Only A Fool Worries About Being On Time For His Own Execution

Tuesday morning I was scheduled for my first cancer chemotherapy session. It was my first night sleeping alone in a hastily purchased twin-bed in our downstairs home office - something I stubbornly swore I'd never do. I would not turn the first floor of our home into a hospital suite. But I had a PICC-line put in and the nurses finally talked some sense into me (no small feat) about hoisting myself up and down the stairs with a catheter running the length of my arm and lodged in my heart.

I told my wife to set her alarm for seven a.m. to give us time to leisurely get ready in light of the disjointed situation. I was awake and saw the clock pass seven. I was sure I heard the radio in our bedroom turn on and then turn off. She must have hit the snooze button I thought. Seven-ten, seven-fifteen. We had decided to use the telephones which have an intercom feature for me to reach my family upstairs. I pressed the intercom button and listened for the ringtone. Nothing. I tried again. Silence. I started calling out. Calmly at first so no one would panic. Within five minutes I was screaming at the top of my lungs to wake them. All of a sudden I could hear voices and feet hitting the floor and stomping down the stairs.

My wife apologized profusely, she hit the wrong button on the alarm. I'm afraid, I was not very gracious and made a stressful morning even more stressful. We were in tears as we drove off. We travelled in silence for a while, then the thought struck me, why the hell was I in such a hurry? I turned to Shellie and said, "I guess only a fool worries about being on time for his own execution." I don't think she knew what I was talking about, but it broke the ice and we were able to share what we were each feeling.

Today is Rosh Hashanah - the Jewish New Year. In fact 5775 to be exact. The two-and-a-half day festival is celebrated with deeply devotional services from sunrise to sunset, followed by the feast. Chopped liver, gefilte fish, matzah ball soup, brisket, turkey, kishke, fresh challah, and all the trimmings.

This was one of my favorite holidays, where the family would get together to laugh and wish good wishes for the coming year. We emphasized the occasion with sweet wine and the first autumn apples dipped in wildflower honey.

For many years I have been able to attend less and less as the drive becomes increasingly difficult. My sister, as in "beloved," chastises me when I start to feel sorry for myself, but year after year, the garbage from the last year just follows over into the new as more garbage piles up in front of me.

Believe me, I get the whole positive-negative outlook thing. My son just told me a joke. He said, "An optimist sees a glass half full. A pessimist sees a glass half empty. An engineer sees a glass that's twice as big as it needs to be."

No one is a more ardent believer in love than I am. I express it in my posts. I express it in my comments on other people's posts. Love is at the heart of my writing. Love is why I endeavor to persevere.

I believe in miracles. There's no other explanation for my wife and I to have come together and remained together as lovers and soulmates. I always said I was so much in love with her that I wanted to shout it from the highest rooftop. Facebook's about the highest rooftop I could find, I guess.

And this is to say nothing of two fine sons, a dear daughter-in-law and four grandkids, one who is a month old.

No less dear to me are our four "girls," especially the black and white stink-fish-pot who bonded with me in vows of unconditional love, implicit trust, and mutual companionship till death do us part.

Every day I wake up in awe and thanksgiving that we get to live in this amazing house. I look around at our belongings, lovingly collected over a lifetime, and infinitely more so when our fall and Halloween decorations are on display. It is as if every stick of furniture and every ceramic piece were meant to be here.

I bask in the warmth of my family and online friends, and in the community to a small degree. A writers group at my local library has made me their cause célèbre; and Shellie and I have been welcomed like long lost sheep into the fold of a non-denominational church in our town. I think Pastor Michelle has made my salvation her mission. (She don't know me very well, do she!?)

Sometimes I am blindsided when someone tells me that I'm an inspiration to them, or that something I said or wrote about my troubles helped them through their own times of crisis. Boy, does that make it all worthwhile.

Lastly, I don't blame people for feeling sorry for themselves. There's a lot to feel sorry about. Health struggles, financial struggles (especially those brought on by health struggles), mental health issues (which often go undiagnosed and untreated), struggles within relationships, struggles with the law and an ever more intrusive government, bigotry, war, ignorance, greed, injustice, poverty, hatred, the deliberate poisoning of our planet, and evil running rampant over our world.

Feeling sorry for yourself is a good thing. It provides a retreat where hope and inspiration can flourish. Invariably, when you type "feeling sorry for yourself" into Google, the results are all self-help links to "snap you out of it in three to ten easy steps." I think this is wrong-headed. Feeling sorry for yourself is a natural reaction to stress. So go right ahead and throw yourself a pity-party. Who deserves it more?

Insert your favorite inspirational meme here

We Wants the Redhead

I saw a movie today. It was rated Arrrrrr.

This is the one day of the year when that joke actually works, International Talk Like a Pirate Day. If ye harken to learn more, shove off to:

http://www.talklikeapirate.com/about.html.

I listened to this album when I was ten because it was my favorite ride. I listened to it at fifteen because Walt Disney World was a stoner's paradise. I listened to side B at twenty-five years of age because I recognized Disney as a fellow intellectual. Age thirty-five found me playing it for my sons, at least that was my story and I'm sticking to it. And every year I hear a long section of it on Halloween, as part of a mix tape I made in the early 80's, and which has withstood the test of time (better than I have).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-6YHcRNx8gE

(Thurl Ravenscroft narrates Walt Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean)

And Many Many More

All the wishes for 'many, many more' puts me in mind of the old joke where a doctor says to a patient, "I have good news and bad news. The good news is that you have six days to live."

The patient says, "Oh my God! What's the bad news?"

And the doctor says, "We've been trying to reach you for the last five."

An Observation On My Birthday

So I stood on a ridge and shunned religion thinking the world was mine,

I made my break and a big mistake stealin' when I should've been buyin'

This should be the theme song of my youth . . .

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqLh3OcwvyI

Another Old Stoner Joke

From when I first started getting high in the 70's, we were taught the habit of holding a hit as long as you could hold your breath. We would exhale in a gush, coughing and gasping for air, wreathed in a cloud of smoke.

We ostensibly did this on the premise that the longer you held your hit, the more you'd absorb, and the higher you'd get. It was basic, middle-class economics - waste not want not.

Even though this has long been proven untrue (research has shown that 90% of the THC is absorbed in the first five seconds), this habit stayed with me.

One time we were down to our last round, and I was holding my hit for an unusually long time, even for me. Finally my wife says, "How long are you going to hold that hit, hon?"

While still holding my breath, I said, "For the rest of my life, or until we get more, whichever comes first!"

If I Were A Rich Man

Yubby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dibby dum . . .

The politics of wealth inequality are as old as mankind.

However, for better or worse, and with all due respect to Queen Elizabeth II and King Harald V, et al., we no longer bow to divine rulers (with the possible exception of some few celebrities).

What gets me is that amongst all the talk of the 1% vs. the 99%, 50% of the 99% support the 1%. Think about that one for a minute.

I ran across this link to an interactive map of the richest individual in each of the fifty states. This is the sort of article I would usually scroll by without slowing down, but something about it piqued my curiosity, and I wondered who was the richest person in my own state of Illinois.

It turns out that it's Chicago-based hedge fund manager, Ken Griffin, worth a middling five-point-five billion dollars. I then wondered, just who are these honchos who represent the wealthiest among us?

Oh, I forgot to mention 'hedge fund manager' and philanthropist. Without exception, every bio of these luminaries includes that description. Yes, they donate huge sums of money, so I will not insinuate here one of my favorite parables about the woman who gave two pennies (if you don't know it, look it up).

As I researched this map further, certain glaring inequalities beyond the numbers became instantly obvious, and I probably don't even need to point them out, but I will anyway. Out of the fifty, forty-two are men, and two of the eight women who made the list are Waltons. We'll get back to that.

Perhaps most tellingly and sadly, there is not one black face in the crowd.

I was also interested in seeing just where these fortunes came from. Again, as might be expected, the greatest generator of vast sums of capital, is capital. Fully twenty percent of these were from the financial sector - investments and banking. The list featured such notables as the Koch brothers who top the list for Kansas (Charles 41.4 B) and New York (David 41.4 B), and the Oracle of Omaha (NE) financial guru, Warren Buffett (63.1 B).

Real estate development was a biggie, with a smattering of heavy construction, manufacturing, energy, agriculture, communications, computing, and retail. Of course, the people in these rarefied airs have their fingers in many pies, heading and chairing conglomerations that include many or all of these enterprises.

Take Dennis Washington of Montana. In 1964, at age 30, he started Washington Construction with one bulldozer. Today, the privately held consortium builds highways and dams, mines copper and rare earths, and has diversified interests in railroads, marine services, coastal shipping, aviation and real estate.

I think my biggest shock was finding out that the richest man in Wisconsin was not a cheesemaker. (In fact, it is John Menard of the namesake home improvement retailer.)

There were many names I recognized, such as Jacqueline Mars of Virginia, the heiress to the Mars candy dynasty, and Mary Alice Dorrance Malone. Don't recognize the name? You've been eating her family's alphabet and chicken noodle soup since you were two years old.

Some of the names I did not recognize, for example, Thomas Frist of Tennessee. Surely some country music superstar from Nashville or the owner of Opryland would rule that roost. But Mr. Frist is the co-founder of Hospital Corporation of America, the largest for-profit operator of health care facilities in the world. Based in Nashville, it currently manages 162 hospitals and 113 freestanding surgery centers in the United States and United Kingdom. That's what I call a major operation.

Giving voice to the all-American creed "Sex Sells," we find Ohioan, Les Wexner. The son of Russian Jewish immigrants, he turned his parents general merchandise store into the Limited Brands Corporation, which includes retail outlets The Limited, Bath & Body Works, The White Barn Candle Company, Lane Bryant, Abercrombie & Fitch, and Victoria's Secret.

I think the title of "oldest money" has to go to Anita Goldberg Zucker of South Carolina, CEO of the Hudson's Bay Company. Zucker, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, runs the 344 year old company, the oldest continually operating commercial corporation in North America. The company was founded on fur trapping. I could neither confirm nor deny the rumor that the original company motto was "Leave it to beaver."

Some would say that all this money is dirty, but in several cases, that is literally as well as figuratively true. Harold Hamm of Oklahoma is not just an "oilman," but a shale oil man. Hamm is the 13th and youngest child of Oklahoma cotton sharecroppers, and went from pumping gas to owner of an oil exploration and production company. His highest level of education is a high school diploma, but he holds honorary degrees from Northwestern Oklahoma State University and the University of Oklahoma.

Shale oil exploitation involves the use of controversial hydraulic fracturing, or "fracking," practices. In 2012, presidential candidate Mitt Romney named Hamm as his energy adviser.

People do not become billionaires without force of personality. Driven, dynamic, focused, complex, and many other attributes can be used to describe aspects of their characters. Take Pierre Omidyar, a French-Iranian-American, who resides with his wife in Hawaii. The Paris-born son of a linguistics professor and a surgeon turned his interest in computers into a company called eBay.

Then there is that one in fifty that earns something more valuable than money - respect. That is what I felt for James Goodnight of North Carolina. His bio refers to him as an Entrepreneur, CEO, Statistician, Software engineer, and Inventor. He started at an early age working in his father's hardware store, and demonstrated an aptitude for mathematics and chemistry. Goodnight remarked on a computer course he took in college, "A light went on, and I fell in love with making machines do things for people.”

He worked at a company that built electronic equipment for the ground stations that communicated with the Apollo space capsules. He went on to earn his PhD with a thesis titled, "Quadratic unbiased estimation of variance components in linear models with an emphasis on the one-way classification."

Goodnight then initiated a project called SAS (Statistical Analysis System) Institute to analyze agricultural data. He found that the SAS software and algorithms could be applied to quantifications beyond corn yields and bushels of soybeans. Goodnight grew the company from first year billings of $138,000 in 1976 to almost two and a half billion dollars in revenue in 2010.

Perhaps most interestingly, Goodnight developed a corporate culture based on four pillars: "help employees do their best work by keeping them intellectually challenged and by removing distractions; make managers responsible for sparking creativity; eliminate arbitrary distinctions between 'suits' and 'creatives'; and engage customers as creative partners to help deliver superior products." In 2004, Goodnight was named one of America's 25 Most Fascinating Entrepreneurs by Inc. magazine.

Even within the list itself, I found vast differences in wealth. At the "low" end is Alaskan capital investor, Robert Gillam, with a paltry net worth of $700 million. And at the top of the heap is our old friend from the great northwest, William Henry Gates III, or Bill to his friends. Gates' personal fortune is estimated at eighty billion dollars. That's an 8, folks, followed by ten zeroes (not counting the two after the decimal point).

Even this staggering sum falls short of the wealth controlled by the Walton family, and I'm not talkin' John Boy here. The three scions of the retailing behemoth founded by Sam Walton also made the list. Son Jim (AR), daughter Alice (TX), and widowed daughter-in-law Christy (WY) clock in together at a cool 108.9 B. Christy is currently ranked as the richest woman in the world.

Now that's great value.

You can find the fascinating interactive map at:

http://www.movoto.com/blog/opinions/wealthiest-person-map

Shovelin' With Both Hands

A memoir is a fictional autobiography. You come out smelling like a rose, no matter how much fertilizer you shovel, and you have the luxury to edit yourself into something like intelligence.