kendall, the first time I heard that bit about the guy on the porch and new people coming to town, it was back in about 1980, after my parents had been killed and I married a guy I didn't know very well. Yikes. He was an alcoholic and a drug addict. I had no clue about addiction. I didn't know what I was getting into, but shortly got out of it, although not unscathed. I had never met anyone who had such a negative reaction to everything in life, and someone told me that story to explain how I saw things positively and he would look at the same thing and see it negatively... not only that, he had moved from a nearby town that he reviled to the town where I live, so the story literally fit the situation.

Mudcat reflects the way people interact in general. For an internet site, I have found it to be much more polite than most internet forums.

Alice