The Small Chill You may recall that in July, I shared a story about my old college friend Rob taking his own life. Today was the day his family decided to hold the memorial service at Rob’s home in rural Connecticut. Seven of us who went to Cornell with Rob decided to go (actually Rob, Laurey, Jeff, Ronnie, Cliff and I went to Cornell and Linda might as well have gone to Cornell since she…
What, Me Worry? It was 1967 at Hebron Academy in south-central Maine. This small, but respected prep school was a dead ringer for the school in Dead Poets Society and I was attending as a freshman. I had somehow lucked into a single room on the third-floor northwest corner but there were another twenty freshmen boys on the floor and one teacher/proctor, Mr. Beauchamp. He was no Robin Williams, Captain, my Captain. He was…
Ain’t Too Proud to Beg Pride, arrogance, hubris, self-importance, pomposity is all one and the same. Pride is the top of the Seven Deadly Sins List followed by greed, lust, envy, gluttony, wrath and sloth. As we all know that pride “goeth before the fall”, the question becomes what do we do to avoid the pitfalls of pride? Tonight, Kim and I went with Matthew and Philip to see Ain’t Too Proud to…
Life is Beautiful Do you remember the 1997 Italian film by Roberto Benigni by the same name? You should, it was a Best Picture nominee and won Best Foreign Film and Best Actor for Benigni, who played the happy-go-lucky Guido, who guides his little son through the horrors of Nazi concentration camp life by making a game of it all. It is a poignant, funny, but ultimately sad movie that has a powerful and…
Expert Witness Back in 2012 I was recruited as an expert witness by a law firm trying a case about securities lending on behalf of a foreign pension fund. The suit was against a big bank that acted as the fiduciary for the pension fund. It was a fascinating case that involved a classically innocent and naive widows and orphan’s operation getting led by the hand down the primrose path of global alternative investments. …
A Bridge Over Troubled Waters In the Spring of 1972, I had successfully negotiated my freshman year at Cornell. That year had been eventful in that I had transferred from the Engineering School to the College of Arts and Sciences. I had pulled that off on my own since my mother’s approach to child rearing was that you were on your own at seventeen once in college. No one challenged me on the move…
Indian Giving One of my favorite possessions is a stone and copper outdoor statue of a reclining Socrates. This is a life-sized Socrates, who’s draped toga is a rough field stone that is shaped just so, to look like a reclined flowing robe. Nature crafted it thus and caught the eye of the artist. The artist attached a head, arms and feet made of copper and adding the element of realism to the subtle…
Just Another Monday Morning Labor Day 2019 has little labor in store for me. I am up early, as usual, only a bit earlier since I was exceedingly tired last night and hit the hay by 9:30pm since I had Nyquiled myself into a stupor. It takes a lot of tired to cause me to be unable to write and I had a sufficient dose to do the trick. I still can’t tell if I’m…
Looking Shrewd One of the things I have learned in doing business in the Middle East is that shrewdness is a highly prized attribute. I have worked for and with Israelis. I have worked with and for Saudis. I have worked for (decidedly not with) a big-time Uzbek. I heard it said by one of these groups and maybe all of them that the greatest praise you can give a man is to tell him…
Summer’s End No matter who you are, in the United States we all know summer starts on Memorial Day and ends on Labor Day. And the July 4th holiday is more or less mid-summer. That’s how we roll in the good old US of A. It doesn’t matter that colleges end in early May, and public schools end in late June. Most colleges start in late August, but at least most public schools start…