Time has a way of smoothing out the edges, shifting the focus of our memories. At a funeral, everything is fresh. Everything is raw. Individual details about life and death are more striking and more urgent. Even if you’re trying to put an entire life in perspective, your thoughts and comments are weighted more to the aging shell, the recent conversations, the final day. When I delivered mom’s eulogy a year ago, I spoke openly about the two different people we had come to mourn. The challenging person who made life more interesting shared equal billing with the woman who made a home and welcomed her family. Everyone at the service had gotten to know her well during her 94 years, and I wanted to recognize the full arc of that life. By the time we gathered a couple of weeks ago to unveil her marker, though, the focus had shifted. We acknowledged the difficult parts, but stressed more of the positives. We spent more time with the woman who hosted the holidays and kept up the traditions, who showed up at all her grandchildren’s events and became a pen pal to two of her great grandchildren. Her grandchildren spoke about the blooper reels, of course, but they also described the lessons learned and traditions continued, the legacy she passed on to a new generation. During the year since she left, my sister put together a gathering of cousins from mom’s side of the family and it was truly eye opening. We knew about some of the dysfunction and some of the tough characters who came before us, but the reality was worse, and it re-framed my view of mom’s life. She was a tough contract, absolutely, but things could have been a lot worse. I had not thought previously about her struggle to get past the family culture she inherited, but my new awareness put a softer filter on my memories. Life is graded on a curve, with a million relevant factors for the ultimate judge. Where did we start? What tools were we given? What was the degree of difficulty? How hard did we try? In the day-to-day, we measure people on an absolute scale and find them wanting. With the benefit of hindsight, or distance, we can and should be more forgiving. After the dedication, we all went back to my sister’s house and spent the rest of the afternoon together, talking and reminiscing and being a family. Looking around at the people, enjoying the ease of our conversations and the closeness of our bonds, I was reminded of the woman who did so much to set the table for us. I went home that night and pulled up the eulogy I delivered a year ago. If I was doing it again, I’d add more stories to emphasize the effort she made, the challenges she had faced in her own family, and the traditions she passed on to the generations that followed. Time has a way of smoothing out the edges. Maybe I’ll mellow out a bit more as the coming year progresses, but you’ll only learn about it if you click here to subscribe.
1 Comment
Once again, the super-science whiz kids at Dad Writes have discovered the hottest new innovation in tech, an advancement that will make AI look even more artificial and much less intelligent. We’ve only encountered this financial tool infrequently, so far, but we know it’s use is going to explode, so you’ll want to get in on the ground floor. Simplifying the concept for everyone who can’t understand how crypto and NFTs work (Hint: They don’t.), lets’ just describe this new invention as a government-backed gift card that never expires, has no processing fees, and can be used in any store. Well, almost any store, but we’ll get to that part later. Anyway, it’s called Consumer Accessible Secure Holdings, or CASH, and I cannot believe nobody thought of this sooner. Basically, it’s a nano-thin gift card that takes up much less space than a stiff plastic card, and you can fold it if you’re into origami. You can fit it into a wallet, under your mattress, or even into your penny loafers if you want to flaunt your wealth. Better yet, you can access these CASH cards without having to download an app, and you always know the balance, because it’s visible on the card at all times. If you only want to redeem part of the value of the card, no worries. You can get other cards and tokens that have their value visible on them, as well. No more embarrassment when you go to a store with the wrong gift card, or your plastic mystery card isn’t worth enough to buy what you want. With the CASH-based card, you don’t need Samuel L. Jackson to tell you what’s in your wallet. And it gets even better for both buyers and sellers. With CASH, there’s no interest on your credit card bills at the end of the month because, voila, no credit card bill. And the store owner benefits, too, because there are no processing fees when people pay with CASH. Still, as with every new technology, there are a few bugs to be worked out. Some retailers haven’t updated their systems to accept CASH, relying on the old-fashioned system of tapping credit cards and demanding 30% tips for handing us a Twinkie. Converting to CASH will make their lives so much easier, but they need to get with the times first and many are still resistant. CASH is also in short supply, apparently, because banks will require that consumers fill out all kinds of forms if they want to obtain more than $10,000 in CASH in any single transaction. It’s a bit of a headache, but obtaining multiple supplies at $9,999 should absolutely solve that problem. Finally, it can be a challenge to record all the transactions when businesses use CASH. With credit cards, computers keep the tally, but businesses that deal in CASH might forget to include some of their sales when they report results to the Internal Revenue Service. From what I’ve heard, though, business owners who deal only in CASH say that has not been a problem and they have reported all their transactions without fail. Once you start using CASH, you'll be a fan for life. I can't imagine any technology supplanting this incredible system any time soon, or ever. What hot new tech will we discover next? Click here to subscribe and you'll be the king of the nerds. I met a guy who achieved some great success about 40 years ago and he couldn’t tell me much about himself beyond that moment. It was very sad. His achievement was pretty impressive, so I can understand why he was proud of his accomplishments. Certainly, he was more famous than I’ll ever be and he has fascinating stories to tell about reaching to top of his profession. And yet, he has lived more than half of his life in the afterwards, apparently unable to appreciate what’s happened since his apotheosis. I tried to draw him out about his life today, his interests and his activities, and it turns out he’s doing some good in his current journey. By many measures, he’s doing more to make the world a better place today, to improve the lives of the next generation, than was the case when he was at the public apex of his career. He didn’t seem to see it that way, and it’s probably understandable. The spotlight, the adoration of the public, the accolades…it must all be intoxicating in a way that becomes addictive. It must be difficult to give it up, to accept that the moment is gone and never to return. I’ve written before about how difficult it is for normal people to move on, to redefine themselves after their everyday careers. It must be even rougher for people who have scaled the peaks. As sad as that is, though, it’s even sadder for those who cannot get past the nadir of their lives, the moments of defeat that become the frame for viewing everything that follows. We all know someone who defines themselves in terms of the almost, the didn’t, the couldn’t. In the never-ending loop of memory, everything returns to the time when they weren’t enough, the time that convinces them they cannot become enough. At least my new friend was fixated on a major success. People who say they have no regrets in life are absolutely not paying enough attention to their own actions. Regret is evidence that we have a conscience and a concern for others. Regret is proof that we are learning from our missteps, that we’ve crossed one more error off the list of things we plan to avoid in the future. Whether our regrets stem from our failures or our successes, though, they’re the speed bumps that block our growth, our progress, our opportunity to build a future. Memories are a great place to visit, but a terrible place to live. Yes, I’ve been waiting 70 years to use the word apotheosis in a blog post and now my life is complete. But I’m moving forward in life, as you’ll see in future weeks after you click here to subscribe. In a few of my prior lives, I worked on a documentary about autism, headed up a large theater company in Chicago, and defrauded my home state. Too many details to describe in just one blog post, but all of these journeys into other people’s lives have changed my perspective about my own existence. In my tiny corner of the world, I’m pretty well informed, open to conversations with strangers, continually looking for new insights, and generally aware of my surroundings. Still, there are parallel universes just down the street, or down the hall, that I will never enter and will never really know. I live in a big city, for example, and I like to think it looks like America. We have rich and poor, multiple races and religions, and more sexual orientations than letters in the alphabet. Some days, I feel pretty smug about my great insight into the huge stew that is my kinda town. If you’ve always lived in the same small town, though, America can look much different, and it’s presumptuous to see the rural experience as less than my own. There’s an intimacy and comfort that small-town life offers, along with different challenges and fears to keep people up at night. It's almost instinctive to feel superior about our enlightened world view, whether it’s based on big-city congestion or small-town intimacy. We all end up proud of something and fearful about something else, and most of our perspectives are shaped by where we are, not who we are. Well, that’s probably not correct, because who we are is determined in large part by where we are, what we see, whom we meet, and all the other experiences of our lives. We’re all alike at birth, but nature and nurture divide immediately and, after a decade or two, it can be hard to discern that we all started with practically identical DNA. It’s easy to think we live in different worlds, not just different corners of the same universe, but that’s a mistake. The people you meet at the tattoo festival and the locals you run into at the train station have the same needs and drivers, the same humanity, as the people we meet in our echo chambers. After a few minutes of conversation, the common links emerge and their strangest traits shrink into a facet, but not an identity. After enough visits into different dimensions, I’ve changed my questions about other people. Instead of asking how it’s possible for someone to believe things that are so incredibly stupid, I wonder how their reality led them to their conclusions. Quite often, I end up with a better understanding of their place in the world and, even if I will never agree with their position, it’s easier to recognize their humanity. If the statute of limitations ever expires, I’ll be writing about that whole defrauding the state thing. Subscribe now and watch this space. I paid $13 for a hot dog and fries the other day. That’s probably a record, and I was actually happy about it. There’s no such thing as cheap eats anymore, including the delicacies that the hip folks refer to as “street food” in Chicago. Some of it is due to food costs, which have already leveled off or started to decline, but mostly it’s a shortage of labor. Suddenly, even lower-level workers are getting a living wage for working 40 hours a week, instead relying on food stamps to compensate for their McJobs. We were paying that price before, of course, but now there are fewer bureaucrats in the middle. This is gonna take some getting used to, especially for people who are still trying to fill today’s job openings at yesterday’s wages and complaining that nobody wants to work anymore. We had a shortage of eggs over the past year and nobody got mad at the chickens, but everyone seems to be angry with the workers who are suddenly in short supply. I get it. I really do. For small business owners, every extra expense is truly coming out of their pockets. It’s not like a public company, where the shareholders lose some earnings per share when benefits go up for employees. In most small businesses, there’s only one shareholder, and that shareholder needs every dime to pay his own mortgage. Even if a guy has mortgages on two or three houses and his kids are going to Harvard on his dime, he still resents the clerk who’s demanding an extra buck an hour. You can’t complain to your buddies at the golf club that some chicken is picking your pocket, but you can absolutely complain about the fry cook and everyone will nod in agreement. And it’s not just the greedy capitalists who are upset at the idea of paying workers a living wage. One of the newer trends in the service economy is tip baiting, a practice of entering a substantial tip online when ordering something and then cutting the tip after the items are delivered. Convenience is worth the extra fees for Uber Eats and Grub Hub and all the other middlemen who add 35% to every food order, but the poor schmuck who delivers the pizza is 100% screwable. I’m rooting for the pizza guy, though, especially in comparison with the tech bros who developed all the apps that add 25-40% to every bill in a race to make your grocery order cost as much as Taylor Swift tickets. The American Dream has devolved from a house with a two-car garage to the needing only one job to put food on the table. We’ve seen this play out before, of course. After the Great Depression and World War II, millions of GIs came home and went back to work in one of the few countries that hadn’t seen its factories bombed. Family formations exploded and more than a decade of pent-up demand was suddenly unleashed. Inflation soared as factories shifted from war production to consumer products and workers benefited from higher wages as the economy boomed. It was a once-in-a-millennium event that truly built the Middle Class and made it possible for factory workers to buy homes while working just one, often unionized, job. Right now, it looks like we’re seeing a small replication of that economy. The pandemic caused major retooling of production, enormous shifts in demand patterns, and all types of shortages, leading to deflation and then inflation and a release of pent-up demand during the recovery period. Inflation rates soared and a labor shortage is driving wage growth for the first time in forever. The federal government added to inflation, absolutely, by throwing $trillions into the economy over the past three years, but it looks like there’s going to be a payoff as U.S. manufacturing starts to recover from more than a half century of neglect. The politicians will work their hardest to screw it up, of course, and the Fed has already announced its preference for recessions—and unemployment—over inflation, but the invisible hand just might be strong enough to swat away their meddling. One can only hope, because the fundamentals are actually looking better than they have in a long, long, long time. It’s going to be a bumpy ride, no doubt, but it’s actually possible that things are moving in the right direction. Will we still be this sanguine about inflation when the hot dog and fries hit $15? Find out by clicking here to subscribe. When you’re part of a persecuted minority, even the most innocent moments of your day can be transformed into unbearable ridicule and oppression. Trust me, on this, because I am the victim here. Even worse, I became a victim simply by surviving long enough to be old enough to be mocked...simply for being old. We don't need AARP. We need a Senescence Liberation Front. Old farts simply can’t get a break, even when we’re doing the exact same thing as Gen Z or X or W. If somebody in her 20s snags a two-for-one deal on an app, it’s a BOGO and everyone applauds. If I do the same thing, but with a coupon I got in the mail, it’s a senior discount and everyone smirks. If some young adult goes out for a drink at 5:00 p.m., she’s enjoying cocktail hour. If she orders some chicken wings with her drink, she’s enjoying happy hour. And if she has a margarita and nachos, Jimmy Buffett might write a song about her. Sounds perfectly innocent, but it’s not an experience I can share. If I go to the same place at the same time, I’m absolutely not cool and hip and enjoying happy hour. I’m old and tired and I’m settling in for the Early Bird Special. The mockery is so painful that I am weeping as I type this. The list of slights can seem endless by now, yet it continues to grow every minute. If I wear leggings under my jeans, it’s long underwear, but if some 30-something does it, it’s a base layer. If I use a device to amplify sound, they’re hearing aids, but if a younger person does it, they’re ear buds or, even cooler, Air Pods. If someone in his 30s embraces the traditions of his youth, he’s an O.G. If someone in her ’60s does it, she’s an O.F. (Original Gangster versus Old Fart, for anyone requiring translation here.) Speaking of the traditions from our youth, why is it living in the past when I recall the old days, but it’s cool to hear what happened, “Back in the Day…” from someone who was wearing braces until two years ago? How can it be retro and hip for some fashionista to wear bell-bottom pants, but I get mocked for continuing to wear the original pair I bought 50 years ago? Doesn’t that make me the real O.G. here? If I write a check to charity, I’m taking the easy route of paying instead of doing. But if some TackyTocker dumps ice water on his head and posts a video, he’s being an ally. Even better, he’ll get all kinds of likes even if he never writes a check. Okay, he was never going to write a check because he only uses Venmo, but you get the point. After a lifetime at the forefront of the Patriarchy, I suddenly know what it’s like to be part of a marginalized minority, and it’s not okay, Boomers. We didn’t survive the greatest economic expansion in world history and take all the good jobs and fast cars and destroy the environment and cultivate the lifestyles that created more than 142 new medical specialties just to be treated like dirt in our senescence. No way. So we’re putting you all on notice, all you young punks in your 20s and 30s and mid-50s. Don’t ever cross us, don’t even think about it, or we’ll cancel you so fast you’ll cease to exist anywhere. We’ll rain the hell of social media scorn on you so hard that you’ll be afraid to show your face in your own households. We’ll tear you a new one and then tear it out and tear you another one. Yeah, that’s what we’ll do. As soon as we figure out how to use this internet thing. We’re also planning to cancel anyone who doesn’t click here to subscribe to Dad Writes, so don’t pretend you weren’t warned… |
Who writes this stuff?Dadwrites oozes from the warped mind of Michael Rosenbaum, an award-winning author who spends most of his time these days as a start-up business mentor, book coach, photographer and, mostly, a grandfather. All views are his alone, largely due to the fact that he can’t find anyone who agrees with him. Archives
January 2024
Categories
All
|