The negative feedback loop between product and distribution

My most recent financial column is published at The Local Reporter. I actually spend time writing these and thinking about their composition, albeit not that much time. Maybe a couple of hours each. Then I post about them on both Facebook and LinkedIn. Of late I haven't been getting many likes or anything, which is kind of dispiriting and makes them feel like trees falling in the forest. 

Probably it is an effect of me not posting very much at all, so that my posts don't get seen by a lot of people because they just aren't being pushed into other peoples' feeds by Facebook. I could remedy that by posting more and courting more attention. But then I would slip into the negative feedback loop in which I am seeking attention and trying to do things that are popular, which would negatively impact my ability to think about the things I am writing about.

Of course, this is the nature of marketing, which seeks to garner attention and help drum up leads and thence sales. In my mind I often chastise Mary a little for doing too little of it and leaving it to me to do it for the whole household.

Really, this is why organizations split out marketing from product development and sales and delivery as they grow. All of these functions take work and compromises are entailed along the way. Right now I just don't have the bandwidth or care that much about sales and distribution. I don't need the increased revenue, and a decent-sized chunk of me just wants to focus on the thinking and the writing. Another part of me just wants the universe to hunt me down and recognize the depth of my sensitive genius. Which is not how it works.

One or many clients

Late last week I discovered that, caught up in the drama around George Jr's last days and also my trip to Colorado, I had lost the thread on something for a client. Nothing particularly time-sensitive, by the way, pertaining to a goal a number of years in the future and doing some tax-advantageous things towards reaching it. But I had forgotten about it, no doubt about that.

Yesterday I discovered it at the top of my task list, but I also had a bunch of work to do on something of benefit to all of my and our firm's clients, a deeper forward-looking fixed income framework. So I had to decide what to focus on: the one or the many? For the short term I chose the many and put my back into fixed income.

My life often looks like this. Choosing between one or many clients. Of course, the dynamic is not that simple, because digging into the particulars of a given client's situation often adds insight that can be applied to multiple others. The relationship seems deeply dialectical. 

Wake up call

I was taking something out to the recycling bin over the weekend when a neighbor walking by spoke to me. She said she has Alzheimer's so she wasn't driving anymore, but that fortunately someone was going to be able to address it surgically. Of course I didn't know exactly what to say, it's one of those rare types of conversations for which we really don't have a lot of experience of training. I just said I was happy she was going to get help and then turned the conversation over how a friend had said he might be able to bring a chainsaw and help with some of the enormous logs of hardwood laying around her yard that the electrical company's forester had left lying there when it took down a tree that was threatening a power line.

But inside I was a little freaked out. She is not much older than us, maybe in her mid-60s. It was just another one of those shots across the bow to remind me of my mortality. I am very used to wake up calls from cancer. This very weekend came the news that UNC's Eric Montross -- who has been such a gift not just to Be Loud! Sophie but also other parts of UNC's cancer center -- has cancer himself. Early onset Alzheimer's and/or dementia falls into another category altogether.

But, again, what is one to do? I did the only rational thing, I went inside and told Mary and then hugged her. I would have liked to have hugged Graham too, but he has COVID this week so I held off on that one. Beyond that, it's just another reminder to focus on health: exercise, eating better (always an area of potential improvement for me), sleep, laughter, talking to friends and family. I probably should have called mom; I'll do that sometime today.

The Rites of Spring

Graham was feeling poorly up on campus on Wednesday, fever, sore throat, etc. So we brought him home. He tested negative for COVID on a home test, so we assumed it was something else. Then his econ professor said Graham needed proof that he had been seen by a medical professional. So he went to Student Health and... a PCR test showed that he did in fact have COVID. 

Thankfully we had been largely careful with him. He had more or less stayed in his room. 

It became immediately clear that it was time to attack the first round of pollen out of on the deck so we could eat out there. On the one hand, it seems early to go after the pollen. We have so much more to go. But even before that it forced me to bring in the last fire's worth of kindling and wood and set it up in the fireplace so we are ready to go for one more fire. 

Then I attacked the pollen in earnest in my traditional Pareto way: I know I'm not getting all of it, but I can get most of it. And also the cobwebs that our cat Leon so likes to munch and that Mary swears up and down must be the reason for bouts of feline nausea. It really doesn't matter whether she's right or not. She strongly believes it, so I have to get the cobwebs for household harmony.

Over the years I have gotten better at mitigating the pollen. What's more, I've come to enjoy the ongoing sweeping regimen in my Italian shopkeeper way. I know that it's an evergreen problem that will only stop being so when the trees cease and desist, but just engaging in the act of keeping it down to a dull roar brings some comfort.

To truly transition from winter into spring I feel like I should also take the pictures of peoples' kids down from the fridge, but I am resisting it. I like seeing the kids' faces, especially first thing in the morning. Pretty sure this is a life phase thing. I find seeing them very motivating, especially vis-a-vis the whole work thing, even though they're not my kids.

AI and age

All this talk of ChatGPT and the various chatbots makes me feel very old. I have a sense that it may well fundamentally change how my profession operates and that eager beavers are out there trying to make that happen, but I don't really care. I don't want to engage with it. I have a full calendar already.

Fundamentally I am concerned that even if it can come up with refined thoughts or text embodying them, is that what I really want? Do I want to produce the thing, or do I want personally to develop the capacity to produce the thing so that, next time I am challenged, I have the mental muscle memory of having done so?

Truly old people or counseled to keep their brains flowing by doing sudoku and other challenging puzzles and whatnot to stave off the decline of their faculties. What happens if we generally outsource our thinking to bots? I already know personally that I'm less nimble in finding my way around simply by virtue of growing dependent on Google Maps, and I'm not alone. What if that is the precedent here? 

The full embrace of the Bible

Tim, the husband of my cousin Neva, has been fighting a blood cancer for two and a half years now. He's gone through not one but two bone marrow transplants. Throughout it, on an almost daily basis, Neva has been sharing and journaling his journey on CaringBridge. I've tried to read as often as I can. Recently things have been trending positive. Their spirits have been sustained throughout by their own steadfast Christian faith and that of most of their community.

After a day of very welcome very good news I commented something along the lines of "fingers crossed" that things kept heading in the right direction, and as I did it I was immediately aware that this was an essentially pagan or superstitious turn of the tongue, so I scrolled down to see what others had said. I was the only one who had not made reference to God or Christ. Mostly God. In other words, I was interpreting this as a random event, whereas most of their community were treating as planned and/or divinely ordained.

As I read through the Bible (I am now in Job), I am struck by how vast and complex the whole thing is and how it could easily merit a second reading, indeed how one could study it one's whole life, as many do. I can also imagine how shared dialogue around the Bible amongst people of good intent could serve as the grounds for a lot of ethical behavior and community.

But then there are so many other books out there, including the foundational texts of other religions. On balance a preference for the Bible as the primary grounds for most knowledge of and engagement with the world has not made for a lot of growth or movement forward in history. I will, in any case, keep reading.

Back to the Monkey

No matter what I do in the morning: meditate, stretch, situps, plank, read the Bible, read 12-step books, pet the cat(cats if I'm lucky), calmly protect quiet time to read a long article or two in the Journal, monkey brain nonetheless breaks in all the time and draws my attention in a thousand different directions. In many regards it is just the nature of the beast. Modern living, raised to a higher degree than usual by entrepreneurship and having no true boss, just responsibilities to a host of clients, plus responsibilities within the family.

My issues are, in short, the epitome of first-world problems. And yet I have to seek to manage them down and focus on specific things to a certain extent or my being and energy is entirely frittered away and dissipated into a flurry of check marks on my task list. 

There are toolkits that help, many of them drawn from the realms of religious, self-help, and management literature, much of which just parrots the other while placing the accents in different places. First and foremost comes habit and process. Having the toolkit, doing the readings (and the meditations), posting to the blog. In the end, to quote Bill Murray's inspirational chant from Meatballs (which oddly I think back to more and more as a touchstone, despite what a dopey movie it is) "it just doesn't matter, it just doesn't matter." Which comforts me.

Quick roundup

Yesterday I made a lot of progress in the latest John McPhee book I'm reading while also doing a bunch of other things to cull my possessions and make way for the most recent influx of stuff from up North:

• I went through a box of papers from work -- mostly printed out articles -- and through out what I didn't need. Which was 95% of it.
• I offered a bunch of Russian books I had brought home from Moscow in 1998 for my dissertation research to professors (or their grad students) from UNC and Duke. I had rounds of this back in 2003 and 2009 on the occasions of moves from Wilton St to Linden Lane and from Princeton back to Chapel Hill.
• I threw away some old torn-up, ratty clothes, including perhaps my favorite garment of all time, a very light J McLaughlin blue and white checked flannel shirt I had picked up at a thrift store in 2006-7. It was so very soft and I had worn it often to work at Goldman Sachs at the onset of the big financial Crisis while the bank FTEs traded tales of how much they had spent on cuff links at Barney's. I also parted with the winter coat I took to Moscow in '98, which is close to useless here.
• I went for a walk and examined the flood plain behind Eastgate and the shopping center where Breadman's and the Tienda Guadalupena are, which excited neighbors had claimed 18 months ago was a failure of design by Chapel Hill Stormwater and its engineering partner. I couldn't tell if they were right, but it seems fine to me
•  I raked leaves out of the ditch above the pipe under the walkway from our yard to the LFA park. Generally I want to get this kind of work done while it is still cold out and pleasant to work outdoors. Once it gets hot raking sucks.

All in all, it was a good day of staying offline for the most part and not watching the news about bank rescues and wobbliness, which is far outside my range of influence.

At the end of the day, Graham came home and I took him back up to campus. East had won its second robotics tournament of the year, its third ever. He was very psyched.

Spring Break

Graham's freshman spring break is drawing to a close, and it has been a good one. It has been more or less an organic extension of both UNC and high school. Tuesday night he got together a crew to go to Linda's for Trivia Night, where they came in 2nd because they failed to listen to important facets of the big question on which they wagered a bunch of their points ("Name the 10 highest towers in the USA that are not residential or office buildings"). Whoops. Friday he went to a party at a friend's house up near Hillsborough. One other night he and some buds went out for burgers. This weekend he has been up in Wake County cheering on the ECHHS Eastbots at a robotics competition. In short, we didn't see all that much of him, which is totally fine and developmentally appropriate. Unlike what we did to our parents, we weren't worried about his driving drunk or otherwise getting in trouble.

We were able to sneak in a couple of movies, Wes Anderson's Grand Budapest Hotel (typical Wes Anderson silliness) and the 1973 Day of the Jackal, which was very dated. In general, it was just good to have some quality time on the couch up under the blanket with our cat Rascal up on the back of the couch with us.

We also sampled a newish dessert from Trader Joe's: the peanut butter Brookie, which we judged inferior to the original chocolate chip Brookie, and we also ate some of our favorite meals, including niangao (this time with chicken instead of pork) and some pork rice noodles. All in all, a fine week.

The Wisdom Books ff

It is difficult to express how happy I am to have rolled forward past the Nevi'im or "prophets" portion of the Bible, to wit Kings I and II and Chronicles I and II. That was some hard going. I am well into Job now and am digging it mightily. From childhood I recalled the basic story of Job, but I had no idea that most of the book is structured as a back and forth between Job and a bunch of guys challenging him and his claim to righteousness. All in all, it recalls nothing nothing so much as Plato's dialogues, which have themselves long been gathering dust on my shelves.

Many thoughts have been flowing to me. I have been over the last year and change enjoying listening to the Acquired podcast, as I have shared before here on the blog. Ben and David, the hosts of the pod, have great vigor, enthusiasm and intelligence which they bring to a wide range of business stories. Which also means they have a lot of both knowledge and insight they can bring to bear on whatever they are investigating on a given episode.

The one problematic aspect of their show is its excessive focus on the piling up of money, which culminated in my mind towards the tail end of their Taylor Swift episode (which is absolutely worth listening to, I learned a ton about the music industry and also about her, whom I now admire even if I am not fully a convert to her tunes) where they say that she has "only" $550 million, so is not really that rich. Which is just both silly and unseemly, and reminded me of nothing so much as this occasion back in 2007 when all these NYC-area "adults" got all excited over the prospect of making billions of dollars. 

What I would really like to see, and I may have to spearhead it myself, is an energetic and entertaining podcast looking at the history of philanthropy. We've seen big moments in recent years. First the Gates Foundation changing philanthropy by introducing corporate culture and a metrics-driven approach to giving away money. Then the Giving Pledge and Buffett's noble call just to give his money to Gates rather than build a large foundation with his name on it. Then MacKenzie Scott's rebuke to Gates by giving away chunks of cash without preconditions to organizations she admires and, lastly, Melinda Gates's implicit stamp of approval on Scott's model with her own post-divorce giving. 

These are just recent highlights. Charitable giving is a fairly stable ~2% of US GDP. Voluntary associations have bean called out as a distinctive feature of American culture since De Tocqueville travelled round two centuries ago. The rise of NGOs worldwide is a major feature of the development of civil society, for example in China in recent years. It's a big landscape. Probably somebody is already doing this, I just need to find it and make time for it. 

Lightning round

Days like these are trying for those of us who lived through the financial crisis and particularly those of us who have taken it upon ourselves to act as financial shepherds for others. The echoes of 2008-2009 are too clear. We like to believe that banking regulation has gotten better, but nothing is ever perfect, the risks of any given situation only become evident when they have broken the wrong way, but mostly none of us can keep our eyes on all of it so we are essentially outsourcing monitoring of if to others: bank regulators, the press, and other market participants.

In a lightning round, I'd give the Fed a B+ for recent years, an A for not letting itself get pushed around by Trump* but a B for failing to see that inflation was less transitory and supply chain-driven than it was earlier in 2021. But not worse than a B. The financial press in general has shown itself to have backbone through these years of its vilification. It's not perfect, but the core financial press organs (Journal, Financial Times, Economist, Barron's etc). keep on ticking and doing their jobs. The rest of the market is a trickier question. I have to wonder if the focus on costs and the rise of passive vehicles and scorecard-driven ETFs rather than having more people continually digging into balance sheets weakens our ability to see things coming. In some sense it's a tragedy of the commons situation.

*Although backing down from interest rate hikes in the fall of 2018 because of market volatility and Trump's hectoring wasn't Powell's strongest moment, he mostly just ignored Trump and did his job

An Ode to Westchester

As I mentioned in passing a few days back, we have come to the end of an era, for the moment at least. For the first time in 60 years or so, no members of the Berridge clan live in Westchester County, NY. 

There are some who would say good riddance. Westchester is not an easy place to do things. The roads are narrow and suffer from being in a high cost area. Stores are crowded. Basically, Westchester -- like most of the New York metro area, is like an extension of New York City where people go about in cars and the things that make the city challenging are marginally less challenging.

But the converse is true as well. Westchester has many of the best features of the City, first and foremost its diversity, which provides for the possibility of finding little pockets of magic here and there if you look for them: the perfect little Italian deli or a pizzeria dating to the 20s or an H Mart hiding around the corner where you least expect it. There are also fine public libraries. And merchants who can scale up the speed and efficiency to cope with rush hour but are also constant presences in communities. 

I will miss many if not all aspects of the place, often if not always.

Some ramblings on the state of banking this morning

The rapid collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the reonset of a crisis mentality around the markets and the nation did little to enhance my day yesterday. To my credit, I had stayed true to an embargo of online news over the weekend -- with memories of the anxiety-plagued weekends of autumn 2008 amply fresh in memory and much better mental health practices in place. By now I have learned at a much more somatic level that there's nothing I can do about any of it so obsessing does me little good.

We will no doubt learn a bunch of lessons from this episode. The political blowback may be troubling. One question people and regulators might have asked themselves is: what happens when a start-up fails to make payroll? So the fuck what. They work for startups and should understand the risks of doing so and hedge them. Failure to make payroll is only really a concern for those that have national security implications where an employee not making payroll could open the door to temptation for espionage (Palantir, etc.). The VC ecosystem should probably have made some capital calls to stabilize many of the companies who banked at SVB -- especially as the VCs bear much of the blame for telling their portfolio companies to bank there.

Ultimately the fact that banks had so much cash in long treasuries is troubling. It should have been clear from the outset that there's a fundamental mismatch between the maturity of an asset that pays out 20-30 years in the future and near-term cash needs. Life insurance companies are the natural consumers of long treasuries. The problem is that people haven't been buying enough life insurance because their own concepts of the horizon of their responsibilities is excessively foreshortened. Also because too much wealth is concentrated in the top income quintile so the natural market for life insurance is too small. The constrained size of a natural market for long treasuries could make it harder for the US government to fund itself so cheaply over the long term.

A look backwards

Yesterday morning I was having coffee with an older gay guy whom I've been getting to know through one of the 12-step programs. He was born in the early 50s in rural NC.

I was discussing Graham's housing propects for next year (still unclear) and mentioned how Mary and I had done a less good job teaching him how to clean a room and a house than my mom had done for Leslie and me -- when she wouldn't let us go outside to play on Saturdays or watch cartoons until our rooms were vacuumed and dusted and our bathroom was clean. My new friend said "When I was growing up, we had a 1-acre garden, so it was dangerous to sit down in front of the TV or you would be sent outside to do something in the garden. It was endless."

He proceeded to regale me with tales of how they largely fed themselves from the garden, how his mom would stand in front of the stove all summer long boiling and canning with no AC. How he was driving an old dump truck and working at a filling station when he was 14, and how if you jump started the truck in reverse the engine would run backwards and you'd have three gears of reverse (still can't quite wrap my head around that one).

His dad had taught agriculture and shop at a local school, which was pretty much a 12-month role because he needed to be teaching kids how to do things like weld so that they could fix carts that were going up and down the tobacco fields.

We talked about reading and how the bookmobile used to come by and drop 20-25 books at the local general store for the summer, including 3-5 books for kids, which he and his siblings would take. How when integration came the school and public libraries were purged of questionable stuff including Joel Chandler Harris's Uncle Remus stories and things that portrayed the Klan favorably and how they had taken those too to have stuff to read. And also about how astounding it was to catch the first glimmers of gay characters in books and realize he was not alone.

It was one of those conversation that reminded me of how much had changed in just the course of our lifetimes.

Early morning surprise

Mary's phone started going off at what my clock said was 7:30 am this morning, which was a bit of a surprise. Turns out, it was not 7:30 but 8:30, a fact which had stolen upon me unawares because it hadn't been covered in last week's Economist or in either of the books I had been reading yesterday (nor, indeed, in any of the soccer highlights I watched before bed or any of the Tiktok-esque [I assume] videos of trampolines, wingsuit flights, skateboard jumps, trickshots or dancers that YouTube has sucked me into watching before bed).

The culprit, of course, is daylight savings time, which has arrived. If I recall correctly, it will soon be permanent, if it is not already so, a fact about which I have pretty mixed feelings. In the morning, no doubt, it will suck. It will make for a longer period of waking up in the dark to start my day, to do my morning meditation, stretching and readings, all of which seems to go nicely with a rising sun. In the evening, it may well exacerbate one of the long-running tensions in our marriage, Mary's preference for a later dinner and a later bedtime, all of which gets nudged by the fact that she is out photographing every day around dusk now, so she comes home after sundown.

Then again, maybe it will make it easier to do my own exercise later in the day without leaving my desk at 4 or 4:30, which is to say it will better align our late day habits and make me snack less in the early evening. We shall see. It would be surprised, in any case, if it proves fatal.

The learning process

Universities fetishize doing research on the assumption that production of new work enhances faculty's ability to teach. Much more important than the production of "new" work I would think is having faculty that are dynamic and engaged in an ongoing learning process and able to transmit enthusiasm to their students. This is certainly something that is very difficult to measure, so I think that publications are the best proxy that universities have landed on. Certainly producing research that is able to bang its way past gatekeepers into hierarchized journals was in years past the best yardstick available.

By now one has to wonder whether the creation of a Substack or the like which garners readership might be a better measure. Of course, people -- scum that they are sometimes -- would be likely to fake their traffic.

Soul tired but looking forward

Mary comes home from New York tomorrow. By then Rob will have packed up all his stuff and gotten on the road to go spend some time with his college friend Michael in New Hampshire. It is the end of an era for the Berridges. For the first time since perhaps 1960, when Mary Lee and George Sr moved to Beverly Place from the West Village, none of them will reside in Westchester County, which is a little sad.

In the very near term, I am the winner, because I get Mary back. In a bonus, Graham's spring break starts tomorrow, although I'm not sure when we actually see him because he and the Quiz Bowl team are off to some tournament for Saturday if not Sunday too. Which is awesome. Although part of me wishes Graham's whole college social life didn't revolve around intellectual competition (which really isn't a good model for how the world works), there does seem to be a very healthy group of kids involved in the club. For example, they sent five teams to a recent competition at Virginia Tech. Which means he's got a big cohort to run and gel with.

But at some point in the weekend there will be three of us in the house, which is much better than one. Likewise, two of us in the bed, much better than one, though I've gotten used to it. It is probably too late for us to go off on another trip to Mattamuskeet this season, but I do hope Mary and I find somewhere else funnish to go together in the next few months. We should enjoy this empty nesting and the freedom it gives us.

Skiing in the West

And so, having now done the whole skiing out west thing, I'd have to say it was a good experience. I enjoyed myself skiing, except for the pain in my legs from the shear exertion of it all and using the quads in ways they weren't quite used to. Owing to the long lesson I took on eday one and my patient friends, who traded off baby-sitting me on the green runs, I made a lot of progress and was largely skiing parallelish by the end of day 2. I skied maybe 4.5 hours on day 1 and 3 hours on day 2, pulling the rip cord at lunch so as not to put myself at undue risk of injury.

I will likely go back and do it again though, honestly, it wasn't all that fun. I mean, sure, it was somewhat enjoyable, but not overwhelmingly so. It was more that I had a sense of accomplishment from not busting my ass, which is a somewhat low bar. Probably next time I'll have more fun because I'll be starting at a higher level.

All in, it was definitely expensive, and that's even after I borrowed all the clothes from Z. Certainly it was interesting to get an eyeball on the celebrated ski culture, but it's not like I have a shortage of opportunities to watch affluent white people doing their thing.

Back East

It was a grind of a trip home. On Sunday, after getting to the airport early so as to ride with my friend Dave out there and sitting around for several hours, my flight was cancelled. In fact, almost all flights were cancelled. So everyone scurried off to nearby hotels with the help of some very enterprising and competent shuttle van services. You could tell this wasn't their first rodeo.

Instead of going to Steamboat where even modest hotel rooms went for $400 and up, I and a bunch of other people hustled west to Craig, a small town with a number of hotels, including my go to the Hampton Inn. Unfortunately, the snow kept coming down and the only option was food via DoorDash, so Dave (whose flight was also cancelled) and I enjoyed a repast of KFC at 5:30 -- so early because it seemed like the snow might shut down what little food service there was. Right when I was ordering it appeared on DoorDash that McDonalds had closed, which freaked me out a little. For a moment I was thrust back in time to August 2003 and the great Northeast blackout, when I found myself in Albany in a hotel with no power and little food and was freaking out a little with residual 9/11 anxiety (everyone was).

After our KFC feast I watched Casablanca for the first time (somehow) and turned off my light by 9pm in anticipation of the 5 am shuttle back to the airport. It wasn't that hard because everything outside was dark and snowy and obscure. Good sleeping.

Yesterday I made my way home through Dallas without incident. Dinner was the last breast of KFC (I had ordered extra because we didn't know if Eric would make it out to Chicago) on an English muffin and some salad. Delish.

Young love

Up in the mountains with my buddies from Yale. Given who we are and especially that one of them is an artist, there are many discussions of art and music and purpose and why this is better than that, and so on. Lot's of loud guitar is being played.

At the end of the evening, I had to go upstairs and cleanse my brain with some of this stuff. A pretty song with a traditional chord progression sang by a woman with a lovely voice about love, and since she's young it feels like young love.

And what after all is there that's better to sing or write about than young love? From an experiential standpoint, it's definitely a highlight of life. It is hard to capture the complex satisfaction of raising children or maintaining a relationship with a beloved spouse over time, though there are good examples. Young love is simpler, purer, and easier. What's not to like?

 

On the snow

Had my first day skiing in the Rockies today, my first day of what everyone around here would term actual skiing, and I must say that I get it. Skiing on this actual snow does indeed differ significantly from the thin layer of entirely machine-made snow back in NC. 

My goal for the trip is to make it through injury-free while enjoying the company of a fine set of college friends. So far so good on both fronts, though it took a lot of discipline to respect the lactic acid in my legs and skip the last 30 minutes of my ski lesson. It may take even more self=control tomorrow when I am out skiing with the lads. 

Back east, George was laid to rest in a green burial at Sleepy Hollow, NY. I was sad to miss it, but given that there is no embalming or the like involved it was important to get him in the ground quickly. There were friends and flowers and siblings, it looked lovely.

The end of an era

Mary's brother George passed away yesterday. He had broken his neck diving into a pool over 43-44 years ago so had lived a long and full life in a wheelchair, immersed in books, sports -- especially Michigan football and basketball, and music. When I met him he was first and foremost a Neil Young fan, but over time he evolved into a Little Feet fanatic, in fact evolving into their primary archivist of bootleg recordings.

George was a remarkably calm and steady presence. He made peace with where he was and made the best of it. He shared an enthusiasm for military history which drew him close to Graham and formed the core of long phone conversations they would have, often on Friday afternoons. They would talk for a long time and I think it was super meaningful for both of them.

There was one particularly memorable day when Graham, George and I went to West Point with Sam, George's longtime aide (he was at our wedding in 1997) to West Point. It was a pretty special day, especially going into the museum where Graham and George traded stories. Much of the time Graham was quasi-lecturing George on this or that detail or campaign. He was still pretty little and hadn't had a lot of social skills training just yet. George dug it, in any case.