At Home I Was A King Of Infinite Space
But not when it came to Nanosaur
Feeling masterful
In the midst of my career, I had many days when I’d come home from work feeling great about myself. One of my investments had made a lot of money or I’d resolved an issue intractable to others or I’d spotted an error in a draft analysis and saved a colleague and the firm from a mistake.
As well, the firm was highly profitable. Each morning, I’d receive an envelope with a sheet of the firm’s earnings for the year to date. I’d calculate my share of the earnings and allow myself a few moments to revel.
These were days during the portion of my career when I was still rising in influence at the firm. Along with two peers, Jeff and Keith, I was one of three people in the tier below the founders. I could see a path ahead where one day I’d be part of the tier at the very top.
With rare exceptions, I was treated with deference and respect.
I ended my work days around five, earlier than most of my colleagues. I was senior enough to leave when I wanted. And I was productive. I worked rapidly and avoided small talk.
Typically, I’d arrive home before six, able to spend time and have dinner with my wife and three children.
I remember one day coming home in a mood of uplift and self-satisfaction. I decided to grace my six year old son Michael with my fatherly presence.
Nanosaur
In his room, Michael was sitting at a low table playing a Mac game called Nanosaur.
It was, I later learned, a complex game.
Your tiger-striped Nanosaur is a futuristic, advanced species of dinosaur. Though highly intelligent, the Nanosaurs are dying out due to a weakened gene pool. Your mission is to travel back in time to the primitive age of your Mesozoic dinosaur ancestors and collect five primitive dinosaur eggs in order to save the Nanosaur civilization from genetic extinction.
You are propelled by a jet-pack that when properly used can evade the T-Rex’s that want to eat you. You have twenty human minutes to find the precious eggs and bring them back through the time portal. After twenty minutes is up, a meteor storm will destroy the primitive world and with it any chance to save your species.
I’d walked into Michael’s room in my suit and tie feeling very patriarchal. It was 1999, I was thirty-seven, and I was prepared to move seamlessly from my masterful role at work to display similar mastery in my role as a father.
I greeted Michael with the nickname I’d given him, “Micycle.” He grunted in frustration at the computer screen. He ordered me to come over.
“Dad, can you help me?”
With a confidence absent of any foundation, I bent down to take over the mouse and keyboard. I immediately propelled the Nanosaur directly into the path of a T-Rex. Michael screamed––really it was a screech worthy of a rampaging Velociraptor. I tried to explain that I didn’t know how to operate the game, but little Michael was not accepting excuses.
I was his father. I was supposed to know how to do things.
Each time I propelled the Nanosaur into harm’s way, Michael cried out in great pain as if he was the wounded Nanosaur.
Michael was raging in tears. I gave up and left the room. I had failed my son.
The Nanosaur incident with Michael is one of my most precious memories. Thinking of it makes me smile. It’s become a family legend.
Like most legends it reveals a few truths. Michael has always been outspoken when displeased. I have always been inept at driving anything, whether a car or a jet-packed propelled dinosaur.
Another truth. I came home before dinner, not out of a sense of obligation, but because that’s where I truly wanted to be.
A meteor
A few years after the time of the Nanosaurs, one of my two peers Jeff left the firm to found his own successful investment firm. A few years after that, in 2010, the other peer Keith died suddenly and tragically of a rare disease.
Before we were colleagues, Keith and I had become good friends doing real estate deals together. I’d recognized just how talented he was and convinced Keith to join the firm to take over real estate investing from me.
It may have been the single best thing I ever did for the firm. Keith was a superstar.
Keith’s funeral was doubly shocking to me. He had gone from well to deathly ill in a month. He was forty-nine. We were the same age. That was the first shock.
In the few years prior to his death Keith and I had drifted apart, no longer socializing together. Perhaps I’d resented his success at the firm. Perhaps he’d just gotten too busy building the firm’s real estate business, including expanding it internationally. He always seemed to be travelling.
I regretted the fraying of our friendship, his death having made its restoration impossible.
At Keith’s funeral, one of the founders and I were to give eulogies. I’d written my eulogy to emphasize Keith’s personal qualities––his charisma, his love of fun, his sweet nature, what a good friend he’d been.
The picture of Keith in my memory I held then (and still hold today) is from the Bat Mitzvah celebration of my daughter ten years earlier. He’d been perhaps the only adult to use the de rigueur face painter. He’d had his cheeks streaked with bold orange tiger stripes that fit well with his blond hair. 1
At the funeral, the founder delivered his eulogy before mine. He centered it on Keith’s business successes.
Then he revealed something I hadn’t known––my second shock. Keith had been selected as a third founder and been chosen as the sole successor.
The pending promotion, said the founder, had promised to be a huge step forward for the firm, and it made Keith’s death especially tragic.
As I heard this, I was standing next to my wife in one of the cavernous rooms at Frank E. Campbell. She turned to me with a look of confusion. I said “I had no idea.”
I had a sinking feeling in my stomach, the place my stress goes to cause misery. I felt disrespected, betrayed, humiliated. This was something I should have been told ahead of time, not at a funeral.
I delivered my eulogy next. I was able to bury the news I’d just heard. I was determined to deliver my eulogy as well as I could on behalf of Keith’s memory, and I did.
The news that I’d been passed over, received in such a callous and disorienting way, made me realize that my career had stalled. And for a while, the shock of Keith’s death and the revelation that I’d been passed over re-animated me. I met with the founders and told them that I was ready to step up.
I did work harder but I was still the same person, unwilling to give up being home almost every night with my family. I hated business dinners, I hated business travel. It wasn’t in my nature to socialize with people just because they were potentially valuable business connections.
Any talent I had for the business could not compensate for my nature as a homebody and my great dislike for business networking. Plus the angst of that funeral revelation stayed with me.
Writing about the funeral now, remembering it with specific and unwelcome fidelity, is not without stress.
Eventually, a number of subsequent events led to my decision to retire.
Enter Ulysses
One of the saddest poems I know is Ulysses 2 by Tennyson. The poem speaks from the point of view of Ulysses as an old man back home at Ithaca from his triumphal adventures, including his victory over the Trojans and his epic ten-year homeward journey escaping death narrowly countless times. When Ulysses finally arrives home, he kills the evil suitors who have been hounding his wife Penelope and dissipating his kingly fortune.
But his exploits and adventures have changed him. “I have become a name,’ he says, meaning he’s tasted fame and basked in great feats of arms and guile. He’s become a celebrity of his ancient world. Being a small-time king no longer does it for him. The poem begins:
“It little profits that an idle king,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.
I cannot rest from travel:”
There are people in business who have had careers like Ulysses where they have founded their own firms and companies, taken risks, and succeeded in creating multi-billion dollar fortunes. They have become “ a name,” celebrities, their names recognizable if not to the broad population then to finance people like me who come across them. Sometimes in real life, sometimes in the business press or in the New York Post’s Page Six when they are involved in some sort of scandal usually involving a decision to no longer be ”match’d with an aged wife.” 3
Regarding the divorces of these billionaires, I wonder if there’s a similar sadness there. They’ve conquered the worlds of their careers, so what’s left to make them recreate the thrill when they were in the throes of business conquest? Perhaps a much younger woman who might remind them of those earlier, fresh, exciting times.
I don’t know what it’s like to be the conquering hero of a realm or of a business. But I do know what it’s like to win the hand of the love of my life and to enjoy forty years of requited passion.
A little further down in the poem, Tennyson’s Ulysses kvetches:
“How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!”
Of course I have regrets, including, but not limited to, my haplessness at Nanosaur, but most days I find it easy, even unavoidable, to shine in use to someone, whether a stranger, a friend, or someone I love.
I’m no Ulysses, never have been, never will be. I’m more like his son Telemachus of whom Tennyson’s Ulysses says:
“Most blameless is he, centred in the sphere
Of common duties, decent not to fail
In offices of tenderness,”
And I’m ok with that. Most of the time.
Question for the comments: Do you recall moments when something has been revealed to you in an unexpected and unsettling time and place?
The night before last, I dreamed that picture of Keith. It was so real to me that I asked my wife if she had shown it to me. She hadn’t.
The sadness of the poem reminds me of the sadness at the very end of Lord Of The Rings when Frodo realizes that his successful adventures have changed him so much that he can no longer live a comfortable, placid life in the Shire.
Most people read the poem as extolling resilience exemplified by its stirring last lines.
“We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”
But I see a guy who can’t control his drive for glory and so is willing to desert his duties as husband, father, and king. Dante is with me as he places Ulysses in one of the deeper circles of hell.
Lines from the poem Ulysses are included a few times in the TV show Succession, recited by Logan Roy, the aged patriarch, who does not want to give up power. Kudos to the writers!
My wife, now a retired psychotherapist, did her intern work at a hospice. In their final hours, nobody wishes they had worked longer hours or spent more time estranged from loved ones. That one’s eulogy be a listing of professional accomplishments is indeed sad. Your priorities may not make you a “name”, but certainly make you human and a mensch.
Gosh. Your question brought back a terrible memory I have managed to park at the back of my mind. It must have been in the 1990s or so. I was hired by an agency to write a booklet on a not particularly exciting subject that I won't bore you with (I work freelance, so I was hired just for the job). It required working with a Committee who was going to make most of the running, with my copy being the final text. It is a job I have done many times and done well – and I love doing it because I learn a lot, while being able to use my writing skills.
At the first meeting, I offered a rough outline of what I thought the booklet might cover (which would serve to structure the subsequent meetings) and I wrote the beginning of an Introduction, so they could see my writing style. No comment. We met for months, with my adding new chapters as decisions were made. At a near final meeting, when I had talked to the people who hired me for some time prior to the meeting, I was told early on IN the meeting, that what I had produced was "not remotely what we wanted in form, tone or structure".
If it were me now, I think I would have said "Well, I gave you plenty of information early on, why didn't you say something sooner? And, in the interests of politeness, why didn't you warn me that you had this view rather than spring it on me in a meeting of 20 Committee members?" BUT I just kept quiet and fought back a sense of incredible embarrassment.
Not quite of the same importance as what you learned at the funeral, but it was awful – and many Committee members spoke sympathetically and apologetically to me afterward.
Happily, it was a rare experience of generally very happy (on both sides) freelance work.