Worlds Colliding
We have an interesting week ahead. Some of it was of our doing, some of it is due to the state of the world. And some of it is just random happenstance. But it all comes together to create a week that we feel the need to rest up this weekend for. So tomorrow is the calm before the storm…but not really entirely.
I have another one of those expert witness cases that starts off feeling like its in my bailiwick, and then I get some kind of download from the attorneys and I panic that the depth of what they are expecting of me seems terribly rigorous, and then I start the process of muscling through the material and dissecting and unpacking the details of the technical issues at hand and start to regain my confidence in my experience, knowledge and ability to get my head around complex facts and circumstances. Today I put in a few hours reviewing the outline and gathering my thoughts. I have arranged to speak with one of my many hidden weapons from a long career being respectful and good to people who worked for me. This person is a true domain expert on a specific type of financial instrument that is the subject of this case, and while I am expected to opine on general asset management issue involving those instruments and not so much the details of the instruments themselves, I want to be as knowledgeable as possible, so I am picking this domain expert’s brain for an hour. That hour turned into almost two hours because it was a trip down memory lane for that person, who is on to other endeavors at this point, but he really enjoyed reactivating his knowledge banks. I used the analogy that I was not being asked to explain how to build a watch, but was expected to talk to the issue of how one tells time. He got it immediately and was incredibly insightful in giving me both some sharp and original insights, but also in reinforcing my confidence in what I already know about the space. When I asked him at the end of our time if he had been out in Central Park watching the marathon, he said he was out in the park smoking a joint. That explained his ethereal insights, I guess.
I thought that was my one activity for the day and was thinking that otherwise I was likely to spend my time in the garden doing some sprucing up here and there with the pruning shears, garden knife and my high-power DeWalt blower. That’s pretty much all the weaponry (in addition to a green trash bucket for the clippings) to make sure my garden shows off to its best. At this time of year, when it rains more often than at other times, it is very easy for the garden to look good all by itself, and it does for the most part (I can be a little hyper-critical). I have about a dozen golden barrel cacti and a similar amount of other succulents ready for planting on Wednesday by Joventino in a spot along the road that I think needs some help, but otherwise, all is well on the hilltop garden. It was nice to get out and around the property again after a month of ignoring it other than to look at it. I felt the blood surging as I went up and down the hillside again.
The other thing I use the weekends to do is to make sure I am ready for my upcoming weekly classes. This week I have two guest speakers for the two courses and they are man and wife. Our good friends and my long-time partner Terry and Paula have agreed to speak in my courses. Terry spoke last year about private company financing since he has navigated those waters as a CFO and CEO of small businesses over and over again and has a degree of calm about business that few businesspeople I have met possess. I often say that he is my spiritual guru for that sense of calm that pervades his presence. He will be talking about a mutual investment he and other friends in our circle have in a Colorado start-up being run by an old junior associate of ours. The company is a FinTech company serving the banking sector that needs to bank the cannabis industry, a financial minefield with conflicting federal and state and local regulations. That has little or nothing to do with Terry’s natural calm, but it is interesting that the weed that lingered in the shadows during most of our lives is now increasingly out in the open and wafting through the streets in many ways.
Paula is a newcomer to the lecture circuit (or at least this lecture circuit) and is combining her ethics background and her interest in Buddhism to teach a class on the subject of the conflict between individual liberty and the common good, specifically on a whistleblower case (the movie The insider), combining it with the Eightfold Path espoused by Buddhism. I’ve seen and read her deck and it promises to be an interesting lecture.
Terry and Paula arrived today and after a classic Kim dinner of Island Pork and baked potato, they have gone off to rest their jet-lagged heads and prepare themselves for the next two days of lectures. By midday tomorrow, our friends from Sonoma will be arriving for our usual election night gathering. We blue state people are more anxious than normal this time around since we feel that so much is on the line and the polls are so very hard to discern. We are hoping for the best and preparing for the worst, as they always say, so they have come down to be near in case we all need each others’ support to get through it all. Due to Kim’s week-long rehearsals for her upcoming Encore show, in which she sings the 11th Hour solo before the closing number, we have to juggle our schedules. All six of us are heading off for an early dinner in LaJolla near where Kim rehearses and only a short distance from the University, where I teach. While Kim rehearses, the five of us will go to class with Paula and I on stage and the other three in the peanut gallery. We will repeat the same program on Wednesday (different restaurant in LaJolla) and that night, Terry and I will be on stage while the rest spectate. There is general interest all around in hearing about the topics since my friend Frank from up north is a long-time venture capitalist and likely to find the topic of both nights interesting for sure.
They all head out on Thursday and we have a day to recuperate before the show begins with Kim’s performances both Friday and Saturday. Friday will be four of us dining at P.F. Chang’s beforehand and then going on to the performance. But Saturday there will be a total of fifteen in attendance with thirteen at dinner at P.F. Chang’s again for another round of potstickers and lettuce wraps. The fifteen consist of our friends Gary & Oswaldo, back from their Mediterranean Cruise and staying with my sister Kathy and hubby Bennett. Then there is fraternity friend Doug and his wife Liz, who are in from the Garden State for a few days. The other six are Mike & Melisa, Faraj & Yasuko, and Sam & Chris, our hillside rotating dinner gang. There will also be two of Kim’s Seller’s Fair pals who are showing up to hear her sing and supporting her interests. Generally, we all tend to keep our various friends and family in separate pockets, but once in a while, we dare to be great and let our worlds collide with one another. The common thread we have found that connects us all, besides a love of Kim’s singing and a need for a night out whenever its available, is that we are all spirited world travelers. That is a coincidence, but then again, there are no coincidences. People of like mind gather for teaching, for election watching, for cultural events and for Chinese food. What could be more unifying in these divisive times than that.