We Entered a New Millennium

2000 was sort of a weird year.  Most people thought it was the beginning of the 21^st Century.  The purists disagreed, arguing that a century had 100 years, not 99.   Some made the point that the early calendars didn’t have any zero years.  I’m not sure how many anno domino years went by before the zero years were added.  If that’s the case I still don’t know when or if the twenty first century began.

Anyway, on January 1, we were relieved to know that that everything from the coffee pot to the computer worked despite dire predictions to the contrary.  For us the biggest time markers occurred on our birthdays.  We both reached 65 and qualified for Medicare.  That took an enormous financial pressure off our backs. 

Speaking of financial matters, things were a bit different then.  A first class stamp cost 34 cents.  I’m old enough to remember when they cost 3 cents.  You could buy a gallon of gasoline for less than a dollar and a half.  I can remember when you buy a gallon of gas for 19 cents.  Imagine what it would be like if you said to a service station attendant, “Give me 50 cents worth of regular please.”  In the first place, there are no service stations.  In the second place there are no attendants.  In the third place if there were an attendant, there’s a good possibility that he couldn’t stop the pump on 50 cents.  If he did, you could scarcely make it around the block before you’d need to visit the gas pump again.

In 2000, we attended the Smart Marriages Conference in Denver, and then took a few days for a Colorado vacation.  We went to Fort Leavenworth for Elliott’s promotion ceremony.  He became a Lieutenant Colonel that year.  We also attended the Bible Teachers’ Workshop at ACU.  I made an unexpected trip to the emergency room at Hendrick’s Hospital.  At one point my blood pressure dropped to 40/30.  They eventually got me stabilized and I walked out of the hospital somewhere around 2 in the morning.  It wasn’t time to let go of this life.  We traveled back to Shreveport the next day, but nobody would let me drive.