Saul’s epiphany occurred in a jolting, blinding flash on the road to Damascus in 36 A.D. My epiphany was at 1:30 p.m. on Friday, December 20, 1963.

      According to Acts, in spite of his crusade to hunt down and slaughter the small band of early Christians, Saul’s conversion is seen as evidence of the power of divine grace. My epiphany was not deus ex machina but intense inner struggle.

      A suicidal lifestyle gripped me at age sixteen and for the next twenty-six years held me in addictive bondage.

     No one warned me about my perilous path. On the contrary, family and friends, caught up in the same culture, surrounded me and reinforced my decision to follow their deadly course.

     I could buy a bag of Bull Durham for five cents and for a nickel more get papers to roll twenty coffin nails. There were Sensations, Wings, Twenty Grands and Avalons--all for ten cents a pack. I jumped from brand to brand--Lucky Strikes to Camels, Old Golds, Pall Malls, Parliaments, Phillip Morris, Chesterfields, Kools, Benson & Hedges, Fortunas, L&Ms, Kents, Salems, Raleighs, Winstons, Viceroys, Newports and Dunhills. One and one-half packs a day for twenty-six years--284,700 cigarettes saturated my lungs with deadly tobacco tar and carcinogens.

     Muckraking reporter George Seldes published a four-page newsletter, In Fact, starting in 1940 when I was nineteen. I was an avid reader. In fifty articles, Seldes warned us about the dangers of cigarette smoking. Scientific studies confirmed that smoking shortens life and causes cancer. The major newspapers suppressed the findings of Johns Hopkins researchers.

    The tobacco industry pumped $50 million a year into newspaper advertising. Of the 300 big dailies in America, only one, The Washington Post, reported Dr. Raymond Pearl’s terrifying news. The readers of our great free press--consumers of 200 billion cigarettes a day--were denied this life-saving information. The only major magazine to publish study results was the Readers Digest with its 7 million readers and no advertising.

      We childishly quipped: “We don’t care if smoking cuts ten years off our lives, as long as it’s the last ten years.”

      My dad died at 47; my mom, 62. My dearest sister died a horrible death from lung cancer at age 60. My kid brother dropped dead from a massive coronary at 65. My little sister suffered a huge stroke in her early 60s and died too young. All smokers.

     I quit cold turkey at 1:30 p.m., Friday, December 20, 1963 at age 42. My lungs are as clean as a newborn baby. Easy? No. Every waking half-hour I had a nicotine fit. Bantron helped. My MO was to tell everyone I met, “ I quit smoking.” How could I light up again?

    At nearly 90, I consider kicking the filthy habit my single greatest achievement--the most significant turning point in my life.

  LST-472 & LST-738 hit by Japanese Kamikazis during the invasion of Mindoro Island - December 15, 1944

      On this sweltering, sticky Philippine June day, he finally gets the long-awaited orders to relieve him of duty and send him flying home to his beloved wife and the baby daughter he has never met.

      A tsunami of euphoria envelops him. Joyfully waving the crumpled, life- saving papers, his bellowing cheer echoes throughout the tent compound and startles every living creature within a half-mile radius. We hug in celebration.

      No more Japanese kamikazes. No more terror. Never again will he witness the torn bodies of his fellow Navy PT boat crews and have to steel himself for the next attack day after day, week after week. This sensitive, scholarly, athletic and courageous 24-year-old is my best friend. A skilled boat handler and crew commander who combines wit and classical scholarship with great physical courage and fanciful play, he is deeply in love with his wife with whom he exchanges long, passionate, daily love letters and is determined to survive the battle of the Philippines and return to Portland and her loving arms.

      Emotionally overwhelmed by the realization that he is about to put the terrors of Mindoro Island behind him, he becomes hypercharged.

      A professional baseball pitcher with the Portland Beavers, this six-foot, 185-pound, muscular Navy Lieutenant Junior Grade, has an uncontrollable urge to throw a baseball. I am his catcher. His pitches pound me at 95-miles-per hour and nearly perforates my catcher’s mitt. I toss the mitt aside and halt the deadly barrage.

     A softball game is in progress in a nearby field. Barefoot and dressed only in cutoff shorts, he rips the bat out of the hands of a player and shouts, “Put it over!” He blasts the ball deep into tropical foliage beyond the playing field, throws his bat thirty feet into the air and dashes toward first base. Ten feet short of the bag he hits the gravel base path in a slide. Bare feet and legs send up an explosion of sharp, flying, lacerating stones. He leaps up, races to second. Another ten-foot slide. To third, another slide. Then triumphantly home with skin and flesh torn and bleeding.

        Detached from reality and surrounded by his comrades, he barks like a sea lion, eyes flashing with terror like an animal caught in a steel trap. He jerks his head back and force, seeking an opening in the human wall around him. His bloody body is torn and stinking in fear, blood and sweat. Hunched forward, eyes glaring wildly, he staggers around the protective ring of sand stained with blood from his bulging thighs and calves.

       We implore him, “Take it easy, man, you’re going home! Remember! You’re going home!”

       Suddenly, he bursts through the human wall and dashes into the sea swimming with adrenaline-powered strokes 200 yards into Mangarin Bay where we finally reach him. Floating face up--lifeless and sightless eyes rolled back like the blind orbs of Oedipus. Salt water washes away the blood. Tendrils of skin hand from his legs like strands of unraveled cord undulating in gentle sea swells.

       We see his limp body apparently fantasizing himself as a dead Japanese suicide plane pilot--bloated, rotting, stinking corpse bobbing in a sea of aircraft flotsam--oil slicks and the wreckage of a thousand ships, planes and PT boats.

      Gently, we cuddle his limp body and carry him ashore. I sit for endless hours of schizophrenic flowing language--his deep voice incoherently ranting disjointed and random histrionic bits of Shakespeare, Dante, Milton and Tennyson--until the next day when the Navy flies him out of our lives.

      Months of deadly Japanese suicide plane attacks fill us all with indescribable fear that builds up like a great reservoir behind a dam of sticks and mud. The terror subsides, but the psychotic pressure endures. When the order to fly him home arrives, the dam bursts. He is carried away on millions of gallons of flotsam that wash up on a barren beach thousands of miles away.

      The Navy’s St. Elizabeth Hospital provides the best care available in 1945--insulin and electric shock--but my dear friend, now a crippled shadow with post traumatic stress disorder, can never go home again as the warrior who said goodbye to his beloved wife so long ago.

     Bless you, dear friend, for all the laughter and poetry that enriched our lives, and thank you for standing steadfast and unflinching under deadly, daily terror attacks. You will live in my mind and heart forever.

       The giant billboard screams: “Where there is water, there is food.”

      The 416-mile drive from Laguna Woods to Oakland is packed with incredible sights and sounds of California’s Central Valley that never fail to present an eye popping tableau of wonders seen nowhere else on the face of Earth.

      Millions of fruit and nut trees and vineyard stakes planted like Iowa fields of corn in rows that stretch from here to eternity boggle. I never believe what I see--too immense for my feeble brain to wrap around or comprehend.

      We look down neatly planted and impeccably maintained rows of almond trees that produce eighty percent of the world’s crop--countless thousands of prolific bearers whose ripe nuts are picked by huge machines that embrace each tree and shake the fruit into gaping truck trailers.

      In sharp contrast, the endless ribbon of I-5 highway that stretches the length of Tennessee is polluted with randomly shaped chunks of re-capped tire treads distributed willy-nilly on both berms and the median--detritus we once shipped to China for crafting into footwear but now is overloading landfills--a ton of tread trash every mile.

      Monstrous eighteen-wheelers rule the two overcrowded lanes, roaring and spewing stinky diesel fuel exhaust fumes and clogging traffic flow when one behemoth pulls into the passing lane to painstakingly overtake a slightly slower cargo hauler. Dinky passenger cars dart in and out at 90 miles an hour thumbing their noses at cars poking along at ten miles over the 70 mph speed limit.

      Northbound to the glorious wedding of our radiant PhD granddaughter to her handsome PhD Danish prince at the Women’s Cultural and Art Center in the Oakland hills, we opt for the highway over the airway, since we are “too old” to rent a car at 89--a clear case of elder abuse and age discrimination.

     Long before we reach the Harris Ranch feedlot with its 100,000 head of cattle, the stench of methane gas assaults us. Miniscule by comparison with many Midwest and Texas cattle feedlots, the humongous herds at Harris are impressive. U.S. ruminants produce 5.5 million metric tons of this gas annually, contributing 19 percent of the world’s methane that traps substantially more heat than CO2 and helps warm the globe.

     Still glowing from the joyful matrimonial masterpiece spiced up with Danish customs that literally keep the bride and groom lips locked as long as wine glasses clink harmoniously and shouts of “Rah!” (slowly), “Rah!” (slowly), “Rah!” (slowly), then “Rah! Rah! Rah! (quick time) raise the rafters and shoes rhythmically pound the ancient wooden floor, we are now southbound in continuous thunder, lightning and flash flooding sheets of rain.

     Suddenly, nearing the Tehachapi Mountains and the 4,100-foot Tejon Pass, the overcast disappears and sunlight dazzles our tired eyes and blankets the magnificent rolling foothills with incandescent California gold.