Tag Archives: Wallenda

Hottie, Hot, Pardie*

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Ronald McDonald

Last night, Nik Wallenda, one of the flying Wallendas walked across Niagara Falls on a tightrope. This was a nationally televised event that garnered much press. My brother Chris, had sent me three photos of the Wallendas, last year, when they performed in Santa Cruz. I had posted these on the blog last year. When I check my blog’s statistics this morning, I was surprised by the large number of hits that it had gotten, all in just one night. I saw that these new-found hits were on the photos of the Wallendas and put two-and-two together. The most surprisingly aspect of this phenomenon was that 99% of the hits were not for the two previously linked to pictures, but for the photograph of Erendira Wallenda. Poor Nik’s came in a distant third and he was the one who had to walk across the waterfall. 🙄

“It’s toasty today”, “No, it’s steamy”, they argued heatedly.

Anne and I did our usual bicycle routine in the park before noon today. Toasty or steamy, it is going to be a hot one today. We encounter a charity bicycle ride to benefit the local Ronald McDonald House, led by you know who. Their numbers were too much for us, so we bailed from the bicycling trail and hit the road. That structure that we encountered the last weekend in the Deer Lake portion of the park is now complete. I thought that it was going to be a wedding chapel, but it turns out that it is a self-described “pop-up” restaurant. It calls itself the Demitasse Underground Restaurant or Demitasse 665 and it will only be open for a total of six nights, through next weekend. There looked to be seating for about twenty people. This is not your normal restaurant’s business model.

“That is sweat dripping off my nose”, she said snottily.

Certainly, our dance card was full this weekend. Surely, we went to a birthday party Friday night and Saturday night, we have a retirement party to attend. Truly, Friday’s birthday party for Captain Don, our captain of Team Kaldis was a very grand affair. It was held on the wide wrap around veranda of the Black Finn, a fine new restaurant at the north end of the Galleria. Verily, in addition to ‘O Captain, my Captain’, all of the other Ons were present too. When Dave was younger, I would come home and ask for messages. He would say that one of the Ons [Don, Ron, John] had called. He never bother to differentiate between any of them, so his messages were less than informative, par Dé by God.

Tonight’s party is for Linda Henke. Linda is retiring as Superintendent of the Maplewood-Richmond Heights School District. Linda presided over the turnaround of our school district from receivership, the graduation of both of our sons and Anne’s employment for many years. We look forward to celebrating her achievements and career.

* Certainly; surely; truly; verily; originally an oath, par Dé.

My Next Quinquennium

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quin·quen·ni·um /kwinˈkwenēəm/ Noun: A specified period of five years.

I love new words, especially the 50¢ variety, and so it is with quinquennium. I encountered it while reading a business article about China, where the author was speculating about the future of the Chinese economy, over the next five years. He was less than optimistic. The juxtaposition of quinquennium and the Communist phrase, five-year plan, gave the article an interesting dichotomy.  

The machinations of the Chinese economy are beyond me, but the article did cause me to think about where I saw myself in the next five years. Remember that interview question? Optimistically, I see myself as being retired in the next five years, but another business article seemed to cast doubt about that too.

According to this article, the concept of retirement is both very modern and also rather transitory. As late as the 1880s, ¾ of American males were still working at age 65 or older. Records for American women were not kept then. The nadir was reached in 1988 when only 20% of men 65 or older were still in the workforce. As of last year that number had ticked up to 22%. The reasons for this are many and varied. Men and women are living longer. The paradigm of a person working their entire career at just one company is almost archaic. More and more employers no longer offer pension plans. This trifecta has reversed the century old trend of earlier retirement, and it is not coming back.

As Anne has just pointed out to me, while previewing this post, I won’t be 65 in five years, only 62 years old. So, my aforementioned optimism, might have been better labeled, delusion, but such are the things that dreams are made of. On the company website, they have this neat little widget that estimates your retirement income. It comes up set to age 65 and for me reads “comfortable”. I could slide it all the way to the right, age 75, and it would read “almost rich”. If I slide it all the way to the left, like next year and on a Monday morning, I do wish it could go further, it would read like rural Mississippi. Is it coincidence that after such a lovely weekend, I chose this theme to write about on a Monday evening?

This post’s three pictures are from Chris’s Camera, taken in Santa Cruz. They include close-ups of Nik and Erendira Wallenda and another telephoto shot of the couple on the high wire. They have three children, Yanni, Amadaos, and Evita, who, have DNA passed down from 25 generations of circus performers. Nik’s ambition is to honor the memory of his great-grandfather Karl, by walking across the Grand Canyon. He has already secured the permits. Another contingent of the Wallenda family performs in Saint Louis, as part of Circus Flora. Anne, Joanie and I regularly go to see them perform.