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1. You have to be very careful when you make out your will. Otherwise things might not turn out the way you planned. A lot of people simply bypass their children and leave trust funds to their grandchildren. I don’t know, but if I were a lawyer, I suspect I’d be opposed to doing things that way. Think how much more lawyers can make when grampy dies intestate and they can sit in on the squabble.

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2. I’m re-mortgaging my farm. Seven or so years ago I borrowed $100,000 to buy an 8 house development contiguous to my farm so I could shut down the so-called “development.” One of the many side benefits is that keeping houses off this nice big woodlot will save the taxpayers in the town of St. George a lot of extra expense and problems. You know how that works. In some of the more progressive parts of the United States, towns buy up pieces of land to keep them wild just so taxpayers will be spared the inevitable huge expense of having dozens or perhaps even hundreds of extra families move into town. I’m saving my land for the people who will be living here 50 and 100 and 200 years from now. I’ve enjoyed living here for the past 71 years and I’d like the kids who live here 150 years from now to be able to experience just a bit of what fun it was to be a little boy and walk through the woods here in 1945. I still owe for these house lots I bought that I have since turned back into woodland. My plan is to do whatever it takes to make sure, that until the fascists enslave us all, no houses will ever be built in what I hope will be known as Old Man Skoglund’s woods.

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3. You have heard me say that I own 80 plus acres of beautiful woodland. I’m in the process of giving that 80 or so acres of woods to my wife’s oldest grandchild. You probably know that the only thing that held some countries together years ago was their social practice of giving the estate to the oldest son. If you only have one thing to pass on to your heirs and it happens to be a beautiful big piece of woodland, there is a good chance that you, too, might believe in this process called primogeniture. Otherwise, after a few generations of splitting up the land and splitting up the land, you end up with a huge mess that is no longer fit to sustain human habitation. It looks like Long Island. So only one grandchild is getting my land. If you’ve ever had to hire a battery of lawyers to split up an estate with 15 of your cousins, most of whom have half-crazed spouses, you can understand why only one child is getting my farm.

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4. I’m giving my farm to my wife’s oldest grandchild. By doing it now, I hope to be able to save my heirs a lot of grief. Nobody is ever ready to die, and too many people who are over 70 or over 80 still don’t have their affairs in order. Thanks to the dozen or 15 pills they eat every morning, old folks are still feeling pretty good. Even your in-house grampy might tell you that there is no rush about these things --- even though he sometimes forgets your name and you are noticing that he gets more and more food on his mouth and shirt when he eats. I suppose you wouldn’t notice all the crumbs on grampy’s shirt and the mess of food on the floor if your husband and your kids eat that way, too.

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5. You might have thought that things couldn’t get any worse when your mother died. But then your father married a greedy, grabbing, selfish slip of a girl younger than you are. She hates you and your kids, even though she knows that she will be living off your parent’s estate, probably even after you are gone. What? Ever since you were a little kid you figured that as an only child your childhood home with all it’s memories would someday pass down to you and yours? Could things possibly get any worse? If this has ever happened to you, you know it does.

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6. Because I’m in the process of giving away my estate, hopefully many years before it is really necessary, we are talking here about my deed and my will. And speaking of will, I went in Good Will today while Marsha was next door in the grocery store. Seems as a few years ago I picked up a good pair of shoes at Good Will. Wow. Things have changed at Good Will. I was blown away when I went in there. The Good Will store is now only catering to people a notch or two above my socio-economic bracket. Would you believe that a pair of shoes in Good Will is now $5.99? Hard cover books $1.99. Paper backs are $.99. People were looking at me in the store because I was making noises: “Wow, Wow, Wow!” I couldn’t believe the prices. I thought Good Will was only for very poor people. Or rich people who are very smart.

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7. Can you believe the prices they are now getting for things in the Good Will store? Please let me explain. I have been spoiled. For the past couple of winters Marsha and I have gone to Fort Myers where we are live-in care givers for Doris. Doris is a wonderful very intelligent woman from Nova Scotia. We live there for free in return for providing the groceries and vacuuming the floor. And picking her up off the floor when she falls. Every Saturday I go lawn-saleing. Saturday morning lawn sales are an integral component of the Fort Myers snow-bird life style and culture. For years every Saturday morning, all winter, I have gone out to see what I could practically steal from grieving widows who have no idea that their husband’s ten pound jar of brass screws is worth more than a quarter. I admit it. This kind of thing is not ethical, but I feel that in some small way I’m contributing to the local economy. And what in the world is an 80-year-old widow going to do with ten pounds of brass screws?

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8. It is in Fort Myers, Florida, that one learns the true value of consumer goods --- the purchasing power of a quarter. The brown shoes that I wear around the farm --- when it is too wet for sneakers and not wet enough for boots --- came from a church sale in Fort Myers. Two dollars. Two dollars for a practically brand new pair of shoes. They fit me, which is even more remarkable. Perfect new blue dungarees for a buck. New pocket books are a quarter. Hard cover sometimes a quarter. Listen closely. The Adams-Jefferson Letters. A hard cover boxed set edited by Lester J. Cappon, fifty cents. I’ll never read them but they look good on the shelf. Medieval Civilization 400-1500 by Jacques Le Goff. Brand spanking new with dust jacket. Twenty five cents. This book is fun reading. And every thing you read in these history books you can see happening in our country or in the world around you today. I have many books about Hitler but this one called Hitler by Joachim C. Fest is the best one I have ever read. I just now opened it at random and will now pass along to you, as an example, what I underlined on that page last winter. Listen. “The philosopher Ernst Bloch has spoken contemptuously of the Nazis’ ‘stupid enthusiasm.’ But in fact that was their greatest strength.” Wow. You tell me if there is a Good Will store in Maine where you can pick up this kind of wisdom from the ages for a quarter. If such a store exists I have many friends who would like to know where it is.

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9. I don’t know how you got me talking about the unbelievable high prices one finds in Maine Good Will stores. Everything I saw at Good Will was about 4 times higher than what I’d been paying for life’s necessities at winter lawn sales in Florida. We started out talking about my will and how I’m leaving my farm to Marsha’s oldest granddaughter so it won’t be broken up into house lots. To get back to that --- to remortgage my house --- so I could give away my 80 acre wood lot, I had to jump through many hoops. Here’s a curious one. I was asked to provide a description of the lot where my 1811 house stands. No problem. Route 131 on the west side. Stone walls on the east and south sides. A recently surveyed line on the north side. My friend Lawyer Crandall wrote up the property description for me. But --- my friend at the bank – the bank that has held a mortgage on my property in one form or another for the past 37 years --- said that she had to send a surveyor down to make sure that my house was actually sitting on the lot that was described. You can probably tell me what group of people snuck that law through the legislature.

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12. Can you believe that the bank that has been holding my mortgages for at least 37 years, and perhaps 42 years, is going to send a surveyor down to my house to take a drive-by or armchair look to make sure my 1811 house is actually on the lot described? My house is on a lot bounded by two stone walls and route 131 on three sides, and the fourth line was surveyed two or three years ago. A casual observer not familiar with the way business is conducted nowadays might think that the customer could get out of this for less than the projected drive-by surveyor cost of $300. I called my friend Lawyer Crandall and asked him if the location of the house could be proven in court by aerial photographs, of which I have several, augmented by surveys of contiguous properties, which, fortuitously, have my house drawn into the plan, indicating that my house is indeed where it is. Crandall was sympathetic. Crandall agreed with me wholeheartedly. Lawyer Crandall said he personally didn’t see any need of all these extra added on costs, especially since they all cut deep into what otherwise would have been his fee.

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