Hi, Bob:

Looking to the next generation, I notice that my oldest son has developed a gift for embellished story-telling. He gets that mostly from me, but also from my Father, who loved to tell stories. Sometimes so convincingly that I believed them. Only my Father would have went sparrow hunting in a horse barn with a baseball bat, with one of his buddy's and then tried to clean sparrows and roast them on a stick over an open fire. How much (if any) of that actually happened is almost beside the point. Just the imagery of my Dad as a young kid taking swings at sparrows flying through the dust beams of sunlight in a horse barn and then trying to take the feathers off of a sparrow and roast it on a stick is worth remembering. My oldest son talks about his great camping adventures (not counting sleeping out in the back yard once until it got dark, I think he camped out twice in his life) with bears (or was it beers, John9?) crashing through the underbrush? In an area where the last bear was spotted in 1847.

If you tell the most hair-brained stories with conviction and sincerity, you can get people to believe almost anything...

I roasted dead rats on a stick over an open fire once(honest truth.)
Don't try this at home. They explode. Forwarned is forarmed. Ot at least two armed.

Jerry