Most of the kids I knew in grammar
school have scattered to the four winds. I may know the whereabouts
of a couple but mostly, the information I have on most is
non-existent or unreliable gossip. A few I heard about went on to
greater things or ended up in prison. The majority turned into their
parents and live nice middle class lives in and around Rhode Island
Today I finally got my hair cut. Had
you seen it, it looked like a nice mop. I go to one of those old
style barber shops populated by men who read the out dated magazines
like Guns & Ammo, Hot Rod or an Auto Trader. There's always the day's ProJo lying on a chair too. What was weird is that there was a “Rhode Island Marriage” magazine. I'm not sure why there was this frilly magazine, aimed at dreamy 20 something girls, thinking of princess weddings, was doing in a "guys" barbershop. You can flip through it and be envious of the rich young who get married on the cliffs of
Jamestown and have receptions at private homes in Newport, that are situated sixty feet from the high tidewater mark.
But today there was a “Mom” there
with a boy of about six in amongst all us guys waiting our turn for a
cut. I felt uncomfortable a bit because she seemed to keep drilling
me to the wall with her stare.
Finally she says, “Ron?”
Of course, I had no idea who this was.
I finally had to stop her in her enthusiasm about seeing me again to
ask her her name, Lisa D.
“Oh God...you remember me from the
sixth grade?” I was surprised because when I was twelve I didn't
have this shock of blinding white hair on the top of my head.
I ask if she was getting her son a
haircut and she tells me no, she was doing this as a favor for her
sister, who she was visiting this week.
She explains, “I'm in Manhattan
still, I come up every now and again to see the family.”
So, we do what everyone does when you
don't see each other for decades, you tell of your life story,
condensed of course.
(As I write this, “I Think I Love
You” is being sung by The Patridge Family in my headphones!)
She tells me she went to Brown U, then
to Yale and spent her career as a senior risk management officer for
Lehman Brothers in NYC, but not anymore.
Great. I'm now shrinking a bit because
this chick opposite of me probably has a bazillion more dollars than
I have and to top it off, a career of promotions, world travel and
all that crap.
I ask her about risk management in
banking. “Oh, it's about due diligence, fiduciary responsibility,
SEC compliance and the such. I also headed up the desk for our Cayman
Islands Division.” I suspect she figured I didn't know Jack Shit about finance, so I turn the conversation to another tack. I then ask if she was there when Lehman
Brothers collapsed. The conversation suddenly gets a bit cooler.
“Yes.” is the answer I get, one
word.
“From what I know of Lehman, didn't
they have their fingers in all sorts of bad loans and deals that
spanned the world? And when the last shoe fell, Lehman's exposure and
“mark to fantasy” accounting caused it to nearly die in twenty-four hours?”
She's quiet as a mouse.
“Cayman Islands? Did you manage high
net worth clients...you know...establish accounts for them in that
'tax jurisdiction?'” When I said that jurisdiction phrase, she
shot a look right at me.
I smiled at her. I found it out. She
was a senior level “risk management” officer whose job at the
time at Lehman was to obfuscate everything.
“Lisa...it was nice to meet you
again...and it's time to get my haircut.”
Yeah, I was an asshole. But I couldn't
help it because here was one of those bankster types who, even though
her particular contribution to this fiasco was small, was sitting before
me, in a barber shop in Pawtucket.
I think most of us in sixth grade were
fairly innocent, as far as humanity goes. Some of us ended up being
drug dealers, criminals, Xray techs or business owners. Where our
innocence ended up at our age now is a slight more different than it
was then. Though some of us remained a bit more innocent than the
rest.
These places still exist.