We had a great visit shopping in San Francisco over the weekend, where we elected to be a few cents here and there for shopping bags. Probably a better call than watching belts, slacks, sweatshirts, perfume, and books and wine bottles...go flying out of our hands...and rolling to their doom on Geary Street.

It seems everywhere you go the big word is sustainable. Yesterday, my buddy Mike Douglas up at Holly's Cove Tree Farm---cut down a beautiful tree for us....and reminded us...that the stu will generate, one two even three additional trees...sustainable...

Then there was the restaurant manager in Napa who kept telling me about the sustainability of the cattle used in their cheeseburgers. He was yakking about how humanely they were raised. With a straight face, I asked if the cattle still wound up dead before landing on my bun. He impatiently told me of course, to which I replied that animal's no longer really sustained is he?

Then there was the pilgrimage to Whole Foods in Folsom. The only thing that doesn't seem sustainable there is whether I can sustain paying those prices. It’s amazing how much more these whole foods - barely processed, untouched by the middle man - cost so much more than our typical groceries.

Overcome by all this, I was even tempted to buy one of those sustainable shopping bags, but offered at 8 dollars each, I got over it. The nice clerk managed to pack about 3 sacks of groceries into one seemingly sturdy paper bag -which in theory could be re-used. Well that theory was gone with the sustainable wind when the sack broke as I carried it into the house. Olives, cheese, and black Arkansas apples went flying. Note to self: those 8 dollar Burlap babies probably don’t break, nor would a couple of plastic bags.

Which brings us to an email that’s been sent to me in one form or another by a host of listeners. It goes like this: a young 20 something clerk is giving some old lady the business because she chooses plastic over a paper sack at the checkout. “You old people aren’t green and you never were.” “You’re right. “Back in the day we weren’t green. “All we did was return milk bottles, soda bottles, and beer bottles back to the store where they were sent back to be sterilized and refilled. “We weren’t green though. We walked up stairs because we didn’t have escalators everywhere. “We washed and reused cloth diapers because we didn’t have the disposable plastic ones that clog the landfills. “Kids wore hand-me-down clothes. “We didn’t use a lot of electricity because our TV screens didn’t come in color and the screens were about the size of our hands, not the state of Wyoming. “And we used one outlet - not a strip with 6 or 8. “And we didn’t waste 220 volts with a clothes dryer. “We let Mother Nature take care of that with a clothesline. “We didn’t waste gas mowing our lawn with a motorized lawnmower. “We used leg and arm power. “We drank from a fountain and didn’t waste money on bottled water that also clogged up landfills. “We refilled our pens with ink instead of buying new ones, we replaced our razor blades instead of throwing out the whole razor, and we didn’t need a computer and a satellite to help us find the nearest pizzeria. “We let our fingers do the walking in the phone book, which we kept for a couple of years. “And because crime was lower, our kids played outside for hours, preserving electricity inside and expanding their oxygen capacity outside.

“Yeah,” the old lady finished as she grabbed her plastic grocery bags. ”We were greener than dollar bills we used back then. “There were no credit cards to clog up the mail box and run up our debt. “We just never thought about or bragged about it. “We just called it doing the right thing.”