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…
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…
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…
Passing Through Our drive to New York City today went pretty much as expected. On a Sunday morning in June, the week-ending population of New York usually doesn’t set out on the roads until the afternoon. That means we expected that our morning drive from the country to the city would be light traffic. That was the case right up until we got to that mess of a set of tangled roadways around Jersey City…
Sneaking Into New York City Today is Father’s Day according to convention in the United States that begun, more or less, in 1910. A Day for honoring fathers has been a part of Western culture since the Middle Ages. Mothers have been honored formally in the U.S. since about the same time as fathers in the Unites States, but more broadly, mothers have been held on a pedestal for at least one day of the…
Betty Goes Swimming This is our third day in Ithaca and it has been wonderfully cool and a little bit rainy to boot. There has been no desire to test the waters of the pool, even though it is heated to a comfortable 85 degrees. Today was sunny and warmer and the thought did occur to me that a dip in the pool might be pleasant in the afternoon. The forecast said it would be…
The Beasts of the Field In the eighteen months I have lived on my hilltop in San Diego, I have gotten used to the critters that inhabit the chaparral. There is a very well defined ecosystem and while I am no zoologist or naturalist, this is how I see it. The baseline are the little ants I see here and there, inside and out. They don’t seem to be around much in the winter months,…
Tiering Up Today we drove the last leg of our Eastbound journey from California to New York. That rounds off to 2,800 miles in seven days of driving for an average daily ride of 400 miles. Today’s ride was only 335 miles, so about five and a half hours plus whatever stops we decided to make. We made it a forced march at 5mph over the speed limit (which I figure put us marginally over…
Ski In Ski Out A road trip across country at my age is bound to raise lots of memories. Indeed, today was a day of memories unlike yesterday. There is nothing wrong with the ride from San Diego through Las Vegas and up through the Virgin Valley Gorge into the red rocks of Southern Utah. In fact, it’s fair to say it’s one of my favorite areas of the United States, but we were just…