My article for the January-February issue of TK Magazine
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I have very recently begun my 66th year. A 65th birthday has great societal significance in our culture. I guess I am officially an elder now.

• There is, apparently, a great data base of people’s birthdays out there. I don’t know where it is or how to access it, but insurance people are well acquainted with it. During the 4 months or so before my birthday, I received literature and phone calls from just about every agent on this continent telling me of the marvelous things they could do for me when I enrolled in Medicare. I dutifully created a file and tucked it all away with the best intentions of studying it carefully. Two weeks before my birthday, having read several novels during what should have been my studying time, I called the company which has been handling my health insurance for the past ten years, and told them to send me whatever I needed to sign.
• It won’t be long now before they will have to send my all my Social Security payments, no matter how much I earn.
• The political, ethical, and social ramifications of a Libertarian collecting Social Security and Medicare are staggering, but that’s an entire column in itself. One which I will almost certainly never write.
• I can remember clearly my thoughts the first time it occurred to me that I might live to the year 2000. I was probably 8, and it went something like this: I’ll be – let’s see – fifty six years old! Older than my parents are now. Maybe even older than my grandparents! Does anyone really live that long? Will I still be able to move around? See? Hear? Will I be a grandmother? Me? (Answers to younger self: Yes. Pretty much. Yes and yes, for which you will be ever so grateful. Not right then, but soon after. Yes, kid, you.)
• Had I lived 200 years ago, statistics say I would have had a slim chance of living this long. If I had, I would have been considered really old, and would almost certainly have been toothless, crippled with arthritis and old injuries and hard physical work, and in pain a great deal of the time. As it is, I consider myself middle aged (no matter what anyone else thinks), and I feel pretty good most of the time.
• My dentist credits our increase in longevity to modern dental care. If you can’t chew your food properly, he contends, nutrition becomes problematic, and health declines rapidly. I know he’s biased, but he probably has a point.
• Bill Clinton’s inauguration marked the first time I was older than the President of the United States. In 2009, both my kids will be constitutionally old enough to be elected President.
• This is a great time of life to take a look at what you have been incubating, perhaps unbeknownst even to you, below the surface. My degree is in mathematics, after all. The first time I wrote anything of consequence, beyond a classroom assignment, was less than five years ago.

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The word “solstice” comes from the Latin sol, sun, and sistere, to stand. It is the time when the sun appears to stand still for a day or two in its relentless pacing from north to south and back again, the time when it pauses before turning to retrace the path it has been following as long as there has been an earth.

At the two equinoxes, the sun’s rising and setting place moves very fast across the horizon. But for a day or two on either side of June 21st and December 21st, it’s hard to tell that the spot has moved at all.

I sometimes speculate on how our ancestors must have felt as they watched their one source of warmth and light moving inexorably away, as the days grew shorter and colder. According to the elders, it had always come back before; but what if this time it just kept on going? Small wonder that December 25th, the first day the keenest-eyed member of the group could say for sure the sun had decided to return, has long been associated with joy, celebration, hope, and light.

The winter solstice, of course, marks the shortest day and the longest night of the year in the northern hemisphere. It is the official beginning of winter. For those of you who, like me, enjoy geometry, I offer my favorite definition: The winter solstice is the time at which the angle between the earth’s axis of rotation and the line connecting the South Pole to the center of the sun reaches its greatest value and begins decreasing again.

However you commemorate (or define) the season of the winter solstice, I wish you joy, celebration, and warmth.

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Burger King has launched a men’s body spray called “Flame.” It’s billed as “The scent of seduction, with a hint of flame-broiled meat.” $3.99 online.

Let us not forget that this is the home of The Whopper.

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This is an edited version of the column I wrote for the November-December 2008 issue of TK Magazine. It’s a true story. It’s too wonderful to be fiction. Alyse has given permission for me to use her and her mother’s names.
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For several years I was a member of Sweet Adelines, and even sang in a quartet. We were never very good, but we had a lot of fun, and have remained good friends ever since.

Alyse Stewart sang tenor in our little foursome, and her Mother, Helen, was our biggest fan. Helen loved and supported us, even when we were dreadful.

Alyse is the fourth-generation owner of Stewart Hardware in Valley Falls. Alyse’s great-grandfather opened the store in 1890, and it still operates in the same delightfully crowded building with a wall full of drawers containing every nail, nut, bolt, or screw you could want. Helen worked there 5 days a week until a few months before her death at age 89. If anyone could embody the concept “pillar of the community,” it was Helen Stewart.

Valley Falls (population 1260 or so) is one of those wonderful small towns where everybody knows everybody. When I go there to visit Alyse, people turn and look as I drive past, because they don’t recognize my car. There are two police officers and one stoplight. Alyse assures me the good folks of Valley Falls are more cautious now, but when this story happened most of them routinely left their keys in their cars.

Helen Stewart loved to fish, and Stewart Hardware carries some fishing gear. One day a young customer came in the store to buy an ocean rod, which was not something Stewart Hardware stocked. But Helen knew of a wholesaler in town who would have it; and, since Helen had help in the store that day, she offered to go with her customer to the wholesaler.

As they walked out the door, Young Customer said, “Would you like me to drive?”

“Well, yes, thank you,” said Helen.

Now, Young Customer thought he was offering to drive Helen’s vehicle for her, and Helen thought Young Customer was offering to drive her in his vehicle. So they sort of moseyed over to the curb, got in a truck that didn’t belong to either one of them, and drove away.

A few minutes later, the rightful owner of the truck came out of an adjacent business, and found his truck had been stolen. The police were called, and a description of the vehicle was taken. Policeman One set out to find the perpetrator.

By that time Helen and Young Customer were on their way back. As Policeman One was sitting at the stop light, the stolen truck pulled up going the opposite direction. Helen Stewart was driving. She smiled and waved at the officer.

Not wanting to go down in the Valley Falls annals as the person who arrested Helen Stewart, Policeman One made a surreptitious u-turn and quietly followed her back to her store.

As they pulled up and got out of the truck, Rightful Owner was hollering and gesturing; and Helen and Young Customer, in a move worthy of Abbott and Costello, turned to each other and said in unison, “You mean it’s not yours?”

Three minutes later, Helen, Young Customer, Rightful Owner, and Policeman One were all laughing over what had to be one of the best stories any of them would ever tell. Rightful Owner got in his truck and drove off.

Two blocks away he was stopped by Policeman Two because he was driving a stolen vehicle.

(You can see a picture of Helen behind the counter of Stewart Hardware.)

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Here you are, Mothers. No, really. Here YOU are.

The Mom Song from Northland Video on Vimeo.

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For those who don’t recognize him, the central figure here is Topeka’s pride and joy, Fred Phelps.

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I am proud to tell you that the author of this piece is my son.

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Two great bumper stickers from lpstuff.com:

“Vote Libertarian. It Only Feels Kinky the First Time.”
“Vote Libertarian — The Fast-Acting Cure for Electile Disfunction.”

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I am proud to present this as the creation of one of our local Libertarians.

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This is a slightly edited version of an article I wrote for the September-October issue of TK Magazine.

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Since this issue of TK Magazine is focused on politics, I am going to take the opportunity to provide some information about the Libertarian Party, of which I am an enthusiastic member.

The Libertarian Party is the third-largest and fastest-growing political party in the nation. We believe in personal freedom and individual responsibility. We are sometimes categorized as economically conservative and socially liberal.

For many years, American politics has been seen, overly simplistically, as a straight line, with the liberal folks on the left and the conservative folks on the right. The left wants personal freedoms and governmental control of the economy; the right wants economic freedom and governmental control of personal behavior.

It’s far more complex than that, of course. There are a few people who want the government to control almost everything, and a large group who want the government to control almost nothing. In 1971, David Nolan, one of the founders of the Libertarian Party, published the diamond-shaped chart that still bears his name. To see the chart, and to take a short quiz that will tell you where you fit on the chart, visit www.theadvocates.org/quiz.

I am not a spokesperson for the Libertarian Party, nor do I intend to paraphrase the party’s platform here. I was at the 2008 convention for much of the platform debate, and that was enough of that, thank you very much. That information, and much more, is available at www.lp.org for those who are interested.

Rather, I would like to present some of the ideas about libertarianism that I, personally, find compelling. They are in no particular order.

• The function of government is to protect your life, your liberty, and your property. It is not the function of government to provide for you.

• You should be able to live your life as you see fit until you start taking that right away from someone else.

• Voluntary charity works better that any government agency. Contrast the FEMA mess with the voluntary outpouring of help from all over the nation sent to the Hurricane Katrina victims.

• When you control your own charitable giving, you have the right to demand an accounting of how your dollars are spent. As things are now, you are required to contribute under threat of incarceration, and yet have no right to demand accountability.

• Lower taxes encourage and attract businesses, which in turn create jobs and lower the need for government programs. If taxes are low, there is no need to force citizens to ante up to entice new businesses to your town.

• The majority does NOT rule, for which we should be grateful. If it did, the majority could dictate to you where to live, what job you could have, even the name of your next child. It’s called Tyranny of the Majority, and has been explored by other writers. No, you should be in charge of every aspect of your own life, even if you are a minority of one, except in those few cases where the Constitution specifies that the majority, via the government, may compel certain behaviors of you.

• The federal government MUST be required to confine its activities to those allowed it by the Constitution. These are functions, such as national defense, which the states and the citizens cannot reasonably be expected to perform for themselves. All other functions are explicitly forbidden to the federal government by the Tenth Amendment. Education, for example, is forbidden as a function of the federal government, but required by the Kansas Constitution as a function of the state. Kansas, and Kansas alone, should be responsible for public education in our state.

• The government should be afraid of the citizens, not the other way around. The IRS is one of the most oppressive and frightening institutions around, and should be abolished, along with the Income Tax. If government were confined to its Constitutional limits, the Income Tax would not be necessary.

• We must end corporate welfare.

• Not everything that’s a good idea should be compelled by law.

• Not everything that’s a bad idea should be prohibited by law.

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