Last Saturday I ran in to a gentleman I used to work with before I retired from Highlands in 1999.
    “What are you doing here?” he asked.
    Shifting the emphasis, I answered his question with another, “What are you doing here?” But before anyone gets the idea my ex-colleague and I came across each other in a brothel or an adults-only video parlor, let me explain.
    Dear Abby, the iconic giver of advice to the lovelorn (whose column has been taken over by a daughter), often was w-r-o-n-g on the advice she gave and especially in the selection of letters she published.
    I’ll get to the one brilliant thought she imparted in a few paragraphs; meanwhile, how has she missed the mark? Let me count the ways:
    “He’s not a mechanic, he’s just a parts changer.” It was more than a half-century ago that my dad made that assessment.
    Now, in the year 2006, when computer technology has obviated much of the demand for mechanics, my dad’s statement seems prophetic.
    Let me explain:
    I hit a man in the eye. Not really. I just used the sentence as a way of demonstrating how adverbs such as “only” get to move around in sentences and thus provide us with a host of interpretations.
    In my class at the United World College a few years back, I wrote down that sentence and asked students to place the word “only” in different positions.
    Like this:
    One expression that keeps making the rounds — usually because someone in print or on television uses it — is “the lion’s share.”
    We’ve even used it here, at the Optic, this bastion of correctiquette. Recently we used it to mean the largest part, the greater portion, as in “the chamber got the lion’s share of the funds.” Invariably, some groups and organizations are left grumbling because they only got a mouse’s share.
    We kept our grandson, my namesake, for a few days last week, and the visit reminded me of the world around me when I was around his age.
    Wanting to please his grandparents, Arthur asks permission to play, say, across the field. Permission granted, just check in every hour. Instead, he checks in every half hour, “just so you won’t worry.”
    By contrast, a constant playmate of his simply shows up at our house. She’s no trouble at all — in fact Arthur looks forward to her visits — but her mother, I suspect, makes a dozen calls when night falls to find out whose house she’s been visiting.
    It happened again. A victim of my own upbringing, I corrected my wife’s grammar once too often. Those of you who may know her also know how egregious this offense can be (on my part).
    You see, I grew up in a family whose father wasn’t given to small talk.
    I could get his attention, so it seemed, only by butchering the English or Spanish language. No matter how preoccupied Dad might have been, the slightest slip resulted in a repeat-after-me type lecture.
    I’ve made my living through the written and spoken word but would have starved had I depended on communication Saturday night.
    Here’s what happened:
    My wife and I drove to Denver to pick up our son, arriving on a late-night flight from Denmark. The heavy volume of holiday traffic made it inconvenient for Adam Stan to land in Albuquerque, so Bonnie and I arrived in Denver after a six-hour drive.
    Two events, which I hope coalesce at the end of this piece, caught my attention only this week, reinforcing my fear that we’re going to run out of space.
    The two things are the go-ahead for a Gucci guru to build the biggest house in Christendom, and watching a real neighborhood game of keep-away near the house where I grew up.
    Let’s begin with Tom Ford, who got approval to erect a 15,862 square-foot house-plus on a mountaintop in Santa Fe. This construction, buildings alone, is the size of our double lot in Camp Luna, but if the Gucci guy were to plunk down the house where we planted our double-wide, he’d be trespassing just by leaving the front door.
    A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.
    “Why?” asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes towards the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.
    “I’m a panda,” he says at the door. “Look it up.”