Perspective

I read once that the difference between a billion and a million can be put in perspective something like this: A million seconds is about eleven days. A billion seconds is more than thirty-one years!

Otherwise, doesn’t sound like much of a difference, huh?

Okay, how about a trillion?

Can you say three thousand years!!!!!

Now do you really want to get scared?

Of course you do. You probably have all of the Alien episodes on DVD. You probably watch American Idol. You drive in bullets at sixty miles per hour, while other cars hurtle towards you at the same speed, missing each other by five yards. Heck, I can jump five yards. Uh, I could… back in high school.

Anyway, you asked for it. I’m going to scare you…..really good.

BWAH! Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha!

Here goes…

The national debt of the United States is

Six.

Six what, you say?

Six,

not million,

not billion.

But Six Trillion Dollars!

That’s over twenty-two thousand dollars for each and every single person in the United States. And every time another person is born, that person is automatically on the hook for twenty-two thousand clams. Welcome to reality. That, on top of the hospital charge, where you get to pay sixty bucks for an aspirin.

And that, my friends, is called perspective.

Speaking of perspective, it took one hundred and thirteen years to do it. And after all that time, it only lasted five months.

Do what?

Mary Dorothy Christian died in April 2003, at the age of 113 years and nine months.

The occasion that lasted five months?

Her tenure as the oldest person in the United States.

Imagine working at something for over one hundred and ten years, and then only getting to enjoy it for just a few short months.

The only thing I can compare this with is when my wife spends two hours making dinner, and then the kids take a perfunctory sniff, and turn up their little did-you-know-children-are-starving-in New Jersey noses at her hard earned efforts. Or when I wait in the doctor’s office an hour for a seven-minute once-over.

Still though, think about it. You could live an entire 75-year average life span, and this lady still beats you out by almost four decades. Long enough for you to be born, grow up, have kids, and go to your kids’ proms … twice, and still have time to go out for an ice cream sundae. Split it in half and you could be a grandparent … twice. She was around for the eve of two different centuries, and lived in parts of three centuries (1800’s, 1900’s, 2000’s).

One hundred thirteen years and nine months.

Are you staggered by this?

Do you need more?

Okay, the nine months alone is long enough to make an entire person from scratch. Yet, this is barely one half of one percent of her life span. In fact, you could manufacture 152 people, from conception to birth in the 1365 months of Christian’s life. When she died, she was older than the cumulative ages of my wife, both kids, my daughter Lauren’s pet rabbit and me.

She lived longer than the average life expectancy of a wolf, sheep, rat, horse, kangaroo, lion, monkey, mouse, parakeet, pig, rabbit, pigeon, common cold and hangnail all put together.

Even more remarkable, when she died, she was just over half the age of the United States of America!!!!

Not only that, but she did it with her favorite foods being Kentucky Fried Chicken and Hostess Twinkies

She took the crown in November 2002, following the death of Mary Parr, and passed the mantle along to Elana Slough, who takes control, also at 113 years of age.

I got on my handy dandy calculator, and figured how long before I might wrest the throne away. Hmmm just 69 years. That’s only 36,266,400 minutes, or just 1.2 million episodes of M*A*S*H.

I can do it!

Pass me the Twinkies.

(P.S. do you think maybe the Department of Revenue could get $22,000 out of her estate, so we could handle her part of the national debt? Oh, they already do that? Well, okay, then.)