Back to the early days

With the markets bouncy, our household more or less maxed out on this whole college thing -- mostly the interpersonal dynamics of our own desires for and fears about Graham, and a bunch of LFA stuff going on, I decided to hearken back to the early days of the pandemic and walk to Walgreens to pick up a prescription. We didn't need any of the supplemental things I have typically sourced from there (floss, coffee, whole wheat goldfish), so I didn't bother taking a knapsack, as I did sometimes back in 2020 when we were trying to limit the number of times we went into stores.

I almost walked off without a mask, then caught myself just as I hit South Lake Shore. I left my phone at home to get "off the grid," as it were.

It was a mild evening. I went up Woodhaven, past Carolyn Daldorf's old house, and was reminded of the time when, back in 1981, I returned from my first trip abroad, to the UK and of course Switzerland. I had bought a can of very temporary blue hairspray at some punk emporium. Maybe the night after I got home, I heard that people were hanging out over at Carolyn's so I sprayed my hair blue then raced over there. I went around back and banged on the window of her rec room, where she and a few others (Shana? Chris George? Kristin Lay?) were hanging out, and I momentarily gave them the impression that my hair was blue. Of course, I've never been one to hold onto a good prank for long, so I quickly told them that it was temporary, because of course really what I wanted to impress upon them that I was so very clever.

I kept on going up the hill. Before long I came to the house, on the right, of these math geniuses who had sold a business and then become math teaches who had been clients of S.C., the first advisor I had worked for. SC was a rigid person, a zealot for value investing. I watched her firm carefully in the decade and change since the financial crisis as value investing kept not coming back from a protracted slump, and marveled how her assets under management never quite collapsed from an exodus of clients. Sometime last year I saw that she had sold her business to the firm from which she had split a decadish before and left the business. 

I cut through the path that leads to Eastwood Lake Road, past the house of Mary, bassist for Southern Culture on the Skids, past the house that we rented when we were doing renovations on our house on Markham. I thought about how small the kids were back then. That was a happy time, when we were in that little rental. All on top of each other, but happy.