February 19th 2010 - Never Take Advice from Children

          I wake up with a wonderful idea.  Since I'm interested in a store in 1866, and since they taxed and licenced just about everything, perhaps the old county tax records will show some payments.  So I dally with the Tax Assessor, who is beautifully grown-up, and she takes me downstairs.  Actually, she leaves me with a pile of ancient newspapers, while she goes off somewhere to look for the old records.

          The newspapers go back to at least the 1880s, but I can't bring myself to touch them.  Clearly they will crumble to bits.  The next person to look through them will be the last.  The Tax Assessor comes back and tells me there are too many things in front of the old records.  I offer to do some moving, but she says I can't go in there.  I wonder what was stacked in front of them: old Tax Assessors? old boyfriends?

 

          The doyen of the grown-up ladies calls me and we arrange to meet at the library.  This is a bit of a pity, because I had half-arranged to see the sheriff at the same time.   She produces some of the books they keep locked away (these genealogists seem to be real light-fingered).  They don't add very much, except to tell me where the Glasgows are buried.  It's not in a churchyard, it's behind someone's house.  The person who recorded it 50 years ago gives a laboured description of how to get there, and says that only two of the markers are still visible, so I reckon there's no point in trying to find it now.  Interestingly, one of the markers visible in 1960 was Sue Glasgow, the land-gathering widow.

          After which I rushed back to the courthouse, but the sheriff had gone.

 

          Later that night, I went to a bar recommended by some youngsters the previous night.  They had promised a good crowd, and country and western music.  When I got there, they wanted $3 at the door "for the band".  The bouncer couldn't give me change of ten, althought the bar was crowded, so I reckon it was a 'grown-up' tax.

          It turned out to be a DJ playing loud pop of that doggerel-poetry variety

You know

The kind

Where they talk too fast

And it's

Just as well

'Cos it all sounds daft.

(Yes, I know it doesn't rhyme or scan.  I was just trying to get into the spirit of it.)

          I escape as quickly as I can, without my $3.