When my mother died at 100, eight years ago, I wrote her biography and called it Mater Gladiatrix. That title spoke to me because of my four years of Latin (which she strongly encouraged me to take) and the strength and resilience that she exhibited fearlessly throughout her life, both in her personal and professional demeanor. As a courtesy to my two older sisters, I sent them a semi-final draft of the book and the…
I have a long and involved affiliation with Venezuela. In 1946, my mother, at the age of thirty, “joined the Foreign Legion” by hiring on to the Rockefeller Foundation to go to Venezuela to do rural indigenous development work. She was literally choosing to escape a turbulent five years on both the global and personal fronts and trade in her decade of work with the New York State Welfare Department for a new adventure. After…
This trip that we are on with the people from Steam Dreams, that run special steam locomotives throughout the United Kingdom for both day trips and multi day excursions, has been a very interesting trip for us. To begin with they have gathered, in addition to a series of well recognized steam locomotives, an older traditional set of train cars that they have retrofitted with quaint plush seating arrangements configured as dining cars. In the…
Back in the 1800s on some obscure cricket field, when a bowler achieved the rare feat of taking three wickets with three consecutive deliveries, he was traditionally awarded a new hat from his club, or allowed to pass around his hat to collect money from spectators. Then in hockey (among other sports), the term became a big celebratory moment… literal hats rain down onto the ice from the crowd when a player scores three goals…
In 2011, while I was trying to launch a hedge fund that would have bought defaulted mortgages from the FHA at levels attractive for them and, we thought, very attractive for us. We had an enlightened plan to fix a lot of the broken mortgages that were the detritus of the subprime collapse. It seemed both noble and profitable and our story was compelling enough to attract $1.5 billion in capital from one of the…
Yesterday we arrived in London, direct from San Diego (I am still in awe of that direct connection) to a cold, but uncommonly sunny city. We chose to bypass the tube and splurge on a London Taxi ride since it was midday, mid-week and traffic was light and the weather pleasant. It was so easy at Heathrow that I wondered why JFK could not make the same accommodation for weary travelers? All I could think…
My friends who read these stories will all be waking up this morning of Thanksgiving and probably turning on the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade spectacle with all the attendant celebrity hosts and various musical numbers from all the latest Broadway hits, performed in the cold and wet of the day on the street in front of Macy’s flagship store on Herald Square. They will be spending their morning preparing for whatever Thanksgiving dinner plans they…
We recently went to dinner with our good friends Terry & Paula, who are in the process of buying a house in San Clemente since they plan to relocate out this way, I think more or less permanently. They are a few years older than we are, but are very young-spirited and in apparently fine shape. We are very pleased that they are heading this way since we very much enjoy their company and they…
I don’t know whether its the world we live in these days or the specific circumstances we find ourselves in on our hilltop and in our semi-retired states, but both Kim and I find ourselves increasingly at philosophical odds with people we want to maintain relationships with. This is happening at the personal level (both friends and family to varying degrees) and at the institutional level with the organizations we have been trying to either…