Category: Memoir

Fiction/Humor Memoir Retirement

Coming Out of Hibernation

By Rich Marin | by Rich Marin

Coming Out of Hibernation Over the past few months, Kim and I have gotten into the practice of regularly measuring our temperature, pulse and oxygenation levels in search of any signs of the Coronavirus. This started by watching video clips of Chinese state agents pointing temperature guns at the foreheads of transiting passengers to determine risk of infection. This predated the thought that asymptomatic transmission was a major concern and seemed like a sensible, though…

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Business Advice Memoir Politics

The Dinner Table

By Rich Marin | by Rich Marin

The Dinner Table In the world of banking, it shouldn’t surprise you to learn that most big firms manage somehow to insure that their top two people are not so fervently politically aligned that when (notice I did not say “if”) the opposing party takes office, the firm is not left without sympathetic inroads into the halls of power, perhaps when they need it the most. I have never figured out exactly how that process…

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Memoir Retirement

My Garage Seat

By Rich Marin | by Rich Marin

My Garage Seat I am becoming a man of new interests. When I started working in late June, 1976 it was a mere two months before I got engaged to be married. Our wedding was just after Thanksgiving. By February we had bought a house. It was a nice little starter house with three bedrooms and a bath upstairs and a kitchen, living room, dining room, den and half bath downstairs. As a starter house,…

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Business Advice Memoir

Captain Bob

By Rich Marin | by Rich Marin

Captain Bob It was in 1989 when I was running the Global Derivatives business of Bankers Trust. I was in London, one of our three big offices in the Derivatives business, in addition to New York and Tokyo. Suddenly I had an E.F. Hutton moment when the entire trading room goes quiet for a moment as someone from the derivatives desk yells over to me across the floor the Robert Maxwell is on the phone…

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Love Memoir Politics

Tearing Up

By Rich Marin | by Rich Marin

Tearing Up In the Spring of 1972, during my second semester of Freshman year at Cornell, a group of us who had joined the same fraternity (Phi Sigma Epsilon) and some of the brothers, who we were getting to know, went into Collegetown for a Sunday night pizza dinner at Johnies’ Big Red Grill on Dryden Road. I was an engineering student as were a number of us and the topic of the evening was…

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Love Memoir Politics

The Time of Monsters

By Rich Marin | by Rich Marin

The Time of Monsters This expression sings so very true today as our cities are under siege and the army, in the form of the mobilization of the National Guard, is being brought to bear first in the heartland of Minneapolis. “This is the time of monsters” is attributed to a a little-know Italian founder of the Communist Party there and it dates to that turbulent era of the post World War I to 1930’s…

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Business Advice Memoir Retirement

Home Ownership

By Rich Marin | by Rich Marin

Home Ownership They say that pride of ownership means everything and I sometimes understand that and at other times ponder its wisdom. It has always appealed to me to think that this life is all about dust to dust and that in the long run, none of us own anything other than the love we give and the love we take with us. Everything else is flotsam and jetsam. I know that some families like…

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