Feels Like Home

I decided to open up an old blog to see if anyone liked it better this time around.  The premise of "Take This Tune" is that I will post a song and lyric and invite people to tell me a story that is stimulated by either the music or the lyric.  This week it is "Feels Like Home" from Randy Newman's musical "Faust".  You can hear and see the prompt on the above link.

My reason for the choice is that I have been working on the genealogy again and the one person I'm having a lot of trouble with is me.  You see I don't have a "home town".  In fact, many of the houses where I lived have been wiped off the face of the earth and replaced by airports, business districts, parks and schools.  The 1940 census was just released and is currently being indexed.  This was before I arrived.  The 1950 won't be out until I am almost 80 and I may or may not make it to the 1960.  That means finding all these places will be from memory, city directories, and Google maps.  So let's just take the first 18 years of - Feels Like Home (Not) and you can see why this particular song stirs a few emotions.

Los Angeles, Walla Walla, Oakland, Fresno, Boulder City, Westchester, Fowler, Pasadena, Phoenix, Albuquerque, Hawthorne, La Puente, Gardena, Torrance, Anaheim,  Hollywood, Redondo Beach, Fresno, Manhattan Beach, Hawthorne, Tucson, West Covina, San Carlos, and Burlingame

Now all of the above is a list of cities lived in (that I can easily remember) from the day I was born until the first year I was married.  It does not include summer side trips and temporary stays of a month or so.  Each city  represents a different house and in some cases multiple houses in the same city as there were repeats in some of these towns.  Almost none of it was with parents, so while not ill treated, there was always the feeling of being a "guest".

2725 W. Vernon, Los Angeles (The apartments are over the businesses) Where the parents lived when I was born.

9012 Earhart, Westchester, CA is now a park on the edge of LAX

216 Sonoma, Chowchilla is still there, but there isn't a picture

San Marino Hall School for Girls, Pasadena, CA

6129 W. 78th Street, Westchester, CA

841 M Street, Fresno, CA used to have an apartment

1132 P Street, Fresno, CA is now City Hall

712 Robertson Blvd., Chowchilla, CA

The next ten years are a rather fuzzy mess and I'm still searching for addresses and pictures.

1126 Broadway, Burlingame, Ca - Up the stairs to the second floor where I lived when my son was born almost 19 years after the first picture.

Every week when playing the "what if" game with the lottery draw, the idea of buying a home flickers across the brain.  The only thing I need now is a place that feels like home.

Happy St. George Day

"I see you stand like greyhounds in the slips, Straining upon the start. The game's afoot: Follow your spirit; and, upon this charge Cry "God for Harry! England and Saint George!"

Shakespeare, Henry V

A Message from Jefferson & Smith

“I don’t know what the Founding Fathers and President Thomas Jefferson would have thought about TV, cars, spaceships, cellphones, skyscrapers, computers or nuclear weapons. But I do know what Jefferson would have thought about the Buffett Rule. He would have liked it.

The Buffett Rule is the Obama Administration’s proposal to adopt a 30% minimum tax rate on personal income above $1 million a year. It would promote one of the central tenets of progressivism: that the burden of taxes should fall on the rich, not the poor.

In 1811, two years after Jefferson left the Presidency, Jefferson wrote a letter to General Thaddeus Kosciuszko, a hero of the American Revolution. Jefferson said that he supported taxes (then tariffs, since there was no income tax yet) falling entirely on the wealthy. As Jefferson explained: “The farmer will see his government supported, his children educated, and the face of this country made a paradise by the contributions of the rich alone, without his being called on to spend a cent from his earnings.”

Here is someone else who was an outspoken proponent of progressive taxation: Adam Smith, who literally “wrote the book” on capitalism. In 1776, in The Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote:

“The necessaries of life occasion the great expense of the poor. They find it difficult to get food, and the greater part of their little revenue is spent in getting it. The luxuries and vanities of life occasion the principal expense of the rich, and a magnificent house embellishes and sets off to the best advantage all the other luxuries and vanities which they possess. A tax upon house-rents, therefore, would in general fall heaviest upon the rich; and in this sort of inequality there would not, perhaps, be anything unreasonable. It is not very unreasonable that the rich should contribute to the public expense, not only in proportion to their revenue, but something more than in that proportion.”

(I wonder: When Adam Smith wrote about the “luxuries and vanities” of the rich, was he contemplating Mitt Romney’s elevator for Romney’s car? Or is that simply beyond contemplation?)

Two hundred years ago, when America was founded, progressive taxation was viewed as just common sense. We still have common sense, don’t we?

First, let’s see the Buffett Rule for individuals. Then the Buffett Rule for corporations. That would be progressive. And that would be progress."

Courage,
Alan Grayson

Earth Day