What If?

“What If?” 

Two words that could mean nothing at all or mean a complete change in a person’s life.

The reason I am thinking about this is because few of my poker playing buddies and I were discussing this last week. We are all about the same age, mid-60s to early 70s and we agreed it is counter productive to ask this question at our age. Our careers are set or we have retired. We have kids and grandkids and long-term marriages. The consensus was it might actually be harmful, or at least depressing, to consider “What if?” at this point in our lives.

Yet this nagging question does creep back into my consciousness every once in awhile and I usually push it out of the way. Still, I sometimes wonder, “What if?”

Before high school, I don’t really recall too many conscious decisions that I could have changed. And that’s what I am talking about—not incidents where fate is involved.

Reaching the Age of “What If?”

Once I reached high school, there were more choices with meaningful “what ifs.”  What if one of the girls I asked out had said “yes” instead of “no” and things had clicked. What if I had decided attend Ball State University—my oldest brother when there--instead or Miami University. If I had gone to Ball State and majored in Radio-TV, I probably would have been in classes with David Letterman (we are about the same age) and, who knows. But, I wouldn’t have met Pam and shared 46 years of marriage together.

Our senior year at Miami, Pam and I both looked for jobs. She was offered an elementary school teaching job in a nice suburb of Cincinnati, but I couldn’t find a TV or radio job in Cincinnati or Dayton, so she turned it down. My only job offer was at Eastern Kentucky University and we moved to Richmond, Ky., the summer after graduation. The week before school started, she interviewed for a teaching job in rural Estill County and was hired to teach a split third and fourth grade class—her first and only year teaching in an elementary school.

What if she had accepted the job in Cincinnati and I had continued to look for something in that market or if I had decided to switch careers?

In the late 70s, we decided to start a family, but after a year nothing happened, so we started going to a fertility specialist at the Cleveland Clinic. After several fruitless years of tests, procedures, etc. there was no pregnancy, so we explored adoption. During those few years, I was offered a new job a couple of times, but we would have had to relocate. I declined these offers, because we were moving up on the adoption waiting lists and still seeing the specialist.

Mid-Career Move: What If?

After we adopted Brian, I didn’t look for other jobs for a few years because we had a nice house and Pam had completed grad school in accounting and was working for a good local CPA firm. In the early 90s, enrollment at UA was declining and it was becoming apparent that our video department at the University of Akron might fall victim to budget cuts. So I began looking for another job. I had several interviews, mostly outside of northeast Ohio, but I never got any offers.

A university in Florida contacted me and I applied for a doctoral fellowship that would meant relocating for a year and then writing my dissertation. Dr. Collins anyone? Could have happened but I missed the final cut.

After our department was axed in 1995, I scrambled around to make a living teaching part time and transitioning into journalism and then multimedia. I returned to UA in 2001 and now that I am retired, I try not to give much thought to “What if?” moments anymore.

I checked Google to see if there were any good articles about this question. There were over four million entries, but I didn’t see anything that dealt with this question to my satisfaction. There have been several fictional stories, a few movies and about two dozen songs containing this question.

I think the reason you shouldn’t speculate on this question is because there is no way to get an answer. A scientist can hypothesize “What if…” and there is a chance of finding a definitive answer.  But, I will never find the answer to my “what if” questions, unless I can find a time machine and go back like the film “Back to the Future.”

Still, every once in a while I wonder: “What if?”

The Nostalgic Summer

“Nostalgia - it's delicate, but potent. Teddy told me that in Greek, nostalgia literally means 'the pain from an old wound.’ It's a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone.”

--Don Draper in a “Mad Men” episode titled “The Wheel”, 2007.

A few weeks ago my wife and I were recalling the events we experienced this past summer, two major trips, two 50-year high school reunions and a major concert that was fantastic. “It certainly was a summer for nostalgia,” she said.

Yes, it was and I have been thinking about how to write about that. I could take the chronological approach, but that’s too easy and it might sound a lot like a Rick Steves travelogue. Or it could end up sounding like the “What I did last summer” essay—an assignment many of us dreaded at the beginning of the school year.

This summer we saw a lot of wonderful sites and reunited with old friends and family. But, as I look back, I realize the trips and reunions were mostly about rekindling memories both good and bad—thus, nostalgia.

The Reunion

Let’s start with my 50-year high school reunion. There was the delight of seeing classmates that I really liked in high school and rekindling those friendships for just a moment half a century later. But, there was also some pain remembering classmates who had passed away or who couldn’t attend because of illness.

At my reunion there was a display of photos of the 24 classmates who had passed away. One of them, only a couple of weeks before the reunion. I looked at some of the photos and remembered happier times and then felt sad for the loss I felt along with their loved ones felt—nostalgia.

It's Only Been 56 Years

A few weeks later, Pam and I had dinner with my cousin Kevin at a very nice restaurant on a hillside overlooking the Pacific Ocean in LaJolla, near San Diego. He once lived in Macedonia, Ohio—about 15 minutes from where I live now. His parents divorced when he was 12 and his mom (my dad’s sister) moved to Florida.

Kevin ended up going to college in Texas and then medical school in Utah where he met his wife and they had a daughter. They eventually divorced and Kevin is now a professor at the medical school at UC San Diego.

We had not seen each other since 1960 and we had a lot of catching up to do.

We reminisced about our visits to his childhood home, living in Ohio versus California and family members still alive and ones passed. He talked about visiting his birth father’s grave on a trip to Ohio. The visit was a mixture of good memories and pain—nostalgia.

The California Couple

One of Pam’s childhood friends lives in Camarillo, Calif., about 45 minutes from downtown Los Angeles. When I was dating Pam, we went out with Carol and her date a couple of times and I always liked her. She was a flight attendant for a few years and eventually met her current husband John and moved to SoCal.

John is a vibrant, likable guy who was manufacturers rep for a men’s clothing company for a number of years. But, he contracted a very rare disease that affected his circulation and has since lost both feet and several fingers. He is now wheelchair bound, but he is able to get around driving a specially-equipped van. We had a great time visiting Ventura Beach one afternoon.

After lunch, while Pam and Carol went shopping, John and I talked over coffee on a patio overlooking the marina. He told me he was a student at Kent State University when the Ohio National Guard fired the shots that killed four students on May 4, 1970. He was walking between classes and saw one of the victims fall about 20 feet in front of him. He said he dove under a nearby car and didn’t move for about an hour. The mood of a pleasant conversation had suddenly turned somber—nostalgia.

A Concert to Remember

After returning from the west coast, we went to a concert at the “Q” Arena in Cleveland. Paul McCartney put on a phenomenal show that lasted almost three hours in front of a sellout crowd. There was no intermission and the 74-year old Sir Paul never left the stage. It was so great to hear the old favorites and one thing I’ll remember most is the enthusiastic audience signing along with many of the songs. But there were a couple of somber moments when he talked about the two Beatles now passed and performed songs identified with each one.

Pam and I had tickets to see Sir Paul in 1978 at the Richfield Coliseum, but we could not attend and I had to sell them to a co-worker. She was in graduate school and her prof scheduled a mid-term exam that night and she didn’t want to ask him if she could take the test another time.

So, there was the pain of missing that concert and the delight of seeing McCartney 38 years later. His music defined my high school and college years and it’s a little sad to think those years have passed—nostalgia.

Can you imagine us

Years from today,

Sharing a park bench quietly?

How terribly strange

To be seventy.

Old friends,

Memory brushes the same years,

Silently sharing the same fear...

--Simon and Garfunkel song “Old Friends”, 1968.

It was quite a summer.

 

Pennies

“A penny saved is a penny earned.”

--Benjamin Franklin

When I come home and change into more casual clothes, I take the change out of my pocket and put it on top of my dresser. At some point, I separate out the pennies and put them in a cup on my dresser. When that cup is full, I empty the pennies into a larger can. Months later, when I get ambitious I put the pennies into paper rolls holding 50 of each and exchange them for paper bills and larger coins at the bank.

I hardly ever take pennies with me, but I feel good if I can use them for a purchase and feel annoyed if I get some more of them as change for a purchase.

The U.S. Mint officially calls the penny a “cent.” The U.S. Treasury officially names it the “one cent piece.”  The name penny is of British origin and some sources say it comes from the name of a seventh-century ruler of Britain named Penda.

The Origin and Cost of a Penny

U.S. pennies are copper in color, but they are more than 98 percent zinc in total composition. At various times, including World War Two, the government decided to use an aluminum mix for pennies because copper was needed for the war effort or to reduce costs because of an increase in the cost of copper.

The current penny has its beginnings in 1909 when the U.S. Mint began producing Lincoln pennies to commemorate his birth in 1809. The Lincoln monument adorned the reverse side of the penny for decades and in 2009, the Mint decided to use four different “B” sides for the penny and retain Lincoln’s portrait on the front.

It costs the government $0.0167 to manufacture and distribute each penny, so the coin is already a money loser. In 2013 it cost $55 million to manufacture nearly 3.5 billion pennies. A significant number of them are probably stored in jars, cans or cups by private citizens and are not in circulation.

Rounding and the Demise of the Penny

Many experts suggest that we should do away with penny and simply allow business to round up or down each purchase to the nearest 5 cents. There was some sentiment for the U.S. Congress to act on this in 2013 when the Canadian government did away with penny and made rounding the law.

A lot of business interests support this, saying that it will save money by reducing the time for cashiers need to make change. However, polls show that most consumers don’t support this idea and about three quarters of them favor keeping the penny. Consumers fear they will lose money if businesses are allowed to round change. However, a number of economists say that the overall effect of eliminating the penny and allowing rounding will not favor either the consumer or merchants.

A group called Americans for Common Cents (www.pennies.org)  opposes the abolition of the penny by the government. The group says its own member polls show 71 percent think keeping the penny will prevent price increases.

A Final Note About Pennies

My senior year in high school, I signed up to take a chemistry class. It turned out to be a good decision, but not necessarily for educational reasons. I attended a Catholic high school, but that school had just hired a lay teacher who had just graduated from college.  Her name was Carol Crawford and she was a very attractive brunette and a welcome change from the nuns and priests who taught most of my other classes. Also, when she paired each of us with another student as a lab partner, I felt like I had won the lottery. My partner was a very attractive classmate named Ginny. So, I actually looked forward to chemistry class a lot that year, but not because of the Periodic Table of Elements.

During a lab session dealing with acids, we were instructed that we could use acid to clean pennies. Ginny and I put a drop of acid (I don’t remember which one) on a penny and it developed a like-new shine in seconds. Ginny grabbed a few more pennies from her purse and dropped acid on them with the same result. We were amazed at the result and I suggested there might be a demand for “Ginny’s Pennies.” I always was a sucker for rhymes.

The moral of this story is that we didn’t see much value in pennies then as currency and there is not much value now because billions of them are not in circulation, but being stored in cans, jars and other types of containers in our homes. They are not in circulation, but they cost our government millions each year as billions more are minted.

This is just a thought about how the government might save millions each year. But now, my penny containers are getting full, so I’ve got to get some penny rolls and think about what I want to do with the money I’m about to get. Woo Hoo!