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.