Cold To The Bone After leaving the tropics in 1961, weeks moved to Madison Wisconsin, where in the early weeks of winter that year, the temperature got down to a frigid 40 degrees below zero. That was a rude awakening for a kid that was used to going on summer holiday in December and struggled to bother to wear shoes. Wisconsin is in that frozen upper Midwest region where cold is a way of life.…
Extravaganza Yesterday, after our family gathering at Morton’s in midtown Manhattan (the Cornell Club private rooms were not available on a Sunday), we took most of the assembled masses to Radio City Music Hall for the Christmas Spectacular Show extravaganza. We don’t go to the show there every year, but have gone many times over the years. This show, or a form of it, has been playing in Radio City Music Hall since 1933. They…
Urban Gentility I am in the least friendly place of my life when it comes to Cornell University. The wounds of my ouster from my 25-year home on the edge of campus in Ithaca have pretty much faded, even though I get the occasional blast from the past. Recently I heard that my long-time neighbor and friend with the unique name of Clover Drinkwater has gotten crosswise with the current inhabitants due to an AirBnB…
Time Travel I have never been a fan of movies that deal with the issue of time travel. The old standard of H.G. Well’s The Time Machine was OK and I must admit I enjoyed the Back to the Future series, but by the time The Terminator came around, I found it was all getting too hard to suspend disbelief. The one that really pushed me over the edge was The Curious Case of Benjamin…
Doomsday I ran a global private banking business for six years and one of the big specialties was the whole trust and estates practice. In those days we were one of the three big trust banks in the U.S. and we had partnered with the prestigious “white shoe” law firm of White & Case for all of our trust and estates work like the drafting of wills and all the more complex elements of putting…
The Price for Being American As someone who grew up in my youth in Latin America, I always knew there was a price to being an American. We were the “Ugly Americans” in the region, which I took to mean that besides being crass and perhaps too uncaring, we were also more prosperous and not ashamed to display that. When I moved to Italy during my high school days, there was a lingering taint of…
Claiming Casualty I recently wrote about the ethical dilemma I face with regard to my new television, which got somehow gouged on its main 85” screen in two small spots. I suppose I could go forward and just not worry about the damage since it doesn’t completely disrupt my viewing pleasure, but it is an expensive new TV and I would rather it be put right, so I am going down the path to try…
Celebrating Life Human being like to celebrate. We celebrate births and deaths and everything in between. The biggest ones tend to be around marriage, holidays and the ubiquitous birthday celebrations. Many of us have occasionally grown weary of some of the celebrations. In a large work team, celebrating every person’s birthday and special events could take up an inordinate amount of time and resources so they are either foregone or done in bulk every month…
Losing a Friend Friends drift into and out of our lives all the time. I, in particular, am very aware of this phenomenon since I spent most of my early life moving from one locale to another as a trailing child to a globetrotting mother. My early years were spent in the tropics of Venezuela and Costa Rica with an interregnum in such different places as Santa Monica and Ithaca. That more or less took…
Heading to Hollywood As Kim and I stumble our way into the holidays, we listen to more than our share of Christmas music on the various Sirius holiday channels and watch more than our share of holiday movies. I have little use for the Hallmark holiday movies that Kim so very much loves, but give me a regular holiday movie and I’m very happy. We maintain our list of top classics like White Christmas, It’s…