Here Comes the Sun
Little darling, I feel that ice is slowly melting
Little darling, it seems like years since it’s been clear
Here comes the sun
Here comes the sun, and I say
It’s all right
– The Beatles, Abbey Road, 1969 (50 years ago)
Out here in California I wake up every day to the sunrise over Mt. Palomar to the East. It’s a perfect setting for my morning joint-soothing dip into the hot tub. I sit in 100 degree bubbling, mildly salty water, not too hot so I can stay in longer. I check my inbox (mostly from the East Coast and Europe) and clean out the overnight spam and finally catch up on the news. I risk my iPad in the tub but have yet to dunk it so all is well. I take my phone in usually and might even make a business call or two if absolutely necessary. It’s a helluva way to start the day.
Yesterday, I had one of those busy days that kept me at my desk from the moment I woke up at 5:40am until noon. It was the first non-rainy day that I haven’t gone into the hot tub since I’ve been here. It was a lesser day for it. Today I am sitting out at a table by the hot tub, right now glancing at my Madagascar Bottle Tree in front of me, my pony-tail miniature palm to my left nestled into the crevice of a ten-foot high boulder, and a mound of assorted succulents and cacti to my right. I feel surrounded in beauty and feel that everyone should know this sort of peace with the Feng Shui-appropriate water flowing over the rocks to the nearby hot tub.
I am writing this on the last day of 2019. Life is not good for everyone in my circle on this day, but it is for me. I will pray for better times for those who fall short of the peace I am enjoying. I will have a few friends and family over for a low-key New Years celebration tonight that will probably end after New York New Year comes about (9pm here, obviously). Before that, we will sit on the deck overlooking the Pacific Ocean to the west, where we will watch this same sun that just arose, set on the western horizon. It is one of the beauties of this hilltop that I get perhaps 270 degree views of the world (only the southern exposure is somewhat blocked by our neighbor) and the house is configured so that I can enjoy all three ordinal points, North, East and West for limitless distances and from multiple locations in and around the house.
Those who follow this blog and know me are always asking me how I will deal with the disengagement of retirement. So to start, other than a few holiday moments when I was at a loss of what to do after the departure of family and before the immersion into the issues of business of the moment, I have found plenty to do. Today I will get on my motorcycle and ride up to Mt. Palomar and beyond to enjoy the beauty of inland California. The temperature ranged from 64 at the start, to 50 on the top of the mountain, where snow was melting beside the road, but not so much that families weren’t out doing some sunny sledding, to 72 when I pulled in back home three hours later. In between I stopped at a favorite Lake Henshaw watering hole that makes a nice meatloaf with tater tots. Can you say comfort food?
Kim has a boatload of yearend errands to do and Cecil has his friend Colean to keep him company. Kim texts me during lunch from LA Fitness gym telling me they have a twofer on memberships and do I want in? For a buck per day I get access to a pool, a gym and limitless classes. I’ve already signed up on the app for some Aqua Fit classes. I’m feeling more retired by the moment, but hey, why not. My yearend fire drill emergencies will not catch up with me until later and it will be too late to do anything about them until January 2nd anyway. This is all the way life is supposed to work.
Back in the early 80’s I was put in charge of the nascent futures and options business of Bankers Trust. Banks were just starting to use futures and options in their trading and funding strategies and I was charged with setting it all up around the world. It was a career defining job with which I was thrilled to be tasked. I spent a week out in Chicago setting us up on both the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange (IMM Division). There are many stories about those times, but what I remember this morning is that the exchanges had circuit-breakers to force irrational moves to be doused at a certain point by time to consider and contemplate. If an instrument traded up or down limit, trading was suspended for a period of time for everyone to get rational and decide how to clear the market. Fear does not make for fluid markets, but neither does arbitrary or superimposed blockages. These circuit-breakers were intended to force introspection and careful consideration before just running a price up or down on fear. The lesson of circuit-breakers was well-learned.
You see, in between all the hilltop motorcycling, meatloaf eating and Aqua Fit scheduling, someone laid a giant legal turd in my lap on account of being aggrieved over a business issue for which I have responsibility, not for vested interest, but for being an honest broker. My insistence is that the vested parties sit and hash the issue out in my presence and with my guidance. The turd-placer wants a preemptive advantage known in the schoolyard as “possession is 9 points of the law”. I want the dialogue of all interested parties, not because he has no legal basis for his demand, but because it seems to me that big-picture righteousness demands it. I am treating the one holiday, two weekend days and six business days between now and then as a circuit-breaker. It may not cool the positional ardor on either side, but at least everyone will be there to watch the decision unfold. It is all a fairly High-stakes game, so it’s best to have at least a few days for everyone to cool down before making any irreversible decisions.
Everyone is sure of their stand, but a little sunshine into an otherwise dark room is a good thing, and now, here comes the sun.