At 88

We were having lunch with Ralph and Oralee, older friends with whom we get together now and then. This time it was to be an early celebration of Ralph’s 88th birthday. Beverly and Kit gave him a beautiful book on World War II fighter pilots, since he himself had been one, complete with photographs; he flipped through it appreciatively and said he couldn’t wait to read it. I brought him a batch of my famous cookies, which pleased him, along with an old dog-eared copy of my favorite translation of the Tao (signed by someone long ago “For Cynthia”), which baffled him -- but he hadn’t been expecting birthday gifts anyway.

There is a kind of calm and stillness in this house. The off-white carpets always appear to have just been vacuumed, the paintings and photographs on the wall are carefully placed, shining with their own light, and the view through the window is of a garden and a golf course, where everything moves in slow motion. The sense of affluence is clear but understated, as is perhaps the poignancy. I look out at the hazy line of mountains on the distant horizon -- "the dreamy blue mountains," as J. Smeaton Chase described them when he wrote about Santa Barbara in the early 1900s.

So there was the usual talk of health issues, friends moving away, the decreasing radius of life. An important victory: driver’s license renewal, passed with flying colors! We chatted a bit too, about recent news stories and world events. Ralph’s opinion on Afghanistan? There’s no winning, militarily speaking, but no exit either: a conundrum.

“Wars used to be fought for territory,” says Oralee. “Now they seem to be about religions or ideas. Muslims? I never gave a thought about Muslims.”

And somehow, perhaps predictably, this leads indirectly to the subject of oil and talk about the environment, and Ralph, a man who looks at evidence and understands data and stands firm on facts, says he cannot understand people who would refute the reality of global warming.

“It's just irrational. Denial. Fear of facing a problem that's very hard to fix.”

“When you were young, like during the Second World War, did the events of the world seem as confusing and overwhelming as they do now?” I ask him.

“First of all,” he says, no doubt thinking of his fighter pilot days, “we were just trying to survive. Stay alive. That part was clear.”

“We didn’t have so much information,” adds Oralee. “Our scope wasn’t the whole world, we paid attention to our own country, our own neighborhood. We didn’t know there were so many threats to be afraid of, or so much suffering that we were supposed to somehow help. Nowadays we’re hearing constantly about all these problems and threats, and maybe it was all going on before, but we just didn’t know about it."

I think she has a point. That global screen is a disturbing backdrop, and we are constantly inundated with reports of problems we do not feel empowered to solve. We are also connected in new ways to the destinies of foreign places that would have once seemed irrelevant.But people are the same, and here we are, and Ralph is ready for that beautiful chocolate cake. I cut him a slice too thin and he asks for another. It’s a damned good cake.

There's something they still don’t understand, though: Facebook and its 500,000,000 users. We have tried to explain, but it's sketchy.