonderful speaker cabinet found a home in our home’s refurbished basement, which I was rapidly converting into a beatnik dive. There, extracting wires from my old record player, I luxuriated in beatnik heaven listening to the sounds of the Miles Davis “Porgy and Bess” album, along with Jimmy Smith, Barney Kessel, and Dave Brubek.

Life was good. “Hooray for science!” said the beatnik. Oops. I mean-

“Cool, man,” said the beatnik.

San Diego: The hotel was confused and said the seminar started at 7:30, but Larry Williams website had said 8:30. So to play it safe, we all showed up early, then started at 8:30.

I’ve been a Larry Williams fan for a long time. If you’ve never examined commodity trading, you might not know that as a young man Larry signed up for this annual trading contest. You start with $10,000 and then trade it for a year, and the guy that makes the most money wins the contest.

(Doesn’t it make you wonder what the contest prize is?)

Larry started with $10,000 and then traded it up, using some blackjack formula for how much to risk on every trade. He made it up to $2,200,000.00 — that’s right, 2.2 million dollars — in about ten months, then had it all riding on one trade which went wrong, dropping his money to $700,000 — Whoah! — and then he traded it back up to $1,100,000. by the end of the year.

So when he offered the seminar, I was all ears.

The seminar was great. I learned about Larry’s ‘Blast Off’ indicator that tells when a big move is coming up. It nicely complements one of my own called ‘AC VPO2 TmBar Diverg’. Catchy name, huh?

I learned why the commercials sometimes buy early. (That is, why does General Mills buy so much wheat before what would appear to be the best time?) There were some others, and I got an interesting one modesty called ‘god’ by the guy sitting beside me, Frank from Cody Wyoming.

If I make 2.2 million I will post it here. It might take me a while. So far, I’m pretty clumsy.

Where is the center of a life?

For me, it’s a place: my grandparents’ farm, eight miles north of Henrietta, Texas. Not the homes in which my mother and I lived when I was a child, but the farm.

The town where I went to college comes close. In some ways, college years were the most important and best years of my life. Now, of course, so long afterward, I know not a soul in that town, and the place I lived is surely no longer standing. The University and it’s buildings will have changed, the businesses and the town no doubt hardly to be recognized. Yet some part of me is still there.

Even more so, the farm. My mother dwelt there as a child; she lived there on the day she died. I grew up there, as much as in the town. Running through the woods, wading through the metal bin filled with grain — it was like water, only thick and smooth. Peering everywhere: down into the water tower, through the fence to watch the pigs, hiking around the tank, climbing rusting machinery, watching grandmother wash, cook, garden.

Some part of me grew there, and forever lives there still.

When my mother died, my dreams for exactly one year were odd in this: No matter the subject of the dream, the farm appeared. A dream of travel would be to, or from, the farm. A dream of worry would take place within the rooms of the farm. A dream of flying would espy the farm on the horizon.

Always, the farm. There is no escaping it. It is me.