Sonny Boy
My youngest son Thomas is coming for a week-long visit on Wednesday. He arrives at San Diego Airport right in the middle of my Ethics class lecture (assuming his flight is on-time). Since the following week is Spring Break and since I do not want to keep my boy waiting too long at the airport (even though it is only a ten minute drive from the campus), I will probably end the class a bit early. The subject for the evening will be the ethical issues of Corporate Reputation. That is a very ethically challenging issue since reputation is one of the guardrails for good conduct in the world. Maintaining a good reputation rather than allowing the greed or ambition of the moment overwhelm is an important consideration for both individuals and corporations. It is true to say that defaulting to long term self-interest is probably not the best way to conduct your ethical life, but I am a teacher of the practicum and theoretical ethics can be found in philosophy books and adjunct professors like me are not needed so much for that. The value someone like me brings to the student body is that our real world experience in grappling with the realities of ethical conundrum makes our teaching more useful to students. Showing them how I and others navigated these choppy waters is very important. Corporate reputation, of the recent death thereof, is one of a dozen important issues that I feel need airtime.
That is why I hit on the idea of following up our discussion last week of The Big Short, which is set in early 2007 with the story of the rigor mortis hitting the financial market in 2008 and the story of several big banks, most notably Lehman, in their endgame throes. The movie Margin Call is a rich case study that vividly portrays the struggle between corporate reputation and survival during a financial meltdown. I have told the students that Margin Call is a FAR better representation of reality than The Big Short represents, but they are also fundamentally about different ethical issues. One talks to the ethical limits of market arbitrage and the other is about the breaching of the reputational barriers that usually keep any business in business. I think both are critically important issues and they are both issues for which my background provides valuable insights that I can share with the students. Nevertheless, I think I can name that tune in 90 minutes and cut 30 minutes off the class time for my own purposes.
I love that my son is coming for a weeklong visit and even though he will be working a(New York hours) most days, it is still great just to have him here and being able to spend time with him. My daughter has her family to keep her tied down and my older son has a new job that is and should be the focus of his attention. My daughter does a magnificent job raising her girls and older son has finally found a job that seems to have all the elements that should make this a great career position for him. Keeping kids on their happiness paths is the most important part of parenting. That means that my younger son’s need at the moment is having a respite from the rigors of both work and New York City.
He is a born and bred NYC kid who lived his whole pre-college life in Manhattan, downtown Manhattan to be exact. He went to pre-school on Irving Place and did grade school and high school in the West Village. He has live the majority of his post-college years in Brooklyn. Instead of being comfortable as a city-dweller, he seems increasingly more interested in living and working anywhere but the City. I’m not altogether sure why that is, but some people are just happier in the country and he seems to be one of them. Everybody has to define their own comfort zone in life.
His visit will give us the occasion to get together again with family and it will give him and I the chance to enjoy a motorcycle ride or two, which is always fun. From his earliest days, Thomas has liked and admired the motorcycle life. I think some of that is because its one of Dad’s things, but I also think he likes the free-spirited part of the sport. So, for whatever reason he enjoys it, I thoroughly enjoy hitting the SoCal roads around here when he’s in town. He used to ride my Kawasaki Versys 1000, but now he rides my BMW RNineT 1200, which is a much better bike that is well suited to someone who wants a lighter bike and only rides occasionally.
I also look forward to spending some quality Father/Son time in the hot tub. Kim is not a hot tub user very often, but I am now in the habit of going in only about 3 times a week. That is less because of any concern about drying out my skin (which does happen with regular hot tub use if you don’t moisturize regularly), and more about being otherwise busy with chores and tasks of the moment. This next week while Thomas is here I will be preparing for departure for our Amalfi Coast adventure in the last two weeks of March. Now that Ukraine seems more likely to NOT lead to a full-scale European/NATO conflict, I am worried less about the winds of war keeping us from that travel plan. I’m not sure that is a prudent way to think, but the one positive lingering benefit of COVID life seems to be a preference to get on with living life and managing through risks rather than hiding in our little corners or on our little hilltops. We’ve all tried that for two years now (3% of my life to date, 4% of my adult life and 100% of my retired and footloose retired life) and we are ready to re-embrace life with more gusto again.
I spent some time with a friend who is 84 years old recently (he’s in relatively good health and still able to get around just fine). He laid pretty low during COVID and still managed to contract what was probably the Omicron variant, but came through that with a weeklong cold symptom level experience. He very clearly voiced the view that we all read about that expresses that having your life constrained and travel-restricted is simply no way to live. To me, that is a sign that he has a lot of living yet to do and is anxious to get on with it. I think that is how I feel as well and there is nothing that will bring that out more than spending a week with my youngest child, who is forty-two years younger than me.
It reminds me that the timing of COVID being consistent with my retirement from the active, daily working life has created a confusion that I need to sort out. My retirement activities have been driven by the start of COVID, but I should not allow it to be defined by COVID. When you find yourself in the common circumstance of having children with a second or third marriage, you find yourself often saying or hearing that it keeps you young. Its a thing people say to put a positive spin on getting back into the fatherhood harness. But as I sit here now, contemplating my young son’s arrival the day after tomorrow, I realize that it is not a trite comment. Children give us joy and purpose to our lives. That can be had elsewhere and in other ways, but it certainly has that direct effect on me and I feel that it should not be wasted. It’s probably also why I teach, why I motorcycle, why I travel, why I garden and maybe even why I keep taking on expert witness work. Anything that makes you feel younger and keeps you looking forward to more things to enjoy down the road of life is a good thing. That’s may strike you as a trivial realization, but to me, part of optimism is to always surprise myself with new realizations. I can’t wait for my own personal Sonny Boy to arrive.