Wildfire threatens some lovely homes

When you live in the West, you always have to accept the possibility of wildfires.

And the last few days, with the humidity in single digits and the temperature in triple digits, fires have been burning all around the Los Angeles area.

We owned a home in La Canada Flintridge for more than 18 years. Homes in our small city have sold for a median price of more than $1 million, making it one of the most desirable areas in all of Southern California. That's why even though we were selling in the middle of a housing crash and a national recession, we came very close to getting the price we were asking.

Boy, did we sell at the right time.


Less than three weeks after we closed and collected the cash for our equity, wildfires have destroyed most of the forest above La Canada. Families living within a mile of where we lived have been evacuated, and firefighters have been working day and night to save their neighborhoods.

We haven't been through a lot of anguish, but if this fire had happened a month ago, we would have been right there with our tenants/buyers doing whatever we could to keep the fire from destroying our property.

Ah, Southern California.

It's definitely paradise, as long as you don't mind earthquakes, fires, mudslides and the rest.

To my son on his wedding day

My son got married today.

It wasn't the beautiful November wedding he and his fiancee had planned. That will still happen as a celebration of their love, but Virgile is leaving for Washington, D.C., in less than two weeks to start his career in the U.S. Foreign Service and he wanted to take Sterling with him as his wife.

We have come to know her well over the three years they have been dating, and we have seen how good they are for each other.

Things got rather hectic on our way to the courthouse in Lancaster, the only one within a reasonable distance that could fit them in. Our brand-new car conked out a few miles short of its destination, and we took a cab the rest of the way.

I didn't really have a chance to talk to my son about marriage, which disappointed me a little. We have had so many good conversations about life and what to expect. We even had the sex talk that so many fathers and sons struggle with.

I have seen marriage from both sides, from a failed one in my twenties to a good one that is coming up on 17 years this fall, so I probably wouldn't presume to give him much personal advice.

I actually would rather tell him about love, and I've never known a better description of love than Paul's first letter to the Christians at Corinth. Here's the famous excerpt from what he wrote in 1 Corinthians 13:

"Love is patient and is kind; love doesn’t envy. Love doesn’t brag, is not proud, doesn’t behave itself inappropriately, doesn’t seek its own way, is not provoked, takes no account of evil; doesn’t rejoice in unrighteousness, but rejoices with the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. Love never fails."


I learned those lessons about love from a wonderful person -- Virgile's mother and my wife. Nicole is the most loving person I have ever known and God granted me the greatest blessing of all when he allowed me to meet her on Sept. 12, 1992.

She and our two wonderful children from her first marriage, Virgile and his older sister Pauline, have brought awe and wonder, grace and meaning to my existence. I have fallen short of glory so many times, including today when the car broke down and I lost my temper, but Nicole's love epitomizes all the best characteristics of the words in the Bible.

She will always be the best person I know, my favorite person in the world.

So the best blessing I can give our son on the day of his wedding is this:

"May you be as good a husband as you possibly can, and may you have a wife as loving and as wonderful as your mother."

Best to speak no ill of the dead

"De mortuis nil nisi bonum."
-- ancient Roman proverb

Ted Kennedy, a man who would almost certainly have been president if not for a wrong turn he took in 1969, died this week.

I have been wondering for a long time what some people will say when it happened, knowing that it is relatively traditional to speak no ill of the dead. Over the last 40 years, no one has been hated more by the lunatic right than the last son of Joe Kennedy.

No, not even Hillary Clinton.

It wasn't all about Chappaquiddick, although Kennedy's failures there gave the nuts the ammunition they needed to attack him without ceasing. It was also because he was the last son of what could have been a political dynasty, and that made him beloved to a lot of people in a way few other liberals were.

What did they say about him today? I don't know what the Limbaughs and Hannitys said; I don't listen to them anymore. But I did check in on Free Republic, the most "mainstream" of the lunatic sites, and they didn't disappoint me. A lot of "scumbags," and "good riddances" and a lot of talk about how the 77-year-old Kennedy is certainly frying in hell.


Far be it from me here to argue with them. I never expected them to be as gracious as liberals were when Ronald Reagan died and they didn't disappoint me. I always considered Kennedy a tragic figure, the least of the brothers who had to bear the burden of the family and the nation's hopes after his older brothers were murdered.

He made a fine record for himself in the Senate, and was considered by members on both sides of the aisle as one of the greatest senators ever for his 47 years of service.

Beyond that, let's just say rest in peace.

Pride goeth before a realization

I was feeling pretty good about myself for a while today.

My wife and I had gone to meet with two financial advisors -- with the object of choosing one -- to discuss our impending retirement. I'm not sure when exactly it will happen, but the odds are pretty good we're down to counting the months on our fingers and toes.

We're not incredibly well off, but we have been working very hard to build up Nicole's 401(k) account and it's looking pretty good. We're living within our means and saving a significant account of money each month.

We managed to impress the advisors with our frugality, but what impressed them the most was the total amount of our liabilities.

Zero.

We just completed the sale of our house, so we no longer have a mortgage. We own all three of our cars free and clear and we have no personal loans or credit-card debt.

Frankly, I'm amazed.

I think I may have been in the same position for a while in 1984, but I didn't have any assets other than a 1979 Subaru that had already blown one engine.

So naturally, I felt good.

Then I thought about how little I really had to do with it. All I really did was marry well; my wife's income in one year is nearly equal to what I made in my best three years. She's a world-renowned scientist. I'm an unemployed journalist.

I write the checks to pay the bills, but that's about it.

So I'm happy I have a wonderful wife and proud that she loves me enough to keep me around.

That's enough for now.

Twists, turns and 17 wonderful years

I was sitting in the front seat of my car a few minutes ago, waiting for a parking space to open.

My son and his fiancee were occupying the space, and they were carrying some things down from our apartment to load into the car. They're getting married Friday and moving to Washington, D.C., in about two weeks as Virgile starts his career in the Foreign Service. It means we'll have a true empty nest, with both our children traveling around the world for their careers.

Nicole carried a few things down too, and I found myself watching her in the headlights and remembering for about the one-millionth time why I love her so much. In 20 days, on Sept. 12, it will be the 17th anniversary of the day we met. Just 51 days later, on Nov. 2, it will be our 17th wedding anniversary.

Can a life really change so much in that short a time?

I'm here to tell you it can. When I married my first wife in 1975, I was 25 and she was 21. A month after my 30th birthday we had separated for good. I know I loved her -- it's tough to hear a lot of songs from the '70s without thinking of her -- but I know we got married for all the wrong reasons.

Nearly 13 years separated the end of the first marriage and the beginning of the second, and there were certainly other opportunities. For one reason or another, though, I was still single in the summer of 1992 when I met Nicole.

I used to occasionally wonder what it would have been like if I had met her younger and we had had a child of our own, but I rarely think of that anymore. I have the most wonderful daughter and the most amazing son; Pauline and Virgile are not just high achievers but geniunely nice people as well.

Now Virgile is getting married and I will have a lovely daughter-in-law. Someday, God willing, there will be a lot more grandchildren. They may not have my blood, but just like their parents, they will have my heart.

And as I sit and look at my wife through the headlights, I know one other thing.

I'm married to the most beautiful grandmother in the world.

A nice day, a nice new car

For the last couple of years, I have been driving a car with some weird defects.

Both of the back windows in my 1999 Pontiac Grand Am are broken -- they won't go up or down and have to be wedged shut with cardboard. My gas gauge doesn't work, so I have had to estimate when I need to fill the tank.

But I like the car. It's the first one I've had in 30 years that wasn't a compact or a subcompact, and as I get older, I've been feeling more and more overwhelmed by all the giant SUVs on the freeways.

Still, it has 134,000 miles on it, which is a lot for an American car, and I have been looking longingly at car ads ever since we put our house on the market a year and a half ago. As we got closer and closer to completing the sale, I started comparing small SUVs and thinking how well my golf clubs would fit in the back of one.

When we were visiting in Seattle earlier this month, the rental car that I drove a few times was a Hyundai Sonata. I was impressed with some of the features, and I started looking at Hyundai's small SUV, the Tucson.

After 17 months of struggle, we finally closed on the house last week. The amazing thing was that despite the economy, we wound up selling for only 2.5 percent less than we wanted in the beginning. Believe me, it really is true what they say about "location, location, location."

To make a long story short, we salted away most of the money we got so that we'll have it to buy our retirement home. We did save a nice little chunk to buy a car, which we did today.

I didn't participate at all. My wife Nicole and my son Virgile both love to haggle, while I'm probably the only guy in the world who sees the sticker price and thinks that's what you have to pay. They got me a nice 2009 Tucson -- the same color as the one in the picture -- for $2,000 less than the sticker price and also got the dealer to throw in a $2,000 navigation system for free.

The best part is that we wrote a check and paid for it all today.

No car loan. No mortgage. No credit card debt or anything else. For the first time in my adult life, I don't owe anyone any money for anything.

I could get used to that.

America has changed since 1961

I don't know that I've ever been particularly enlightened by Ronald Reagan, but this 1961 speech against Medicare is kind of interesting.

Not so much for its specific message. Conservatives fought as hard as they could to stop Medicare, and as recently as 1995 with Newt Gingrich, they were working to privatize it and gut it. That's no secret to anyone.

But what fascinates me so much about this speech is how much America has changed.

Before the 1930s, there was no government welfare in America. And even in 1933, when Franklin D. Roosevelt came along with the New Deal, he made a point that its programs were strictly temporary and designed to get people back on their feet.

Folks believed then that any sort of permanent welfare would simply destroy people's incentive to go out and work for themselves.

There was a feeling that we were different, that Americans were more self-sufficient and would be ashamed to have to be supported by their neighbors.

That's pretty much changed. Ask even conservatives if they would do without Medicare and they're likely to look strangely at you. Ask farmers if they would go without subsidies, or bankers without last year's bailout, or the millions of folks out of work without unemployment insurance.

Not a chance.

I worked without interruption for 29 years, only to find myself out of work in January 2008. I have been collecting unemployment ever since, and I have been paid at a higher rate than I earned until the fifth of my seven career stops.

When you consider taxes, I would have to make at least $14-15 an hour to make any more money, and even then I would be working 40 hours a week for a net gain of about $20.

Should I be ashamed? I've had numerous friends say no, that I paid into it for years and I ought to get it back. But my mother, who grew up in that different America, says that money should be for the truly needy and I should be working, even if it's for less money.

Have we changed?

You bet we have.

Living when you know you're dying

What would you do if you knew you had a year to live?

Would you walk away from all your responsibilities and spend 12 months doing everything on your "bucket list?" Would you do things that previously scared you too much, like bungee jumping or hang gliding, or would you double down on your efforts to make sure everything you needed to do was finished before you ran out of time?

You might think that last year would be all for you, but very few people actually see it that way.

Most folks live their lives the way they always have ... for as long as they can.

What would you do if you had a month to live?

Make sure your finances were in order? Take one last shot at trying to hook up with the love of your life? Go on one last vacation?

Would you spend a lot of time regretting the things you never did, or would you take pride in the things you managed to get done.

Although those 30 days would pass quickly, for a lot of us, routine would hold sway at least until the last couple of days.

What would you do if you had a week to live?

A week isn't all that long. Seven days, 168 hours ... you'd spend a good chunk of it just sleeping. But what about the time you're awake? A week might be devoted mostly to saying goodbye, both to the people and places that have made up your life.

Some fun, but probably not so much.

What would you do if you had a day to live?

A day isn't much, but I think you might try to stretch it by not sleeping. If you had 24 hours, my guess is you would try to squeeze as much living as possible into that time.

I doubt you'd want to spend much of the time traveling. There might be some place that you still want to see, but losing time getting there wouldn't be much fun. You might just want to spend that last day with someone you love.

In a wonderful 1998 Canadian film, Don McKellar's "Last Night," a group of people in Toronto know that the world is ending at midnight. Most of them look for people with whom to spend their final hours. That's very human.

What would you do if you had an hour to live?

I know I would want to spend that time with the folks I love most -- my wife, my children and my grandchild. If any part of me lives on after my death, it will be in the effect I have had on their lives and the lives of the other people close to me.

I wouldn't spend a lot of time giving them advice. In fact, I don't think I would do much talking. I would rather look at them and listen to them, memorizing their faces and voices to carry with me into eternity.

What would you do if you had a minute to live?

A minute can be the blink of an eye ... or an eternity. But if I knew I were about to die, I would spend the final 60 seconds praying. I would thank God for everything He has given me and I would ask His blessing and continued guidance for the people I love.

I think I could make that minute stretch long enough to get that done.

Have you noticed what's missing in all of this, whether a final year or a final minute?

Anger.

Hatred.

Revenge.

Some folks do spend time regretting things left undone or things poorly done, but not many people go to their death cursing old wrongs. I doubt that even Richard Nixon spent his final moments thinking of those folks on his "enemies list."

Life is a precious gift. There used to be a sculpture in the United Nations building -- I don't know if it still exists or not -- with a caption on it.

"It is a privilege to live this day and the next."

It really is.

Time for Democrats to get tough

There are apparently two kinds of people who are very vocal about not wanting any sort of health care reform.

One is real, the other isn't.

The real ones are mostly angry white people, many of whom would be opposed to anything proposed by the Obama administration.

Those folks are getting scary, many of them carrying guns to town hall meetings and bearing signs like the one in the picture that implies a message that Obama's blood should flow.

If you're not familiar with the reference, Thomas Jefferson once said that it was necessary from time to time to water the tree of liberty with "the blood of patriots and tyrants."

I'm sure this isn't true of all of them, but it's very apparent from some of the right-wing Websites, not to mention the words and signs of the protesters themselves, that there is more than a little racism involved here. Some of these people just cannot tolerate the idea that a black man is the face America shows the world.

Actually, they're not the worst. As vile and as ignorant as racism is, at least these folks are out there showing their true colors. The second type of protesters aren't even that; many of them have been recruited or hired by right-wing politicos or the insurance companies to derail reform. They're supposed to make it look like the grass roots are rising up against Obama, but it's actually a charade that Mother Jones magazine exposed 10 years ago.

It's called "astroturf" protests, aka fake grass roots.

These are the people carrying signs about death panels, or keeping government out of Medicare, or other ridiculous arguments.

It's time for supporters of reform to start turning those tactics against the people using them. Democrats need to get a lot more "in your face" with Republicans and stop treating lies as if they needed to be argued.

Why not just call a lie a lie?

Why not just call the people spouting them liars?

It's really the only tactic they fear.

Juvenile humor strikes again

Q: "What do the U.S.S. Enterprise and toilet paper have in common?" A: "They both look for Klingons around Uranus."
-- children's joke

Third graders all across America got a good laugh Wednesday.

After hearing Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., put down a protester at a town hall meeting by asking a woman who compared President Obama to a Nazi "what planet do you spend your time on, talk show bloviator Rush Limbaugh struck back quickly.

"Isn't it an established fact that Barney Frank spends his time hanging around Uranus?" Rush asked on his radio show.

Barney is gay, get it? I'd call it frat-boy humor, but Limbaugh isn't the fraternity type.

Ten million third graders and one retired MBA in Dallas are laughing their heads off.

Stay classy, Rush.

And remember, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.

'Nazi' health care? Yeah, right

Freedom of speech is a wonderful thing.

It's often misunderstood; just because you have the right to say something doesn't mean there won't be consequences. I've heard people who have been fired for saying something argue that they were just exercising their freedom of speech. They misunderstood their right.

That's why I got such a kick out of Rep. Barney Frank's response to a woman's question at a Town Hall meeting in Dartmouth, Mass., when she asked why he supported a "Nazi program" like health-care reform.

Aside from the ridiculousness of the comparison, it has become increasingly weird to see the rise in paranoia at both ends of the political spectrum. Late last year, there were plenty of folks on the left who were at least somewhat concerned that George W. Bush and Dick Cheney were going to declare some sort of martial law so that they didn't have to leave office.

Instead, we've learned from Cheney that he was disgusted that Bush "went soft" on him during his second term in office.

Now the right is wildly attacking "Obamacare," even though part of the problem is that there is no such thing. Part of the reason there's so much controversy right now is that President Obama didn't propose anything -- he told Congress to write its own bill as long as it followed certain general principles.

There is no "Obamacare," and even if there were, do we really think a liberal administration with numerous Jewish members would be writing a "Nazi" bill?

Nope, Barney Frank is right.

These people really do spend their time on some other planet.

The wilder the claim, the scarier it gets

I'm not sure why it is people can look at two sources of relative similarity and totally accept one while totally rejecting the other.

My friend Mitch is constantly sending me e-mails with things like "Isn't this scary?" in the subject line. When I open his e-mail to see what he's referencing, it's almost always some right-wing news source claiming that President Obama's health care plan will euthanize Grandma, sterilize the kid down the street and outlaw Christmas unless we agree that Santa Claus should be black.

Now Mitch, as you know, is a pretty intelligent guy. When leftist sources claimed that Dick Cheney ate boiled babies for dinner, watched snuff films for entertainment and led Dubya around on a leash when no one was looking, Mitch dismissed that as ridiculous.

Even when I showed him the evidence.

It's like the folks who listen to talk radio, left and right. Some take the words of Rush Limbaugh as gospel, while others wouldn't believe him if he said the sun was rising in the East.

Mitch's latest panty-twister was an editorial in the Washington Times citing some early writings by one of Obama's health-care advisors as proof that euthanasia and forced sterilization were goals of the left in the current battle over health-care reform.

Now I suppose it's always possible that some Democrats would love to see forced sterilzation of Republicans, and there are certainly plenty of conservatives wishing liberals weren't allowed to reproduce.

But if you look at motivations, it's easy to see that the Times -- owned by the Reverend Moon -- is opposed to health-care reform. And while it would be nice if both sides limited themselves to the truth in arguing their case, it just doesn't happen anymore.

Truth is nice, but to 21st century politicians, winning is much nicer.

Let's tell the truth about health care

Who would ever have believed that health insurance companies would have become a symbol of all that is good about America?

Sound crazy?

Listen to some of the people fighting against any health care reform and you'll believe that they're fighting to protect the right to have a family or to believe in God, not massive corporations who have turned health care into a cash cow.

In fact, they're fighting to hard to protect Big Insurance that they're telling out-and-out lies. Former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin says she's worried that under a reformed system, she would have to go before a "death panel" to fight for the rights of her special-needs child simply to stay alive.

That's the new lie -- that reform would result in euthanasia, or even worse, eugenics.

As you can see from the cartoon, conservatives feel more comfortable surrendering constitutional rights than they do giving up any part of unfettered capitalism. By now we've all heard about the congressman who went back to his district for a town meeting on health care only to hear one of his constituents say, "Keep your government hands off my Medicare."

Then there's the woman who followed Obama around to town hall meetings until she got to ask the question "Name one thing the government does well."

Her question was straight out of Rush Limbaugh's mouth, and she seemed genuinely surprised by the answer. Obama named Medicare and Veterans Hospitals, but he could just as easily have named national parks, the interstate highway system, Social Security and a host of others.

Medicare works and it works well.

That's why conservatives have been trying to gut it or repeal it since it was passed in 1965.

The only way they can stop health care reform this year is to lie about it and scare the daylights out of people.

No, Sarah, there are no "death panels."

Just health care for folks who can't get it.

Any problem with that?

August escape is a wonderful time

We escaped Southern California at just the right time.

It has been a very hot summer, and spending the first two weeks in August a thousand miles to the north is just what the doctor -- Dr. Feelgood, that is -- ordered for me.

We have been up here eight days, and I haven't had a television set on once. I've only read two newspapers. I haven't even kept real close track of news on the Internet. I know Bill Clinton freed the journalists in Korea and Sarah Palin is lying about President Obama's health plan, but that's about it.

I've been hiking in the forests with the Amazing Baby. Oh, Pauline and Nicole have been with us, but most of the time I find I can't take my eyes off little Maddie.

She's much prettier than Sarah Palin.

A wonderful vacation in the green

This baby is just so incredible.

We're in Washington state for two weeks, visiting our lovely daughter Pauline and the Amazing Baby, little Madison Nicole.

Maddie is 10 1/2 months old now and is extremely close to both walking on her own and talking. She is becoming such an interesting person and is a delight to spend time with.

We're staying about 40 miles east of Seattle, near Snoqualmie Pass, and the one thing that is truly amazing is how green it is here. When you live in the Southwest, you get accustomed to duller shades of green and a lot of browns.

It's nice to relax, but nicer to be with Pauline and Maddie.

California's future isn't bright

"It used to be I'd go places and people would say, 'Where are you from?' I'd say 'California' and they'd be, 'Ah gee, aren't you lucky.' Now it's ridicule."
-- MERVIN FIELD

Mervin Field has been polling Californians since shortly after World War II. In fact, there may not be anyone alive who understands Californians better than the 88-year-old Field, who was interviewed in Saturday's Los Angeles Times.

He was here during the boom after the war, when the state's population swelled to 10.6 million in the 1950 census. He was here during the can-do governorship of Pat Brown, when most of the state's infrastructure was built.

And he's been here since, through Ronald Reagan, through Proposition 13 and all the boom-and-bust times until the current time. As of last year, there were 38.3 million people in California, and only 43 percent of them were non-Hispanic whites.

As usual, California leads the way in looking like the rest of America will look in 20 or 30 years.

And what it looks like is ... ungovernable.

Whether you want to blame it on too much spending, on too little taxation because of Prop 13 or on too many illegal immigrants, the fact is we don't have the money to pay for the government we want.

So we'll hit 40 million people soon and eventually 50 million. The hillsides will be covered with houses, and people will be living farther and farther out into the desert and eventually everything will fall apart.

Too many people, not enough water.

Too many students, not enough teachers.

Too many criminals, not enough police.

Yes, we will lead the way either into anarchy or into some sort of fascist state. Those who have the money will either leave or barricade themselves into walled enclaves, and everyone else will fight over limited resources and eventually try and storm those enclaves.

Anyone who thinks the future on the present course is bright is fooling himself. By the 1950s and into the 1960s, America had built maybe the most egalitarian free society in history. The middle class was thriving and so were the wealthy.

But the super-rich never stand still very long. Enough is never enough for them. If they've got $1 million, they want $10 million. If they've got $1 billion, they want $2 billion. They're the only ones who never seem to understand that we really are all in this together.

So bad things will ultimately happen, both here and in the rest of the country. Not because we couldn't have stopped them, but because too many people had too short-sighted a view and the folks cashing in truly did think it would last forever.

But damn, this used to be such a beautiful state.