Brother, Can You Spare A Tummy Tuck?

I scored some blueberries, nectarines, and blessedly, white peaches, this morning at the downtown farmers market, but this bounty cost a ransom. It’s not the farmers’ fault, of course.

This week and last, Doug Woerner, my quince and main white nectarine and white peach man, has been beside himself with the almost lack of business at the Pimlico and Howard Park farmers markets. Fixed incomes just can’t stretch. I'm grateful for the option of fewer niceties to afford the meteoric rise in the cost of healthy eating, but just like medical care, food at an affordable price should be an unalienable right.

And speaking of health care, the lead story in today's Sun details doctors who are closing their practices because of the ever-increasing cost of doing business. My two most important doctors, both with huge practices, retired early for this reason. Here, in a city and a state with the world's most famous medical institution and a plethora of other extraordinary hospitals, it's projected that we'll have a shortage of doctors.

Money makes the world go around - to be sure, it's a simplistic view of complicated economic theories way over my head, but I wonder how close we are until the escalating cost of everything, fueled in part by the unceasing price of oil, brings us to a full stop.

As I jumped from the Sun’s front page to finish the story, I encountered an ad for - I swear - a well known plastic surgeon's fifteen percent sale on cosmetic surgery. Things must already be worse than I thought.

Be kind, be kind, be kind

Today is 40 years since the death of Senator Robert F. Kennedy. I still hold him and his ideals in great regard, of course, but I also admire his eldest daughter, Kathleen Kennedy Townsend, whom I've neither met nor have ever had any contact.

She and I have much in common - a strong committment to volunteerism, fathers who were cut down in their early 40s at the hands of madmen, and an unshakable belief that from grief - from which we agree there is never closure - we must find hope, effect change, and always always push forward.

I once heard her convey a massively important piece of advice she said her father often repeated - be kind, be kind, be kind - shorthand for the Golden Rule - the root, the essense, of civility. Indeed, just about two thousand years ago, the great scholar Hillel, demonstrating he could teach the entire Torah standing on one foot, needed cite only the Golden Rule.

Today's headlines detail the colossal challenges left in the wake of $139-a-barrel oil, with kindness unfortunately not the cure. So I'll focus on the almost matter-of-fact, race-and-genderbending achievements of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, and their new-found detente, made possible via respect and civility. America will recover from our economic mess. There's hope, there will be change. We are most definitely pushing forward.