Death Pays a Visit When I was much younger, someone gave me a copy of the Gail Sheehy book Passages. It outlined some typical moments in our lives when certain things naturally occur. I specifically recall reading that while in our 30s we almost all come face to face with our own mortality, usually by way of the death of a loved one. We are then forced to grapple with the inevitability of our own…
Coming of Age Tomorrow is my 69th birthday, which means I will be starting my 70th year. I have never been a person who cares much about age as a defining characteristic. When I hit 30, 40, 50 and even 60 it was a non-event. I’m not so sure that 70 will be any different for me when it comes in a year. I think it’s fair to say that these days, except for the…
Back to Perfection I generally don’t aspire to perfection. I learned a long time ago that zero-default systems are too expensive to afford and that perfection is simply too difficult to attain. Every business and activity defines its tolerance levels with enough leeway to allow things to be almost perfect, but never quite totally perfect, and that’s just fine. I have always liked the movie The Last Samurai with Tom Cruise and Ken Watanabe. In…
The Otto in Us All Today, as I wandered around NYC, I went to go see A Man Called Otto, starring Tom Hanks. Hanks has been the American cinematic Everyman for many years and as he ages along with the rest of us Baby Boomers (Hanks is two years younger than me) he is increasingly playing older roles, which seems both appropriate and very sensible. I don’t know how beloved he is to Millennials, but…
A World Gone Mad I am once again sitting in the sedate and peaceful setting of the NYC Cornell Club breakfast room. I find hat hen one travels, one’s view of the world takes on a different perspective. We awake in a different time zone with people we know still asleep and others we used to know less far away. The places around us are either or both more or less familiar and we tend…
Invictus In 1875, William Ernest Henley penned a short poem about the English tradition of maintaining a stiff upper lip in the face of adversity. The last two lines of the poem are the most memorable and are: I am the master of my fateI am the captain of my soul. I was reminded of the poem while watching the Matt Damon and Morgan Freeman movie by the same name, Invictus. It is the story…
Leaving My Wingman As the sun comes up in the east and I can feel that graininess in my eyeballs that comes from insufficient sleep, I am comforted in knowing that at the other end of my house on the hilltop, my little baby boy (Thomas) is fast asleep with his fiancé, Jenna. How they got there only several hours ago is a story of holiday travel 2022 that I feel may be worth sharing.…
The Warmth of the Season Today it is 70 degrees warmer here on the hilltop than it is in frigid New York City. I got a Snapchat this morning from my daughter, who lives in Brooklyn that had her dog, Abe, running around their place with a knit Santa suit on. The video stated that it was 8 degrees, implying that Abe was lucky to be clad to stay warm. Meanwhile, back here on the…
Starry Starry Night Last night we had the pleasure of going to what is called the Rady Shell at Jacobs Park. To begin with, Ernest Rady is a self-made philanthropist who has given away billions of dollars mostly to help sick children, but also to enhance his adopted home of San Diego. The Rady Shell is a acoustical marvel and is a outdoor bandshell sitting on a spit of land adjacent to the San Diego…
Top of the Wall Everywhere I look these days, I am seeing articles about one of two issues: homelessness in America and the crisis and the U.S. border with Mexico. It is sometimes hard to reconcile the two issues. On the one hand people from all over the world, especially Central America are finding the conditions in their countries intolerable and abuse for risking life and limb to get to the U.S. border to seek…