I noticed today that my hands are not my real hands.

Someone has replaced my real hands with hands that look very old. If I hold them up to the light with my fingers pointed upward, I can count the number of wrinkles on each finger and there are at least 50 on my middle finger now. I know a few years ago there were some wrinkles on each joint and that was about it.

I read the obituaries and understand that people are dying at my age. My father died when he was four years older than I am now. He didn’t want to live unless he could do everything he wanted to do. He wanted to drive a car and ride his motorcycle and fly his plane and steer his boat to unknown places. He wanted to do everything all by himself. He didn’t have many real friends. It seemed that the people he hung out with were all people he worked with or people that worked for him. Mostly people that worked for him, and that was true his his whole life.

There were a lot of young men who admired him and after he died, they told me stories of time they had spent with him. It used to annoy me to hear these stories, but now I think about them and understand my father better than I did in the past.

I think that people who are extremely successful in life cannotbe extremely successful both in business and in their personal lives. It’s simply impossible. Many people think that they can balance both sides of the coin, but in fact they can’t. You have to choose, which is more important to you.

I think that once you get a taste of power, you can’t let go and the same is true about money. The more you have the more you want and the more you feel that you don’t have enough. I’ve noticed this in this new generation of young people today. Money is a means to an end, but they never understand when the end has come. Very few people in the world today think about how much money they want to make and once they’ve made it stop trying to make more.

Sometimes money brings attention to those who crave it. Having money makes people feel a sense of protection. They don’t have to do the things that normal people have to do. They don’t have to wait in lines or go through airport security or charm other people at parties. They have such a long biography that they never need to actually connect with other people. People read about them and stay at least 20 feet away. Assumptions are made about people with money and for the most part they’re not positive yet people still want to be in that group. Once you’re in that group, all you think about is who is more important than you are and unless you are God, there is always someone who is more important.

I remember growing up in our family when people would come visit us who were politicians or movie-stars or whomever, wewere instructed to be charming and say hello, and then immediately go to our rooms. That, in retrospect, says a lot.

I’m not sure things are going to get better. I belong to a small tennis and swimming club near my house and each time I go I am horrified at the bad behavior of the children.  Most often I go to swim in the early morning because there’s no one there and the pool is outside and I’m so grateful that I get to spend 45 minutes in an empty pool while the sun is coming up. On a couple of occasions when I have gone to have dinner there, I have been absolutely horrified at the behavior of the children. The mothers congregate at a table far off in the corner of the fenced in back area and drink wine and ignore their children. One of my guests heard the mothers discussing how effective Gummies were in getting their children to go to sleep at night. They said it was as good as using Ambien on the kids.

My friends were pretty upset at this and  as the evening progressed, we all noticed how out of control the children were. The more the mothers drank the more of the children ran wild over the property, including using the gym and throwing balls in the pool and basically being disrespectful of the adults who were trying to have a nice evening. At one point, I went into the gym and asked the boy that was using the adult exercise equipment to stop. The response I received was very rude and I realized this generation of children has not been taught respect and in fact, felt entitled to do whatever they wanted.

The next day I sent an email to the club manager, and membersof the board describing what had gone on. They are trying their best to address this-behavior and were horrified to hear what had gone on. The trouble is no matter what they do to discipline these kids this generation of parents do not feel that they need to discipline their children or teach them respect or manners. 

I am wondering what will happen in the future. . I know that if these children had behaved this way at a Connecticut country club, they would have been banned from the club for the summer or forever.

I think that if this is the kind of behavior we are teaching our children we can’t expect much for the future of the world. I think other countries do a better job of teaching children respect and manners than we do. I also think that other countries do better job of respecting the older generation. I feel sad that I have become invisible and refuse to let that happen. I have a lot that I care about and a lot that I want to stand up for and corny as it sounds on this memorial day I’m going to do it. For the rest of my life, I hope in some way I can make a difference in someone’s life that means a lot to me.