Nov
27
Next-generation generation
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Nothing changes your perception of your position in the space-time continuum like becoming a grandfather for the first time. It is a milestone on the road, not to aging, which is its own road, but on the acceptance of aging. More about that in a moment.
My son Sean and his wife Michelle, as suited to parenthood as any people I know, have named their firstborn Jack, and promise to send photos of him soon. He’s healthy and his parents are ecstatic. They live in Hollywood — the zip code, not the state of mind — and I will fly to L.A. for a quick visit in two weeks to get a look at the next-generation family member.
It’s big news for their big circle of friends who knew how much they wanted a family, and for my daughter Leina’ala, who can’t wait to fly out to L.A. from her own home in the Washington, D.C., area to meet her new nephew. It also expands the already expanded family for my wife Bernadette’s three children Lauren, Vanessa and David, who already feel kinship to Sean and Leina’ala.
I’m sorry my first wife Marilyn didn’t live long enough to meet Jack — she used to joke to Sean and Michelle that she was tired of just having grandcats, but we all assumed that behind the joke was a genuine desire to experience being a grandmother.
If you think about it, being a grandparent is one of the first milestones of aging that we do look forward to.
In my early years in radio, working in the same county I grew up in, I covered a lot of high school news, and often returned to the high school I attended. This provided my early milestones of aging — the first time you go to a high school and the students look like children instead of people you would befriend or date — and the first time you go to a high school and see people who look to you like students but turn out to be teachers. Eventually I interviewed principals who were younger than I, and at last there was a school superintendent who was younger.
There is something stressful about a doctor who is younger than you are, but it works the other way when a police officer is younger.
In my youth, the main signs of aging were weight gain and wrinkles. Really old people had dentures. Men who fought in World War II sometimes had tattoes. And their hair was really short. In time, of course, everything changed. Tattoes came to represent women who were too young to be interested. Dental care has improved so everybody has his own teeth unless they grew up without fluorodated water. Kids can get fatter in their teens than I have in 54 years. Even wrinkles are on the decline, and now we realize that smoking was exacerbating that particular sign of the passing time.
Jack will grow up in a time that knows very little smoking and very good dental care. He won’t be into tattoes because the pendulum will have swung the other way again. Pollution is likely to be less of a problem because so many solutions now in the pipeline will have been made workable.
Medical care will be much, much better, because aging babyboomers will be the single greatest political force in America and they’ll care more deeply about that than anything else. We will devote an increasing amount of the nation’s wealth and ingenuity into solving health problems.
There will be a couple of major epidemics, though, because modern transportation facilitates the spread of disease. One day cancer will be vanquished and superbugs will be the biggest medical fear.
War? Impossible to predict. The biggest threat in this area is the miniaturization of war. So long as war required whole nations to conduct, the process was to some extent predictable. Then war required only a conspiracy, but that’s still a lot of people and group behavior can be anticipated. The greatest danger will come when a nuclear attack can be mounted by a single person, because no one can say for sure what a single person will do.
Barring that, the single biggest problem will be the sheer size of the population. Our nation’s infrastructure isn’t as bad as some people say but neither is it equipped to handle a doubling of the nation’s population, and that will happen during Jack’s childhood. If you were born before 1970, you’ve seen the population double once already. And how did we handle all that growth? Badly. Imagine the same situation but worse. More highways, more congestions, relieved by only a few mass transit lines because of opposition from the auto industry, truckers, NIMBY types and the like.
The problem may be worse on the mainland than in Hawaii, btw, because in Hawaii it’s easier to envision the consequences, while on the mainland it’s easier to delude oneself into thinking that development will expand into great open areas you don’t especially care about.
If we want Jack and others of his generation to have good lives, we need to get a lot more serious about land use, especially the preservation of vital or beautiful land and the concentration of high-density housing and employment centers along mass transit corridors.
And what about Jack? Based on Sean and Michelle, I can confidently predict he will be good-looking, smart, funny, and warm-hearted. I wonder if he’ll be left-handed… like his granddad.
Nov
26
The 12 Days Consumer Price Index
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PNC Wealth Management, which does an annual survey of the cost of your true love’s shopping list for “The Twelve Days of Christmas,” reports that the cost of the list this year tops $78,000 if you buy each item as often as it is mentioned.
If you buy each item once, on the assumption that the repeated references are to the same single purchase, then the cost is still almost $20,000. The single-item tally is up more than 3% from last year and the higher number is up 4%.
Figure half again more to order all this stuff online.
A major factor is the price of gold (remember the five golden rings?), driving this factor alone up 21.5% over the past year. But an increase in the minimum wage is cited in the 13.6% increase in the cost of “eight maids a-milking.”
Higher food costs pushed the six geese a-laying from $300 to $360. And reflecting higher gold prices, those five gold rings will cost $395, up 21.5 percent from last year’s $325.
Prices were flat for doves and swans, but geese prices rose 20%.
Nov
26
Ten years of helping visitors
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Herman Scholtz and his wife were at the beach and she was swimming in the ocean and had trouble getting back to land. Herman swam out and got her, but on the way back in he had a heart attack and died.
I left out two things. This was their honeymoon. And it was in Central America. Imagine his bride, not just beset by grief but alone in an unfamiliar place with emergency arrangements to make.
This situation was not lost on Scholtz’s daughter, Jessica Lani Rich. Today she is head of the Visitor Aloha Society of Hawaii, which this year marked its first decade of service to Hawaii visitors in distress.
The society was founded by the Honolulu Rotary Club, the one that meets in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel. Rich became its executive director about three years ago. The society is funded to the tune of a nearly quarter million dollars a year by the Hawaii Tourism Authority and gets in-kind assistance of many local businesses.
More than 100 people a month are helped by the society, which finds lodgings for visitors who’ve been robbed, and helps them with emergency arrangements when someone dies or becomes ill while far away from home. Most of the people who work for the society are volunteers. There are offices on four islands.
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