Currency of the Heart: A Year of Investing, Death, Work, and Coins (Sightline Books)

CurrencyoftheHeart

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. . . . . . . . . . sightline . . . . . . . . . . . . .books .......................................... The Iowa Series in Literary Nonfiction Patricia Hampl & Carl H. Klaus, series editors

Donald R. Nichols

Currency of the Heart

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A Year of Investing, Death, Work, & Coins University of Iowa Press

Iowa City

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2002 by Donald R. Nichols All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Design by Richard Hendel http://www.uiowa.edu/⬃uipress No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. The publication of this book was generously supported by the University of Iowa Foundation. Printed on acid-free paper Cataloging-in-Publication data on file at the Library of Congress. 02 03 04 05 06

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lawrence ray nichols 1924 – 1998 dad

.Contents ........................................................................

Author’s Note / xi Acknowledgment / xiii South Seas / 1 For the Record / 4 Taxman / 7 Final Reckoning / 9 Home, There and Now / 11 Making Money the Old-Fashioned Way / 13 Double-Die / 16 Money Talks / 19 Alternate Thursdays / 23 Windsor Fund / 25 Breach / 28 Maketh Its Own Place / 31 Greeks Bearing Gifts / 35 Holding Ground / 37 In Furious Sleep / 40 Winter of Our Discontent / 44 Joint Account / 47 The Downfall of Windsor / 49 In God We Trust / 51 Works Better, Costs Less / 53

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Cheap Thrills / 56 Stairway to Success / 58 A Final Place in Time / 61 Chemistry / 66 Broken Connection / 69 April 26, 1998 / 72 Two Wives, One Mother / 74 Last Wish / 78 Business as Usual / 81 Keeping Time / 83 Full Faith and Credit / 86 Both Sides Now / 91 Pound Foolish / 95 Wedded to Windsor / 98 Deutsch Heute / 100 Gains and Losses / 103 Emancipation / 106 Last Laugh / 107 Future Value / 110 Back and Forth / 113 Money Doctor / 115 Dungeons and Dragons / 116 Stranger in the House / 118 The Oracle / 120 Mother in the City / 121 Money Ugly / 125 Making a Change / 128 Philosopher’s Stone / 130 Speaks in Madness / 133

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A Dollar in Hand / 137 Double Bottom / 140 Windsor Too Little, Windsor Too Late / 143 The Matter of My Garret / 145 Portrait Painter / 149 Half-Century / 153 All of the People Some of the Time / 159 Sorrier by Half / 162 Cashing Out / 164 Word of Mouth / 167 Rara Avis / 169 Levels of the Game / 173 All That Glitters / 176 Penny Wise / 178 Whole Life / 181 Grace and All That Follows / 185 Look Homeward, Angel / 189 IC/DC / 192 The Twain Shall Meet / 196 Every Picture Tells a Story / 198

.Author’s . . . . . . . . . . .Note .............................................. ...............

Currency of the Heart is about the year surrounding my father’s death from prostate cancer. I turned fifty that year, and what men at fifty ordinarily ponder was made larger by Dad’s decline. I was working then at the U.S. Mint, dealing often with coin collectors whose conversations paralleled, comically or painfully, my father’s dementia during end-stage cancer. It was one of several jobs in which I’ve worked near men whom the world considers important. Those experiences, contrasted with memories of my father and his hardware store, shaped my present idea of what it is to live an able life as a decent man faithful to your nature. It was a year of realizations, even while on vacation in Key West, and it produced what you might call a financial memoir. Many of these stories are about making money—literally making it at the Mint, figuratively making it by managing my parent’s investments, earning it in a life’s work, receiving it when a life ends. In financial markets and other important ways, much is recognizably different since Dad died in 1998. You and I might be wise to make decisions different from those we made years ago, whether they are about money or anything else. But nothing changes about the year of your father’s death, whatever else that year may change forever.

.Acknowledgment ......................................................... ...............

I owe many people thanks, and I hope they understand why I can place only one other name beside a dedication to my father. This book is the idea of Carl H. Klaus, founder of the nonfiction writing program at the University of Iowa, my most formative professor, and himself a fine essayist. For nearly three years— decades after I had any reasonable claim to his attention—he read each of these pieces and commented extensively. His instruction many years ago prepared me to earn a living writing. His teaching enabled me to write this.

CurrencyoftheHeart

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.South . . . . . . . .Seas ................................................................

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coworker came into my office today to declare the boom in Internet stocks is over. This is certainty, he said, because he’s finally bought some — nibbled at a few, is what he said. Ken is chief counsel where I work, a lawyer from Maryland, and our conversations about stocks often begin this way. He knocks tentatively on my door and asks, “Is the psychiatrist in?” Since this is early in a new year, I guess our tradition will continue. The problem, it seems, is his portfolio isn’t pulling down the gains he and most of the world have been reading about. “I know it’s crazy,” Ken said. “I’m making money, and I’m not happy. All I can think about is these other people who are landing whales, and I’m catching minnows.” Minnows, in Ken’s case, are twenty percent–plus returns his retirement account has been cranking out these past several years. It’s a rate of return that’s doubling his money every three years or so, without taxes. I told Ken he came to the wrong doctor if he expected me to make sense of Internet mania or, for that matter, a market that won’t quit at twenty percent returns. My problem, I explained, is that I took the B-school courses in portfolio theory, and nothing I learned is worth anything in that world. I learned what traditional security analysts learn — fundamental analysis. You examine a company’s earnings and assets and dividends and project what the stock “should” be worth in five or ten years if everything moves in a straight line, which, of course, never happens. Then you discount its estimated growth back to today and compare it with the growth rate implied in its present price. If you like the comparison, you buy the stock. These analytical tools learned at effort and expense are useless when deciphering companies in the ether of the Internet because they have few earnings, profits, or assets. What these

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companies may or may not have is the chance to bet a few Thaler on Gutenberg before he sells his first Bible. They are companies like Amazon.com, Internet purveyor of discount books. Ken groaned when I mentioned Amazon.com. He watched it run from $24 a share to more than $300 without owning any. An investment of $2,400 would be worth more than $30,000, except Ken didn’t invest. Not at $24 or $48 or $96 or $192. Even if he’d bought at $192 a share, he’d almost have doubled his money. Instead, his portfolio won’t make him a millionaire for three or four more years, a geologic crawl in this market. “I could be living on a yacht in the South Seas,” Ken said, but he was making fun of himself. Ken knows who he is, and that’s a decent, dependable, hard-working father and husband who will retire comfortably soon because he’s saved and invested diligently. Thing is, Ken’s right, mathematically. Having done thus and so, having put your money here after moving it from there — statistically, mathematically, sure, Ken could be living in the South Seas. Perhaps on a yacht next to my father, who in my version of this story never sold his BerkshireHathaway. What Ken wanted, of course, was for me to agree we’re being reasonable, and that I could do. After all, IBM has honest-to-goodness earnings, assets, and dividends, yet its stock underperforms every ditdot-com run by a billionaire GenX’er who could close shop by disconnecting the electricity. Except, of course, the crazies who ignore every principle of prudent investing are making money, whereas Ken and I, for now, have only our probity to console us. Amazon: even the name invokes the South Sea Bubble of the 1720s, when Englishmen coursed the globe and returned with pineapples and silks and stories of plantations and riches. Giant trading companies vaulted up overnight — today we’d call them supranationals. Investors off the sidewalk turned pence into millions, like investors in this market, through brokers who often didn’t reveal what they invested in or where — what we call a hedge fund. Where is this cyberspace place, anyway? What’s the difference between the Internet and the South Seas in the eighteenth century? The South Seas may as well have been cyberspace back then. Ken and I catch each other looking at our watches, so we lay aside our talk of whales and minnows and wealth that could have been or

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might yet be. Ten thousand conversations like this go on every day in offices like mine between people enjoying comfortable lives and the longest stock market run in decades. Many of them end as mine did with Ken: someone decides to reach for a little more. Ken has nibbled at the ’net. I wish him luck.

.For . . . .the . . . . .Record ............................................................

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y father has had prostate cancer for six years, and now it’s clear his struggle won’t continue indefinitely. For a time I thought it might. Years after his diagnosis prostate cancer seemed no worse than a bad allergy — something serious, even lethal, but, treated, didn’t prevent wintering in Arizona, mowing two acres in the summer, enjoying hobbies. Dad’s PSA, his prostate specific antigen, went up and down, sometimes way up then way down, and I once joked, “If it hits 100, do you explode?” He answered, “If it hits 100, sell.” Every publicly offered stock, bond, and mutual fund trades under an alphabetical symbol. For instance, T is American Telephone and Telegraph, IPC.D is Illinois Power Company 4.25% Preferred Series D, and FKTIX is Franklin Federal Tax Free Income Fund. I’d ask, “How’s your PSA, Dad?” And he’d reply, “Pretty much like my TVB”— his Tennessee Valley Authority Preferred B, a steady stock, regular dividends, never big gains or losses. After several years the cancer began to get stronger and Dad began to get weaker. At night he slept an hour or two, then less, between trips to the bathroom, and he got weaker from no sleep. His treatments got harsher — radiation, chemo, drugs, more drugs, stronger drugs — and each made him weaker. He ate less, then little, then nothing, and weakened more. He tried to build strength by circling the dining room table while holding to backs of chairs, but it did no good. “How you doing, Dad?” “About like IBM.” IBM wasn’t doing well. Dad was worse New Year’s Eve, when I was in Iowa to help my parents move from their home of thirty years. It’s about two weeks later now, and he’s been in the hospital almost since the day I left. It’s been half a lifetime since I’ve seen my parents twice within weeks, not since

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grad school and coming home Thanksgiving and Christmas. I’m here to see Dad and to start my parents’ taxes. Mother has explained with emphasis to my sister Susan, the oldest of my three younger siblings, that her children have different strengths, and Susan has conveyed to me that I am the taxman. Weather has been warm and the snow light all winter. These are blessings for my flight from DC — one bounce in Chicago, no delay — and for Mother’s sixty-mile daily drive to and from the hospital through hilly eastern Iowa. On the plane I made notes about my parents’ finances. January, let’s see: 1099s will be in from Smith Barney, that’s most of the interest and dividends . . . Krupp II — real estate partnerships are always late, good reason not to own ’em . . . Does Dad have one dividend reinvestment plan or two? . . . Those CMOs surely have paid down by now. Dad can fill this in for me when I get home. Mother met me at the airport and grabbed at my coat when she hugged me. In the car, me driving, she said Dad had worsened since New Year and sometimes he isn’t lucid. Talking about him, she forgot to give directions to the hospital, and we crossed the Mississippi River into Wisconsin. How to put this: a man lying in the hospital bed was a pale and diminished version of my father, and someone within that man called me by name instantly. But another person mainly was there, and he was disoriented, fretful, and sometimes coherent only by reference to something he alone sees. Several long-time friends of my parents stopped by the hospital during my first day here. He recognized each, then wandered. They left, concerned. Dad said good-bye to each by name and thanked them for coming. Mother and I spent the day with him until 7 p.m. As we left, I said, “Dad, I’m going to start on your taxes.” “OK, that will be a big help.” “Have you been filing 1099s?” “I don’t know.” “How about I look over your portfolio, Pop? I think you’ve got bonds maturing in the next few months.” “Bonds,” he said. “Bonds, bonds, bonds.” In the car, Mother asked what I’ll do if I can’t find the tax records. We stopped at a small restaurant with a smaller bar, and I ordered an Irish coffee. The teenaged waitress didn’t know what Irish coffee is

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and speculated that the bartender, nowhere in sight, didn’t either. “Fine,” I said. “Here’s how you make one: take a mug or any cylinder with a handle. Fill it two-thirds with coffee—preferably fresh. Add two shots of Irish whiskey — preferably Bushmill’s, you probably have Jameson’s. Cover the top with whipped cream — you probably have Cool Whip. Dribble crème de menthe over it — the green stuff in the bottle I’m pointing at. Put a cherry on top, then stick a cinnamon stick in it. If you want, I’ll make it myself.” The incident was a restrained echo of that scene in Five Easy Pieces where Jack Nicholson orders the sandwich, but the comparison would be lost on the waitress-munchkin, who couldn’t have been born before 1980. She wandered away from Mother and me, and I wondered how soon she’d be back, having forgotten my instructions. I told Mother not to worry, because I will find the records and I will do the taxes.

.Taxman ........................................................................

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y parents’ financial records look like a struggle between ego and id or the aftermath of a wrestling match between forces of light and darkness. Mother takes care of the checkbook, and it’s in perfect order: social security duly deposited, insurance timely paid, birthday checks to my brother and sisters and me noted in the expected months, the amount the $25 it had been for decades. Dad handles investments and taxes and keeps records in green Pendaflex folders, neatly labeled, hanging in the lower right drawer of a desk he made himself. That drawer, however, was jammed by everything Mother had stuffed into it, knowing only that financial papers go there. I squeezed a ruler inside to hold down the papers, and the drawer sprang open like an over-packed suitcase, spurting documents and printouts and envelopes. For an hour, I opened envelopes, purged papers, and stacked documents by category, annual reports all together, the hospital records, the insurance papers, then arranged papers in each stack chronologically. I had resolved to focus, but I let myself be sidetracked by Dad’s insurance records and hospital bills. I know nothing about that part of his finances, and it could be the part I’ll most need to know if he stays hospitalized. But mainly I was curious because in mid-1992 I took a job with the U.S. Senate Finance Committee, which presides over Medicare that’s paid most of Dad’s hospital bills, and I remembered wrenching letters from people like my parents whose insurance companies didn’t want to pay their medical bills any more and canceled coverage. I was married then to a woman who worked for a big insurance company, so I asked her about it. She said cancellations “happen” when “claims experience” exceeds actuarial norms, and after allowing me a moment to de-euphemize, she added . . . “the assholes.”

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My father has had no such experience with his insurance company. I looked back through weeks, then months, then years of his bills and claims, and every one had been paid promptly. There was one disagreement of $24, and I thought, next time, just send ’em my birthday check, Mom. I looked at bills and dates, and I looked hard at amounts. By evening I’d put Dad’s green folders in order and had arranged tax documents on the dining room table. Mother said I’d made impressive progress when she came home from the hospital. Casually, I asked about their medical insurance. When Dad’s insurance agent retired, his son took over the agency, and Dad decided, as Mother put it, to give the kid a chance. The kid, of course, is my age. It would’ve been easier to drag a dog downstairs to a bath than to convince my father to buy insurance, so I can’t imagine how the agent persuaded him to spend $2,500 a year on Medicare Part B supplemental insurance. Then again, maybe not, because Dad had figured it out. I’ll find out when I call to thank that insurance agent. Dad signed up for coverage around the time I joined the finance committee staff, and nine months later he was diagnosed with cancer. In years since, medical bills would have taken everything he accumulated in a lifetime of working and saving. Instead, yearly expenses have been about $2,500 for insurance premiums and $2,200 for drugs. Not a small amount — except compared to losing every cent you’ve saved your whole life. An apocryphal fact I recall from working on the finance committee is that half your lifetime medical expenses accrue in your final ten days of life. I’m not sure I’m remembering that correctly, but I suspect Dad won’t come home from the hospital, and it’s certain the cancer killing him would have bankrupted my mother. The tax papers spread over the dining room table didn’t seem like a big deal anymore. Neither did paying a few taxes.

.Final . . . . . .Reckoning ..................................................................

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he papers I’ve been organizing are a record of my father’s decline and my parents’ lives over the past several months. I see Dad was doing well enough in September: third-quarter statements were where they should have been, inside the green hanging files, most recent quarter in front. The first loose records had dates beginning mid-October. Everything dated after mid-November was untouched. Some envelopes held interest and dividend checks. Mother hadn’t recognized the addresses, so they remained unopened, the checks uncashed. When I was publishing books about investing, I used to write that a portfolio reflected its owner. It was an offhand remark on my authorial part, and now, reviewing Dad’s records, it isn’t, because I see my father in his portfolio. I guess 1982 was a good year, because he picked up a municipal bond fund. There’s no federal tax on muni bond interest, so you buy munis when you move to a higher tax bracket. In the mid-1980s, preferred stocks started showing up — widow and orphan stocks, steady dividends, things to own when you live on investment income. I held the statements to the light and mumbled, “ What happened in 1984, Dad — you retire or something?” Sure enough. There’s a wild hair here and there, including ten shares of Storage Technology — a paradoxical purchase for a man who keeps records in Pendaflex folders — and trade confirmations from a brokerage in Colorado, where we lived when I was nine. The confirms earn my rapt attention. On April 26, 1961, Dad bought 300 shares of BerkshireHathaway at prices between $10 and $12, which he sold within a few weeks for a few hundred dollars in gains. Berkshire-Hathaway is the firm Warren Buffet made legendary, now, at $64,000 a share, the most expensive stock on the New York Stock Exchange. Three hundred shares would be worth almost $20 million. Years ago when I was an

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investment advisor most of my clients told family stories like this one — the grandfather who could have bought a hundred acres of what’s now downtown Miami, the father who ignored the chance to buy Xerox at pennies per share. Berkshire-Hathaway is my family’s story of passed wealth, although I remember that a few hundred dollars was lots of money to my father when I was nine years old. I see, though, that Dad didn’t let small amounts of money get away. In 1982, he bought a few shares of a utility company and in 1984 invested in Vanguard Windsor Fund. He began reinvesting utility dividends and all gains from Windsor in additional shares. This is a classic wealth-building strategy, something financial authors urge readers to do and they generally don’t. My father did. Dividend Reinvestment Plans are known as “Drips,” which aptly describes how they work. Quarterly dividends drip into the purchase of additional shares, which also pay dividends that become more dividend-paying shares, and over time the total accumulates. “Drip” is a perfect name in another sense. Four times a year, dividends buy shares, over the years they increase in price, the stock splits, the company changes its name or merges, dividend reinvestment continues with the new company. When it’s time to sell, you have to figure the cost of each and every share you’ve accumulated, and that is like Chinese water torture. Reinvesting in mutual funds works the same. Funds pay returns — sometimes monthly, sometimes quarterly or semiannually — which go toward buying more shares in the fund. Those shares also pay interest, dividends, and capital gains, and they, plus shares previously purchased, can increase in price. As with Drips, year-to-year keeping track isn’t a problem, because the fund sends summaries, and only that year’s payments are taxable. Again, however, when it’s time to sell, you must total up years and years of reinvesting. But only when it’s time to sell. Only when you prepare to close positions you’ve built for years, maybe decades. In Dad’s records I found a single sheet dated the month of November, two columns of penciled entries on three-ring binder paper. In November, when his strength was failing and radiation and chemotherapy clearly hadn’t worked, when he was tired beyond belief and his doctors no longer bothered to measure his PSA, my father sat down at his desk and for the first time in fifteen years added everything up and left it for me to find. He knew. In November, my father knew.

.Home, . . . . . . . .There . . . . . . . .and . . . . .Now ...................................................

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ince New Year’s Day and I was last with my parents, my sisters have settled Mother in the house she and Dad bought a few weeks ago. They hired a carpet cleaner, and the furniture looks as if it’s always been where they put it. I recognize the contents of this house, of course, but I’ve never been inside before this week. Dad was here six days before entering the hospital, and Mother has since spent all her time with him. She wasn’t interested or involved in how my sisters organized things, so she and I have had to grope around finding silverware and the few toiletries I leave with my parents. My sisters put everything in its place, but neither Mother nor I knows where that place is. I’ve spread tax forms on the dining room table, and in my mind I see a different room in a different house on a winter day forty years ago. It’s a place and time only Dad and I would remember, and now, the way Dad is, only I remember. I am nine years old, and it’s the morning after the night my biological mother died. My father sits in a sofa chair in our living room. The room is almost silent even though filled with neighbors who stand over my father, at times whispering to him, placing a hand on his shoulder, then moving away. My father is crying, then sobbing, composes himself, then cries again. It seems to me he tries to push tears back into his eyes with the ball of his hand, but his hands begin to tremble and he can do no more than press his palm to his cheek. I don’t believe the man in the chair is my father. The man in my father’s chair has bloodshot and swollen eyes, but his other features seem to have sunk into his face, and I don’t recognize him. He looks — the first time I thought this word in this way — beaten. Unlike nearly everyone present, I am dry-eyed and steady. Neighbors try to pat me and speak to me, and I have none of it. Several times I push through them to stand in front of my father, but he says nothing, seems

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neither to see nor know me. I stare at him but he does not register my presence, and I decide with flat finality that my father has gone and is not coming back. I am resolving myself to this idea when the doorbell rings and my father’s boss enters. He is one of few adults whose entire name I know — it is James M. Schaefer. He is a tall, thin, and, to me, elegant man who wears dark suits and shoes tapered at the toe. He sees me, rubs my shoulder only a moment, and goes straight to my father. Kneeling beside his chair, he asks what he can do. Wiping his face with the palms of both hands, my father manages one choked and strangled request: he asks for help arranging a loan through their company. In a single swift and unhesitating motion Mr. Schaefer pulls his wallet from his hip pocket and lays $500 on the arm of my father’s chair, promising to take care of everything. Then he looks around with frank suspicion at everyone else, puts the money deliberately in my father’s hand, and folds his fingers around it. I’d known for a long time that we needed money and must need it badly, because there were no presents at Christmas. I suppose most nine-year-old boys would have known only that, but I knew it cost $35 a day for my mother to be in the hospital and she’d been there for months. I do not know how I had learned this precise figure, but I knew it as a certainty, as I knew for a certainty parents could claim a $500 tax exemption for each child. Forty years later now, I wouldn’t believe a nine-year-old knows such things, but I knew them. I knew the exact phrase —“claim an exemption” — I knew the amounts and what it cost for my mother to be in the hospital, and I will never forget those numbers. The rest of this scene and that morning have faded from my mind, as in truth I have no emphatic recall of years and places we lived until Dad married the only woman I think of as my mother. I suppose years from now I’ll have no particular memories of this house, and I’m glad Mother will live here without memories of sharing it with Dad. But I remember a moment forty years ago when my defeated and crying father held $500 in his hand, looked across a crowded room, and for the first time that morning seemed to see me looking back at him.

.Making . . . . . . . . . .Money . . . . . . . . the . . . . . Old-Fashioned . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Way ...............................

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n my day job I am director of corporate communication for the United States Mint, a bureau of the Treasury Department. I’ve held that title many times in my career, and even if it isn’t a title you see often in the federal government, the work is the same— writing speeches, preparing annual and quarterly reports, dealing with media and the public, supporting the marketing department. Just as my title is an oddity in government, the Mint isn’t typical of government agencies, because we run a business that actually makes and markets a physical product. We do three things: we manufacture circulating coins, we manufacture and sell bullion and commemorative coins, and we guard the gold at Fort Knox. Of these activities, the oldest, most routinized, most archaic — minting circulating coinage — is the one that most interests me. We start with multi-ton coils of cupronickel strip — “clad strip,” copper, zinc, and nickel pressed into the sandwiched alloy you see if you turn a dime, quarter, or half-dollar on edge. We run the strip through a blanking press, which punches out what you’d call a slug and we call a coin blank. Pennies are mostly zinc, and we buy them preblanked, because eight billion of the twenty billion coins we make every year are pennies —“one cent coin” is the proper name — and blanking so many would be a real bother. We perform an act of art upon the blanks: we stamp a design simultaneously on each side with high-speed presses. Images of presidents on circulating coins may seem unchanged year to year, but each year they’re touched up and altered, hence the dies that make them are retooled. Preparation for this — clay models, reversed lettering, negative rubber molds — is more intricate than anyone imagines. I delight in the machine that makes it possible, a Janvier transfer-engraver, being more than two hundred years old.

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Once minted, coins go into bags for shipping to Federal Reserve districts. There’s a single portal on the shipping docks at our mints in Philadelphia and Denver, and when bags pass through this doorway and only this doorway their contents then and only then become money. In the strict parsing of rules, the United States Mint has never touched money, but a billion dollars depart its two anointed doors every year. This is art, history, economics, manufacturing, and magic, although I shouldn’t be romantic about what’s merely the time-honored right of kings to declare what is money. The formal name is “fiat currency,” money made so by dictate. But, to me, transforming copper and zinc into stuff that makes life and dreams possible is magic. It’s as if Demeter and Hermes still hover overhead, as Greek and Roman coin makers believed. However, coin making is fearfully backbreaking, calamitously noisy work. In mahogany suites in Boston or New York, Bespoke-suited men and women make discreet ripples in silent oceans of capital with keyboards. In Denver and Philadelphia, men and women in T-shirts move tens of thousands of pounds of coins on forklifts amid noise that requires protective earphones. There’s no bell-like tinkle of wealth. Coins clatter out of presses like cash registers maniacally upended. There are two ironies about those billions of coins. The public irony is that the Mint manufactures coins, according to the mission statement I wrote, “to sustain the nation’s commerce.” Yet studies show that the nation’s commerce needs only two percent of the coins already out there. For every two coins the economy needs, ninety-eight are floating around. But every year, the Federal Reserve demands more; we do not, after all, make coins for fun. The personal irony is I seldom touch coins, except to stack the few in my pockets into neat plastic tubes on my kitchen counter. When I have 50¢ in pennies — or $2 in nickels or $10 in quarters — I roll them and deposit them in my savings account. Actually, I can’t claim to do even that. While colleagues are moving thousand-pound pallets of coins, I phone my bank and transfer $2 or $10 from my checking account. I pay for dry cleaning with the rolled coins. My Korean dry cleaner seems to need them. Every year about $500 builds up in my savings from coins I don’t spend but am indirectly involved in making. I move the yearly $500, again by telephone, to a mutual fund, where it will become $20,000

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when I retire. This is more of the magic of money, if the stock market continues to work as it has for a century — a reasonable expectation when you work for an outfit that’s made money twice that long. I do not, by the way, hold stock certificates. I don’t handle paper money much, just as the Mint doesn’t print paper currency. Even my checking account scarcely functions as one, for I rarely write checks. I use a debit card to transfer funds from checking to gas pumps, grocery stores, and restaurants. I pay mortgage, condo fee, insurance premiums, and utilities by automatic withdrawal. Salary I earn for helping to mint money is deposited electronically. I never see that, either. But if you come to Denver or Philly you’ll see money enough. You’ll see coins blanked and washed and tipped and minted and bagged by the billions. Plastic strips and electric blips and tones on the phone explain why the economy needs only two coins for every hundred the Mint made long ago. This new money also explains why the Mint must make billions of coins every year — explains, that is, if you let your mind roam as mine does when I see coins and think of Demeter, the divine right of kings, and magic doorways. Whether it’s made from gold and silver or copper and zinc, money is only an abstraction, an idea, a necessary notion. Coins are money’s gadget, a stage prop for the invisible hand of the market. Machinery makes metal into blanks, art makes blanks into coins, enchanted gates make coins into money, and as money . . . the coins . . . simply . . . vanish.

.Double-Die .....................................................................

A

long time ago I worked at an oil company whose vicechairman said he didn’t believe in computers. Then I worked for an apparel company whose president didn’t believe in bonuses for middle-managers. I also worked for a food conglomerate whose chairman didn’t believe in dividends even though shareholders do. These statements still baffle me. Is not believing in computers like not believing in the tooth fairy? Is not believing in middle-management bonuses like not believing in sex on a first date? Is not believing in dividends like not believing in fish on Fridays, or is it more like not believing in majority rule? These men may have been thinking something sensible and saying it badly, but I doubt it: the vice-chairman didn’t believe in computers because “It’s like hiring two secretaries to do the work of one.” After these experiences, I now rarely ask what people mean, because they might mean something so strange I never recover from hearing it. Therefore, this morning when a man phoned from Oregon demanding to see Fort Knox because Americans don’t believe any gold is there, I didn’t ask why. I asked what time it was in Oregon. This led to a conversation in which I could say the Treasury Department, the Inspector General, and an accounting firm had inventoried the gold, and I would gladly mail him their verifications. That wouldn’t do, he objected, because they’re in on the conspiracy. When the conversation lulled, I said: “So to sum up, you’ve called from the opposite end of the country at 6 a.m. to say Americans think there’s no gold at Fort Knox, but they’ll change their minds if we let you see it.” There was a long pause before the man said, “I wouldn’t want to put it quite that way.” My present job entails such conversations, so I know that what people do believe is as odd as what they don’t. Several years ago the

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mint in Philadelphia had a loose hub in dies that strike pennies, and coins with double-struck profiles of Lincoln escaped quality control into circulation. Error coins are an incredible event in numismatics, particularly when they’re first discovered and no one knows how many there are. A dealer in New York paid $1,000 for a double-die penny — a good deal for the lucky finder and the dealer, whose $1,000 bought nationwide publicity. The publicity brought my staff and me two weeks of headaches, even when more double-die pennies appeared and increasing numbers lowered their price to $250. That’s when a school principal in Kansas announced over the loudspeaker that the Mint was recalling pennies and would pay $250 for each one. This was gleefully reported home, where parents had buckets of pennies, each of which they immediately believed was worth $250. News like that spreads. Every state with a panhandle, the entire state, phoned my office. Almost no one asked if the story was true. Virtually every caller was responding to an established fact to ask where they should deliver their pennies and whether the Mint was paying in cash, check, or tax refunds. These were calls from people with jobs and responsibilities and voter registration cards, people licensed to drive vehicles at high speeds and old enough to sign mortgages. I was so astonished I broke my own rule. A representative conversation went like this: “The Mint makes pennies. Why would we buy them?” “Because you’re recalling them.” “ We’re not. If we wanted pennies out of circulation, we’d just stop making them.” “They wouldn’t let you.” “But they let us pay $250 for a penny? Would you pay $250 for a penny?” “Of course not. But you’re the government.” I have learned two things in the world of investing, work, and coins, and they’re overlapped in my mind like Lincoln’s profile struck atop itself. Item one: people will believe something utterly improbable with total conviction. Item the second: they won’t appreciate that being brought to their attention. Still, I try to understand what conclusion people had to reach before they sought me out. Silently and to myself, I try to figure it out. There is no difference between my secretary and a computer.

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I’m not dumb, but the government is. My kid’s principal said the Mint’s paying $250 for pennies, so it must be true. Someone did pay $250 for a penny — someone paid $1,000 — so what happened can be as strange as what people think, especially about money. Not that there’s much point in acknowledging it. The point to be acknowledged is that we only say we don’t believe in the tooth fairy. Or perhaps it’s that when someone sums up what we think, we wouldn’t want to put it quite that way.

.Money . . . . . . . . .Talks ...............................................................

M

y strongest memory of money belongs to a summer evening when I was five or six. I’d lost a tooth while staying with my grandparents, and after dinner my grandfather returned to the kitchen table carrying a cigar box. “The tooth fairy can’t come by tonight,” he said, “so you can have one of these.” I remember laying back the lid with both hands and finding the box half full of silver dollars. My grandfather must have thought I’d dive into it and send coins flying all directions, but I took each separately from the box and laid them side-by-side, aligning them by date until I’d circled the table in silver dollars. My grandfather watched with a grin that itself was missing a tooth or two, and while I deliberated my grandmother came up behind my shoulder. She seemed, as always, afraid I’d hurt myself, and as I reached for my chosen dollar, she said, “Just remember: money talks, but character shows.” These years later I have many thoughts about that first memory of money, including the slightly creepy recollection of being paid for a lost body part. I regard my grandfather’s dollar as an inheritance on many levels now, but my only financial one for a long while, I hope. I note that my impulse toward money seems always to have been to order it, align it, regulate it. Even at five or six I gave each dollar due diligence. I remember the chill and hardness of the silver in my grandparents’ steaming kitchen, the weight of each dollar in my hand, how weighty my choice of one among so many dollars. I remember slipping from bed and standing at the window to turn my dollar end over end in the glint of a full moon, imagining rows of candies and toy soldiers and comics such unexpected wealth could buy. I remember thinking I’d impress my grandparents by dutifully taking my dollar to the bank, but that fleeting notion twinkled no longer than fireflies in the yard

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beyond. I remember holding my dollar toward the moon and drawing it to my face until their round edges matched, then moving it ever so slightly away until it was ringed by a bright, thin corona of moonlight that still shines into my mind’s eye. It’s decades since I touched a silver dollar. They don’t make them anymore — we at the U.S. Mint don’t make them anymore, not for circulation anyhow. These days nobody makes money that has the tonnage of a silver dollar, but because my memories are anchored in one all dollars seem solemn and worthy of attention. I sometimes think my career of money has been kaleidoscopic because my first encounter was. As a fledgling economist I’ve memorized the abstraction money is — medium of exchange, unit of account, store of value, standard of deferred payments — yet my eight books about investing are handleturning practical. As a financial advisor, I learned how money’s figuratively made, and at the Mint I see how it’s literally made, down to one hundred eighteen ridges on a dime and one hundred twenty-five on a quarter. In the job I have now, every day reminds me of something I’ve learned about money’s uses and forms, its emotional weight, how it unites and divides as well as multiplies, that it serves some people and rules others, the gullibility and greed plus the sadness and silliness both produce. Reminders reach my ear as phone calls from the coinconsuming public and as letters, including one from a best-selling financial author whose spiel is a neo-nineties, New Age, feng shui of flawed metaphors. Lessons of my financial life are especially underscored dealing with coin collectors, whose relationship to money is the most peculiar I’ve seen. I’m sure a memory of love prompted them to start collecting, for serious collectors tell similar childhood stories of kitchen tables, grandfathers, and poking through pocket change or jars of pennies. Yet if you touch a serious collector’s coins, the reaction you provoke won’t leave fond memories. When I told one caller a collection might fetch less than his late father paid, he said, “Serves the old SOB right.” I got the feeling coins had more of his father’s attention than he’d had, but in that instance and most I’ve seen there’s too much psychic loose change to sort through, too many possibilities rolling off on their wobbly rims, one hundred eighteen ridges to the dime, one hundred twenty-five to the quarter. Even the Mint’s confused. We make billions of circulating coins so

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everyone can have them without hesitation or scarcity, yet we make commemorative and numismatic coins and urge everyone to buy quick before they’re gone. We make and sell every gold coin we can, but we’ll shoot anyone going near the gold in Fort Knox even though it just sits there, its transactions velocity zero, and for all practical purposes is demonetized. Equally disjointing are the facts, if that’s the word. Shortages happen even though, as I’ve said, the economy needs only two coins for every ninety-eight now circulating. The Mint spends ninety percent of its effort on its commemorative-numismatic business although costs eat ninety-five percent of revenues. Today gold is $290 per ounce, but the Mint values the Fort Knox gold at $42.22 per ounce, because that was gold’s price when it ceased having any economic function. If the place that makes money is so confused, it’s not surprising people are. When people talk about cold hard cash or seed money or nest eggs, it hardly seems they’re describing the same thing. They’re more confused when trying to describe what money means to them. Even if you grant that money has too many possible meanings, people seldom are clear about any one of them. Strange, this. One thing you can say about money is that everyone wants more, yet people are disordered about money they already have. Sometimes I am, too, but a hard constant was fixed in my mind when I touched my chosen dollar: money talks, my grandmother still whispers to me, character shows. My grandmother’s link between coin and character clatters like Marley’s ghost when I turn to my parents’ money. The amount strikes me, considering how many years Dad never earned five figures. That’s when you could own a house and two cars and support a family in small-town Iowa on less, which is what my parents did with their money, but less also meant less to invest for themselves. I remember how much of themselves went into making their money, especially when Dad owned his hardware store, but I remember little spending on themselves. Mother’s Fridays at the beauty parlor and Dad’s basement woodshop barely register as self-indulgence. There remains little: after prescriptions and health insurance my parents’ largest expenditure is their donation to church. Such character shows in this that it’s like my parents’ lives issued their own currency, and I can’t lay that thought aside when I try to be detached and impartial about their finances. This is no matter of circling

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my grandparents’ table in silver dollars. How much yield should I sacrifice to hold cash for my pay-as-you-go parents? Do I hesitate investing $10,000 in that bond because it’s a subordinated debenture or because memories subordinate ten grand to growing up in a house that cost less? Dad owns a preferred stock from CoastalCorp, and it reminds me Mother was thirty before she saw the ocean. Is CoastalCorp a sound investment in that light? There’s a stock in Dad’s portfolio, symbol AOA, that’s Greek to me. AOA: alpha omega alpha — the first, the last, the first again, like first memories that recede then leap to mind. There probably aren’t many people whose formative memory of money is a Midsummer Night’s Dream of tooth fairies and fireflies and a full moon and a cautionary tale of what fools mortals be if money talks without character to show. There probably are fewer whose fairy tale first memory of money connects multiple careers. I suppose all I can say is my encounter on a summer night multiplied the number of things I’d consider about money the rest of my life. In a way, that one silver dollar is all the money I’ve ever touched.

.Alternate . . . . . . . . . . . .Thursdays ............................................................

S

ometimes what my coworkers and I think can be as logically scattered as what my phone callers think. I hit upon this realization because my cleaning lady came today. I don’t call María Elvia a cleaning lady, but not for reasons of political correctness. It’s that I picture cleaning ladies as stolid, Teutonic women who enforce a scrubbed godliness upon domestic disarray by genetic main strength, whereas María Elvia is a hazel-skinned elf who scoops out my condo on alternate Thursdays. I could call María Elvia just about anything without offending her, because we don’t have a language in common. She used to come on Saturdays before switching to Thursdays so she could spend weekends at her church, and one Saturday morning I found her sponging the microwave with a spray-bottle of carpet cleaner. “Uh, María Elvia?” “Hi, Do-nald.” “Hi, María Elvia. I notice you’re using carpet cleaner on the microwave.” By pointing and patting the carpet and finding the right stuff for the microwave, we straightened everything out. We also established that she wanted a new mop. She didn’t like the sponge-on-a-stick kind I had; she wanted a cloth mop with the business end that resembles a Raggedy Ann. To signal I understood I dangled one forearm perpendicular to the floor and waggled my fingers. Her face lit up, and she nodded vigorously. Since we both realize we have no language in common, she wouldn’t even say “Sí ” when I guessed right. I’ll buy María Elvia any cleaning tool she wants. I saw her climb on top of my refrigerator to clean cabinet doors with a wad of paper napkins. I’d run out of paper towels — the brand with the lumberjack, I believe — and instead of going home, which is what most people

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would have done, María Elvia was making do with napkins. We met when she worked for the contractor that cleans my office building. I must have muttered something about needing a cleaning lady, because she came around with a coworker who spoke English to ask if I’d hired anyone. The coworker turned out to be her sister María Consuela. Their brother Manuel also works for the contractor, and I see him almost every day. I pay María Elvia $120 a month and refer her to friends. I believe I was supposed to have asked if she’s here legally, but as I said, we don’t have a language in common. Six dollar bills fell unnoticed from trousers hanging in my closet, and she stacked them on my bedroom lowboy with faces of George Washington aligned. That was like seeing her green card, I guess. You hear that people like María Elvia are a problem. She is clumsy, but the problem you hear is that people like her are lazy, dishonest, and taking advantage. I’m not unsympathetic to that notion. My greatgrandmothers were Native Americans — Crow on my father’s side, Sioux on my mother’s. You never know where this immigration thing will lead. One of my coworkers is very upset because we Americans are giving our country away, as he puts it. Our borders are so porous that immigrants are wading the Rio Grande to get a free heart transplant — his specific example — and as a result we as a nation are headed for bankruptcy. He’s decided that when he retires he’s going to take his 401k, federal pension, and wife to Canada, where people apparently are parsimonious and nationalistic with hearts. One of many oddities about this conversation is that this coworker is Jewish. He has such a strong racial-ancestral sense about it, he says, that he can’t stand to hear German spoken. From my point of view, what’s most odd is how he assumes he’ll drive into Canada and be welcomed. He obviously can’t imagine Canadians standing around the office complaining about the unwanteds drifting up from down south.

.Windsor . . . . . . . . . . Fund ..............................................................

D

ad’s portfolio is overwhelmingly income investments. These are securities like certificates of deposit, preferred stocks, and bonds that pay fixed dividends and interest. Buying income securities is like renting money to the bank, corporation, or government that issued them. You invest a fixed sum, and the issuer pays you a fixed amount on a set schedule for a specified time. At the end of that time, the issuer gives back your money, and you pick another investment. The predictability of this arrangement makes income securities popular with retired investors, for whom dividends and interest replace a paycheck. A smaller amount of Dad’s capital is invested for growth in securities like common stocks and stock mutual funds that seek returns via increases in share price. Disproportion of income over growth in Dad’s portfolio doesn’t surprise me. Nothing guarantees that a stock or growth fund will increase in price, and retired investors prefer assurances. But also, I suspect Dad gravitated toward income securities because they reflect how he dealt with the world. He kept promises and respected those who did, so he would pick securities that make promises and keep them. Among his growth investments, the largest holding is Vanguard Windsor Fund. One of the first and oldest mutual funds, Windsor is a growth & income fund; its investment objective is to buy a mix of securities, usually common stocks, that pay regular dividends — that would speak to Dad — but also have potential to increase in price. In this, Windsor differs from funds devoted strictly to growth or income. I’m paying attention to the Windsor and beginning to be uneasy. In the first place, a growth & income fund makes two promises and in doing so is the classic financial example of trying to serve two masters. In

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the second place, as a matter of historical record, they seriously underperform ordinary growth funds. If you’ve owned a growth & income as long as Dad’s owned Windsor, odds approach certainty you’d have been better off elsewhere. What’s more, Windsor is a managed fund. That is, it employs a manager to buy and sell securities for its portfolio, and how well the fund performs depends on its manager. During the early years Dad owned Windsor, it was managed by Wall Street legend John Neff, but a new manager took over several years ago, and it’s nearcertain that a manager who inherits from a star performer doesn’t equal the predecessor. In addition, Dad is missing records for the early years he invested in Windsor. I can trace back only to the second half of 1993, about when he was diagnosed with cancer. The period then ’til now has been among the greatest for the stock market generally, yet prices on his Windsor records don’t seem to parallel that. In a market like this has been, you expect to see big jumps in price of a fund’s shares — its net asset value — if it’s achieving capital growth, even if only half its purpose is growth and the other half is income. Finally, Windsor pays distributions twice a year, June and December. June payments generally represent dividends from stocks in the portfolio, whereas December payments include capital gains from selling stocks it owned. Windsor’s recent years’ December distributions have been whopping —$6,000 last year, $1,000 to $3,000 for earlier years. Distributions mean taxes, and taxes devour returns. There’s another potential problem in those distributions, maybe several. A mutual fund distributes capital gains only after it sells securities, and managers sell for two reasons. The first is that stocks hit their growth targets, and managers take gains to reinvest in other stocks. The second reason managers sell and raise cash is to pay shareholders withdrawing money. Shareholders do that because the fund isn’t performing. So the first half of this financial tale is a clean, unexceptional story. Dad bought this, it pays that, the two will part eventually, even-Steven. The other half of this tale involves a real Steven — or a Jack or a Jill — who runs the Vanguard Windsor Fund, and that person’s story doesn’t look right to me. It’s easy to be suspicious of another manager’s performance, and you’re more inclined to be when your parents’ money is at issue. That’s

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true even if the manager is your own father, and in this case I wish Dad had invested more in growth instead of the income securities he favored. All things considered, though, he has been a pretty fair investor — steady, disciplined, not prone to wild bets—and over the years he could invest he gathered a fair amount of money. As a result, he’s leaving Mother a fair amount of money which I will manage. Manage as well as my father, I hope, but my present concern is whether my sort-of predecessor at Windsor did well enough to warrant holding his fund. News from home about Dad hastens my need to find out. The partial delirium I saw back in Iowa seems to have taken over entirely. It is, I guess, accurate but unpleasant to say my father isn’t in his right mind, and I don’t know if he’ll reinhabit himself the way I see him inhabiting the portfolio he built. I know they’re only bonds and stocks, inanimate things paying interest and dividends at the command of a computer. But my father also is hooked to monitors and a box on an IV pole that jolts him with painkillers. My father is the soul between machines, and it’s easy for me to see his soul in a portfolio that’s still keeping promises, still providing, still functioning as the steady, reasoned product of his mind.

.Breach .....................................................................

F

or the past two nights I’ve had the same dream. I’m scuba diving in the Gulf but don’t know which. I’m swimming beside a whale, hundreds of feet, hundreds of tons, and I’m swimming — this phrase repeats in my mind — for dear life. Water trickles into my mask and warms against my cheeks. I can taste the salt on my regulator and hear my exhaled breath roil past my ears in rumbling bubbles. I’ve lost my watch and gauges and don’t know how long I’ve been under or how deep. I’m wearing too little weight and could bolt uncontrolled to the surface, where the bends can turn my blood to foam. I struggle after the whale because I must turn him aside before he finds his mate. I know she’s near, but this is murky water like the Midwest where I learned to dive, and I see scarcely a few feet. I’m paying $162 for this dive, and as I look up for the underside of the boat, the whale begins to nose toward the ocean bottom. He’s heading into the Rift, which I sense as I sense his mate. I know he and I have been to the Rift before. Where did the Rift come from? Why must it still be there? I had no answer when I awoke gasping in aborted, panicked breaths. I thought about the meaning of dreams a great deal during a parttime year as a student in my twenties and almost daily during a year in my thirties. This dream makes me want to dust off the old skills, and the first thing I notice is, as with most dreams, this one morphs. My psyche painted the dark setting and made an invisible rift familiar. Each image embodies part of me, an able diver like the whale, but shapes content from my subconscious. So the whale could be a projection of my imposing father, who always wanted to be a diver but never learned. In a reversal dreams can have, my psyche made him the water mammal, soothing discomfort of a son’s skills exceeding his father’s, and me a tiny figure with an impossible task. Alone, no gauges,

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weights, or visibility, I’m in danger if I stay where I am, surface, or follow the whale’s descent. It’s easy to see my feelings of peril and inadequacy about what’s happening in my life, of being an ill-equipped light-weight out of his depth and surrounded by death. Not my death, as you’d think from the interpretation so far, because dreams also hold a dreamer’s empathy and identification with others. In my dream as in my life, the person in danger of dying is an unskilled diver. Someone in my dream has died already. My biological mother didn’t long survive the birth of my brother, which strained the impaired heart no one knew she had. Just as dreams might not lead where you expect, my father and I didn’t grow closer through our shared loss. Therefore, if my dream is partly about trying to keep my father from dying — from joining his mate — it’s also about trying to keep the largest unexplained regret in my life from happening. My brother was born in April, our mother died the following February, and since this wasn’t a dream the order of events isn’t in question. My father did what he had to do: he returned to work. He also did what he didn’t have to do: he kept his sons instead of separating us between an aunt who wanted me and an uncle who wanted my brother. He could have become — I guess the oxymoron is a Merry Widower — but chose his children. That summer I was usually alone, looking after the house and my father while my baby brother was with neighbors. Being alone was my choice, for my neighborhood friends had become incredibly frivolous, suddenly. I remember heating canned soup for my father’s daily lunch and mending a washing machine hose with electrician’s tape and tying it off neatly with a string. A pretty Mexican girl took care of my brother and me awhile, a teenager who made us Chef Boyardee pizza. What I remember most are a fiercely adult pride of sufficiency and that box of pizza parts. Such an amazing yellow box, so marvelously competent, the way it held small cans atop taller cans beside a packet of yeast. Were someone else describing that little boy I’d feel sorry for him, but if life carries into dreams and dreams linger into waking, life may grant amends for what it takes. In my case, maybe, adult resources to stay afloat, to cope with the unpleasant and to patch leaks, psychic and otherwise. A psychologist would describe it in more complex terms, but I look back and say simply that I became a self-contained package very early. I also look back and see that my father was young — barely

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thirty — and wonder if life granted him the same amends. That seems likely, looking again at forty years ago, seems to be the answer that feels right and the only one that adds up, because I never suffered an instant of mistreatment or neglect from my father that justifies the distance between us much of my younger life. He never hesitated at any responsibility toward me, and I don’t think I was ever more fractious, willful, or disobedient than any other child. I know of nothing, no fault or flaw or series of defects, to explain it. I can only stand here four decades later and see when it seems to have begun. Perhaps combining an only child with a quartz-like rationality, a baby who’s everything not rational and mannered, and a father who’d lost half his life’s definition is so dis-integrating one might understand it only in the fractured logic of dreams. Maybe we didn’t know what to do after she died, so we found what we needed within ourselves and held up separately for so long it became a feeling. Maybe it was that the person who inherently bridges fathers and sons wasn’t there between the years I was nine and thirteen, and in her absence the rift adolescence cleaves between fathers and sons had had a longer run when it reached us. Maybe it would’ve been otherwise if we’d sunk together just a bit when we were younger, but that wasn’t our way of dealing with things. Our way, apparently, was to become estranged by reacting alike to what affected us both. Regardless of whether I’ve interpreted my dream correctly or even remembered my memories correctly, I’m on familiar ground now. This time, life more fairly requires me to face a parent’s death, and this time there’s no exaggerated adequacy in facing it like the adult child. This I have been granted as I take care of things again for my father. And for Mother, my life’s proof that life gives something for what it takes, who once said more succinctly what I’ve finally realized: “You’re just like your father.” At times neither Dad nor I would have been flattered by the comparison, and as I close my remembrance of things past I don’t know if he’d agree with anything I’ve decided. It’s not worth pursuing anyhow. Our issues ended years ago with a paradox interpreters of dreams would relish: we got old enough to be the people we became when we were younger. Whatever my subconscious revisits on its own, nothing can separate my father and me now except his death. Old woes, new wails — not Dad’s way or mine. I’m grateful for our shared nature this time, this second time I see a parent die.

.Maketh . . . . . . . . . .Its . . . .Own . . . . . .Place ....................................................

M

y father’s delirium has brought his mind to its own place. What brings me near tears isn’t that it isolates him from Mother and me but that it overlaps us, like a spreading eclipse. Propped up in bed yesterday, he held both arms to full length in front of him, palms flat, fingers upright and spread, and began to pivot his left arm slowly and exactingly around his stationary right hand as if aligning a piece of glass or large panel. After several minutes of narrowing and more precise adjustments, he fixed it in position with one hand, gestured toward me with the other, and asked for a Phillips screwdriver. Susan thinks this is a drug interaction, not Dad’s cancer. She’s said so to Mother, but she hasn’t pressed the issue or confronted Dad’s doctors. “I think Dad’s gorked,” she told me. “I’m sure his sedatives and painkillers are conflicting, but it’s Mom’s place to say so.” I haven’t pressed the issue either, although Susan told me her suspicions days ago. I observe, I guess, the boundaries, separations, and pairings that comprise our family. As six people under one roof we were seldom a group of six, like Norman Rockwell paintings of Thanksgiving dinner. We were, I’d describe us, sets of pairs, and still are. Our parents were a couple — a pair unto life, it turned out. My sisters seemed like a matched set and both are nurses now. My brother and I never were alike and still aren’t. He and Dad are great with machines, Mother and I aren’t; we’re the fine-food-and-books pair. Dad and I were at odds until I returned from the army, and then we got on a wavelength and remained there. So much so that when we all, eventually plus spouses and kids, gathered for holiday games that depended on partners’ mutual apperception, it was house rules that Dad and I couldn’t be teamed together. The only variation has been that Susan and I, eldest daughter and son, spend more time talking these days — the only variation

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besides one other: my semblance with Dad is only half intact. I did find missing financial papers by asking myself where he’d have put them, but now Dad is somewhere I can’t reach, and when he reaches toward me, literally reaches, or speaks, I can’t be sure it’s from a place we have in common. I can’t be sure we’ll ever have one in common again. I watch Dad’s eyes. Sometimes they dart quickly side-to-side, tracking something happening fast. Sometimes he stares straight ahead at something yards away, then his focus changes, his head tilts slightly forward, and he presses back into his pillow as if someone’s approaching. Dad is weak, so his moves and shifts in position aren’t forceful, but they are entirely normal. They seem in no way out of place, although that’s what they are. They’re happening somewhere else. Mother and I had been in Dad’s room most of the day. For long stretches he was apparently involved in a project at church, and for awhile he was taking inventory at his hardware store. All day he’d been building or giving instructions or calling for tools, so I barely noticed him roll to his right and grope toward something, tongue between his lips like it often is when he concentrates. He was definitely concentrating — on the intercom strapped to his bed rail. He found it, pushed the call button, and held it until the nurse answered. By the time I saw he was coordinated toward something actually in his room, he’d summoned the desk nurse by name and asked for help going to the bathroom. It was Dad’s voice, its tone and timbre were his, it was him speaking — clear, referenced, unrushed. Faster than I realized, I was off my chair and moving toward his bed. He saw me; the locus of his vision compressed as it had earlier, only this time someone — me — really was moving toward him. “Dad?” “ What?” he said, frowning and shying his face a quarter-turn aside, the ordinary, wincing reflex of someone too loudly spoken to. “Dad, are you with us?” “Yes, I am,” he answered. Immediately — and it was less time than I could say more — he began frantically turning a small dial counter-clockwise while pulling a lever beside his right leg and stomping fiercely on what must have been a brake pedal. His nurses came, and Mother and I went into the hall to give Dad privacy, but after two or three minutes one leaned from his door and

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motioned for me. “He’s asking for you,” she said. Mother and I started back together, but the nurse stopped her. “Just you,” she said to me. “He specifically said only you.” Surprise, then puzzlement, then hurt crossed Mother’s face, but I walked into my father’s room alone. It was dimmed and still, and at the foot of his bed his nurses held my proud and self-sufficient father upright on a porta-potty. They had draped his hospital gown delicately over its front and sides, and Dad was holding out his thin and trembling right arm toward me. When I knelt on both knees by his right side and let his arm fall heavily across my shoulder, he caught my neck in the crook of his elbow and pulled me toward him, a strong, unexpected tug that startled me. He was anxious, near panic, his eyes were moist, and when he had drawn me even with his face, he laid his other hand lightly on my chest and talking fast, said: “I’ve got to go, Don. You’ve got to let me go.” On my knees, inches from my father’s face, I looked into his tearing blue eyes and sensed I had only seconds to understand what was happening. I’d heard that sometimes parents won’t die without their family’s permission. They won’t allow the end until they know they aren’t dying when they’re needed. Even if they know time is close, they must have permission to die. They need their family’s consent before they can . . . go. I saw what must have taken place in Dad’s mind. For the barest moment he’d been back. When he saw where he was and who was with him, he knew what he wanted to say. In the next instant it strayed, but not completely. Enough of Dad remained to be coherent and purposeful, but his purpose, the thing he had to say, was deflected and confused with another necessity — and he called for the nurse. He saw his mistake, but he was slipping. He tried to stop by braking hard and pulling the lever. He tried to back up by reversing the dial. His nurses put him on the toilet as he’d asked, but they didn’t understand, didn’t understand. Clarity was going. He knew he had no time to risk that Mother wouldn’t understand either. He knew I would. Dad’s elbow tightened around my neck. His eyes grew wilder. He pulled me closer with his right arm but pushed me away with his left hand. Louder, more urgently, struggling for breath, he said: “I’ve got to go, Don. You know I’ve got to go.” I held my father’s left wrist against my chest and laid my hand on

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his opposite arm. I waited an instant past his agitation, and slowly, deliberately, looking straight into his eyes, I said, “I understand, Dad. You have to go. You do what you have to do, Dad. It’s OK.” His arms fell to his side, his face turned blank, and he was somewhere else again. As the nurses helped him unsteadily to his feet and guided him toward bed, so was I. I had known this moment before. The feeling I had and the feeling I’d had then, whenever it was, were the same, but when and where wouldn’t come to me. It must have been long ago, because I would remember a time later. Long ago, I was younger therefore smaller. Probably smaller than Dad. Probably small enough that when he was seated I was no taller than his eye, and at eye level . . . had seen him in tears and beyond reaching, and there it was: an earlier dimmed and silent living room with ineffectual people hovering around a father I’d decided was gone and wasn’t coming back. I had been wrong to believe so then, and in a flash of parallel and absolute certainty I knew I was wrong to believe so now. Dad had fallen asleep as soon as his nurses placed him back in bed, but I knew he was still present somewhere inside. For a moment he’d been back and had tried to stay, but something was stronger. Something, perhaps, like two drugs not cooperating as they should. Tomorrow, I told myself, I phone Susan.

.Greeks . . . . . . . . .Bearing . . . . . . . . . .Gifts .....................................................

F

or my new year’s resolution I put myself on a regimen of reading the classics and the history of philosophy, but what with two trips back to Iowa in January it was late in the month before I made my list of Great Books and a reading schedule. I went to Borders, Kramer’s, Second Story, and a few other Washington bookstores, and bought Herodotus, Thucydides, Plato’s Republic, Tacitus, and other worthies, and I’ve begun progressing through them. Of the characters I’ve read about, Cassandra is the one for whom I have the greatest feeling. Cassandra was the prophetess who warned about Greeks bearing gifts. She tricked one of the gods into granting her an ability to see the truth, but he didn’t like being tricked and fixed it so that no one would believe her when she spoke it. I cast a thought toward Cassandra this afternoon at work when a woman phoned from a local army base, identifying herself as Specialist so-and-so and declaring she had a two-headed dime right there in her hand. By her description, this dime-like object had the customary profile of FDR on the obverse and the reverse — that is, its head and tails. This isn’t uncommon. Carnivals, gag shops, casinos, and coin dealers buy two-headed coins as tokens or sales promotions. They’re made by private mints and look enough like legitimate coins that some get into circulation. This soldier had apparently received one in change, was enthused about it being worth lots of money, and she wanted to know if it was real. You shouldn’t ask someone reading philosophy about the nature of reality, but she didn’t know that. So I explained what had to happen for this coin to be from the United States Mint, if that’s what she meant by “real.” We make billions of dimes, I told her, and this is how it works. Machines feed four dime-sized coin blanks into retainers on a high-speed

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press. The press strikes all four simultaneously on the obverse and reverse. The press rods the dimes directly into dumpster-sized bins. From there, dimes flow into a counting-and-bagging machine, which deposits the right number of dimes into a bag and sews it shut. The bags go to shipping-and-storage on the opposite side of the building and are stacked on pallets. We aren’t producing lots of two-headed dimes, I continued, so there’d have to be an intermittent malfunction with one of the four retainers on one of the presses. This dime would have to be struck only on its obverse, the side with FDR’s profile. After that, this dime, still blank on one side, would have to escape the dumpster — or, harder still, a bag sewn shut. It would have to roll the entire length of the production floor and climb back into the blank feeder. With its blank side up, this Houdini of dimes, this Lassie-come-home of coinage, would have to find its way back to the exact retainer on the same press that struck it originally. This press would have to repeat its malfunction at precisely that moment and again hit this one dime only on one side. That, I concluded, is the only way an image of FDR could appear on both sides of a legitimate coin. My explanation was followed by the long silence I have come to know excruciatingly well in my job. “Oooookaaay,” the woman said, slowly, meditatively stretching her vowels. “So what you’re saying is, there’s a chance it could be real.”

.Holding . . . . . . . . . .Ground ..............................................................

T

rips home have delayed my finishing the Mint’s annual report, so I needed to be in the office over the weekend. Saturday morning traffic into the District was like Iowa traffic, only me on the road with a car occasionally in the distance. I don’t spend many Saturdays at work, but I remember Dad worked every Saturday. All week I’ve been recalling fragmented things Dad said about his life before I was born or when I was a few years old, stories like buying a pack of hotdogs with a dollar he found in the street during the Depression or starting college after the war, going house-to-house for an attic or out-building to live in. The place he rented is in my first baby picture. I’m mummiedup in a blanket, cradled in Dad’s elbow outside a two-room cabin of “native stone.” It was a shed made of Sheetrock, really. In a later picture I’m sitting up unaided, turning pages of a textbook between my diapered, chubby baby legs. Most places we lived are pictured in old family albums that Mother and I occasionally look through when I’m back home. One picture of a brownstone comes to mind—Arkansas, I think—a scruffy fox-fur boa around my two- or three-year-old neck, the desiccated head of the fox grimacing atop one shoulder and Dad clowning behind the other. Another photo—Kansas, maybe, third grade—Dad and I on an outdoor stairway to a third floor apartment. Lots of pictures have disappeared from the albums, or I’m remembering those that should be there. There are no pictures of houses where it was only Dad and I and my infant brother, no pictures, in fact, until I was in high school and we lived in a two-story on a broad corner, one bedroom for the boys, one for the girls, ample driveway and sidewalk to snow-shovel. A few pictures outside our final house as a family of six, a three-bedroom ranch when I was in college. Then the big split-level on two acres out-

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side town, long driveway, tall trees, the house of Dad’s happiest years, his hardware store so successful he paid off his mortgages early. There aren’t pictures of what will be Dad’s last address — address, not residence — a six-figure bungalow he paid for with cash. Dad no longer remembers these houses, and my memories mingle with fragments that have landed in my lap and about which Dad also no longer knows anything. His records show him in the mid1980s buying mortgage-based securities — a limited partnership from Krupp, a pass-through from Government National Mortgage Association, a collateralized mortgage obligation from Citicorp. Mortgage securities are bundles of individual mortgages wrapped into one investment, like an eight-pack of hotdogs, and they’re a bundle of problems. They have no reliable yield, maturity, and par, and that’s bad for a retirement portfolio. When mortgages they hold are repaid early, these securities repay principal, so they may look like they’re yielding big interest when in fact they’re paying back Dad’s own money. Because paydown is piecemeal and expiration uncertain, maddening flukes happen: the Citicorp has shriveled to $300 and dribbles a dollar or two in interest. Like Dad’s dementia, that could continue a long time, and, like his cancer, the telling number is a PSA. Not prostate specific antigen, which implies the speed at which cancer consumes him, but a Public Securities Association factor implying how fast principal is paying down. You’d like that PSA to be 1. You’d like both PSAs to be 1. The Krupp limited partnership is a mess to figure out. Real estate developers package their deals and sell units to small investors as limited partners before a stick of scaffolding is up. Limited partners have no say in the business and can’t know if it’ll be profitable, but the Krupp likely has soured because real estate tanked and Congress wiped out tax breaks for limited partners. It’s easier to find a dollar in the street than to sell an LP. Buyers, if any, bid less than LPs are worth, and to sell you need a medallion signature guarantee, not simply a notary seal. Disposing of them takes more-special witness. I know Dad intended to sell his Krupp because he’d filed several solicitations, but I don’t know which offer he was going to accept. I wasn’t around when Dad bought his mortgage securities, but I know they’ve lost most properties they held, just as he’s lost all memory of places he lived and the business he built. My father knows me when he sees me, but he no longer pictures me or us in any of the places where

39

we were together. Unless something changes — and it doesn’t look as if it will — my father and I have had our last conversation with any kind of shared reference. It looks like I, his limited partner, will go broker-to-broker, seeking takers for what’s left of his mortgage securities. I, his more-special witness, am again knee-deep in his papers, trying to preserve the part of his estate that was most real.

.In . . .Furious . . . . . . . . . .Sleep ........................................................

I

’ve spent two consecutive and productive weekends in the office. With no one around and no phones ringing, I caught up with my annual report on Sunday. I’d say the office was quiet as a tomb, but I’m avoiding those comparisons. When I got home at noon, I found a message from my sister on my answering machine: “It’s Sue. Call the hospital. Dad is totally with the program today.” My first hope was that Susan had talked to Dad’s doctor and a change of medication had brought him back. My first thought was that she’s being premature, for even at his worst Dad knows people and says things that seem sensible if you aren’t there to see otherwise. During my last mealtime with Dad before returning to DC, he in the chair beside his bed with Mother feeding him, he’d taken a few bites and began demanding, “Feed me, Katie, feed me.” He’s eaten so little that we were glad, but I knew something was wrong when he gulped a bite whole and asked Mother why she wasn’t feeding him. She cut meat quickly and scooped peas on a spoon, and Dad swallowed without chewing between bursts of complaining, “Feed me, Katie, feed me.” Mother soon had the fork in one hand and spoon in the other, shoveling meat and peas as fast as Dad swallowed while I fed him bits of bread between sips of water. Dad turned his head back and forth between us, gulping meat and vegetables and bread while pounding his fists in frustration against the arm of his chair and crying out, “ Why won’t anyone feed me?” When I am trying to hold these memories at bay, I compare Dad’s logical, orderly derangement to being in linguistics class and debating the sentence “Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.” Sometimes I treat his coherent incoherence as an ultra version of conversations with coin collectors. In my worst moments of seeing cancer replace Dad from inside with someone who looks like him, I remember a movie

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from my teenage years — Invasion of the Body Snatchers — and I call this replica of my father, may I be forgiven, “the pod man.” My last thought before dialing the hospital was that I should be thinking of him, not myself. Mother was joyous when she answered and passed the phone to Dad. His hello was faint and labored, but even though it had the telling sound of my own father, I didn’t know what to say. I’ve spent so much of our hospital time trying to reason with Dad or to convince him things aren’t as he sees them that normal conversation felt awkward. It wasn’t the first time, I realized, but as soon as I did, I wished I hadn’t. What tawdry tricks time and memory are that you go forward with the past shadowing the present. What a useless thing will is if you can’t will away memories of the past’s anger and regret. For much of our lives my father and I fought. When we weren’t fighting we circled one another in sullen, counter-strike preparedness or removed ourselves pointedly to different parts of the house. We fought like medieval villages in a thirty years’ war. We argued like Counter-Reformation cardinals ready to shed blood over whether Christ owned his clothes. At times, it was exactly that: we argued for days over a half-chenille olive-brown sweater I’d bought. We argued the whole time I was a teenager up to our worst argument, the evening after my twenty-first birthday, a few days before my senior year in college, when I threw my clothes unpacked into the rear of my red Rambler and left, saying I wouldn’t be back. I’d turned twenty-one, and Mother knew I meant it. I don’t know how she found out where I was living off-campus, but I know my father and I would never have spoken again if she hadn’t. I’m sure of that, but I can’t remember what our argument was about. For the life of me, I cannot remember. For a long time I’ve thought our arguments were about money, which I spent like a teenager, which I was, or about conflicting ambition — Dad had some, I didn’t, refer back to teenager. But they weren’t about money or laziness, and no prodigal cause was the reason our arguments got out of hand. Our arguments were about things neither of us realized at the time. They were about my living a comfortable life on sacrifices I didn’t appreciate his making. They were about Dad at eighteen and nineteen and twenty in a war numbered two, ducking German snipers while young men in olive-drab died in the mud beside him. Our arguments were about self-indulgence and frivolity —

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mine — and they got out of hand through shortsightedness — ours. Shortsighted, because neither of us ever saw the meaning of my being his eldest son or of the twenty-four years separating us. When I was sixteen and Dad was forty, when I was twenty-one and he forty-five, those twenty-four years assured that when he was sixty I’d be thirty-six, and when he was seventy I’d be forty-six, and if beyond seventy he might be bedridden and fading in and out of right mind, I still would be twenty-fours years younger and still would be his eldest son. Did my father ever foresee that then might come between us quarrels whose causes had vanished but whose harsh memories remained? No, he did not. For I’ve been a forty-year-old man, and fortyfive, and now I approach fifty, and I know at forty and forty-five he did not ever foresee it. I graduated college at twenty-one, joined the army, and left the country. I returned four years later, having spoken to my father once, maybe twice, in those years and having not seen my family at all during three years in Germany. My absence was an absence of arguments, and everything had changed in silence, in the silence. My family had moved to the town where Dad built his hardware store, and I came home to a place I’d never been after crossing his former ground. My time in das Vaterland was spent ducking potshots from editors at Stars and Stripes, but I’d taken the road he traveled, and that made all the difference. I returned with $9,000 saved on a lieutenant’s pay. That was twenty-four years ago, and my father and I have not exchanged a bitter word nor mentioned those we once had. They have lain unechoed, unechoing, for a quarter-century until now, when their senselessness returns loudly, redoubled in bilious regret, harsh words between pod man likenesses of my father and myself, genetic strangers in the strange land of unknowing adolescence and adolescence unknowingly remembered. Across the telephone distance of half the country and half of my life, I asked my father, “Dad, is that you?” and he answered, “As far as I know right now.” I had to laugh. As far as I know right now. And people wonder where I get my skepticism. Still skeptical, I listened for signs he wasn’t really there, back, present. He sounded disassociated, but only in the manner of someone back from a trip who’d missed a few changes, and I listened for him to say something that would prove he wasn’t going

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away again. Then it came to me, a question I could ask, an answer he could give, that would convince me: “Dad, where’s your paperwork for the Krupp?” He answered without hesitating: “It’s with Ed,” his banker. The paperwork is in the safe deposit box at the bank. It was the answer I needed to prove my father was back. “ Welcome back, Dad. You’ve been away awhile.” “ What month is it?” “It’s mid-February, Dad. You’ve been sort of elsewhere for several weeks.” For a second time he didn’t react to what I’d said about his absence. He said, “Are you doing the taxes?” I laughed again. I had no doubt this was my father. Of all things at that moment, I most wanted to know if Dad remembered being an addled replica of himself. I wanted to know if he remembered Mother coping with him and me trying to speak sensibly to him and whether he sensed our dwindling hope that he’d return. Of all things, I wanted to know where he’d been and what it was like. “Dad, do you remember anything?” “No.” “You don’t remember anything you’ve been saying and doing?” “No,” he said. “Nothing.” I let it go. There was no point in provoking further comment. Wherever he’s been will remain where it was, for what it was. Call it furious sleep. Call everything before now furious sleep. In furious sleep you quarrel with people your life depends on today or a quartercentury from now. In furious sleep you disappear for several years. Or several weeks. In furious sleep your father calls you by name and accuses you of starving him as food falls from his lips. Call it all furious sleep, and let it go. Just say you’ve been replaced from within and count yourself fortunate not to recollect what madness you spoke. Awakening before it’s too late is what matters, and my father has. Both of us have. Maybe Dad really remembers nothing he’s said, and maybe he remembers and doesn’t want to admit it. I understand why he wouldn’t. I understand.

.Winter . . . . . . . . .of . . .Our . . . . .Discontent ....................................................

I

t’s the end of February, and on this trip back I see winter has arrived in Iowa, although the snow is light by Iowa standards and the cold is not as bad as I remember from growing up here. They’ve transferred Dad by ambulance to the hospital in town, so winter, even if it reverts to form, won’t keep Mother from being with him. I dislike few things as much as winter, and I accept this less worse weather only grudgingly and only for her sake. Besides being inevitable, at least in this part of the country, winter is necessary. Farmer friends who visit Dad say the light snowfall means delayed planting in the spring and poor crops come summer. Mother listens edgily to their talk from her chair in the corner of his room. She half-rises when Dad begins coughing after a word or two of commiseration, but she sits back when he finds the Kleenex on his bed stand without help. My father’s friends keep short visits, and after they’ve left, Dad turns toward Mother in the corner and says, “Farmers sure do always expect the worst.” My parents have lived twenty-eight years in this town of four thousand souls, so the parade of visitors is steady. I mostly know their friends as remembered names when Mother reintroduces us. They are comfortingly of a piece, these unpretentious, hard-working people who’ve lived entire lives around small towns and now visit the man who sold them snow blowers, nails, the occasional shotgun, all the needed daily stuff of lives built around hard goods, changing seasons, and routines of planting, harvesting, and laying up for winter. They seem literally cut from the same cloth — wool and flannel this time of year — with faces respectful of Dad’s illness and of years they’ve known one another. By comparison, my parents’ closest friends are a cosmopolitan trio: my father’s banker Ed, his wife Grace, and Alva, their minister, who’s

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finishing a doctorate at the University of Chicago. Mother and Dad play bridge with them, winter in Arizona with Ed and Grace, visited Brazil with the church group. Like me, Alva trekked Nepal; we have a bet about who sees all seven continents first. They visit every day, sometimes twice, and I feel better about life not being wholly intolerable for Mother a month from now, three months, somewhere, anyway, in the near future, After. I think about my parents and their life in this tiny town and about the scarcely larger place where I grew up. The only conspicuous northsouth street and the only noteworthy east-west street intersect in the center of town. The whole layout of life seems to forbid anything moving at a diagonal. You put up your money — maybe to build a hardware store — you join a church, send your kids to public school, work, and over a span of years capital of different kinds compounds — friends, a reputation, a contribution people acknowledge, a little money for the winter’s day when you’re sick. It seems as sturdy, simple, and virtuous as a savings account. It’s noon, there’s no news in the commodity report on TV, and I’m wondering if Ed’s banks give toasters for opening savings accounts, when Alva enters. She shakes my hand and waves briefly to Mother. “Hi,” she says to Dad, and, veteran speechwriter that I am, agri-kid who took the road out of town and kept going, I listen for nuances in that syllable, finding in it a not-understated but also not-pitying sadness. “Hi, Alva girl,” Dad answers. My practiced ear records the effort at cheery familiarity. Dad’s an agnostic but a struggling one, active in Mother’s church but not a member, and it amuses me that he has a female pastor. It does not entirely amuse Dad. As I recall, their previous minister, perhaps the previous two, were women, and last year, before he was homebound, then bed-ridden, Dad wondered aloud if men are losing their authority. I thought a female minister was an interesting departure but said nothing because I thought Dad wasn’t talking about men in general losing their authority. Dad and Alva speak about nothing in particular — a girl from a family I don’t know has a music scholarship, the owner of the music store has decided to close. Alva is eight years older than I am, taller than Mother but most everyone is. She asks about my German lessons, and I remember her daughter studies comp lit out East somewhere, Maryland or Connecticut. Before being ordained in her mid-

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forties Alva was a dentist’s wife. She and her husband sponsored emigrants from Central America to work in his practice, often young women like María Elvia. At least one was available for duties around the home, as euphemism from my part of the world puts it. Alva apparently soaked him in the divorce and went to divinity school on the settlement. She’d always meant to attend divinity school, so a parting of the ways put her on track. When conversation arrives at the weather I know Alva’s about to leave, and I offer to walk her to her car, saying it’s slippery out there. Then I’ll go home and finish the taxes because a problem has come up. Medicare and Dad’s supplemental insurance cover hospital bills only if his treatment seems to be doing some good, and it clearly isn’t. At a point very near, his diagnosis will become “custodial,” a word to hate as much as the cold, and Mother must pay for his care. I have to figure out how. I’ve been plotting scenarios for three months. I told Mother I’ll work up six months and a year, too, but my sister Susan and I think it’s three months, outside. It’s a simple proposition: $162 a day for ninety days, bill due at the end of each month. There’s cash and a bond about to mature, then I’ll pull dividends out of reinvestment. For ninety days it’s a walk without surprises or sharp turns — start here, end there with less money. It will be easier than negotiating knee-deep snow three miles up the Himalayas. Or an ice-coated parking lot in eastern Iowa. I traveled a long way to learn how alike they can be. It is a simple proposition. Spring, summer, fall, winter. Make friends, leave friends. Work, save, draw it down. The clock ticks while the wife keeps vigil, the meter ticks under the reckoning gaze of the eldest son. All roads meet at right angles, a few turns and you’re back where you started. Straight lines and closed circles are the geometry of infinity. And there will never, ever, be anything I dislike more than winter.

.Joint . . . . . . .Account .................................................................

S

ince taking over Dad’s portfolio I’ve kept something important about it to myself. They say silence is golden. I wish “they” were going to pay the price for my silence. My parents own their investments as joint tenants with rights of survivorship. Mother will receive all their stocks and bonds free and clear without estate taxes when Dad dies. Unless the tax laws change before Mother dies, assets larger than the exclusion on her estate, including however much I grow her portfolio, will be taxed when passing to my siblings and me. There’s an instant way around most of those taxes, and that’s to carve up my parents’ estate now, before Dad dies. As a legal proposition it wouldn’t be hard. I could arrange their financial divorce without moving Dad from his bed or Mother from her chair beside him. Identify some assets as his, not theirs, making sure I reduce Dad’s portion below the estate tax exclusion. Shift Dad’s assets to a trust. Open a single account in Mother’s name for what remains, move the investments into it, close the joint accounts. If only Mother owns the investments before Dad dies, they aren’t part of Dad’s estate, and when she dies her estate qualifies for its own exclusion. Dad and Mother lose nothing if I transfer investments now. The paperwork is almost the same, the procedure little different, whether I transfer to her name now or later. But if I transfer now, the difference in tax later will be hundreds of thousands of dollars. Only the government loses, and it wrote these rules in the first place. It’s going to happen anyway. Dad will die. Their investments will go to Mother. Very soon she will own all those investments by herself. It’s as inevitable as death and taxes, but I can cut eventual taxes by more than Dad earned throughout whole decades of his life. I can see to it that more of what Dad worked for goes to his family and less to the

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government. I can do that. All I have to do is take his name off a few papers. All I have to do is strip him of his money like he’s already dead. When I have a portfolio problem, I ask what I’d do if I were merely the advisor, but this time that won’t do any good. If I were my family’s hired advisor, I’d talk to someone in the family privately and then propose the idea to everyone. In other words, I’d go to me. I’ve gone to me, and I can’t do it. It would be like saying, “Sorry, Dad, I’ve seen the future, and you aren’t in it,” and I can’t say that, because it’s true. It would be like saying, “Thanks for the memories, Dad, but you’re on your own,” and I can’t say that, because it isn’t true. We are in this together, to the fast-approaching end. To my surprise and my family’s detriment, that’s what a joint account means to me. The impartial financial advisor has been overtaken by a son who’s making a rookie’s financial mistake: he’s confusing his father with his father’s money. Mentally, he’s linked his father’s unavoidable fate with paying avoidable taxes. Emotionally, he’s associated closing his father’s accounts with deserting him. Worse: I know the mental, emotional, and financial errors I’m making, as I know the consequences, and I persist in them. For their financial sakes, I hope others don’t make the same mistake. I hope they do as I say, not as I’ve done — and if not that, I hope they at least don’t do what I’ve done: Mother and I at lunch, rubberized booths, Formica tabletops, her explaining Medicare and veteran’s benefits and me ticking them off, “So they’ll pay that until then,” “So Dad qualifies for this,” until she snaps back, “Yes, he qualifies — regrettably.” I pushed the plastic coffee urn aside and touched her hand: “I know, Mother, but my father is not counting on me for sympathy. He’s depending on me to be clear-eyed and focused about his finances.” Well, here I am, clear-eyed and focused and seeing exactly what can be done, what should be done, what I would say must be done if I were advising and not involved, and I can’t bring myself even to suggest it. I have refrained from the greater part of sadness, solicitousness, sympathy, all my dying father deserves, so I can do what he expects of me. And now, having suppressed the son to succeed as advisor, I fall short as advisor because I am too much the son. How ironic. How totally, wrenchingly ironic. I have created the only possible way for my father to receive neither my genuine feelings nor my best advice.

.The . . . . .Downfall . . . . . . . . . . .of . . .Windsor .....................................................

I

leave my car at work while I’m in Iowa and pick it up for the drive home after my return flight. After this trip, I instead went to my office on the seventh floor of the Mint and logged onto the Internet. I tracked my portfolio on the Yahoo! financial site and called up the feature that allows me to check mutual fund performance. I typed in VWNDX, symbol for Vanguard Windsor Fund, then migrated to the charting feature, clicked on the option that lets me compare Windsor against the S&P 500 Index, and stared for awhile at the two lines appearing on the screen. The red line representing the S&P ascended in a sharp northeasterly course for several years. The blue line depicting Windsor traced an ever-widening southeasterly departure from the red line above. The two lines resembled the silhouette of ragged-toothed scissors or the jaw-line of a carnivorous fish. The picture showed all I needed to see, but Yahoo! offers further options, and I solemnly pursued them, click after click, noting the various screens. Windsor’s performance for every period recorded was substandard. Substandard compared to the S&P, substandard compared to funds of its type. I saw that comparisons aren’t adjusted for taxes, which would draw an even more dismal picture. Yahoo! has hypertext links to news about Windsor and to message boards for Windsor shareholders. I glanced through them and found, not unexpectedly, lots of angry shareholders. Articles from financial wires relayed two dreadful bits of information. Windsor shareholders have steadily withdrawn billions of dollars from the fund over several years, and it’s closed to new investors. This combination of money leaving without money coming in is a death knell for a mutual fund. Windsor’s stocks may have gone up, but only

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a little. A little doesn’t please investors, and they want out. Windsor sells stocks to pay fleeing investors. If Windsor sells winning stocks, it produces taxable gains, net asset value falls, and chances for further gains from sold stocks disappear. If Windsor sells losing stocks, it produces losses, investors are even less happy, and more sell out. I clicked back through screens on my computer until I reached the first red and blue chart, and I looked at it awhile. I compared its image with the image Dad had in his mind. His image is of a professionally managed, conservative equity fund that would compound many years, producing gains and growth that would someday support Mother and him, and then Mother alone. The image I saw was two diverging red and blue lines that reminded me of Dad lying in his hospital bed, his thin and ulcer-ridden legs carefully laid away from each other and cradled with pillows at his knees and ankles. I see where this is leading, and I see there’s no point hoping my father or Windsor will revive, because the evidence is unmistakable: they’re going down in tandem, steep and fast. Everything is falling apart. Falling apart while I watch. I signed off my computer, rode the elevator to the basement garage, and drove home.

.In . . .God . . . . .We . . . . Trust ............................................................

T

oday while whittling down the stack of work in my in-box and hoping fate would defer calls from collectors and coin media, I realized I was remembering one time when I didn’t try to decipher what conclusions and contradictions had moved someone to phone me. I just hoped with her. At the start of the second week of double-die pennies, a woman phoned from West Virginia. “Sir? I’m in West Virginia? I heard about some pennies that are worth something? And I think I have one?” She had a thin, weak, hesitant, intimidated voice, and right away I thought, This woman can’t afford this call. “You’re calling long distance, so why don’t you give me your number, and I’ll phone you back on the government’s dime.” “You’d do that? You’d call back for sure?” “I’ll call back for sure. Just give me your number.” I dialed the number, and when she answered I heard children in the background dragging metal chairs across a linoleum floor. The woman turned from the receiver and whispered, “Hush up, you kids. It’s the man from the government.” I asked her to describe the penny, asked if Lincoln had two noses and chins and whether the words In God We Trust looked like they were stamped twice on top of each other. She said, “You maybe could say that.” “ Well, that sounds like the penny I’ve been hearing about.” “You don’t know what it would mean to us if it is. Times are so hard since the last mine shut down. What do you think maybe it’s worth?” I took out the address list of coin dealers that I keep in my desk drawer.

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“You’ve got to take the penny to a coin dealer to find out what he’ll pay for it, if anything. There’s one in Wheeling.” “Lord, that’s a ways.” I told her there was another possibility: pawn brokers and gun shops often buy and sell coins — this is true, by the way, for whatever it means. Was one nearby? There was, she said, and I heard in her voice a hint that just this once hope might prevail over life. She thanked me, the first that had happened in a couple weeks, and I hung up. The phone rang with my hand still on the receiver. Before answering, I said a prayer: “God, please let this woman have just one of those damned double-die pennies.”

.Works . . . . . . . .Better, . . . . . . . . . .Costs . . . . . . . Less ...............................................

T

he federal government says it wants to adopt business practices and inspire a mindset of efficiency, customer service, and bottom-line thinking. Its slogan — “Government that works better and costs less”— appears on newsletters that tell how well the federal government’s doing at “reinventing” itself in the image of business, and I was about to pitch the latest one when Manuel limped into my office, pushing his giant gray rubber trashcan. Like his sister María Elvia, he works for the company that cleans our building and, like her, speaks no English, so maybe it’s perverse of me that I speak to him, even if I have a question: “ What’s with your leg, Manuel?” As he always does when answering me, he chewed on his lower lip and beseeched the ceiling, as if English might descend, and said, “Umm . . . I . . . ah . . . María . . .” Then he lifted his pant leg to show a blue-black knee twice a normal size. “Good grief, have you seen a doctor about that?” Manuel nodded more emphatically and smiled more agreeably, turned around by halting, jerky hops on his good leg, and hobbled out of my office, more leaning on the trashcan for support than rolling it ahead of him. A flick of the wrist, and the reinvention newsletter floated gracefully and tidily into the wastebasket Manuel had just emptied. A few minutes later his English-speaking coworker knocked on my door, asking if I’d wanted something. He should see about that knee, I said. Manuel thinks the doctor will keep him home, she said, and he won’t get paid. And we have no health insurance. I could be wrong, I told her, but I think companies working for government have to have health insurance — some law, or maybe I misremember what I never

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heard right anyhow. We aren’t employees, she said. We are in-de-pendent con-trac-tors. They pay us in cash every week. She seemed proud of her status, as if it were the apex of opportunity. In-de-pen-dent con-trac-tors, chin rising, paid in cash. Yes, I thought, that would be bottom-line thinking. No company-paid benefits for independent contractors. No employer contribution to social security for independent contractors. No payments to state unemployment funds. Paid in cash, too. Not much record-keeping with cash. I don’t doubt that Manuel is better off than before he came here. There are doctors who speak Spanish and arrangements if he can’t pay. No doubt what I see is unnecessary on many levels. No doubt working better and costing less are worthy goals. But neither do I doubt that government should think about that phrase and what it might come to mean. Situations like Manuel’s have become a problem at my university, which now suspects its sweatshirts and paraphernalia are sewn in sweatshops overseas. Knowing I taught economics, friends on its human rights council call me, asking, “ Would those women and children have work at all if not for sweatshops?” “If their economic choices are working in a sweatshop, begging, stealing, or starving,” they ask, “what kind of moral choice am I really looking at?” These are serious questions about which they must make a decision, and therefore their earnestness stands above self-convinced summations like “works better and costs less,” which ignore many open questions and show little thought. So little thought. I write for a living, have done so twenty years, for executives and now the executive branch, for business and now for government intending to emulate business, and Manuel’s daily arrivals reprise many conversations even though he speaks no English. Years ago I wrote for a man who’d laid off several hundred employees, pieceworkers who assembled suits, sewed buttonholes, and pressed lapels, labor not so different from the sweatshops troubling my friends. I had to write his statement, and when I interviewed him he said, “ We’re in a war, and in a war you take casualties.” I had many such conversations, and each upset me more with the nonsense of assertions continually defeated on their own terms. Since I do understand English, and more comprehensively than people I’ve worked for, seldom could I merely nod emphatically and smile agreeably, as Manuel does. Seldom could I keep from asking, “If you’re at war, why are you killing your own troops?”

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Government thinks the old speeches and statements are new, but to me they arise from the dust bin of memory and resettle in my inbox, where I peel back old familiar words, like Manuel peeling back his trouser leg, to face what’s there. Sometimes — the fortunate times — I face only my own mild skepticism, wondering, for instance, if my university wants it both ways and wants a slogan that portrays its compromise as if it hasn’t made one. “Tastes Great, Less Filling” perhaps. Sometimes, as when I see Manuel working for a not-employer not paying into worker’s comp, I consider the business of phrases like “independent contractor.” But mostly when Manuel rolls his trashcan into my office I realize how painful much of my career has been. Of all the painful ironies of writing the kind of thing I write — of all the painful experiences and memories of doing it — the most painful has been to write for people who think in cliché-ridden analogies. “Just give them what they want,” my ex-wife used to say — like Manuel’s coworker/ translator, it now seems to me. I couldn’t. I couldn’t even convince them to give up their hackneyed — hack kneed — expressions. Government suits me better than corporate America for many reasons, the bureau where I work especially so. Washington’s a good place to be a writer. There’s little doubt I’m working better now. Compared to salary I used to earn, I certainly cost less, but the job costs me less, too. I’m better off than where I came from, and I want it to stay that way. For that reason, too, the sight of Manuel hobbling on his wounded knee stays uneasily in my mind.

.Cheap . . . . . . . .Thrills .............................................................

W

hatever collectors may or may not know about coins, the Mint has learned a lot about them. On average, our customers have purchased coins for longer than ten years. To a man, they are men: women don’t collect coins. They are Caucasian: African Americans, Hispanics, and Asians don’t collect coins, although Asians buy gold coins and Hispanics silver coins as bullion investments. Or to tally the ledger, people who regularly and repeatedly buy coins are white, male, military veterans age sixty or older who often have a college education and earn at least $60,000 yearly. In dealing with coin collectors, however, I’ve learned facts beyond the database. For instance, chiropractors seem to collect coins, as do osteopaths to a lesser extent. Per capita, Montana and Wyoming have more coin collectors than other states. Many, many coin collectors are named after someone else — that is, they are Someone Else, Jr., a characteristic they share with most Fortune 500 executives I’ve worked for. Coin collectors often write letters by hand in #2 pencil and not uncommonly in red or green ink. They frequently correspond using postcards or 3-5⁄ 8” ⫻ 6-1⁄ 2” envelopes. If coin collectors encounter a phrase, they adopt it like a mantra. Coin World published a story about the Mint’s annual report that ended “Collectors who want to obtain a free copy of the 46-page glossy, illustrated, report should write. . . .” I received a hundred requests — pencil, green ink, bantam envelopes and all — saying, “I want to obtain a free copy of the 46-page glossy, illustrated, report.” Coin collectors tend to live in small towns, including small towns in populous states, and they often receive coins through post office boxes. I grew up in a small town, and I know small towns have street addresses and postmen who will deliver coins to your mailbox. Until today, the riddle of the PO boxes perplexed me.

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With PO boxes you can’t find a customer’s phone number after his letter appears in the press. Also, where customers claim to live when writing the editor isn’t necessarily where they live when ordering coins, so the Mint’s customer files aren’t helpful. Therefore, I frequently wind up phoning postmasters in tiny, far-away places to ask if they know John Thompson — to make up a name — and a street address that can yield a phone number. “ Well, I’ll be. The U.S. Mint you say? Calling from Washington, DC.” “Yep.” When was the last time I said “Yep”? “Are you looking for John Thompson, Sr., or John Thompson, Jr.?” “I don’t know.” “You might be looking for Johnny Thompson.” “Is that John Thompson, Jr.?” “Nope. Johnny is Little Jack’s boy.” Big Jack, Little Jack, and Johnny — I grew up in a small town, so I’m following this. “ Well, Mr. Postmaster, I’ll bet Little Jack and Johnny have the same phone number, so unless you have more John Thompsons for me, all I need is two street names for the operator.” “You only need one! Big Jack kicked the bucket awhile back! Little Jack and Johnny live on Elm.” I’d been on the phone twenty minutes and didn’t know if I’d found the John Thompson who wrote an angry letter to the editor. I called the operator for the number, dialed, and a woman answered. I identified myself and asked if Mr. Thompson may have written to Coin World about his problem order. There was a long, long pause before she began speaking in a low, slow, angry voice. “You mean he still buys coins from you people? He said he cut that out. How much did he spend?” “This particular order is about $60.” “Sixty dollars! This particular order? There were others?” “Mrs. Thompson, I bet you’re going to tell your husband I called. Let me leave my number . . .” So today I found John Thompson, letter writer, and discovered why coin collectors might rent PO boxes. Sometimes I love this job.

.Stairway . . . . . . . . . . . to . . . .Success ......................................................

F

or several years I’ve been taking German on Thursday nights, and I don’t know why. This wouldn’t be a high-percentage return on my time in any case, and to my continual surprise and occasional embarrassment, I’m no longer very adept at German. I studied it as an undergraduate because I hoped to be stationed in Germany when I joined the army after ROTC. That was the first adult goal I consciously set for myself, and my German and I did well in Europe. But now that I’m back with the language, I’m mostly tongue-tied, halting, and annoyed. I wonder why I torment myself this way. One possibility: once I did something better than I do it now, and I rise to the affront of age, railing at the flickering if not dying of the light. Another: I see myself as one who speaks several languages, and one horrifying day I realized I can’t. How I’ve avoided this chasm in self-knowledge is a mystery, particularly since I hear half-a-dozen languages every day. Sometimes I think I’m readying to bag this work-a-day gig and face again a Ph.D. program with its language requirement. But my real motivations are unknown, therefore troubling. I think about motivations because one night in my early thirties, midway into my fourth master’s degree, I realized my classes were populated by two distinct groups. The first, earnest lads and lassies in their twenties with fire in their eyes about Business with a capital B and coals in their innards about their Place with a capital P. The second group was men in mid-late middle age who clearly and plaintively felt the younger half of class pushing them off the planet because they lacked Credentials with a capital C. These seating choices bifurcated each classroom: the grasping to one side, the clutching to the other, a frieze under fluorescent lights that was like joining the first and last panels of a Hogarth procession — Youth and Age or some such. I can’t recall an-

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other instance of people so clearly displaying a sense of their life’s mobility by where they plopped down on their butts. I sat in the middle, to the back. I also remember an elderly woman from school at the Jung Institute in Zürich during my early twenties. She was coming down steep and narrow stairs of a centuries-old building where we attended class, both legs immobilized hip-to-heel by a brace of bars connecting her knees and ankles like an aluminum A. She maneuvered on tubular crutches clasped around her forearms with a grip perpendicular to the shaft. A blue bookbag dangled from a cord around her neck. I remember thinking, Here’s a lady who wants something, and I hope she gets it. The stairway was narrow, so I backed down to let her by. As she struggled past, I said, »Grüß Gott«. Every time I pack my German book and head for class, I don’t know if I’m ascending those stairs toward her, following in her footsteps, or still backing down ahead of her. The latter, perhaps. Mark Twain, a fair speaker of German, said that no man in his heart thinks well of himself, but my heart is a jumble to me. A jumble as great as a language that encompasses Bach, Bauhaus, Biedermeier, the BMW, and Buchenwald. I fault myself for never having focused on one firm thing for a life and career — focused in that life-defining way forced on children by asking them, “ What do you want to be?” Were the judge of my heart — that’s most likely me — to decree I wear a scarlet A, like Hester Prynne, it would stand for Ambivalent. It’s not that I’m undisciplined, for I’m disciplined about many things, like studying German. Nor am I indecisive. It’s just that I’m nearly always indifferent to the available choices. Like Bartleby, also a scrivener, “I prefer not to.” So I think about the elderly lady on the stairs. Surely at her age she had no notion of becoming a practicing psychoanalyst. But perhaps I think so because I didn’t intend to be one, just as later I studied enough English to become a professor and enough finance to become a treasurer without intending to become either. Once again, I’m not studying something to Get Ahead. Otherwise, I’d have picked HTML or Spanish so I could speak to María Elvia. I think also of my father, who no longer manages stairs or his hardware store. Dad always wanted his own store, and I don’t recall his ever saying why. Perhaps it meant something more than he’d have admitted, but there’d have been no extreme self-analysis in his answer or

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notions of Business with a capital B and his Place with a capital P. Just as, until now, I’d have offered no analysis of why I studied without having a direction or took jobs without plotting a stairway to success. Maybe I intuitively knew I’m suited to be little besides a philosopher king and few openings appear in the want ads. My career has been like those moving walkways in airports, even if it led to a résumé like Mount Rushmore. Maybe I made a Faustian bargain without realizing it. My best guess is that I’m trying to get back to something or perhaps get something back. A sense of purpose, maybe, or the active pursuit of possibility I had when I was younger. Perhaps, as Bertrand Russell or Bernard Shaw said in old age, I’d like to be the person I believe I could have been, and German speaks to that person. It is, after all, the language of poets and Prussians, the twin — poles? props? crutches?— of my subliminal self. Maybe the elderly lady meant to graduate and hang her analytical shingle, at advanced age still ascending, firmly and optimistically like younger students in my business classes or precariously and fearfully like the older. I think, somehow, it was enough for her that she did it, although that could be merely my wishful, self-justifying thinking. The point for Dad would be that he did it. My point is that I think of the elderly lady and see myself hobbling between Goethe and Göttedämmerung, and when I see my father in his hospital bed I see myself lying there. There’s no elective seating in either arrangement, no option of choosing a noncommittal, above-it-all seat in the middle to the back. Which is where I sit now in the class I take for reasons I scarcely comprehend and barely articulate, my command of why as faulty as my command of German itself.

.A. .Final . . . . . .Place . . . . . . . .in. . Time ......................................................

I

have an appointment with my father. Mother phoned me at her dining room table from his hospital room late this afternoon to say Dad wants to go over his money this evening, maybe at 7? At 6:30 she pulls into the driveway, and I picture her having helped him with the few bites of bread, a teaspoon or two of fruit cocktail, and a few sips of water that comprise all he eats and drinks now. I’ve gathered necessary papers into my briefcase — the financial statements, new account forms, powers of attorney, one of those plastic magnifiers the size of a typed page in case he needs it. Mother provides answers that the expression on my face apparently requires, telling me how Dad all afternoon had worked over something in his mind, then struggled upright in bed to call the nursing station and say his son will be by after visiting hours to take care of some important papers for when he’s not around, and would they please let me in. As if this were necessary, as if his nurses hadn’t long ago stopped enforcing visiting hours. Mother describes his clearing my way in a tone almost cheerful, as if his sudden focus and formality were encouraging. I pinion my briefcase under one arm and leave without saying anything. The evening is warm for March and hazy in the paling gray of pre-daylight savings time as I negotiate my parents’ oversized car eight blocks to the hospital. It’s Friday, and teenagers are beginning to show up. At a corner I come to a stop before turning right, but a kid in a ratty baseball cap lunges into the oncoming lane beside me, pauses for the instant his foot takes to find the gas, and fishtails his noisy, muscled, haphazardly rebuilt Trans Am around a left turn. It’s a car that was popular during my own late teenaged years, rocketing down the road away from me, a dusty, aged reminder of earlier Marches in time when

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I also set out on Friday night with two goals, the second being to get my parents’ car home unscratched. Nurses at the night desk pay no attention to me, familiar sight that I’ve become. This is the extended care wing. If the kid in the Trans Am is gurneyed in later, he won’t be brought here. I try to enter Dad’s room without being either abrupt or furtive. “Hi, Pop. What say we do some money?” He’s awake and rings for nurses to help him into a chair. He’s not strong enough for preliminaries, so I launch right in, explaining that I’ve looked into his stocks and bonds in detail, and I see things we should do. My father sits completely still, but listening. I can only imagine the strength this must take from him — no, I’ll not concede even that: I cannot know it or imagine it. We should open a discount broker account for you and Mother, I explain. Sell these odd lots at smaller commissions, fold your dividend reinvestment plans into the account, minimize paperwork coming into the house. Mother won’t know how to deal with quarterly statements and proxies like you did. Do, I quickly substitute. Like you do. “Yes,” he says evenly. “Your mother’s peace of mind is worth a lot. A joint account, you say.” I go item by item through my list until I come to the mutual fund he bought through Smith Barney, $10,000 in that, a piece of work which upholds my long-held prejudice against proprietary brokerage products — performance below the S&P, yearly management fees approaching two percent, supposedly a stock portfolio but fourteen percent in cash, a five percent exit fee. No reason to pay a manager half again the industry average for below-average results, I tell Dad. No reason to pay someone to keep fourteen percent of your money in cash. I don’t mention the exit fee. I half-hear Dad’s broker assuring him in that unctuous Vanderbilt University drawl, “No commissions and loads to buy this, Ray”— which, strictly speaking, is true for what they call Class C shares: no loads, but a $500 fee to sell this flea-bitten, C-minus dog. I indulge a moment of concentrated hatred for exit fees. My father nods, and I continue, proposing to replace bonds coming due, how we need a better growth fund, my suspicion that he doesn’t need municipal bonds in his tax bracket. To each suggestion he merely says, “OK.” We come to the end of our review. I take applications and powers of attorney from my briefcase and ask if he has questions. He thinks a moment, then turns his head toward me, an odd,

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economized movement as though his head were swiveling on top of his neck. “How’s your portfolio?” His question swerves me totally off-center. “Mine? It’s great, Dad. Twenty percent these past couple years. More, actually. Last year I earned more investing than in salary.” I stop. “Of course, you wouldn’t invest for you the way you’d invest for me.” That is to say, I wouldn’t and won’t do such a thing, you can be sure. I wait to see if he says more. He doesn’t. I have a surprise for him. When it’s time to sign the papers, I pull from my briefcase a collapsible wooden writing board I asked him to make for my trip to the Himalayas — two pieces of sanded and lacquered mahogany joined by a wire hinge, a lip at the bottom to keep paper in place, about half the size of a small notebook when it’s folded. He made it in his workshop in the house my parents used to have. It’s the most valuable thing I own, this and two portable writing desks he also made for me, replicas of the desk on which Jefferson wrote the Declaration— the course of human events, a decent respect, impelled separations. I lay it open and slide the locking tongue into place. “I never go anywhere without this, Dad.” He signs where I point. He’s been sitting up more than an hour. His concentration and stamina ebb with each signing — I see him save a little from each signature for the next — until, finally, we’re done. “I need to lie back down now,” he says. His nurses resituate him in bed. I lean my elbows on the safety railing, fingers folded, pads of my thumbs pressed together. He looks at me, moving only his eyes. He wets his lips and tests his jaw, moving his mouth soundlessly up and down before he asks, “Is your portfolio bigger than mine? Mine and Mom’s, I mean.” “ Well, yes, Dad, it is. A little bigger.” “Then you’re pretty much OK.” It is equal parts question and statement. My father has gone straight to the bottom line on his own list, a list that’s surely grown over the years I’ve been in Washington, years during my mid and late forties that should have glided into stable ascendance of middle age and instead were legioned by a divorce and scramblings into a succession of one-bedroom address changes and ugly, agitated, cattle-call job hunts when men I worked for left office, left town, left their loyal without a look back. I look down at my father and

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see that my disquieting life list must go back further, to my thirties at least, years trapezing from and into unhappy jobs, a marriage that must have seemed peculiar if not purposeless, four bedrooms in suburbia where even my neighbors sensed I didn’t belong. My father saw all this then, and God knows what he felt. Was there ever a time I gave him the comfort of feeling I was on course? Achievements, sometimes. Bragging rights, now and again. Things good and not-so-good to be astonished at, certainly. But have I ever given this man a moment’s — peace? “Dad?” “Yes?” He answers quickly, like an over-prepared student who expected to be called on. “Dad, it looks like we’re going to be parting company here, sooner rather than later.” “Yes, it does.” “I want you to know I’m sorry for that. I’m sorry you’re in pain, and I’m sorry for the pain I’ve caused you, especially these past few years.” I don’t know how I expect him to answer. I don’t know if I expect him to answer. Maybe just tell me it’s OK, since there’s no point denying it’s true. “I knew what to tell the other kids. But everything you’ve done was so far beyond my experience. I wish I could have advised you better.” “You never let anybody down, Dad, least of all me. No one ever had a better example.” I sound so lame. “I’m tired now. I need to sleep.” “That’s a good idea, Dad. You sleep.” “Just take care of Mamma. I know you well. Will. I know you will.” My father gives me his glasses to lay on the nightstand and gropes for the console to dim his room lights. He pulls the covers to his chin, his closed fists to either side of his cheeks gripping the edges of his blanket. He is so thin I can barely make out the contours of his body. He looks like photos I’ve seen in Life magazine from the 1940s: a semicircular head, two round eyes, a nose peeping over the caption “Kilroy was here.” What must my father be thinking as I leave his bedside and tiptoe from his room? Does he squint after my retreating back, head turned in the owl-like way that uses the fewest muscles and saves the most of

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his failing strength, watching as I carry away all his money, everything he will leave Mother, the dollar-denominated remnants of his life packed, signed, delivered into my not always capable hands and not always sound judgment? And what was I thinking? Did I want forgiveness for making him watch as I careened around life’s corners in the wrong lanes? Or did I want answers that finally open the right accounts, set the dividends on schedule, get the growth going from here on? Whatever I wanted, what I have done, in what’s likely the final hour I’ll spend alone with my father in this life, is leave him feeling he failed me. Killjoy was here. As I pass the central lobby of the hospital, I hear a commotion in the corridor toward the other wing. By the time I reach the parking lot and put the key in the door of my parents’ car, the siren has stilled on the red and white county ambulance that skidded to a stop at the emergency entrance. Slamming doors, fast-moving feet, metal wheels, and the mechanical beeping of medical equipment. I don’t look around to see who’s carried inside.

.Chemistry .....................................................................

I

am hard to sedate. My internal seismograph barely flickers from drugs that level landscapes. In my spectrum of pharmaceutical impunity, yellows and reds are mere colors. Darvon has no punch, Demerol barely brings on a nap. This is a curious thing to know about yourself and in my case is anomaly upon anomaly, as I’m not notably tolerant of anything else. I have no preternatural alertness or will to be awake, like a child at bedtime. My disposition is not frantic nor my spirits so kiting as to resist pharmacopoeia dragging them earthward. If there’s an explanation, maybe it’s in the opposite being true: I so gravitate toward somber estimations of everything that adding a downer to my chemistry might be like dropping a cork into a pail of water. I began to wonder what this imperviousness means when I started to have headaches. A headache, actually, always the same one, like a baseball grinding into the top of my head. I’d never had headaches, not even tiny ones. People rarely believe that, as doctors scarcely believe it when I stroll off unfazed by their prescriptions, but to me the fact of a headache, much less a recurring one, was remarkable. I could touch the crown of my head and almost feel it pulsing. The headache got bad enough that I took it to my internist, a shortish, fast-moving, breezy VMI grad with a bawdy humor. He also has a professional demeanor that kicks in with an almost audible click, and when I mentioned my first-ever headaches, the click was like a roomful of knuckles cracking. He did the tapping of knees and scraping of soles and the neurological rest of it and seemed satisfied. He’d treated me for back spasms, and having seen what analgesic artillery that took, said, “I see two clinical possibilities: (1) I drug you into a coma, (2) you deal with it. I think your head’s trying to tell you something, and when you figure out what that is, you won’t have your headache.”

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And so I began thinking of my headache as a possession or obligation, something to put up with but also take care of. We came, my headache and I, to an arrangement. I’d let it rage awhile, then hit it with six ibuprofen. That was my signal that its point wasn’t getting through, and after half an hour or so it gave up until next time. Then one day, lying on my couch waiting for the ibuprofen to work, I remembered a commercial for Colgate toothpaste, an old one from when the neighborhood’s lone TV was black-and-white. A man in a business suit faced the camera, and behind him a baseball pitcher in a Yankees uniform began his wind-up. As the pitchman spoke, the pitcher fired a fastball directly at the back of his head. At the instant of imminent carnage, the baseball struck a transparent barrier with a jarring whack and rolled away while the man explained that Colgate works like an invisible protective shield. Lying there, I realized I’m buffered by an invisible shield of sorts. I’m certainly assailed by less than many men, having no compromises to make with a wife, no sacrifices to make for children, or even chores for pets and houseplants. I’m also screened from what drives men my age to climb the corporate ranks or generally assert themselves on the world. In fact, I’m glassed off from many pre-occupations of the male gender, most of whom could name five pitchers after Whitey Ford. Life tosses all that around with no impact on me, but that’s not happenstance, like having a constitution unaffected by mega-drugs, for I had a life like that once and left it. I both felt that life as an intolerable pain and resisted it as an overwhelming narcotic until my internal chemistry did finally prevail. Maybe I made a choice, maybe only a decision because no real choice was possible, but this present life feels like my life and holds none of the usual things — marriage, children, satellite dishes, lawns, a corner office. None of that holds anything over my head, and that’s my most compelling reason to figure out why I have headaches. Maybe these are the headaches I avoided elsewhere in life. Maybe this is the revenge of the unappreciated guy-stuff. Having been accountable for so long only to myself, maybe I have headaches because I now have a dying father and responsibility for my parents’ finances. Or maybe I foresee a tomorrow in which life presents two clinical possibilities: (1) lie there cased in pain because no one believes the dosage of drugs I can tolerate, (2) lie there gorked as Dad was, but with no wife

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of years at my bedside, no son to assure my affairs, no daughter to intercede with my doctors. I wonder how I’ll feel about everything then. Either I’ll wish my chemistry had been different, or I’ll feel it was enough to have lived according to my . . . nature, constitution, composition, make-up, whatever it is. When I’m lying in my final bed as my father is, I hope I’ll feel that was enough. At the end, I guess it will have to be.

.Broken . . . . . . . . .Connection ...............................................................

I

’ve been phoning Dad before lunch Iowa time, when I know he’ll have been awakened. I also know the arrival of lunch will give him an excuse to stop talking before he has to admit he can’t continue. In the meantime, I have been. I prepared a statement about my father being too ill to sign my parents’ 1040, Mother signed for them both and filed taxes in early April, and I have been moving securities from Smith Barney. Enough have nested in the new account that I could begin the consolidations Dad and I discussed. I have power of attorney and could place trades, but I don’t, and in other ways couldn’t, without talking to him first. Mother always answers the prosthesis-colored touch-tone phone by his bed, which gives me time to adjust my voice — I tend to speak softly on the telephone — and to locate a persona other than enforced casualness or affected pleasantry. I do everything to keep the one overwhelming question from my voice. In years past when I called home, Mother and Dad spoke to me together until conversation turned toward markets or interest rates, then Dad and I carried on, often without noticing Mother had hung up. The reversal, lately, of speaking to her first and last while squeezing in sentences with Dad between is not lost on me. I apparently have become quite the predictable pre-noon caller, because Mother said only “Hi” when she answered. In the background I heard Dad asking for the operator. Fixation on a word is common in end-stage cancer patients, my sisters tell me, and since an earlier visit, when we phoned my uncle on my long-distance card, Dad has been raising his wavering arm off his chest and calling out, “Operator . . . Operator.” Before and after these episodes he’s lucid and normal, and they nearly always stop when Mother comes to him, but not today, apparently.

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“ We’re having a bad day,” Mother said matter-of-factly, “so just a minute.” I heard her soothing him and sounds of pillows being forcefully bunched. I had a brilliant find to tell Dad about, an AT&T bond attractively priced for its generous coupon and callable above par. It’s the kind of bond I’ve recommended many times to Dad, and I was eager to show I’m on the job and alert. “Just a minute more,” Mother said into the receiver. I heard the guardrail on the bed lock into place — Dad must have been badly agitated — and this sound like a cage latching filled me with inexplicable confidence and purpose. The sound was what I imagine the sound would be when the coach summons you to the mound in the ninth inning, slaps the baseball into your mitt, and tells you to ice this game in the record-book. For that was suddenly and precisely what I intend to do and what, suddenly, I felt unreservedly capable of doing. Dad and I began discussing his investments more than twenty years ago. More than half the securities he owns are those I recommended. Investing became an interest we found we had in common, and two decades of doing it overrode the acrimony of adolescence and brought us together. For twenty years, we’ve had this one thing firmly in common, and there I sat, preparing to talk about it again, and I not only had a spectacular bond for the conversation, I had a witty remark, too — a Telephone bond with great call features. After a moment more, my father’s voice was on the line. “Operator?” he asked. “ Well, sure, Dad, in a manner of speaking. Your very own financial operator here.” I tried to explain the bond I’ve found, but Mother was apparently holding the receiver to his ear, because Dad began to cough, then choke, and the receiver, I could tell, was pinned between her shoulder and neck. I heard my father saying, “Operator, Katie . . . Operator.” When Dad was back on the line, I started to explain again, but he stopped me. His voice came through weakly but clearly and focused. He said only, “ We can’t both do this any more. From here on out, I’m just going to have to trust you.” “Did you hear that?” It was Mother. Did I hear. Did I hear him say we can’t do this any more. Won’t do

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this any more. Not ever. I heard. Did you hear that noise like shattered glass in a tin cup? Did you hear my heart breaking? I heard my own voice as if from very far away speaking faster and louder: “Tell him he can trust me, Mother. Tell him I’ll do my best for his portfolio every day. Tell him no one ever gave it more attention than I will. Mother? . . . Mother?” “Mr. Nichols?” “ What? Yes? Are you talking to me or my father? Who are you?” It was Dad’s nurse. She said Mother was busy with my father and it might be better if I called back later. I said I rather doubted that.

.April . . . . . .26, . . . . 1998 ...........................................................

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y father died Sunday at 7 a.m. Iowa time. I was out late last night and am a sound sleeper, so I didn’t hear my sister phone with the message I retrieved after mid-morning: “It’s Sue. Call me right away. I’m at Mom’s.” I thought only for a moment that Dad’s condition had worsened, for I caught the current in her voice which said that wasn’t the case. I wondered if there’s a circuit for telepathy in an answering machine. I also thought, “Never eat at a place called Mom’s and never play cards with a man named Doc,” but I couldn’t recall the third admonition. I settled for “April is the cruellest month.” I didn’t phone back right away. María Elvia cleaned a few days ago, so the kitchen was presentable and I made coffee. While it brewed I took my Franklin Day Planner with its thumb-tabbed addresses from my briefcase, but I put it away after realizing Susan would have called everyone. She and I have come to anticipate one another’s efficiencies as halves of a parental au pair. Now au pair to a single parent. Not four days ago I gave instructions to wire Dad’s IRA distribution into his regular account. I sold shares of an electric utility to raise cash. Sold it before its ex-dividend date, too. Sacrificed the dividend to avoid possible problems from delaying the distribution. I watched the coffee dribble into the carafe, filling to the line that marks six cups. That would be a pot half full or half empty, depending on how you look at it. I felt no particular insistence or urgency, but I noted that even as I woke up and smelled the coffee, my reaction was to count the number of cups. Kona, it said in stylized script on the two-pound can. The utility stock I sold was Hawaii Electric. A few more days and it would have paid a dividend. Susan answered the phone on the second ring and told me the rel-

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evant times and the morning’s eventful events. She described standing outside Dad’s hospital room, turning away the nurses and undertaker while Mother was inside. We discussed what to do about our brother Bob, who was driving in from Omaha after his night shift and didn’t know what had happened. Last weekend I called to say he better be home soon if he intended to see Dad again. Susan and I have speculated why he hasn’t come back more often, and we decided it’s because he’s the most emotional of us. That’s why we didn’t call his cell phone while he was on Interstate 80. A couple hours earlier and he’d have made it in time. Susan told me Mother was bearing up, and I said I was ready to talk to her. Mother was upset because she wasn’t with Dad when he died. She said it was her duty to be there. I said that was her plan, and you know what they say about best-laid plans. She was leaving for the hospital when the call came. Five minutes and she’d have been there. Five more minutes and she’d have ended thirty-six years of marriage with the closure she wanted. I tell myself there’s a moment when life is and a moment when life isn’t. Between those moments anyone can be a day late or a dollar short, and afterwards you have all the time left in your life to replay each moment, changing ever so slightly the tiniest facts to make things turn out the way you want. There also are moments after which life won’t ever be the same, and you’d better frame then what you know and feel, because afterward their facts are too large to change even slightly. Twice I’ve met important, influential men the day their fathers died. One founded and ran a brokerage firm that changed the securities industry. The other ran fiscal policy and had run for President. Both accepted my condolences with brief, neutral thanks and got down to the business of hiring me. I’d never seen these men except on television and in newspapers, but both times I sensed something altered about them, as if I’d have met different men the day before. My intuition was right. I’d met two prominent men the day they became something more than they were twenty-four hours earlier. A father’s death adds to a son’s life — not an increment but a fundament, new responsibilities and new relationships with every responsibility you have. Men have to become their own man the day their fathers die. Death is the final step in raising a son.

.Two . . . . .Wives, . . . . . . . . .One . . . . .Mother ..................................................

M

other has to write Dad’s obituary for the newspaper, and on the phone yesterday she asked, “Should I say something about your and Bob’s mother?” I admit I laughed. One might be forgiven any reaction within minutes of learning his father died, but I laughed because the question was so typical of her: Don’t put off what needs doing. . . . Don’t put yourself first. . . . Don’t forget anyone. “No,” I answered, “the courthouse says Dad had a former wife, but Bob and I have no doubt who our mother is.” My answer was more civil than I usually am when anyone mentions that ours is a family combined through remarriage of widowed parents. When I returned from the army my parents invited several tables of friends to meet me and play bridge, and a woman I’d later learn was the church busybody leaned over her cards to say, “You must remember your mother.” “Vaguely,” I answered, exaggerating a pose of deep introspection. “As I recall, a short woman, dark hair, glasses, playing no-trump in the living room.” After my parents’ wedding one of their friends, a well-intended woman, in the meddlesome way of small towns, asked, “ What are you going to call your new mother?” I didn’t miss a beat: “Spot,” I answered. “I’ve decided to call her ‘Spot.’” Family gets facetiousness. My parents married the summer before my freshman year in high school, and on their thirtieth anniversary my eldest niece asked how we got along as teenagers. I said that as a teenager I was secretly proud of my parents, as they were better educated, better spoken, and broader of perspective than friends’ parents. “Your grandmother was, anyway,” I added, nudging Dad’s shoulder. “Your grandfather never did get the knack of representing me well.” It must have been uncomfortable acquiring a mother, although if I’d inherited a thirteen-year-old son at age thirty-three, as Mother did,

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I’d have poisoned him, especially if that thirteen-year-old had been me. I believe we’ve established that the neighbors wouldn’t have blamed her. I’m sure there was friction, and I’m certain it originated from some teenaged jerk I’d rather not acknowledge. I find it amusing, sort of, that Mother embraced me as the teenager I’m trying like the devil to disown. Actually, now that I think about it I don’t find it amusing at all. But even if as a teenager I expressed only secret pride, I always was impressed with Mother, and not merely for being more poised and polished than friends’ mothers. I had enough sense to intuit I should’ve been, although not enough to consider why. At the least I should’ve thought to be impressed she’d agree to raise two sons. Mother married the first time at nineteen. Her husband was diabetic, which meant no health insurance when he was sick and no life insurance when he died, leaving her with two daughters. For a time she was receptionist in a doctor’s office — probably was the office, I imagine — and she finished enough college for a teaching certificate. A widowed mother, many bills, little money — that was “a policy issue” when I worked on the Senate Finance Committee. I don’t know what Mother called it. Or Dad, facing that exact situation. I say my mother will never again be anxious about money, insurance, rent, or anything under my power. My mother will never know another moment of discomfort over anything I can prevent. What’s embarrassing, as separate from the humiliation of revealing myself as a teenager, is I can’t see “the” portfolio as Mother’s. I guess this, too, is forgivable for awhile. I guess transition from “Dad’s portfolio” to “Mother’s portfolio” is like progressing from “Spot” to “Mother”: it happens in its own time. Mother worked as hard as Dad at their store and cared for him, their house, and my siblings besides, yet to me it’s Dad’s money. Left to her, assuredly, but although I manage it for her benefit, I do so for Dad’s sake. Mother would understand, though. I’m not sure how the subject came up, but years ago she told me it’s hard to accept that “yours” becomes “ours” when you marry. Including, I say as she did not, other people’s kids. It occurs to me that I kept my wife’s investments and mine separate, nothing in joint account except house and checkbook — “the” house, “the” checkbook. It occurs to me, also, that when I got engaged at thirtythree, I told Mother weeks before anyone else, even my father, and asked her to keep it our secret.

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After we agreed to divorce, my wife mailed me my dental records. I laughed then, too, thinking it her way of saying, “Let someone else ID the body, Buck-o.” Years later she sent an envelope of clippings and photos I’d forgotten in the move to Washington. Its contents included my biological mother’s long, lugubrious obituary, which rambled a whole paragraph about nine-year-old me. That little guy was more recognizable than “the” teenager. Who, by the way, grew up to write thank-you notes, stand when speaking to elders, chew with his lips closed, and hold a chair for his mother. Someone insisted on that and that he learn to type, a skill he uses every day. Someone insisted on English and encouraged him toward speech and drama. If you plopped him onto a three-legged stool where he had to be sociable, polite, and coherent of speech or page, the guy sitting there would be his mother’s son. Last month when Dad and I were alone in his hospital room, he turned toward me and said, “I’ve had two good wives.” It suggested much from a man who knew he was dying, and I didn’t know how to answer. Dad and I never discussed my biological mother’s death, not even the morning after she died, when he came into my room saying only, “Your mother died last night,” before leaving. He didn’t tell me he was remarrying, and I don’t recall a conversation that began, “How’s it going with a new mother and sisters?” So for many reasons I didn’t know how to react. I said, “Yes, Dad, I think everything worked out all around.” If I should’ve said more, I didn’t know what and still don’t. Maybe Dad was wishing he could take back a few things, too, so maybe there’s nothing I could have said. I’m glad I did say, “You and Mother have always shown a lot of character, Dad. That’s a good quality to be passing on.” He gave me an out by adding, “I’ve got four good kids,” and I took it: “Actually, Dad, you’ve got three good kids, but I won’t say who the bum is.” Consistency is my suit: sardonic on the subject to the last trump. After all these years I still don’t shrug it off. Partly because it’s nobody’s business, especially since only I among immediate family remember things being different. Partly, I reject the whole doleful DeMolay-like discussion. In particular, connotations surrounding “stepmother” are inaccurate in my case. What’s more — not to sound awful — at my age and time of life having a late mother is like having a former wife: both were important in ways I might never realize, both

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have my appreciation and respect, both shaped a person I was and the person I am, but mostly they’re incidents of fact that needn’t be repeatedly . . . exhumed. To me, the question is who receives the love, regard, and responsibility that only a mother inspires. Therefore, there is no question. Mother accepted my opinion about Dad’s obituary and asked if interest and dividends will be interrupted while her joint accounts transfer. I assured her that everything goes on as it has. Evidently she’s talked with their lawyer about estate and wills, and he suggested adopting my brother and me, our advanced ages notwithstanding. Dad adopted my sisters, but the deal didn’t reciprocate between her and us boys. “ What do you think?” Mother asked. “Should I adopt you? Would you mind?” I’ve got to confess: I thought that question was funny, too.

.Last . . . . . .Wish ...............................................................

M

other always said to be careful what you ask for because you might get it. Dad always said to be careful what you promise because you have to deliver. Neither is what Shakespeare meant when he wrote about a rose by any other name and lilies that fester, but all day Shakespeare’s lines have run through my head alongside my parents’ adjurations. They ran through my head as I did what I commonly do at their house — circle the block several times during several daily constitutionals. They ran through my head and nipped at my heels and whispered in my ear as I circled the block and circled the block. They did so so many times they jumbled themselves up and came out as twisted as the consequences of asking a question and making a promise. The final time I spoke to my father was a brief and wheezing Friday afternoon phone call. Dad was gasping and coughing, and because I had little to say and Dad was breathing fitfully, I decided to stay on the line only until Mother returned to his room. I don’t know why I asked — looking back on that afternoon, it seems pointless — but the words simply came out. “Is there anything I can do for you, Dad?” “Yes,” he said. “Make sure Mom gets something from me on Mother’s Day.” “No problem, padre mio,” I said. “ What’d you have in mind — candy? jewelry? flowers?” “Flowers,” he answered. “Flowers are fine.” “OK. I’ll make sure you send her a dozen roses on Mother’s Day.” The deal was set, the obligation laid, and two days later my father died.

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By mid-afternoon it felt like I’d been circling the block forever. I began circling it a few days ago as I rehearsed the tribute I wrote for Dad’s service. Afterwards I circled the block so many times I could have shut my eyes and done it by memory. I have circled the block and circled it and have come no closer to deciding what to do about the roses. I can keep circling it days more, and in a few days it still will be Mother’s Day. I could keep Dad’s last request to myself, as I’d kept to myself the option of removing his name from the joint account, and I could decide, as I’d decided then, that I would not do it. There were good reasons. Over-emotional last gestures, voice from beyond the grave, the implication there’d be endless future Hallmark Moments of widowhood —“ With Sympathy on Your Birthday” . . . “ With Sympathy on Your Anniversary” . . . “ With Sympathy This Holiday Season.” Yet the harder I thought, the less I could find a way around my inner war of the roses: I had promised my father to send flowers, yet receiving them would make my mother cry. Whose feet do not by themselves dodge cracks in the pavement as he circles the block? It is well known you wander purgatory forever if you don’t honor your father’s last wish. But nothing in anyone’s philosophy ever considered that your father’s last wish is the last thing to be wished. I could imagine too well the artfully arranged dozen, the porcelain vase, my mother sobbing over the spray of baby’s breath while re-reading the accompanying card and knowing she’d never again have the company of the one who’d sent them. I had decided, at least, on one thing: the message on the card. If I were to order the roses, the message was easy enough: “On instructions from my father for Mother’s Day . . . With Love, Ray.” If I were to order the roses, that would be what I’d write. I have not varied from my father’s other wishes. I haven’t diverged from the plan we’d agreed on. I told Dad I knew what he wanted and I’d make it work. What future corner do I cut if I cut this corner now? What do I find easier, more easily justified — next time? Not two days ago I said, in church, that my father never permitted circumstances to alter a promise. What festers more surely than a promise broken on the excuse of good intentions? Those are fine questions, as “Unmoved, cold, to temptation slow”

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are fine qualities. “They that have power to hurt and will do none” is finer. What principle, what virtue, what point of honor ever could rank above avoiding a mother’s tears? I was not going to be able to work my way around this one. I couldn’t put it off like extending the maturity on bonds, couldn’t swap my way into less taxing consequences, couldn’t cut my losses. Honor thy father and thy mother, then choose. I had no trick for pulling that off, no savvy maneuvers for delivering this rose without its thorns. In the end, I decided there’s only one promise by any name, and I’d made it. I wish I could say principle alone turned me toward Brenda’s Flower Shop near my mother’s house instead of circling the block again, but it didn’t. Another fact determined my choice, or at least made it possible. Mother’s Day is next week, and I return to Washington tomorrow. When Dad’s roses arrive, I won’t have to be here to see my mother cry.

.Business . . . . . . . . . . . as . . . .Usual .........................................................

A

fter Dad’s service and time with my family I flew back to Washington and reached my desk mid-week. It’s strange how truly life does go on, banality and all. My junior editor had Fedexed deadline items from my in-box to Iowa. They didn’t seem important as I’d looked them over at Mother’s dining room table, seated along the side where I’d done the taxes. They had slightly more urgency back in the office, the sign of a rocky but not unpromising re-entry. Then the telephone rang. After phone duty following Dad’s service, thanking callers and telling them Mother was unavailable, it was odd to know the call had to be for me and that I had to answer. When you work in government, you understand why they killed Socrates first chance they got. Most of my colleagues have their own personal citizen wacko. There’s no kinder way to put it. They’re usually elderly men who have both an intense preoccupation with your agency’s activities and, somehow, your phone number. My first call since returning to work was from mine, and mine, I’m afraid, really is. He calls from what is plainly a pay phone in a busy and cavernous hallway. Given the obsessiveness of his frequent requests and background intercoms paging people for medication, I have an idea where he’s phoning from. Mine, sadly, is a younger man, and this time he phoned because he needed “the authorities” to authenticate his dime. The Mint authenticates coins only for a court or another government agency, and I was readying to say so when he began to tell me about his dime: it was a 1932 Roosevelt dime, he said, part of a cache struck by executive order of Calvin Coolidge and given to FDR. FDR had personally handed out these dimes to returning servicemen, and this one was worth $250,000. It was the only time I’ve almost yelled at a caller. Barely four days

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had passed since burying my father, I was behind at work, and someone had plagued me long-distance, likely from an asylum, with a crazy story first thing in the morning. “Please listen to me,” I said. “ What you say is impossible. Roosevelt dimes were not minted until 1945. You cannot have a 1932 Roosevelt dime because they were not struck for thirteen more years. Franklin Roosevelt never handed out this dime to servicemen, because he died before World War II ended. Calvin Coolidge did not authorize this dime, because Harry Truman was president. It is totally and completely impossible that you have a 1932 Roosevelt dime.” “No,” he said. “This is a 1932 Roosevelt dime. It’s worth $250,000.” “Please listen. You might have a 1982 dime with a worn-down 8. You do not have a 1932 Roosevelt dime. There was no Roosevelt dime in 1932.” “If you don’t think it’s worth $250,000, what do you think it’s worth?” he asked. “A dime,” I said. “It’s worth ten cents.” He began his entire story again — Coolidge, Roosevelt, 1932, returning servicemen — and I was about to hang up, when I realized I wasn’t hearing him. I was hearing Dad in the worst of his delirium, when I’d tried to manage him with facts and tangible truth and every reference to hard reality I could think of. It occurred to me that my caller, my personal, public service, demented one, had a family who paid for his care and nurses who watched over him. “OK,” I interrupted. “You want your dime authenticated. Send me a photocopy, and I’ll send you a letter on Mint stationery attesting that it cannot be a 1932 Roosevelt dime.” My promising to look at an image of his dime pleased him a great deal. As I was repeating my address, the line went silent. He had apparently run out of change — except, presumably, for the dime we’d discussed. I thought a moment about my never-seen caller in a clinic hallway beside a pay phone. For a few seconds I pictured him staring into a dead connection, perhaps with a confused, disbelieving glance at the implacable metal box. For a moment I remembered Dad calling out, “Operator . . . Operator,” and then I rose from my desk and went to refill my morning coffee.

.Keeping . . . . . . . . . . Time ..............................................................

E

verybody spends money foolishly — the global economy depends on it — and my pet foolishness is cheap watches. Like Ishmael pausing involuntarily before coffin warehouses, I can’t pass sidewalk watch vendors on any street anywhere. There are several in Georgetown, and on a nice day with nothing much to occupy me, I’ll bounce among them like a pinball fulfilling its karma. If I don’t come upon them by chance, I hunt for them. I once left a $400-a-night hotel room to find the real Hong Kong and knock-off watches. Twenty or thirty tick silently and patiently in my bedroom lowboy. Counterfeit Cartiers, simulated Sakens, and trompe l’oeil Tag-Heuers snuggle like a litter of pups amid authentic, no-pretend, $10 mutt brands, all mine. I bring them back from everywhere for their metaphysical import. They’re the oddest set of contraries — nonentities and assumed identities, fair of face fakes, time “passing” as it were. But only on one plane: Is that a fake watch? No, it’s really a watch. If a cave man found a phony Piaget in the forest, he would still assume the existence of a watchmaker. All sublunary watches imply the one true watch. All is illusion, says the Buddha. I have philosophy upon my wrist and also an instillation of economics: a real Rolex? Who’d pay that kind of money for a watch? These watches don’t look half-bad, and they work fine. They’re functional props for any role I feel like adopting. Sportsman, sophisticate, traditionalist, solid guy. Existence mingles with essence, even for the watches. For what that’s worth. I once asked a physicist to explain Relativity in terms of a watch. “Take two watches,” I said, “yours and mine, both set at noon. I get on a space ship at the speed of light and come back six hours later. Your watch should say six o’clock like mine. Instead, I find your grandchildren eating dinner.” The explanation, she said, is that both watches are subject to the same constant, namely the

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speed of light. There’s much in that I don’t understand. There’s much in it to make me uneasy. What I do understand — and what makes me equally uneasy — is that my watches must work well, because strangers regularly ask me the time. The frequency of this happening is eerie and often unwelcome. Years ago I flew to be with a friend whose wife, herself my friend, had carried a pistol to their basement and shot herself in the heart. As he and I talked in a corner of a plush Boston hotel, a woman walked the length of the lobby, past waiters and the concierge, past people whispering over inlaid mahogany and crystal glassware, to stop at our table and ask me — me specifically, not my friend — the time. This happens so often it’s like being continually auditioned for a B movie. Bystander sucked into intrigue, the transfer of jeopardy, the malignant outcome of courtesy to strangers — they’re implicit in this question you can’t sidestep (“The time? Why do you ask the time?”). Being repeatedly placed in this situation has given me a dread of being drawn into someone else’s fate, like Starbuck when dead Ahab beckons. Ahab’s arm waving as the white whale sounds: that’s a fair facsimile of the hand of fate. So is a second hand sweeping over a backlit elapsed time dial, everything assembled, like fate itself, somewhere far away. Malaysia maybe. Or close to home, for there’s a new watch in my drawer: Mother let my brother and me take two watches from Dad’s three. I wanted his everyday watch, which I gave him in my early twenties, a small, lowend Halston which he evidently felt suited the tight corners and highimpact likelihood of a hardware business. Its obvious wear shows he wore it often, whereas my watches see daylight maybe once a month. I’m reminded of Relativity in having given my father that watch as I began a decade of extending my adolescence via travel and grad school. It’s as if I transferred the jeopardy of adulthood back to Dad. The third of my father’s watches was his father’s, a large and thenexpensive pocket watch chained to the overalls he wore as a railroad foreman. My grandfather’s only watch told him when trains were due and when, therefore, he had to pull his section gang off the tracks. There was real jeopardy in my grandfather not knowing the exact time. I suppose my grandfather’s watch also will be mine, for custom gives eldest sons the family watch. The family watch — a noteworthy singularity to one who owns so many, for it implies meeting all your

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obligations with a single timepiece. That lone watch which has outlasted my father and grandfather also implies . . . father time. By comparison, having so many watches seems like plain silliness, evidence of too few responsibilities or evidence of one who, despite being nearly fifty, lacks steady character, changing personae by changing watches. On the other hand — of time?— maybe all sons suspect they have less gravitas than their fathers. Compared to my grandfather’s one watch, Dad may have thought owning two showed a frivolous nature. And when I was a boy, I remember, my grandfather described his father as “the last real man you’ll ever see.” My great-grandfather might not have owned a watch. Dad’s watch returns to me with the finances he left me to watch over, my grandfather’s watch awaits me inside a time capsule on Mother’s bookshelf, and together they’re weightier than the two-dozen-plus in my lowboy. I’ll acquire at least one more watch, and that, to all appearances, suggests my collection amasses meaning, not just metaphysical import. The meaning, I assume, of Prince Hal pondering his excesses as the nascent Henry V: “I’ll so offend to make offense a skill, / Redeeming time when men think least I will.” For a long time, perhaps since owning but a single Seiko, I’ve suspected there’s a meaning in having watches. I sensed it in being the one whom others think is paying attention, in being the friend expected to make sense of what happened, in being the stranger others instinctively ask the time. It is becoming clearer to me what that long-suspected meaning is.

.Full . . . . .Faith . . . . . . .and . . . . .Credit ....................................................

M

other has finished sending thank-yous for sympathy cards she’s received. Most of the cards held donations for flowers or notices of gifts in Dad’s name, but some included cash or checks without explanation or earmark. These latter seem peculiar to me. A well-meant generosity, of course, perhaps an ancestral prairie memory or only a gentle-souled Midwestern custom. But . . . a man dies, you send his wife money — that just seems odd. I’ve told few people at work about Dad’s death, as I didn’t want to deal with their condolence mail besides all the financial papers I’m handling. Still, a couple weeks ago when Mother mentioned that my ex-wife and former mother-in-law had sent cards and perennial plants, I guess I thought they’d send me a card, too. They haven’t, and I think my feelings are hurt. We were related twelve years, after all. I’d know more firmly whether my feelings are hurt if I had stronger memories of being married or deeper resentment over being divorced. Suppression, repression, paraphraxis, whatever — fact is, I simply don’t. Oddly, I recall opening an annuity after my wedding. I see myself filling in forms at my rolltop desk, naming my wife as beneficiary, folding a voided check into a postage-paid envelope. It was a flexible premium annuity, the kind you can open with $50 if you’ll have $50 monthly drawn from your checking account. Hence the voided check. I remember how adult it all seemed. Hefty increase in salary lured me from my job shortly after I was married, and I stepped up our savings. I met the financial conspirator you’re lucky to meet in your thirties, a low-pressure young broker named Mark. The early 1980s was the era of zero coupon bonds. Zeros work like savings bonds in that you buy them at a price below their

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par value of $1,000 and interest appreciates until maturity as the difference between purchase price and par. In other words, maybe you pay $600 for a bond that matures in ten years, when you receive $1,000. The longer its maturity and the higher its yield, the lower its price. Zeros yielded ten or twelve percent then, and I paid $75 for long-term zeros that will appreciate to $1,000. An accord up front, patience, increasing appreciation — zeros work like they say marriage and career should. A new horizon opened when I got the idea to ladder zeros. That is, buy some maturing in five years, ten, longer, and hold them. Fill in intermediate years when possible, and as the zeros mature you’re guaranteed a stream of income. I was publishing books then, and I took my third book from my ideas for managing zeros. Published articles about them and earned some sizable expert witness fees, too. Became briefly famous in limited circles as the man to see about zeros. Financial fads and authorial fame don’t last, and I wasn’t going to get along with Fortune 500 America, either. My wife and I took a first anniversary cruise, and my entire department, fifty people, was fired while we were away. I returned to find someone else working in my office. Out there on a love boat I’d been zeroed out in a way not so fortunate, but it could have been worse. For one thing they gave me a year’s salary in severance. For another, being fired moved me to start writing and publishing in earnest, even after I found a new job, because it taught me, as Billie Holiday said, “God bless the child that’s got his own.” Getting this child’s own involved learning more — formally, rigorously, methodically more — about investments, taxes, insurance, mortgages, any related subject. I wrote what I learned into articles and books. And practiced. Opened a Keogh for my royalties, twenty percent pre-tax off the top, deferred taxes on earnings. Filed Schedule C, made some of life deductible, including stamps, stationery, and a day from one vacation spent hunting facts for a chapter on gemstones. I incorporated, paying fifteen percent tax on corporate income, not fifty percent on personal income then. Quoted a broker in an article, thanked a brokerage in a book, there was a share or two for me in the next IPO. The brokerage loans you cash to buy and credits your account with the gain after you flip your shares. When they asked if I wanted in, I said, “I do.” Everything was legal.

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It also was a separate rhythm from nine-to-five in a decade when a tender offer meant a hostile takeover. Sometimes my job meant explaining why it benefited everyone to break up a subsidiary, fire its employees, and Mongol the balance sheet to stop someone from paying three times yesterday’s price for the company’s stock. Afterwards I wrote statements which didn’t mention that men who’d wrecked the company received millions to resign. It wasn’t a good time for me, and it wasn’t a pleasant time to be married to me. For a number of related and unrelated reasons, many a separate peace was being made. My wife took a job in marketing with an insurance company. I began writing full time, teaching economics on the side, and managing money for private clients, including family. My former father-in-law is a fine man and lifelong good provider, truly a providential quality in a man with seven children, but like many fine men he is a poor investor and an unwise one. He placed my mother-in-law’s small inheritance, $25,000 from selling her childhood home, into call options. A call option entitles you to buy stock at a fixed price within a set time, usually a few months. That’s a moneymaking deal if the stock goes up, but if it doesn’t, the call expires worthless, and that’s what happened. He lost her inheritance, all of it. When my mother-in-law’s employer offered her an early retirement settlement, she asked me to invest her money. I serialized Treasury bonds for her, a strategy like laddering which I’ve described in several books. It involves buying six or eight bonds maturing at three-to-fiveyear intervals. You minimize interest rate risk doing that. If rates fall, you’ve got longer bonds paying higher yields; if they rise, you’ve got bonds with short maturity to reinvest at higher rates. I bought Treasuries because they’re immune to default and kept a bit aside to buy growth stocks. I took her to Mark, one of many six-figure clients I brought him when I ran money. A realization: my ex-wife and in-laws knew of Dad’s death because he told them. After the divorce, my once-father-in-law sent me a nice letter asking if I’d continue advising them. I was flattered and moved, but it wouldn’t have been a good idea. After the initial heartache, it was an amicable, adult divorce. The last time my about-to-be-ex-wife and I spoke, we were laughing, although nervously. One of her brothers, a doctor-entrepreneur who owns a string of walk-in medical clinics, had developed a cataract and could no longer practice medicine, which he

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was frankly tired of. It doesn’t sound like something to laugh about, but ya’ hadda’ oughtta’ known that brother-in-law. The guy’s a wild man who was bone-tired of being a doctor, and his disability policy paid him to stop being one. Paid several million dollars, I believe. I don’t remember exactly, but when he and I had talked years earlier about disability insurance, I said he needed a bunch. The most hurtful thing was the annulment, which the Catholic Diocese of Joliet granted on grounds of “defect of prior consent.” The phrase hurt my feelings, and I’m not Catholic. When their forms arrived, I spent hours writing a letter defaming their Thomasian subtleties, but I never mailed it. I realized they didn’t want my opinion; what they wanted was a hundred bucks for an annulment. Within months my ex-wife married the fellow I knew she’d marry, a brother of her college roommate who’d eaten at our house many times. He coached at a Catholic junior college, lived with his aged mother. He always said investing is nothing but gambling and he’d never do it. Now he has half of what was my portfolio. It really isn’t the money: it’s my portfolio, the zeros I bought so assiduously and laddered so carefully. I spent many, many hours aligning those zeros. They’ll pay half-a-million dollars when they mature. I believe the first pays this year —$20,000 in May, as I recall. May. This month. Time flies. I don’t track the old accounts any more. I paid four or five years into the annuity, then let it ride. It’s worth $34,000 now — the beneficiary: my alma mater. With the stock market we’ve had, the plain old S&P has returned what I lost in the divorce. No need for those zesty former IPOs. Mark called today, and I remarked that the Intel I bought my father-in-law in ’92 sure paid off. Actually, he sold that, Mark said. Sold Intel? The hundred shares I bought at $84? The Intel that’s split five times and hit $84 again? What about the Schwab I bought at $24? Split four times, just hit $90? Sold that, too. For God’s sake, the Treasury bonds, Treasuries at eight percent in this five percent climate? At least he kept those. Only Mark has called since Dad’s death, although a woman I work with, another Midwesterner, baked cookies and left them in my office when I returned from the funeral. I won’t hear from my former relatives, and that’s for the best, all things considered. How long has it been? Four years? Five? For me, at least, long enough that theirs would

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be voices from a distant past, their condolences appreciated, but, in truth, appreciated on a par with those I’ve kept coworkers from offering. We were related twelve years, and whatever could have grown from those years has done so for all of us. In hindsight, I see everything worked out as well as it ever could have, beginning from day one. My ex-relatives benefited from knowing me, and we’re all well off after parting company. Remembering them and our years together reminds me of how often and in how many ways money and parting go together.

.Both . . . . . .Sides . . . . . . . Now ...........................................................

W

hen I was in grade school Dad surely wondered what career I’d choose. When I was a teenager he probably wondered if I’d ever look for a job. When I stayed in grad school forever, he thought I’d be a professor. When I went to business, I don’t know what he thought. Now, to my surprise and probably his, I’ve been designated an elder in the profession I floundered into: my former English department wants an article from me about how English grads can use their skills in corporate jobs. Not exactly your honorary doctorate, this request, but some validation I haven’t totally been the lost vocational cause Dad might have imagined. As I ponder my article, though, the issue is what to tell my readers, not what I would have told my father. An education in English used to be about books and literary skills: the logic of utterance, the structure of sense, felicity of style, perspective, plot, theme, character, consistency of narrative, point of view, the brains of beginning-middle-end from someone else’s pen or yours. As a result, it was axiomatic, if not always true, that English majors could write, and I landed a corporate writing job because I’d also studied business, economics, and finance — not so odd, considering notable links between culture and commerce: Booksellers like Blackwell’s, Shakespeare the entrepreneur, the poet and insurance agent Wallace Stevens, John Maynard Keynes stirring up currency markets and the Bloomsbury Circle. I thought I’d tell my readers that combining a little business with their literary skills might make them employable. Then I realized an English education mostly isn’t about literary skills any more. It’s about GRICE, as a former professor calls it: gender, race, identity, culture, and ethnicity. Judging by articles in literary journals I glance at in the big Barnes & Noble in Georgetown, the skill English

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students seem to be cultivating is using books to prove white male imperialists mistreat women, persons of color, foreigners — everyone, basically. I’ve not seen big demand for that skill in business. I should’ve seen this high-handedness coming, though. Even back then, English students thought superiority to business, economics, and money proved their moral authority — as business students thought near-illiteracy proved their practicality. Seems nobody aspired to be John Maynard Keynes. That must have been my goal as a student, as I wasn’t preparing for anything. Which may be how I wound up with five degrees plus detours into Carl Jung, German, philosophy, and calligraphy. I’ve seldom aspired to be anything in a career sense, either, which explains why I’ve been a student, soldier, teacher, investment advisor, author, ghost writer, Senate staffer, federal employee — and, multiple times, a Fortune 500 hand. However, there’s someone I’ve wanted to be since I was a boy: I wanted to be Paladin — a white man in black leathers, a trailwise aristocrat and gunman accurate with Shakespeare whose ambiguous occupation was Have Gun Will Travel. The world of black-and-white TV was a world of moral and cultural black and white, but that fueled my wanting to be a gentleman who was at home in a San Francisco hotel and on the prairie and everywhere was unfailingly capable and unchangingly himself. As an English student I’d have said I wanted to be a scholar-warrior, a Renaissance man, Gracian’s true person, Shaftsbury’s man of parts, but what explains my becoming an English student — and probably explains most things about me — is that I’ve always wanted to be Paladin. Eventually I wanted money, too, so I tried business. That’s another reason I’ve not begun my article. For if English students’ “skill” is maligning the sensibilities of men and moguls, I can’t fault their conclusions. One Caligula I worked for fired a whole department whose chairs weren’t tucked under their desks one Friday night. Several were duck hunters. Bhopal, Love Canal, Three Mile Island, the Pinto, and massive personnel downsizing never surprised me, coming from men who’d shoot a duck in the back. Another invited us to Easter buffet attended by rented black women wearing white gloves. In a burst of ebullience, he grabbed a cleaver, heaved the sterling silver cover off a serving platter to unveil a ham big as a bolt of cloth, and asked the first person in line, “Mrs. Rosen, would you like some ham?” So it went: “Hello, Mr. Eisenberg, have some ham” . . . “Good to see you, Mr. and

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Mrs. Ginsberg. Ham?” I relive it in slowest motion: the beaming CEO, the bison-sized hunk of prostrate pork, the misty spray as the precisely aimed cleaver bit into it with hostly vigor, the aghast silence as each severed slab hesitated one guillotined head of an instant before calving like icebergs from a glacier onto the reluctantly outstretched plate of a grimacing Jew. Yet I stayed in business, partly because I couldn’t go home again. English departments changed those final semesters of the seventies when I studied prose style, rhetorical theory, and twentieth-century American essays. I was reading great writing and hoping to add just one sentence of mine to it while my department championed idiolects, Black English, “students’ right to their own language,” and “spelling doesn’t count.” My choice was business or $14,000 no-tenure jobs fighting to teach educated expression in an English department. I persisted because the slow effect of corporate America was cumulative. Not until my third corporate job did I find my boss — whose face had acquired the pallor and perimeter of the many asses against which it had been eagerly pressed — rifling through my briefcase. And when doing my actual work, I was doing what suited my temperament, talent, and, yes, education. Plus there were intermissions— during book tours, self-employment, and becoming an investment advisor before the life-change of joining the Senate Finance Committee and the halfbusiness/half-government U.S. Mint. Money also counted. Not from stock options and Croesus salaries: money saved from average salaries — for non-teaching jobs — began small and grew. Savings I saved to save myself, my portfolio proclaimed liberty within imprisonment more eloquently than poets and was portable property, sir, portable property writ larger than Dickens. It was mine, like my degrees, forever mine and growing, mortgaged to no other will. Money saved by discipline and multiplied through diligence, my money, was an exponent of my wit independent of jobs “Enjoyed no sooner but despisèd straight . . . Past reason hated as a swallowed bait.” Investing offset the expense of spirit until the merely witless became savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust. If I knew today’s English students could appreciate paradox and irony, I’d say what they’re learning, as I perceive it, won’t qualify them for any corporate job, although it applies to all of them I’ve had. But what I really want to say is, “Jeez, kid, you read books for that?” I think they asked the wrong guy for an article. I studied English

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and business but left the one before it betrayed me and the other before it killed me. I only wanted to be civilized, multicultural, a wellspoken and well-ordered mind, and my skills brought me jobs from men who serve pork to Jews. Talk about irony: my skills made me palatable to them. I’ve decided I’ll just send whatever I write and hope other English students get lucky earlier than I did. Anything else might confirm them in a prejudice they tortured out of books and haven’t earned. In my case, what matters is that everything did work out. I’m relieved that Dad lived to see me content in a non-teaching job. I know he worried. So did I.

.Pound . . . . . . . .Foolish ................................................................

C

oin collectors are wealthier and better educated than statistically typical American consumers, and businesses file lawsuits hoping to get the Mint’s mailing list of 1.1 million names. Days like today, when it’s time to phone customers who wrote angry letters published in Coin World and Numismatic News, I’d gladly turn that list over and let some other business deal with them. My father was a retailer, so I half-sympathize with customers who wrote complaining their order never arrived or it was incomplete or mistakenly billed or that we otherwise in some way failed our part of the transaction. I’d fully sympathize, except most items we sell cost $20 to $30, and over so little money some of them behave in ways that would shame their mothers. I can help this group, at least, but not letter-writers who complain about the coins themselves. Their number of potential objections is limitless. They don’t like designs. They don’t like themes commemorated. They don’t like the packaging because we changed it or didn’t. We’re minting too many coins or too few. You’d never believe something as small as a coin could generate vitriol and worse from people who are wealthier and better educated. For these letter-writing customers, you’d think there’s a simple solution: if you don’t like it, don’t buy it. Or send it back for the Mint’s smiling refund. I’m afraid it isn’t that simple. These are the “ten-power collectors” of the coin trade, which they refer to as “the hobby,” as if there were no other, and they have to have coins. They buy them and complain, but they’ll keep buying them and complaining because being a coin collector is their life definition. They’re called ten-power collectors because they use 10⫻ magnifying glasses to examine their coins, but after so many conversations with this numismatic sub-group I simply call them angry and bitter old men. I think they like being unhappy.

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I think it satisfies something in them when the Mint makes coins they dislike, because they can feel institutionally insulted and unappreciated. Since ten-power collectors overwhelmingly are elderly men, I wonder if complaining about coins is their way of railing about the world going on without them. I wonder if collecting coins is their way of harboring against death. Maybe it is, because I’ve never once spoken with a ten-power collector who even faintly seems to like coins. They certainly never touch their coins; they don’t touch the clear plastic capsules that hold their coins unless they’re wearing gloves. Some of them rarely even take their coins out to look at. They keep them inside their plastic capsules, inside their cardboard packaging, and inside a safe-deposit box, locked cabinet, or locked room. If they ever look at them, it’s through that 10⫻ loupe. I’ve also never heard a ten-power collector admit he buys coins for himself. They couldn’t possibly have spent thousands of dollars, often tens of thousands, on themselves. No, they buy coins for their children and grandchildren. That’s what they say if you ask and what they say when they write the editor. I suppose in their minds the grandchild excuse absolves their behavior when I phone. It couldn’t possibly be that they’re rude and resentful people; they’re only acting that way on behalf of their descendants. My father was a grandfather and greatgrandfather, and I don’t recall anyone ever asking Dad to buy coins and hide them in a box for our sakes. My job makes me the first person wives, children, grandchildren, and lawyers phone when they’re trying to sell the collection. That’s what happens to the coins. Believe me, I know. I know, also, that I’m tired and sad and have my own multigenerational anger because my father died ten years before he should have. I’m not disposed to deal with ten-power collectors just now. I’d throw the newspapers away and alibi to my boss, except Dad was a retailer and tried to appease disgruntled customers. I hope a useful lesson comes from dealing with people who are psychically such small change. Perhaps a linguistic lesson about progression or proportion as elements of definition, for many people have coins lying around but aren’t “collectors.” Perhaps a life lesson in deciphering emotional mysteries, such as the link between a compulsively cramped personality and itty-bitty mintmarks, tiny engraver’s initials, or imperceptible

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scratches. Here’s certainly a tutorial in how excess is moderation squeezed too tight. Squeezed, let’s say, until the imprint of Lincoln’s beard appears on your thumb. I suppose there’s even a financial principle: you must be a miser at some emotional level to collect coins, but you must be part-miser to do anything judicious with money. No one has a cent to invest unless he refused to spend it, unless he first gave in to miserly impulses. But even if I find redeeming lessons in this situation, nothing changes my feelings about it. Meanness, be it bad manners or a stingy soul, shocks me in people who have a big salary, big portfolio, or big coin collection. As I see it, there are only two reasons to earn, spend, save, invest, hoard, collect, contemplate, or associate with money. One: it stands between you and poverty. Two: each cent after the one that assures survival — each extra cent that distances you from stealing potatoes, sleeping in culverts, and washing in bus station bathrooms — lets you gather another penny’s worth of dignity, grace, and civility. Jack Benny played the penny-pincher for laughs. John D. Rockefeller gave a dime to people who stopped him on the street. If you won’t let abundance broaden your spirit, you may as well be Scrooge without learning his lesson, Midas without repenting the golden touch, or Silas Marner without ever having loved the golden-haired girl. Whatever ten-power collectors may know about coins, they haven’t learned that about money.

.Wedded . . . . . . . . . .to . . . Windsor ........................................................

A

few days ago I mailed Mother information and comments about Windsor Fund that I’d downloaded from the Internet. I’d highlighted facts about performance that I wanted her to see, but I was measured in what I sent, leaving out most disparaging things I’d found, like comments from shareholders who’d apparently flamed off e-mails to the chat line while placing sell orders. I phone Mother every Friday, mostly to gauge the sound of her voice, and she brought up the papers I’d sent. I had the feeling she’d not read them, but when she said she didn’t want to sell Windsor yet, I heard something in her voice. Windsor Fund was the only investment she knew Dad owned, because it seems to have been the only one he spoke about. I gathered that sometimes he’d tell her Windsor had declined a little but it would come back. Why he would speak to Mother about a mutual fund, which scarcely interested her, and why he mentioned only Windsor among the securities he owned are questions I can’t answer. The question is made more curious because Dad seldom discussed Windsor with me, although we talked about his bonds and preferreds and other parts of his portfolio that paid income. Maybe he thought more of my opinion about income investments because most of my books are about those. People don’t invest emotionally in income securities as they invest in growth securities, and people don’t delight in the same way when they pay off. If you buy a bond that pays interest on time, it’s only doing what it’s supposed to do. There’s no swell of wind filling your sails as there is when a stock rises or a growth fund takes off. People might cash an interest check with a sense of relief, gratitude, or even of entitlement, but I’ve never known anyone who did so with the feeling life had conspired on their side and graced them, like Gatsby’s smile, with

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an irresistible prejudice in their favor. It’s curious. Own a bond, and you own a promise to be paid. Own a growth security, and you own Promise Itself, even though you’re promised nothing. Mother doesn’t want to discuss Windsor, and I understand. Dad bought it for its promise, and as long as she holds it, the promise isn’t over. Maybe that’s why Dad never discussed Windsor with me. He was sixty when he bought it, and I was thirty-five. Maybe he didn’t want me looking at Windsor as if it were merely an investment. OK, I said to Mother, let’s hold Windsor awhile longer. We’ll put Dad to work on it. She liked that idea.

.Deutsch . . . . . . . . . . .Heute ..........................................................

M

y performance in German was even more fumbling and stumbling than usual this fine June evening, and after class I flung myself onto a bench outside school and lit a cigarette. A stupid thing to do when your father died of cancer, and it joined the roster of shortcomings I began upbraiding myself about. Several minutes into my monologue in self-reproach, a familiar alto voice cast a cautious “Hi” over my shoulder. The voice, followed by the trim figure and cinnamon hair appearing with a turn of my head, belonged to my teacher. “ Waiting for your ride?” She spoke in English, which was for the best, considering, but her politeness — not to mention practicality, given my evening’s tongue-knotted performance — added to my nettle. “No,” I said, “just sitting here reciting from the Book of Lamentations.” Susanne’s English is nearly native, but my darker expostulations are beyond most people, so I added, “An Apocryphal Scripture. Goes between Ruth and Revelations.” That cleared everything up. Talk about darkness. She asked me about class, and I answered, “It good. Me not so.” After three hours scarifying German, I’d shed English for Tontospeak and forgotten my manners, too. I’ve seldom spoken to Susanne outside class, but she’s said a little about herself there. She’s Serbian, Croatian, and Austrian — speaks four or five languages — has an American husband who’s State Department or CIA and two sons. She earned Austrian degrees in a business-office program and law, and it wasn’t easy. If you can hear hurt in the voice of someone speaking a language you barely follow, I’ve heard it in hers as she described teachers who dissed her as a low-

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promise child of inferior races, how she started college in her midtwenties because her father scoffed at girls going to school, and how early on she decided never to marry an Austrian, a German, or a Yugoslavian. I could picture her — maybe standing at her mirror as a teenager, tallying her ever-so-slightly and Slavically rounded nose, the mole to the right of her chin that I find adorable — and I could imagine her deciding to go it alone if that’s what it took. Smarts, flirtatiousness, and flint make up this woman, and I thought I should make up for being churlish. “As you can tell, I’m not happy with my progress.” “Can I ask you something? Why are you doing this?” “You mean why take German when I’m so bad at it? I wish I knew.” “I know one thing,” she answered. “You are a very complicated man. Maybe the most complicated I know. Definitely the most complicated American man.” She spoke with such certainty of not being contradicted that I laughed. I almost asked if she spoke as an experienced teacher or as a forty-year-old woman and if she finds most men uncomplicated or only American men, but instead I said, “Every woman I know says the same thing. The last thing my ex-wife said was” — I startled myself by blurting it spontaneously in German: »Mein nächster Mann wird normal sein«— My next husband will be normal. I thought that was funny, but Susanne didn’t. Empathy for another female perhaps, or maybe after ruling out men who’d have held her to Kinder, Kirche, Kuche she wasn’t humoring any extreme. I don’t know how she could’ve decided anything about me, unless I simply look complicated as I sit in class, sputtering. It made me think about all the “others” who counsel themselves in native languages while cleaning my house or office, starching my laundry, serving me in restaurants, or chatting me up at embassies during coin presentations. Provided you speak Spanish, María Elvia could tell you more about me than I want known, including, I admit with chagrin, that I fleck a little toothpaste on my bathroom mirror. Assemble all these people in an English as a second language seminar, and I wonder what all of them could tell me about me. For my part, I seem to be most intent on telling apart those who least resemble me. I’ve learned to see right away if someone’s Japanese or Chinese, and I’m beyond mistaking a Thai for a Korean. But tell a

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Spaniard from an Italian across the room? Not right off, unless they’re acting like caricatures. And I’d be more annoyed at myself mistaking a Thai for a Korean than a Spaniard for an Italian. On the other hand, Germans, Austrians, and Yugoslavs resent being mistaken for each other, but Susanne wouldn’t marry any of them. One aspect of dating the woman I now date is watching Russians discover America — she imports them for U.S. Information Agency — and not long ago a Russian woman said to me at a party, “Can I ask you something? It’s about my coworkers. They come in at 8:30 with coffee and a bagel. They work through lunch. At 5:00 the boss lets them have beer, and they work and drink until 7:00 or 8:00. Do all Americans do that? Is that normal?” Not for those of us who have German at 6 p.m. Whatever went into making us, something else has gotten into us — a voice over the shoulder, an image in a glass darkly. You always hear how we seldom get the chance to see ourselves as others see us, but that’s not true. Sometimes the chance comes right up and sits down beside you.

.Gains . . . . . . .and . . . . .Losses ............................................................

I

still hear from women who once decided I’m too complicated. I don’t know what to make of there being so many. These are women I’ve known for decades, half our lives in some cases, since grad school. The literature part, not the business school part. My switch in curriculum vitae was a source of dissent. I paid more attention to stock quotes than her, one complained. I’d forfeited a literary ethic, I believe another said. There are no laudable novels about bankers, one may have pointed out, probably citing James, Dreiser, or Dos Passos. Almost all of them now work for corporations, big, household name outfits, their stocks heavy in the go-go mutual funds. They used to send Christmas cards. Now they send to know about time-shares in the islands. Odd thing is, long distance money-talk has brought us closer than when we saw each other every day. I know who’s unhappy at work, who’s divorcing and why, whose kids have medical conditions, who sleeps in separate bedrooms. Telling me when they’re broke means they tell me when they’re broken-hearted. Their stories are awful. One ex-girlfriend in New York worked as a waitress into her thirties, painting, giving English lessons, trying to sell canvasses. She used to ask about credit cards with cheap rates. Then she met a man — that’s how they put it: “I’ve met a man”— an investment banker from Puerto Rico. He was out of the country half of each month, but absences didn’t prevent their marrying, moving to the Upper East Side, and apparently being happy until his wife in Puerto Rico showed up in New York, one child in her arms, another holding her hand. I couldn’t advise about settlements for non-marriages, was glad I knew nil about the “mony” in palimony. I guess I could have made a literary allusion — Maria: A Woman Wronged. George Sand maybe. I didn’t. Only

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one time in all these conversations have I let myself say, “Looks like I wasn’t such a bad deal after all.” We laugh sometimes. Out in Oregon, a former live-in love was going over her portfolio as her eleven-year-old daughter swept into the room, hunting for the TV remote. She called out, “Look, dear. See how much there is for your college?” Her daughter snatched up the channel-changer and tossed back, “Sure, Mom, but what’d you pay for those stocks?” “Are you sure that kid’s not yours?” she said. “Not funny,” I said. “Not remotely funny.” Yet it seems they half-are my charges, though not my children. A former coworker in Chicago calls to ask if her daughter can afford a house. The ex-wife of a coworker asks if a trust department should handle their daughter’s college fund. Other calls, other questions. I’ve not seen these mothers or children in years — ten, twelve, fifteen even; some daughters are the age their mothers and I were then — but I’ve seen their savings accounts opened, savings bonds cashed, wedding loot scooted into blue chips. Not all their fathers can say the same. And mothers of women I knew — know still, I guess. I’ve acquired mothers bearing late husbands’ stocks and bonds, pensions to be taken lump-sum or annuitized, CDs drawing woeful interest which they fret about moving, even to Treasury notes. The mother of my current significant other has her money in a savings account, and her savings account pays 0.8 percent interest. I can boost that by a factor of ten; I’ve done it lots of times, and I enjoy it more each time. Zero-point-eight percent interest. Less than one percent on a savings account. That’s why there are no nice books about bankers. I haven’t met a one of these mothers, but I know their names — May, Mae, Devorah, Hazel. I know their first question: “ Won’t the bank be upset?” I know their baking and their banking because some sent thank-you pound cakes, a twist on “in for a penny, in for a pound.” Their money — I know their money therefore know them, as I know their daughters and daughters’ money, and maybe their granddaughters and granddaughters’ money. Sometimes I feel like the polygamous cyber-scion of an extended financial family, watching over e-mail in-laws, web widows, phone progeny, mail-order divorcees whose mid-life dowries arrive Federal Express, stuffed with 401k pa-

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pers. I’m trying to remember the name of Pip’s barrister in Great Expectations. That would be me. It’s not the same, being here for is not being there with, and I wonder what it means that I’ve acquired half-a-dozen virtual families but never one of my own. I wonder what it says that I’m always willing to help raise their mothers’ interest rates but am not at all eager to help raise their children. What to make of these multi-decade, Dutch uncle, Mister Chipps, ménage à pal relationships, except to say they’re nice for what they are and in ways deeper and more pleasant than I remember them being when we dated or worked together. It’s as if we’ve found a way to build on the trusted parts of knowing each other, and in that way have become closer friends. There’s so much to make of this, yet I don’t know what to make of it. Money is no basis for a relationship, we all were motherly told, but it’s been the basis of a lasting, evolving, expanding one among us. We have grown up together even though we haven’t been around each other for years, and in our separate absences we also have learned you don’t live on love, two do not eat as cheaply as one. Simple things. True things. All financial things, and in being financial things they are much more, as we now see, separately therefore together. We have gotten older, been kicked around some, faced things, and kept each other when others have fallen away. They have vindicated me, the grad grind with the stock tables. It’s been a gift of greater value than any advice I ever gave them. It’s life. It wouldn’t make a bad book. One other thing. One other thing to be said. Sometimes I look at their accounts and remember when we lived on stipends and split dinner checks, or I remember having $1,000 left from paying tuition and being known thereafter as “my rich boyfriend.” Once in awhile, looking at their accounts and mine, I see what they’d add up to if they were combined, and I recall what we said we’d do if we ever had money. I reflect on how much better we know each other now, really. Then I think . . . no, no. Return of the Native. That way lies madness.

.Emancipation .....................................................................

E

xcept for Lincoln, every president on a U.S. coin faces left. Only Lincoln is in right profile. Several times each year phone callers bring this to my attention. Then they ask, “Is that because the other presidents turned their backs on Lincoln for freeing the slaves?” Honest — honest as Old Abe himself — I swear I’m not making this up. People who most recently called me with this question were a banker, a librarian, a teacher, and a civic club program chairman. It is a point of professionalism with me that I’m patient and polite with people who call, but of all questions that hover in the nether nowhere beyond my telephone, this one is really vexing. For one thing, if you lay a cent, nickel, dime, quarter, and halfdollar in a line of ascending denomination, the other presidents face toward Lincoln, not away from him. Even if you never knew that Washington freed his slaves, although not in his lifetime, you’d have to have a loose grip on this century to believe FDR or JFK would resent it. As for Jefferson . . . well, what can you say about Jefferson? But the other presidents? Fact is, to pose this question you’d have to be in another place and time altogether — somewhere there’s a presidential Olympus from which Washington, Jefferson, Roosevelt, and Kennedy reached into the world of mortals and flip-flopped every likeness of themselves on every coin ever minted just to spite Abe. You’d have to be . . . Greek, right from my reading list. They say the Classics are always with us, but I never thought this is what they meant.

.Last . . . . . .Laugh ..................................................................

T

he sole remaining task awaiting me in Iowa was to audit Dad’s safe-deposit box, and I dreaded the whole undertaking. That’s how I saw it — an undertaking. Excavating the last details, the bare bones. It was the last task, and when finished I’d have to admit what’s ended. An inventory of the box proved everything was irrevocably my responsibility now. Since the first of the year I’ve slid unspoken into my role because it was assumed I’d care for Dad’s portfolio and Mother’s needs. Mother and Dad, the lawyer, the broker, the bankers, the transfer agents, even my parents’ friends merely accepted I would handle what needed to be handled. I accepted I’d be handling everything. But until inventory of the box, there’d not been a moment, a mark on the calendar, that said, “From here on . . .” The ritual was as prescribed as disarming a bomb. Mother and the woman from the bank inserted and turned matching keys simultaneously. The woman eased the long thin box from the wall, careful not to scrape its sides against its casement, and handed it to me with polite, dutiful indifference, as if it were harmless now. We walked to her desk, and she extracted from her center drawer — a pencil and notebook paper. The final accounting would be taken like a pop quiz: short answer, fill in the blank, neatness and penmanship particularly count. I knew I was overly touchy about this prying, semi-obscene ritual. Overly touchy — I knew how apt that description, too, was as I raised the lid and started to lift out the contents. First came the Citicorp certificate, intricately scrolled in green-andwhite with eagles embossed in the corners. I remarked on how lifelike they seemed, but the woman wrote only “certificate from Citicorp.” I saw the certificate from Krupp, folded lengthwise into thirds. I refolded it and perched it in my shirt pocket. Entry: paperwork from

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limited partnership. Mother’s expensive jewelry wrapped in cloth — unwrapped and rewrapped — came next, suitably itemized, and it lay atop another certificate, red and ornate like the others. Sonoma Mines? It wasn’t in Dad’s records. Successor to the Lost Dutchman? Wealth of the ages, legend of the Americas, right in my hand? From across the desk: scribble. I’d found all the papers I needed, and I’d found Sonoma Mines for curiosity. That was enough. I didn’t need or want to dig further, but that was irrelevant to what compelled this ritual. No one saw it as I did. They saw it as signing for contents of the box. I saw it as accepting the content of Dad’s affairs. They required me to sit there with my mother and count everything. I saw it as making everything count from now on forever. What mattered to them was that I note anything of importance. What mattered to me is that I never miss anything of importance now. A wooden nickel was wedged in the seam in the rear left corner of the box. I didn’t see it as a good omen, for it was the tangible icon of every voice in my head. Don’t take any wooden nickels. Everything Dad left is yours to care for now. This is all the money your mother will ever have. Don’t blow it. Don’t make even a minor mistake. Take no wooden nickels. When I worked it loose, it was a token from Dollar Days, a sale that merchants used to put on every summer, their way of saying, “A dollar buys a lot if you shop locally.” That may explain the token, but not why Dad kept it thirty years in his safe-deposit box. I laid it back gently next to a satin pouch with a drawstring near a rolledup paper bag half-again larger than a pack of cigarettes. I lifted the pouch and squeezed it, like groping a mystery grab-bag at a carnival, and felt metal discs slide beneath my fingers. I picked up the paper bag and heard the dull clink as I hefted it in my other hand. I poured the contents of both onto the desk. Coins. Unmistakably, indelibly coins. Copper-cast and silvershining, some dull some bright, some reed-edged and some smoothrimmed, sound as a dollar, common as a penny, specie, coin of the realm, coins — a couple dozen Morgan and Peace silver dollars with dates scattered from the 1880s through the 1930s, a hundred or so wheat pennies from the 1930s and 1940s. Mother looked at me and said, “Do you suppose they’re worth anything?”

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I laughed. It was the perfect joke that I, the helpful voice of the U.S. Mint, who’d addressed that question a dozen times, two dozen, for widows on the phone, should have to answer it before a pile of my own father’s coins. It was perfect, and I sensed Dad in it, as if he knew what bothered me and therefore left something I deal with every day for the last thing he put into my hands. I could almost hear him saying, “This won’t be so bad. You do this kind of stuff all the time.” I told Mother to save the coins for the great-grandchildren. The coins could be more valuable when the great-grandchildren reach my age. They would be more valuable if they’d known their greatgrandfather, but I guess they’ll never realize that. If you must know — and I know you must — the Morgan and Peace dollars were in average shape and probably worth $8 to $30 apiece. Dealers often sell wheat cents by the pound, although some are worth big money. Lots of things are valuable if you know what you’re looking at. The wooden nickel, for all I know, is priceless. At least as priceless as a wink and a nod and a last playful vote of confidence from your father.

.Future . . . . . . . . Value .............................................................

M

other has asked me to look into strategies that diminish inheritance taxes for my brother, sisters, and me when she dies. Pleasant agreement was not my reaction. I did not care for any hint that she’s given up living or that she sees her investments as her children’s money. Your investments are your money, I objected, and there’s every indication you’ll live another ten years and longer. That was a reasonable supposition on my part: at seventy-four she’s the youngest among several healthy siblings whose mother was beyond ninety when she died. I am arranging your portfolio with the idea you’ll need money for fifteen years more, I told her. Turns out I was the one being emotional. She was merely responding to information I’d given her weeks ago. The information was a print-out I’d prepared from a future value program off the Internet. A future value program tells how much money accumulates in so many years if you invest so much monthly at an assumed rate of return. I’ve found many future value programs on the Internet like the one at www.interest.com/hugh/calc/annuity.cgi, and I’d entered the amount I intended Mother to invest at an assumed growth of nine percent, well beneath eleven to twelve percent annually which the stock market averages. The calculation said that in ten years we’d more than double the money Dad left and double it again in fifteen. This future value program also has an annuitization feature, which tells how much can be withdrawn monthly from the accumulated sum and for how many years, given the even lesser seven percent rate of return I’d assumed. According to the annuity feature, Mother eventually could spend two hundred times what she now spends and could do so forever. Before she reached her nineties, I assured her, she would have

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at her disposal a yearly income that placed her in the wealthiest two percent of the U.S. population — all because, I satisfiedly thought to myself, your eldest son is a financial genius. It further turns out I was being not only more emotional than Mother but also less sensible. My mother is the daughter of a Pennsylvania Dutch housewife and farmer/ lay minister who grew up in Iowa during the Depression. She and my father raised and educated four children through frugality and self-denial and worked sixty-hour weeks at a hardware store they built in their forties. My mother refrigerates peas from the dinner table and reheats them for lunch. She couldn’t imagine being wealthy, besides which, money, her own included, does not impress her. She finds it a tacky subject. Know your client: I had forgotten the first rule of managing money. I also had forgotten inheritance taxes. Joint assets she and my father owned passed to her without taxes. But if her assets grow as my projections suggest, the federal government and the State of Iowa will take upwards of sixty percent of everything. My father, as he would have put it, would rather eat gravel with the chickens than give the government his money. Therefore, today I phoned my Nepal trekking buddy Cindy, an estate attorney on K Street, and per the Washington custom when you seek advice offered lunch instead of her $300 hourly fee. What she suggested is that my mother refuse my father’s estate. Refused, the estate passes to its next heirs, my siblings and me. In turn, we establish a trust for Mother’s benefit. I manage the trust, which Cindy sets up at her hourly fee — we’re not dumb here in Washington — and Mother accesses its income whenever and in amounts she wishes. When Mother dies, there’s no estate to be taxed, as my siblings and I already own everything. I asked for the catch. “None, really,” Cindy answered. “Except, strictly speaking, your mother would be penniless.” Cindy mentioned another possibility, reminded of an incident with a client: when it’s time to fund the trust, one of us could back out of the intended agreement. And what could I as executor do about that? Not much, she answered casually. Set up the trust anyhow, maybe sue the offending sibling. The trust pays the lawyers. The lawyers usually get everything. “But you don’t foresee any problem like that, do you?” Cindy asked.

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Suddenly — and shamefully — I didn’t know if I foresaw a problem. As a registered investment advisor I’d seen families sundered over money — unknown cousins twice removed appearing from nowhere demanding a share, siblings who focused every childhood grudge on any amount they thought due them, mothers who spent final days in agony because of it. Those families thought there would be no problem, and there was, big time. This alternative is out of the question, I said to myself. I can’t present this idea. Then my own Washington instincts asserted. What if years from now someone learns I knew about this and didn’t suggest it? No possibility, I said quickly; my brother and sisters aren’t like that. Just as quickly I thought, if there’s no possibility you wouldn’t already have ruled out presenting it. And the potential isn’t only my brother and sisters: they have wives and husbands and children who would be adults when they found out. I know them less than I might know my own brother and sisters. At a window table of a French restaurant with images of my siblings’ faces floating above my plate, I recalled something I’d read, and if any synchronicity governs remembering what you read, it was probably from Great Expectations. It was something about the heart beating in the breast of the person lying beside you being the heart of a stranger. I don’t know what I’m going to do about this, and there’s no future value program off the Internet to help me figure it out.

.Back . . . . . .and . . . . . Forth .............................................................

F

or several days I’ve felt like large, rough fingers have been stirring around my gut. I’ve not slept well and have spent hours each evening pacing in my kitchen — I do that when I’m preoccupied or upset — as I weigh whether I’ll propose a trust for Mother to my brother and sisters. That’s part of what I’ve been thinking. In no order, more like simultaneously, I’ve been thinking about estate-reduction, my promise to look into it, Dad’s expectation that I’d take care of everything, the prospect of being hated by at least one brother or sister, paying a lawyer $300 an hour for any reason, Mother’s will, the need to update my own, and what would happen to Mother’s finances if anything happened to me. Mostly, I’ve been thinking I don’t know my brother and sisters. That’s overstatement. Perhaps not overstatement, merely a statement with over-stated undertones. Actually, what may be bothering me is that I don’t know if I have a cause for concern and, therefore, don’t know whether my potential cause for concern is overstated. No, that’s not it, either. What’s bothering me is that I don’t know my brothers and sisters well, and I’m not sure how that happened. I was a freshman in high school when Mother and Dad married and assembled a his-and-hers family of two boys (his) and two girls (hers). My siblings were in grade school and junior high during the four years we lived together, then it was four years of college and four years in the army for me. When I returned to Iowa for grad school, one sister was married with a kid, one was about to be married, and my brother was hanging around two years out of high school. I phoned an air force recruiter and gave him my brother’s name. Bob spent twenty years in the air force, so I must have had the right impulse. Both sisters became nurses, but that was later and I had nothing to do with it. They were in

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their late twenties when they started nursing school, although Susan may have been in her thirties. I don’t know if their spouses have middle names. It occurs to me I might learn their middle initials for the first time on litigant’s papers. It occurs to me my siblings don’t know I pace back and forth when I am preoccupied or upset.

.Money . . . . . . . . Doctor ................................................................

I

n executing power of attorney over my mother’s finances I am undertaking responsibilities that affect her and my siblings, and I am doing it as would the proverbial Reasonable Man, the Prudent Man. That is, I’m following proper principles. You could lay my portfolio plan before any blue-blood trust officer, and he would approve, but I have no idea how my siblings would react. Homo fiduciarus, I observe first principles from the racial wisdom of financial mankind but know only approximately the ages of my brother and sisters. I made a similar observation years ago to a surgeon I had seen after I erupted with hemorrhoids the size of cat’s-eye marbles and small sausages. He barely glanced at the affected area — a stare would have been neither necessary nor edifying for either of us — and announced, “Those have to come out.” I replied that I find one thing about surgeons and surgery fascinating: “You do this unfathomably intimate thing of entering another person’s body, and yet it’s also totally impersonal. You propose to carve up my butt with a scalpel, I’m about to agree, and we scarcely know each other’s names.” This was not an insight he’d received from other patients. He leaned imperceptibly back in his chair, scrutinized my face slightly longer than he’d examined my hemorrhoids, and with an air between reasserted professionalism and offended dignity answered, “I use a laser.”

.Dungeons . . . . . . . . . . . . and . . . . . .Dragons ...................................................

I

have no laser but I do have e-mail, and they seem like identical wizardry from the vantage of someone who remembers carbon paper, mimeograph machines, and slide rules — or, for that matter, remembers when television was in its infancy and remembers his baby brother brought home from the hospital with a soft spot where the bones in his head hadn’t joined. I sat down at my computer, brought up e-mail and the message group Siblings, and composed a letter — if they’re still called letters when they’re electronic. I explained what I’d been looking into at Mother’s request and described the workings of trusts and their advantages. I explained I had doubts despite their elegance at ducking taxes, and among them was the prospect we’d wind up hating each other. I said, although whether in essence or outright I don’t remember, that the arrangement came down to artificially impoverishing Mother and, although not in immediate effect, enriching ourselves, even though Mother would continue to profit from a portfolio removed from her ownership. And then I wrote that despite the abstractions they may find hard to follow, there would nonetheless be a real moment when I would hand each of them a check for more money than any of us had ever seen — then ask them and their spouses to hand it back. The only way I could present this option to Mother, I wrote, would be to establish beforehand that each of us agreed. If this is something they have to ponder longer than ten seconds, I told them, their answer must be “no,” and one “no” — or hesitant “yes”— would be reason to scrap the idea. While I was explaining this, I felt a growing shame, as if I were doing something behind my mother’s back. For all I knew, my brother and sisters would interpret it precisely that way, in which case I’d have sired instead of avoided the suspicion and resentment Cindy warned

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about. In fact, I wouldn’t have blamed my siblings for deciding to take hold of Mother’s money for her sake lest I do something underhanded. I spent more than an hour composing my letter, changing words and phrases, clarifying, I hoped. I revised the ending to emphasize I was describing the proposition, not advocating it. When I finished, I couldn’t send it. I left the computer glowing in my study and went downstairs to the kitchen to reheat my coffee in the microwave. I cursed the position I was in, even though there’s no likelihood I’d ever trust someone else with Mother’s money. I blasted the invention of e-mail, which makes it easy to dash off the wrong message and spread it around. Executors should do this as kings or regents did it, bearing signet-sealed proffers upon silver trays down torch-lit corridors, not popping up on someone’s computer screen like a Mario Brother — an odd opinion, considering the discarnate notion I’m conveying to my siblings: that Mother would be penniless on paper but in fact would receive money through investments which don’t physically exist in a trust no one actually owns. I went back upstairs and sat for a long time, re-reading my e-mail. I decided to save it, look at it in the morning, and send it from work, if that’s what I wanted to do then. It was growing late, and the space between my stomach and head were in full burn. My eyes were burning, too, the lateness of the hour, contact lenses worn too long, the involuntary squinting at the screen. But the real problem was that I had a large spot in my head where the bones have not yet joined around this whole business.

.Stranger . . . . . . . . . . . in . . . the . . . . .House ..................................................

O

ver lunch hour I closed my office door and called up personal e-mail. I re-read what I’d written last night, held my breath, and sent it. I left myself recourse, however, because I asked my brother and sisters to reply to me privately, not to all of us jointly. I’d written that I’d abandon the idea if one of us had reservations; with my siblings not knowing the others’ answers, I could have the killing reservations if they didn’t. I decided my verdict counted as much as theirs and the duplicitous thing would be to keep secret the possibility of a trust, not to stack the outcome against one. This logic also made me think I’ve been in Washington too long. Even so, I welcomed this solution and wondered why I hadn’t always seen it. I didn’t feel relieved for long, because Susan answered right away. My first reaction was vague disapproval that she’d be home and on-line at that hour, although as a nurse she works a different week. Apparently, at home and in cyberspace are customary places to be mid-morning in the Midwest, because my brother, who works nights, also answered immediately. I waited several minutes before opening their replies, wondering what they’d be and how I’d feel about them. I read their answers with the feeling of being released from a tight collar. Both said they didn’t want the government getting our parents’ money, but they rejected any idea that made Mother uncomfortable. They saw no reason why things shouldn’t stay as they are, implying I’d find a later way to thwart the IRS. Instead of e-mailing back, I decided to phone. At times in our lives my brother and sisters and I passed years without speaking. There have been ten-year periods when we didn’t see each other twice. I met one nephew as a baby and saw him the second

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time as a high school student. My siblings spent more time around Mother and Dad, and you’d ask why they’d trust me with every cent our parents had. Yet they did, and we shared the same opinion about at least one alternative. It occurred to me that my brother and sisters had always been there in the background and were appearing like a suddenly obvious solution to a difficult problem. I should get to know them better. By day’s end, however, my sister Kathy hadn’t answered, and I was annoyed. As kids, she was always last in the car when we were going anywhere.

.The . . . . .Oracle ................................................................

I

wonder what the Oracle at Delphi thought about people who brought her questions. For reasons I can’t figure from my reading, the Oracle is also called “the Pythoness.” People came to her with questions, like “ Who’s the wisest man in Athens?” or “ What about these invading Persians?” She never gave people a straight answer, however — only clues to decipher for themselves. In that regard, expectations of her petitioners differ from mine. If she was really a phythoness, she surely wanted to squeeze the daylights out of people once in awhile. “Good morning,” this woman on the phone said in a polite and modulated voice. “I have a half-dollar, and the back of this half-dollar is upside down. I’m wondering if I have a coin that might be valuable.” I don’t get many questions about half-dollars. The Mint makes only fifty thousand a year, the fewest of any denomination, but they have something in common with every circulating coin: all their reverse designs are upside down compared to the obverse. Take any U.S. coin between your thumb and forefinger with the profile of the president facing upright, and turn it end-over-end. The design on the back will be facing upright. This is called a coin flip. I should have told the lady this fact straight out, but I guess I was feeling python-like. “If you have other coins in your purse, take them out and lay them in front of you with their heads facing up. It doesn’t matter which coins.” I could hear this being accomplished. “Now, turn them all over.” I heard the clack, clack, clack as she dutifully did so. “My God,” she said. “They’re all upside down. Does this mean they’re all valuable?”

.Mother . . . . . . . . . in . . . the . . . . .City .......................................................

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o my surprise, it wasn’t hard to convince Mother to visit me in Washington over July 4th. I only had to ask three or four times. Her trip involved small hitches. Ed’s bank issued her a debit card instead of a credit card, so the ticket fee came out of her checking account right away. That alarmed her, as she’d rather pay her Visa by check. Also, I didn’t arrange more than an hour for changing planes at O’Hare. Still, everything balanced out. I was at National Airport much longer than an hour before her plane was due, and her luggage did catch a later flight. This was a trip she and Dad said they’d make but never did, and it was Mother’s first solo since Dad died. He always took care of everything when they traveled to Arizona with Ed and Grace and to Europe and South America with Alva’s church group. Although Mother had flown only three hours from home, it was the longest trip she’d made in a long while and the first flight she’d ever taken alone, as far as I know. A few days before her flight, I mentioned we’d be going to a party at a friend’s house on Capitol Hill, and I didn’t sufficiently appreciate that it would be the first time in thirty-six years she’d meet people who had no expectation of meeting Dad. She’d told me her passport needed renewing. I told her to bring her old passport and photos and I’d run them to the State Department storefront on 19th Northwest, but I missed the point. That wasn’t what she meant at all. I spent part of the previous weekend making my condo motherworthy, sponging off the handrails to the upstairs bedrooms, wiping down the inside of the fluorescent light panel on the kitchen ceiling, stuff María Elvia doesn’t do because she’s short but which my scarcely taller mother would notice. I took a few days off work and we made a

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circuit of all three branches of government as well as Smithsonian’s Air and Space Museum, which interested neither of us but which Dad always wanted to see. I’d planned everything well, if I say so myself. Dinner on the Alexandria waterfront the first night and a walk through Old Town, off to Mount Vernon down the road next morning, lunch, sightseeing nearby. The next day a tour to my former Senate Finance Committee office in the Dirksen Building, which adjoins the Hart Building where I dropped off papers before we toured it, then the underground railway to the Capitol, tour, out the historic Document Entrance on the east side and across the street to the Supreme Court, tour. The Museum of American History’s Dresses of the First Ladies exhibit dovetailed with an elevator jaunt to see the original of Jefferson’s writing desk that Dad replicated for me in his workshop. Picnic on the west lawn of the Capitol for the national Independence Day celebration, which featured an aging Leslie Gore singing “It’s My Party.” In high school I played that record repeatedly, 45 rpm speed, until I drove Mother to distraction, a destination to which I probably guided her often as a teenager. Then — glitch!: the schedule had us cabbing to Lincoln Memorial at the opposite end of the Mall, the best place to see the fireworks, but Independence and Constitution Avenues were cordoned off. Not a problem for a former Hill rat, now executive branch bureaucrat and back-avenue DC adoptee. A side route to the Third Street tunnel, 395 South to the Pentagon, two right turns and up Memorial Bridge, reaching Lincoln the back way. The next day, as we drove by the Federal Reserve Bank headquarters on Constitution, I said, “That’s the building where they change the interest rates.” All in all, a neat, tidy, clockwork sequence executed with the efficiency I try to bring to Mother’s portfolio. Even the leisure came off on schedule. I laid on dinner at La Chaumière on M Street in Georgetown, which I chose as much for the interior as the food — the still-functioning stone forge and wooden lathing and beams of what must have been a stable or blacksmithy. Mother predictably ordered shrimp and salmon in a puff pastry shell, a performance she can’t get in Iowa, and I ordered something or other, probably steak, with nonchalance as if to say “See, Mother? Your eldest son does this all the time.” We had a nice champagne. We ate among

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a good Washington crowd, several languages in evidence, nicely suited men, a couple Kennedy-era doyens so thin that tendons on their necks stood out. I noted with satisfaction that these were great ancillary highlights of the real Washington for Mother’s trip. Mother even ordered dessert, and after cappuccinos she asked our waiter for the check. Before I could object, she looked across the table and said, “I can afford this, can’t I.” It wasn’t a question. It was a confident statement of finding a justifiable happiness in the enjoyment of her means. My mother can afford a nice French dinner and knew it. She was telling me she knew it and that she liked knowing it. She would like it if I acknowledged it, so I said, “Yes, Mother, you certainly can afford this, if that’s what you want.” The contentment on my mother’s face as she signed the receipt was for me the highlight of her trip. That moment in the restaurant amid anvils and forges and intersection of past and present, of interiors preserved for nourishment of many kinds, was also the moment of a large lesson for me. It was a moment that showed me why I run my mother’s investments as fiercely as I do, why I cut every transaction to the nearest bone without really knowing why: I do it to see that quiet, secure, knowing contentment on her face. Mother’s simple confidence and serenity in her money are more important than my maneuvering, my stratagems, my scheduling, my arrangements, and I tend to forget that while attending particulars. It’s the principle I too often discount in managing her principal. And her dividends. But there was an equal lesson in the previous moment, the moment before confidently signing the bill when Mother was figuring the tip, and I stopped myself from saying, “DC tax is ten percent, so just double the tax.” That was a moment when I realized I am the one who takes care of things now. I am the one who sums things up swiftly and sets them on schedule and seals them down. I am the one who turns messy financial epics into neat fiscal epigrams to seal one luminous moment of Mother’s happiness and security. And even when I forget that luminous moment is my goal, that moment happens because I work toward it, even unconsciously. Caught up in the one moment, I said again, as much for myself as for her, “Yes, Mother, you can afford this,” and enjoyed my own in-

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creasing delight as she paid for dinner — paid with a credit card, not her debit card. She made sure. And remembering my thoughts in the moment that preceded it, I treat myself mildly for thinking, “Enterprise Oil 9.84% Series B Cumulative Preferred paid its quarterly dividend on July 1st. That covers it.”

.Money . . . . . . . . Ugly ................................................................

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nhappy news from Mother during my Friday phone call. During the past several weeks, her minister Alva has had difficulty standing and walking. She lost her balance working in her garden, and last weekend, when she and Mother were returning after a bridge game — separate cars, thankfully — she drove off the road and barely stopped before taking out a guard rail. Her doctor sent her to University Hospitals in Iowa City, where a brain scan found a tumor, and the next morning she entered what should have been three hours of surgery. In forty minutes the neurosurgeon was back in the waiting room, telling Alva’s mother and children the tumor had implicated too much of the brain and he saw no hope in treatment. Mother went to Iowa City to see Alva in the hospital, so I asked how she looked and if she’s been told. “ Well, you know,” she answered. I’m getting better at reading my mother, so I said, “Mother, what is it?” “Oh,” she said with the asperity she used when giving in to my father, “I just want to know that if anything like this happens to me, my kids won’t spend my final days arguing.” “Arguing over what?” “Oh, arguing over my money.” “Alva’s kids are standing around her room arguing about their inheritance?” “Not all of them,” she answered with the evasion she must have heard in my voice when I was a teenager. “So only most of Alva’s kids are yelling at each other.” “Not yelling,” she said, with the unmistakable intimation I should drop this subject.

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“OK, bickering. Bickering in earshot of their mother over what they get when she dies.” “I really don’t want to say more. I just don’t want it to happen with me.” I’ve never told Mother about earlier in the summer when I’d looked into trusts. She might like to have heard that her children are unanimous about what’s hers and uninterested in getting their hands on it. As we talked — that is, as she was trying to extract my promise to prevent what she wouldn’t admit is happening — I almost told her but didn’t. I guess I’m still queasy about everything in my mind then, or maybe I know the truth of situations doesn’t appear before the situations do. Or maybe I’ve seen enough ugliness over money that, like my mother, I’d rather not mention it. The memories rise up anyway, leaving their coppery taste in the mouth. Katherine, an acquaintance whose father died days before her wedding, leaving a business partnership that had no successor provisions because, after all, the partners were friends. My friend Debbie’s stepfather, who shoved a pen and new will into her mother’s hands on her last day in the hospital. Grad school chum Jill, whose parents disowned her for her relationship with the woman who held her hand as she died. The business was argued into receivership, what was Debbie’s mother’s was divvied up elsewhere, and the parents who disowned their daughter refused to be disinherited from the pathetic few dollars willed to her friend. How many of these stories do I know? Add to them Alva, now bandaged, diapered, and dying with a dying fall while her children won’t even remove their shouting to a farther room. It’s easy to call this the bad side of greed, the side which, like the back of a coin, is obverse-reverse to good greed, which moves people to save instead of squander, to invest so money grows, to be productive so it provides. But a Jekyll and Hyde reading gives these people too much credit. It’s like letting them blame an evil twin for what they did. I can’t even grant that these people were unwell in some way — lacked the enzyme to metabolize avarice or their chromosome for shame was defective or their cells went crazy and multiplied into an appalling tumor of a person. I don’t know what kind of people stiff their partner’s widow, sell their second wife’s jewelry without asking her daughter, or argue within earshot of their dying mother. All kinds of people, apparently, and a lot more of them than I used to think.

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What strikes me is how everyone’s hell-bent to get what he deserves in these situations, and no one does. After a lifetime of not smoking or drinking, Alva did nothing to deserve dying of cancer at fifty-eight and surely nothing to deserve what her children are doing to her. Her children aren’t getting what they deserve either. For that matter, my mother doesn’t deserve losing her husband and her friend within months. I guess the evil done to people lives after them, but the good is interred with their bones. If I get the chance again, I’ll promise Mother that the last sounds she hears won’t be her children yelling over money. It seems sad that it would be such a large and comforting thing to promise.

.Making .........a . . .Change .........................................................

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he good news in Friday’s phone call was that Mother abruptly said I should do what I think best about Windsor Fund. She said “about” not “with.” Rarely have I sensed greater meaning in choice of prepositions. I don’t know what prompted her change of mind, or perhaps heart. I’ve not mentioned Windsor lately, so it’s not as if I’ve been working on her. Maybe she looked at the material I sent, or maybe the prospect of something askew with her money has been gnawing at her. Question not the cause, said Heimdal, guardian of the gate to Asgaard, grant instead the effect. Whatever the cause, it reached a critical emotional mass, and she’s given me permission to do what I think best. About the Windsor. One does something about situations but with things, and investments are things. They respond in foretokened ways, rather like puppets upon a string of interest rates, earnings, business cycles, bond covenants, investors’ preferences, and companies’ good or bad decisions. There’s nothing you can do about this. In particular, you can’t reverse causes by berating their effects — may as well hope a rose will rebloom by yelling at it. However, there’s lots you can do about a portfolio, because you can change investments within it. By altering investments within a portfolio, you can change proportions of income and growth, increase or decrease exposure to different consequences, alter tax consequences, limit volatility, and situate it to profit from circumstances. Like reseeding a garden, you can plant what blossoms in the economic countryside, even if it’s cactus. Provided you’re willing to act, that is. Years ago I appeared on a radio show to promote a book, and a man phoned to bewail that his portfolio paid too little income. You can do three things to improve a portfolio’s income. Buy securities with

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longer maturity, because they usually pay higher interest. Switch types of securities, maybe from savings accounts to stocks. Sacrifice quality, as lower-rated securities usually pay higher rates. To each alternative he replied, “I’m a senior citizen.” What it came down to, he and I gently agreed, was that he wanted higher yields without doing anything except phoning the author at the radio station. I think of that man, picture him with bank statement in hand, tongue-lashing his ninety-day certificates of deposit or sighing at their ingratitude toward a senior citizen’s lot, insisting on desert with abundance all around. Mother dislikes the term “senior citizen.” Maybe that explains her willingness for me to do something about Windsor and the way she phrased it. Windsor is a circumstance she need not surrender to, a particular to be adjusted with improvement upon the whole. On the other hand, maybe it’s nothing like that at all. Question not the cause when you have permission to do something about it.

.Philosopher’s . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Stone ....................................................

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s of today the stock market’s gains for this year are gone. After fading several months, they’ve vanished like the Cheshire Cat behind its grin. The Dow crouches at its January levels, as does the other well-broadcast index, the S&P 500. Mathematically, we’ve descended to a null set. In the financial record-book this year no longer happened. This is the sound of one hand clutching at straws. It is the point in the show where Peter Pan steps to the proscenium and asks, “Do you believe, boys and girls? Do you believe?” Right now, the market lacks believers, and only believers make stocks fly. The long and short of it is that investors buy stocks because they believe they will go up. Maybe investors have fundamentals to believe in — earnings, products, merger — but at bottom they buy because they think others will. When others do, a stock or an entire market rises. A small increase is a crumb of evidence, a slight further increase is a loaf. Fishes and loaves multiply only briefly before someone preaches that a new age has arrived, one in which extraordinary gains are a new norm. “Paradigm” is their usual word. For reasons earnestly argued, historical patterns, relationships, and constraints no longer apply because the market is making — “new history,” always a shinier, higher-multiple tale than “past history.” What’s equally remarkable is that investors also believe people who say the world’s coming to an end. Maybe the best of this kind are but shadows, as in Midsummer Night’s Dream, but the best known had long, self-enriching runs in the sun. Eliot “Calamity” Janeway, Howard “Ruff Times” Ruff, Jude “No Longer Obscure” Wannisky, and Ravi “Coming Crash” Batra were wrong for years, but investors will pay to hear a good fable of doom. Investing often inclines toward myth, magic, and fables. Corporate kings sit at the Business Round Table.

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The goose that laid the golden egg was the original cash cow. The Midas Touch now forges golden parachutes and golden handcuffs. The giant atop the industrial beanstalk smells the blood of an Englishman or Samurai or Third World outsourcer. Corporate damsels swallow a poison pill when no white knight saves them from barbarians at the gate. Now we have a Goldilocks economy and a stock market that until today was turning lead into gold. Turning lead into gold is an apt allusion, because people often think investing means having a philosopher’s stone. Trust departments, brokers, and mutual funds imply they have one, although they call it something semi-believable like “superior research” or “proprietary selection techniques.” Investment books promise that any reader can unearth one. For a time, at any given time, any portfolio manager can seem to have one, and some do better over time than luck explains, but usually they’ve only got hot dice. No one holds a philosopher’s stone — unless, I’m tempted to say, it’s the little girl at the end of The Lottery. That, too, is an apt allusion, because you can pillory everything about investing — the naiveté, pretense, predictions, and mismanagement, the errors people make over and over, the Elmer Gantrys of Kingdom Come or the Herods of Paradise Lost— and you can feel smarter, hipper, and more philosophical than lesser financial mortals . . . right up to the minute your mother’s money starts to vanish. Time for a gut check. That’s not ordinarily a moment when Edward Gibbon comes to mind, but he does, the part in the Autobiography where he describes long walks while reviewing everything he knew. Bland, bloodless, bookish Edward Gibbon — “I sighed as a lover, I obeyed as a son”— walks the heath pensively, recalling the fall of Caesars and slaughter of the innocents. I sit pensively at the computer where I’ve seen the market rise and fall and also sift through the rubble. What I know is that the market comes back. All those indexes that have tumbled will revive, although it can take awhile. That’s why disaster-mongers are most wrong when they look most right. And because the market averages eleven or twelve percent over long periods, it rebounds mightily when recovering its average after a stretch of poor performance. Then the epoch-of-higher-returns gurus look right. I also know how to redeem this situation: buy into it, because the market comes back. Whoever didn’t believe that was wrong, and whoever didn’t buy on the dips regretted it. That’s why investing isn’t like

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blowing grocery money on magic beans or signing it over to a religious cult, even if that’s precisely what its trappings of fairy tale, false prophets, faith, and resurrection imply. Time for a reality check. I’ve strengthened Mother’s income, trimmed taxes, and reduced paperwork. I’ve sold the odd lots, jettisoned Smith Barney, and bought an S&P fund. There’s no lasting peril because I didn’t over-weight in stocks. Yet everything I’ve done is zero consolation when nothing I’ve done has meant a cent of growth. Markets go down, they come back, and I know it. But when they’re down and you’re standing out here on the last rock God made, it’s hard to do what you know you should.

.Speaks . . . . . . . . . in . . .Madness ............................................................

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very job I’ve had has involved me in a quantum of fractured sense. Some episodes were quirky indignities upon logic, like the editor who said, “Your book has to be long, because we’re going to charge a lot for it.” Others paraded as harmless verbal commonplaces and weren’t — describing business as war and the office as a family, for instance. But my coin conversations can be disturbing in ways so exquisitely personal it’s as if a jeweler of the absurd rotates my psyche under a lens until the light of lunacy strikes each facet just so. I first felt the coin craziness coming after me, personally, when a caller claimed he was a two-time Medal of Honor winner and accordingly entitled to two hundred shares of Mint stock. “Stock?” I said. “Like IBM?” “Right,” he answered, “and I need it right away.” The Mint is a federal agency and obviously never issued stock, and I could have left the matter there, except I’d been a soldier and felt compelled to check with Pentagon public affairs: nobody’s won two Medals of Honor since the Spanish-American War, I believe it was. During the double-die penny fiasco one caller’s opening question was, “ What kind of fools are you people?” Since pennies are redeemed in gold, buying pennies back would take all the gold in Fort Knox and bankrupt the country. He didn’t believe me when I said that nothing of the kind is true and that the federal government has never redeemed coinage in gold anyway. “You people think you can do anything you want,” he shouted, hanging up. I once taught economics, so I had to look up which year the U.S. stopped redeeming currency for gold. Three lawyers have phoned representing clients with “thirty-two hundred metric tons of AU.” All three said “AU” not “gold,” as if AU — the periodic table, high school chemistry — were the Opensesame to my taking them seriously. The Mint guards Fort Knox and

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I was an investment advisor, so I’m curious if anybody could have more gold. I phoned a bullion guild: thirty-two hundred metric tons is more gold than has been mined in all of recorded history. I have to check out these calls because I must confirm that what I know from nearly fifty years occupying this planet is intact. Coworkers are mystified at this, as former coworkers were aghast when I told one boss there were two sure clues our office ain’t no family: if my father needs my kidney he can have it and you can’t, I said, and I won’t leave my father for a higher paying father. I’d have explained the difference between mass national slaughter and selling suits, soup, or super octane, but, in Joan Didion’s marvelous phrase, I hesitated to enter the proposition at its own spooky level. I understood what impaired mother-wit accounted for business babble, but my coin-age assaults on sense are scary. Can the world have fakers or madmen large enough to claim they earned two Medals of Honor? What rend in honesty or sanity fabricates stock in a federal agency as its fiction? What convolutions lead someone to believe copper-zinc pennies are redeemed in gold? Or that anyone has thirty-two hundred metric tons of it? Most of all, why must people cross my threshold flaunting these absurdities at me, the former soldier/econ teacher/investment advisor, current federal employee, and prevailingly rational man? From the time of my first business job, Dad knew it would be this way for me, I think. He worked for a retail corporation before opening his hardware store, so he knew what comes with an office and likely knew it would bother me. Still, he said only, “I don’t know what they’d want with you.” I was insulted then, but I see now he meant, “ What would they want with you . . . after they get to know you?” I wish he’d told me, but he likely knew I wouldn’t believe him, as callers often don’t believe me. I also think Dad knew I’d pay for persisting on the path of divine majority, as Emily Dickinson put it, and I proved him more right than I’d have imagined. The summer I turned forty I’d spent many years in business, and I was deeply, clinically depressed. I was sleeping three hours a night, had shed forty pounds, basically couldn’t stand talking to anybody. Describing uses of this world as weary, flat, stale, and unprofitable didn’t begin to cover it. One night after teaching I stopped at Happy Joe’s Pizza and drank coffee that had lain in the pot so long

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the waitress wouldn’t charge me. I filled a page of yellow legal pad with everything bothering me, then tried to write one sentence of salvageable hope. There wasn’t one. My parents visited that summer, and one evening when Dad and I were walking, he asked what was wrong. I said I couldn’t see that anything — work, marriage, being alive — had a point, a purpose, a reason, any appeal, sense. I couldn’t see any sense in anything. “Of course you can’t,” he said. “There isn’t any.” That’s all: “There isn’t any.” I never believed him, for I granted his life purpose at many stages. I’ve thought about it since he died. Maybe he meant my life didn’t make sense, and, if so, there were times I rationally, sensibly, and on the evidence couldn’t have disagreed. Maybe he meant there’s no sense being upset at nonsense, or maybe he meant only what he said. I wish I’d asked. In part I didn’t because there seemed no sense in that, either, at the time. I might have thought Dad and I would discuss it eventually, as he was in his early forties during his final years at the large company, and those were horrible years for him, too. More recently, as my portfolio grew and it became clear I won’t be in my sixties before I retire, I thought Dad and I would be retired together for awhile and he’d make sense of it for me, if I hadn’t by then. Father-and-son golden years: me telling AU stories and him pointing out the moral as we updated stock quotes. It’s odd to have looked forward to being an old man with your father. If I’m grateful for anything, it’s that Dad was in his right mind at the end. For Dad to have been out of his mind while I dealt with some of the calls I get — I’d not have seen that as creation’s little jest at my expense. I’d have seen it as enemy action. Dad often was amused by my kooky coin calls, maybe because they reminded him of dislocations people laid at his retail door. I had a call today he’d have enjoyed. A man phoned saying that since Susan B. Anthony dollars are unpopular he’d buy all of the Mint’s for ninety cents apiece, provided we ship them without charge and allow him timepayments without interest. He planned, he said, to set them in pendants and watches and melt them into Daliesque pinkie rings. I was about to face absurdity with reasoned politeness for the umpteenth time, when the memory of Dad saying, “There isn’t any” flipped my switch another way. I told my caller, “ Wouldn’t it be easier if I sent you a check?”

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“I beg your pardon?” “Instead of selling you millions of dollar coins for ninety cents, why don’t I send you a check for ten cents per coin?” “I don’t understand.” “Tell you what: if you’ve got a savings account or portfolio or IRA, I’ll give you ninety cents for every dollar you have.” “Are you crazy?” he said. “Yep,” I said. “Crazy as a bedbug.” I felt like Job afterwards, a latter-day Job who got the better of his interview with the Jeweler, but it was only an inside joke in case Dad was listening. I confess that many of my callers unsettle me. I’m a rational man who once felt a little madness, and I’m uneasy in earshot of people whose sense is unhinged and don’t seem to know it. Over time, I’ve learned to laugh at some of them. A few more of them than I used to laugh at, anyway, now that I comprehend the cosmic joke bigger than any of my phone calls, the biggest, most personal prank this universe could possibly have played on me.

.A. .Dollar . . . . . . . .in . . Hand ............................................................

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good investment advisor reviews your portfolio with you at least once a year. Around your birthday, perhaps, when you’re prone to look things over anyway, perhaps decide to make changes or at least consciously realize you’re going to coast with things as they are. A little of both in any life and portfolio. It’s a few days before Mother’s birthday, and August is a good time to look at things in the light of day, so I’m preparing notes about her portfolio to tutor her a little, as she’s asked. Despite some changes I’ve made, Mother’s portfolio remains largely the portfolio Dad set up for them over fifteen or twenty years. It’s devoted largely to producing income to live on, and an income portfolio is a straightforward thing. The idea is to follow a few simple rules, keep exceptions to a minimum, and arrange predictable results. What you want is the highest regular and sustained income from investments that aren’t prone to default and don’t fluctuate intolerably in price. You define terms for yourself. For example, regular income. In nineteenth-century novels profligate young wastrels tidy themselves up for yearly calls on solicitors for inheritance checks, but most income investors want more frequent payments, checks monthly or quarterly. Assurance against default means that you want securities which pay you, on time, their stated interest, dividends, or principal. And within reason you want securities that don’t move around much in price, because it doesn’t average out if something pays $10 in interest or dividends and loses $100 in principal. In short, you want a portfolio that’s prompt and dependable, something that toes the straight and narrow and doesn’t cause a row. Most people don’t venture from home for income investments, choosing certificates of deposit at the local bank. CDs are insured

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against default, pay regular, although fully taxed interest, and don’t vary in price, but these commendations aren’t everything. Investors shouldn’t settle for CDs without looking at securities like preferred stocks, bonds, and income-based mutual funds. These aren’t exotic once you’re acquainted, and they have many attractions. Stocks pay dividends quarterly, usually on a March-June-September-December schedule, and that’s useful in arranging regular income. Bonds pay interest twice yearly — for example, January and July — that’s sometimes exempt from federal or state taxes. Income-based mutual funds provide a mix of stocks and bonds, or they can concentrate in one sector. They, too, pay quarterly and often monthly. Income investments may have special features — for example, conversion privileges whereby you may trade them for other securities by the issuer, like an option to lease or buy a car or to date your boyfriend’s brother. This is the panoply and possibility of financial life, the mix-andmatch of charms and consternation, and there’s another consideration: maturity. Except for money market funds, savings accounts, and most mutual funds, income investments come due at some point, then stop paying interest or dividends and return your capital. Securities mature at different times — some within days or a few years, some at eighteen or twenty-one years, even thirty years or longer. Attention to maturity is important. Long bonds or other instruments usually but not always pay higher returns as an inducement to leave your capital in place. On the other hand, shorter maturities usually pay lower returns, but they’re “closer to cash,” and if circumstances change, you can exit with fewer losses. Also, if a stock or bond is a ways from maturity, it won’t be steady when circumstances change, and your desire to retain it will waver, even if, as an income-producer, it’s a good provider. These days, investors don’t expect income securities to be longrunning. Even if they buy a security intending to hold it forever, they often sell it and move on. They perhaps even prefer investments of three or four years. Things happen. Also, most preferred stocks and bonds and now even CDs are callable, meaning the issuer can take them back at the time he chooses and return your principal, paying you no further mind or interest. Both parties these days insist on exit rights. It’s more rare than it used to be for issuers to pledge forty unrestricted years and for investors to hold through thick and thin and for both to be together when the covenant ends. It happens, sometimes, even though both know the end will come.

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Older investors tend to hold maturities short. Perhaps they’ve seen enough volatility in their lives, or perhaps they don’t want to ride ups and downs anymore, or maybe they expect all promises to expire sooner. Generally, however, they simply assume they and their investments are supposed to come due at the same time. This notion should be interfered with. An income portfolio is supposed to fund your life and every possibility for however long forever lasts. There’s no free toaster for dying close to cash and no early withdrawal penalty for outliving your portfolio. That’s the idea, in fact. There’s every reason an octogenarian could own a twenty-year bond. A June-December payer perhaps. So if you manage money for your mother, here’s what you do. Assemble a portfolio that pays like clockwork because you were listening when she lectured you about dependability. Buy only A-rated securities or better because you still have to bring home a report card. Buy a bundle of stocks and bonds and mutual funds for richness and diversity because that is what her life should have and what her money should bring. Promise that whatever happens you and her money will be there. Finally, buy one bond that matures on her one-hundredth birthday in August 2024 and tell her to think about where she wants it reinvested when it comes due.

.Double . . . . . . . . .Bottom ............................................................

S

ince Dad’s death the stock market has fallen in a prolonged, wrenching plunge. The Dow and S&P have been sliding a percent and more each day, relieved only by days of fractional-point up-ticks. I’ve carefully and steadily parceled cash into Mother’s S&P index fund for months, and all I’ve done is lose her money. But here in late August something encouraging may be happening: the market may be forming a double bottom. A double bottom is a pattern in price of a stock or multi-stock index like the S&P that resembles a W. It’s a picture of a stock falling to a specific low point and then rising. After rising a few weeks, it falls back. Two things can happen next. One: the price keeps falling; the momentary recovery was only a dead cat bounce — as in “A dead cat bounces if you throw it off a tall building.” The second possibility is that price forms a true double bottom — it finds a support level — and after touching that level a second time price rebounds, and the right arm of the W rockets skyward in a long, sustained soar. Double bottoms, support levels, and dead cats bouncing are terms of art and totems of belief among technical securities analysts, also called Chartists and Elves. Chartists say fundamentals like balance sheets, financial ratios, and sales are about companies, not stocks. Stocks are about being bought and sold on convincing volume, so Chartists draw charts of a stock’s price movements, connect long-term and short-term highs and lows, and study their pictures, their formations —flags and pennants, head-and-shoulders, cup-and-saucer — to decipher a trend. A true double bottom is good. Very good. Barring comets from the blue, a double bottom means the bad time is over and the situation’s turning up. It’s not a certainty in a free-falling market like this one’s been these past months, but I’m counting on a double

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bottom for Mother’s portfolio, and I’m hoping on one for Mother herself. Alva died yesterday. Mother’s minister and friend died from brain cancer almost four months to the day after my father. A couple months of recovery following Dad’s death, and Mother is, as Chartists put it, “testing the previous low.” I’m concerned about her rebound in general. I think Mother prepares for my Friday calls and wills herself to sound cheery. But when I catch her unexpectedly in a mid-week call, her voice dwindles in mid-sentence, as if she forgets to breathe. There’s a break in her speaking rhythm, sometimes in pattern of her thoughts, too, then she inhales and sighs her sentences to a close as if she herself is scarcely interested, her point really not worth rising to. My sister Susan has noticed, also, and tells me she asks Mother what’s wrong when she hears this pattern in her voice. I think a glance at the fundamentals would tell her the answer. Mother stays busy — decorating for bridge marathons, heading the search for Alva’s successor, shouldering various tasks for Women’s Group, serving Meals on Wheels. But sometimes movement is only movement, activity only activity, a trendless line, mark-time. Fundamentals then become significant, but those that become most significant are likely those you can’t ask your mother about. You see only behavior and try to decipher it. Mother’s portfolio is great conversational cover in those instances. Just today, I explained the double bottom to her. I told her I’m not sure, but I think we’re seeing a double bottom here, and if so we’ve got the worst behind us. Mother has taken to following the stock market more than she did, and she said she hoped so. She said she hoped that was the case. This time, I think we both were talking about the same thing, but there is no way to know for certain which way things go next. Full recovery or continuing decline are equal possibilities. When you stand right on the point of the pivot, that point is the only thing in sight, and your worry is palpable. An experienced investor knows the only thing certain about an unfolding double bottom is his own worry, a wisdom that applies to markets and mothers alike. However, Chartists and Fundamentalists assume you’re going to do something, not just stand there, and in this instance being an experienced investor is less helpful than being an attentive son. A stock doesn’t know you love it. Markets don’t know you’re depending on

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them to rally. The S&P 500 will never feel obliged to pull itself together for your sake. You cannot move a market to recover just by standing in its presence and letting it know you’re there. With mothers, that’s what you count on and hope for, and you must never let on that you’re worried it won’t happen.

.Windsor . . . . . . . . . . Too . . . . . .Little, . . . . . . . .Windsor . . . . . . . . . . .Too . . . . .Late ................................

D

ad’s purchase history arrived from Windsor Fund today. I took the envelope straight to my desk and began going over its contents. When I’d figured everything up, I wasn’t sure if I’d start crying or swearing. In mid-1984, Dad made his initial investment in Windsor and instructed the fund to reinvest all interest, dividends, and capital gains to buy more shares. By the end of 1998, his Windsor had apparently increased eight-fold, but only apparently. With his initial investment and reinvested returns, Dad had bought shares of Windsor at prices between $11 and $19. Today’s price is slightly above $15, so a substantial number of shares he bought are worth less than he paid, and it looks like he broke even on maybe one-third of them. Totally, Windsor is worth only $3,000 more than all the money Dad put into it since 1984, but the full story is even worse. Dad paid state and federal taxes on Windsor’s yearly returns, and last year alone taxes were $500. Shares he bought after the early 1990s, years of a rampaging bull market, shares that should have grown and multiplied, didn’t. During those years only Dad’s cancer grew and multiplied. I know why Dad couldn’t see what was happening. Windsor was paying dividends, the number of shares kept increasing, and the capital gains were bigger than the taxes. When net asset value slipped, that seemed part of normal events and no cause for alarm. There was no apparent reason to check anything. There was a reason, but Dad didn’t have the charts, computers, printouts, and other diagnostics to show the accumulating symptoms, as I do. When the worst appeared, that eight-fold increase masked how badly everything had gone wrong. So I know how this happened. It happened the way cancer happens.

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First thing tomorrow, I sell Windsor. In one phone call I dismantle those years and start Mother in a different fund. I’m glad I don’t have to tell my father. All I could have said is that Windsor invests in “undervalued” securities it hopes the market will bid up someday. Someday hasn’t come for Windsor. It came for Dad first.

.The . . . . .Matter . . . . . . . . .of . . . My . . . . .Garret ..................................................

I

have installed Mother’s August financial statements neatly in the three-ring binder where I keep them, tossed my government ID in the safe-deposit box, and left Washington for vacation, my first since Dad died. The market is headed north after its summer swoon, but I predictably have gone south, as far south as you can go in the U.S. Actually, Key West may not be in the U.S. When coworkers ask about my vacation plans, I tell them Key West is the nearest foreign country I can get to on short notice, which is how my vacation plans are made. I come here — that’s the bottom line — and have for several Septembers running, although running is an odd notion to apply to a place where the temperament is narcoleptic. People whom islanders, the Conchs, call relaxed would be called catatonic elsewhere. Yet running has been and is part of Key West—running guns, dope, liquor, illegal Cuban cigars, illegal Cubans, running from families, running from failures, running from the law. Torn pockets of frayed cutoffs all over town conceal Treasury Department IDs like mine because lots of laundry gets done here. One afternoon after reef diving I was in the Green Parrot Bar near the zero mile marker where Highway 1 ends, looking like something the catfish dragged in — matted hair, wet swim trunks, gear bag under my flip-flops — when a large man put his hand on the bar beside my elbow. “ Who do you work for?” he whispered. I had the feeling my elbow could have found itself between my shoulder blades in another two seconds. “U.S. Mint,” I answered. “Thought I’d seen you,” he said, and walked out. Gay and lesbian life, often with extravagant display, presides in Key West, as it does in DC, but with sharper perceptions. An unmarried man my age draws questions in Washington, but here preferences seem written on your forehead. I was waiting in a hotel lounge for my table,

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watching people file upstairs for a party. I should have known — a poster outside announced an Esther Williams retrospective. My, those women are tall, I said to myself. My, they’re large women, too, some of them. My, they’re. . . . The bartender was jubilant when one group arrived and gave one of its number, apparently back after long absence, a wet, exuberant kiss. Then he approached me and said, “Good evening, sir. What may I bring you?” Whenever I’ve inadvertently wandered into gay environs in Key West, I’ve received the chaste, continent courtesy you’d pay a dowager empress or — forgive me, too good to pass this one up: the Queen Mother. I have a bohemian streak that’s never been appeased, and I guess that’s why I come here. Grad school in the Midwest among aspiring English teachers was the closest I came to a garret in Paris or a coldwater walk-up in New York. I like it back there off Duval, past Simonton, away from Truman by the above-ground cemetery on Solares Hill, where the heat is palpable and the sidewalks are cracked and clapboard houses have lost their territorial struggle with thickening catalpa trees. In the Cuban grocery elderly women make real con leche in Styrofoam cups. Mornings when I dive early I buy one for each hand and drink both while walking to the marina. I decline the extra sugars, earning a nod of collective regard from Cuban gentlemen who at 7:30 are enthroned in green-and-white lawn chairs beside the bread rack. The following morning I’ll get a nod of recognition, one that says Observe, here again is this yanqui who spurns the extra sugars and therefore must have the makings of a man. At Sandy’s I get only con leche, no nod. Sandy’s is a combination coin laundry and sandwich shop where the Conch aristocracy, mainly cab drivers, hangs out between shifts and fares from the airport. Customers who weren’t born on the Rock or didn’t move here before air conditioning go unnoticed. Apparently unnoticed. If you show up next morning, you get a look that implies “Don’t take to liking it here.” I visit frequently enough to appreciate their wanting the place left alone, because I see what’s happened to Key West. I can’t pretend the scuba diving is good any more — the coral’s been walked on and the fish scared off, Joe’s sunken tug looks bored and a bit humiliated. There was an outdoor restaurant at Duval and Caroline with Banyan trees big enough to hide you from your waiter. Hooters is there now. Planet Hollywood and Hard Rock Café are down toward Mallory

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Square. The fellow with trained parrots seems a parody of beached pirates whose cute birds caged drinks. The man who takes your picture with his Burmese python probably owns a quad at Truman Annex. How many T-shirt shops can one town have? Soon all that’ll be left of the real place is its sunset. My unappeased bohemian streak doesn’t run unchecked either. Once or twice it’s Sunday-go-to-meetin’-snubbing fun to enter the best restaurant in town wearing cutoffs and a T-shirt, but I never went to church all that much. At night people sleeping on public beaches are people I’ve seen drifting to their ends in Haight Ashbury, outside caves in Crete, in Needle Park in Zürich, in the Thamel in Katmandu, or anywhere in Marrakech. I took a ride in a tri-bike pedaled by a thirtyish German who said he came to Key West as a teenager and never left — had, he said, never left the island. It’s the only place in America he’d been. Still, there’s the matter of my garret. This distant in time, I see it vaguely in blues and grays, eroded but unchanged. It houses recollections of Early Work. I think of myself as having Early Work, as I think of myself as someone who speaks French. I see myself there in chambray work shirts. Had I ever had a garret, I’m at the point in life where I’d probably revisit it. The journey you never made always takes you back to places that are familiar in the way places are when you have to remind yourself you were never there. There is one thing, though: places in your almost-memory never change. There’s another thing, too: journeys almost made can leave you in the most surprising territory — the place where you realize maybe things worked out mostly for the best. Certainly that they could have worked out worse. I now have in my walk-in closet all the chambray shirts I want, nicely starched. I guess I come to Key West because I like being scruffy for a few days. I picture people back at the office with pythons around their throats instead of neckties. Being recognized by DEA agents has a parcel of panache and makes for a good story, as it makes a good story to imagine what real bad guys at the bar thought if they saw me being approached. And con leche, count that twice, along with approval from strangers. There’s undeniable clarity of a kind here, and it’s easy to get to last minute, remember. But Key West also reminds me that roads untaken might not have been so great anyhow.

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This time when I leave Key West a thought will follow me home, and maybe during a future visit I’ll have it steam-pressed onto a T-shirt at one of those shops. The thought is that you are who you are. At my age you should acknowledge you’ve lost some territorial struggle with yourself, and I should’ve seen the signs long ago. My bohemian is a psychic sideshow, maybe even a bit of a parody whom I carry on my shoulder like the huckster with his parrot. I see my garret as clearly as I see the restaurant once standing at Duval and Caroline, but once upon a time the restaurant really was there and my garret wasn’t. I have the wanderlust and it took me to Crete and Katmandu and Marrakech, but I didn’t stay when I could have, as the German bicyclist stayed in Key West. Gay men wear women’s clothes, like me cross-dressing in cutoffs, but they are not women, as I am not a beach bum. A codicil dangles from that thought: you are who you are, and it shows. The gay men saw right away that I am not gay, just as natives at Sandy’s saw right off that I am no native. From a place that is not quite like any place, I will take back a souvenir of image and identity and reality and maybe even the truth, of a type. The truth is that I am a middle-aging man who is orderly with his mother’s money. I work at a desk with an ergonomic chair in a sedate building with granite columns near statues presiding over manicured parks. I may have left my ID at home and run, but when I’d reached the last mile there is, the law put its hand on the bar beside my elbow and whispered, “I know you.”

.Portrait . . . . . . . . . .Painter ..............................................................

A

woman I once worked with described my life and career as a field of baled hay — four-year and five-year bunches of time in college, the army, and grad school, this many years freelancing, that many in business, another clump managing money, each bale of years tied up and squared away from the others, left behind to dry. It’s a fair description, one cleverly applied to a transplanted Iowan, and it keeps cropping up: coworkers often ask why “someone like you, who could do so many things, isn’t doing something different.” I think of it myself when I consider doing something different. Key West is a good locale for pondering such things. The place has this end-of-the-earth, corners-of-the-wire quality that makes you ask generally how you got here and whether you’re going any further. I got generally here by way of writing and money. Looking back, I see how that might have happened. As far as I know, I’m the only person in the history of my graduate school to take Renaissance lyric poetry and modern portfolio theory the same semester. In the end — that is, in two decades to the present day — I generally wrote about money. All in all, I’ve done it well, and for highly placed people: Fortune 500 and 1000 CEOs, U.S. senators, executive branch luminaries, army generals, a Big Ten president — although the jobs eventually dulled or my employer moved on or I accepted brief and circumscribed projects, a hired pen making hay. There’s craft in what I do. Fit felicitous phrases around facts, give people something to say without putting words in their mouths, seal assertions with vivid images, leave reporters a quote and clients an exit for when circumstances change, keep the millions and billions straight in a fixed number of words — sonnets allow only fourteen lines — while portraying someone’s personality if he has one or creating one if

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he doesn’t. There’s craft, it takes a talent, but I don’t think, really, I ever set out to develop it. I guess I had a skill and people paid me, so I used it and with practice got better. I mean to write something else someday. I’ve long meant to write something else; it’s one of the bales not yet delivered to the barn. Sometimes I wish I’d tried seriously. I know many accomplished writers. I sat beside Jane Smiley through a semester of Chaucer. David Morrell was my American lit professor, as was Anthony Burgess. I took a year of fiction writing from Allan Gurganus. I keep saying I will someday, and I know my plans should be taking on more defined features, because I’m within a standing leap of having enough money to retire. The market has been falling these past months, but it looks like it’s turning up. Three more years like these past few, and I could be on the beach. Five more years if the market does its average twelve percent. All I need there on out is the averages. To my surprise — there have been lean years — I’m on the verge of being comfortable. Not rich by standards of rich people, but a man of means adequate for my needs and caprices. I will have only myself to please, if I can. Writing and money brought large figures, in both senses, to Key West. Tennessee Williams and Hemingway, D. H. Lawrence and J. J. Audubon, too, I think, and many others. For years at a stretch Key West has been the richest and poorest few square miles in the U.S. Paying to tour the Hemingway house shows that the entire town is a business, but what catches my attention for its collusion of art and money are the galleries that sell paintings of Day-Glo fish. I’ve swum with strange fish as a scuba diver and in a career of financial writing, but I’ve never seen fish in that kind of plumage. I guess artists paint them because tourists buy them, or maybe it takes more talent to paint fish as they really are. Galleries here make me miss galleries in Washington. National Gallery has a standing collection of works by John Singer Sargent, and exhibitions bring more, each work perfectly placed in gilded frames, flatteringly lighted like their subjects, hung at intervals that let each make its point before segue to the next. Sargent the portraitist, the portraitist, the best and preferred of his time, born in Italy, trained in Paris, studioed in London, influenced by the Dutch and Spanish, describing himself as an American artist. The ultimate circles sat for Sargent — businessmen, benefactors, poets, socialites, femmes

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fatales. You see right off he started with talent. Early work is solid and steady, believable bankerly stuff that did what it was supposed to. His work moves on and up, doing more with each canvas and doing it better. Intricacy appears in faces and poses, shadings, toning, the relation between background and foreground makes a whole. In giving patrons what they wanted to see and how they wanted to be seen, he walks up to the believable edge of idealizing but not beyond, at least in the eyes of a friendly audience. The portraits are, as Oscar Wilde described his fiancée, quite perfect. When he must have felt most secure in his powers, something happened to Sargent. You can’t see it easel-close, where patrons stood when giving final assent, nor on a canvas at the end of a hallway. But at eye level from a mid-distance, perhaps a distance Sargent stood from his subjects, disapproval, even dislike, steps into those pictures. Behind a woman’s beatific, pensive half-smile there’s a laudanum haze. Occupy that mid-distance, and the self-assured angle of the magnate’s shoulder rotates toward conceit, the tilt of his head menaces, you see mendacity in the posing of a rear foot. What up close or farther back is selfassurance cools by notable degrees into qualities not remotely flattering. It’s like suddenly finding the real speech by lifting the middle word out of each sentence. Sargent was certainly secure in his fame when he stopped painting portraits. Fame or not, he didn’t want to do it any more, not even when he got away with the portrait between the brushstrokes, not even for vanity-sized commissions. He apparently had the money he needed and gave up mantle-piece work for smaller, piecemeal scenes — families, groups, settings, people among each other, interiors, paintings that attempted plots. He sold several late-life canvases, presumably to people who bought them because they were Sargents. They’re befuddled, muddied, indistinct paintings. It would be kind to say they are immature work. I wonder if people asked Sargent why he didn’t do something else or paint someplace warm and colorful. He seems to have started off painting portraits and only at the end turned away. Maybe he wondered if he had something else in him, maybe even long had wondered. Several women I know studied art, some still paint and sculpt, and they’re convinced Sargent sold out. They say he had the goods and chose the money, the social life, a reputation. They say he knew it at

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the end and turned back, only to find he’d squandered the time he needed. That may be, but I’m not so sure. I think Sargent always knew he was a portrait painter. Even when he saw he’d become a consummate portrait painter, one gifted enough to produce levels his clients never saw, gifted enough to editorialize at their expense, he knew he was only a great portrait painter, none the more, none the less.

.Half-Century ........................................................................

A

round three o’clock this morning a giant wheel turned over in a nearby heaven, and when the front desk phoned with my wake-up call a few hours later I was fifty years old. I half-expected the desk clerk to rouse me with a suitably sobering and pensive message, like a muezzin’s call to prayer: “Good morning. How many more do you think you’ll have?” Even a little attitude might have been admissible: “This is your wake-up call, and I mean this is really your wake-up call.” But the heavens apparently hadn’t told the desk clerk that today is an occasion. For the heavens, of course, it isn’t. I’m not sure it is for me, either, but I suppose it should be. Turning fifty should be something you think about. Were I to think about it — and I seem about to — I guess the first order of business would be to acknowledge friends who haven’t made it this far. Unfortunately, nothing in that would be unique to fifty, for I had friends who didn’t see thirty or forty. Better I should spend a moment thinking of those who seem unlikely to make it much further, friends who’ve come down with crippling viruses, friends with childhood conditions catching up to them, friends who are fifty pounds overweight and pushing all odds. A long time ago I read someone’s remark that there’s something not unpleasant in the misfortunes of friends, but not when friends’ misfortunes bring you face-to-face with Big Things, like deaths of people you expected to grow old with or forfeiting a leg to diabetes or losing a child. I’ve seen friends endure these misfortunes, and what struck me hardest was not how little I could do for them but the awful banality of being able to do nothing, as if I could only watch some of the worst of what life offers be reduced to the cliché of my own helplessness. What seems equally awful, for its irony, is people I’ve worked with or known slightly thanking me for the

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difference I made in their lives. They stun me by mentioning an offhand remark or ordinary gesture I didn’t notice at the time and hadn’t thought of since. Slight efforts for people-in-passing grew so large. The most I could do for my closest friends was so little. I’m tempted to say that if seeming madness is divinest sense, it’s not the kind of sense I can discern, except that some of my strongest memories are of people I saw only for a few seconds. I remember the couple in their mid-fifties waiting for the valet to bring their car outside a toney restaurant in Palm Beach. They were dressed as richly as people dress where conspicuous wealth is flaunted. Face-lifts and spa treatments were evident, on the woman, anyway, and, also unmistakable, the couple had no interest in each other, didn’t look, speak, touch, or show any sense of the other’s presence. I expected the valet to bring separate cars. He brought one Rolls Royce, and as the husband tipped him, a young couple in jeans and T-shirts walked by, arms around each other’s waists, laughing and sharing a fajita in wax paper. The girl was voluptuous beneath her T-shirt; the young man was lucky and knew it. It says something about me that I watched the older man, and his face as the couple passed was the saddest I’ve ever seen. People say they’d give everything they own to trade places with someone, and at that moment that man would have. I also remember lots of people I sort of half knew once. A former student comes to mind, a perky and leggy blue-eyed blonde named Patti or Peggi or something she diminuated with an “i.” She was a scrub nurse for a plastic surgeon outside Chicago. What a great life, I thought — everybody she sees ends up looking better, she doesn’t lose many patients doing nose jobs, she doesn’t have to carry amputated limbs to the lab. But at thirty-five she still gave up cookies and ice cream for Lent, she told me one night during break. “ What did you give up when you were ten?” I asked. Cookies and ice cream was her immediate and unselfconscious answer. I struggle with two thoughts about that. I’ve never known many physically beautiful people who were drawn to any kind of deep reflection. It seems consistent to me that an attractive woman in a career of appealing surfaces would keep a ten-year-old’s notion of self-denial. On the other hand, I ask how much clinical injury and surgical sadness I’d have anybody witness for the sake of acquiring a bit of depth. Perhaps at my age it’s normal for people you’ve known the longest

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to be the most puzzling. Some of my longest-standing friends earn major money, and I guess they enjoy it. They send me form letters each Christmas that recount — exactly the right word — what they bought all year. Lately they’re buying stuff denominated in acres. They themselves become such object lessons. I’ve laid their letters aside, and them, too, I guess. I’m not indifferent to friends’ miscarries, though. Among my boyhood chums the smartest, best-looking, and most eager to be away in the world quit college the last semester of his senior year and has spent twenty-seven years driving a parcel truck in central Iowa. He and his high-school-graduate wife teach their kids at home and barely let them see the outdoors, I’m told. I wonder what happened. The more I see the well known and highly placed, the greater my reservations. I have an idea what it takes to become and to be a U.S. senator, for instance. From time to time I see a Forbes or Fortune that calls to mind my years in Fortune 500 America. Then I shudder. My suspicions about persons who reach wealth or prominence young, before fifty say, are high. Sometimes I know what corners they cut to arrive where they are. I’m awed to read about twenty-somethings inventing a revolutionizing gadget, but only momentarily. I’m not too old to resent a prodigy or to disparage revolution, but I’ve seen the earth make enough circuits around the sun to know that awe wears off and that respect, like integrity, is long a-coming. One praises the tortoise over the hare not for winning the race but for plodding with character. I won’t say slower progress means higher virtue, because I know better now. But at middle age I see more virtue and sense in any middle trajectory, therein paying Icarus his due. As for the better angels of our nature, my preference for the middle now includes what Alexander Pope called “the middle isthmus of a moral state.” Far-leaning positions from a conference, caucus, council, or coalition earn my immediate misgivings. Speakers who lecture about values and authors who catalogue virtue earn worse than my misgivings. Too visibly often, there’s little they won’t do, no trick too low, no person they won’t sacrifice for a chance to appear great in public. If these people are so centered on character, community, and values, maybe they should pack up their families in the middle of life, open a hardware store in a town where they knew no one, and earn a respected place among decent people by offering fair goods at a fair

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price. I don’t know who died and anointed them Mr. Morality. I’ll rephrase that: I do know who died. In general I have acute memories of people I’ve disliked. If mellowness or understanding or forgiveness arrives at half-century, I’m still waiting. I judged those people correctly, and I know it. It’s good when age confirms younger judgments; I wish it happened more often. There are entire categories of humanity to whom my sympathies don’t extend now. There always were, but lately their ranks grow with prickly specificity: for example, people with education degrees in counseling who call themselves “psychotherapists.” You hear it takes all kinds. People say so as if all known earthly imperatives require the people and qualities they’re talking about, but I never believed it takes all kinds and believe it less now. I don’t perceive that tides, the sunrise, gravity, or getting an order of fries and a Coke requires any modicum of qualities I’ve seen in people during fifty years. Or since yesterday. It doesn’t take all kinds; all kinds simply are. All kinds is merely the way it is, life’s petting zoo. I must try harder to be more aware of my own present moment. Notable exceptions aside, I’ve paid too little attention to this day, this step, this breath. It seems I’m always thinking about something else. Others have noticed, as long ago as the spelling teacher who wrote on my report card “seems preoccupied.” The phrase has a peculiar, tumbling air to it, like “pre-driven automobile,” in suggesting someone else used the premises before I arrived. That wouldn’t be entirely accurate. In many ways I’m little different from when I was younger, and I think long-time friends would find me no more puzzling than they ever did. When I order wines I ordered at twenty-five, waiters don’t onceme-over like I’ve popped the cork on pretension, but they’re the same wines. Since the first time I heard it, my favorite fairy tale has been The Emperor’s New Clothes. Since grad school my favorite refrain of poetry has been and remains “Cast a cold eye on life / On death. / Horseman, pass by!” I’m still irreverent, and I’ve kept my hair — there’s probably a connection. Lately I’ve been increasingly preoccupied by a belief I’m going to relive my life, starting soon. I don’t mean that I’m making resolutions for the future or vows from here on to do some things differently. The idea in my head, and not far back in my head, is that I’ll soon start over the life I’ve known. I’m not sure how reconnecting to the loop is sup-

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posed to happen or why I assume I’ll replug in at a propitious point in life, but I regularly say I’ll pay closer attention the next time Miss Hepker teaches high school French . . . and that next time my undergraduate major won’t be journalism ( journalism for Christ’s sake) . . . and that next time I’ll not marry at thirty-three, because I’ll know who shows up a few months later. I’m reminded of a story by Scott Fitzgerald about a man who started becoming younger. Mentally unchanged, he physically juvenesced. I can’t recall the story’s title or its details, but let’s say at fifty he looked young enough to do something he’d never done — go to university. He announced his decision to his children and enrolled, fitting right in. At fifty-five a war came along, and he looked almost too young to enlist. By its end he looked young enough to attend prep school, which he then did. I forget how the story ends. I believe he turned into a baby and then into a puddle. I wasn’t imagining linearity reversed quite that way, but something like it appears in a list of things I want to do. It’s a twenty-something’s list, at least a twenty-something who’s not revolutionizing the world, certainly a list I wish I’d completed in my twenties, now that I’m fifty. Study in Freiburg or Tübingen or London School of Economics. Write something worthy. Really learn wine. Walk the length of Italy (this one a surprise; I don’t like Italy, but there it is). Maybe all fifty-year-olds make life lists, but when I ask fellow half-centennials about theirs, they reply in winsome, Neverneverland sighs. You hear the unspoken “maybe in my next life.” Me, I intend to squeeze them into this life whether the loop comes ’round or not, and I’ve crossed off a few already (Earn master scuba rating 冑 See Mount Everest 冑 Read classics 冑 Re-learn German 冑 ). I confessed this business about the loop to a sculptress friend who advises me to keep an open mind because we never know when we’ve seen the whole pattern. To illustrate, she recited the sequence of planets out to Pluto and reminded me that every fifty years or so they discover a new one. I thought that was her point, but it was only the preamble. “ What if,” she then asked, “every trillion years the whole thing flip-flops? And what if the trillion years are almost up?” Maybe there’s something to this idea. It would explain why the world seems to be a place of such inversions and contraries to me. Maybe I’ve sensed something like the Great Flip-Flop all along. If it

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happens when I’m fifty-one, perhaps I will become fifteen again. The Big Bang reversed and muffled to a whisper, there will be time, then time again. Ontogeny recapitulates philogeny — until the Flip-Flop. Those would be cosmic consequences to stack up against any revolutionizing gadget. It’s an attractive sylph of a notion, the kind to flirt with when you take something too seriously, such as turning fifty or wondering if you’ll ever have anything figured out. It’s the kind of thing that, for the moment, might let you take the expression “mid life” at face value and assume that one hundred percent more remains to be seen. I hope to be seeing it — with a cold eye, of course — for a good while longer. One way or another, I’ve got all the time that’s left.

.All . . . of . . . the . . . . .People . . . . . . . . .Some . . . . . . . .of . . .the . . . . .Time ....................................

A

mong things I regret about my life is having lapsed into a career most organizations call “public relations.” I’ve also heard it called public affairs, public information, or corporate communication — occasionally with a terminal “s” — and I’ve met a few vice presidents of external affairs and even of constituent relations. I decided long ago, and still believe, that real professions and jobs involving adult work have few synonyms. Janitor. Plumber. Mechanic. “Doctor, lawyer, merchant, chief,” the nursery rhyme goes, and although you hear other terms — physician, attorney — they’re passed off as affectation or argot, like hearing lodge brothers hail one another on the street. But when practitioners of your profession can’t agree on its name, you think about that, particularly when the purpose of said profession is to create images and identity. I belabor this polynomial point because I realized my work has no single name along about the time I began to dislike doing it. My early dislike was rudimentary and grousing, as when an executive revised a speech to read, “The 1970s were no bed of roses for the petroleum industry, but history may record the 1980s as our darkest hour.” A coworker to whom I lamented took one of my hands in both of hers, looked soulfully into my face, and said, “You’ve got to take the bitter with the sweet and remember that tomorrow is another day.” Then we both laughed. Shortly later, I began to be aware that my profession didn’t seem especially professional in a cumulative, forward-moving way. I reached this realization after joining, briefly, professional societies that credential members with designations like APR and IABC. They sent me flyers about seminars for putting zip in news releases and humor in speeches. I recall hearing “the Henry Ford of investor relations” and

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luminaries whose names adorn global PR agencies. One of them told lunch-goers who’d paid $35 a plate, “If you’re not in the loop, you’re going to get pushed into a corner someday, and then people will really know you’re in the dark.” I worked for several big companies in the 1980s, and I began to be bothered by something deeper. When I was a senior communication specialist, the chairman delivered my stirring speech about corporate philanthropy being a business investment not an executive perk, and a day later he announced the company’s half-million dollar grant to his alma mater. I became manager of executive communication for a company whose chairman-chief executive-and-president moved into the company’s hotel suite with his secretary, leaving a note on the refrigerator for his wife. I wrote his letter about his commitment to quality, value, and service in that year’s annual report. I moved on as manager of investor relations for a chemical company whose chairman praised its independent auditor for having two ideal qualities: it was gullible and compliant. I wrote Wall Street road shows for the chief of the pharmaceuticals division, who couldn’t pronounce the name of the chemical responsible for most of its revenues. As manager of internal communication at the next company, I wrote statements of mission, vision, and values that were bound and given to every employee, and I read survey responses from employees who said “the best thing about working here” was being able to walk to work because the company had lowered their piece-rate and they could no longer afford to drive. After I was promoted to director of corporate communication, the chairman sought me out to say he’d had a letter to Brazil translated into Spanish — this after earlier telling me his secretary was so smart and industrious that she could have gone far with the company if she were a man. Every CEO and would-be CEO was reading In Search of Excellence by then. I think it was the best-selling book since Babbitt, not counting the Bible. Perhaps the worst was that I seemed to be the only one upset by what people now call “a massive disconnect” all around me. I was upset more than I knew. In the final eighteen months or so that I worked for Fortune 500 America, I was diagnosed with an ulcer, given cortisone shots when my face erupted in blue-black streaks, admitted to cardiac intensive care over Christmas weekend, and opiated senseless

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for back pain that immobilized my left leg. A couple weeks before my fortieth birthday, I had a grand mal seizure while sleeping. It lacerated my tongue, tore the muscles from my left shoulder blade, and cracked three ribs. Other people have a take on this. Some say a normal adult shrugs off office hypocrisies or copes without having seizures: before leaving for her Fortune 500 job each morning, my then-wife always said, “Give us this day our daily mask.” Some call it naive to expect integrity from people who’d print manifestos about their principles. I suppose even Hamlet knew Gertrude could merely assume a virtue. Lying in the hospital as doctors debated whether I had epilepsy, meningitis, a fungus, a micro-embolism, brain cancer, or nothing, I decided I’d spent ten years in every discernible kind of rage — intellectual, spiritual, aesthetic, personal, moral. I had spent a decade in mounting fury, and there I lay, ribs cracked, shoulder half-dislocated, enzymes out of whack, breathing in pain, paying for it, pure and simple. This was not stress, in the ordinary sense, and no buzzword about high-output environments or high-visibility jobs applied. This wasn’t business. It was personal. These things happened almost exactly ten years ago, and corporate America remains an unwise subject to raise with me. So does the subject of public relations. I was watching TV with my significant other when 60 Minutes aired a story about Texaco executives calling African American employees “black jellybeans.” I started swearing at the television, and I think I frightened her. I certainly startled her, and I startled her again when I said the next sound bite would feature the chairman of Texaco talking about “the Texaco family.” That is exactly what happened, and his exact words were “the Texaco family.” As Prufrock said, “I have known them all already, known them all,” and someday, if I come to terms, that’s all I’ll say when I watch another public relations man, whatever his title, try to clean up the mess, spin it, repair its damage. I guess it’s fitting that my profession has many ambiguous names, because its frequent goal is to avoid calling people and circumstances what they are.

.Sorrier . . . . . . . . .by . . . .Half ........................................................

T

his morning I received a letter from a kind of person I’ve never heard of: a woman who buys coins. More precisely, the letter was from a grade school teacher who, according to her typed note, had spent thousands of dollars over the years on gold and silver commemorative coins, silver proof sets, American Eagle proof gold coins, and assorted numismatica because she intended to sell them someday and retire on her gains. In short, these coins were her retirement. Not all of it, I hope, because when she retired she took her coins to a dealer, and the dealer offered her less than half the sum she’d spent buying them. She wants to know if the Mint will buy back her coins and reimburse her for what she spent. Perhaps I read more anguish into her letter than she intended, but it’s anguishing. My mother taught before she married my father. Dear lady, was there no eldest son for you? What were you thinking when you put your hard-earned teacher’s pay into coins year after year? Why ever did you think they’d be worth more? The Mint never promised you that. She asks a question of her own: “How can money be worth less than I paid for it?” She isn’t here to answer my questions, but I must answer hers. There are many answers, including the answer that anything can be worth less and in lots of different ways. The dollar in your hand will be worth a dime if you hold it long enough. A new car will be worth fifty percent less before you’ve driven home. And, of course, there are other answers, some pertaining to any kind of investing and some only to certain kinds. To a specialized, knowledgeable group of people, a few selected, specific coins can be investments. They’re “collectibles” or “tangibles,” a category they share with art, first-edition books, baseball cards, figurines, or any palpable object, like Judy Garland’s ruby

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slippers from The Wizard of Oz. For a collectible conceivably to be worth more than you paid, it must have three qualities: scarcity, desirability, and a liquid marketplace. In other words, people who want to buy something in short supply and sellers they can find easily. Absent any of these qualities, a collectible is a whim, a curiosity, perhaps a rarity, but it has little hope of producing your retirement fortune. Buying one would be like buying a lighthouse or cigar-store Indian: reasonable only if you must own a lighthouse or you know everything about cigarstore Indians or you’ve met everyone on earth who’s willing to take yours off your hands. I must answer this desperate lady’s letter, and I can’t tell her any of this. I know what else to tell her: hire an accountant and angle for a tax loss . . . buy a good mutual fund . . . find a broker . . . be productive with what’s left — but I can’t tell her any of that, either. In part, I can’t because I’m thinking of my mother and I don’t want this lady to feel foolish. But mainly I can’t write anything that might reappear in court, something such as “I’m sorry.” Which is precisely how I feel, perhaps more sorry than I could say if my position let me say it. The harder irony is that my mother, my sisters, my nieces, my friends, my coworkers, and sometimes total strangers seek me for investment counsel, and this lady who needs it badly won’t receive a word of it. She will receive instead my carefully worded reply explaining the Mint has never represented coins as investments and does not repurchase them. The bottom line, as she sees it, will be that she lost money buying money.

.Cashing . . . . . . . . . .Out ...........................................................

I

sold the last of Dad’s Windsor Fund today. Over the past few weeks, I’ve been divesting bits and chunks, hoping up-ticks will add a few cents to the take-home. This is not generally a smart thing to do. When an investment disappoints you, it’s best to sell and move on. Second-chance investing, like second marriages, is a triumph of hope over experience, and copping a few extra cents on a disappointment like Windsor is an especially dismal hope. I know I went about this unwisely, but it was my father’s money plus years of his life as an investor, and I guess I defied long odds and good sense to stretch their faintest final chances. Now I have the final task, and that’s to figure gains and taxes Mother owes from the sale. I’ll do that now, because next April will be the first anniversary of Dad’s death and I don’t know how well I’ll be concentrating on tax deadlines then. The IRS gives me two alternatives. A: claim each block of shares bought, about thirty transactions, as a separate sale with its own gain or loss. B: declare an average purchase price for all the shares and subtract it from the income of each sale. Averaging is generally to your advantage, and it’s simpler than listing separate purchase prices on a tax form. However, I piecemealed the sales hoping for more gains, so I chose Alternative B and decided to dismantle Windsor piece by piece hoping for fewer taxes. Even so, I no sooner decided that than I knew I’d figure it the other way, too. I laid out my pad, pens, and pocket calculator and began, as the IRS puts it, “realizing” the gains and losses. But numbers raise questions when they speak for themselves, and ciphering over Windsor, the investment Dad held the longest and which has raised the most problems for me, led me to a harder question: How do I add up my father’s life?

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Thou may’st owe thy Maker a death and owe Caesar what is Caesar’s, but only one of those debts has a worksheet with instructions. Even if they’re life’s only certainties, death and taxes share no computational conventions, neither in matching pluses against minuses nor in averaging everything out. Nor do there otherwise seem to be Generally Accepted Accounting Principles for surviving sons. Maybe that’s because what counts depends on who’s counting. Dad worked my way through college, the first time; he also left work one afternoon when I was nine to surprise me by patching my blown-out bicycle tire. Most people could easily say which counts for more, but I can’t. I don’t seem able to say much of anything, now that the question is raised. I can’t even repeat words of wisdom Dad might have left me, because I don’t remember any. I’ve had a career making important men quotable, but Dad had no desperate need to be known for undying remarks someone else thought up for him. I do remember once a long time ago he said, “There are no two ways about it.” I don’t remember why he said that or what he was talking about. The context, the setting, when — those are lost to me, but I know he said it, and I know why I remember it: my father had certainty of mind. There were no two ways about most things, not important things, anyway. I don’t think he ever asked anyone what to do. Or needed to. I don’t think he ever changed his mind, and I don’t think he ever second-guessed himself. Maybe none of that was true and I simply never saw, but I doubt it. My father knew what to do and didn’t expect credit for doing it. “He was a man, for all that,” someone said. If not, I just did. I also insert a few things there are no two ways about. My father got up every morning of my life and went to work, and he never complained in my presence. In the middle of his life he put up every penny he had, borrowed more money than he’d ever seen, and built a thriving business on his own ability. For thirty-six years he came home to the same woman at 6 p.m. every night except Friday, when he closed his store at 9:00. The church was full when we buried him. See him in his life and not at his end, and know this reckoning isn’t one I owe. Dad was my father, not my buddy. He required my respect, not my approval or praise, and never needed me to take stock of him. So I return to my neat handwritten rows of Windsor numbers, which set me on this parallel moment. I revert to the problem I can answer

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and must before April. That is long before I need to balance Dad’s life ledger, if ever. It’s interesting how managing the money and the taxes and the rest raises parallels in your mind. It’s interesting, also, that sometimes they converge and sometimes they’re only something else to realize.

.Word . . . . . . .of . . .Mouth ..............................................................

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anuel came into my office today. The government’s fiscal year ended yesterday, and October 1st is always one of the busiest days of the year. The phone was cradled between my shoulder and ear while I typed on my computer, which had flashed an icon for incoming e-mail as the second line of my phone started ringing, so I didn’t hear Manuel enter or see him at my desk until he handed me a white linen envelope. It looked like a wedding invitation. It was. He and María Elvia are getting married. Hold the phone. Bizarre things happen to me at the Mint, but even by standards I’ve grown half-accustomed to, a short, silent, non-English-speaking young man at my door to announce he’s marrying his sister is unusual. There’s more to heaven and earth than dreamt of in the philosophy of Franklin Day Planner, so I put mine aside and went to a coworker whose parents were missionaries and who speaks fluent Spanish. She explained that María Elvia and Manuel are not related; their church congregation refers to each other as brother and sister. “You don’t know Elvia’s story?” she asked. “Apparently not by a long sight,” I answered. María Elvia came to the United States from El Salvador as a teenager after soldiers burst into their house and killed her parents. I said that would have been difficult to convey to me in sign language. It would have been difficult for me to comprehend in any language. Like most people who live in condominiums and have insurance and work at jobs with pensions and parking spaces my life has many spoken assurances and unspoken assumptions, one being that life will not slaughter me that day. I also can’t imagine how María Elvia could live in the United States

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fifteen years without learning English. Of course I see the nation’s capital isn’t the United States you know growing up in Iowa. Like every teenager I knew growing up, the presiding desire of my life was to be elsewhere, and I now am so accustomed to Eritrean cab drivers, Afghani sidewalk vendors, Azerbaijani restaurants, and cleaning ladies from El Salvador that Iowa seems like a foreign country when I’m back. María Elvia also had compelling reasons for wanting to be elsewhere. However, she emigrated into a life still lived entirely in Spanish, and that bothers me. It seems wrong on multiple levels that I’d abolish if I were emperor. I guess I’d be a tyrant with no clear goal beyond everyone being able to speak to each other, but even in this I’d be inconsistent. I was at a café in Switzerland while attending a coin show, and a European man at the adjoining table, without a nod or word of preamble, turned to me and said, “English has become the lingua franca of Europe, you know.” He’s right, and that bothers me, too. Switzerland functions in several languages, but its real language is money, and I suppose it’s America’s lingua franca, too. Perhaps María Elvia and Manuel regard me merely as the vaguely pleasant face of economic exchange, much as I regard the Korean family at my dry cleaner or the Pakistani man in the hot dog booth outside the Mint’s headquarters. Maybe that’s why they invited me to their wedding when they know I don’t speak a word of Spanish.

.Rara . . . . . .Avis ..................................................................

O

ccasionally while dining out I notice I’m one of the few white men in the room. In the scant moments that works on my attention, I think “white” is an odd way to describe me, given my reddish complexion amid many plainly whiter objects — the tablecloth, the salt, the menu, the crockery, and sometimes the wine. On these occasions I remember a logic professor who’d show the class pictures of a Barcelona, a Chippendale, an ergonomic, and a bean bag and ask, “ Which one is a chair?” In my case “Caucasian” doesn’t precisely fit because of Native American ancestors, none of whom came from the Caucasus, where this nominal confusion literally started. The salmon my steady date invariably orders comes from nearer there than I did. She herself is more aligned with that part of the world, for she runs a Russian visitors program at U.S. Information Agency, and she, a most decorous female, would not be someone you’d call white. That would make us what sociocultural types label “a mixed couple,” and in their contented categorizing they’d be dead wrong, for we’re more alike than any two people I know, almost identical in likes and dislikes, emotional cycles, intellectual styles, views of the world, bulging clothes closets, and enthusiasm for food and wine, which sometimes includes simultaneous cravings for Taco Bell. We keep Amazon and Levenger in business, we speak about our portfolios daily, and we buy more pens, paper, and paperbacks than a school district. She can name more kings of England than I but prefers nineteenth-century British literature over eighteenth, if you can fathom such willful wrong-mindedness. If so, perhaps you fathom something I don’t — namely, how the person most like a white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant farm boy from Iowa could be an African American woman who grew up mainly in

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France and West Texas. I admit that we both grew up in the army, she as the daughter of a career non-com, I passing through on a hitch, and how we both say our formative years were those we spent in Europe. We both taught at one time. We’re both Southerners, but only by birth. However, I have all of that in common with lots of people I’m not remotely like, so none of it persuades me why people so different in gene and gender are so much of a feather. My young lady and I call ourselves “postmodern,” but I’ve not read enough philosophy this year to know what that really means. We apply the term liberally to phenomena like the Russian-speaking couple dining beside us at Kramer’s, an all-night bookstore and café in Du Pont Circle. He was in his mid-twenties and decked out in J. Press, probably son of a diplomat, and his date, nineteen or twenty, must have been newly arrived: her thin flower-print dress was sad and plain and doubtless her nicest, and she was holding the menu upside down. He paid with a green American Express card, and we decided that was postmodern but paying with a gold or platinum card wouldn’t have been. Ours weren’t the oddest of Washington’s color-coded distinctions. By general consent, the Queen of England, María Elvia, and I are white, although officially subcategorized, but the question of who’s really black or suitably black or just black remains in dispute. Washington has a centuries-old, landed, moneyed, influential African American upper class in comparison to which Kennedys and Rockefellers pale to parvenu, and it spotted my young lady when she hit town. Even in Washington, where the rule is never to seem to notice anyone, looks and bearing like hers got her noticed quickly, and added to a prestigious master’s degree in public policy plus an appointment from the White House they also got her invited. Her invitations dwindled when hosts learned she’d worked her way through the LBJ School on scholarships and part-time jobs and was a granddaughter of sharecroppers. For a long time she was a card-carrying Democrat, but she quit attending those gatherings because too many smiles accounted for her as a miracle of Affirmative Action. She joined a professional society of African Americans in foreign relations, but its members walked away in mid-conversation when she said her interest was the former Soviet republics, not Africa or the Caribbean. Into this situation insert me, whose psyche was diagnosed long ago in medical records which read like no Who’s Who, and the diagnosis said

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I had “the psychological complement” common to African American males. At the time, that meant a generalized anger, sense of dislocation, and propensity to expect the worst. The doctor who diagnosed this and who worked nearly every day for a year to divest the worst and harness the rest was black, seventy years old, and — I hope still is — the other person on earth most like me. He said we had “a bone marrow familiarity with each other,” and since in psychiatry the analyst is supposed to be incognito, psychoanalyzing a patient who could read his mind was, he said, “like fighting door-to-door at Stalingrad.” That’s as good a way as any to describe a war in your spirit. When I was younger I was desperate to be away from people who seemed exactly like me, and I got away because highly placed white men hired me, assuming I was like them because I looked like them. Turned out I wasn’t at all like the people I tried to escape, for otherwise I’d not have tried so hard to get away. I certainly was nothing like the men who thought I was, and they absolutely were people I least want to resemble in any way. And now, having lived in places nothing like the place I came from, I’ve discovered that the people most like me are those who look the least like me. I’m hardly alone in these discoveries. One of my neighbors has a Russian mother and Swiss father, spent much of his life in Japan despite being born in Indiana, and says he feels more Japanese than anything. My Austrian-Serbian-Croatian German teacher is as American as anyone I know. Of course, I exclude María Elvia, who’s worked here fifteen years, several in my living room, and seems never to have been here at all, except for vacuum cleaner tracks she leaves on my carpet. Nor do I know what to tell my longtime friend Olha with the Ukrainian family name. She comes from Wisconsin, holds a magna cum laude in economics plus a JD and MBA and a Chartered Financial Analyst Certificate, speaks Ukrainian and Russian, just spent two years creating land-reform laws in the Balkans, and I’m baffled what to tell her, because recruiters want her to use her middle name, Ann, when interviewing for $300,000-a-year chief counsel jobs. They want her to be Ann because Olha sounds foreign. But they compliment her on her English. My German teacher says I’m the most complicated man she knows —“definitely the most complicated American man” — and sometimes I see what she may mean. For a long time I struggled with

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the feeling of not being in the right place, sometimes not even in my own skin. Every now and then one of my component selves really tries to bust out and take over. The farm boy hates traffic, the city guy craves nightlife, the former corporate type wants back in business for the big bucks, the fellow with four master’s degrees wants back in college, the middle-aged American is just fine in Washington, the kid wants to live in Europe again. The only thing they all agree on is that they all love being under water. Inside a Neoprene wet suit all these guys are happy as clams, although the Native American in there complains about sunburn. Maybe someday one of my component selves will dispossess the others, but I think all of them realize the unhappiest mistakes we’ve made came from putting ourselves in situations in which only one of us was acceptable. We don’t want to be in that situation again. I spent a long time looking for a place where most of me could be at home. It must have taken awhile to become a reddish-white Iowan with the psyche of a black man. It’s taken even longer to understand that other people have more difficulty with this than I do now, that there’s nothing I can do for them, and that an effort demoralizes me more than it elevates others. I recall reading in the Upanishads or the Mabinogion or somewhere that the final battle for all mankind will take place within the soul of one man. Mine is by no means a soul at peace, but I can say now, as I couldn’t have said before this year in which my father died, that my soul will not be the battleground. As a result, I have no particular pause accepting that my Russian-Swiss-Hoosier neighbor feels Japanese, nor, for that matter, do I have difficulty thinking of María Elvia as simply Salvadoran. The consequence is that I’m privileged to spend time with a literate, educated, gourmet Russophile who mysteriously is just like me and whom I’d not have been in the same room with if I’d stayed where I was. That, as far as I’m concerned, at least for now, is pretty much that. On the surface of it, which seems to be where most people dwell, we presumably are a striking couple: we get very good tables in restaurants.

.Levels . . . . . . . .of . . .the . . . . .Game ........................................................

M

other has begun to ask about changes I’m making in the portfolio. Most of the time there’s amusement in her questions, as when she says, “I think you enjoy playing with my money.” Lately, though, I may hear concern in her voice. Maybe she’s bewildered by flurries of trade confirmations in her mailbox, for Dad was generally a buy-and-hold investor who kept some positions a decade or longer. Also, she’s mentioned how simple her friends’ investments are — mostly money market funds and certificates of deposit from local banks — and I think she’s beginning to sense hers are very different. It’s apparently time to begin explaining what I’m doing and why. It will be easiest to explain the casual steps. When we didn’t know how long Dad would be in extended care, I let cash accumulate, and now I’m investing it. I sold some securities merely to tidy the portfolio and a few because their quality slipped. Others, like Dad’s preferred stocks from Barclay’s Bank, meant burdensome IRS forms for foreign taxes. I’ll keep some explanations to myself because they sound coldhearted. This is the last year Mother files joint tax returns and claims Dad’s personal exemption; therefore, I’ve taken gains because she’ll have only her exemption to reduce taxable income after this. But the coldest thing to explain is that her friends might be less happy with their investments if they had a better idea of what they’re doing. Those certificates of deposit, for instance. CDs are the majority investments in most retirees’ portfolios, but I’ll not be buying any for Mother. The local bank’s CDs are yielding six percent, and I can get seven on quality corporate bonds. That’s at least a thousand dollars more in yearly income for a portfolio like Mother’s. What’s more, interest income from CDs is fully taxed, but these days Treasury notes

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also yield six percent interest that escapes Iowa income taxes. Mother keeps $30 to $50 more of every $1,000 she earns in yearly interest. I’ll have to explain those bonds from federal agencies with acronyms like inventions of futuristic fiction. But you often beat yields on Treasuries and keep the tax break with selected federal agency securities — Federal Home Loan Bank Board but not Federal National Mortgage Corp., Farmer Mac but not Freddie Mac. If you are an investment advisor, you can ask friends in the business for “good stories” from their inventory — the triple-dipper muni with no taxes at all . . . the corporate debenture yielding more because of quirky call features . . . the participations in letters of credit backed by Uncle Sam. Those are showing up in Mother’s portfolio, too, awaiting explanation. Not every investment’s story is a good one. Dad owned Franklin Federal Tax Free Income Fund for years, and Mother asks why I don’t buy more if it was good enough for him. The fund pays monthly income with a good yield for a municipal bond fund, but I’ll not add to it. Franklin charges a horrific front-end load — four-and-one-quarter percent. In other words, for every $1,000 I invest, the fund keeps $42.50 for itself. Since a thousand-dollar investment in Franklin pays $45 a year, Mother would lose a year of interest on every new purchase. More, really, because loads eat capital before it’s invested, leaving less to earn income. Once I start to explain, I’ll go slowly so I don’t sound defensive. And so I don’t disparage Mother’s friends. Above all, I don’t want to imply I’m criticizing my father’s investments, the more so because there’s little to criticize. Dad built his portfolio a few hundred dollars at a time, but I’m managing sums he accumulated over a lifetime, which is far easier. Nothing I do with their portfolio can equal the achievement of having assembled it in the first place. Besides, financial markets are bigger and more accessible to personal investors now. Dad couldn’t have bought some securities that Mother now owns, and others didn’t even exist then. And Dad never wrote books about this stuff. I’ll step reluctantly to the task of explanation for another reason: among the last things Dad said to me was, “Your mother’s peace of mind is worth a lot,” and I realize he’d want me to watch over that more than her portfolio. Therefore, I want Mother to think her portfolio is an amusing diversion, not something I treat with four decimal points of seriousness every day. I want her to think her investments

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could easily take care of themselves, because then she’ll believe they’ll easily take care of her. I’d much rather she thinks I play with her money than have her know the real level of the game. Unfortunately, the game is up — my particular game, that is. Those trade confirmations in Mother’s mailbox tell her something’s happening. Mother might eventually understand why I have no comment about her friends’ investments. I wonder how much income they’re losing, how much extra tax they pay, how much money they toss away in fees and loads. Multiply that by all the widows comparing notes over coffee at this moment, and the figure is beyond imagining. Sometimes I think I should offer to help mother’s friends a little — you know: in a neighborly kind of way, maybe just look things over if they’d like — but they haven’t asked, and Mother would be mortified if I volunteered. Besides, my credibility is no doubt suspect among these ladies, for by now they probably know my mother doesn’t have a CD to her name.

.All . . . That . . . . . . .Glitters ...........................................................

M

other wants to know if she should own gold coins along with her stocks, bonds, and mutual funds. I thought her question was some Halloween prank, since it’s that time of year, her way of teasing me back for kidding about dividing her portfolio between pork bellies and commemorative Elvis plates. She was serious, however. Could be she’s talking to widowed friends who found gold coins in husbands’ safe-deposit boxes. Maybe she’s seen advertisements for gold that have been reappearing in the newspapers. On a whim I put her name on the Mint mailing list, so she might have read our brochure for American Eagle gold coins, which we make in sizes containing an ounce to a tenth-ounce of gold. Actually, Eagles are flying off our presses in rousing flocks, literally selling faster than we can mint them. People haven’t bought so many gold coins since the late 1970s and early 1980s, when inflation and interest rates were gathering more numerals than a ZIP code and you couldn’t give away the Dow Jones Industrials. Gold is supposed to be an investment of timeless value, a counterpoint to “paper” stocks and bonds, the ultimate hedge against inflation and financial ruin, and people buying gold back then drove its price to $800 an ounce. Today’s price is $290, so whoever bought this investment of timeless value has lost sixty-three percent of his money. Now there’s no inflation, interest rates are low single-digits, and the Dow has as many numbers as a ZIP code, yet people are again buying gold coins like there’s no tomorrow. Its price isn’t soaring, however: it flutters at $290 per ounce like a butterfly pinned on a board because sellers are dumping as fast as buyers are buying. Of course, if gold really had timeless value which assured against total ruin, no one would sell at any price.

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So by any standard of reason and fact investing in gold for my mother is a poor idea. Since working at the Mint, though, I’ve learned how little reason and fact have to do with gold. People who buy gold have to have it, that’s all. Watch their scalps tighten, faces warm, eyes gleam when a one-ounce American Eagle lands in their palm, and you’ll see they just plain have to have gold. Have to have it about as bad as the conquistadors had to have it. Neither gullibility nor greed nor grip of compulsion is in my mother’s nature, but since she’s a rational woman something must prompt her interest in gold coins. Her native grace and decorum, maybe, or memory’s linking gold coins to a golden age when “good as gold,” “a heart of gold,” and “a golden touch” meant integrity, kindness, and ability. A time when fathers gave gold coins to sons setting out to find streets paved in gold. When living in balance and harmony meant the Golden Mean, when courtesy and consideration were embodied in the Golden Rule. Gold embodies a different sentiment today. Gold enthusiasts revised the Golden Rule: their version is, “ Whoever owns gold makes the rules.” Today a golden parachute is a payoff, usually to boards of directors who cooked a company’s golden goose. Golden handcuffs mean you’re earning too much money to quit your job. It’s not only that gold’s a poor investment; it’s the fixation of irrational people and a thing of beauty that now refers to what’s tarnished. Financially and metaphorically, gold has been turned into a base metal. On the other hand, Mother has the grace and character that gold once represented. She persevered over a Depression, deaths of husbands and friends, hard work that never had a sure outcome, and probably far more than I know, and she’s never wavered or complained. She has respect, a home, love of her family, self-sufficient means, and much else worth more than gold these days. For any days that ever were, in fact. Given all this, buying gold coins for Mother’s golden years would show more than poor portfolio judgment on my part. It would show exceptionally poor taste.

.Penny . . . . . . . .Wise .............................................................

O

ne thing about coin collecting, though: it’ll get you paying attention to spare change. Provided you don’t spend it foolishly, loose change becomes a lot of money, given time to grow. I’ve been telling this via e-mail to my twenty-fiveyear-old niece, who’s made me a great-uncle again and has asked how she and her husband can send Little Jarrett through Yale, where he’s destined. “ We are poor,” my niece’s e-note said, “and won’t have much money for a long time but want to do something. How much do we need?” What’s as pleasant as seeing a little money become lots of money is seeing roustabout nieces and nephews turn instantly into responsible parents. It’s more pleasing than seeing myself turned into a graybeard eminence by their plaintive questions, for in my mind I myself am their age. I was not, however, about to pass a chance to look like a wizard and wrote back promptly with my answer: $18. Over Little Jarrett’s infancy, adolescence, young adulthood, and working years, $18 a month earning the stock market’s historical average twelve percent will make wage slave Jarrett worth $703,000 at my age and Old Jarrett worth $4.2 million at age sixty-five. That outcome isn’t money in the bank, of course, but it’s the prospect every documented norm foretells. Being a good great-uncle with a pedantic streak, I ran numbers for her and hubby, too: $36 per month apiece under those assumptions make my niece and nephew-in-law worth $544,000 each at sixty-five. The phenomenon is compound interest, and it’s as impressive a miracle as you’ll find outside Lourdes or perhaps outside of birth. I met compound interest in the financial part of grad school, when professors taught the time value of money on reams of mimeographed columns to six decimals. Compound interest was the only lesson that impressed me from business school, but it was a lesson worth its tui-

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tion. When you can envision sixty cents a day, $18 a month, as a sum that becomes $4,140 in ten years, $17,806 in twenty years, $63,909 in thirty years, and $1 million in fifty-three years, you see a world in which seven-figure wealth equates to ordering a tall cappuccino instead of a grandé. This is finance’s ultimate acorn-and-oak lesson and is most profitably learned when the acorn has longer to grow. Of all foundations being young offers, a chance to get rich off pocket change is among the sturdiest. But also like most lessons this one goes unlearned because the young cannot see how quickly they’ll become old, and when they are, compound interest isn’t what they’ll mean when they’ll say time is money. I did learn the lesson by the time I was twenty-five — really twentyfive, not the twenty-five I think I still am. After all this time, which has proven to be money, I’m nearing the point where the mathematical curve takes off like a homesick angel, the point where Little Jarrett’s $18 a month, having become $703,000 in fifty years, will become $4.2 million in fifteen more. There are financial miracles at my age and will be for Little Jarrett when he gets here, if his mother takes my advice. As for me at fifty, I’m considering prospects I have for affording all I want to do in my time left, and I’m also considering prospects I’m now regrettably afforded. As Shakespeare’s Richard II said, “I have wasted time, and now time doth waste me.” I’d like e-mailing my niece to correspond with the notion that older, wiser, and richer go inevitably together, but I can only hope that wisdom multiplies over time like money does. I’d like to draw an analogy between the accretion of years and compounding pennies, one suggesting experience and finances reach a middle-aged mass of wisdom and wealth. I’d work harder at the analogy, as I insist my niece work harder at saving, if I didn’t also see how time is least like money: you can’t save time by not spending a day of sound mind, health, and promise for a future day when it’s worth much more, maybe every penny you have. What middle-aged bachelor uncles have in common with niecesbecome-mothers is the hope their choices about time and money pay off. In a sense, we’re both advantaged — she has the time value of compounding on her side, and I, being older, have a fuller concept of future value. I can, of course, only display the financial tables to my niece, for she must learn to bank on her own wisdom as I make withdrawals from that account and my financial ones. So I’ve done my

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avuncular duty and displayed the financial future — in its rational progression, anyhow — for her and Little Jarrett, who by my figuring is already Rich Old Jarrett. Rich Old Jarrett, indeed. Time passes just that quickly. What time and money have most in common is that you can spend both foolishly or invest them productively, but ultimately you will spend both.

.Whole . . . . . . . .Life ................................................................

A

t seventy-four Mother has bought a $4,000 whole life insurance policy, the first life insurance she’s ever owned. She mentioned the policy while she was in Washington over July 4th, and since then I’ve blessed whichever god of silence kept me from saying no more than, “Really?” It’s early November now, and when my family gathers at Mother’s house for the first Thanksgiving since Dad died, I will give official federal holiday thanks for having said nothing more, because Mother answered, “Yes, I need to know there’s money to bury me beside your father.” I certainly could have said more, and months of thankfulness for my silence in July have been months of steaming resentment. The only people who need life insurance are those whose family or business partners will be financially incapacitated by their deaths. They are people like my friend Donna, a single mother with two college-bound pre-teens and a deadbeat ex-husband. Lots of people buy life insurance, but there’s no question who really needs it, and insurance agents know that. There’s likely no seventy-four-year-old woman on the planet who should start buying whole life, and agents know that, too. Variations aside, whole life is a straightforward product. You pay a fixed premium over years, perhaps decades, based on age, health, and size of “death benefit” you want to leave your beneficiaries. Part of the premium buys insurance and part goes toward “cash build-up,” which disguises whole life as an investment. Whole life policies have a breakeven at which premiums you pay begin to equal benefits your heirs receive. That was one of many details about Mother’s policy I’ve been planning to review while home for Thanksgiving, and now I’ve seen the printout. She’s paying $410 per year for $4,000 of coverage. It took half-a-minute to see there’s no meaningful benefit — death, cash

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build-up, or otherwise — in that arrangement. Nor does the agent who sold it deserve benefit of any doubt. That’s especially disturbing. The company behind this policy carries Mother’s Medicare supplemental insurance, and its agent was the son of my father’s friend. Back in January I almost phoned to thank him. While I was thinking about that, Mother appeared behind my shoulder, and she noticed when I reflexively hid the printout under my forearm. “ What’s wrong? Oh, I’ve done something foolish, haven’t I?” “No. No, Mother, I’m just looking things over.” “I have. I can tell by your face.” I asked Mother to explain what happened, and she wasn’t sure, which is nearly always the case in these situations. The good part of the story is that their family friend had quit the insurance company before what followed. The bad part is that the company assigned another agent. I saw what he’d done. Years ago, Mother and Dad bought Medicare supplemental insurance from their friend’s son, the insurance that kept them from bankruptcy when Dad was sick. Mother paid premiums each April and October. This April, Mother had paid the semiannual premium early in the month, and because Dad died on the 26th the company owed her a return of premium, about $400, when she converted their husbandwife policy to hers alone. Instead of sending a check, the agent came to see her — no appointment, page one in the sales manual. Mother thinks he said something about cheaper rates on whole life because she had the other insurance and about acting now because rates would go up. The first statement a half-truth at best; the second, true enough: premiums increase with age, and since he had Mother’s data he knew she’d be a year older in August. In short, he came unannounced when he knew she was vulnerable and convinced her to spend her refund on life insurance he knew she didn’t need. That wasn’t how I explained it to Mother, but sugarcoating didn’t work. She saw that she’d eventually pay more than $4,000 for $4,000 of insurance. She looked down at me, seated at my father’s desk, and her eyes began to tear over. “Did the agent know that? Did he know for certain?” I bless, even now, the kindly god who put it into my mind to say,

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with breeziness, “So you bought a little insurance. You wanted a little extra peace of mind, and you bought it. No big deal.” “But how will you bury me? I don’t want my children paying to bury me.” I stopped myself from saying that wasn’t an issue, because for her it clearly was. I suggested she sign an undated blank check from her brokerage account and leave it in the safe-deposit box at the bank. When time comes, I’ll make the check out for the sum it needs to be. “I feel so foolish,” Mother said. “I feel like such an old fool.” She walked away near tears, wringing her hands and calling herself an old fool. That was the image in my mind when I telephoned the agent. He was a kid, early twenties by the sound of him, and that angered me more. Our conversation was brief: “My young friend, you sold my mother a piece of crap, and we both know it. You keep her Medicare policy in force, and you never talk to my mother again for any reason. You call me. At the Treasury Department. In Washington. I’m next to the office of financial fraud.” Mine was a bigger lie than he probably told. I work nowhere near the division of financial crimes, nor would it matter if I did, because it’s rarely a crime to sell people what they don’t need. The kid knows that and probably foresees a bright career because of it. He also knows that regardless of what he or any broker, advisor, or counselor says, the deal in court is the deal you signed on the dotted line, not the deal you thought you heard. Fortunately, money is the least issue in all this. A $400 misstep is tiny compared to what I’ve seen. The important issue is the lessons this teaches, and $400 is small tuition for those. Lesson One: if taking advantage of people when they’re vulnerable didn’t work, insurance agents would have abandoned the tactic long ago. It’s always worked, likely always will, and there’s no point feeling naive about that. Lesson Two: people first blame themselves when someone takes financial advantage of them. They bought needless insurance. They learn their bank’s paying 0.8 percent interest and they could’ve had six or eight elsewhere. They discover their mutual fund’s taking five percent off the top. They find their broker’s earning more on their trades than they are. I’ve seen all that and more, and people blame themselves. They shouldn’t, but they do.

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Lesson Three, which I haven’t learned until now: what I’m doing with Mother’s money may not be what’s meaningful to her. I’ve been reducing taxes, raising income, balancing her growth, keeping her IRA intact, building annuities against expenses for nursing homes I hope she never needs, keeping every penny from lying fallow. I’m looking at printouts and statements; she’s looking at the whole of life and seeking assurances for what comes next. Maybe I left Mother open to a crooked kid with a self-serving angle on what matters to her: having cash to be buried beside my father without inconveniencing her children.

.Grace . . . . . . . and . . . . . All . . . .That . . . . . . Follows ..................................................

T

here appears to be no end to what Mother is calling “the sad, bad things.” A few weeks ago Grace, the Grace of Ed & Grace, my parents’ closest friends, had surgery for a small chronic problem she decided to take care of before this busy Thanksgiving and Christmas, and it blew up. Aspiration pneumonia, coma, death. For something so minor to turn so quickly horrible is beyond understanding. It means Mother has lost the three people closest to her in six months. Not long ago I was telling her about double bottoms and telling myself to do nothing but stand there. That’s what I did, and I apparently made the right call, for Mother rallied. So did the market. It formed a double bottom when Alva died and into late autumn is still rising, so money I invested for Mother as the market fell is running strong. I was right about that, too, but it seems unimportant now. I’d thought Alva, Ed, and Grace would be Mother’s support when Dad died. After Alva died, I thought it would be Ed and Grace. Now that Grace has died, I wonder what else I was wrong about. I am close to my former professors, many of them retired now, and some days when we speak they don’t sound well, and their voices hint that they know it. Whether to say anything when this happens. Whether to ask, for not liking the answer. Nor is it only older friends on my roster of concern. My friend Olha, ten years younger, whom I’ve known through the worst sad bad times of my life and hers, has something wrong with her blood, and the best bet, at this point, is Chernoble, because she’s home from two years in the Ukraine. Debbie, my beauty from grad school, whom I might have married and perhaps should have, has lived five decades with everything physical and medical so overwhelmingly against her that she shouldn’t have lived

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five years. Doctors call her life a miracle, and now she tells me about worsening pain and organs shutting down one by one, except for her perfect sight and three-octave voice. My friends may be melting down, able to see it plainly and say so in a twenty-four note range, and I think of them once teaching in checked gingham shirts and now retired and maybe receding, as they were with six-figure salaries and are without jobs, remember them with waist-length black hair and with their miracle running out. I think also of my mother, but I never picture her, as I do my friends, in a range of time, now and as she was when she became my mother. I picture instead gestures and movements that always have been hers and therefore call no age to mind nor remind me of when she was half the age she is. Mother sways slightly when she comes through doors, left side forward, left foot turned slightly inward and right arm trailing at her hip, and she uses brooms with greater determination than she uses a vacuum cleaner. I recall, but at distance, that she takes pills for high pressure in her eyes, which have always been brown, and that she has a standing Friday appointment with her hairdresser, who stopped dying the gray years ago. She has always made the green bean casserole I like and the doughy holiday cookies and the raisin sauce for the ham. She has always driven with the car seat way forward because she’s always been only five feet tall, and she’s always kept the car very, very clean, inside and out. I’ve never known her not to finish a book she’s started to read, even if she isn’t enjoying it. I’ve never known her to weigh more or less than 102 pounds or be more or less than size — four? Small, anyway. I’ve never seen her shoot rabbits with a .22 rifle when they invaded her vegetable garden, but she’s a farmer’s daughter and has admitted to doing it, from the balcony overlooking the garden at my parents’ former house. The gun would have been as long as she is, so I’m as surprised as the rabbits must have been. What also surprises me is that during the past few months I’ve stopped picturing her with my father, despite the wedding ring she still wears and always will. Or more accurate to say she and my father together is no longer the first image to mind. What’s truly odd is that I feel leporine myself when I give her jewelry for birthdays and Christmas, as if that remains my father’s prerogative and he might be displeased. Good grief, I’m still Oedipal at fifty. I know she’s older and

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probably wrinkled and that her knees hurt, but all I grant as different is that when we both were younger her face had a quizzical expression that’s no longer there. In fact, everyone I most often think of had a quizzical expression with their own unique mannerisms, and they no longer do. It seems to me they should. Having had the quizzical look when they asked, “ What’s happening?” and then “ Why is it happening?” they should have it when they’re entitled to ask, “ Why is it happening to me?” But it’s not there on their faces any more. I wonder if it’s gone from mine. Perhaps what they wanted to know has been answered. Perhaps the quizzical look is what experience takes from you. Now that Grace has died and I’m wondering what else I figured wrong, I’m no longer confident calling “experience” anything, because I may have been wrong when I thought the implications of Grace’s death were for Mother. It seems suddenly likely they’re for me. A pattern is clear now: Mother is quickly and serially outliving everyone she depends on, and I may be the person she most depends on. After husband, minister, and best friend, eldest son seems predictable, foreseeable, even ordained. Ordained: Alva was not so older than I. Me — it happens. Grace’s death makes me realize I definitely had one thing wrong: I thought life’s patterns affected me mainly as a witness. I’d seen them. Memory of them rose so easily, they were so predictable in repetition, that recognizing them passed for understanding, as profiting from them passed for wisdom. How graciously those patterns let me think that in understanding them I was outside them and therefore excused from them. How accommodating they were in letting me be so wrong. Seeing there’s a pattern is perceptiveness, but not necessarily insight. Profiting from it is acumen, not wisdom. Wisdom would be seeing there is a pattern, knowing you are in it, and functioning while fearing it’s coming to a close. At best, I have come only part way, and now I think also that wisdom may consist in realizing it reaches you late. What did I say months ago about keeping good watch and the fear of being caught in someone else’s fate? I was paying poor attention not to consider I already was. What did I say about having all the time there is? How much is that, exactly?

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What did I tell my niece about compounding? It was another assumption is what it was — that you’ll be there as money multiplies. What did my sculptress friend say about the heavens being ready to flip-flop? I think they have: where first I was concerned for Mother, I now am terrified for myself, because right now, this moment, I more easily imagine myself coming to an end than my mother. It seems so likely that I almost lunge to adjust her portfolio before it happens — buy long bonds, set up dollar cost averaging for the index fund, arrange quarterly withdrawals from her IRA because she won’t know which yearly forms to sign. Prepare, in short, right now for the shortly coming day when I have neither the option of acting for her nor of merely standing there. How ironic if it’s Mother, not I, who lives to see her stocks compound and her bonds mature. I don’t think she’d see me in her portfolio as I see Dad. She would see me in the hospital as she saw Dad, then Alva, then Grace. Maybe it’s understandable I’d think that after my father has died, after people I know died unexpectedly, after older friends give me concern, after people I’ve known seemingly forever no longer seeming to have forever ahead of us. Maybe I’m mistaking a sense of the moment with the sighting of a pattern. But maybe, if wisdom comes late, it is later than I think, and I have seen wisdom’s ending thing. I have no way of knowing whether Mother outlives her portfolio or I do, whether I leave my friends or they me, or whether I am being foolish. There was no saving Grace, not for Mother’s sake or anyone’s, but which, for my sake, is the saving grace when facing sad, bad things: not knowing or knowing I will find out soon enough?

.Look . . . . . .Homeward, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Angel ...................................................

I

’ve been figuring Mother’s estimated tax payments for next year. Since taking on her accounts, I’ve increased her interest and dividends, so I thought she might need to pay a bit extra each quarter. I thought right — it would be a little extra — until an infuriating stipulation in the tax code forced me to add half of her social security to her investment income and run the total through a formula. The result is that next year, when Mother becomes a single taxpayer, every extra dollar I earn investing draws taxes to that dollar and makes fifty cents of social security taxable. Next year is only the start. As I transfer yearly distributions from her IRA and increase her interest and dividends, I make more income from social security taxable. My parents never owed tax on their social security checks because there’s a higher threshold for married couples, and so for the first time since Dad died I’m facing a financial problem he never faced. My reaction is not my father’s. Dad would have scanned my figures, tongue between his lips, and said — mimicking my grandfather — “Humpf, humpf, humpf. Ain’t that a revoltin’ development?” My reaction is to crumple my sheet of scribbles and fling it across the room, ranting about taxes that fall more heavily on widows and threatening to phone the Senate Finance Committee to show them what they’ve done. My reaction is to fume twenty pointless minutes at the facts, and the foremost fact I see is that Mother wouldn’t have this trouble if my father were alive. I wouldn’t be fighting taxes and seeing my best work blasted. Neither she nor I would be in this impossible place if my father hadn’t died, and I want to scream, “How could you do something like this! What in God’s name were you thinking! ” Only after realizing my reaction is one of my father’s after all do I fetch the crumpled paper from across the room, smooth it against the leather of my desktop, and understand

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that I’m not angry at the flat, intractable, deal-with-it of Mother’s finances. I’m angry at my father for dying. I’ve heard of this. Delayed stress, deferred anger, displaced aggression. They simmer in there, I’ve heard, awaiting an ordinary thing — a stone, a leaf, an unfound door; of a stone, a leaf, a door — that sets them loose and makes you cry havoc and curse the dead in their deaf heaven because they left you. I have heard of this, as I have heard about taxes on social security, and it seems clear, now, I should have foreseen both. I must have been so intent on making the finances work — and maybe more intent on proving I could — that I thought anything off my agenda wouldn’t happen. Now that I’ve lifted my head from a crumpled page of my own devising, I wonder what Mother and my brother and sisters thought. I wonder if they’ve passed through this before I have. Maybe it’s been deferred for me because Dad left something for me to do, and maybe — or maybe not — I am more fortunate than they because he did. I wonder if Mother looks angrily at the empty side of the bed she shared with my father for three decades. For that matter, I wonder if my father cursed his own deaf heaven while raging at the cancer that killed him. But if I know my father, and if I know the man who fought his pain and his drugs and the brace doctors made him wear so tumors wouldn’t shatter his spine, I know what he thought: he thought he was deserting his wife and family because he was dying. I know he thought so until the very end, when he was so weak and in such pain he told my sister Susan — told my sister but not our mother or me — how much he wished for a heart attack that would take him quickly. I’d have cursed the cancer if it had been killing me, but I never hated my father’s. In that detached and evaluative way of mine which confounds my family even while they count on it, the dispassionate me admired that awful disease for how it set its terms and took over. In the abstract, most times, I could take it on its own terms. It was something that happened to Dad, to us, his family, the kind of thing that happens when the facts change. I accepted that. Accepted it, apparently, more calmly than I am accepting the new facts of Mother’s finances. My father never wanted to die until the end, when it may have been a blessing, and I cannot rationally be angry with that father. Therefore, the father I’m angry with is my healthy father. In my mind, which now makes its own place as I once saw Dad’s do, I am angry with the very

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father whom I know would never have left me to face this circumstance alone. He is the father on my mind, and all these months since he died I’ve been expecting him to come back. The one thing I have most prepared for is that Dad will appear at my door demanding to see how I’ve taken care of things. I’m ready to show how I’ve structured Mother’s payments and arranged bonds to mature each year until 2009. I’m ready to explain big changes like Windsor and subtleties like switching to a money fund that isn’t taxable in Iowa. I’ll show Dad there’s extra income in April and June when Mother pays property taxes and health insurance. We will speak reluctantly but with reassurance about funds I’ve earmarked just in case — just in case Mother must replace the furnace, just in case Mother is ill, just in case she can no longer live alone. I’ve prepared a sheet listing the stocks and bonds, a superscript © beside those about to be called, interest and dividends itemized not only by month but with municipal interest italicized and Treasury interest boldfaced. How comprehensive my printout is, Dad, yet tidier than the one you kept, easier to read and more comforting for Mother. Only then, after I have proved how well I’ve done without him, does my father go away forever. Except, it would seem now, I am not doing so well. Mother’s paying more taxes, my portfolio successes are backfiring, I’m mad at my father, and at the same time I crave his approval. All these months since he died I’ve been waiting to tell my father how well everything will run after he’s gone. Now I sit at my desk amid order I’ve created and confusion that’s descended and say to a father who’s never coming home, “I need some help here, Pop.”

.IC/DC .....................................................................

T

he professor of my first grad course in economics had an expression: “Everybody gotta’ be somewhere,” he’d say, X’ing spots on blackboard graphs of curves, dotted lines, and subscripts. He used his pet phrase irrespective of topic, whether the circular flow of income and expenditure or the Life Cycle Hypothesis of Income-Consumption-Saving. His point, however, usually involved something not so much in place as on the verge of motion, about to move astride one curve or leap to one higher or lower. As Christmas and another year approach, I’ve been in Washington six years and know a graph of this place would be bipolar, like a twohumped camel. You’re not here long before realizing the middle distribution is thin and the extremes are extreme. All those Chamber of Commerce averages — average income, age, home price — are mathematically enforced norms that don’t really show central tendency. In other words, the joke about your head in the oven and feet in the fridge: statistically, you’re comfortable. Here, whether you run a restaurant, run for office, or run after legislative largess, you’re in or out, a winner or loser, count or don’t. Wittgenstein said something like, “The world is all that is the case,” and this world is a case of either/or. I’ll never slide atop Washington’s power curve or leap to its inner circles, but I’m amazed to be here. At First and Constitution Northwest, senate side of Capitol Hill, arching branches of a bush frame the capitol dome perfectly if you pause walking by. I used to look at that marble dome framed by those green branches against a blue sky, and reality vertigo would be so strong I’d have to steady myself against the waist-high stone wall edging the grounds. Not believing I see what I see is a common occurrence. Yet admittedly what I relish is only a deeper slice of what tourists see: the northwest sliver of a city where other quadrants are dangerous to venture into.

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Finding the middle ground between where-are and where-to, between Ubi sunt? and Quo vadis? is harder because I know another place with a capitol dome, statehouse of a former territory. It’s on a hill in the center of town and campus, and from east and west you approach it on a long, straight sidewalk bisecting acres of bluegrass. It’s plated in gold, as the capitol of one’s convictions should be. There you might park beside someone who’s won a Pulitzer Prize, is poet laureate, explained the umlaut, or is doing neurosurgery on a head of state. It, too, is a one-industry town. The industry is a Big Ten university. The place is Iowa City, Iowa. I took a degree there, left for the army, returned, took three more degrees, left again for degrees and jobs in Cleveland and Chicago before Washington. Iowa, Illinois, and Ohio: I did cover the middle ground once, but part of me never left Iowa City, maybe the best part, which wants to learn widely, think precisely, write well. The part that wants to be — I’m embarrassed — a student. One reason I’m divided and why Iowa City and Washington, DC, are poles of preference is because I learned something in that land between: “On the average and in the main,” Adam Smith’s pet phrase in Wealth of Nations, that darkling plain of workaday averages and dome-shaped, standard distribution normalcy doesn’t respect what I value. Not really it doesn’t, although it claims to. Economics raises the voltage of IC versus DC. Staying here means working fifteen more years to afford it. Given an average stock market and Iowa’s lesser cost of living, I soon could exit Washington for Iowa City, buy a house with equity now in my condo, and live on savings until IRA, annuity, Keogh, pension, and social security kick in. I could be set. That is, in a town with no Tibetan, Levant, Chilean, or Ethiopian restaurants —fill in the list, and see what the list implies to understand what I’d miss. The lesson of my old professor’s everybody is that you can’t be two places at once. But his lesson didn’t consider your head being one place and your heart another. Or that, after declaring for one or the other, they trade places. The lesson of unattainable bi-location doesn’t cover wanting to be in two places without being totally content in either. Or which to choose if both ill-suit you to be elsewhere. After you meet the man who discovered the Van Allen Belt, a mere CEO isn’t anyone stellar. After you’ve worked for the Senate Finance Committee and Treasury Department, orbits elsewhere seem small. If there’s an

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“after Washington,” it has to be where bits of cosmos are named for passers-by. Why have I saved and invested if not to have that at the earliest moment? Answer: because instead of repeating their twenties, men my age should just buy a letter sweater, not quit work and re-enroll. Yet men my age also should understand themes to their lives and subscripts upon its indelible graph. Mine are an eclectic palate, writing, managing money, travel, and school — perennial, repeated, lifelong school. All of this has been so since second grade, when my teacher unrolled a canvas map mounted like a window shade above the blackboard, and I promised myself I’d see that tiny country with the highest mountain in the world. Forty years later I made it. Shortly after joining the Mint, I loaded a trek to Nepal on my MasterCard, and one afternoon was looking at a wall of Sanskrit text and life-sized Buddhist gods in a small temple. After I’d stared awhile, a woman began to name them. In English with a French accent. I hadn’t seen her meditating there behind me, a novitiate whose name was Muriel. I thanked her and said perhaps we’d meet again, and she answered, with buoyant Buddhist assurance and an unmistakable French smile, “Of course we will.” That evening I saw her by a mound of prayer stones at the edge of the village where the mud path broke sharply downhill. Hugging herself against the chill, she was watching the sunset, her scarlet robes seeming to blend and braid among streaks of red and orange in the sky. A sleeve of her yellow sash fluttered loose in a momentary breeze and floated outstretched like a sunbeam encircling her shoulders. She disappeared into the last blinding burst of daylight off the mountain snow then reappeared, a flash of scarlet and yellow against the backdrop of sudden night. She turned, saw me, and said, “ We meet again.” We ate dahl baaht by a teahouse fire and talked about why she’d shaved her head and left Paris to sleep on slats in central Asia. I asked why Buddhists believe the world is illusion and can’t accept what they see as real, but I understand something of that now. Still, to transit many lifetimes, maybe after untold incarnations leaping to a higher plane — that seemed an off-chance bargain with enlightenment. “Think of it as a memory that closes a circle,” she said, and I remembered a day, seemingly another lifetime, when I vowed I’d be exactly where I was sitting. At that moment both my old schoolroom

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and the teahouse seemed so real that I did believe in being two places at once. Muriel told me about the Bodhisattva who gains enlightenment and could exit planes of birth and re-birth but returns to teach others. I said the ultimate teacher must be a tough act to follow. “Mine isn’t,” she said, “but tell me: if you can afford to be here, you could be somewhere warm and comfortable. So why are you here?” “To see Mt. Everest. I’ve wanted to since I was little.” “So you’ll walk twenty days in the cold and sleep on the ground just to see Everest and go home, but you don’t believe someone could reach the goal of many lifetimes and turn back.” “Touché,” I said. “ What will you do with the rest of this lifetime?” “ What will I do when I grow up? Study philosophy, I think. Is that self-indulgent?” “Only to be a student, yes. But to become Bodhisattva, no.” I should know that stasis, equipoise, fixity of any kind are rare and temporary and that real equilibrium, where all forces intersect, conjoin, and rest, is more rare and fleeting. I should accept there’s no middle ground in middle age, unless it’s to stand between the accumulating years and mounting anxiety about how to spend those remaining. And since I remember my dinner with a Buddhist nun but wasn’t converted by it, I’ll say second chances expire before time does, and you spend time afterward looking back on points where you might have leapt and didn’t, or did, and leapt the wrong way. I have, on average, twenty-two more years. Every year’s delay consumes four-and-ahalf percent of my remaining life, and those years may number more losses than gains. My decision won’t be financially feasible for awhile. It must be financially feasible, for that’s the way I am, this life and any I know. I have awhile to appreciate that my professor was right and so was Muriel. Everybody must be somewhere, yet we repeat portions of our allotted days. I left Katmandu at noon on Sunday, flew eight hours to Singapore, left Singapore at midnight Sunday, flew twelve hours to Frankfurt, left Frankfurt on Sunday morning, arrived seven hours later in New York, and at noon on Sunday was back in Washington. For the moment, I am here.

.The . . . . .Twain . . . . . . . .Shall . . . . . . Meet ..................................................

T

oday’s phone caller had bought a coin and was suffering post-purchase doubts. He thought he might have paid too much and, once the coin was in his pocket and his cash wasn’t, realized he had only the dealer’s word that the coin was genuine. The Mint had “an opportunity to reassure me”— his phrase — by examining the coin. Another opportunity. Every time I get such an opportunity I think of Fiddler on the Roof, the scene when the Marxist-Leninist boyfriend says he’ll stay for dinner, and the mother mutters, “Another blessing.” It was time, once again, to tell someone the Mint does not authenticate coins as a guarantor for private commercial transactions, but blurting that straight out seemed abrupt, too much the knee-jerk response of a nay-saying bureaucrat. So I asked what coin he’d bought. He didn’t want to tell me. That was a clue he’d bought a coin he isn’t supposed to have, likely a gold American Eagle minted during the Depression. Keynesians running the country then made it illegal for citizens to own gold — “hoard” gold, one of few times economic and political usage coincided. Americans were required to surrender their gold coins for cash, which theory said would be spent, stimulating the economy. The embargo included American Eagle gold coins minted before the law. Few were struck and most were melted, so those remaining are valuable, middle six figures valuable, and are literally sold under the counter among dealers and collectors who know it’s still illegal to own them. I told him he shouldn’t worry if he’d bought the coin from a reputable dealer. “If ‘reputable’ applies in this case,” I added, larding all the ironic enigma possible upon “reputable.” “I’d rather not say where I bought it,” he volunteered. “And I notice you haven’t told me your name, either,” I said.

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Silence. “If you send us this coin, and it’s one you’re not supposed to have, we’ll confiscate it.” More and deeper silence. “Let me try to sum up here. You don’t want to tell me your name, you don’t want to tell me what coin you bought, and you don’t want to tell me where. So basically, you’d like to hold this coin up to the phone and have me tell you it’s real. Correct?” To his credit, the man laughed. Coin collectors do not, in my experience, have great capacity for laughing at themselves, and he did say good-bye pleasantly. That conversation stayed in my mind most of the day. It reminded me of how often people ask me to reassure them about their money in various ways, and it recalled why I didn’t like being a paid investment advisor. Manage money for a fee, you deal with rich people because only they can afford you, and, fact is, I came not to like rich people much. I’m embarrassed by my prejudice — Fiddler on the Roof again, that comic socialist — but I don’t. Rich people do things like try to make you an accomplice to illicit coin transactions. On the other hand, I readily help people with a little money, like the young Mint employee who came to me about Thrift Savings Plan, the government’s 401k. Through internal publications I supervise I’ve been urging employees to participate, and she had questions. She couldn’t — nope, simply couldn’t — save ten percent of her salary. “OK,” I said, “start with one percent, one penny of every dollar you earn. You can’t tell me you can’t save a penny out of a dollar.” Those are my days and the contraries who and which populate them. The guy who bought a coin he can’t show off, the girl who won’t save a dime before she sees it. Cagey with the former, cajoling with the latter. The first conversation involved a few hundred grand easy; the second, a penny, one red cent, one one-hundredth of one dollar. The Mint makes twenty billion coins a year, and sometimes I feel that one way or another, eventually, if I work here long enough, I’ll talk to somebody about every one of them.

.Every . . . . . . .Picture . . . . . . . . . .Tells . . . . . .a. .Story ............................................

I

have a photograph of my father on my refrigerator, and sometimes I talk to it. This isn’t as mawkish as it sounds, for my conversations are brief and neutral: “Had to sell Windsor, Dad. Too many taxes, not enough growth.” The picture shows Dad and Mother and me beside my brother and his family outside my niece’s wedding. Dad is pale and his face seems unusually oval, as if beginning to melt in on itself, but he’s standing and wearing a suit for the last time. My sister Susan took the picture, and I stuck it on the fridge under magnets shaped like tiny ears of corn that I bought at a truck stop. Mother’s congregation holds a service for parishioners who died during the year, so I slipped its bulletin, which lists Dad’s name across from Alva’s, under the picture. I meant to do something with them, but I guess they’ll stay on my refrigerator until they’re as yellow as the corn-ear magnets. I’m remembering my father from pictures, especially those in my head. Some are hilarious. My sister Kathy married the week I returned to Iowa from overseas, and Dad’s tuxedo matched the groomsmen’s. Unfortunately, those were the mid-1970s, and the groom chose canary yellow with wide-set black pencil stripes, cuffed elephant bell-bottoms, and widow’s-peaked black satin patches draping each shoulder like a hunting jacket. Its shirt was turquoise with frilled placket and cuffs. First time the guy ever wore a tux, and he looked like an exasperated b’wana draped in an over-ripe banana and parrot feathers. I laugh remembering the consternation on his face, but he wore the tux. And paid for the wedding. Other pictures are video clips and not funny. At the pharmacy last night, the elderly man ahead of me whispered to the pharmacist’s assistant, “Do you carry urinals?” She was South American and spoke little English. “ What?” she asked. “Urinals,” he said louder, as we in

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line around him pondered the miracle of shoelaces. “Is urinals a prescription?” “U-R-I-N-A-L-S,” he spelled. Still not understanding, she motioned him toward the pharmacist, a tall African whose speech is a clatter of consonants like the vowel-less name on his nametag. As the man limped away, holding to the counter, I remembered the last time I saw Dad at home, holding to backs of chairs as he circled the dining room in his bathrobe. He was catheterized then, and his struggle was more awkward because . . . No, we will not replay that home movie. Not that one. I fell asleep on the couch when I was home at Thanksgiving, and Mother said I looked like Dad in my sleep. Her eyes were teary when I awoke. I guess my cheekbones and lower half of my face are Dad’s in middle age, when his jaw line began to melt into a pouchier jowl. My coloring is Dad’s when he was healthy, red dotting my blonder beard and hair, which I kept and Dad didn’t. Now that I have his clothes, I see both of us liked blazers, bomber jackets, and khakis, but his blues are more green, his browns more sallow, his tans more gold than I’d choose. I wear the clothes anyway. My posture is Dad’s when he was healthy, straight-backed, six feet of us, but his eyes were blue and mine are brown — which fits my darker vision of life — and set more deeply under a more-square forehead. I have the eyes of my biological mother, also remembered mostly from photos, and they have a narrowed, accusing quality Dad’s never had. Cast a cold eye on life: my favorite verse apparently my native one. What’s on my mind isn’t whether I look like Dad; I’d like to know what of Dad might be in my mind looking out. We both moved through life with a small wake, more inclined to offer help than accept it: Dad wouldn’t let Mother put her inheritance toward their mortgage. We’d have identical opinions about people who speak limited English filling prescriptions and about stores clerked by teenagers after 6 p.m., no adult in sight. In my case there’s self-critique in the opinion, because that’s what I think looking in the mirror: no adult in sight. The picture on my refrigerator showed a man who’d fought a war, built a business, and raised four children, and beside him there’s a middleaged, dishwater blond-kid in a $500 suit, ever thankful children are preventable. I’ve wondered if my father slept with many women, as he probably wondered about me. At his store he worked in a lemon-orange jacket

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with an oval Coast-to-Coast Hardware logo on the breast, and I once joked that I’m cuter than he was at my age, especially in that jacket. Mother said he was cute enough. Dad was enormously well liked, but he didn’t need to be; it was enough not to be disliked. He was similarly two-minded about my lack of attachments — read: fifty and unmarried. But out in Arizona one winter he noticed that after sixty there are steadily more single women. At that stage of his cancer, he likely thought so with reference to himself. My father envied me, but not in a jaundiced way. I’ve done things he’d have done had he been the bachelor. He envied my travel and experiences, and, late in life, he envied years I’d spent in grad school, reading and carving out ideas. Dad would have liked to have had my master’s degrees and my master scuba rating. He regretted there’d never be a book under his name. A few years ago he wrote some short essays, seemingly for church magazines. One had to do with God providing rocks for cavemen to make axes, his theme being how mankind merely discovers advanced uses for the originally provided material. I retyped it, corrected the grammar, and mailed it around, unsuccessfully. Alva took the idea for a sermon. If I’m a chip off the old block, it wasn’t always evident to either of us. Wednesday nights when I was a teenager, Dad went to Toastmaster’s meetings and became a fair public speaker. He spoke at my high school several times — career day, that sort of thing — and he was there when I spoke at graduation. He could’ve given a better sermon than Alva, but in the end I’m the one who did. Over the years, I’d send home speeches I’d written for my various employers. My father the Toastmaster never made the connection. Neither did I. Dad never had my anger and sarcasm, and he was more sociable. “An intellectual hatred is the worst”—Yeats again, “A Prayer for My Daughter.” Dad said I’d get mellower, but I haven’t, except for reducing the number of subjects I find it worth having opinions about. It was ironic he’d talk about my mellowing. Most of my life I’d have called him authoritative and overbearing and still might, mitigated by an explanation: faced with a problem, his impulse was to find solutions whereas mine is to fault the proposition. All of Dad’s nurses told me how gentle he was. A symmetrical memory: as a teenager I overheard my parents sharing astonishment that a neighbor had praised my manners.

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My father’s hospital gown was printed with yellow flowers. When I think of them they remind me of an afternoon forty or more years ago when he and I were passing through Kansas in late summer and stopped at a roadside park near a field of sunflowers so deep and wide and boundless it could have dropped from Oz. Dad was a determined driver who rarely stopped on the road, but we pulled over and walked among flowers bigger ’round than any Jack’s beanstalk and taller, it seemed to me, than any house, much taller than my father’s head. Their round, pitted faces, so many more feet above my own head, seemed like benign lions with fragrant manes, and as we walked among them Dad said, “Isn’t this something?” When I think of Dad, that’s how it is. A long time ago, my father and I walked into a field together, and when his time came I walked out alone, a likeness of him telling his story. I left him there among the sunflowers, where he still wanders among their thick stalks, hands in his pockets, wonder on his face, no longer in a rush to reach home before dark. He has all the time in the world now. All the time there is, healthy, curious, and afoot. Perhaps when the picture in my kitchen has yellowed in time it will match that picture in my head.

.Sightline . . . . . . . . .Books ............................................................ The Iowa Series in Literary Nonfiction

Shadow Girl: A Memoir of Attachment deb abramson Embalming Mom: Essays in Life janet burroway No Such Country: Essays toward Home elmar lueth Currency of the Heart: A Year of Investing, Death, Work, and Coins donald r. nichols Memoirs of a Revolutionary victor serge