My dear children, how can we fit hedge funds into our scheme of things? How can we fit into our own thinking these annual salary figures for the 10 top hedge fund managers?

Yes, what should we think? Your mother sends all of us pictures of her three orchids now flowering outside of our café window. I harvest our tomatoes, while troubled and wondering what it is that is killing the leaves of our tomato plants.

In the carport our grandson has turned a large cardboard carton from a recently purchased Skutt kiln into a prison with bars (bamboo stalks) and all, and where our granddaughter is held captive, willingly, while making constant demands on her jailor-brother for food and water.

It does seem that while we’re living our normal lives, while carrying out our everyday pursuits, these “hedge” people, while hedging their bets, are pulling in billion dollar annual salaries. How did we grow so far apart. At one point in the past we both hunted and gathered. Now they seem to do it all, especially the gathering.

So what is one to make of it? I read that in France just last week all the talk all week across all the country was all about Jerome Cahuzac, the traitorous budget minister in François Hollande’s socialist government. The traitor had squirreled away some 600,000 euros in one of those Suiss banks or island accounts and then last week standing up before his colleagues in the National Assembly he denied he had done so.

Bad! Although 600,000 euros comes to only .03% of the money that David Tepper of Appaloosa Management gathers in just one year budget minister Cahuzac did betray his President.

A final question, what does David Tepper do with his billions? And then, how much of David’s newly gotten wealth trickles down to the rest of us? Wouldn’t the French love to have David et al. among them and subject to President Hollande’s, struggling to get through the French courts, 75% income tax?

And in answer to your question why didn’t I…?  —well things were different then, and no less important I didn’t have whatever it takes, so now I’m reading about these new Titans while tending my garden and gathering my cabbages.

Your father,