Why is medicine so expensive and communication so cheap? 

First consider research, technology development, manufacturing, training, service delivery. Think about factories, distribution, satellites, IT, call centers, retail outlets. Then consider that time spent in the ER, with a few tests and a small handful of medical personnel, can cost $1000 per hour, while our three DVR-equipped Dish-fed TVs, phone landline, two iPhones with massive amounts of capacity, and whole-house wireless internet connectivity costs about $0.42 per hour.

Just sayin’

The cleaning ladies are here this morning. Three cheerful, careful women come every other Friday to clean our house. They know Sheila likes butterflies, so one day they brought us a dead, but otherwise perfect, yellow swallowtail butterfly that that they found on the sidewalk. They give us tamales at Christmas. They do the windows and floors, and laugh at our comical dogs. I give them two hours of my salary for their six woman-hours of work, plus a holiday bonus that grows every year. I think it’s a great deal and I believe they are okay with it, too.

On Mondays, the Poop Lady comes with her scoop and bucket to clean up our back yard. A month’s worth of her visits is roughly the equivalent of 90 minutes of my salary.

I get my shirts laundered — that’s about six minutes of salary each.

All those services plus painting the bedroom, replacing the furnace filter, waxing my eyebrows, polishing my toenails — all things I could do myself but don’t have to, because of the increasingly uncommon blessing of money to spare.

My Aunt Margaret had a posse. Those women, all born within the first decade or so of the last century, wouldn’t have thought of themselves that way. They were friends, or maybe bosom buddies, or just “the gals.” I saw them as reliable sources of card-game rules, egg salad sandwiches, arithmetic tutoring, and models of how to be a grown woman.

Five of these six women were born in El Reno, Oklahoma. Billie moved to El Reno from Virginia as a young bride. Two of them, Margaret (not my aunt) and Martha, never lived anywhere else. Those who hadn’t stayed, “came home” at some point in their lives because of divorce, broken health, economic necessity, caring for an elderly parent, or retirement. By the time I was a teenager, they were part of the fabric of my summertime life.

When I was old enough, say 13 or so, I would join their card games. Canasta, Spite & Malice, and some weird kind of poker are the ones I remember best. There were glasses of iced tea and glasses of bourbon on the card tables. Little bowls of salted nuts and those semi-soft white mints that melt in your mouth. I don’t know what the conversation was like when I wasn’t around, but I suspect it was neither profane nor sanctimonious.

These were well balanced women, who had seen a fair amount of life (except maybe Martha, who always seemed to be slightly somewhere else, somewhere sweeter) and understood that expectations and resentments were first cousins. They had all worked for their livings for decades. They were teachers, a social worker, a nurse, a businesswoman.

I remember their laughter and that they always dressed up (at least more than my friends and I do) and smelled good. I’m sure they had sorrow and disappointment with husbands, children, jobs, but it wouldn’t have occurred to them to share those stories around me.

I don’t know what bound them together; if longevity of friendship was the secret, or if it took a tightly knit culture and more shared than singular experiences. Just being friends wouldn’t have been enough, though. I have a social set, some dinner companions, a few fellow card players, and a handful of good friends, but I don’t have — have never had — the closeness these women shared.

So here’s to Margaret, Margaret, Martha, Lois, Billie, and Virginia and their 80-year-long posse.

Every workday morning I drive through a gate onto a U.S. Air Force Base. The lines of traffic creep forward to the guards who view our badges and give us permission to enter. While I’m edging toward the base gate, I watch a colony of prairie dogs foraging, tumbling, scampering, and, seemingly, guarding their territory. Some of the critters stand upright, looking like fat-bottomed meerkats, with their backs to the colony’s home turf. It’s possible they aren’t on guard duty. I suppose they could be watching the cars go by, maybe figuring out when it is safe to cross the four lanes of pavement (never!), or maybe they are asking themselves why one human needs so much metal, glass, and noise to move really slowly into and through their limited, ground-eye view.

Their territory, by the way, is the front yard of an elementary school. School buses use the circular drive that surrounds the yard on the north side of the building. The playground is on the east side of the school and the teachers’ parking lot is to the west. Except for the morning and afternoon bus trips, the yard is a peaceful place for the prairie dogs to dig their underground homes, raise their young, and munch on the weeds and grasses.

The size of the colony has changed over the years I’ve been making my way through the gate. I don’t know if its size is self-regulating or if occasionally humans decide to reduce the numbers. Right now it is pretty small, with maybe a dozen individuals roaming around in the morning. I suppose colony size could be seasonal. Youngsters are born in the spring and stay underground until they are big enough to fend for themselves, usually at about six-weeks old.

My work is useful and good for our country, but it isn’t warm and fuzzy. Watching the prairie dogs go about their business as I get ready to go about mine gives me a boost and puts a smile on my face. I’m sure the guards appreciate that.

Several months ago I decided to stop eating meat for ethical reasons. A month or so after that, I decided to stop eating all animal products for health reasons. That foray into veganism lasted until I bumped into a breakfast burrito at the Los Ranchos grower’s market. Back to eggs and cheese. Then fish swam in. Now my dietary rule for myself is to not eat meat from anything that walks on the earth (I thought about making the rule “nothing with feet,” but I wasn’t sure where crabs fit in.). Eggs are a little iffy under that rubric, but I don’t feel like adding a clause excluding embryos.