My friend Britt and I agreed to have lunch at a Thai restaurant near my place. The buffet was fantastic, and the conversation better, as we took turns telling the stories of our lives. "Your father was insensitive in the '50s -- let me tell you about my insensitive father."

Since Britt's a music writer, among other things, I mentioned I was once backup rock critic for the St. Paul paper, twenty some years ago. But I lost that gig one February when the Rolling Stones came to town, and my editor, Bob Protzmann, wanted me to cover a Conway Twitty/Loretta Lynn concert that night instead.

I was sure there was something that could be said about that concert, but I was just as sure I was not the one to say it.

And I loved the Stones - enough that I laid down my $75 a shot job for them. Predictably, when I returned to the paper as a computer columnist 20 years later, only one person from the old regime remained in the newsroom - Protzmann.

And now that they've fired me from that job, too, for being too independent, I write this column for pretty much nothing. I feel these days like a broken-down Rolling Stone, plying my trade for the fun of it, and it feels good.

I like jazz, and blues, and classical, and other things, too. But what grabs me in my heart is still rock and roll.

Now, this is a warm spring day, and as I slip my fleece sweater over my head in the restaurant booth, my wallet falls out of my pocket and into the next booth. When lunch is over, I am unable to write a check to pay for it.

Worse, when I call the credit card company, I learn someone in the restaurant the same time as me put a $50 Thai meal on my card.

But I didn't know that, and I was rhapsodic with Britt. I had gotten my latest MRI that morning, and the films showed my brain tumor had not grown even a bit over six weeks time. So it wasn't cancer.

Best of all, I told Britt, it's calcified. An unrolling stone, gathering chalky moss.

That was cause for celebration. Plus, these were the first hours of spring, and as we walked to my place we could feel the new green pushing up everywhere, like the first whiffs of revolution.

I show Britt my CD and tape collection, and we quiz one another on favorite Dylan albums. He likes "Blood on the Tracks." I'm a "John Wesley Hardin" man.

Then we asked about the Stones. Britt dug way back and came up with "December's Children (And Our Own)," circa 1964. My choice was more conventional, "Beggar's Banquet." It was the record playing in my college dorm in 1968. I had it on an old cassette, but not on CD.

Since I got my diagnosis, I made a deal with myself to cut down on expenses. I had no idea if I'd be alive by year's end, or disabled, or what. So I cut out escapist spending habits like ordering music from Amazon.com. I probably bought 50 CDs in the year previous. We need that cash to pay the mortgage now.

And now my credit cards are stolen, and some predatory person is buying strangers noodles with my money, with me right there in the restaurant, groping for my wallet.

After Britt left, the pining returned. I went online to Amazon to linger over the Rolling Stones discography.

At the end of concert back in 1977, they did something wonderful. Mick had terrorized people in the front rows all through the first set with a steel bucket. Everyone assumed it was full of water, but when he finally emptied it on the people, after many false spills, it was only rose petals, fluttering onto their faces and shoulders.

For the last few numbers they turned on the house lights. Whatever mystique they had created earlier in the show, with the huge inflatable phallus and neon puckered lips-and-tongue, dissipated instantly, and they were just guys in T-shirts, blasting out "Jumping Jack Flash."

It was a democratic gesture, topped when Mick dumped the bucket on himself, and this time it was filled with water.

So I'm sitting at my computer, licking my lips at the URL for "Beggar's Banquet." I want to have it. I want to turn up the volume, close my eyes, and relive the sounds of my naughty youth.

Maybe, with the clean MRI, I can afford to buy it. Maybe I'll live to be a hundred, and have the best record collection in the home.

But I don't need it. I can play the versions I already have, the one on cassette tape, the other in my head. Because I know every twang of every song by heart, from "No Expectations" to "Parachute Woman."

And my favorite song, which I always loved, even though it made no particular sense, makes sense to me now:

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