My wife, Diane, insisted that now I am retired, and with all four of our children finished with college and out of the house, we should eat out often and travel the world. I gently reminded her that when our children left the house for college, the bulk of our savings left the house at the same time. I encouraged her to read the AARP magazine that began arriving bimonthly, particularly the articles explaining the risks of being on a fixed income and the inadequacies of social security payments.
She would have none of it.
So, we eat out often. And travel often. To make it work financially, I have discovered all the Early Bird (dinner) Specials offered by any restaurant with a twenty-mile radius. We eat dinner at 3:30 and go to sleep at 6pm to make sure we don’t get hungry again in the evening. Diane and I had different notions of travel. While I thought we should drive to the neighboring towns we hadn’t seen in a long time, Diane thought we should fly to neighboring hemispheres we hadn’t seen at all. Fortunately, I found some sizable discounts on Ukraine Air, where each flight has nearly enough seats for all its passengers. Mental health gurus and motivational speakers preach that money will buy style and comfort, but it will not buy happiness. I sure would be happier if my bank account balance weren’t declining as fast as it is.
The pace of social and technological change over the course of my life has stunned me.
When I went to college, students were expected to confront and discuss controversial ideas, and feel some pressure to get good grades. Everyone loved Halloween. Back then, a safe space was the painted path on a street where a crossing guard helped young children cross from one side to the other. Now? I am still having it explained to me but a safe space (a location on campus where students can go to avoid ideas and speech that make them feel uncomfortable) sure sounds like I place that I would have much preferred to be than in a classroom with a boring professor. And to think that decision would be up to me since I could I issue a trigger warning---an alert that warns others that my sensibilities are being offended---to that boring professor to back off if he threatened to penalize me for not attending his class. Having Halloween subjected to cultural appropriation taboos would have been a bummer, though. Removing nearly all costume creativity would have made for a dull holiday celebration.
I also remember when ADD was something we did in arithmetic class. In fourth grade, we knew little Tommy McCusker as a boy who never stopped running during recess (and sometimes during class) and couldn’t seem to understand the multiplication tables. Back then, no one understood much about Attention Deficit Disorder, but I always made sure that I chose Tommy for my side when we played team tag.
There was a time in my life when Tweet was the sound a bird made, and Snap was a movement made with my fingers when I heard a sweet-sounding tune. In my early years, I recall having a tough time mastering the use of the three knobs on our brand-new color television set compared with the two on our black-and-white one. What chance do I have now with the bewildering number of buttons on the TV remote control and the plethora of channels, streaming videos, YouTube and Hulus (whatever that is) available? It drives me crazy and makes me schedule extra appointments with my impecunious psychiatrist.
Soon we will have a President who tweets, and a machine that we can ask questions of. Oh, we already have that.
“Alexa, how many steps have I walked today, and who is going to win the fifth race at Belmont tomorrow?”
• • •
ROBERT J. LICALZI
Bob was born and raised in Queens, NY, where his fondest childhood memories were the invention of color television and his first day as a teenager, when, after twelve sweltering summers, his father bought an air conditioner to cool the family apartment. After graduating from Queens College, Bob began working for an international bank.
A few years later, in the late 1970s, the bank assigned Bob to sunny Puerto Rico at a time when sunblock did not have numbers. There, Bob met and married Diane. After job assignments in Tokyo, London, and New York, and after having four children, Bob retired from the bank, moved the family to Puerto Rico, and learned the importance of SPFs (Sun Protection Factors).
Bob has been an aspiring writer ever since his choice of Finance over Journalism as a major in college temporarily postponed that aspiration until the room was cleared after his retirement party. Bob has written hundreds of opinion pieces and briefly ran a blog called “Puerto Rico Commentary,” which presented his views of Puerto Rico’s economic policies. He was encouraged to publish this collection of essays, mostly by his children who, while still on allowance, found every one of them funny.
Adding a Little Levity Page 14