Month: November 2022

I spent the Thanksgiving holiday with my immediate family near the beach—no sand for me but there were several walks in the salt air when it wasn’t raining. I did what I could to take a few days away from the computer. I didn’t quite succeed in that endeavor, but things were slow with work as counterparties were all offline. It was a time of reflection of how much the lives of almost everyone in the family have changed over the past year. While I may be living in the same place as I was a year ago, my work is different and more fruitful than what I expected. As my work continues to evolve, where I am this time next year could be just as different from where I am now (crazy as that possibility sounds given just how much has changed this year). For those who follow this chronicle closely, this will read like a repeat of last week’s missive. In many ways it is, aided by the extra time for contemplation during some long drives to the coast and back.

After the last few months, this week has been calm. That even includes my six-hour drive yesterday in an attempt to beat some of the holiday traffic going into the Thanksgiving weekend. The attempt was not as successful as I’d hoped, but my walk this morning was down to the pier, past the lighthouse, and through the live oaks instead of on the city streets in my Raleigh neighborhood.

On a broader level, this is a time of anticipation and building. There are a lot of things in development but none have yet borne fruit. I’ve had to force myself to zoom out and contemplate things on a timescale of months and quarters instead of days and weeks, and this has been frustrating given the rapid growth the business through most of this year. I’m sure many of you will have experienced similar times in your own lives. Now to keep my head down and keep moving forward through the rest of this period.

Last week offered a stark change from New York City. I spent a few days in east Tennessee surrounded by open space and very few people. There was still plenty of noise at times but noise of very different sorts than car horns and ambulance sirens.

The trip started with a multiday quail shoot on a preserve located on a bend in the Tennessee River. The hunts themselves involved walking through fields behind two dogs, a pointer and a flusher. To watch a bird dog in action is to see an animal in a state of absolute joy and it is a show just to watch it work the fields. The dogs worked in tandem. The pointer would run back and forth until it picked up a scent and pointed towards a covey of birds. Then the group would catch up to the pointer and the flusher would be released to flush the quail up into the air. The addition of the flushing dog made this hunt much less tiring than last year’s iteration where I was the one who had to kick about in the grass to get the birds to fly. The flushing dogs were also great retrievers and we didn’t lose a single bird during any of the three sessions. Dad did, however, shoot a few at such close range that there wasn’t much left to retrieve.

I then spent a couple of days with cousins and an aunt and uncle. Or more specifically, I stayed a few days with the three youngest members of the family and everyone else who happened to be with them while I was there. I hadn’t seen the kids in six months or more and they just keep growing, especially the youngest who was only a few weeks old when I saw him last. I don’t get to be around the children as much as I’d like, but I do enjoy how small their worlds are and how their worries are over toys and books and puzzles and combing their hair. I doubt I’ll ever be able to get that back. The oldest is now in first grade and has so many questions about so many things, especially Spanish translations this time, and her younger sister soaks in what information she can from listening.  It is refreshing to just sit and answer their little questions.

Last week was the longest I’ve ever spent in New York City. It was my first visit to the city in six years and I would be okay if I didn’t return for another decade or more. The way my life and business is trending, I don’t expect that to be the case but alas. Working out of a small hotel room that exceeds a dollar per square foot per night is not exactly my dream remote work arrangement. And while coffee shops and open coworking spaces function well for some, we can’t have client calls in such surrounds. That chained me to within a certain distance of the hotel and so forced me to stay in Midtown for most of the trip.

Walking up and down Fifth and Madison Avenues was more jarring than I expected. It is early November, so a few of the stores already had their Christmas decorations on display and the public ice rinks were set up at Bryant Park and Rockefeller Center. And it was 70 degrees every afternoon. The juxtaposition felt off.

I got a glimpse into life in a Brooklyn brownstone too on this trip. That was the one area I went where the noise wasn’t constant. Brooklyn is also (for now) built more on a human scale so that the buildings don’t smother you. Brooklyn has lots of other things that would make it a frustrating place to live, too, but at least this time I was able to do more than aimlessly walk around after choosing a subway stop to exit like I did on my previous visit to the borough. In any event, score a point for local knowledge.

Food is very important to me and often my travel schedule is constructed around meals. When I chose restaurants on this trip, there was a clear bifurcation. If I chose an old-school Jewish deli, then I had a very good pastrami sandwich and a mix of very good and not-so-good pickles. If I chose anything else, the food was mediocre at best. When a client or friend chose the restaurant, the food was great and the atmosphere matched. They were four for four in that regard and all very different—oyster bar; tapas; Mediterranean; Asian fusion. Score a few more points for local knowledge. Not that I needed to relearn the lesson that going with a local makes travel better, but there were several reiterations of that lesson over the past week.

This is not my first time in New York City, not even my first time staying in Midtown Manhattan. It is the first work trip to the city and the first time I’ll be hosting client meals anywhere, but that comes with my current working life. Fortunately for the clients, they have chosen the restaurants as I picked a dud last night for myself. There are still more opportunities, though, so I’ll keep trying new places in the hopes of finding one that I remember fondly many moons from now. I am handicapped by not having had the benefit of several weeks’ advance notice regarding the trip, precluding anything requiring an advance reservation.

New York has never been my favorite city, and this will be the first time I’ve spent more than about 48 hours here. I’m going to really try to enjoy this visit, but I have always had a low-grade anxiety walking here, something different than fear. The Asian megacities I’ve visited pressed in on me, especially Delhi. There were crowds of people everywhere, a wall of traffic of all sorts of vehicles in the street, and horns blaring all the time. New York is different. Sure, it has the crowds and the traffic, but the horns are less frequent and there is much more steel and glass. New York presses down on me. It’s a different shade of mild claustrophobia and one I’ve never felt anywhere else. Surely I’m not the only person who has felt that way.