I have spoken before about my extended cadre of siblings. The two that I have been closest to for the longest (other than my full sisters, Kathy and Barbara) are Diane and Sondra. Back in 1962, when we were living in Madison, Wisconsin during my mother’s graduate years spent there getting her Ph.D., my mother got thinking that for various reasons it might be a good idea for me to go visit my father in California. I think she felt that American summer breaks for kids were very long and unstructured and that with her very busy academic schedule she wanted her only son to have some male guidance. So, when her brother, my Uncle John and his wife Kitty, came through town on their way back to San Diego (he was a retired Chief Petty Officer in the Navy who lived here in San Diego), she asked them to take me west to visit my father, who lived in the San Fernando Valley at the time. I got a bad ear infection in Las Vegas, so my arrival into San Diego was less than propitious, landing me at the Naval Hospital for a few days. My father drove down to visit me and brought with him a female friend named Shirley. Then, when I got discharged, he came down to pick me up to drive me back to his home and on the way he told me that Shirley was actually his wife and that they had two daughters at home. I would be living with the four of them. I don’t remember that upsetting me and when we got to their house I got introduced to 3-year-old Diane and 18-month-old Sondra. Shirley was nice to me, so I went about my visit. I was eight at the time.
I spent several months there, actually starting school and getting used to living the Valley life for a bit before heading back to Wisconsin. I was not very much in contact with my father or his new family for the next dozen or so years as I grew from childhood into young adulthood. In fact, I was largely unaware that my father had eventually moved on from Shirley and his two new daughters and gone on to propagate even more siblings for me to discover over the years to come. I had a few contacts with him as I entered college where he promised me this or that and I watched those promises fall by the wayside and become the enduring pattern of my relationship with him. At one point, when I was in my late twenties, my father came briefly into my life again and I visited him in California, mostly, I think, because he wanted to show off his newfound wealth and status to me for some reason. I got an update on my two half-sisters, but did not see them during that visit. When I got into my late thirties I was suddenly contacted by Diane and Sondra, who were trying to grapple with their own sense of abandonment by our mutual father. They seemed to need an older brother and I was the only one they had. Our father died in 1993 and that served to increase the communication amongst us as half-siblings and I actually got quite close to my now-grown half-sisters. Diane had married into an uber-wealthy Los Angeles family and had three children (two boys and a girl). Sondra had married and had two sons, living in Orange County, south of L.A.. During those few years I got to know the whole bunch of them and when both Diane and Sondra got divorced, I was again called on to help give them and their kids some avuncular life guidance, especially with Sondra’s boys, Will and Matt.
One of the dynamics I saw in both generations of these California family members was a noticeable difference in perspective about many aspects of life, none more central than the attitude towards education. It made me realize that while the thirst for education may have some roots in innate curiosity, some of it is clearly also nurtured into us during our upbringing. I benefited greatly from being in my formative years while my mother went through graduate school in Wisconsin, when I was still in grade school. I grew up simply knowing that I would not just go to college, but would go on to some form of graduate school. It was not even a conscious issue to me, it was just deeply imbedded and presumed. My father had never gone to college, though he pretended to have. He once asked my mother (when we lived in Rome) to get a forged University of Padua diploma for him from 1943. His interest in being perceived to have a degree was greater than his interest had been in actually obtaining an education. I believe neither Diane nor Sondra had the benefit of that educational imperative that I had gotten. In turn, their husbands, for perhaps very different reasons, did not bring that educational imperative to the table for their children either. What that created was a generation of children that hadn’t been driven to get higher learning, but somehow felt the latent desire to fill in that gap as time went by.
In the grand scheme of things, I know that while my intelligence level is slightly above average, I am far from being a brain trust, especially compared to many people I have encountered over the course of my academic and business career. But, as they say, in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. And to my half-sister’s children, I became somewhat of the go-to uncle for guidance. That was especially so for Sondra’s boys, who have both wandered into the financial world where I spent 45 years at senior levels and even spent 13 years teaching graduate level finance. So, last week, Matt reached out to me for some advice as he is working his sales and fundraising job in private equity. I was able to help him and he seemed genuinely appreciative (to the point of offering to buy me a Rolex if that particular deal goes through…I told him I don’t need a Rolex to help him). Then, the next day, Kim got a text from her friend Matthew, who was in Nashville for a conference. It seems he had run into my nephew Will, who valeted his car at the hotel where he was staying. They somehow triangulated to the realization that they both knew Rich and Kim (what are the odds of that happening when you valet your car?). The last I had heard from Will, he was trying to get into the crypto market to make a living. Kim and I had also seen him on HGTV House Hunters, buying a home in L.A.. I had tried to reach out to him to confirm that was him on House Hunters, but never heard back. Now this connection from Nashville. That caused me to pick up the phone to Sondra and, sure enough, she confirmed that Matt was going great guns in private equity and that Will had been on House Hunters, but had sold the house and become disillusioned about L.A. and chosen to go “off the grid” to Nashville, where he hopes to restart his aspirational crypto career. Meanwhile, he is parking cars.
Sondra also told me that Diane’s daughter Lauren has decided to move to upstate New York to “get back to nature” with her two infant children. This was all strange to me since everything about my half-sisters and their kids was centered in California, but that seems now to be spreading eastward. When I asked where in upstate New York, I learned that they are moving to a house in a town that is walking distance from where my old college roommate lives. All of this has given me pause and made me think about the intersections between family and education… and that it really is a small small world when all is said and done.