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FOUR SEASONS BREEZE | JANUARY 2017 7 inches shorter than I was back then, so the weight is more – shall we say – concentrated. Despite this, I looked so withered in the picture I thought I might have lost a pound or two. Alas, the scale said no. Well, the boys look good in both pictures. I am rich with sons; they help make my Years Golden. I was walking out of my doctor's office building and spotted three dimes on the ground just in front of the door. I bent to pick them up, thinking "this is certainly good luck," then realized several people ahead of me must have seen the money and walked by. It wasn't valuable enough to bother with. Only an old geezer – with a memory of when a dime would buy something and not just pay part of the tax – would take the trouble. And it's a lot more trouble for me to bend over and struggle upright than it is for some 50-year-old punk. Inflation has thrown my sense of what things cost into chaos. At the end of the Great Depression, I remember buying a hot dog, French fries and a coke for a nickel each. That 30 cents would feed two people for lunch. My mother used to talk with awe about people with a "five-figure income," that is someone making $10,000 a year – the lofty salary that meant one had really made it. In 1935 a U.S. senator made $8,500; today $10,000 is below the poverty line. (Of course, you were considered pretty well off back then if you had both a telephone and a car.) There is talk today of raising the minimum wage to $15 an hour – that's over $31,000 a year. When I entered the labor market – as a teenaged soda jerk at the end of World War II -- I was paid the minimum 50 cents an hour. That's $20 a week or just over $1,000 a year. Ten years later, after college and a stint in the Marines, I re-entered the civilian labor market at the opulent new minimum, a princely $1 an hour. Over the years my salary went up and I, myself, achieved a "five figure income." But inflation had gone up too, so I was short of the Forbes 500. Inflation has a toll: My house today cost more than 15 times my first house. The assets my wife and I accumulated over some 40 years for our retirement vastly exceed any amount I anticipated as a $1-an- hour cub reporter – but in today's purchasing power they are quite modest. I still stop to pick up every three dimes I see on the sidewalk. Inflation has taken a lot of the gold out of my Golden Years. My sons have grown and I have shrunk; my assets have grown, but their buying power has shrunk; my age has grown but my circle of contemporary friends has shrunk – all at increasing speed. Well, maybe the New Year will be at least as Golden as the last. And let's hope 2018 takes a little longer getting here. Time is too valuable to go by so fast. continued from page 6

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