Frick the maker of hot-burning, steel making coke was an industry man like Ford, Edison, Vanderbilt, or Rockefeller.

Frick loved fantasy and paintings by Watteau. They were placed in his house on 71st and Fifth and I visited them and felt that life really should be and most likely would be very much a la Watteau.

Whimsy has been the ephemera at the core of my being.

Baum helped, and so did Lewis Carroll.

I never “grew up” I grew sideways into fantasy, fiction, science, and Glory Road (Heinlein).

Math, physics, chemistry did not straighten be up into a sober-thinking person of prudent good sense.

They just made me more dangerous.

Fortunately I never had the discipline to become a rigorous ideologue. I could not be very self-consistent for more than a page or two.

Watteau is how I was raised to see the world, and how I do see it, even after 8 decades of experience that might have instructed me, but I resisted. The 1950’s locked me on course. The 1960’s annealed me and catalyzed me into a firmly ephemeral cloud of Eloise at the Plaza.

Childhood is what life was designed to be. The creator wants it that way for us, and I go with the Tao of Fun.