Green, green, rocky road

Near my father's house is a field where we played baseball and football. After we got out of high school, the family sold the house and moved away. The new owners at first kept the field mowed, but, after a few years, they let it go. The field is now woods, blending nicely with the deeper woods in back. You'd never know that kids used to play ball there.

And along the narrow roads, you see stone walls, tumbled down and nearly overgrown with trees and brush. They're all over New England. No matter how rugged the terrain, you'll find these stone walls, meaning that some brave or magnificently deluded soul tried to farm this land. They cleared the land for plowing and every winter brought forth more rocks for the field and tosses the rocks in the wall to the side.

Telecommunications, as Tom Friedman observed, has made the world flat. I had to order some supplies from a company that makes financial software. After the usual hops through the telephone options, I speak to a person. He's a pleasant man with a fairly thick Indian accent. "Hello, thank you for calling Intuit supplies and service. How may I help you? My name is, uh, Joe."