We were very tired when we landed at 8:30 Hawaiian time (11:30 PT). We were tested again for C-19, then picked up our luggage. Moving everything out to the curb, Karin sat on the stone wall while I was going to pick up the car. I had to run to catch the airport shuttle that took people to the car rental yards.

Once on the shuttle and underway, I relaxed for about two minutes, before I remembered my wallet was in my briefcase back with Karin. When I rented the car on Priceline they told me all I had to do was stop and pick up the key at Enterprise. Everything was paid for. I got to the counter after standing in line for 30 minutes.

All was going well, I finally got to the point where I would get the key. I was very close. The key was on the counter right in front of me. Then he asked for my credit card.

I explained to him that it was in my luggage back at the airport. He said he needed the card to take a damage deposit on the car. “No credit card, no car.” I told him I would go with the car and get my luggage, along with Karin who was sitting on the stone wall for an hour now. I would drive right back with my card. He checked with someone behind the door in the wall then came back. “No credit card, no car.”

I was having to get back on the bus to get my card at the airport. If I hadn’t already been into this car rental for $1,400 (we were there for a month), I would have just taken a taxi.  I got back on the bus.

The driver was the same one that brought me to the rental car lot. He asked me, “What happened?” I told him my sad story. I should mention that I was using my walker this whole time. He told me he would drop me off to get Karin and my luggage then come right back after he dropped off the two other people that were on the shuttle.

I bounded across the street, grabbed Karin and said, “Hurry up!”. She didn’t know what was going on. No car, and we are rushing to catch a bus?  We made it back to the shuttle stop just as he pulled up. He jumped out and took care of all of our “stuff” and we were on our way back to the car lot.

When we arrived, the shuttle driver told me to go in and get the key and he would take our belongings over to where I could drive the car right up to them. I got the key then went out to find someone on the lot to find the car. The driver took the key and trotted off into the lot and drove our car right to our luggage and loaded it in. I think perhaps the bus driver was the reincarnation of one of my dogs – – I loved him.

Now very tired, Karin got into the car.  We set the GPS for the timeshare’s address which we had no idea how to get to, then pushed the GO button. The battery in the phone was dead.  JUST KIDDING. All went well. We found the timeshare with a note on the door which said, “Use the phone in the box on the door to call after hours.” It was definitely-after hours. We could hardly get out of the car. We made the call and were given a place to drive to and registered. A maintenance man, I think he was related to the bus driver, grabbed our stuff and put it in his cart and took us to our unit. I decided they were not related, they were just both Hawaiian.

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This is not about my time in Hawaii, but about the actual process of getting from my house in Aliso Viejo, CA to Kona on the Big Island. I have made this trip many times before and the process was always simple. Buy a plane ticket and fly to Kona. Rent a car and drive to my timeshare. This was not to be, this time. Due to a combination of the CV-19 virus and my incompetence, (I blame on my age not my IQ), it became a frustrating and expensive experience.

The process started when I found a flight with the perfect times for us, a direct flight out of LAX to Kona, taking off at 7am and arriving around noon. It was on Alaska Airlines. I gave Karin the fight information and she booked the same flight, but it was with American. Same plane and times. A few days later I got an email notification from Alaska saying,” Your travel plans have changed.” I was now on a flight that arrived in Kona at midnight, and Karin, was left on the original flight. I called and told Alaska that “my travel plans did not change” and I wanted my money back so I could buy a new ticket on American and be back with Karin. I did that.

All seemed to be back on tract. A few days passed and we got a message that our American flight had been changed. We were now taking off at noon and arriving in Kona at 8:30 pm. I called and changed my car rental to a 9pm pick up.

We got the information that we had to be tested for CV-19 within 72 hours of our take off time. OK we can do that. Then we were told that it had to certain type of test by a certified facility that the airline and Hawaii accepted. They gave us a list. I started calling places on the list and found out that we had to pay for the test because it was considered to be a voluntary test, not a medical test. I could understand that. After calling a number of places I finally found one in Carlsbad, 60 miles away, that only charged $170/test. Everyone had a different price. Some were up as high as $395 each. We drove to Carlsbad on Tuesday morning to get our test within the 72 hrs.

We were told that we had to create an account with the state of Hawaii and upload our results when we got them by email. Karin did that on her computer and I did it on my computer. We were under pressure by now because we needed to upload a picture of ourselves, fill out a health form, and upload our CV-19 results from an email we were to get on Wednesday. Once it was all complete, a QR code would be sent to us which we must have on our phone or we couldn’t board the plane.

With the help of my daughter and her husband we were able to figure out how to do the health form and the photo. I received my test results, but Karin’s didn’t show up in her email. It was now late Wednesday and I’m going into panic mode. I called the Carlsbad testing site.

They had sent her results to my email address, instead of hers. They guided me through how to find it on my computer. I found it, then sent Karin an attachment for her to upload into her Hawaii travel account. It didn’t work. I printed a copy of it and took it to the airport with my fingers crossed. It worked – – they let us on the fight.  We landed in Kona at 8:30 p.m., Hawaii time. I’ll pick it up at that point in my next blog. The adventure isn’t over yet.

Wondering what I should follow my last blog about exercise with, it only made sense to also encourage you to get an annual checkup. Thinking on that subject I remembered what was perhaps the most hilarious thing that I can remember in my entire life and it happened in a doctor’s office. (I wouldn’t want you to think that I have become a serious old curmudgeon just because I’ve turned 86)

I had a back operation and was in the hospital. The doctor said I could go home if I could empty my bladder. I really wanted to go home so I used the bathroom in my room and emptied my bladder really well before he came to see me. When he came in, I told him what I had done. He said I had to show them, not tell them.

I was dry. I really wanted to go home. He said if I had a catheter put in, I could go home and come back the next day, then have the catheter taken out and tested. I said, “Great.”

A nurse, that had never inserted a catheter before, was told to do it. She forgot she had to lubricate the tube and was only successful in making my little man raw and bleeding. A doctor was called and he did it with no problem. No that wasn’t the funny thing – believe me, but I got to go home.

I was back at the hospital early the next day, worried about the test. I didn’t have any urine in my bladder; it just ran through the catheter into a bag. The doctor told me not to worry, it was OK and handed me a gown.

I took off my clothes and put on a gown that covered nothing like most hospital gowns, laid down on my back and he proceeded to pull the long tube out of my little man. He had a nurse there to aid him in the procedure. I think she was a trainee. She looked about 18 years old and very cute. He told her to give me the test and left.

She explained that she was going to put in another catheter (I almost got up to run out of the hospital) and pore a flask of water into a funnel through the tube and into my bladder to fill it. Then she would take the catheter out and I would have to empty my bladder into a container and they could measure it and tell if I was able to get it all out. I will not describe the procedure she had to go through to accomplish this, let’s just say that she and my little man became very close friends before it was through. My bladder was full. She pulled out the tube. All that was left was for me to urinate into the container.

She handed me the container and looked me right in the eyes and said (with a straight face), “Would you like for me to leave the room, so you can have some privacy?”  I couldn’t contain myself. I started laughing and then she fell apart and we were laughing so hard I almost missed the container.

I’m not sure what the message of this blog is, but I think it is to see your doctor at least once a year for a good checkup.

No, I’m not out of my mind, and I am talking to you. I can’t help myself – I just want all of my friends and family to stay as healthy as possible. I didn’t give exercise the credit it deserved for helping until I got older, and many of my age mates/friends didn’t as well.

I have only six or seven close friends who are enjoying gift years beyond their mid-80s.  What do we have in common with each other that helps to answer the question why? The only thing I could come up with is an active/physical life style. We are all still active, both physically and mentally.

We have aches, pains, and handicaps that we mitigate the best we can and just handle the ones we can’t. We don’t complain because no one wants to be around someone who complains a lot. It doesn’t help, anyway.

Built into our daily routine, we have all done things that have kept us moving. Two of the ladies started aerobic workouts when they were in their 50s and are doing as much as they’re able in their late-80s. Several go to a personal trainer twice a week and have for 35 years. All of us have had severe physical and mental trauma in our lives and believe we survived mainly because our bodies and minds were in good shape for our age. Two among my small group of friends just recovered from Covid-19 at age 86.

I’m going to use myself as an example, but realize all of us are the same, we just have different life challenges. I get up in the morning and put on my glasses so I can see well enough to find my hearing aids. Next, I lay down on the floor and do a combination of a yoga, stretching, Pilates, and a dumbbell workout. It takes an hour; I do these four times a week. Daily, I talk a half-mile walk with my walker, because I have numb feet and a bad back. I do this twice or three times a day, as time allows.

When the pandemic arrived in March of 2020, I couldn’t go to 24-hour Fitness. It was closed. I had a Concept II rowing machine in storage that I had used to train for my kayak trip down the coast of Baja in 1991. It was too long to fit in my room so I put it in the garage where it fits just fine, plus it’s available 24/7. Then I bought a Total Gym machine; it fits in my room. I work on them four times a week. Now, I have no reason to have a gym membership. I can do everything at home that I did in the gym. When I travel, I work out in the pool. My pool routine takes one hour.

None of my friends have the time or inclination to work out two hours a day, like I do, but they all do some exercise most every day. It’s working, we are all still active and mobile. Because I love you all, I have a favor to ask of all of my readers. Please exercise at least 30 minutes a day. I don’t want to be the last one standing. It’s lonely at the top.

   

Enjoy Every Day. Open Every Door. Try Everything. You Can Do It.         

                                                                                   

Talking to my friends that are well along the road, shall we say to Act #3, also known as the “Golden Years” of their lives, the topic of conversation often turns to, “What can we do that is worthwhile”, in our remaining years. We looked forward to retirement and now we have it. We’re still alive, healthy and bored. Most of us travel for a while but can only be unproductive so long before we start wondering why we are here.

If you create an honest list of the things you can still do, at least semi-competently, it will be a lot shorter than the one you could have made at the age of 45, but it will still be a list. You still have options. Looking at the list, rank them in order to which ones you would most like to be involved in now, and go for it.

I had to do this at age 80 when my wife lost her fight with cancer. The plans we had made together were now non-existent. For about a year I was at a loss as to where I was going or what I would do if I got there. I made a list. It was short. The item on the top was to stay in contact with my family as much as possible. Our pandemic has made that hard but I do the best I can.

The second on the list was to write. I have published three books so far and several short ones. I now have a path. I’m not a great writer but it’s OK; I’m not great at anything anymore, however, I am a happy person that knows he has something to do. I hope my readers find the tips I sneak in on being positive in all you do and to learn from everything you do to be worthwhile.

I love being a grandpa and a great-grandpa. I have had the joy of watching my 11 grandchildren grow into strong upright individuals, all very different and that makes each one of them very special. I would like to share what they have become as adults. Please tolerate an old man as he brags a little. Some of their occupations include lab technician manager, urban tree specialist, computer programmer, tattoo artist, hair stylist, engineers – good jobs in varied fields. The only problem is they are now adults and not inclined to sit on my lap. But it’s OK because they have given me, so far, nine great-grandchildren to take their places.

I love being the elder in my family. I get to love them all and have no responsibility. I used to help them do things. Now they all are there to help me do things.

I do my best to be like Clint Eastwood. When he was asked how he kept so active at age 88, he said, “I shut the door tight and don’t let the old man in.” Keep your door closed, remember that getting old will happen, if you are lucky, but being old is a mental state of mind. Don’t let it happen to you.

I wrote a book recently about making choices in life that set a person on a path to follow. A few people choose a path and never deviate from it their entire life. It could work out well. They might win an OLYMPIC Gold Medal. Unfortunately, most that never deviate from their original path become good at whatever they are doing in a short time, and that stops the learning process available free to them in life. They also can get burned out or just plain bored and be unhappy with where they end up. Retirement is often depicted as sitting in a rocking chair on the front porch watching the world going by.

I believe a person should take advantage of every opportunity offered to them in life. How else can they find what they are good at and what they love to do. I have taken many paths. One I stayed on because I loved it. Teaching was my calling and became my life’s freeway, but I continued to constantly take side trips to keep learning.

There are those that believe you should change your profession/work every five years or so, to stay in a constant learning mode your entire life. You are not learning when you are repeating something you do well. I find I am not on either end of that pendulum. I am halfway from the center to both ends.

The pages in my book, Life According to Grandpa II, the world is a classroom well spent as a Wonderer, tells the story of many of my side trips. What fun I had on them and how important they were as classrooms in my school of life.

Take as many side trips as you can. The freeway you are on will lead you to many off-ramps for you to try. There is always an onramp ahead to get back on your freeway. Each side road is a classroom full of wonder for you to add to your map of life.

Strive to be the one whizzing by the porch, not the one in the rocking chair. It really is worth the effort; and the bottom line, as you as you gain the wisdom of many years, you can always do anything that you can still remember. That’s the hard part.

There have been a number of books written that tell us how we can compartmentalize our lives into various sections. All of them are true for the writer of that book. We only write about what we know, however, we all live in our own worlds which we have created in our minds. Reality for us is only found within our personal world.

I have trouble at times accepting the realities in my world that I have to modify as the environmental and cultural worlds evolve around me with the inevitable passage of time.

I no longer live on a farm where I could step out of my front door with my 22-caliber rifle and shoot a rabbit for dinner. I now live in a city where if I was seen with my rifle out on the street I would be shot or arrested. What has changed?  First of all, the rabbits that live around my apartment complex are now considered wildlife pets, not food. Second, the hundreds of people that live in close proximity to me would be afraid I was going to shoot them.

Over the 85+ years in my personal world the physical environment has changed so that I am now packed into a cement container along with several hundred others in their containers called condos where our enormous population of humans live like bees in a hive.  We all come and go from the hives, and call them complexes.

The cultural environment has changed just like the physical. The people that lived around me when I was growing up made eye contact with me when they passed on the street and said hello. Now they look at the ground and try not to make eye contact because it might be taken as a challenge.

I understand the changes in the physical environment and the adaptations we all have to make in our personal lives to be happy and accommodate the huge world population growth. What is hard for me to understand, and adapt to, is the hate and fear that we have created and accept as the new normal for ourselves.

Where did it come from? How did we let it creep into our society? More important, into our personal worlds. We are not born with it. We have learned it from the people around us. It makes me want to go back to my old world where gasoline was only 17 cents a gallon and most people were looking ahead at the horizon and smiling, instead of down at their phones, doing their best to ignore what is going on around them, seemingly denying any responsibility for it.

I think the rabbits are much happier now, because I put food out for them instead of using them as my food.

In the town of Oceanside, I have watched a group of about 12 young/new mothers, with their new precious gifts tucked snugly in their strollers. They meet early in the morning just below my fifth-floor veranda when I am having my morning coffee. I come to Oceanside often and have watched them meet and take off down the back street at a good clip. Every time I see them, I think what a wonder routine that is. It isn’t very often I encounter anything that has no downside to it.

Everything about the group is positive. The new mothers need the exercise to get their normal non-pregnant body back in shape. The baby gets used to a moving environment around them. They will adapt to life more easily and not be frightened by it. The community has healthier mothers and children as residents.

The social comradery is also of great importance for the mothers. A new mother stuck at home, especially now with our lock down, has good reason to get depressed. It is a time that she needs her friends around her for support.

I smile as I watch them trotting down the street. I’m not too sure why, but I get a very warm feeling around my heart as I watch them. The babies are very fortunate to have mothers that are so committed to good health. Not only for themselves, but so they will live long and healthy lives to take care of them.

I said there was no downside. It depends on who you are, I guess. I feel a little sorry for the husbands that get up in the morning and have to make their own coffee, because momma is walking the baby. It’s OK though. Men are tough, they can handle it.

I hear that they are going to change the name of one of my favorite ski resorts, Squaw Valley, to a new name still to be determined. It seems that it is offensive to Native Americans. A number of names have been changed because they are offensive to one group or another. I have no problem with that. I think sometimes there is perhaps a little over-sensitivity involved, but that’s ok. If it makes some group feel better, that is a good thing. I just don’t want to be left out.

I have a sensitivity about something that I believe at least 100 million others have, or at least should have. It isn’t even a whole word. How can just three letters change the world?

What are the three letters, and why do they affect, in a negative way, many different groups that want to get rid of them? The letters are ISM. Three letters that affect more people than all of the rest of the letters put together – at least in my world.

I will give two examples. The first one is the word Race. We all belong to a race because we define race by the container our Self lives in. It would be ridiculous to try to judge the contents of all the packages in a UPS truck just by looking at the boxes they come in, but that is what we do with humans when we talk about race.

The body has no life force. The body is just the container for the brain. If the brain dies the body becomes just a chunk of meat. We need to look at the brain to see who we are. If we do, we find there is no difference no matter what our container looks like. We are all the same. We should strike the word racism out of our dictionary and out of our lives. The world has been working on that for a long time. I hope we are getting closer so all of us can see ourselves when we are looking at another container.

The second ism that affects a few hundred thousand is Ageism. This one affects me very personally. The term sets boundaries and limits on what we can do based on our age. It makes the assumption that because our containers are a bit damaged from the journey that our brains are too. That just isn’t true.

We are still capable of doing extraordinary things. How do we define extraordinary? The dictionary says things which are strange, unusual, unexpected, surprising, bizarre and other terms like those are extraordinary, there is no reason why an elderly person can’t do those things, and we do so all the time.

Every time we do something that is outside the normal limitations that the term ageism has set for us, we are extraordinary. We need to educate the masses that we are still functional and not invisible except to them. There are times, of course, when it is best to be invisible – like when someone needs to do the dishes.

Karin and I are back on the road again going to our timeshares. We arrived at one of our favorite places, Oceanside. Wow! What a difference in procedure to check in. We had to call on the phone and tell them we were outside ready to check in. It was 2:00pm, the time I normally check in because I am what they call a VIP, but not that day, I had to wait until 4:00pm which is the regular check in time.

There were no comfortable lounges in the lobby like normal – all seating had been taken out. We had to wait outside in our car for two hours.

We were able to use the pool during our stay, but only for one hour and with a reservation made the day before. All of the other normal activities were canceled. It worked out well for us. We had Karin’s great granddaughter and one of my great-grandsons with us.

They did the beach one day and the pool for two days. One morning we walked a mile and had breakfast at the “Swami’s”; we walked out to the end of the pier and had dinner at Ruby’s, also a mile walk.

Life can be so simple if we let it. That is one of the good things about being 85 years old. People are inclined to let you do anything you want. Your kids worry about you getting hurt for a change, instead of you worrying about them getting hurt. It is a time when they find out that you can be just as obstinate as they were when they were teenagers.

I was pleased with all of the extra precautions we had to put up with because I felt safe there. We were only there for four days. In September we will be staying for three weeks. Perhaps a few more activities will be open then. The two I missed the most were the gym and the ice cream social. Both necessary, the gym to keep me healthy enough that I can eat the ice cream to keep me happy.

It is so much fun I wish I could be 85 forever, but then 86 may be even better. Only time will tell.