Chapter 1: Introduction, My First Life

I’m Mason Carpenter, and I was 83 years old in 2036. I slipped and fell in my bedroom and broke my left hip. This alone was not unusual. This happens all the time. As you get older, your muscles get weaker, and your balance gets worse.

Sadly for me, I was all alone and on the floor in horrible pain. I knew I’d broken my leg or hip. Man, did it hurt.

My third wife had already passed away several years before. Being almost unable to move, I had to crawl sideways to get to my cellphone. I got it and called 911. I was a bit out of it with the pain, but it seemed like it took them forever to come and get me.

They eventually wheeled me into the Emergency Room. I waited while several doctors cycled into my curtained cubby and looked me over. I’m not in an actual room; it’s a series of curtains among a wide hallway.

It doesn’t seem to be an emergency for them. They don’t care that I am in great pain. This is just part of their everyday business model. Make me suffer so I will agree to literally anything they want of me.

Several doctors dropped in to get a small piece of the consultation pie that was me. I’m Mason Charles Carpenter, in other words. They’d look at me, talk for a few minutes, then bill Medicare and me for big bucks. I do not remember signing anything that stupid.

Isn’t “free” government medical care grand? Nothing in life is free, and especially Medicare. The vultures all want a cut for five minutes of looking at my chart. Then they talk to each other in their alien-doctor-ish. Normal people hear jibber-jabber. It’s all made-up words mixed with a dead language nobody has spoken in millennia.

Luckily, I was retired military, so I had good secondary insurance.

I take a pill called Tadalafil; that’s the generic name of Cialis. I take it because it helps my prostate operate better.

Neither Tadalafil nor Cialis means crap. The words are made up mumbo-jumbo. I have talked about all of my many meds with lots of doctors and nurses. No two health care providers pronounce any of my medication names the same way. As I said, it’s just jibber-jabber.

No wonder health care is so *&#%$ expensive. The industry is full of shysters and flim-flam artists.

Meanwhile, I was suffering great pain as I seemed to be trapped in some hellish hospital limbo. I’m lying out with the curtains open. Glad I had Pj’s on. I’m in a limbo where time slows almost to a stop because you’re suffering. Layered on top of that, boredom and harsh hands touching you.

Then, I was told the worst thing: my prognosis was very poor. The break was so bad that they would not, could not, do surgery on my broken hip bone.

I’d suspected as much. I have the beginnings of congestive heart failure. I also have emphysema. I’ve had both of them for a few years now. No surgeon wants to do surgery on someone my age with my medical problems.

I smoked for 30 years in my youth, which caused my emphysema.

So, I was stabilized and ended up in a wheelchair with a zippered soft cast on my hip. They tell me this is for the rest of my life. The cast immobilizes the break, and I get a weak dose of Empirin (Aspirin) for the pain.

So, they deemed me no longer able to care for myself with my loss of mobility and my other issues.

They couldn’t squeeze Uncle Sugar for one centime more of Medicare and military insurance money. They shipped me off to a nursing home. I arranged for them to send me to a small private nursing home I knew of; it was Taylor Senior Supported Living.

It was somewhat exclusive. It had only eight patient suites, with one patient per private suite.

I could afford it because I had been a career sailor in the Navy. I advanced through the LDO program until I reached the rank of Lieutenant. After my service, I joined a Beltway Bandit corporation and made real decent money there. I grew my money carefully through a good brokerage company. ( Fidelity ) I had been looking for a good nursing home for some time. I knew my health was failing and I would need one pretty soon. The hip is what forced me into it.

I knew this place had the best reputation. The staff is top-notch. The food is great, and it has a homey atmosphere. That is, considering it’s full of old geezers like myself.

{c.} Why had I joined the Navy? Oh ya, that’s a long story. I talked to my high school counselors about going to College. Where I was in the South, we only called it college.

I didn’t know a college teaches one thing or a select number of things. But a university is bigger, teaches many subjects, and usually does research, too. Side note: Most research is government-funded.

I got NO help from the school’s guidance counselors. None at all!

They all told me I had to decide what I wanted to study.

I had absolutely no idea what I wanted to study. As they say, I didn’t know the difference between shit and Shinola. ( A military phrase. Shinola is a shoe polish ) How the devil was I supposed to pick a career? I had no inkling about what I was good at. Wouldn’t that be a good start? Wasn’t there a test for that?

It is a complex question that affects your life, maybe more than a wife. (Wives seem to come and go) What talents do I have that will suit ME best? Why in the dang world did the school system fail so miserably at actually helping us kids get an education? One that is actually useful and career-enhancing?

This conundrum sent me to my old pal, the local Public Library, in desperation. The librarian ladies were much more helpful. (There were no male librarians back then, not in the South anyway).

I had always been a reader and was already friendly with several of the librarian ladies. They were all helpful people.

Since I was a young boy, the librarian ladies had taken me under their wing. Once upon a time, women used to like boys and men.

Yet, What did I want to do? How the heck would I know? I’m a kid with no experience beyond flipping burgers.

Miss Gibbons, my favorite librarian, asked, “What do you like, Mason?”

“Sailboats?”

I had finished reading “Two Years Before the Mast” a few months earlier. It was a difficult yet rewarding read.

Published in 1840, it’s an adventure story about sailing on wooden ships. It has plenty of action and human-interest moments for its time. It put me on a ship’s deck in 1840 with angry-looking, tough men all around.

I knew I liked motorboats and sailboats. Being a Floridian, I had often been out on the water on one kind of boat or another. It’s kinda a great way to spend the summer.

Sailboats were not a useful idea. I couldn’t connect them with getting a college education.

I got a book from one particular college at the library. It listed all the subjects they taught that year. Somebody, please give me three aspirins.

You would think the school could give you a test to help you figure out what you would do well at. Everywhere I was asked, “What do you want to do, Mace?”

I want to get rich and live in a big mansion with servants. Where do I go for THAT? I can’t say that out loud.

My mind always returned to: I want to do anything but ask, “Do you want a large drink or fries with that? I had been doing that already for some time.”

At age 16, I decided I had to get a job. I was tired of putt-putting around on my Honda 50, which my dad had bought me two years earlier. I wanted at least a 250 so I could tool around on faster highways during my time off.

I got great at flipping hamburgers. I can flip 24 Mickey D hamburgers over in 12 seconds. I can run the grill position for hours, all on my own. Most stores need 3 people to fill the positions needed for rush hour. I could do both rush hours.

I did this for peanuts; they paid me in peanuts. Cheap *&#%$ jerks.

Having not come to a worthwhile decision about college, I came to a final conclusion. I am just destined to be a working man. This wasn’t because I wasn’t smart enough; I was. It was because I saw no purpose in spending a lot of time and money on a generic or useless degree. Another issue is that a degree in a field full of candidates does not guarantee a good position, as they call it.

So, in essence, I had made up my mind that College was too expensive and an illogical thing for me to attempt. Especially since I have no idea what I want to do, and my school system is useless at guiding me.