Life lessons on the golf course

I had the privilege of attending the AT&T Pebble Beach National Pro-Am media day Tuesday and playing the Monterey Peninsula Country Club. Golfers—if you ever have the opportunity get on that course—take it—it’s spectacular, particularly the shore course holes bordering Monterey Bay.
Tuesday was clear and crisp (the second frosty day one resident had seen in 20 years), but amazing for the whale watching. Spend 60 seconds looking at the ocean and you’d see multiple spouts plus, often, whale fins and flukes. There was a solitary whale watching boat tracking the pods and I suspect those onboard enjoyed the whale experience of a lifetime.
The local paper had reported that the season was at its peak and they were on the money. One of my golfing partners called his wife to report that he’d never seen this many whales in Hawaii and our host country club member said he saw more whales Tuesday than he’d seen all of last year.
In response to a question, he said he was a retired AT&T/Baby Bells executive who lives off the first fairway at the country club. He was in the final few days before a mid-year retirement years ago when his wife of many years sat up in bed and said her chest hurt.
Those were her last words—his wife and the mother of his five children died of a ruptured aorta. That was the crisis “Smiling Ed” Kinney amazingly survived a few years back only to die a few months later of cancer that was discovered during the repair operation.
The exec and his wife had criss-crossed the country from the Pacific Northwest to New Jersey and back before finally preparing to retire in the Bay Area.
The moral of the story—life goes on. Through mutual friends, he connected with a widowed lady. They’ve celebrated 20 years of marriage and he’s on the golf course four or five days a week and swinging well after eight decades on the planet. She also loves to golf.
It’s similar to what I saw with my father-in-law who lost his wife prematurely at 58 (a year older than my golfing partner’s wife). He remarried after a few years and enjoyed the better part of 20 years of marriage to his second wife.

OUR GOVERNOR delivered a relatively upbeat State of the State address Wednesday claiming California is on the mend while promoting his $7 billion temporary tax increase that is planned for the November ballot.
Absent from Gov. Jerry’s comments were details from state Controller John Chiang’s December budget update. The controller pointed out that the state entered the fiscal year $8.2 billion in the hole from the shortfall in the prior budget.
Revenues for December were off $165 million from the budget projections, bringing the shortfall for the current fiscal year to $1.43 billion on the revenue side. Couple that with the expenditures of $2.65 billion more than the budget plan and that means a $4 billion hole in the current year.
Not a pretty picture no matter how the governor tries to paint it.