Picking Your Friends We all find and make friends in different ways and at different stages in life. When we are babies, our mothers make choices for us. These days it is most common for young mothers to join activities with their child that quickly lead to the forming of playgroups. We all want our children to be socialized and not bound solely to the nuclear family and the cat. So, these groups are,…
Reverse Polish Logic I’ve discussed my love affair with the Hewlett-Packard 12C financial calculator. It is from that device that many of us learned about Reverse Polish Notation (RPN). It’s the logic protocol used by the 12C for operating the calculator. With it, the operator (the numbers) come before the operands (the function like addition or multiplication) when inputting the equation one is looking to solve. RPN was invented in the 1920’s by Jan Lucasiewicz,…
Responsible Hosting I have owned vacation homes since 1986. That is 33 years. Over that time, I have owned vacation homes in the Berkshires (2), The Hamptons, Park City (5), San Diego and Ithaca. By my count, that is a total of ten vacation homes. At one time, I have owned as many as three at once (what a headache). The big issue is always how to maintain the home in my absence. By…
Day Tripping In 1998 when I was at the apex of my banking career, I met Terry. I was on the Management Committee of Bankers Trust Company, where I ran both the Global Private Banking and was Vice Chairman of BT Alex. Brown, responsible for their Private Client Services business. It was a big job with loads of perks, easily the most I ever received. The biggest perk was a car and driver, which was…
Pseudo Back in 1999 lots of funny things happened. It was very much an end of an era for me. I was the end of a twenty-three-year career, with all the incumbent ups and downs, with my primary employer, Bankers Trust Company. We sold ourselves to Deutsche Bank for $93 per share and all got lots of money from our pent-up options and restricted stock. Some of us got our walking papers, some got…
Road Show Last night we went to New York City Center for a performance of Steven Sondheim’s musical Road Show. This is a twenty-year-old version of a story which has been produced under various names like Bounce, Wise Guys and Gold!. While we thoroughly enjoyed the show, it had little to do with the production and almost everything to do with good music/singing and the captivating story of the life and travails of the Mizner…
A Persian Goodbye I always wanted a to be an architect. That came to a screeching halt the first week of freshman orientation when this student magazine was slid under all our dorm room doors on which it showed the earning power of all the major professions. Veterinarians were at the top and architects were at the bottom. I had not applied to the school of architecture, but as an engineering student, I still had…
Clubbing I know what you are thinking, no matter how much I do or don’t know about this guy, he is definitely not the clubbing sort. But wait a minute, things change and people change. Clubbing takes many forms, but all have much in common as well. He skipped the Reb Blazer and The Loft in the 70’s, he avoided Studio 54 in the 80’s, never went to Elaine’s in the 90’s, and the Blue…
Triangulating Friendships Last night Kim and I had drinks and dinner with an unusual kluge of friends. They themselves are not unusual, but the connections are a bit complicated. Tricia worked for me in 1981 in the early days of Bankers Trust. She was fresh out of school and both impressionable and eager to learn about the world. Her husband Sam, who came along years after Tricia and I had parted ways, came to…
Getting Robbed I had a message on my phone last night from a woman I recognized as an old college friend Rob’s ex-wife. I hadn’t spoken to her for years. I called her knowing something meaningful was up. I had spoken to Rob a few months ago and he did not sound at all well. I told a mutual friend that he sounded like he was 90 years old and feeble at that. At…