Back Up the Truck For the forty-five years of my Wall Street career the expression to “back up the truck” refers to something a guy by the name of Tom Pope said to me. Tom had grown up in the International Department of our bank in the first half of the 1970’s. That was when the domestic banking market was in its decline due to large loan losses on loans to REITs that had gone…
And the Livin’ is Easy Summertime was written in 1934 by George and Ira Gershwin with a lyrical assist from DuBose Heyward, the author of Porgy, on which the opera, Porgy and Bess is based. It is at once a jazz song and a folk song and as such may mark the beginning of the trend towards classic black music of the South. Much has been made of the use of the word “and” after…
Juggling Tasks For the forty-five years of my active career, I recognized that the art of juggling tasks and prioritizing the use of one’s time was simply part of the job of working. I also knew that it was part of life in general outside of work, but rarely found that the personal tasks had the sort of urgency of triage that they had in business situations. Now I was never in the military and…
A Walk in Her Shoes Kim and I did what we always do on Thursday morning, we found an excuse to absent ourselves from our house so that the cleaning crew could do their thing without having to work around us. I think it bothers them less than it bothers us because watching others clean your personal space is less than comfortable no matter who they are. We use the time to do our errands…
Remembering How to Teach I taught at Cornell for ten years. When you start teaching you learn how to develop a course, write a syllabus, prepare lectures, prepare assigned reading, prepare cases and assignments, prepare tests and administer and present all of that. A wiley old professor of mine (now rest his soul), told me he figured he put in five hours of preparation for each hour of lecture that he gave. I found in…
Rocky Mountain High Yesterday we were approaching Denver from the East and could see a wall of stormy-looking cloud cover over the distant mountains to the West. I have always been a big fan of big sky western panoramas with cloud formations covering the skies. There is something about that sort of view that seems to scream America the Beautiful to me. The power of the weather as shown by the clouds combined with the…
The Leader of the Pack It’s July 4th, Independence Day, and I am thinking about packs of people and how they interact with one another. I wrote yesterday about my transition from working guy to retired guy and I know that these are not unusual thoughts for a man of my age, but that does not prevent me from thinking that I can somehow express them in new, interesting or possibly even unique ways. I…
Working It When I started college, I began as an engineering student at Cornell, one of the best engineering schools in the U.S. Like so many young men, I tended to show stronger grades and test scores for math and science than for verbal. That and a romantic sense of manly endeavors in the engineering world made me think that I wanted to be a civil or perhaps operations engineer. I actually did well in…
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…
Post-Pandemic Parenting I am sitting here in the most bucolic of spots on my deck in Ithaca. The view across my pool in this bright sunshiny June morning (73 with a high predicted of 78) makes this a pretty ideal place to hang out under the awning and umbrella shade. To take a moment to describe the scene, the pool is surrounded by a substantial white picket fence (as is the deck a few feet…