Red Ivy, on me
disgusting, invisible
blood, splatters, body

~m

It’s like watching the slow and dying embers in the
backyard firepit on a sultry summer’s night.
In some ways I understand it, some I don’t.
Maybe it’s meant to be that way.
It’s hard enough to watch someone you love die but it’s the
‘dying marathon’ of Alzheimer’s that really hurts inside.
I had a deeply emotional visit with my father this past Sunday.
I felt this impending sense of detachment from him that I’ve never seen or felt before.
My sister says it’s that way with most patients in the final stretch of the endgame.
I am trying to make myself understand that.
Not doing too well with it either.
The past 5 years have been a sad and long goodbye and although I’ve said it before,
I want to believe in my heart that he is ready.
My father did not cry yesterday which had me scratching my freshly shaved noggin.
It was almost as if he was trying to be strong just for me,
but maybe I’ll never know.
I sat and held his thin and badly shaking hands and really looked at him,
into my father‘s eyes.
My heart was instantly shattered as a lifetime of tender and lost moments came crashing into my mind.
I want many things for my father and not one of them was in this room that has held him prisoner for the past 5+ years.
I want him to walk and feel the rays of the sun on his face again,
love and be loved in return, find the missing piece of the puzzle he’s been searching for since he got sick.
Find my mother.
I want him to find enough strength to finally fade away and find his corner of the sky,
his cerulean peace.
It’s time for my beautiful father to go home.
Because of all the places I roam, I miss having him there the most . . .

Out on the street I was talkin’ to a man
He said “there’s so much of this life of mine that I don’t understand”
You shouldn’t worry yes that ain’t no crime
Cause if you get it wrong you’ll get it right next time (next time).

You need direction, yeah you need a name
When you’re standing in the crossroads every highway looks the same
After a while you can recognize the signs
So if you get it wrong you’ll get it right next time (next time).

Life is a liar yeah life is a cheat
It’ll lead you on and pull the ground from underneath your feet
No use complainin’, don’t you worry, don’t you whine
Cause if you get it wrong you’ll get it right next time (next time).

You gotta grow, you gotta learn by your mistakes
You gotta die a little everyday just to try to stay awake
When you believe there’s no mountain you can climb
And if you get it wrong you’ll get it right next time (next time).

“Get it right next time” by Gerry Rafferty

Maybe it’s a sign of survival, of anguish,
of the frightening realization that mortality does exist in the deepest recesses of the mind.
Maybe it’s a sign that everything is still changing,
still in that near frozen state of flux . . .
For him, for me, for the four walls that still imprison him,
for a world that looks to him as confusing today as it did several hundred yesterdays ago.

Maybe it’s not a sign at all but a palpable gesture that while he sleeps,
this ravenous disease does not; it always wants more.
It replaces what it takes with something barely recognizable, something dark and foggy,
something you never want to talk about around the coffee table but remains forever.
Sometimes this thing just takes.
And takes . . .

Maybe it’s a sign that he is tired, fed up with playing the host,
sick of food that looks like pureed shit put through a strainer that he has to try and swallow.
Banana Crème Pie should never look like soup.
But it does.
And that’s a crying goddamn shame.
His mother was a pastry chef, Christ in a sidecar.

Maybe someday I will look back at this point in time and have a moment of revelation
but I’m not betting on it.
If this disease has taught me anything it’s not to get caught up in any kind of emotional gambit.
It’s a losing proposition at best.
So maybe it is a sign.

For my father maybe it’s a sign that simply says ‘stop’ . . .

Bobby Minara was a firefighter in Manhattan.
Ladder Company 25.
On September 11, 2001, he was 54 years old and almost ready to retire.
I found the next little snippet online from a woman named ‘Rita’ that knew the family.

“The last time I was with Bob was July of 2001.
Bob and Paula and my brothers Tom and Mike were all together to celebrate the baptisim of my daughter’s triplets, John, Michael, and Thomas.
He was his usual happy self and he had
three shirts from the firehouse for the boys (they still wear them).
Bob was going to retire in September and I remember Paula telling us she had a “sick feeling” and she wished he would leave now.  Bob laughed and said “I’m 54, how can I retire “He felt guilty”.
I’ll always remember that day.”

Intuition is a scary thing sometimes.
I wondered how many people had a ‘feeling’ that morning 8 years ago.
From what I’ve been able to find on the web,
Bobby was a regular guy with family and friends that loved him.
He died in the line of duty at the World Trade Center.
In researching this post, I was horrified at the number of firefighters and emergency personnel that perished.
I found the picture for this post on Google and could only assume that the memorial stone is near Ground Zero
or the firehouse.
When I visit NYC next year, I plan on finding the stone if only to say a short prayer
for the man I am paying tribute to today.

My thoughts and prayers go out to the Minara family today as I know this nightmare will
never end for them.
Bobby died doing what he’d done his entire life – helping a total stranger to safety.
May God bless this unsung hero and give solace to all the hearts that he left behind.
In closing, I found a quote from a firefighters remembrance page.
It was quite simple and I could almost hear Bobby saying it:

“If my job was easy, a cop would be doing it.”

Rest in the arms of the angels, RM
Thank you for keeping us safe.

(I hope I haven’t offended anyone using his nickname  ‘Bobby’. I used it with the utmost respect.)

Click here for my 2006 tribute to Amy Jarret, a stewardess on United Airlines Flight 175.

Special thanks to Dale for keeping this thing going with his undying focus.
There’s a very special place in heaven for you, my man.

For Elizabeth & Sara and their favorite angel, fast asleep . . .

Cumulonimbus, in purples and lavender greys
it’s heavy with rain . . .
it smells like rain, feels like pain,
but there’s little need to look back again
because it’s just more of the same
cutting it deep

Lightning rains from the heavens above,
the brilliant flashes of pure white light . . .
it illuminates all but the darkest and sacred of corners
in a room where the walls are ever-changing,
re-arranging the unfathomable fractures of the soul
sadly caught up in a crystalline hurricane

One thing is tragically clear,
a storm has settled over here,
as the clouds shift their gossamer form . . .
with a heart on the mend, tired of trying to bend
the soul looks for the eye of the storm
And maybe hope will rain
someday . . .

Though I can’t totally vouch for its authenticity, this hit me emotionally.
It was an email sent to me by my good friend Will.
After reading it, if it ain’t authentic, it certainly makes me remember much of the
imagery of that day.
This guy was definitely there.
Powerful stuff.

**************************************

There are two images that have not muted with time.
They are exactly 84 months old.
After seven years, these closed eyes still see
the jumpers as vividly as I did that morning.
I counted five in the few minutes between the time
I first turned around to look at the smoldering
North Tower and the time the second explosion rocked the South Tower.
The couple holding hands and flinging themselves
out of an uppermost floor right below the “Windows” restaurant
are framed on my inner eyelids.

They seemed so young to me. He had no jacket and tie.
She had long hair which was illuminated by the bright sun.
It was hard to see much more detail from that distance.
Even now, as I write this, they still seem so young.
Yes, too young, they were much too young.

I often speculate about what was in their minds.
They were knowingly jumping from 100 stories to certain death.
What was it like for them with heat and smoke and
carnage to bring them to that action?
This was before the second explosion and before the buildings fell.
This was an act determined by them and only by them
before we learned details of scheming Al Qaida monsters
and their consummate evil.

Were they young lovers?
Were they a couple?
They jumped holding hands.
They fell clasped to each other for as long as they could.
They must have been plummeting a hundred miles an hour
as their rate of fall accelerated.
Had they been at breakfast together on that
clear, blue sky, bright sun, welcoming beautiful?
Did they hold hands while walking to work that morning?
The instant before Mohammed Atta struck,
that “September morning” was as appealing, tranquil
and inviting as one could imagine.
Was it that way for them?

The second explosion is the other image.
I was then standing on the knoll across West St.
and near the entrance to the building where the escalator
takes you up to a lobby and on to elevators that rise to the
Wall St. Journal offices.

Ancient army training instinctively had me measure the size of the fireball.
It was 20 stories tall and about the same width.
I counted the stories out of instinct.
I also counted the “flash-to-bang” time and determined that
I was between 4000 and 5000 feet from it.
I could feel the heat briefly as the shock waves rolled out from the blast.
It made the loudest sound I had heard since the ‘60s when I crawled
on my belly next to an artillery simulation pit at Fort Sam Houston, Texas.

My mind surfaced the 23rd Psalm that morning as I stood on that knoll.
Looking across West Street and down Liberty Street and beyond Broadway
toward Wall St. one had a vista of two smoking buildings,
panicked people, chaotic and sporadic emergency vehicle movements,
injury and death.
Through all of this, the bright sun and cloudless sky
allowed a sharply defined shadow to angle onto the buildings in the financial district.
There are places here where the sun never reaches the pavement, I thought.
The nickname“canyons of Wall St.” entered my consciousness.
I cannot recall who coined that phrase. and running

From the metaphor of canyon and shadows the psalmist’s words leapt at me.
You are looking at the valley of the shadow of death, David.
At that moment we felt calm and not panic.
We pursued action not frozenness.
We moved decisively.
We escaped and are here to tell about it and to contemplate.

Why me?
Why those jumpers?

Ancient texts yearly ask that we reflect and personally examine that question.
Millennium old teachings say that an annual accounting is done in a spiritual realm.
Who shall live and who shall die?
These things get sealed yearly according to those traditions.

But good deeds of charity and kindness can annul the judgment.

That is also the message imparted by those ancient teachings.
Maybe that is why I recite the 23rd psalm?
Why I keep it on my personal bulletin board in my kitchen?
Maybe that is why its final sentence is phrased so profoundly with the text that we know?

~David R. Kotok, Chairman and Chief Investment Officer