good talk

My mother would have been "98" today.  Asheville, NC is and was the largest-city in western North Carolina, and my mother, Mary Ellen Williams, graduated 3rd in her class (?) from Asheville High School in 1936, and, not overly ambitious, won and took-advantage of a scholarship to Cecils Business College.  Begun in 1905, by the Cecil Family, relatives of the Vanderbilts, it was called this for a century, it's now called something-else.   Asheville was a resort-town, and people came and lived-here, as high in the Blue Ridge Mountains, it was considered good for those who had Tuberculosis, my mother's father, a tobacco-salesman, had this.  After graduating from Cecils, my mother worked as a secretary at the County Courthouse, she didn't know Thomas Wolfe, she used to see-him walking-about, but knew his secretary.  I haven't been in Asheville since I was quite small, but would like to someday see the Biltmore Estate, built by George Vanderbilt in 1905, the fab house is the largest in the U.S.  Anderson Cooper of CNN is the son of Gloria Vanderbilt, so this might give-us a slight-connection.  I quit smoking on Sept. 5, 1983, it was Labor Day that year, after smoking cigarettes for 16 years, and man, that's a rough-habit, I'd be dead by now had I continued.  I also smoked marijuana throughout my 20's (when I was "20" I took a pound of weed in the inner-pocket of my sportcoat, on a plane, from Frisco to Cleveland, no way of telling how many State and Federal Laws I broke).  Take it from one who knows from vast-experience, for recreational, medicinal, and other reasons, smoking-anything is terrible for you (inhaling smoke?)