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…
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…
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…