The morning of his eighteen birthday Westinghouse Patent Pend. Ainstruther hears his Ma say, “Wes, break a leg.”

He realizes it is carnie talk telling him to leave the desolate homestead to go out in the world to make his fortune and send it back, that the other eight kid’s ration of corn meal mush and goat’s milk not be permanently interrupted.

Unschooled he is well read from his Uncle Abernathy, an English Remittance Man’s, library.

He is then a Victorian minded American youth dropped into the bucolic glitz of San Diego, CA of the Thirties.

His first acquaintance is Alyse, rambunctious daughter of an oil tycoon. Smitten she offers to help his quest but her mind is more on long white dresses and bridal bouquets.

At Alyse’s admission of her love of antiques they mine the defunct Ensenada Hotel, once a posh beanery, of its furnishings as items to sell on Antique Row in San Diego.

They are astonished to find in the various armoires exotic birds and reptiles being smuggled in for the San Diego Zoo, and finally a defunct Mafia gunman.

They over come to make it, in Wes’ own words, “A typical American Horatio Aglae (sic) Success story”.

In the 30’s Adam’s Father was Superintendent, Medical Services, San Diego County. Money was tight and while they had an ambulance it could not attempt the back county roads.

Then his father would take the family car to bring to the hospital patients with broken bones or diphtheria or gunshot wounds. When it was a prisoner from the Work Farm, Adam would ride in the back seat with a shotgun.

On one of these he encountered abject poverty and a family who held off that ogre with only courage, patience and good nature.

Here was gist for his story mill. But it seemed unfair to the family to paint it in the black of reality but better to write it as a cheerful comedy

Arriving at the black topped one-and-a-half lane road I suddenly realized that I would have to make a decision, my first decision ever, all on my own. I looked both ways along the road but nothing was moving. There was no sign of any living thing all across the whole valley but me. Where was I going to go? And what was I going to do?

As I often do when I got some serious thinking to do, I bent down and put my hands on the ground and walked a couple hundred yards on my hands. In our family and with my kind of build it's as easy to walk on my hands as on my feet. And it always seemed to kind’a help my thinking when I was upside down. More blood in my brain or something but this time nothing came.

 I stopped, did a hundred one arm push ups with one hand and then with the other but still there was no enlightenment. I didn't stop to rest at all. Little stuff like that doesn't bother me none, but I was perplexed.

 I sat a spell and then backing up to a cut bank by the road I put my coat on the ground, I got kind of sensitive head nerves or something, as padding, and stood on my head on it.  I figured if walking on my hands didn't bring any ideas I'd just stand there a half hour or so and let things percolate.

I guess in a way it worked at least something happened. At first it was just a hum and then it became the sound of a car coming fast, mighty much too fast for that little road. Not particularly interested I tried to ignore it until getting closer the noise changed from a 'whoosh' to a 'bumpa bumpa bumpa'.

It slowed and stopped across from me. Even upside down I could see it was a funny little thing. Looked like a pregnant roller skate. Mostly on this road we saw wagons or carts with an occasional fish truck from El Rosario on the gulf. This thing was real low and short but it had a round little hood on the front and no bump on the fanny and was painted bright pink.

The door opens and a lady steps out and bends down. And even up side down and at first look I thought, "Oh the poor thing."

You see she was not exactly a beauty at all. Not like Aramantha. Aramantha is skinnier even than Ma. When her Ma, Senor Ochoa, makes Ara a new dress each Cinco de Mayo, Senora Ochoa comes over to borrow Ma's pattern for my sister Pennywort. Pennywort is eleven, and the dress when done just fits Aramantha.

 Boy that girl is really something. When she gets on one of them calico dresses she is about as big around as a quart peach can and but filled with more sugar. And that tight  dress across her chest is flat as her flat belly and there is no bulging out behind either.

Why when she tries to wear a pair of Levi's they just slip right down off her 'cause there is nothing to hold them up. Uncle Abernathy calls her 'willowy' when she is being nice to him and 'boneyard' when she’d stuck out her tongue at him and told him what she really thought. Needless to say she is the class of the class of half a dozen valleys and a dozen ranchitos, with that shape.

Well this poor girl was nothing like that. Just when she was first getting out I couldn't help but notice that her sweater bulged out in front of her, high and straight like Ma's warming shelf on the big, kitchen wood stove. Her waist was tiny, maybe as tiny as Aramantha, but once she squatted to look at that rear wheel she stretched out her skirt in the back like it would split right in two.

The lady stood up, said something under her breath and looked both ways along the highway. There must have  been nothing to see so she looked back at me. Bending double she tilted her head to see what I might look like standing up and then approached warily.

"Say, Honey. Would you do a girl a great big favor?"