"The very rich are different from you and me," said F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Had a woman in the store who works for Morgan Stanley. They've moved to the fourth floor of the Franklin Crossing building.

She told me she's worked for them since they were Reynolds; then Reynolds, Dean Witter, etc. etc. Been in Bend since 1988, so she's seen many of the changes. That's a long time, I give her that, especially to keep the same job. But:

"You just missed most of the trauma that downtown went through in the '80's," I said. "We were just coming out of the trough around '88. But I will say, almost all of the old guard that were here then are gone."

She told me there was a retail store on the third floor of the Franklin Crossing, I forget what it was. Must get major foot traffic, I said, sort of like opening a business in my back hallway. One thing I was told when I started was never open a retail business that wasn't on the ground floor. There are exceptions but the odds aren't good.

I told her that downtown had lost most of it funk. That to be interesting, it needed a bit of pepper, a bit of ginger, a bit of spice, and some sugar. Instead, it was turning into all sugar.

And, as these things go, I asked her what she thought of the housing market. I asked her if she had ever heard of the housing blogs, and she hadn't. (I've yet to run into a housing person who has.) But when I mentioned that I thought, with so many jobs related to housing, that there was a possibility that the population of Bend could even drop, she shook her head decisively.

"Too many wealthy people are moving to town," she said.

"Yeah, but Bend is too big to fill with only rich people. How many are we getting per month? 10 millionaires, twenty millionaires? It just can't be enough. They might be building their custom homes, but what about the rest?"

She more of less dismissed my argument. "There is some real big money coming to town. I know."

O.K. O.K. I believe her.

One of the problems I think I'm having is that, perhaps, I don't understand the rich. I was raised in an upper middle class doctor's family, so I haven't lived my whole life in the 'minimum wage' class. But I've never understood the ostentatious spending of money. My next door neighbor sells jewelry, and to me, most of it it look like overpriced trinkets (not his stuff specifically, but the whole diamond industry.) I wonder if we're so different from the Indians who sold Manhattan for bangles and trinkets. I don't understand why people need huge houses, bigger and bigger cars, and all the rest.

Added: The more I think about it, the more I enjoy the analogy of Manhattan to downtown Bend. In my building alone, we traded some real goods and services -- engraving, shoe repair -- for trinkets and bangles and bolts of cloth.

So if I don't understand the rich , maybe I don't understand what's happening to Bend.

One real revelation to me was when my house doubled in value. Suddenly, in theory at least, I was worth a 175k more than the day before. I started to understand how it was possible for people who had done even better than that selling their house in California, to open a business that looked crazy to me.

The rich, and the very rich, are a whole nother level above that. They are operating on premises that leave me mystified. The woman from Morgan Stanley said, "The people moving here don't worry about mortgage rates."

So, how can I ever understand their motivations?

I fall back on my assumption that even the rich don't like to lose money. Even the rich get bored with businesses that don't turn a profit. Even the rich won't stick around a town that has lost his mojo.