Sunday
Now, this is almost funny but not really. It’s Labor Day weekend. I
am up in Sandpoint with my wife and my pal, Phil DeMuth. I am
feeling extremely unwell and have been since I got back from the
American Legion Convention in Milwaukee on Wednesday. I was a
speaker there and privileged to introduce Secretary of Defense
Robert Gates to the convention for a speech on Iraq, Afghanistan,
and defense policy (a superb speech) and also privileged to speak
of my own gratitude to these fine men and women.
But just before I left, Phil facetiously told me I should
be careful not to get Legionnaire’s Disease. The joke, although
it’s not really funny, is that now I have a vicious pulmonary
disorder that’s tearing me to pieces and as I read on line about
Legionnaire’s Disease, the symptoms are painfully
similar.
I do not in the slightest blame the Legion for this, but
the hotel was a bit suspect.
Anyway, yesterday I should have stayed in bed all day but
I didn’t. Instead, I idiotically took some people on a long ride
down a very choppy Pendoreille River to get a dreadful meal,
enlightened only by an adorable young singer named Joanie who
appeared at our table and sang her little heart out. By the time I
got back I felt 99% dead.
Well, now it’s Sunday and I am having lunch with five
local people who bid for lunch with me at a charity auction and
won.
These are five simply great people and what they are
telling me is making my head spin.
One of the guests is a woman who does psychiatric social
work with kids in bad situations in Bonner County. These are the
children of meth addicts, alcoholics, and so forth. Her stories of
tiny tots left to fend for themselves while their parents go on
long benders are heart breaking — but then she got to the part
that made my jaw drop.
“What’s really making it worse,” she said, “is this 99
week thing. Now that people who are unemployed can get paid for
doing nothing for almost two years, some of them just stay high as
long as they can and don’t do anything else.”
“An unintended consequence,” said I, “of
compassion.”
“Yes,” she said, “but a consequence for sure.”
The man sitting next to me, who used to run a large
sawmill near Coeur d’Alene, had another story to tell.
“We had a heck of a time getting workers even at the peak
of the boom,” he said. “No one wanted to work. No local people
wanted to work unless they were already there. The Mexicans would
come and work all day but the whites just would not work. Now, they
can’t get work even if they want it and a lot of them don’t even
want it. They just want to be paid to do nothing.”
It was all very discouraging. On the other hand, these
were some of the most interesting, pleasant men and women I have
ever met in my life. I don’t think I have ever had this interesting
a conversation in Los Angeles.
But by the time it was over, I was burning up. I went back
to our condo for a nap, felt worse. My wife said she felt terrible,
too. So, we dragged Phil along and went to the Bonner General
Hospital emergency room a few blocks away. They treated us great.
Flawlessly. They gave us medicines, wished us well, and off we went
to go home and die.
Tuesday
Wifey and I spent all of Labor Day resting. Sleeping. E
mailing, more sleeping. Listening to Warren Buffett’s trains roar
by. Then a modest dinner at the Trinity Café and then back to
sleep.
Today, I did various errands. Summer is really and truly
over. It is cold and gray here. I still don’t feel well. Plus, I
had a deeply unsettling evening. I went out to get some films
developed at Wal-Mart. (Yes, I still once in a while use film and I
love it.) While I was waiting for the developing, I wandered to the
men’s room. Next to the rest rooms was a bank of three computers
with a sign above saying something like, “Wal-Mart Hiring
Center.”
Sitting in a chair hunched over a keyboard was a very old
man, at least in his 80s, with matted gray hair and beard,
struggling to use the set up to apply for a job. A younger woman
was very kindly and gently helping him.
I pulled her aside. “Is this man applying for a job here?”
I asked.
“Yes,” she answered.
“Didn’t he work as a greeter here a long time
ago?”
“Yes, but now he needs a job again,” she said.
At first I felt horrible, and then I thought how great it
was that Wal-Mart would probably be giving him a job. What other
company in this whole country would do that?
I went home to whine and complain about my life generally
and then I got an e-mail that really rocked me. A woman who used to
be the girlfriend of a wealthy man, then of another wealthy man,
and had recently done some bits of work for me for very good pay,
asked for more money. I told her I could not give her more. She
said, in essence, that she would then have to become a call girl. I
didn’t respond. What could I say?
The sad, indeed, horrifying, thing about this is that she
might be the fifth or sixth woman I know who has, in recent times,
told me calmly that she is about to become a call girl to keep up
her life style in the absence of a well paid career — or maybe
just in the absence of any sense of self-respect or work ethic.
However you slice it, it is deeply upsetting.
On the other hand, there is that elderly man at Wal-Mart
with the guts to still seek to be self-sufficient through his own
exertions.
What a world. And then there are the soldiers, shining
high above all of it. And the Legionnaires, whom I love so much.
What a world.
