### ### ### ### ### #### ### ### ### #### ### ### ##### ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ### ##### ### ### ########## ### ### ########## ### ### ### ### Underground eXperts United Presents... ####### ## ## ####### # # ####### ####### ####### ## ## ## ## ##### ## ## ## ## #### ## ## #### # # ####### ####### ## ## ## ## ## ##### ## ## ## ## ## ####### ####### # # ####### ####### ## [ My Neighbors & I ] [ By Eric Chaet ] ____________________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________________ MY NEIGHBORS & I (c) 2002 by Eric Chaet I DRINK HALF REGULAR coffee, half decaf, & eat oatmeal, & sometimes eggs & toast, at the Farmer's Friend, at a crossroads called Tillman. Houses are being built there, rapidly now, streets being extended, crews digging along the concentric edges, laying sewer pipes. I sit at a counter, &, gradually, over the years, my neighbors - most of them dairy farmers or mill-workers - confide bits of information to me. Mostly, tho, they confine themselves to remarks about the weather, equipment & prices, & "clever" remarks at the expense of "the suits." One morning, I was talking with Ellison, a thin, bespectacled guy about my age, who, after milking his cows, often smells of the barn. Lately, he has told me about a water bottling business that he has started, using water from an artesian well that's been on his land all along. (He was born & raised on the farm, & returned to it after being drafted & fighting in the war in Vietnam - where his older brother was killed.) The price paid the farmers for milk has been so low, so long, that almost all the dairy farmers have either quit or diversified. Ellison says, "I can pretty well figure out how much has to come in each month.... I'm looking at this bill, & I say to Janey, 'This ain't right. What's this five thousand dollars for?' She doesn't know.... It says Promotion. Well, promoting WHAT? We're selling them bottled water, they're putting their label on it, & giving it away to good causes. It's got THEIR label on it. Nowhere is there any label for US. How do WE get promoted? We don't! 'Get on the phone & find out,' I said. "Lots of money for promotion. DuPont pays five million dollars to have their name on So & So's Nascar race-car. For a little label, this big" - he makes a rectangle with the fingers of his hands - "$75,000. And it's on the wrong side of the car, too. Who's going to see it? Ya know what I'm sayin'? "Lost a quarter of a million dollar account, because someone found oil in the water. Where did the oil come from? - they're checking for purity all the time, everything is filtered, all the filters are serviced all the time. "Turns out, it was from the bottles. They were heating up the mold too hot. Some of the petroleum the plastic's made of was leaching right thru from the outside in. We're filling the bottles with pure water. The oil residue left in the bottle - you couldn't taste it, but you could smell it." And the bottle company tried to charge him for the bottles, too. Good thing he figured out the codes, which show which shifts produced which bottles, including the bad ones. "I've already paid for the good ones," he told them. Meanwhile, he'd spent thousands of dollars buying new equipment, thinking, just maybe, somehow, his equipment was getting oil into the water. An oil-less compressor, for instance, $1,200 - & you have to take it apart & replace all the teflon parts once a year. It wears out, because - no oil. Alone, Ellison, too small, couldn't fight, wouldn't be believed. Together - another company had already spent $300,000 buying new equipment, thinking that the problem was just maybe with their equipment - they were a class. So, they could file a class action suit. "Ya know what I'm sayin'?" The company that sold Ellison the bottles sent him a nasty note, saying he was overdue on his payments, & they were turning his account over to a collection agency. Since his credit was now no good, other companies he approached for bottles wanted only certified checks, up front, before they would give him any bottles! But now that Ellison had a stronger ally, the company that sold him the bad bottles wrote to tell him they were forgiving the debt. Forgiving! The son of Ellison's veterinarian (the father died of cancer; the son has cancer, too, but he's still alive) needed some land to operate on. But they were charging $26,000 an acre. Ellison said, "How much land do you need?" "An acre." "Well, let's get 7." (Another time Ellison told me that he had invested in MCI many years ago, & the stock had appreciated so much in value that he was rich now. But Roy, the veal entrepreneur, told me that Ellison lies.) Anyway, Ellison says he bought the veterinarian's son 7 acres. On one acre is the new vet place, across the street from where they just built the brand new high school - the one that looks just like that school in Colorado, Columbine, where the 2 kids shot up their classmates. "You'd think they wouldn't want to build schools just like that one. You'd think they'd try to make things as different as they could figure out. Ya know what I'm sayin'?" Nine years later, Ellison sold his six acres at a quarter of million dollars each. "Ya know what I'm sayin'?" ANOTHER MORNING, another talk with Ellison at the Farmer's Friend: Seems that the recent arrivals from Mexico buy an animal from him occasionally - not a calf, but not a full grown steer or cow, either. They like them medium. They like to butcher them their own way. It's a ritual. It's okay with Ellison. He lets them use a piece of land, maybe 60 feet wide, about 175 feet long. They have a picnic, maybe once a month. Also, he sells them bottled water. "Once in a while, one of the bottles gets dented, or one of the labels gets put on the wrong side - otherwise, nothing wrong with it - ya know what I'm saying? "It's $10.95 for a 5 gallon bottle. But one guy paid the first time, then kept taking one a week for 5 weeks, without paying. "All these guys know one another. So I tell this one guy about the other guy who hasn't paid. 'I want to get paid,' I say. I say, 'Fifty bucks would straighten it out.' He takes out a roll, & peels off a 50. He says, 'I take care of it.' "A few hours later, he comes back with the empty." EARLY SEPTEMBER, morning fog, on Algonquin Road: I was noticing the corn. There was a khaki layer on top, then the bright green leaves & the amazingly sturdy stalk, with the "beard" - pouring out from the green leaves encasing the ear of corn - also khaki, mixed with green, about a foot or 2 above the khaki-colored dried-out grasses at the foot of the row of corn closest to the road. "Good morning, Ted!" I shouted to my neighbor, who was climbing down from his small, old, blue tractor, amid his silos, vehicles, & sheds. Ted turned, & slowed down. I asked how the corn was doing - it got off to such a poor start: there was so much rain in the spring, the ground was flooded for most of 2 months. "Looks like it turned out pretty good," I ventured. "Not really," he said. "There's just little tiny kernels on the cob. We'll have to grind up the whole thing for silage." "The cows will eat it all?" "Oh, yeah. Not much hay, either, this year. More protein in the hay. Have to buy feed for protein." "I read," I said, "that the protein in the feed comes from slaughtered cattle that's cooked at a rendering plant, at 300 degrees. Somebody said that Mad Cow Disease is being spread that way, that the bacteria or virus, I don't know which, survives up to 360 degrees. Also said that Alzheimer's might be the human version of Mad Cow Disease." "I dunno," Ted said. "There've always been senile old people." "Yeah, maybe we just live longer, more of us, to get senile." Ted once told me that his father had started their farm, here, when the foundry he was working at, in Milwaukee, stopped operating during the Great Depression. He also told me that he'd been in the Navy in the 50's, and had been on a big ship that, during a storm, was in troughs, with big waves towering above. Hard to imagine: Ted is so relaxed, & he looks like he was born in the faded overalls he wears. "Say, Ted, what's that" - I held up 5 fingers - "brown thing on top of the corn plant? Is it like stamen & pistils, pollen? Is that what the bees go for?" "Well," he said, "the tassel" (he called it TAH-sel) "is the male part. The pollen's there. I don't think it needs any bees, tho. When it's ready, the rain knocks it down to where the cobs grow - that's the female part. You know, the corn silk, those HAIRS?" "Yeah." "There's a hair attached to each kernel on the cob. Those hairs were the female part of the flower." "Well, look," I said. "I can see that corn is GIANT GRASS - but what's the equivalent of the COB for REGULAR GRASS?" "It's not grass. When I spray, I kill all the grass, but not the corn." "Huh. It must be grass wed to something else. I'll let you get back to work." Ted headed back toward his tractor, & I resumed my walk on Algonquin Road. MY ATTEMPTS TO GET MY WORK INTO CIRCULATION, & to get paid, nearly always came to a big fat nothing. But I always managed to find some kind of work, &, since my spending habits were, essentially, spending nothing that was not required to exist - except occasionally to pay for some envelopes or postage, or coffee or oatmeal or eggs at the Farmer's Friend - I frequently had time to myself. Some of the time, I enjoyed - reading, working out, working on this or that song or story. But, frequently - what with all the construction going on around me - & everyone else, including Eileen, always at work, or talking about work, or shopping with what they earned at work - & almost never any recognition - or, if there was recognition, after a little while, I'd think, so what? the world is still being turned into a desert by the worst people squeezing everything & everyone dry - I'd feel pretty useless & ashamed of doing so little about it all. I tried not to get addicted to anything with too terrible consequences: I took walks, sometimes I watched a lot of television, I read a lot.... Probably everyone thinks that the things that they do when they don't know what else to do aren't serious indulgences, with serious consequences, that everyone else's are worse. Probably the drunkard & heroin-addicts think, Hey, at least I'm not a general, addicted to battle, or a politician addicted to building up people's false hopes. But there were serious consequences to my indulgences. I was mostly alone. There was less & less chance that, by interacting with people, I would have a chance to right any wrongs, let alone advance myself. And I was getting used to the situation, that was the worst thing. IF CORN'S not GRASS - or only PARTIALLY grass - what is it? I wondered, one day, walking around outside after a few desperate hours of trying to achieve something - but what? - at my desk - & pacing around in the house. Corn has cones: kernels on a cob. These kernel-laden cones are the fruit resulting when FLOWERS are fertilized by pollen from tassels above. I looked around: gymnosperms (the evergreens: pines, spruces, cedars) are similar: there were dozens within sight, along the road, & beyond a field recently plowed under, on the golf course that's always so busy these days. The gymnosperms don't have flowers with PETALS, like corn's pale blue flowers. Their flowers are tiny, & clustered around a stem in a rude-looking, dull-colored cylinder, so that they don't look like what people usually call flowers, at all. When pollinated, they produce woody, spiral-toothed cones, with little nuts under each TOOTH, or WING, or SPROCKET, equivalent to corn kernels. Gymnosperms are woodies, whereas the corn - & grass - are herbacious. The gymnosperms don't have leaves, like the giant grass-blades the corn uses to gather in sun-light. Rather, the "leaves" are needles coming out in all directions from a branch (so that you can't grab the branch), or clusters of needles (2's, 3's, & 5's), or - in the case of cedars - green, over-lapping, ramifying SCALES, resembling FISH scales - tho the wrong color, & not on a finned, swimming vertebrate. The branches of the gymnosperms are mostly arranged - like the "sprockets" of the cones & the kernels of corn - in a spiral pattern. Tho some, like big White & Norwegian Pines, ramify, with major "forks" along the onward & upward road of growth, like the broad-leafed maples, oaks, birches, & elms. THE PRICE OF MILK. At the Farmer's Friend, Edgar sits down next to me - he seems to like me. He's kind of boyish - tho probably at least 10 years older than me, & with more mass than a boy. A little chubby, side-burns, open face, moves a little in slow-motion. He wears flannel shirts & jeans, & the same kind of baseball-type caps most of us wear, who don't wear suits, around here. He's talking about the extra cost of building a manure pit, due to 2 government workers whose entire job is watching the 10 guys who are doing the actual work, to make sure regulations are being followed. I commiserate with him, but point out that, if the government didn't treat us all like we're cheaters, the cheaters would get away with building, for instance, leaky manure pits. But that, those of us who are honest are always being offended at being treated like cheaters, while those inclined to cheat are never offended. "They'd find a way to get away with it, anyway," Edgar points out. Another day, Edgar told me that he makes money buying & selling old Studebaker cars. He goes all over the country to pick up the ones he buys, using a trade paper, & fixes them up himself. His kids do most of the farming, now - tho he still helps out a lot. Today, he says that he doesn't have any money, but he has a lot of land - he sank whatever money he did have into it. "Probably worth a lot now," I offer. "Probably," he says, without enthusiasm. "When I started," he says, "we got $12 & something for milk. That lasted about 10 years. Since then, it's gone up & down a little, but it's been mostly where it is now, down around $9. Can't make any money that way. But it's a good job. If you like it. "For the first 30 years, my wife & I never took a vacation, or ate in a restaurant." He's eating, now, two eggs over hard, with "home-made" toast, butter, & coffee. He says he doesn't guess the price of milk will ever go up again. "Sure, it will," I say, "but not until they've driven all the small farmers out of business." Edgar grunts in agreement. "Then they'll be able to set the price," he says. IT'S BEEN MONTHS SINCE RON SAT DOWN NEXT TO ME - partly because I rarely get to the Farmer's Friend before 6 AM any more. He's a little man, hair cut short, t-shirt & jeans, pugnacious, wise-cracky. I doubt if he remembers, but the last time he sat near me, a few stools down the counter, he grinned & leaned toward me - where I was reading one of Immanuel Wallerstein's histories of the economic world-system & drinking coffee - &, acting as tho my reading a book was a cry of loneliness, said, "Aw, should I come over & keep you company?" "You can insult me just as well from over there," I said. Anyway, today, he sits down next to where I'm reading the local paper, drinking coffee, & waiting for my bowl of oatmeal, & starts by asking, "What have you been doing, Goldberg?" Goldberg's not my name. I guess he's decided that I'm Jewish - he's noticed that I read books occasionally - &, Goldberg is his name for a Jew. Why not? I think. And I start to tell him about my current project: I've been given 2 weeks to gather the information that will make it possible to certify (thru state & federal government agencies) a (sub-orbital, educational) space-port at Kickapoo, about 50 miles east of here, along Lake Michigan. I've been dragging my sorry ass around feeling sorry for myself, because I couldn't earn money, so - tho it's not my idea of the way I want to focus my attention, the pay is good - I'm feeling more confident than I have in a while. But Ron is already telling Janice - the gray-haired, always-dependable, & usually-cheerful waitress who has come to take his order - a joke, & what he wants to eat & drink. I realize, AGAIN, that he doesn't really care what I'm doing - it's just idle (& brief) curiosity, & impolite politeness. So I say, "What are YOU up to these days?" which most people would rather talk about - & I'd prefer to learn his business than tell him mine, anyway. "Well, I was going to do some roofing, but if it keeps raining, I don't know what I'll do. I guess move a truck-load of runny jam & too-solid peanut butter. "What do you do with runny jam & too-solid peanut butter?" "Sell it to people in the U.P." - pronounced YOU-PEE, meaning Upper Peninsula of Michigan - "for bear bait. Ran an ad in the paper up there. Doing pretty good." I also learn that the property he owns in Nicolet, where he & his wife have been selling "antiques" - old junk, mainly, from the looks of what's on display in the window - is all paid off, & that a doctor from Green Bay is interested in buying it. "Good thing, too - with me being just a couple of years away from retirement." He also tells me that he is now selling the "antiques" at a place in the mall in Appleton that he's been renting since February. I've finished the brief summary of national & world news in the local paper, & turn to the one page business summary. Ron glances at it. "Stock market's not going up like it was," he offers. "Nope, pretty steady now for about 6 months. How did you get in on the runny jam & too-solid peanut butter business?" I ask him. "Oh, my cousins at Carrothers Feed used to do it. But they don't have any storage space any more, so I took it over. I work for them, sometimes." Seems that when the manufacturers switch from making strawberry to grape jam or vice versa, sometimes a batch is too runny to sell, & that sometimes a load of peanut butter is kept in the freezer too long. "Very resourceful," I tell Ron. Ron has owned & operated a tavern on the edge of an Indian reservation, & built all kinds of things for a locally-owned chain of department stores. Then, for the last 10 years, he's re-modeled homes for dozens, maybe hundreds of people around here - a jack of all the building trades. He's got a lot of energy, likes to tease. He's so ornery & independent, I'd love him, if there was anything he aspired to beyond acquisition, & retirement from the effort of acquisition. And if he wasn't always trying to let me know - because he is getting more money than he ever expected to, & I, an idea-guy, anyway, have let it be known that I'm looking for work - that he is my superior, as a person & a man - as a getter. I LIVE ALONG THE BEAVER RIVER - so named by more than one of the tribes that are no longer here. The French explorers in the early 17th century thought the Beaver would lead them from Lake Michigan to the South Sea & China. It proved to be rich with otters, beavers, & fish. The otters & beavers are gone - beaver hats were all the thing in 17th century Western European big cities - & so are most of the fish - their reproductive processes disturbed by PCB's from the paper factories. Most of the people around here travel the roads on either side of the river early in the day, then around 5 or 6 in the afternoon, into & out of Green Bay and Appleton, working their pay-check jobs. THE ONLY PERSON AROUND HERE willing to pay me to do anything is Red Finster. He recognizes my intelligence, & I make it a point not to express my ideas, but to make it clear that it is my intention to use my intelligence conscientiously in his behalf. He's an irrepressible development booster - with a thriving ceramics business (his father ran a similar business in Cincinnati) that he mastered long ago. Except for an occasional big deal, the ceramics business bores him. Red originally hired me as an "executive assistant" - for 4 months, helping him form a trade association of companies in the state that were somehow, anyhow, involved in space exploration. He wouldn't put me on the pay-roll. I had to submit an invoice every two weeks, as a consultant. So, after the 4 months, I told him that my job was done, & if he wanted me to work for him any more, I would be glad to - & I handed him a business card I had had printed up: I was now a consultant, & my rates would be a bit higher. Red has me researching space-ports, launch procedures, federal & state regulation & legislation, life-support systems, & helium-3 (a radioactive isotope on the Moon that he thinks will one day provide Earth with a lot of its electric power). I keep working at my songs, tho the market I once thought barely existed for the kinds of serious songs I was writing seems to have totally evaporated - &, anyway, I'm old now, & songs are sold to the young, performed by young musicians & singers. Celebration of youth--cynical pandering--seems to be mainly what is being sold--rather than any particular song. Except that the songs shouldn't interfere with making youths feel like they are the highest rung of evolution, without anything being required of them, mentally, spiritually, or - over a period requiring determination & endurance - physically. So my life hasn't turned out as I hoped. The dairy farmers would say the same. And the cows - what would the cows say? THERE WAS A POUNDING ON THE DOOR, & I ran downstairs to answer. It was Johnny, bright red blood running down his forehead, & off the tip of his nose. "Come in!" I said, & he did. We went into the kitchen. I yelled upstairs to Eileen, "Eileen! Johnny's hurt. Get lots of hydrogen peroxide, & come here!" "Sit down," I told Johnny. "I don't want to get blood on the rug," he said. "Sit down!" I said, & he sat down at the kitchen table, tho careful to lean in such a way as to avoid dripping blood on the rug. Johnny is one of the two reasons I agreed when Eileen decided to buy this house - which is big & plain & not especially attractive. Eileen was earning enough, by then, to get a mortgage & pay it off, if that's what she wanted to do. Since I was earning just enough to pay half the rent of our tiny cottage by the golf course - & sometimes not even that - she was only listening, to the extent that she WAS listening to me, out of kindness. "If you must buy a house, buy this one. You've got a river running just beyond the road in front of the house. And you've got a good neighbor. Good neighbors are precious." While Eileen was showing me around inside, trying, at least, to get me not to hate the idea of her getting us involved with a mountain of mortgage debt, & our moving (I'd have to spend money to print more business cards) - Johnny had come over & knocked, to offer any help he could, tho the realtors had warned him not to bother prospective buyers. The house had been built by his family, when he was a boy - he had been partly raised in it, & lived in it many of his adult years, taking care of his father. Johnny is tall & gawky & not sophisticated - eager to please, forthright, & handy. He always cuts the the lawn here - there is a lot of lawn. When he lived here, he cut it - & he has kept right on cutting the lawn since we moved in. "Is it okay?" he asks occasionally. "Okay? It's great! You're doing our work for us." He uses a gas-powered lawnmower, so we occasionally pay for some of the gas. When he wanted to buy a new mower, the kind you ride around on, we paid a third of the price. He didn't buy the kind his company makes - he works in a factory producing lawnmowers & snowblowers - he bought a competitor's model. He said they were almost exact equivalents, tho the competitor's model was designed just a little better, & cost only 2/3 what one of the kind he produces would have cost. Johnny's not terribly impressed with the management since "the old man" retired, & the son runs the company. Johnny has spent months at a time, traveling around - to warehouses in Detroit & Baltimore, for instance - fixing hundreds of snow-blowers, that had been paid for & shipped out, with defects that the purchasers complained about. "You can't do that - especially with all the mild winters, lately," he points out. Johnny lives on the land next door, & mows his lawn - there's a lot of it - & ours, together, several times a week. It's his main hobby, apparently. In the winter, he also snow-blows our driveway clear. Eileen put a compress with hydrogen peroxide on Johnny's bald head. He was fixing up his tool shed in back, & a plank from the roof he was re-building fell on his bald head, a corner gashing deep into the flesh. We drove him to the emergency room of the hospital. It was no big deal, kind of a pleasant excursion - the fields are full, just shy of harvest - & a chance to do some good. "Bonkus-on-nogginus," the young emergency room doctor joked after looking at it, briefly - & the wound turned out to need only a few stitches, & to have no serious effects. And Johnny had insurance, from work, that covered it. Last winter, Johnny had his feet operated on, first one, then the other. He was laid up for months - in the little house he & his brothers built out of two trailers, on the land next to ours. I visited every day, except a few days when one of his sisters kept him company. I fetched his mail from the post office 6 days a week, & occasionally bought him a quart of milk. We talked about the Green Bay Packers football team. He was reading a book about its famous coach, Vince Lombardi - a perfectionist, who led the team to several championships, against much better financed teams, from New York & Chicago, for instance. "He treated all the players equally - like dirt!" Johnny told me. Then he read a bunch of magazines about Arizona - put out by the Arizona Department of Tourism. Johnny sometimes goes to Arizona, with his brother, Bob, on vacation. He showed me some pictures of desert plants. And he told me a lot about his family - he has pictures of mother & father & brothers & sisters all over the place - old days in the nearby town & this neighborhood. "So much building going on around here now!" I'm terribly impatient - I always want to get to work - tho, frequently, when I have the chance to work, I find I can't do it, anyway. But I made myself stay at least ten minutes, &, often, a half an hour or more. And once a week, Eileen & I ate a meal with him, over at his place. He loved that. You have to love the guy. He certainly loves you. He has been working at the factory that produces lawnmowers & snowblowers for 30 years - tho all he ever wanted to do was be a farmer. He used to be truant from school - he'd be operating a neighbor's tractor all day. When the principal of the high school said something less than respectful about his family, just before he was due to graduate, Johnny threw a book at the principal, walked out, & never graduated. He's been working at the factory, ever since he came back from the Vietnam War, which he describes as "a farce," shaking his head, but without bitterness. The last day he was in Vietnam, he came closest to being in trouble. He was operating a radio - his job the whole time he was there - in a shed. A bomb went off right next to the shed. He'd had a relatively safe time of it, til then, working behind the lines. But just as he was leaving, there was no more "behind the lines." IT USED TO BE - after the Indians were displaced - Black Hawk War, 1830's - that most of the people around here were dairy farming families. That's not so, any more - as a lot more people live here than used to, most of them working in the towns & small cities & commuting in & back. A lot of the dairy farms have failed, too. Both the market & government incentives favor big operations over the family farms. In any case, as I am speaking about my neighbors, I should say that a lot of my neighbors are dairy farmers & dairy farm families - but a lot of my neighbors, too, are cows. Most of them are black & white Holsteins, & they live pretty much penned up in small areas, adjacent to iron-red wood barns in various states of decrepitude - tho a few, more than 100 years old, seem still to be solid, & are regularly painted over. OCCASIONALLY, AN OWL flies by, low & purposefully, dull gray or dull brown, or some dull intermediate color. Or a hawk is perched quietly erect, or with its head tucked, asleep, on the dead branch of a tree, or on some weather-worn wooden fence-post. The hawk, also dully brown or gray, may have a slight reddish-tinge to the tail - in which case it's called a red-tailed hawk. Nothing flashy, tho. An eagle or a pair of them, high above, cruise by occasionally, letting out a kind of metallic cry, neither harsh nor melodic, either - other-worldly - easy to ignore, if you're busy, as something mechanical, maybe something to do with one of the freight trains that occasionally goes by across the river, or something to do with some farmer's equipment, or with some big truck moving to or from a construction site. The eagles fly very high. Sometimes you see them, flying silently by - sometimes, rarely, not much higher than the peak of a house, following the river. But sometimes, tho you hear their cry, you could look up for them, but they're flying too high, & you can't make them out - they're less than specks, part of a haze.... You could be here for years: earning money however you earn it; paying for your house; paying your taxes; getting along as best you can with your spouse & family, & with your spouse's family; & the county, state, & federal governments, all the agencies; keeping the lawn mowed, oil or gas in the furnace, car running; hearing about the high school football team, & extension of the sewer lines to where, til recently, there were only dairy farms; reading in the paper about the ruinously low price of milk & ruinously high price of oil - & you'd never even know that the eagles, hawks, & owls are living here, occasionally moved to seek out & concentrate on one particular mouse, mole, or chipmunk - necessary to go on. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- uXu #597 Underground eXperts United 2002 uXu #597 1991-2001 uXu ten years 1991-2001 ---------------------------------------------------------------------------