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Awakening in California: A Short Story
A 2019 accident put Rip in a coma. He came to last week in a different world.
ByAllysia Finley
Dec. 24, 2023 4:21 pm ET
It was Christmas Eve.
A week earlier, Rip awoke from a four-year coma. Doctors called it a miracle. Last thing he could remember, he was driving south on I-5. It was Dec. 31, 2019. It was pouring rain. KNX was reporting about an outbreak of a mysterious respiratory virus in Wuhan, China. And then bam!—an SUV plowed into him.
The world he awoke to was dramatically different. Joe Biden was president and Donald Trump his opponent. There were wars raging in Israel and Ukraine. And, my Lord, gas cost $5 a gallon. It had always been expensive in California, but he couldn’t recall prices this high.
Yesterday, his wife, Jess, took him shopping at Target. Toothpaste, deodorant and paper towels were locked up. She said stores did this to keep shoplifters from clearing out the shelves. He nearly had a coronary when he looked at the prices. Twelve bucks for a pack of cotton socks? Three dollars for a half-gallon of milk?
They were spending Christmas Eve with family in Riverside. Four years ago, his sister Rachel and her husband, Steve, had bought a three-bedroom tract home for $400,000. Homes in her neighborhood were now fetching close to $700,000. You might as well be living in Texas where the weather is the same and everything costs half as much.
They had thought about moving closer to the coast but couldn’t afford to at current prices and mortgage interest rates at 7%. Last time he could recall rates being this high was around 9/11. In any case, homeless people were now everywhere. There was no escaping them, unless you moved out of state.
That’s what his brother James’s family did when California went into “lockdown” in March 2020. Lockdowns, Jess explained, were why his barbershop and favorite Mexican restaurant were no longer around. That a democratic government could order businesses and schools to close for months on end dumbfounded him.
James’s three kids were now enrolled in private schools in Arizona. The state paid for their tuition thanks to a new education-savings-account program. The accounts also paid for his youngest to get special tutoring for dyslexia.
Last time he saw James’s wife, Jenny, she had been diagnosed with metastatic melanoma. Remarkably, she’s been cancer-free for 2½ years thanks to the immunotherapy Keytruda. Her doctors told her that if she had received the diagnosis even five years earlier, she’d be dead.
James could hardly recognize his brother-in-law Steve, who had dropped 40 pounds with a new obesity drug called Wegovy. Last weekend he even won a pickle-ball tournament. “What in the world is pickle ball?” Rip asked. “Tennis but with a paddle and a Wiffle Ball,” Steve explained. Apparently, everyone was playing it.
His 27-year-old nephew, Joe, was waylaid after his Rivian electric pickup ran out of juice. None of the chargers at the local shopping center worked, so he had to call AAA. Rivian made electric trucks for yuppies, Steve explained. Joe had bought $10,000 stock in the company when it went public in 2021. Now it was worth less than $2,000.
“It could have been worse,” Steve noted. Joe had a friend who lost thousands of dollars on the cryptocurrency platform FTX. Another had invested thousands in nonfungible tokens that are now worthless. “What are nonfungible tokens?” Rip asked.
“According to ChatGPT,” Steve explained, “a nonfungible token is a type of digital asset that represents ownership or proof of authenticity of a unique item or piece of content using blockchain technology.”
“ChatGPT? What’s that?”
“Oh, brother,” James sighed. “This is going to be a long night.”
“Where did Joe and his friends even get all that money to invest?”
“The government,” Steve replied. “They made $1,000 a week in unemployment benefits and received thousands of dollars in stimulus payments that they couldn’t spend on going out.”
His 15-year-old niece, Madison, was glued to her iPhone, mesmerized by videos on TikTok. Teens, he learned, didn’t use Snap or Instagram anymore. “What about Twitter?” he asked her. “You mean X? . . . Uncle Rip, are you going to vote for Trump?”
He scratched his head. He wasn’t sure. He never loved Donald Trump but things seemed better when he was president.
“But don’t you care about abortion?”
His wife had earlier explained that Trump had appointed a new justice to the Supreme Court, which during his coma had overturned Roe v. Wade and struck down affirmative action in college admissions. Good riddance. At least there were some good political things that happened while he was asleep.
Don’t get him wrong. He was thankful he and his family were all still alive. But part of him wished to return to the world as it existed four years ago.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/awaken...rt-story-gas-election-covid-abortion-52efdfde
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