Stay Loose

Where Have All the Domestic Sedans Gone?

My daughter and I took a four-day trip to Los Angeles over the summer.  She and I had been there before with the rest of our family, but this was a chance for the two of us to spend some time together.  She picked the destination and about half of our activities for the weekend.  The highlight for her was our day at Disney.

 

I had generally stayed away from Disneyland when I lived in LA for nine years in the late 70’s and early 80’s.  My only visits there were to accompany friends from out of town who thought that visiting LA meant going to Disneyland.  I had never pushed Disney on my family during our visits there, and so I was surprised when my daughter asked to go there.

 

The place is 50 years old looks much like it did 30 years ago when I first visited.  Why, I wondered, wandering through the park with my daughter, has Disney not upgraded and modernized it over time?  They are a big company with sufficient cash flow to make lots of capital improvements.

 

The answer became clear to me as we watched our friend Dave and his daughter enjoy the park with us that cool July morning.  Dave was re-living the experience he’d had in the fifth grade, back in the early 60’s, by visiting all the old attractions.  Sure, a few of the characters at “Pirates of the Caribbean” had changed, and there was the SpeedPass feature to minimize our time spent standing in line, but Dave was able to say to his daughter “this is what Disneyland was like when I was your age” and share this experience with her.  Maybe he even saw his fifth-grade self in her and felt that he’d found a sort of fountain of youth.  We didn’t discuss it.

 

It’s commonly thought that what starts in California moves eastward across the United States and becomes part of our culture.  We got a glimpse of the truth behind that idea on this same trip to LA, as we were flying along with thousands of other cars one afternoon on the 101 freeway (otherwise known as “Ventura Highway,” from the song by America.)  I said to my daughter, “Look at the cars that are ahead and behind us in the eastbound lane.  None of the cars are made in America, but most of the trucks and SUVs are American.”  Sure enough, it was three to five minutes before a pesky Cadillac sedan passed us on the right, going 15 MPH faster than everyone else.

 

Since I live in Columbus, Ohio, a state that still depends heavily on the automotive sector for its economy, I was used to seeing a 50/50 mix of domestic and foreign sedans on the roads at home.  We have all seen the sales figures and know that Toyota and Honda are about to surpass GM and Ford in total vehicle sales.  That afternoon on the 101 was a sobering vision of what is to come in the Midwest.

 

We stayed at the house of good friends in a part of LA called Monte Nido.  It’s in the hills above Malibu and very rustic and upscale at the same time.  As I walked around the neighborhood each morning, I saw at least two cars in every driveway.  Invariably, one of them was a hybrid car or some other very small sedan.  Each one was a foreign car.

 

 

It’s not clear how our economy can continue to grow without manufacturing jobs.  Sure, books like “The World Is Flat” explain that we are knowledge workers now, and that our ideas will be turned into goods in other places.  Still, I wonder what happens when the countries that manufacture our goods start to hold us hostage for economic, political or religious reasons.

 

P.S. While my daughter and I were in LA, my wife and my son picked up my new sedan in Cincinnati.  It was made by a Japanese manufacturer.  I never considered any American cars in my search.

Where Were You?

Where were you when you first heard that Barack Obama was going to be elected as the next President of the United States?  Maybe you were with friends and family who agreed with your point of view on this election.  Or, you might have been with people who had voted for the candidate you didn’t vote for, so you were having opposite reactions.  And maybe, just maybe, you were by yourself and got to let out a cheer or a boo that nobody heard but you.

 

We have moments in our lives that cause us to say “I’ll always remember where I was when I heard the news.”  Some of those moments are known to only a few, such as the birth or death of a loved one or the beginning or end of a relationship.  More of those moments happen around events that are shared by millions, such as the death of a public figure or the news of an act of war.

 

I remember exactly where I was when I heard that John F. Kennedy had been killed, when the Challenger had exploded, or when the first plane crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11.  And I remember where I was when I heard my father’s voice on my answering machine telling me that my grandfather had passed away and I needed to get home as soon as possible.

 

It seems odd to me that most of the memories I have of these epochal moments are about events that were tragedies.  About the only celebratory events I can recall in this vein are sports victories, and those are not epochal moments, no matter how hard we try to believe in them.  (There are always just as many people who think of those moments in a negative vein, since there is a loser for every winner in a sporting event.)

 

I was driving from Lima, Ohio back to my home in Columbus on the evening of November 4, 2008.  Our family had gone to Lima for an early dinner to celebrate the birthday of my mother.  The dinner was early because we needed to get back home so we could get to bed on a school night.  And my mother agreed to have dinner with us on one condition: we had to be finished by 8 p.m., because she had committed to meeting with her friends in the local “Grandmothers for Obama” group to watch the results of the election at Obama headquarters.

 

I decided to vote for Barack Obama soon after he and his opponent picked their running mates.  Though I was inclined to pick Obama earlier in the race, I thought it would be best to wait to decide until I learned who the Vice Presidential candidates would be.  Obama’s pick confirmed what I suspected about him: that he would surround himself with team members who had strengths he did not himself possess.  McCain’s pick confirmed my worst fears about him since he had started tacking to the right before getting the nomination: that he would do or say almost anything to get elected, and he would even make an irresponsible choice of running mate to attract votes from the far right.

 

Four years ago, a friend from New York City came to stay with us during the 2004 election so she could volunteer to work for John Kerry.  (I might have opened my doors to friends who wanted to work Ohio for George W. Bush if any had asked me, but none did.)  After the results of the 2004 election, I got a number of e-mails from friends outside of Ohio who expressed disappointment that the state had voted for Bush instead of Kerry.  So I had been carrying around some remorse from that for four years, and I dreaded what might happen if Ohio tipped the 2008 election to McCain.

 

If you judged the probable results of the election from the yard signs in our neighborhood, it was going to be very close.  And I did not believe the pre-election polls were very accurate, even though they showed Obama with a seven-point lead in the last poll prior to the election.  There were too many unknowns and firsts in this election, and too much was at stake.

 

We were listening to NPR on the drive home that night.  It was turned down low as the commentators filled the airtime with human interest stories.  At about 9:30 p.m., as we watched a half moon rise over the landscape on US Route 33 near Mad River Mountain, a voice came on the broadcast that had a new sense of urgency.  We turned up the volume.

 

The voice said “We are now predicting that Barack Obama will win Ohio, and we predict that this will carry the Electoral College for him.  We declare Barack Obama to be the winner of the 2008 Presidential election.”

 

Where were you?  Will you remember this as an epochal moment in your life?

 

P.S.  The title of this story was inspired by the Jackson Browne song of the same name from his 2008 CD entitled “Time the Conqueror.”

A Change of Seasons

The fall is one of my favorite seasons in central Ohio.  My body is wired to like cooler temperatures more than hot days.  The beauty of the colors can be stunning on sunny and cloudy days alike.  We can see changes every day if we look for them, and the change in scenery beats the long dreary days of winter and the long dog days of summer.

 

Not everyone feels this way about fall, though.  The wonderful person who cuts my graying hair every four weeks told me this morning that she was not looking forward to fall because it was getting colder.

 

I didn’t appreciate the changes of seasons in Ohio until I moved to New Hampshire for college and Los Angeles for my post-college days.  In New Hampshire, the winter seemed to start near the end of October and end in late April.  It was not uncommon to have at least a few inches of snow on the ground from mid-November through mid-April.  And the temperatures could drop into the single digits and stay there for weeks on end.  So the winters in Ohio look idyllic compared to the New Hampshire winters.

 

A body can get used to almost anything.  I would come home from New Hampshire

to Ohio for Christmas and walk around outside wearing nothing up top but a t-shirt and a wool shirt when all my high school buddies were bundled up in ski parkas and hunting caps with the flaps pulled down tight over their ears.  I simply didn’t need those things to stay warm in temperatures below freezing.

 

It is said that there are two seasons in southern California:  summer, and fire season.  Only rarely would the rains come and wipe the skies clean of the smog that was resident most of the time.  Those days were stunning, as the mountains that surround the San Fernando Valley were suddenly visible where they had not been the day before.  The only real sense that the seasons were changing came from the fact that the skies got darker earlier in the fall and stayed lighter later in the spring.

 

We humans are programmed to both embrace change, and also to resist it.   I discovered over the past year that I am a real creature of habit when it comes to diet and exercise.  In order to lose some weight that had built up steadily over the years, all I had to do was to change a few simple habits regarding my diet and my workouts.  So once I built some new ruts, it was easy to run right along in them and maintain my new weight.  I changed because it was good for me, and resisted changing back to my old habits because who likes change?

 

Some people may not like fall because they know that winter will surely follow.  But I say that I like winter because I know that spring will surely follow, too.  When I am feeling down, which fortunately doesn’t happen very often in my blessed life, I am always able to get out of my funk by using the following internal dialogue:

 

“When you have felt this way before, has it ever lasted forever?”

“No.” 

“So, don’t you think it will get better this time, too? 

“Yes, I guess it will.  Maybe I should go take a walk.”

 

We may be afraid of fall and winter because of their symbolism for the cycles of our lives.  When we get into our 70s and 80s, and have seen more yesterdays than tomorrows, we may think of being in the winter of our lives.  Winter can come earlier to someone who is facing a critical or terminal illness.

 

That’s why I vow to celebrate every fall and every spring like they will be my last.  I embrace the change and look for it to inspire me.  I hope you will, too.