Today I will write about life at Stanford University.  Much of this info comes from the monthly STANFORD for alumni, but I've also visited a bunch of times after graduating. One of the miracles of my life was that I even went there at all.  I was an average student most of my life.  Perhaps growing up in Kakaako, a lower-class portion of Honolulu, was partly responsible.  Maybe wanting to be like one of my gang was not personally productive.  Whatever, by the time I was a sophomore at McKinley High School, I was put in a lower level English-Social Studies group, as our school system placed students by performed capability. Around that time, Bishop Estate essentially kicked our neighborhood out of our homes to pave the way for all those tall buildings you now see in Ward Village.  Kalihi was not much of an improvement, plus I had to catch the bus to get to McKinley High School.  In most ways, I was sort of alone for the first time in my life.  Yes,...

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...