1. That the federal government keeps track of banks that are in danger of failing, and that usually there are 10 or so on the watch-list, and this year there are 117 (112 of which, I think, have since failed).

2. That there would be a big financial disaster soon and the Dow would fall to 7000 before it starts going up again and I should put all of my 501k retirement money into Treasury Bonds (Sure. I ran to my room, broke open my piggy bank, and double-checked that both of my retirement dollars are still in there – whew!)

3. Not exactly apropos to financial disaster (though I’m getting back to it), that my grandfather, his father, a farmer in Mississippi whom I never met because he died the year before I was born, never ate in a restaurant. Not once in 69 years. Not even a McDonald’s.

4. That my grandfather also didn’t attend his daughter’s nor his two sons’ weddings, not against any spousal choices, but rather in a kind of protest over spending that hullabaloo on something that could be done quickly down at the J of the P.

5. Finally, that my grandfather, when he was 17, ran away from home and made some money sharecropping for his uncle. Then he and his friend Prentice Arrington (a better name even Faulkner couldn’t have dreamed up) hoboed around the country.

6. They went to the big city up East, but they didn’t like that. They went to Florida. They didn’t like that either. They came back to Mississippi and sharecropped summers, to save up some cash. They followed the wheat harvest, making money as migrant labor. They followed the circus, because they liked it.

7. Then, one year, they bought a Harley and set off West, with two bedrolls, a frying pan, and a .22 rifle (for shooting jackrabbits) and toured the big country of Texas, California, Arizona, Oklahoma. They loved that. This was during the Great Depression.

8. So if the bailout needs a bailout, or money becomes just so many scraps of paper, Pulao and I might pack up our compact Toyota with some 400 thread count sheets, a frying pan, and a credit card, and take to the open road. It’s in my blood, after all.

I’ve always been fascinated by cows. I suppose being fascinated by cows could be considered a negative indicator of intelligence, but I prefer to think of it as a love of nature, and a reverence for where my hamburgers come from.

As a kid, I helped my cousin in Mississippi get his show cow ready for the fair. “Helped” mainly meant “watched,” as I was a bit of a city slicker, and hadn’t beefed up (sorry!) on my cow fundamentals. But I helped clean and groom the cow, which included a thorough tail bleaching. The tail bleaching, I’ve always remembered, was to counteract the cow’s tendency to get shit all over its tail — a shitty tail, my cousin taught me, a winning fair cow does not make.

As a teenager, when I visited my brother in upstate New York, I made him stop by the side of the highway so I could burn a roll of film on some cows mulling about a field. This was another choice of subject matter, along with my “clouds of the sky” picture albums, that made my dad seriously rethink my filmic allowance.

But last week, when I was in Delhi, I had two things going for me; a 2GB memory card and cows conveniently on the street!

Street cows are not your ordinary everyday cows. They sidle up to you and talk fast; before you know it, you’re the proud owner of a “genuine” Rolex, or you pat your back jeans pocket and realize your wallet’s been pinched.

No, actually they’re exactly like country cows. The impressive thing about cows (besides their immensity and tastiness) is that they are unpreturbable to the nth degree. Cow A (pictured) chewed her cud as placidly, traffic whooshing and honking on either side of her, as if she were in a rolling meadow of flowers. She might have been be too stupid to know that she wasn’t in a meadow of flowers, or else realized that none of the small cars could really put a dent in her.

We only caught the tail-end of Cow B (above). As we passed this street cow I pointed at the window and shot at the head of the cow. But by the time the shutter clicked up and down, we had reached the business end.

Cow C posed very thoughtfully for me in the square of a local market, underneath a sign which, I’m told, is for a stock brokerage. Kismet!