Thinking quickly I grinned, waved at the Gnomies sewing santa embroidery Christmas tshirt and shouted a greeting as if we were lifelong friends. He greeted me back in the same fashion. So when she passed away in 2015 the family looked to me to pay for her funeral. I said she is not my mother and not my problem. Because if I had paid for it. Then it would have been on their terms with my money. Nobody tells me how to spend my money. When I was seven years old, me and my second grade classmates went with the teacher and an aide on a field trip. We didn’t have to ride the bus or anything. Our school was just a few blocks away from our destination, and we lived in a small but self-sufficient town in Missouri so we were going to all walk.