With time raging along, a warning to get serious about health

Another year ...

If there is one thing certain about getting older, it's that nothing is certain. I turned 65 earlier this month, an age about which there is really no doubt. People can tell you 60 is the new 40 or other such platitudes, but 65 is one of those numbers that doesn't bend.

When you're 65, you're eligible for Medicare and just about every senior discount there is. Of course along with that, you are definitely a Senior Citizen.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

It's the stuff that comes along with it that kills you. Stephen King's short story, "My Pretty Pony," has a grandfather on his deathbed telling his grandson about the flexibility of time.

When you're 7 years old, a summer can last forever. When you're 70, years seem to pass almost overnight.

Time goes from slowly meandering river when you're young to raging rapids when you're older.

This past weekend Nicole and I went to Jamaica for the second time in 13 months. Last year our granddaughter Madison was 5 and our grandson Lexington was 2.

Maddie, 6, with her cousin

This time they were 6 and 3, which if you think about it makes the last year 17 percent of Maddie's life and 33 percent of Lex's. Of course there is now a third one. Albanie Yvonne is two months old today, so the next year will be incredibly long for her -- nearly 100 percent of her life to date.

And from today till Dec. 31, 2015, God willing and the creek don't rise, will be roughly 1 1/2 percent of my life.

The days they pass ...

Of course, some days pass slower than others. Days of difficulties, of problems that seem insoluble, seem to last longer, and with Nicole diagnosed with truly serious medical problems, 2015 could turn out to be a very long year.

Lex, 3, and Albanie

I suppose it all comes down to attitude. The old "when life hands you lemons, make lemonade" saying certainly applies here. My only goal now is to make the most of whatever time we have left together. Nicole has been having physical problems in addition to her serious one, and starting tomorrow, she and I will both start a serious regimen of diet and exercise. We'll eat healthy and do some sort of workout every day.

I'm hopeful it means 2015 can be a better year for both of us.

It's sort of a last chance.

Time doesn't go on forever, at least not for individuals.

Wonderful memories live on even if they won't be remembered

Think about the very best memories of your life and the odds are that they will include early days with the person you wound up loving the most of all.

1992

I have wonderful memories from 1970 of the first serious girlfriend I ever had, and truly special ones from 1974 with the woman who became my first wife.

But the good times from 1970 didn't survive to the end of the year, and the first marriage was effectively over by the end of the decade.

The memories are still in there somewhere, although they have been tangled up with ones far less pleasant. There are other good ones from the '80s, although that may have been the most confusing of all decades to me. I lived in six different states between the beginning of 1980 and the end of 1989.

Everything changed for the better in September 1992 when I met Nicole. She was the smartest person I had ever met, although I do have one male friend who would disagree. She was a lovely woman, a wonderful mother of two and a world-renowned scientist in her field.

She never bragged about it, but sometimes something would slip through. She would show me something that looked totally incomprehensible to me and tell me that aside from her, only one or two people in the world understood it.

Fifty-one days after we met, we married. Everyone who knows me knows that number, but one you may not know is 8,037, as in today was the 8,037th day of our marriage.

It wasn't one of the better ones. For the last few months, Nicole has been undergoing medical tests to find out what's wrong. Today the neurologist confirmed what we had first heard a month or so ago. The love of my life, the smartest woman I have ever known, will slowly be losing her intellect and her memory and slipping into dementia.

She essentially has Lewy Body Dementia, also known as Dementia with Lewy Bodies. It shares symptoms with Alzheimer's, although LBD has some symptoms from Parkinson's, some hallucinations and some problems with REM sleep.

If there is one thing you cannot get in a situation like this, it's specific information. In fact, other than a brain biopsy -- which no one does -- we'll never know for sure if this is an exact diagnosis. We just know what will almost certainly happen.

It will be heartbreaking, although I will do everything in my power to make things more comfortable for her.

It isn't, as some people might say, the least I can do.

Sadly, it's the most I can do.

From 10 to one, the most amazing things I have seen in this world

What are the most amazing things you've ever seen?

I'm not the world traveler my wife, my children or my parents are, but I have traveled enough and been enough places to have seen more of the world than a vast majority of Americans. When it comes to countries, I have been to Canada, Great Britain, France, Monaco, Italy, Austria, Greece, Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, China, South Korea and French Polynesia.

The list I came up with included four natural sights, five man-made sights that are very old and one modern man-made event.

In reverse order from 10 to 1:

Yosemite

10. YOSEMITE -- One of the loveliest natural views in the world and the greatest of America's national parks, Yosemite has something for everyone. I spent three days there in 2004 when my wife and I took her sister and her husband on a three-week trip around California.

We saw a lot of beautiful places, but our time at Yosemite was clearly the highlight of the trip. I'm hoping to get back someday and to be in good enough shape to do a lot more hiking.

9. 1997 LAUNCH OF CASSINI -- The only modern work of man on my list. My wife spent most of her career working for NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and she put in 20 years working on the Cassini-Huygens Mission to explore Saturn and its satellites.

In October 1997, Nicole and I and our son Virgile -- 12 at the time -- went to Florida for the launch at Cape Canaveral. The manned launches of the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs in the 1960s, and while I watched them on television, it would have been wonderful to be there.

The best part of the Cassini launch was that it took place at 3 a.m. The nearest spectators were about 10 miles from the gentry, but as a reporter I was only three miles away. The thing that put this on my top 10 list was that when the rocket left the gantry, the  fire from its engine turned a pitch-dark sky into high noon. As the rocket climbed higher and higher, the sky grew brighter until all of a sudden the dark swooped back in and it was the middle of the night again.

Definitely an amazing sight.

From 50 years ago, a lot of songs still resonate in the present

In the last couple of years, the music companies have been doing some interesting things in trying to fight back against the dominance of online companies like iTunes.

One that strikes me is a package of "5 Classic Albums" on compact disc for about $20, all by the same group. An awful lot of people buy the greatest hits packages, but it's a lot of fun sometimes to hear the original albums as we heard them back then.

Yesterday I picked up five early Beach Boys albums, although "Pet Sounds" is only an early album based on the fact it was released 48 years ago. It was actually one of their last great albums during their heyday, but it's all a matter of perspective.

The album I really wanted was "All Summer Long," their second album from 1964, which in the pantheon is almost a greatest hits collection in itself.

The collection starts out with the group's first No. 1 hit, "I Get Around," which Music.com rates as the 15th most popular song of the year in its combination of U.S. and U.K. charts.

You may recall that 1964 was a big year for the Beatles, who held the third, sixth and seventh slots on the chart.

They might have done even better except for the fact that "I Wanna Hold Your Hand" topped the 1963 charts due to its December 1963 release date in England.

"All Summer Long" includes "Hushabye," "Little Honda," "Wendy" and "Girls on the Beach" as well as the title song made famous in the 1973 movie "American Graffiti." That's a lot of meat on one bone, and there are six other cuts that are pretty good.

As popular as the Beach Boys were, they actually didn't have that many songs that reached No. 1 -- three in the '60s and one much later. After "I Get Around," only "Help Me Rhonda" and "Good Vibrations" topped the chart in the '60s, and "Kokomo" did the same in 1988.



There's one thing very strange about the way music hangs around these days. Listening to music from 1964 in 2014 is almost the same as listening to music from 1914 in 1964. Of course there's one big difference. Advances in the quality of recordings were much greater from 1914 to 1964 than they have been in the years since.

Burr

Songs that were recorded in 1964 can be made to sound as if they were new last week, although there are very few recordings from 1914 that are even remembered. Someone named Henry Burr had three of the top 10 recordings of the year. Burr, a Canadian, was one of the most prolific recording artists of all time with more than 12,000 recordings to his credit.

His top recording in 1914, which was second behind a comedy recording called "Cohen on the Telephone," was "The Song that Stole My Heart Away," and recordings of it on YouTube are about what you would expect from a hundred year-old recording.

That's progress, I suppose. Still, there's no way I would sit around listening to music from 1914. If there is any irony in all of it, it's that as I've gotten older I have started listening to big-band music from the '30s and '40s, music I never cared for when I was young.

We all grow up, we all get older.

And as we do, if we're fortunate, we discover so many wonderful things we never knew when we were younger.

The evening a 72-year old man's energy put me to shame

Paul in Atlanta

"The long and winding road ..."

I didn't think I would ever see Paul McCartney in concert. When the Beatles stopped touring, I was only 16 and had never been to a concert.

In 1976, when Paul was coming to the Capital Centre in Landover, Md., in the "Wings Over America" tour, the date of the concert turned out to be the very day I had to put my first wife on a plane for the start of a two-year tour in Austria.

I was going two months later, but I wasn't about to suggest that I see McCartney without her.

We went to a lot of big concerts in the '70s. I saw the Rolling Stones, Chicago, the Beach Boys, Crosby Stills Nash & Young, Loggins and Messina, the Eagles, Billy Joel, Jimmy Buffett, ELO and others.

But never McCartney. The last arena concert I saw was Bruce Springsteen in 1984 in St. Louis, and the last big concert of any kind was in 1989, when I saw Ringo Starr and His All-Starr Band at the California State Fair in Sacramento.

I was about to turn 40, and I figured the rock concert part of my life was pretty well finished. In 2010 we moved to Georgia and I didn't think that would change anything. A few more years passed, and all of a sudden I saw that Paul McCartney would be performing in Atlanta in June 2014.

One last chance?

I got two tickets, but before we had a chance to go, McCartney became ill and postponed that part of his tour. The Atlanta concert was changed from June 21st to October 15th. When the time came, my wife wasn't feeling up to going, so I went alone.

I read a review of the concert in Dallas two days earlier, and at least one part of it knocked me for a loop. The 72-year-old McCartney had performed for nearly three hours.

I'm eight years younger and I was pretty certain I couldn't sit through a three-hour concert. As it turned out, he didn't play for three hours. He played for three and a half hours, and I made it through only two thirds of it before I couldn't manage any more.



Of course I missed the wonderful stuff at the end, but it's stuff I have on CDs from other McCartney tours. What I heard was a great mix of the Beatles, Wings and Paul's later solo career. The opening number, "Eight Days a Week," brought a smile to my face, and the third one, "All My Lovin'," brought tears to my eyes.

Jeez, 1964.

Fifty years ago.

Two songs from the classic "Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" album -- "Lovely Rita" and "Being for the Benefit of Mr. Kite" -- really touched me, because they were songs the Beatles never performed live.

I lasted for about two hours and 15 minutes and I had nothing left. I left right after Paul sang one of my favorite of his songs -- 1975's "Band on the Run." I hummed it all the way to the car and then played a McCartney CD on the way home.

I'm sorry I didn't last for the whole show, but definitely glad I made it at all.

It was well worth the wait.

Time passes, both good and bad, but we have to hang in

"If you live long enough, you will lose everyone you ever loved."

I don't know exactly when I first heard those words, but I do remember the first time they meant something to me. It was Thanksgiving 2008, a very"circle of life" year in my life.

In January I lost my job after 29 years in journalism. I probably deserved it, but my employer had sold out in 1999, and the next eight years were spent working for people I would never have chosen to be my bosses.

My parents in 2006

In March I lost my dad, who died at 82 after years of fighting various illnesses and medical conditions. When we buried him at Arlington National Cemetery, it was only the fourth family funeral I had attended -- two grandparents, a young nephew and my dad.

In September the wheel started turning when my first grandchild, Madison Nicole Kastner, was born in Beijing. And at Thanksgiving in Southern California, I learned that the oldest living American -- an Indiana woman -- had just died at the age of 115.

Six years later, I have forgotten her name, but I remember some of the facts. She lived in three different centuries -- the 19th, 20th and 21st. She was married once. Her husband died of a heart attack when she was only 38 and she never remarried. Seventy-seven years alone.

Star of news, magazines and television -- It takes a healthy ego

Somewhere in my mother's house, one of two buildings I can call home, there is a 52-year-old edition of a weekly newspaper with my picture in it. It has been decades since I've seen it, but it was a column logo for the first column I ever wrote.

I was 11 or 12, and it was a column about junior high sports in Huber Heights, Ohio.

I had a crew cut and I seem to recall I was wearing one of those shirts like the Beach Boys always seemed to be wearing. Of course it was the year before we heard about the Beach Boys in Ohio, so I can't claim to be particularly hip.

What was fun about it was that kids I knew read it, and some of them asked me from time to time if I would put their names in the paper.

I enjoyed it a lot, and the irony was that it was 15 years before I even thought about doing it again. I never even considered working on my high school paper and the first two times I went to college I had too much else on my mind to think about it.

I did develop some vague idea of becoming a writer, and I wrote lyrics for five songs -- one good, one fair and three execrable -- and one childish, amateurish screenplay.

After days of waiting, counting them down from 25 to No. 1

We have reached Day Four of the great countdown, where the rubber meets the road with Nos. 25-1 of my favorite songs ever.

And maybe it's time for another clarification on songs I love. I started listening to pop music regularly in 1961 when I was 11 years old. That's why except for great old songs I heard later, most of my music starts then.

But there were songs I loved before that, mostly songs my mother sang to me when I was little and songs my dad played for me on his hi-fi when I was a little older. These aren't songs that would make the top 100, but they're songs I love all the same. Songs like "I've Got Sixpence," a British morale song from World War II. Songs like Pete Seeger's funny story song, "Abiyoyo," about a ne'er-do-well who saved his village from a giant.

And songs like Jim Reeves' novelty song, "Bimbo," from 1954. In case you don't know it, the Bimbo of the song was a happy little boy.




At any rate, they're songs I remember fondly, and maybe someday I'll have to make another list.

For now, though, the top 25.

***

25. "CHERISH," the Association -- It topped the charts in September 1966, and I was probably one of ten million American teenagers who had a picture of the object of his unrequited love in his mind every time he heard the song. It was a nice song, but it doesn't wear as well as I would have thought. And surprise, surprise, "Never My Love" might actually be the best song the group did. Also: David Cassidy did a good remake in the '70s, and in 1985, Kool and the Gang did a lovely song that shared only the title with the Association's hit.

24. "MY GIRL," the Temptations -- There are plenty of people who think this was the greatest song ever to come out of Motown. I've got two others that rank higher, and you'll be seeing them as we move along. The Temps had many other great songs, but this one was special. "I've got sunshine, on a cloudy day ..." Also: The Supremes and Martha and the Vandellas had big hit after big hit, ones that could easily have made the top 100 but didn't.

23. "YOU WEAR IT WELL," Rod Stewart -- Fifty years of hit records as a solo artist and with groups, Stewart's big breakthrough was "Maggie May" in the summer of 1971. But this song a year later was always the one I liked best, a song of a man trying to talk to the girl he let get away and now misses desperately. "You wear it well, Madame Onassis got nothing on you ... Also: In recent years, Stewart has extended his career by doing remakes of great old songs from what could be called the Great American Songbook.

22. "HOW DEEP IS YOUR LOVE," the Bee Gees -- No singing group ever got more out of a movie than the Bee Gees did. The Brothers Gibb had been on the charts since 1967 and had had three No. 1 hits, but they were fading by 1977 when they got the chance to write and perform songs for "Saturday Night Fever." This song, my favorite from the movie, was the first of six consecutive No. 1 songs for the group that ruled disco music. Also: I have at least one friend who says the Bee Gees' "Stayin' Alive" is the one song that best defines the 1970s.

Heading toward the top of the list, 25 more of my favorite songs

We're at the halfway point. I was asked by a friend to do my top 100 songs of all time, and after doing 100-76 and 75-51, I'm realizing what a nearly impossible task it is.

I've found that there are artists whose music I love very much that I can't pick one song that would fit into my top 100. I could listen to Harry Chapin all day, but I don't have one particular song that I would put in the top 100. I'm still trying to fit a few songs in from outside regular pop music.

So let's see how it goes as we count down from 50-26.

***

50. "GOIN' HOME," Anton Dvorak, from "NEW WORLD SYMPHONY" -- Many people think that "Goin' Home" is a Negro spiritual, but while the melody was based on spirituals, it is actually from Dvorak's Symphony No. 9 with lyrics added by a pupil of his, William Arms Fisher, in 1922. It was President Franklin D. Roosevelt's favorite song and it was played up and down the line when a train carried his body from Georgia to Washington, D.C. to Hyde Park, New York in 1945.

49. "SWEET SOUL MUSIC," Arthur Conley -- Before I ever heard songs by Lou Rawls, Wilson Pickett or Otis Redding, I heard Conley's homage to them in the spring of 1967. I'm not sure if there was ever another song that evokes a place and time the way this one does. After pit band practices for the senior class play, we always stopped by Cleve's Pizza at Fairfax Circle. I remember two songs that were always getting played on the jukebox -- this one and "I Think We're Alone Now" by Tommy James and the Shondells.

Heading to the halfway mark, 25 more songs I really love

A hundred songs?

My favorite 100 songs of all time? If there's one thing I know, it's that when I finish this list, within two hours I'll remember a song I've always loved that got left out. The one thing that's pretty definite here is that a guy who finished high school in 1967 isn't going to have many post-1990 songs on the list.

I don't know of any new groups that would crack my top 100, but I have seen at least three songs I like. "Road Song" by Fountains of Wayne and "The Good Don't Last" by Spock's Beard are fun for different reasons, but the one that really surprised me in a good way was from the "Chimes of Freedom" project with dozens of artists doing Bob Dylan songs for Amnesty International.

Who would have thought Miley Cyrus could do such a good song?




So there are good songs being made, and not just by people who have been making great music for 40 years. Here's the second quarter of the list:

***

75. "I ONLY WANT TO BE WITH YOU," Dusty Springfield -- This is one of my wife's very favorite songs, which caused me to revisit it and realize it really was a pretty terrific song. Dusty had some other great songs -- "You Don't Have to Say You Love Me" and "Son of a Preacher Man," but this one was the best.

74. "AMERICAN PIE," Don McLean -- This song ruled the charts in late 1971, giving the history of rock 'n' roll from February 3rd, 1959 -- the Day the Music Died -- to the present, but it hasn't aged well. Now that another 43 years have passed since the song was released, now it's just another look at the Sixties. If you lived through those years, it's a fun song. If you didn't, it's a history class. Worse yet, when you say "American Pie," most people under 40 think of that goofy movie about the kid humping a pie.

73. "WONDERFUL TONIGHT," Eric Clapton -- Clapton is best known as one of the two greatest rock guitarists ever, particularly for his work with Cream and Derek and the Dominoes, but this is a beautiful love song to his wife, maybe one of the nicest marital love songs ever.

Not the best songs ever, but a look at my favorites of all time

A Facebook friend asked me a question the other day.

He told me his brother wondered if I had ever done a list of my favorite 100 songs of all time. Since I'm a moron, I said I would give it a try. I could go back all the way to the songs of Stephen Foster if I wanted.

I realized immediately it was an impossible ask to be completely accurate. Where could I find all the songs and how could I compare things I loved when was 15 with things I love now.

I decided to limit the universe I would consider to songs on my iPod and songs I have bookmarked on YouTube. Since the total of the two is nearly 12,500 songs, I figured that was OK.

I went through the two lists with the goal of cutting as much as possible. My first cut took me down to 236 songs. I decided I would not consider patriotic songs, although a couple that are in the neighborhood slipped through.

This is actually a massive task, but I'll try to make some sense of it. I'll do four days, so here for today is 100-76.

***

100. "WALTZING MATILDA," Various Artists -- I've never been to Australia, but I desperately want to go there someday. I first heard Banjo Patterson's song in the movie "On the Beach," and I've loved it ever since. Also: Making the list of 236 and earning consideration but not making the 100 are a couple of Eric Bogle songs I love, his "And the Band Played Waltzing Matilda" about the battle of Gallipoli and his "I Hate Wogs," maybe the best tongue-in-cheek anti-racism song ever.

99. "DOUBLE SHOT (OF MY BABY'S LOVE)," The Swingin' Medallions -- Until I moved to Virginia from Ohio in the eighth grade, I thought beach music was the Beach Boys and Jan & Dean, but in the fall of 1967, when I started college, I learned that in the east, beach music was, as someone described it, middle-aged black men singing to drunken white kids. I*t was -- and is -- wonderful. Also:  "Be Young, Be Foolish, Be Happy" by the Tams, and "I've been hurt, by Virginia Beach's own Bill Deal and the Rhondells, were great songs. Still, there were even better ones and they'll come up later.

98. "STRANGER ON THE SHORE," Acker Bilk -- Starting in 1961, there were some great instrumentals in the '60s. This was the first one, a haunting clarinet solo that has been winding up in movies ever since. Also: "Telstar" by the Tornadoes a year later honored the first communications satellite, and "Cast Your Fate to the Wind" by Sounds Orchestral in 1965 was really beautiful as well.

If presidents are leaders, Reagan let America down on AIDS epidemic

"Reagan made America feel good again ..."
-- MANY PUNDITS




Sorry for the sarcasm, courtesy of Dana Carvey, but is there any "accomplishment" claimed for any of the 43 men who have been president that has been more ephemeral and less meaningful?

In fact, a metaphor that ties Ronald Reagan in with his decade very effectively might be that Reagan was the cocaine of presidents.

He may have made some people proud, but are they still proud? His most rabid fans say he won the Cold War, but even Mikhail Gorbachev said Jimmy Carter's emphasis on human rights had far more of an effect than Reagan's military buildup. In fact, it's worth arguing that Billy Joel's concert in the Soviet Union in 1987 had more of an effect as well.

Oddly enough, after Reagan left office in 1989, he was regarded by most historians as nothing more than a mediocre president. He had been mostly disengaged during his second term, and it was fairly obvious he was slipping mentally in the last couple of years.

The long decline of the American middle class started under Reagan, and the deficit spending that has left us with trillions of dollars of debt started in his administration.

But where Reagan will really be regarded with infamy is in the way his administration ignored the AIDS epidemic. When a reporter brought it up in 1982, press secretary Larry Speakes couldn't stop laughing about it.

Hudson in 1985

In the summer of 1985, Reagan learned that his friend Rock Hudson, who had been a closeted homosexual in Hollywood in the '50s and '60s, had AIDS.

Still, it was September 1987 before the president mentioned AIDS in a speech. By then 20,849 Americans had already died from the disease, which had spread to 113 countries.

Would it have made a difference if the full force of the government had been brought to bear on the disease in 1982?

Of course it would, but in 1982 Reagan ally Jerry Falwell was calling AIDS "God's wrath upon homosexuals," and Reagan aide Patrick Buchanan said it was "nature's revenge on gay men."

Reagan wasn't saying anything. It enabled him to maintain vicious, heartless policies while letting others look like the bad guys.

I never thought Reagan was an evil man, but I certainly think he was a stupid man. I think his view of what America should be was formed in the 1920s and never really changed.

When I first read Randy Shilts' book, "And the Band Played On," in 1987, it was one of the most compelling stories I had ever read.

And give HBO credit. Three outstanding movies about the AIDS crisis were all made for HBO. First was the Shilts book, second was Tony Kushner's "Angels in America" and Larry Kramer's "The Normal Heart," which was produced as a play in 1985 and finally became a movie in 2014.

Kramer's play may be one of the angriest great plays ever written. Starting with the happy days in the New York gay scene in the late '70s and ending in the mid '80s before Reagan ever even mentioned the disease although more and more men were dying "Normal Heart" is one of the most emotionally powerful stories I've ever seen.

The choice of music for the final scene is brilliant. "The Only Living Boy in New York," from the last Simon and Garfunkel album, has just the right mix of poignance and melancholy to end the movie.




More than 36 million people have died from AIDS worldwide, including a huge chunk out of two generations of American men. God only knows what creativity, with accomplishment we lost because they didn't live out their years.

I don't want to be presumptuous and compare them to Reagan, but I've got no problem saying we would be a better country if these gay men had lived and Falwell and Buchanan didn't.

And his ignorance of what was happening around him is hardly the only reason America would have been better off if Ronald Reagan had never been president.

Want to know the most important thing in politics? It's voting

What's the most basic thing about elections?

Voting.

I live in Sun City Peachtree, an active-adult community just outside the Atlanta metropolitan area. We're in the northern part of Spaulding County, which was a population of about 64,000.

We have a County Commission, and one of the residents from our community ran for one of the five seats.

He campaigned hard within our community and did an extraordinary job of getting out the vote.

In the May primary, he was the leader of the three main candidates but came up short of the 50 percent needed for the Republican nomination. The way things work in Georgia, that put the top two finishers into a runoff in late July.

Our guy won, with roughly two-thirds of the vote. There are no Democrats in the county -- at least not enough to matter -- so he will be unopposed in the

Two weeks or so later, a couple of county residents wrote letters to the local newspaper, the Griffin Daily News, to express their displeasure.

"Looks to me like Sun City rules, no matter what."

It's easy to understand the fear. Spaulding County is economically depressed, and Sun City is a planned community of new houses that will only get larger. As of 2014, there are between 750-800 homes occupied. The plan is that within 12 to 15 years there will be 3,500 homes.

When that time comes, Sun City will be a big dog, and one thing that will bother locals is that many of its residents will be from outside Georgia and even the South. What they don't know is that they will change us as much or more as we will change them.

One immediate difference, though, is that we vote in large numbers. A summer runoff usually draws extremely low numbers, even with a runoff to determine the Republican nominee for a U.S. Senate seat. Countywide, just 5,055 voters went to the polls in the runoff in 21 precincts. But in the Sun City precinct, there were 986 eligible voters and 840 of them cast ballots.

That's an 82 percent turnout.

Woody Allen said it best when he said that 80 percent of life is just showing up.

That's even more true in politics, where folks who show up and get others to do the same have more influence than anyone other than maybe the mega-donors.

Not everyone can donate millions.

But everyone can show up.

There really is a place in this world for people who hate government

People who hate government always seem to come back to two examples -- the DMV and the Postal Service.

These two organizations are made to seem like the closest thing to Hell on Earth, things that would be so much better if we lived in a Libertarian paradise.

In reality, though, other things are far worse. The DMV is crowded because at one time or another, nearly everyone needs their services.

As for the Postal Service, I'm with Jon Stewart on this one. When someone attacked the Postal Service, he asked if they meant those people who would deliver a letter to his sister on the other side of the country within two or three days for less than half a dollar.

Awful, huh?

Anybody who thinks that's awful obviously has never dealt with a cable company. You know, the folks who tell you they'll be there on Thursday sometime between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m. to install your cable TV.

Or even worse, how about dealing with an insurance company? My friend Mick is a proud anti-government type, but the worst horror stories I have ever heard from him have nothing to do with the government. Mick can do an extemporaneous hour on the horrors of medical insurance.

Private medical insurance.

At least at the DMV there's no one whose job is to stop people from getting drivers' licenses.

The fact is for the last 35 years, there has been a concerted campaign by folks on the far right to destroy people's faith in government. Whether it has been eliminating programs that benefit the less fortunate, or flattening out the progressive income tax, or worst of all, the estate tax.

I've heard people say that one of the worst things about our country is that we have reached a point where people worry more about their rights than about their responsibilities.

On the most basic level, government exists for one of two reasons -- either to protect the poor from being exploited by the rich or to protect the rich from having their possessions stolen or destroyed by the have-nots. In recent years we have swung from one side of the pendulum to the other.

Seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke said that the purpose of governments was to protect people's rights to life, liberty and property. Partly traditional, although the idea of liberty wasn't all that widespread in a 17th century in which kings ruled by the divine right of God.

In the final quarter of the 18th century, Thomas Jefferson spoke of the basic rights of man as being "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." It may not have been as big a difference as it seems now; owning property was a big part of happiness in 1776. But I'm not sure Jefferson and the other founders ever envisioned a society in which one family would be worth $140 billion.

After all, as Doctor Evil learned in the "Austin Powers" movies, some sums are too big even to imagine.

And while it may be difficult for today's crop of Libertarians to imagine things worse than the DMV or the postal service, if you want the best present-day example of a Libertarian  paradise, just head northeast along the coast from Mombasa. It's an 18-hour drive from there to Eden.

Mogadishu, Somalia.

No laws, no gun control.

No DMV, no post office.

Just do whatever you want.

It's wrong to attack Williams for wanting to escape his pain

If there is one thing that truly has stunned me about the death of Robin Williams, it's the outpouring of venom from people who call themselves conservatives.

What Dreams May Come

Whether it's Rush Limbaugh using Williams' suicide as an example of how unhappy liberals are or some of my co-religionists saying suicide is the only unforgivable sin, it's like Stupid just went on sale at the Walmart.

Limbaugh is one thing. He jumped the shark years ago and hasn't said anything sensible or perceptive since Bush was president. The first Bush.

As for my fellow Catholics, I know the doctrine, but I refuse to believe that a Ted Bundy or an Adolf Hitler or even a Dick Cheney could repent at the last moment and scoot off to paradise, yet a depressed, troubled person could take his own life and never find his way out of Purgatory.

Ironically, one of Williams' more underrated movies dealt with exactly this subject. He plays a man who dies in an accident and goes to heaven. His wife can't cope with missing him. She kills herself and winds up in hell. He is told that she cannot be saved, that people who kill themselves are damned by the fact that they don't even know they're dead.

That's not the God I worship. In one of Stephen King's lesser books, "Desperation," much of the story is given up to thoughts of how tough God is and what sacrifices he demands of us. But the character who makes the ultimate sacrifice leaves a message behind that sums everything up in just three words.

"God is love."

I refuse to believe that the God in which I believe would punish someone who was in such terrible pain for no longer being able to cope with it.

Generally, it isn't bad people who take their own lives. The chance of someone like Dick Cheney killing himself is only slightly greater than the Chicago Cubs winning the World Series three years in a row.

Most of the people we lose are people who will be missed, people who really made a difference in other people's lives.

And the ones who live forever are the Rush Limbaughs and the Dick Cheneys.

It's a messed-up world.

One thing was true: Williams wasn't like anyone else at all

"Shazbot!"

Explaining exactly how and why Robin Williams made such a major splash in the fall of 1978 as the main character in "Mork and Mindy" is almost impossible now.

For one thing, it was nearly 36 years ago, the age of Jimmy Carter, disco music and Reggie Jackson. A very different time.

Mork from Ork

For another, seeing the comedy explosions Williams did as Mork from Ork is no surprise to people who experienced the next four decades of his comedy, from wonderful to excruciatingly awful. And with Williams' death at the age of 63 this morning, there won't be any more Adrian Cronauers or Mrs. Doubtfires, but there won't be any more Patch Adamses either.

But in 1978, none of us had ever seen anything like him.

It wasn't just that he was funny. There were lots of funny people on television and plenty of funny shows.

My friend Bill Madden summed it up very well at the time.

"We don't watch the show because it's a great show," he said. "It isn't. We watch it for that minute or so in every episode when he just does off and starts free associating."

When Williams moved on to films, his first two roles showed the dichotomy his career would take. He had the title role in "Popeye," one of the worst movies legendary director Robert Altman would ever make, but he showed his acting skills to best advantage in George Roy Hill's "The World According to Garp."

In the end, if the good movies he made outweighed the bad ones, it wasn't by much. He did have three Oscar nominations for leading roles, and he won a best supporting actor Oscar in 1997 for "Good Will Hunting."

Matt Damon and Robin Williams

In that movie, he played a psychiatrist working with Matt Damon's mathematical prodigy, and what he did better than anything else was tone himself down.

He battled addiction issues all his life, and for the last year or so he dealt with serious depression. I don't know why, but if there's one thing I know from studying comedians, many of the funniest people out there are either very angry or very sad.

If it is true that Williams took his own life, I can't help but wonder if at 63 he felt that his best years were behind him and he didn't look forward to a world in which people talked about how great he used to be.

"Good Morning, Vietnam"

I'll always remember the fall of 1978, though. That minute or two each week on "Mork and Mindy" every week was usually the biggest laugh for me, but I can't help but remember when my first wife and I got together with friends of ours who had a two-year-old daughter.

The big joke was that they had taught her to say Mork's most famous catch word from the show.

"Shazbot!"

It was an expression of surprise, or sometimes annoyance or even chagrin. But it was hilarious to hear this little girl saying it and she loved the laughs she got.

Funny that I find myself thinking of her. I haven't seen her or her parents since 1979, and the last time I saw my first wife was 1982.

It seems so very long ago.

A lifetime, in fact.

When the center fails to hold, we won't like what comes next

"Turning and turning in the widening gyre, The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity."

-- W.B. YEATS, "The Second Coming"

Can the centre hold?

Yeats had it right, and it's beginning to look as if Mencken did too.

As far back as there has been a country, Americans have understood that in a republic, what is good for the most people is generally what works best for the nation as a whole. It didn't always work that way. Until the 20th century, Americans lived under a fairly rigid if unofficial class system.

Unless someone was fortunate enough to invent something or lucky enough to find precious minerals, the chance of a working-class person to become rich was about as likely as the Horatio Alger stories being true.

Two things happened that changed our society, both of them during World War I. One was the income tax and the other was the estate tax, both of them worked to reduce the strength of what was essentially an American aristocracy.

From then up until about 1980, we built one of the most egalitarian societies the world has ever known, and at a fairly high level. Through the 50s and most of the 60s as well, it was possible for a man without much of an education to get a good enough job to own a home, raise a family and live a reasonably middle-class lifestyle.

But just as Ronald Reagan once said that freedom is never more than one generation away from being threatened, the same is true of an egalitarian society. The mega-wealthy, America's "aristocrats," never stop battling for ways to reduce the amount of their money that goes to the government.

Less than 35 years later, our country has changed fundamentally. Mencken said that ignorance and greed would ultimately bring our republic down, and even if it isn't the same people who are ignorant and greedy, they're all over the place these days.

Maybe the best way to look at it is that the ignorant are allowing the greedy to steal from the rest of us.

We allow a family with $140 billion net wealth to continue growing their fortune by keeping their workers in poverty.

We allow two brothers with more than $80 billion between them essentially to buy entire state governments to further their own interests.

The center won't hold much longer.

And when it finally does not hold, when everything put together falls apart, we may have the answer to Yeats' question in "The Second Coming."

"What rough beast, its hour come round at last, slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?"

Academic excellence comes in strange ways and then vanishes quickly

In the course of nearly 25 years of school, I managed to come across some teachers with some odd gimmicks.

In the mid '70s, when I was trying to get my mojo back taking some junior college courses, I signed up for Sociology 101 and met a teacher who gave the final exam on the first day of class.

The deal was to give his students some idea of what the class would cover. He offered one incentive. Anyone who earned a passing grade on the final could leave, never show up again and he would give them a B with no work at all.

On a 90-80-70-60 grading scale, 60 percent or better would win the Kewpie doll. He said he had been doing it for three years and no one had ever passed the final on the first day.

So we took the test. I think he had four classes with about 150 students, and he came in a few days later to tell us that one of his 150 students had earned a 62 on the test. A pretty bad grade at the end of the quarter, a pretty good one at the beginning.

I think I was 23, and when it came to school, I was totally f**ked up. I had flunked out of college three times between 1969 and 1971, and I had no clue at all what I was doing with my life.

One might think displaying enough knowledge to pass the final would have made it easy for me to earn an A in the class, but that wasn't the way I rolled then. I took the B and never showed up again.

After a few years working for the government and then living overseas with my first wife, I went back to school five years later with a plan in mind and the goal of being a journalist. I went back to the junior college to clean up some credits and I signed up for the second part of the Sociology class.

Same teacher.

Same gimmick.

He apparently didn't remember me, which was no shock. I had been in his class for two days five years ago.

He told the class his gimmick, and he said that in the eight years he had been teaching, only one student had ever succeeded on the first day.

A few days later he came in to tell us that number now was two. Actually one. But twice.

He asked me what I wanted to do this time.

I was 28, and the last time I had done really well in school was sixth grade. I got straight A's all through elementary school and then went into the tank. Once I made it to college, I started cutting classes and eventually even cutting final exams.

The word is "self-destructive."

But in the spring of 1978 -- 11 years after high school -- I had found myself wondering if maybe I no longer had the potential I had as a little kid. I had washed out too many times to be confident, and I told myself that for one quarter, I would do something I hadn't done since high school.

I would attend every class and do every assignment. I remembered Woody Allen saying 80 percent of life is just showing up.

I told sociology guy this time I would try for the A.

I had four classes that spring, two of them in areas I had never done well -- science and foreign languages. I was taking Chemistry, Elementary German, Sociology and a fourth class I have long since forgotten what it was. I attended every class, turned in every assignment, took every test and even did some studying.

And for the first time since sixth grade, I got A's in every class.

I figured I was on my way to a brilliant academic career at George Mason, but in my second semester there, my marriage fell apart and it was all I could do to get through school with enough to launch my 28-year career as a journalist.

My kids did much better in school than I did. Pauline earned two degrees from UCLA cum laude and Virgile didn't get anything lower than an A in his major at Cal State Northridge.

He always said the best advice I ever gave him was the Woody Allen quote.

Of course, I got it wrong.

I always thought it was 90 percent.

Most of the time I couldn't even do 80.

I sure am lucky to have such great kids.

What can we do for men who took pride in blue-collar work?

Is there any future at all for blue-collar workers in this country?

The quarry

In the wonderful 1979 movie "Breaking Away," four recent high school graduates are trying to decide what to do with their lives.

They spend part of their time swimming in a quarry that once was filled with stone that men from their fathers' generation cut to build large buildings in Bloomington, Indiana.

One night one of the boys is out walking with his father, who spent decades working as a limestone cutter.

The boy is telling his dad that students at the university (Indiana) call the kids in the town "cutters" to put them down, and his dad tells him he was proud to work as a cutter. There was one thing strange about it, though.

"I was proud of my work," he said. "And the buildings went up. When they were finished the damnedest thing happened. It was like the buildings were too good for us. Nobody told us that. It just felt uncomfortable, that's all."

It's just an example, but it's a good example of the type of jobs that used to be available to men with strong backs who may not have had much in the way of education. By the 1970s, those jobs were starting to go away. In the 40 years since, the guys who used to do those jobs haven't just fallen through the cracks. They've fallen off the edge of the Earth.

And if they thought the buildings made from their limestone were too good for them, wait till you see how they feel about the country that has thrown them away.

There just aren't enough janitorial and security guard jobs available.

Alzheimer's an ever-growing fear for aging Boomer generation

I'm not really a big fan of glorified romance novels, although in the course of my nightly reading to my lovely wife, we've worked our way through Danielle Steel, Nora Roberts and Nicholas Sparks.

Sparks' "The Notebook," book and film, were both a big deal about 10 years ago. I'm not sure why both of them only came across my personal radar this year, but I watched the movie and then went out and picked up the book.

The Notebook

The story is of a man and a woman who have been in love for most of their lives, and after roughly 50 years together, are nearing the end.

The man is all but crippled by arthritis and heart trouble, but his memory is all there. The woman is in better physical health, but is in an advanced stage of Alzheimer's Disease.

This wasn't always such a big deal, but with all the publicity the disease has received the last 20 years or so, it has become one of the greatest fears of almost everyone at or past retirement age.

It has never been a great fear of mine. It doesn't run in my family. Nearly everyone has lived into their 80s or 90s, and other than some memory problems for my grandfather, no one has come close to Alzheimer's. I'll be 65 in December and I'm fairly confident something else will kill me before Alzheimer's.

My wife has been more concerned about it. For one thing, she has a much better mind than I do. When she used to do some of her work at home, I would look at discarded legal pads and see the most complex equations imaginable. I was always pretty good at math, but I didn't even know what all the symbols represented.

Nicole

I've never had to apologize for my intelligence, but if you were to compare intellect to a cross-country race leaving from New York, my vehicle would run out of gas somewhere on the plains of Kansas while hers would cruise into Los Angeles with petrol to spare.

So she has far more to lose than I do. I could sit in a chair and watch "Rocky & Bullwinkle" reruns for hours at a time and not squirm once. Most of the television my wife watches consists of DVDs of the Great Courses. For her, learning really is a lifelong thing.

But it was just 16 years ago that her own father was dying of Alzheimer's. She sat with him in his room in a Toulouse, France, hospice and read to him for hours. He may or may not have known his youngest daughter, but what she did for him made him happy. And when she kissed him on the cheek, he smiled and said, "Encore! Encore!"

But the family connection concerns us, although we have faith that the worst won't happen. She is the love of my life -- at least the most recent third of it -- and I will be with her as long as we are both alive. And when and if the good times end, I will remember them as long as I remember my own name.

Sometimes the best people among us are the ones who suffer the most

"The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry."

July 2005

I've never been a big fan of Ernest Hemingway, although the quote above from "A Farewell to Arms" is one of two by Hemingway that I love.

I expect to live a long time, largely because I am neither very good, very gentle or very brave. I suppose the world has broken me more than once in nearly 65 years, but there will be no special hurry to kill me.

Nearly every reach I've made for a dream has come up short, and if I'm not quite done reaching, my arms seem shorter than they ever were.

But my lovely wife Nicole is good, gentle and brave. She did work that really mattered and she was one of the top two or three people in the world in her field. I remember her telling me once -- proud and a little shy at the same time -- that there were concepts she understood that no more than a couple of other people could grasp.

She spent several decades working for NASA at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. If you're not familiar with JPL, it's the space science equivalent of Metro Goldwyn Mayer, the 1927 Yankees and CBS News back in the days of Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite.

When it comes to children, some things are way beyond forgiveness

I was never fortunate enough to be the father of a baby.

I have two wonderful children, but I didn't come into their lives until they were 12 and 7. Other than very faint memories of my own younger siblings, the only first-hand experience I had was in October 2008 in Beijing when I held my tiny granddaughter in my arms and she fell asleep on my chest.

October 2008

It was an incredible moment, one of those that I will remember till the day I die. I know other people who feel the same way. My wonderful friend Mick Curran has three children, and he was in the delivery room each time.

I learned that when I turned a page in one of his photo albums and saw a full-page color shot of his firstborn, half in the world and half out of it. I have since become a lot more cautious looking at photo albums.

But that's not the point of this. Like many other people, I have been horrified by the story of the Georgia father who has been charged with murder for leaving his infant son in a hot car.

Cooper Harris, just 22 months old when he died, was left strapped in his car seat in a locked car for seven hours with the temperature in the high 80s. His father had taken out two insurance policies on him, had been visiting websites about living a child-free life and others where he was exchanging obscene photos with various women.

Victim and father

When he "discovered" his son's dead body in the car, he didn't even call 911. He started calling relatives, presumably setting up his story.

I really don't want to say much more about Justin Harris, other than to suggest that he may already have realized he made a big mistake.

I don't believe in capital punishment, but there was a phrase that always struck me as very evocative.

"He was beaten within an inch of his life."

That seems fair to me, although I also think it's quite possible Mr. Harris will develop if not a penchant at least a tolerance for being the passive partner in frequent anal adventures.

If he even gets to live. Most inmates have very little tolerance for other inmates who hurt children.

Lexington, Pauline, Madison and Ryan

I actually knew someone in California who went to prison for child molestation. I believe he was killed by a fellow inmate before he had served a year. I had a great deal to do with sending him to prison, and I expected something like this would happen.

I certainly don't feel bad that it did. The man molested seven children, including his own 3-year-old daughter. The world is a better place without him.

The world is also a far better place because my daughter Pauline, her husband Ryan and their children Maddie and Lex are part of the world.

And because a third grandchild -- a second granddaughter -- is coming this October. Little Albanie Yvonne will add another star to my sky.

I have never understood how anyone could harm a child. If it were necessary, I would give my life for any of my grandchildren and also for my daughter. If you don't see the name of my son-in-law there, it isn't that I wouldn't. Heck, I've had a long life. I probably would put my life on the line to save him if needed. I'm still thinking that one through.

Kelsey, Sean and impossibly young me.

But there are other wonderful children I love too. My Massachusetts nephews, Jacob and Nathan, are both nearly grown. My friend Mickey's children Sean and Kelsey are full-grown adults now, and I have loved both of them since they were tiny kids. I don't mean to leave his daughter Shannon out of it -- she's a great kid -- but she came along so late I have never had the chance to get to know her.

No one I know, no one I value as a human being, would ever knowingly hurt a child. To me that's the easiest division between worthwhile people and worthless people.

Just to give one more thought to the tragedy here in Georgia, let's assume for a minute the Bad Dad didn't intend to kill his little son.

It's a real stretch to believe, but let's say Cooper's death was an accident and Bad Dad just forgot he was in the car.

It doesn't matter.

He's still worthless. It's terrible enough to forget and leave a dog in the hot car, but a little kid?

Sorry, Justin.

No forgiveness for you.

Declaration's 'unalienable rights' are really only means to an end

"Does the end justify the means?"

That's one of the oldest, toughest philosophical questions of them all, and where I generally would fall on that question is that it doesn't. That in fact there are no ends, only means, and it is the means we use to achieve our goals are what define us.

But today is Independence Day, and I have a different motive in asking the question. In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote that "all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness."

Liberty, a means to an end.

You can ask almost any American and they'll tell you those are the big three, pretty much in that order. We've even got a political party of a sort that rates Liberty as the most important thing in the world.

Anybody who has been a regular reader of my writing knows how I feel about them. Whether it's "Every man for himself" or "I've got mine, Jack," to me Libertarianism is pretty much the ultimate in political selfishness.

It's actually sort of silly, too.

You see, Liberty isn't an end.

It's a means to an end, and if we want to be honest about it, so are Life and the pursuit of Happiness. On the most basic level, Liberty means you are free.

To do what?

If you are free, no one is telling you what to do or not to do. You are free to do what you want. So Liberty is a means, not an end.

Ditto with the pursuit of Happiness. You can call Happiness an end, certainly, but pursuing it is only a means to an end.

As for Life, it's mostly a condition. You're either alive or you aren't. Being alive is a means to an end. You have to decide what sort of life you want to live, either one serving others or one serving yourself.

In the end, being alive, being free and pursuing happiness aren't the things that matter most. What matters most is how we use them, what we strive to achieve to make the world a better place before we leave it.

There really are no ends for us.

Only means.

Don't steal from others, give them a hand up

Are we really so flawed, so underevolved, that we see logic in the idea of getting what we need by taking it from someone else by force or tricking them out of it?

It's a big question, maybe even a silly one.

We are what we are and we'll never be any better. At least that's what we tell ourselves, and if we convince ourselves, the world will never be much better than an abattoir. We speak of Survival of the Fittest, and we say that Only the Strong Survive, but that doesn't mean that those of us who are strong should survive by hurting the weak.

What sort of people do you admire?

People who succeed no matter what they have to do, no matter who they have to hurt? Or people who understand that they are not the pinnacle of creation and that we live most nobly when we put the needs of others ahead of our own?

Is it really so difficult to understand, when every religion known to man except for Satanism is built around the law of reciprocity, a law we also know as the Golden Rule?

I hold no brief for anyone who succeeds by knowingly hurting others.

I accept the fact that there are people who get rich at the expense of others, but don't ask me to like or respect them. I'm always going to admire Mother Teresa before I admire Donald Trump. I'm always going to admire Warren Buffett more than I admire all the Kochs and Waltons there are in the world.

I do believe that we are our brothers' keepers, and I could even include Trump in that category, but only if I owned a zoo.