I’ve been thinking about this one in six figure which divides America into who has health care coverage and who doesn’t. According to a Gallup Poll, 16 percent or one in six Americans over age 18 do not have health insurance. That number is a product of the current system, the broken one, the one that grows more inequitable and expensive the longer we wait to change it.

It’s a shameful statistic. It means that under the American health system, one in six can’t get into the lifeboat. One in six Americans - expendable.

You may not be the unfortunate person out of six, but you probably know one, especially in these tough times. A friend just lost her consulting job in San Francisco when her position was eliminated because of funding. The job’s gone and so is her health insurance. “You’re either part of one statistic or another,” she said.

My husband has a friend with a prostate problem and no health insurance. He’s hoping his body waits until he turns 65 and qualifies for Medicare. I know a woman in her 30s who’s been having chest pains but says she’ll wait until they get really bad and then drive herself to the ER.

Members of Congress who are deciding what to do about the one-in-six problem not only have a seat in the lifeboat, it comes with their name on a brass plaque. They have their own exclusive government-run public plan. In relating to the uninsured and underinsured population, they quite possibly suffer from an empathy deficit disorder.

Conservatives aren’t always big on empathy, the quality of relating in a visceral way to another person’s need, declaring it was not appropriate for a Supreme Court justice. But I think just a little empathy might be useful if you’re deciding on health coverage for all - including yourself.

What if one out of every six members of Congress was suddenly dropped from the government’s insurance plan? That would be 89 newly uninsured people who as members of Congress deciding on the health care bill, would be thinking about how to pay for their kid’s MRI and their own sudden heart surgery. Stripped of their government perk, 89 uninsured members of Congress might be very much in favor of having a public plan rather than be at the mercy of profit-minded insurance companies.

They’d have to think like real people, the ones without insurance and the ones who fear it losing it. Including people who stay with lousy jobs just for the insurance. Who worry about being laid off and having to shop for individual coverage. Who fear being denied because they once had a strange mole on their shoulder.

Critics say health care reform is too costly and we need to worry about the debt our children and grandchildren will face in the future. Future? The kids are here now. The future is this afternoon and tomorrow. If those kids don’t have a healthy beginning they’re not going to grow up and be able to pay anyone’s bills.

California’s new budget includes cutting health insurance for poor kids. Ten thousand kids in Sonoma County alone are going to lose medical insurance through the Healthy Families program for children in low income families, causing one health expert to call it a public health nightmare. Kids go back to school, flu season hits, the uninsured kids who before might have been going to their doctor with symptoms end up in class with the insured kids. Now, everyone gets sick.

It could be the same for Mr. and Ms. Congress Person sitting next to someone on a plane who’s afraid she has swine flu but can’t afford a doctor.

We all sneeze on each other. There’s your empathy.

We brought along the essentials - books, magazines, coffee, wine, the dog.
Facebook stayed home. We had no internet, no TV and cell phone connection was spotty.

It’s good to find out you can still function without all your stuff. For our vacationing pleasure we had a river, a mountain, giant trees and a Sierra cabin, borrowed from a friend, built in the 1930s on the American River.

To move into such a place requires little – open the door, turn on the water, flip the switch to the hot water heater. Make sun tea and locate your first favorite reading site. The lumpy rocker in the living room. A flat rock in the river. A chair on the deck with a railing for your feet.

Then check in with the senses. There’s that toasty summer smell of the Sierra and spicy warm pines. Then the noise of white water rapids dominating all sounds and delivering memories of childhood creeks, although none so clear and cool as this river that begins at the top of a gray-faced mountain, a tower of granite that moves over in the morning to let the sun come around and reaches up to turn on the stars at night.

Here is a place where writers strain to come up with inadequate poetic images when really all you need to say is trees, river, mountains, summer. Reliable, constant, dramatic. No agendas.

The place stands in the middle of now and then.

Sylvia Boorstein who writes simple profound books on meditation, which one day I vow to follow, says a good way to focus is to just listen. There’s highway noise on one side of the cabin from a road that began as a Pony Express route and is now the major shot up and over Echo Summit to Lake Tahoe’s South Shore. On the other side of the cabin, river and wind sounds. From inside, hiking boots on a creaking wood floor, a screen door slamming and Sylvia Poggioli in Rome. Roughing it is one thing. Honoring your addictions is another. We brought along a radio and NPR.

The cabin is soft and worn, vintage rustic, pre-Pottery Barn with serviceable furniture, unmatched curtains, a piano, original roof and a wood stove in the kitchen, no longer used but a monument to the cabin’s Depression-era beginnings. Looking for something to put on my husband’s arm that he cut while rescuing the dog who flew over the river bank after a ball and which might have ended the vacation before dinner, I found a bottle of mercurochrome in the bathroom cabinet. Another antique, with a 35 cent price tag

The cabin stands in the middle of now and then. Best of all, it came with old guest books, begun in 1940, rich with stories, milestone dates and ghosts. Vacation memories of five generations of family and friends from Berkeley and Davis, Indianapolis and Kansas, some written in pencil and all in neat and clear handwriting, recording favorite hiking trails and fishing holes. There was an entry about berry picking in August, 1940 and the last April snow in 1941. In June 1944 someone called the cabin “the castle on the river.” A group celebrated VJ Day with beer and steaks.

In the mountains some people work very hard to have fun. For one late afternoon’s entertainment we sat on the deck and watched climbers scaling Hogback mountain. They crawled and stopped, the shadows climbing faster than they could. Finally in the last piece of light they reached the top and high-fived each other.

We stood and applauded, lit a candle and went back to our books.

I have to admit that one of the big reasons I wanted to see “Cheri” was to check up on Michelle Pfeiffer who has been talking freely about hitting 50.

“If you think 40 is liberating, wait till you turn 50,” she said at a news conference.
“You dread it for years and then it happens and it’s no big deal.”

Pfeiffer turned 50 in the middle of filming “Cheri,” the story of Lea, a 49-year old retired courtesan in love with a much younger man. The movie blurbs like to call Lea an “aging courtesan” or sometimes “an aging beauty.” Aging, being the ouch-y operative word.

Critics gave Pfeiffer kudos for playing her actual age. I guess that’s because audiences were bound to give hard study to a 50-year-old playing an aging beauty. Critic Kenneth Turan said the movie is “art imitating life, with a vengeance.”

Actually, both Pfeiffer and Lea seem to manage aging well, at least physically. Pfeiffer’s character Lea ages comfortably, glamorously and more healthily than her friends. Pfeiffer, herself, appears to be aging beautifully, thinly, firmly and blonde-ly.

Certainly age is a theme throughout the story. Lea tells her young lover, Cheri, who is 18, (played by 27 year old Rupert Friend) to not crinkle up his nose or he’ll get wrinkles. Cheri’s mother, played wonderfully bitchy by Kathy Bates, compliments Lea on her perfume and then zings her with how much better perfume clings to the skin when it is “a little less firm.”

When her maid asks Lea what’s wrong she sighs, “You know. Age.”

The film is set in early 1900s France before World War I, a time that has a few things in common with today. Age obsession, for one. Plus, women taking lovers young enough to be their godsons, proving that cougars are not a modern phenom. And the rich and powerful, on the brink of losing it all, growing decadent and obese. Pfeiffer’s Lea is about the only fit one in her crowd, in part because she pushes the wine glass away and dines on toast and grapes while her friends’ necks grow too big for their diamonds.

Lea, in Pfeiffer’s body, looks like she goes to the gym. The chin is holding. The arms are work-out toned. In the books by Colette on which the film is based, Lea eventually lets the flesh take over and stops dying her hair. But in the film Lea’s body and face reveal only minor signs of age and they’re hardly troubling, although telling enough to be registered by the young lover.

And here is a beauty hint for us all:

Pfeiffer told an interviewer the quickest way for her to look older for the camera was to sit in the sun without makeup and not smile. When the smile drops, so goes the face.

Director Stephen Frears raved about Pfeiffer being a sport, never fretting about her looks, never asking for favors from the camera. On the other hand, Frears, who is 68, has his own aging hang-ups and says he thinks it’s more difficult for men than women to get older. The women around him seem fine with aging, he said. They’ve stopped “flapping around about their appearance all the time. I imagine it’s a great weight off the mind.”

Yes, it could be, especially if Hollywood and the rest of the media would get past their own obsession over youth and beauty.

It’s possible that “Cheri” will encourage more films that deal honestly with age. And that wonderful and realistic roles for women over 50 will continue to come along. In the meantime, don’t let your smile down.