Heeeeere’s Donny There are few movie lines more memorable than Jack Nicholson sticking his head through a freshly axed bathroom door saying with a devilish smile, “Heeeeere’s Johnny!” The Shining, from which the line comes, is also right up there in the pantheon of scary movies. Well friends, we are in our own scary movie and while I need to substitute Johnny with Donny, the urgency and extreme nature of the threat to us all…
Man Interrupted There has been a theme in recent cinematic content about interrupted lives, first with Girl, Interrupted and then Boy Interrupted. Girl, Interrupted was a 1999 film based on an earlier book that details the life of a young middle class woman who gets put into a mental institution for attempting suicide. Boy Interrupted is a 2009 true-life version of the same thing except its about a boy who is diagnosed as bipolar-polar and…
Dog Fight Right after my normal Sunday morning bagel run, Kim called to say that we had a problem with Buddy. It seemed that he had gotten bitten by another dog at the place where he is boarding for the weekend. I needed to go and pick him up and take him to the vet to see if there was any serious damage. When I got to Colean’s house, he was brought out and while…
What We Value I pretty much ignored the “Trial of the Century” about the O.J. Simpson accusations that he killed his wife and her lover. That happened in 1995 and I was close to being at the height of my career in investment banking. I was busy running around the world and building a global investment business. It was the year that my youngest son was born. The last thing I cared about was the…
Work/Life Balance Throughout my working career, the subject of work/life balance was a constant. We all know the story of the workaholic that overworks himself to the point of ignoring his familial obligations. He comes home after the kids are asleep, he cancels vacations at the last minute. He leaves all the child rearing to his wife. And he always misses the baseball game or recital of his children. I occasionally suffered from all of…
The Stone Menagerie In the 1944 play, The Glass Menagerie, Tennessee Williams wrote an autobiographical memory story that launched his writing career and put him into the Pantheon of great American writers. It is a subtle story about a middle class American family with a mother living below the standards to which she had become accustomed from her youth, a father that is woefully absent, an underachieving son who yearns for independence and a grown…
The Man of the Decade There is an old story about Donald Trump creating a phony Time’s Person of the Year cover to hang in one of his golf resorts. When we all heard that, we felt it was a pathetic sign of what a narcissist Trump is and how desperately he craves adoration and attention. This week, Trump has legitimately made it to the cover of Time magazine with the headline, “If he wins”.…
Campus Unrest I feel like I am reliving my youth. During high school in Rome in 1968-1970, I watched the United States wrack itself from afar over the issue of the Vietnam War. I watched students get shot at Kent State and radical blacks take over the Willard Straight Hall student union at Cornell, the closest thing I had to a family school, as the place where my mother had attended. The similarity of those…
Vax Redux Last fall Kim and I were very diligent about getting all vaccinations that were being advised for people of our age by the CDC. We had the latest COVID booster. We had our regular annual flu vaccination. We got the pneumonia vaccination. We also got the RSV vaccination so that we wouldn’t catch one of those nasty deep lung infections. They checked the status of our shingles vaccinations, but we had gotten that…
The Abortion of Humanity I have long considered abortion to be one of the thorniest policy issues in American politics. It strikes me as one of those issues that galvanizes people to the extreme and yet one that can be debated on grounds of morality ad infinitum. Ignoring the politics of the moment, the dimensions of the issue involve gender equality, primordial imperative of procreation, libertarianism, privacy, cultural norms about sex, the balancing of individual…