At least in this country, people are expected to understand that a large part of the money wait staff earn comes to them in tips. Whether it's 15 percent, 18 percent or more, without it the people doing the serving are little more than serfs.
Kansas 'Christians' failed to tip.
Lately, though, tipping -- or more accurately, failing to tip -- has become something of a political statement.
In a Wichita restaurant recently, a family of "Christians" left their waiter what appeared to be a generous $20 tip.
He was pleased ... until he realized what they had left him was a religious tract designed to look like money.
My son called from the Southern Hemisphere on Christmas Day. Virgile and his wife Sterling are halfway through their third and final year in Asuncion, Paraguay, where it is early summer.
Sterling and Virgile
He has been in the Foreign Service for 10 years now and in his early 30s, he has either lived or visited every continent except Antarctica (no embassies there) and maybe Africa (I'm not sure).
Virgile is an amazing guy. People say things about him that most of can only dream about hearing about ourselves.
On his first tour, his supervisor wrote in his evaluation that "Virgile is the best young Foreign Service officer I have seen in 20 years."
Eight years earlier, in his first year of college at Cal State Northridge, his roommate told me that "Virgile is the nicest person I have ever met."
Wow.
I can't claim credit for that. Nobody ever called me the best young (or old) anything, and certainly no one ever said I was the nicest person they ever met.
Many people still alive remember the time when the United States of America was known as the "land of the free and the home of the brave."
Some will even remember when the "American Dream" wasn't about getting rich or owning a business, but just doing well enough to have a home and a family and some leisure time to enjoy life.
People pretty much got to choose how much they wanted to succeed. If they were satisfied to work hard enough to support their family and not much more, that was OK. If they wanted to work hard enough to become a big success, they could try that too.
We had yet to become the Consumer Society, where our worth was based on how much we owned and how often we gobbled up the newest televisions, or computers, or cars.
1938
We had yet to learn the glories of consumer debt.
People bought things after saving for them. The idea of "buy now, pay later" came along after World War II, and bank cards -- essentially revolving loans -- were a generation further in the future.
When the troops came home from Europe and the Pacific, and when rationing ended, folks who hadn't been able to buy anything for four years all of a sudden splurged.
And all of a sudden we were off to the races, acquiring possessions at nosebleed speed and not even really asking ourselves whether each new thing we owned was actually making our lives better.
When my parents were first married, they were on a tight budget. Each payday, they cashed their checks and put money into envelopes for each of the bills they had to pay.
The first envelope was always savings. Whether it was $5 or only $2, they always saved something.
Sometimes it amazes me how much professional pundits try desperately to avoid the truth.
I was reading an article in the Washington Post by Mitchell Lerner, a professor at Ohio State claiming that the end of the Cold War was a major contributor to the ultimate election of Donald Trump.
Lerner said Americans put aside their hatred of the federal government because of the need to battle the Russians in the Cold War. Once it ended, Americans no longer had use for the federal government.
That's a nice conservative point of view.
Of course it's wrong.
The right wing has spent more than 50 years attacking the government, defending the right of states to treat their residents badly.
We're one of the only countries in which you have fewer rights and/or privileges if you live in, say, Mississippi instead of New York.
The great irony of it all is that it's the people in those states who are conned into believing that they might be poor and ignorant, but they have more freedom than other Americans.
"In spite of everything I still believe that people are really good at heart. I simply can't build up my hopes on a foundation consisting of confusion, misery and death. ... I think peace and tranquility will return again." -- Closing paragraph, "The Diary of A Young Girl,"Anne Frank
So where do we go from here?
I remain basically an optimist about the good hearts of most people, and I was definitely taken aback -- and seriously flattered -- by a reader's comment about me being the "last best hope for a permanent MIDDLE viewpoint."
And anyone who doesn't believe in the basic goodness of people -- especially in view of the fact that a young girl hiding from the Nazis can feel that way -- is either seriously afraid or a serious misanthrope.
I even believe that Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush had basically good hearts, although I'm not at all sure about Dick Cheney.
That's a joke, folks, although I remain flabbergasted at the idea that someone could shoot an old man in the face and then make him apologize for getting in the way.
But what do you say to someone if they're shot or killed by some lunatic who believes the Jews or the Blacks are out to get him? Too bad? Tough luck? You should have ducked?
What do you do when you encounter hate like that?
In the fall of 1989, I was covering a 49ers football game for my employer at the time, the Reno Gazette-Journal. After I filed my story, I walked to the Candlestick Park parking lot to find that someone had smashed the passenger window in my car.
Since I faced a 220-mile drive across the Sierras to get back to Reno -- in December, at night -- I was also faced with basically freezing.
When I got into the mountains, I couldn't take the cold any longer. I pulled off I-80 and went into a convenience store to buy a pair of cheap gloves and a ski cap. A perfectly nice-looking man, manning the cash register, made conversation with me and asked me why I was buying those particular items.
"Somebody smashed my window and broke into my car at the 49ers game," I said. "I'm freezing."
"Probably your ni**ers," he said. "Your ni**ers will do stuff like that."
(If you can't figure it out, the * replaces the letter g)
I knew I wasn't going to convert this individual to tolerance, and I was getting tired, so I just thanked him, got my change and went back to my car.
If I had been younger, if I hadn't been a tired 39-year-old who had seen too much, I probably would have criticized his racist remarks. But except for the racism -- and I know that's an "except for that, how did you like the play, Mrs. Lincoln" remark -- he didn't seem like a bad guy.
He didn't say what he said in an angry voice. He was more old and ignorant than anything else, and I'm not convinced we should hate people for being old or ignorant.
All that happened a long, long time ago. And so much has happened to make it more difficult to stand against hate. We have a president who rode a platform of hate and anger to the White House. Whether he won fairly or was installed by the Russians doesn't much matter after nearly two years. We have to deal with the fact that he's there and at least for now has a great deal of power.
Queen Elizabeth II once referred to a year late in the last century as an annus horribilis, and except for the fact that I'd probably get snarky about the first word, I might be tempted to describe 2018 with that same phrase.
I have two very close friends I have known forever. One lost his wife on Thanksgiving Day, the other lost his mother on Christmas Day. That one had been chronically ill for years and the other was 88 years old may have made it less surprising, but that's about all.
My own mother is slipping away. She'll be 92 next month, and she has outlived her husband of 52 years -- my dad -- by more than a decade. I have nine siblings, five of them brothers and sisters in-law, one one of them learned recently of an advanced case of liver cancer.
Albanie
I don't remember who it was who said it first, but we all reach a point in our lives when life begins taking away more than it gives us. The "gifts" it has been giving me in recent times are chronic arthritis pain in my neck and upper spine, stenosis somewhere in that same area that has me almost blacking out at times, and worsening pain in my left hip that has me worrying I'll need a hip replacement.
Oh, and assuming I live another 344 days, I'll "celebrate" my 70th birthday in December.
After nearly 70 years of surprises, the thought of being truly shocked by something wasn't part of my makeup.
Until Thursday.
I signed onto Facebook and saw I had a message from my lifelong friend Mick Curran. We had a dialogue going recently and I figured this was his latest response.
I opened the message.
Cheryl and son Sean
"Cheryl died today."
I don't know if I was ever more shocked by something that probably shouldn't have been that shocking. Mick's wife had been in poor health for many years and had been hospitalized recently, although she had returned home and posted on Facebook that things were looking up.
"Sick for two months now. I am done with this. Unfortunately, it is not done with me. Yes, I am still thankful for so much!"
That was Saturday.
She died five days later.
I didn't realize it at the time, but Mick told me I had known Cheryl longer than any of his other friends. We met in the summer of 1978 when my first wife and I visited Mick in Los Angeles.
Mick and Cheryl pre-1980
We met again in 1981, two years after they married and nearly two years after my first marriage ended. They had come to Virginia to visit Mick's parents, and we went on a double date to see a movie at Bailey's Crossroads. Ironically, the woman I was dating and have remained close to for nearly 30 years later became friends with Cheryl through Facebook.
Cheryl told me she and Lisa had enjoyed some long and wonderful phone conversations. I was happy for both of them.
Aside from a vacation in Los Angeles in May 1986, I didn't have any contact with her until my last stop before moving to California myself in 1990. I worked in Reno from the fall of '88 to the spring of '90, and there were five or six times I made the 1,000-mile round trip for long weekends.
She and Mick had two children by then, and her health was starting to slip by then. They had tried for a long time to have children, and Sean (1983) and Kelsey (1985) were turning out to be two wonderful ones. I don't think there was anything in her life she took more pride in than being a mother, and sometimes it made her react to certain things.
In 1990, there was a TV commercial for a convenience store that talked about the challenges modern mothers face. The joke was that the two "mothers" in the advert were Mr. Moms. She was upset by that because she thought it was making fun of mothers.
When I moved down to Southern California, I stayed with them for a few months while looking for a place of my own. Kelsey was 4 that year and adorable, and I taught her a sequence of "high five, low five. baby five and goofus five (hands backward)" that we would joke about.
Kelsey grew up to be a wonderful, unselfish person who spent the last couple of years taking care of her mother 24/7. Just last Friday, Cheryl voiced her appreciation on Facebook.
Easter 2016
"My Kelsey has taken such good care of me through all this hospital and sicky stuff. So grateful for her."
Of course Sean and Kelsey weren't Cheryl's only joys. She and Mick had a third child -- Shannon -- in 1999, and Shannon brought much pleasure to her mother's life.
Through all her health problems, Cheryl remained wonderfully upbeat on Facebook. She was thankful for what she had, not what she lacked. She wasn't able to go to church, but she thought it was wonderful she could "attend" through streaming video on the Internet.
When you're retired, as I have been for nearly 11 years, it's easy to lose track of people. Mick has been my closest friend for more than 50 years, but the only time I've spent with him the last eight years was when we both attended a dear friend's funeral in Colorado in 2016.
It had been too many years since I last saw Cheryl, and there is so much I don't know about her situation. Close friend or no, Mick keeps his cards very close to his chest these days.
I know Cheryl spent her adult life loving Jesus, loving her husband and her children. I know that for all she went though, it didn't cause her faith to falter.
I know beyond any doubt that when she passed from our world on Thursday and stood before the Lord, she had only one word to say.
