While love and happiness prevail, my mind nevertheless wanders and wonders a lot.  I see homeless people and realize that with only a wrong decision or two, that could have been me.   I have been lucky,  Very lucky. I consider my life to be a success.  Of the  117 billion born , surely I rank in the top one-tenth of one percent.  In other words I am among the best 11.7 million  Homo sapiens  who ever lived.  I'm tempted to improve this by another order of magnitude to 1.17 million, for it has only been in the past century that life became tolerable for most, but all this analysis is meaningless, for what is success? In this thoughtful mood, I looked back on certain points in my life and wondered where I would be today if I made another decision.   A big one was, which college? As a junior at McKinley High School in Honolulu I was only an above-average student, with no athletic talent and little social skills. Then my life chang...

We grew up believing in those statements.  To some degree, my life has unfolded with some personal effort, while overcoming disasters.  Recent events, though, have convinced me that I'm reaching a point of peak luck by pure chance.  If I don't brag about this today, as all things have a way of balancing out, I might never again be able to say that I'm the luckiest person I know. To begin, being born in Honolulu, Hawaii, the best place on Earth, in a period where the previous generation ( World War II heroes ) made it easer for me, provided the foundation for an incredible life.  Those events had nothing to do with hard work on my part. I had an uneventful youth, growing up in what was then considered to be a relatively dangerous and low class environment, Kakaako.  In reality, this was a safe neighborhood, until now, when the homeless crowd has definitely made an impact.  But today, I live in a Nuuanu cocoon, where we escaped COVID-19 ( we all had our secon...