The End of the World Last night Kim and I went to diner st the house of a friend from business school. I knew John quite well during my eighteen months the Graduate Business School at Cornell (then called B&PA, now called the Johnson School….part of the Johnson College of Business at Cornell….too long of a naming story to recite in full here and now). I think its fair to say that John was the…
Immune to Immunology I am reading about the Immunity Debt, a new term being coined to explain why people who have been socially distancing during the Pandemic are getting sick with other more common viruses for which they have not been building immunities. I have said for a long time that my sisters and I are more robust and in good health because we grew up eating a lot of emerging markets dirt, compliments of…
Dog Fight at Homeward Bound When Roger and Carolyn were little, a movie came out that they were desperate to see. It was 1993 and it was called Homeward Bound; The Incredible Journey. It chronicled the ever-endearing saga of three pets joining forces to try to get back home through the wilderness. Chance, Sassy and Shadow don’t start off as friends but develop their rapport through the trials of the journey. For an animal kids…
Arts & Crafts All through my youth in Middle America (not so much when living the survivalist regime in the tropics or the ethereal existence in Rome) I kept getting taught about how to do arts & crafts. In some sort of shop course in middle school in Middleton, Wisconsin (I was actually in middle school in Middleton in Middle America), I had to make a pump lamp where the pump handle was attached to…
B2B2B2B Back in late 1999, my buddy Bruce, who was a partner with me at Bankers Trust for many years, introduced me to two guys from Madison Avenue. One (Sam) he had known as a family friend for years and the other was his partner (Terry) for years. We thought of it as two Wall Street guys meet two Mad Men. Bruce and I had run our course with Bankers Trust, which sold to Deutsche…
On Solitude It’s an overcast, but pleasant, Saturday morning and it’s the first morning since we have been in Ithaca, having arrived here twelve days ago, that we are totally alone in the place. We started with Gary & Oswaldo here for four days, then Josh & Haj and their kids for three, then off to NYC for three, then Ann, Chris and their pal John for three. This Saturday is our only day when…
Sitting Still I am over at my daughter’s home in Brooklyn. It is a duplex in Columbia Waterfront, which is a happening part of Brooklyn, the most happening Borough in New York. Before the pandemic, this area was almost too hot, with people like my daughter and her family wondering how they could NOT sell to capture the crazy appreciation in house values. About eight and a half years ago, my daughter surprised me at…
The Big Fix Yesterday was a near perfect weather day here in Ithaca and I used it to good purpose to make a bunch of decisions and to fix a bunch of things. Some days nothing seems to work right and you just stumble through hoping for the best and needing the assurance that you are not just a complete screw-up that can make nothing happen right. Yesterday was different. Everything I touched and thought…
Six in the City I have three children, all of whom currently live in New York City. There is Roger with wife Valene and their new pup, Pudding (a blonde, long-hair, miniature Dachshund) who live in St. George, Staten Island. They have their eye on moving to Delaware in the not too distant future and are working that move aggressively at this exact moment. Then there is Carolyn and husband of ten years, John and…
Acey-Deucey When I was twelve, we moved to the state of Maine. The three years we lived there felt very formative to me not only because I went through puberty in “Vacationland” as the state proclaims itself on its license plates, but also because of all the work hard / play hard lessons I learned during those years. During the winter of our arrival I asked the man (Saul Feldman) who owned the Poland Spring…