Why Don’t He Write?
We started learning to write to family and friends when we went off to summer camp. I went to summer camp, and probably did write letters home, but at age eight, I went off for the summer to California (we were living in Wisconsin at the time) to meet and spend some time with my father. I still have a copy of the letter I wrote to my mother that summer telling her I was fine and that I hoped she was fine and to please say hello to my pal Larry. Since we were in the habit of moving every few years, I had ample opportunity to write to friends I had left behind, but I don’t recall that ever being something I thought to do once I was on to my next place and thing. Larry is a distant memory as are the friends I had in Middleton Wisconsin (Larry was in Madison), Poland Spring, Maine, and Rome Italy, all places that I lived on my trek to college. I do recall receiving one letter during the summer after my first year in prep school from a friend who I owed money to and to whom I had been delinquent. It so surprised me that I immediately gathered up the necessary cash and sent it off to him to clear the decks. I never went back to that prep school, so I never saw him again, but I was relieved that I had cleared the decks with him none the less. I have kept two good friends from high school, and while we do occasionally speak by phone, I can’t recall ever writing either of them a letter. By the time college came around, it was far more common to keep in touch with friends and family by phone than by mail, so the need for that form of communication just faded away until I met the young woman who would be my first wife. I was in the last semester of my graduate year and I still lived in Ithaca and she was on Long Island, living at home, but working for a living after college. I certainly called her a lot, but I also wrote her many letters as one does when one is in the courtship stage of life.
Once I was a full-fledged member of the working world, she and I were soon wed, so there was no need for any writing back and forth. I have written before that she had a job with some ex-Honeywell entrepreneurial types who were starting a computer time-sharing business. Their killer app and the basis of their early sales was something they called “Electronic Mail”. I have never bothered to figure out whether theirs was the first or only company to have started the email phenomenon, but I am certain that they had to be among the first. They were, after all, ahead of the personal computing curve since it was 1978 and from their headquarters in 30 Rockefeller Plaza in midtown Manhattan, they catered to the corporate market, especially the financial institutions with far-flung people around the world that needed a cheaper and more convenient way to communicate rather than telex. Being a banker, I understood the need for such a communication medium. Today I laugh at what we thought was high-powered finance and the messaging that went along with it. The tools of our trade from those early days in the digital revolution seem like tinker toys to me today, or better yet, they seem as antiquated as the old fashioned letter from a friend.
My favorite “product” from that era was the correspondent banking product that had us holding U.S. Dollar cash accounts for foreign banks that felt the itch to be connected to big American banks in New York. We were one such bank and we did a land office business in holding deposits for foreign banks who aspired to globalizing. The big secret to success in that business was to understand the difference between book and available deposits. Book deposits were when we received an instrument that indicated a credit to the account, for example a check for $10,000. Once received, that’s check gave the client a book balance of $10,000, but that money then had to clear and become unassailably the property of the account holder. This clearing process was the main business we were in, getting proper payment from whatever institution that instrument was drawn upon. Once that happened, usually in stages, the account shifted from a book deposit to an available deposit. All available deposits were also book deposits, but not all book deposits were available deposits. See how tricky that was?
The game that was played as a correspondent banker was to keep the clients mostly unaware of how much in available credit they had with us for the simple reason that we earned money on those deposits. Clients in Europe and other distant lands around the globe would write to us asking about the status of their deposits. We would reply coyly by telling them their book balances, reminding them vaguely that not all those balances were available. They would write back and ask for specificity and then we would tell them the available level so they could use the money. The next big trick was to agree that certain services could be paid for through the maintenance of available balances at a specified crediting rate. Naturally that rate was as low as we could possibly get away with. There was at least enough honor among thieves that we charged the same crediting rate to all clients, even those who were less aware of the state of the global yield curve. But we retained the old trick of not being very diligent in informing the clients of how much they had with us in available balances and how much they needed to have to maintain the services we provided them. The primary business strategy was to keep clients as much in the dark as possible so that they would just be lazy and keep all their excess funds in their accounts with us, to use as we wished. What a racket.
It was on my first day of banking that I learned all of this. I was assigned to sit with Christof Pfeiffer, a Harvard graduate of about 50 years old who handled the Germanic countries. As I sat in his guest chair at his window desk on the Northern Europe “platform” (as we called the client interfacing areas of the bank), he would go through his inbox and teach me what was what. He plucked out one letter from Bank fur Gemeinawertshaft, or some such thing and quickly read a few lines inquiring about a certain credit they thought they should have received. Chris promptly balled up the letter and tossed it under his desk into the waste bin. He looked at me, the eager beaver wanting to learn how to fly a desk, and just said, “If it’s important, they will write again.” That was some combination of 1976 client service in correspondent banking and an active business strategy to get money for nothing. The writing of letters to resolve banking depository issues seems almost as silly as that old form of communication itself.
I have written four letters that I update once in while, but which will likely be the only other letters I ever write. One is to Kim and one each to my three kids. I should probably add one for each of my two older sisters. These are farewell letters that are meant to be my last message to each of them from beyond the grave. The written form seems important for such an occasion to properly address the sentiments of a lifetime. But then I realize that there is probably nothing that I can write that better expresses who I am and how I feel about them or the world than this written log of my wandering thoughts. I have plenty of faults, frailties and vices, but among them is not a lack of expressiveness. Since 2019 I have written 2,170 blog stories as of today that approximately 12,000 people have read or at least viewed. That represents about 2,700,000 words or about 30 books worth. Add the 7 books that I’ve published and the presumed 7 million more words I am destined to write between now and my actuarially assumed death and my family and friends will have about 100 books worth of my writings to search through my every random thought. I can think of no better way to empty the vessel before the vessel empties itself of my being. No one will likely ever say of me, “Why don’t he write?”