“It all depends on how you answer the meta questions,”  I explained to my friend.

“What are the meta questions?,” he replied

“That’s one of the first things you have to agree on.”

I have to tell you right up front that Dude is smart.   All of my close friends always are.    If I’m smarter than you and we are friendly,  I may be genuinely attracted to something about you.    More likely,   if you at some point fail two or three smart tests,   I might just re-evaluate the relationship and focus instead on manipulating you into doing something for me.   Or just ignore for awhile if you have nothing I want today.     I fear that I have too much ethics and long range thinking to ever actually con someone out of money or to be greedy.    I did set my huzband up to fall in love with me.   Though I only actually stayed with him because I found that I loved him too.     Just because I may have resorted to manipulating people   (not that I would ever call it that.    Any Southern lawyer worth his salt knows the basics of how to manipulate people.   And honestly,   I’m a lot smarter than many of the lawyers I have met.

I have been for these years learning to socialize without manipulating people.   And I do feel that I learned a great deal in the just over a year that I have been on Empire Avenue.      I tried so hard to always be ethical and honest in all of my dealings with people.   And in my heart I know that I have.   I hope if you have come to know and trust me in the past few years,  that you will continue to visit and read and maybe leave a comment from time to time,   kind of like writing Kilroy Was Here.   Which once might have been a legitimately informative comment.   And today would be a good cultural reference,  perhaps used as a motto.   I know so many words.    I’ve studied 4 years of Latin,   7 years of French and 3 years of Spanish.    I am not fluent in any of those languages.   But I do remember lots of stray words,   particularly words from those languages that can be changed just slightly and used in English.

If a doctor or lawyer doesn’t convince me that he or she is smarter than I am.   I am likely on insisting on knowing all of the details of the diagnosis and treatment plan.   My medical consultant was a registered nurse who work in the ER and the ICU at many hospitals.    I always ask kitty’s opinion,  and I almost always trust his judgments.    Kitty knows more about the human body and how to fix it than I could learn in a life time of reading books.    One of my survival skills is to mostly surround myself with smart people whom I can’t readily manipulate.    Those are my peers.   Those are my friends.

It was a long, long chat,  from about 6 in the morning til about noon or so.     We talked About dozens,  or perhaps hundreds of different topics, issues, ideas and themes.    We always did the back and forth,  responding to and building upon each other’s  statements.   And at the end,  I said,  as I walked out of his house,  ”And once again,  what you just said,  all boils down to how you answer the meta questions.   I was a librarian in another life