Last Thursday morning, my lovely bride and I boarded a plane bound for San Francisco. We were supposed to run in a 12-person Ragnar relay race covering 200+ miles from San Francisco to Napa. One of my co-workers organized the team, just as he had done in 2017. That year, raging wildfires caused the cancellation of the race about a week in advance.
Shortly after we arrived, it was, as Yogi Berra would say “Deja vu all over again.” We received notice that this year’s race also was cancelled due to raging wildfires in Sonoma.
It was a bummer, dude, but we managed to make some lemonade out of the lemons we were given. The entire team met at the starting line at Golden Gate Park on Friday morning, when the race was supposed to begin, and we ran to (and across) the Golden Gate Bridge.
Then we had lunch on the bay in Sausalito. Then Muir Woods. And sunset back at Golden Gate Park’s beach. And we still did the winery tours that we had scheduled for Sunday. So don’t cry for us.
Nice shirt…
But do cry for California, which has been devastated by wildfires over the past few years. It’s a beautiful piece of the globe, but idyllic has turned dystopian. Infernos are the new normal.
And cry for the residents who have lost their loved ones, their homes, their businesses, their power… their way of life. (Check out this NPR article for more.)
I love the sentiment of this quote, and especially the vivid language of it. “Your universe has tilted”… “irrevocably lost”… “bow before the mystery”… “let gratitude wash over you”…. “brief walk on our fragile planet”. It’s note-perfect.
This quote comes from Gratefulness.org. You can subscribe to their “Word of the Day” email. It’s usually a phrase instead of a single word, but it truly is the thought that counts.
I know you probably don’t need yet another email in your inbox, but this one takes mere seconds to read each day, and the heightened awareness can last a lot longer. Maybe even the rest of your “brief walk on our fragile planet.”
[I’m grateful to my good friend Phil Roberto for sending me the link to Gratefulness.org a few years back.]
Nick DiNardo is a fellow parent of Walnut Hills High School kids. Our sons played on the same junior high soccer team, and our daughter participated in the Ultimate Frisbee club that he leads/coaches.
(Photo: Jeff Dean/The Enquirer)
Nick’s day job is Managing Attorney for the Legal Aid Society of Southwest Ohio. He was featured in a Cincinnati Enquirer special section a couple of Sundays ago. The Enquirer is doing a four-part series on the lingering effects of the Great Recession, and it’s well worth the reading investment. You quickly realize how the economic collapse of a decade ago created an even greater divide between the haves and the have nots, and how the cards are stacked against the poor.
The article is a great example of how hard it is for the poor (including the working poor) to keep their heads above water. All it takes is a single, solitary, unexpected expense — an urgent care visit or car breakdown — to crush you.
Most payday loan customers are poor, earning about $30,000 a year. Most pay exorbitant fees and interest rates that have run as high as 590%. And most don’t read the fine print, which can be unforgiving.
Read the article to find out how a working single mom wound up paying $3,878 for an $800 loan. And she’d still be on the hamster wheel if not for Nick’s intervention.
Payday lending may not be illegal, but it sure as heck is unethical.
DiNardo hopes the new Ohio law regulating the loans will mean fewer cases like hers in the future, but he’s not sure. While mortgage rates go for 3.5% and car loans hover around 5%, poor people without access to credit will still turn to payday lenders for help.
And when they do, even under the new law, they’ll pay interest rates and fees as high as 60%.
The purpose of life is to discover your gift. The work of life is to develop it. The meaning of life is to give your gift away.
David Viscott – Finding Your Strength in Difficult Times: A Book of Meditations, 1993
My gift is goofball writing. You’re welcome.
Typical dubbatrubba reader…
Speaking of giving it away, if you have a friend who might enjoy my random brain droppings, please share a link to dubbatrubba.com with them. Thanks.
According to my WordPress dashboard, this is Post #677. I’ve still got a long way to go to get to the 10,000 hours that Malcolm Gladwell cites as the benchmark for mastery of a craft. My “gift” is a work in progress.
But I’ll keep working. And I’ll keep giving it away.
In case you missed it: a youth football/cheer squad organization in a town just a few miles from Cincinnati was requiring kids as young as age seven to sell tickets in a gun raffle as a fundraiser. (Full story from cincinnati.com is here. All excerpts below are from that article.)
Absurd is absolutely right. Asinine.
Because the brave mom questioned the “wisdom” of such an event, the organization’s leaders allowed kids to opt out of selling tickets. However, the youth org is still raffling off the type of semi-automatic weapon of war that has been used in several mass shootings/killings. The Junior Lions need to raise funds to… wait for it… pay their insurance bill. Because youth football can be a bit dangerous, don’t ya know?
Kudos to Heather Chilton for trying to provide a sanity check in a country that desperately needs more of it.
Here’s a photo of our second child, Peter, taken just a short while ago:
And here’s a shot of him from yesterday:
We dropped him off at college, at Ohio University. Abandoned him, really, at the tender age of 18.
Our oldest goes to school in town, so Peter is the first one to be truly “away” at college. It’s a two-and-a-half-hour drive, but it seems light years away.
I know he’ll be fine; it’s the rest of us that I’m worried about. Peter is a “glue guy” as the sportscasters like to say. Easygoing, funny, gets along with everyone. A straight arrow. And more than happy to chauffeur his two younger siblings around. With him gone, the sibling dynamic will change, and the family fabric will be altered. We’ll all have to adjust to life sans Pedro.
I know it’s just the first in a series of goodbyes, of slowly but surely letting go… but that doesn’t make it any easier.
Kevin Sullivan on Life advice from a man who lived it: “A good one Damian. Bring our lens into focus after the long weekend or our long life journey.” Jul 7, 09:38
You done said…