A round table in downtown St. Paul Friday night.

The rule is only buy oysters on the half shell in months with an R in them, but I took

some relatives to dinner Friday and shelled out 50 bucks for a dozen shells of

small oysters, which is truly dumb for a man my age, but it gave me the chance to quote

Mark Twain to a great niece sitting next to me at the restaurant,

a smart sixth grader.

I said, good judgment is the result of experience and experience the result of poor judgment.

And she laughed.

She'd never heard of Mark Twain, which gave me the chance to quote some more of him. To do good is noble. To tell others to do good is even nobler and

much less trouble. And don't let your education get in the way of your learning. I was educated

once, and it took my years to get over it. I'll bet she went home and Googled him and read a hundred more

quotes and learned something invaluable about sentence structure.

And long after I am gone into the sunset, I will have helped bestow a fine humorist

upon the world, which is a noble thing, and all the result of poor judgment.

It was a beautiful dinner, the best I've been at in months, nine of us, relatives, around

a table in downtown Saint-Paul, four of us teenagers, which taught me I've been spending much, too much time with people my own

age. And when I do, the conversation devolves to a low point, inevitably, just as if you eat

dinner with four other plumbers, you're likely to wind up discussing interesting toilet

problems. When I eat with old people, we wind up talking about Mr. Mar-a-Lago. But Friday

evening, his name never came up, not once. The closest was when I said I do my best writing before dawn.

The 10th grader on my left talked about her sports swimming.

She does the 100-yard butterfly and about friendship, which being on a swim team leads to, and about playing violin and places

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