Cashing the Check For my many years in senior management on Wall Street, friends would regularly tell me that I was too nice for Wall Street. That was a polite way of saying that I was a pussy and refused to treat people harshly. Don’t get me wrong, I have had to downstaff thousands of people over the years, but I also always gave people the benefit of the doubt and tried never to take…
Russian Garden It’s a crisp Saturday morning in late October and I have nothing on my agenda today before going with Kim to a Halloween party this evening. For that party, I will be dressing up as I have several years past as a Russian. This is less a political statement on my part than it is an attempt to make sense out of keeping a large Russian fur hat that I acquired 35 years…
In the Still of Autumn Is it just me or has everything sort of gone quiet all of a sudden? I know the world is on the precipice primarily because of the Israel/Hamas/Gaza situation as Israel pauses before making a ground incursion into Gaza. I know that the fighting Ukraine continues, but that Ukrainian fighters are infiltrating Crimea and sending more an more drones to attack Russian positions in Eastern Ukraine and in Russia itself.…
What’s Up With Ping Pong? When I was a kid of about five years old, we lived in Costa Rica, which meant that many of the standard American games and conventions were missing from our daily lives. We had bikes and simple toys, but we would do crazy things that the local kids did for fun like dragging a dead snake behind a bicycle. I don’t really remember whether my mother remembered to bring things…
Truth or Consequences For almost fifty years, America listened or watched a show that was designed to make average people do crazy things if they did not properly answer some obscure trivia question. It was called Truth or Consequences in both the radio and TV incarnations. Just to be sure that their plans for zaniness did not get derailed, the producers layered their questions so that they were always more complex and impossible to answer…
The Family Jewels Among all the other issues we face these days, there remains one underlying issue that always manages to bubble up when the going gets tough. This may be just my own sensibilities, but it has to do with guns. Just to review the facts, there are supposedly 393 million privately owned guns in America. There are about 260 million adults (people over 18 years old), so that would seem like 1.5 guns…
Bagel Run In my family there is a legend that goes back to my days of owning a house in the Hamptons (technically in the town of Quiogue, which means “little clam” in the language of the native Montaukett tribe). I owned that house from 1989 until 2003 and used it as my weekend respite where I would take my children for our time together. We spent time in the pool, we built a treehouse…
Little Maxie Back in 2012 (hard to believe that was 11 years ago!) I was just starting work on the New York Wheel project. That seems like a lifetime ago at this point, but then I was living with Kim at our South Street Seaport condo and as of late July, I was on payroll as the CEO of New York Wheel, which had offices at 19 State Street, a curved glass high rise building…
Walking Myself Home I just read a beautiful story in the Washington Post about a man who spent a year of his life caring for his cancer-ridden wife until the moment of her death. He described it as walking her home. Many people over the years have written about these final moments, and we have seen movies like Terms of Endearment, that capture the wistfulness of someone beloved’s last moment of consciousness. But despite the…
Secret Gardens As I’ve mentioned recently, I characterize my property as having 30 or so separate gardens. Perhaps that’s just a reflection of how easily I can, or cannot, manage the scope of my gardening. But nonetheless, I do attack my gardening in segments that reflect my thinking or at least my aesthetic interests of the moment. I have always thought that compared to many people I have a pretty good three dimensional sensibility about…