Louis Roney: Good health, good life, good grief

• Today, as I write, is b.w.’s birthday. She is adamant that it be no special day, but I still celebrate in my mind and heart that we have been together for 34 years, and she has made those years the best of my 93. Friends drove us to Apopka where we had a most delicious dinner at The Back Room Steakhouse. Restaurateur Ed Conlan proudly serves up top-quality steaks and delectable fish, topped off with celestial key lime pie! Well worth the trip.

• Winter Park can be grateful to our city commission for being more concerned with our future township than with the wishes of developers. After some 40 years of worldwide concertizing, I bought a house in Winter Park, because the city has retained much of the charm that has blessed its population since my school days! When and if Winter Park becomes only a busy suburb of Orlando, my house will be for sale.

• People with a serious yen to sit in the president’s chair in the Oval Office may find that they must sacrifice much of their private life, and that their health is the public’s business. Hillary Clinton has medical problems. A while back she had a blood clot in her leg. And this past January she had a blood clot in her brain — serious business! Only a doctor could determine if her condition could make a person unfit to run for the nation’s top office. Well, blood clots certainly don’t enhance a candidate’s qualifications. Facts are facts, and any candidate’s health is something we should know and take into consideration. Is this information important if you’re voting about the future of your country? You bet!

• As an old New Yorker, I recall Mayor John Lindsay’s suicidal handling of the snowed-in borough of Queens. It was a big goof that cost Lindsay the next election. New Mayor Bill de Blasio’s Achilles’ heel is the notoriously wealthy Upper East Side of Manhattan, which was not plowed at all in a recent snowstorm. De Blasio refers weakly to an “out-of-commission snowplow.” That ploy may not win back the scads of votes de Blasio may have lost. He calls himself a “man of the common people,” and is politically very liberal. The East Siders think he sent them a message. I think Mr. de Blasio has just done a “Lindsay” that may well tarnish his civic escutcheon and curtail his reign as mayor!

• Spring is here! Television has brought us the Masters Tournament and the Kentucky Derby. And the sun is blazing away on us lucky Central Floridians. The sun, never forget, is the source of all life in our little corner of the universe. And we seem to be the only living human beings within reach. It’s a lonely life, but it’s better to be a preacher who knows what life is, than to be an inanimate, inert zilch! We had better give a thought to what we are doing on our earth, hadn’t we? Don’t we spend an inordinate amount of energy and time thinking up ways to wipe out other human beings before they figure out how to wipe us out? Are we perhaps not the first earthly creatures to have been created and later to have found the way to annihilate themselves and everybody else? Many people have thought that our sexual urge is mankind’s main driving force. However, in his old age, Einstein concluded that self-destruction had replaced sexual drive as mankind’s primary thrust. There are a lot of nice little sayings that I often think of: “Live and let live,” “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you,” “Give the other guy an even break,” “Never hit a man when he’s down,” etc. In the game of life, one may capture his primary desire, and still lose every material thing he owns. Solitary triumph is not always a joyous situation in the people game. Sharing is the smart way to proceed — who wants to eat alone, dance alone or sleep alone? A shared life divides by two both sorrow and joy … it’s not the whole pie, but it’s a big piece, isn’t it?