From the Back Nine: The One Percent

We are all in The One Percent, depending on what we are talking about. For instance, I am in The One Percent of Americans who has never liked “The Sound of Music.” I’ve neither seen an episode of “The Game of Thrones,” nor did I follow “Downton Abbey” all the way to its conclusion. I am among the handful of females 65-plus who watches “The Walking Dead.”

My viewing habits have nothing to do with superior or inferior. The One Percent does not have to mean at the top, any more than it means at the bottom. It can be sliced out of the continuum anywhere along the line. We need to keep that in mind when it is used to imply dominance … like with money.

In my career, I have had clients in many corner offices. They were often rich, but that did not mean astute, happy, respected. One was just smart enough to know his brain functioned at about the level of a hedgehog. He had the office only because daddy’s name was on the masthead. He was one of the saddest people I ever knew. Being in The Saddest One Percent is nothing I aspire to, even though he wore alligator shoes and I wore pleather.

I am in The One Percent so addicted to dark chocolate that I no longer care how good or bad it is for me. I am in The One Percent who think “bird” when we hear “tweet.” I am in that rarefied few who resist the belief that Sasquatch, Roswell and the Loch Ness Monster have been debunked.

Well, maybe this last is a bigger group than I know.

Just being on the Back Nine — a simple matter of longevity — gives you an opportunity to be in a One Percent that youngsters can’t claim. I have seen every state and every ocean but one. I no longer give a crap that I am taller than the average American man, that I have no poker face whatsoever, that I can’t hold my liquor or anyone else’s.

What is your One Percent? Can you grow a perfect rose? Do you recognize different kinds of whales by their different kinds of spouts? Are you captain of an American curling team? Can you lift one eyebrow at a time? Wiggle your ears? Do you think the Olympics have been so riddled with scandal we should give up on the whole damn thing? Do you get your best stories from eavesdropping in restaurants? (oh no, wait … that one’s mine … )

The world would be a very dull place if we each didn’t have our own combo of One Percents that make us the only one such me or the only one such you.

Thank goodness we don’t all have to like each other. Thank goodness we all mostly do. Don’t we?

Linda B. Myers is a founding member of Olympic Peninsula Authors and author of the novel Fun House Chronicles, and the PI Bear Jacobs mystery series. Her newest novel, “The Slightly Altered History of Cascadia: A Fantasy for Grown Ups,” is now available at amazon.com. Contact her at myerslindab@gmail.com or Facebook.com/lindabmyers.author.