For these last few days my son Scott, came to Harbour Ridge to play in the Member/Guest golf tournament with me. He is a wonderful golfer and a great young man. Unfortunately his back is broken trying to carry me. With great pain and personal reassessment,  I accepted the fact that I stunk! 

Not to be thwarted I rallied to participate in more intellectual activities like smoking cigars. drinking whatever and feeding my face. I was at the gym this morning at 5:30 trying to shed the effects of my debauchery. Stay tuned. Results in a month. 

I drove my buddy to Fort Lauderdale at 6:30 yesterday morning. It is the only airport that has direct flights to Denver. During the hour plus ride we had a marvelous conversation as a son and dad are wont to do. We reminisced of the last few days and centered in not on golf but the participants. 

Harbour Ridge is beautiful and understated in so many ways. It is a gated community but that is a bit of a misnomer. Scott surmised that Mom and Dad had found what they had been looking for, for many years. There are no pretentious people although I am sure there is plenty of money. This is no recitation of previous glories because it just doesn’t matter. People are comfortable in their skin. It is a great place to live. 

We noted that several dads had brought their sons. To a man whether they were 30 or fifty, they were just genuine people. No attitudes. No arrogance. Maybe the old men were able to pass their modest ways down the food chain. 

Our conversation drifted to try to find that certain something that was there. Scott noted that since he no longer was a member of a club, in some ways HR made him feel a little privileged. He wasn’t sure he was comfortable with that. We didn’t want to call it elitism because it really wasn’t. People were too down to earth. Maybe extraordinary takes on a different meaning?

He queried what was special about the whole club scene? For me it is the ability to be yourself and to expect something of your cohorts. Simply put, it is the expectation that people will live up to standards. Not of fame and wealth but of that little word called decency. You keep your shirt tucked in, you don’t wear your hat in the club house and you are respectful to members as well as staff. Act like a gentleman. 

That may sound prissy to some and snobby to others. To both of us it meant good manners and a rare word in today’s world called civility. Webster defines it as a formal politeness and courtesy in behavior or speech. Is that restricted to the upper crust or top 10 or 20%? I think not. It is applicable everywhere. 

Unless you live under a rock, you heard of the shenanigans of one Robert Kraft this weekend. We are treated to an endless barrage of tweets from His Hairness. “Me Too” has exposed the ugly underbelly of management throughout corporate America. There was the GM plant where racism is alive and well. Priests, doctors and coaches are molesting at will. The press hops on a story and then backtracks, sort of, when they realize they have it all wrong. Is this what we have become?

I have often talked about pushing boundaries. I love thinking outside of the box. But all that freedom has its casualties. We are no longer offended by the vulgar. It becomes common place. Crass is our new vernacular.  I laughed as I told my son of what constituted a lurid verse in a song or an X rated film in our day. You can catch that most nights on today’s sitcoms. The eternal question is, have we gone too far?

Those who know me, can vouch I am not a prude. All of us have done and said a variety of things we would not do in front of our mothers. But I think we have to revise the lines we cross to not give wider latitude but maybe pull in the reins a little bit. As we pulled up to the departure curb it struck us both the word we may have been looking for was CLASS.

To our way of thinking  you can have it whether you are a plumber or a banker. It can be in the men’s grill or local bar. It’s an awareness of what is acceptable and what is not. We can all have that touch of class. It is not snooty but decent. Let’s give it a try. 

As Always

Ted The Great

Factoids:

Some of the most common Bad manners that are acceptable:

Cell phone conversations in public

Dressing inappropriately  

Hats on in a restaurant

Foul language in public places

Bad table manners in a restaurant

Rudeness to staff. Forgotten words of please and thank you

Letting children misbehave

Classy People :

My Wife and Kids

Henry Aaron, Joe Torre, Mariano Rivera

Arnold Palmer, Gary Player, Jordan Spieth

Audrey Hepburn, Sean Connery, Matt Damon

George H W Bush, Sorry could not come up with more.

I am reading three or four books at this time, which for me is normal, whatever that is. “One Last Talk” asks what you would say and to whom, if you could have just one more audience before you die. “Oh Florida” is a wacky history of the Sunshine State. Then “American Titan” portrays the twenty something character who started the Silk Road which is where you can buy anything no matter how outlawed or depraved. 

But the one that has truly piqued my interest is “Brain Rules” by John Medina. I often wonder but have not a clue what really goes on in my head. Kathy wonders too. In parsing everything from the mechanical to the emotional, the author lets you delve deep inside your cranium. 

So much of what happens is automatic. Our heart beats, we walk, talk and even write without any difficulty. Yet grasping the incredible amounts of electrical energy and the complexity that goes into raising a glass to our lips or reading Aristotle is simply astounding. Neurons are firing at Mach III and somehow it all works out. 

Yet the simple thought or observance is so chock a block with a zillion factors that push us one way or another it really makes you wonder. 

We view, hear, touch or smell something and we immediately see if we have ever been there before. That’s memory. We decide if this thing is cool or lethal. That’s our survival instinct. And then we act on it for better or worse. If it’s pleasurable, we want to relish the moment. If it is scary, our adrenalin kicks in and we want to get the hell out of there. All in a nanosecond. 

It seems if we are emotional our ganglia take on a whole new sense of attention. We listen closer. We peer with Sherlock intensity. The amazing thing is we do not readily remember detail but put all our brain power into getting the gist of something. And we make our decisions based on that emotion. It takes you down a distinct path that is hard to deviate from.

Fake news or not the media play with our heads. They want to punch our buttons. If you are liberal the sight of a child being wrenched from their parents at the border sends you through the ceiling with rage. If you are conservative you are shown immigration officials taking every effort to make sure we are respectful and understanding. Same sequence. Totally different conclusions for the same set of circumstances.  

Advertising plays us like an A Flat. We laugh, we cry, or we want to rise up at a relatively simple situation. It is in essence an occurrence or a setting that has no feeling on its own. But how it is viewed and analyzed by you and me gets to our innards. Man, if I can be like that person I am gong to go out and buy a lifetime supply. You thought dudes selling elixirs out of a suitcase were dead. They are alive and well. 

One part of the book was demoralizing. It blew up my favorite myth…the human brain can multitask. Not so, mes amis. In order to go through any thought, there are a set of sequences as I have described above. You have to do them all. You may decide to put down one project or pick up another. You may think you have a million ideas going through your brain at once. It cannot happen. I am of course, biased and devastated.

Think about it. If you are driving and talking on the cell phone or God forbid texting, your hands may be on the wheel but you are far away on a call for business or pleasure. We say we lost concentration but we are just thinking of different things….one at a time. Remember that nanosecond shifting of gears we can do. 

Bottom line is that we have this wonderful thing called our mind and it is so complex but oh so beautiful. It is part of the greatest machine of all times, our bodies. The grey matter operates in world of its own. It is the director. The veins, arteries, pumps, muscles operate on cue. We think of artificial intelligence and we are awed by it. We ought to look in the mirror and be blown away. 

My final thought is simple. We think we have control over everything. Our ingenuity has helped us cross so many frontiers. Do you really think this marvel that is us, just happened by accident or a process of evolution? Doesn’t it appear be in the realm that we were created and not manufactured or grown in a lab? I don’t know about you but I am not ballsy enough to think there is not a higher Being. Makes one feel pretty grateful to Him, Her or It. . How about you?

As always

Ted The Great 

Factoids:

The brain continues to send out electric wave signals until approximately 37 hours after death.

Our Brain has over 100 billion nerve cells. Only four percent of the brains cells work and the remaining cells are kept in reserve.

Your bones, pound for pound, are 4 times stronger than concrete.

The muscles of the eye move more than 100,000 times a day.

It takes 17 muscles to smile and 43 to frown. You use 200 muscles to take one step.

An average car being driven 15,000 miles per year eats through $8,469. How much do you spend taking care of  your brain and body?