Farewell to the Captain, Hello to Tradition

Every once in a while the stars align. An opportunity arises. A chance to not only right a wrong, but to create a memory and to set things aright all in one. Every once in a while.

Remember your first major league baseball game? Yankees Orioles in the Bronx. 1987. I was 10. Eddie Murray went yard to right field to win it for the O's. I sat up in the upper deck of the old Yankee Stadium along the first baseline. I still smell the cigars along River Avenue.

I attended that game with a then distant friend of the family, not my dad or anyone else who could walk me through the game, the Stadium, the lore, the history. I just remember the sights, the smells. No audio.

This fall, though, I got a chance to set things right for the next generation. By a luck of the draw I had tickets to the second to last regular season home game in the Bronx this year. Derek Jeter's second to last home game at the Stadium before he retires. I chose to take my two year old nephew. It was his first game.

We took the subway up so he could get a feel for the fans, for the pre-game chatter, and the ritual and rhythm of mass transit. We listened to the Bleacher Creatures so he could hear the roll call. As each player responded to the crowd I filled him in on their position, their season, and their place in Yankee history. This introduced him to the second most important cheer he learned that day: DER-EK JE-TER.

Next to thunder, my nephew's never heard anything so sonorous as the Jeter chant. And next to his family, he's never heard anything so full of love, admiration, adulation, and gratitude.

It's times like these that I curse the new Stadium and it's solid structure. In Game 1 of the 2006 ALDS against Detroit I witnessed Jeter go five-for-five with a home run in a winning effort (remember that, Harris?). By his fifth at-bat the chant was so pervasive that the lower deck shook. I have never been so delightfully afraid. [The old Stadium, like Venice, used to open up to fans the way St Mark's Square unveils La Serenissima - the tunnels from the entrance down to the field giving way to what Bart Giamatti referred to as the Green Fields of the mind - that oasis of green amid the concrete jungle.]

Between at-bats we walked around the stadium so he could see the field from different angles. He heard the Voice of God, Bob Sheppard, before he too posthumously retired. I pointed out the area behind third base where Jeter dove into the stands against Boston (remember that, Batters?), the gap between first and second where he tied Gehrig (remember that, Javy?), the lower deck in right field where he became Mr November and the city of New York cried in catharsis after 9/11.

After a long day through three boroughs, the kid nodded off in the middle innings, but I like to think the sounds of the crowd, the smells of the park, and the ambiance of the moment have baptized him in baseball. I'm just glad I got to take him to his first game. May this tradition continue.

In a Flash

hortly after mentioning how I planned to write 28 pieces of flash fiction in 28 days, I heard from friends who wanted in. Kinda. They had half-baked stories that they could no longer look at. They needed fresh eyes. Considering the authors and the subjects, I said send them my way.

The stories hit all of life's important subjects; religion, politics, sex, ideas and baseball with each writer honing in on one theme from unique angles. Many currently read like essays in need of story and character development. There are a lot of broad strokes, but more so, there are a lot of daring ideas to flesh out and bring to life.

It'll be fun editing a collection of their work.

Hooey Savvy Update: Would you take advice from someone who wasn't an expert in their field? To this end, I'm taking steps to make myself an expert in financial education.

First, I've taken preliminary steps to work with non-profits specializing in homeless affairs. Why? Because I want to know what the homeless wish they could've known about personal finance. If I don't address issues that frustrated those in extreme poverty, Hooey will be just that: hooey. I've also reached out to the academic field, specifically behavioral economics, with the hopes of running a survey/study this fall. I want to make sure what I'm advising works in line with how people learn and make financial decisions.

I don't believe that Hooey will make everyone's lives better, but I do believe there are a number of concrete steps I can take to make it the best product possible. Hopefully, working with the homeless and running this academic survey/study will bring Hooey closer to that goal.

Flash

aving spent a few years writing a novel, several months writing children's books on financial education, and turning out screenplay drafts in 20 days, the amount of time spent writing in proportion to the value of one's time comes into question. How much time do one's spend on a project? In cooking, as they say, a dish is done when it's done. Then again, how many dishes take three years?

While working on longer projects ideas for others pile up and collect dust.

Enough.

To kill two birds with one stone, I've decided to tackle 28 different story lines in the next 28 days. Each story will be a piece of flash fiction (ie, short stories of less than a thousand words, approximately four pages at the most). The shorter length should also cut down editing time. In the end, it should make for a novella.

Heartbreaker

t breaks your heart," Bart Giamatti wrote about baseball. If that's what he thought about baseball, I don't even want to know what he'd call the emotional roller coaster and agony of March Madness.

A vast majority of major league baseball fans will never get to know the team's stars, the parents of those stars or the team's manager. Rather, we admire from afar day after day, year after year, referring to the players by their first names as if we knew them.

With the exception of the occasional one game playoff, rarely does the season break one's heart in a swing. There are playoff series. Best of five. Best of seven. It's a slow burn before it goes cold for the winter.

College basketball? The NCAA tournament is win or go home. One minute you think you're moving on to the next round, the next you're canceling your hotel room for the rest of the weekend. Now you're hot, now you're done.

And then there is Davidson College basketball. Unlike the Kentuckys, the Carolinas, and the UCLAs, we lived on the same halls as our players, went to class with them in Chambers, and ate with them at the Commons. We're classmates.

Coach McKillop may as well tack on professor, alumni relations, development and career services to his title. He never forgets a name, a face or a conversation he's had with you and he makes himself available after every home win at the Brickhouse Tavern in Davidson for a beer. Where else can you do that?

We know our players. We know their parents. We know our coach. We're not fans, we're family. Hell, we don't even have fans who aren't directly affiliated with the college. At least, that's what I thought.

So while you would think that Davidson's 59-58 loss to Marquette on Thursday would have broke my heart as I stood in attendance at Rupp Arena, it did not. No, that happened well before Marquette's last basket. In fact, it happened before the game even started.

At the tail end of the Butler-Bucknell game, prior to the start of the Davidson game, I met Richard. A native of Ann Arbor, Michigan, Richard drove to Lexington, Kentucky for the game wearing his #30 Steph Curry Davidson jersey. He was alone and he was squatting the seat next to mine. I asked him his affiliation to Davidson.

He wasn't a student. He wasn't an alum. He had no direct connection to the small school from outside Charlotte, North Carolina. He had seen Davidson play in Detroit at Ford Field five years earlier. Ever since then, he said, he had followed the team. He was, by far, the most hyped fan in my immediate vicinity. He knew the team well, more importantly he said he followed Davidson because he loved its fans, how passionate they are and how personal an experience it is. He had only one question:

"Do Davidson fans still sing 'Sweet Caroline'?"

I smiled and nodded. That broke my heart. I had a lump in my throat the rest of the day.

Fans believe in their teams. The Davidson family believes in what Davidson stands for; Trust, Care, Commitment. The basketball program is simply an extension of a campus-wide phenomenon.

So congratulations to Marquette for defeating Davidson and advancing to the next round of the NCAA tournament. But when it comes to breaking my heart, Marquette, you come in third behind the categorical altruism of Davidson and the effect it had on a perfect stranger. Welcome to the family, Richard.

Of Love & The Chinese Beer Flower

n the latest screenplay, The Beer Flower Limited, I juxtapose two characters with conflicting philosophies; an American financier who swears by the free market, but sees the affairs of the heart as a monopoly and a Chinese micro-brewer who refuses to mass produce her beer for fear of poor quality, but who claims to love everyone and everything. He derides her ubiquitous hugs and off-the-cuff proclamations of love for one and all as "the Bud Light of Friendship." She mocks his "Unicorn Love Ale" as non-existent.

Who's right? Which of the two values love best?

She fills her love portfolio with friends, family and animals; a healthy diversity of love assets that keep loneliness risk at bay for a steady and modest love yield at the cost of a big love return.

He values love so high that it's an illiquid issue akin to Berkshire Hathaway A stock which he is only willing to purchase when sure it will out-perform the average love market for the long run; a good, all-his-organic-love-eggs-in-one-basket bet...till Warren Buffet meets his maker.

Through the writing of this screenplay and The L-v- Fund earlier this past fall, I've had to think about a subject I haven't thought about seriously in a long time. In so doing, I've asked myself, what's normal? What's not? What's best? What can be learned from the other side of each argument? And what could constitute a compromise?

Using beer, Chinese drinking games and the language of the marketplace for cover, I find a way to discuss how we value love - for better or for worse - in The Beer Flower Limited.

It was a very good year

hen I was 17, my high school French teacher, Dana Danforth, a mentor in style, wit ("If you can't laugh at life, you're fucked.") and facial hair, turned me away from Sinatra before I'd even heard The Voice.

When I was 21, the Smoothest Man Alive, Jiorgis Kritsotakis, introduced me to Puccini (Bergonzi, Tebaldi & Serafin; Callas, De Stefano & De Sabata), Lebanese women, Greek slang and Old Blue Eyes in St Andrews.

And now, at 35, I can say, hell, I can bellow, "It was a very good year."

For it has been a rather good year. Two series of children's books. Three screenplays. New friends in new towns; old friends in old towns; new friends in old towns. Unfinished conversations picked up. The start of a grant writing career. A November moustache. A glass of Brunello on the house. Three welcome homes in three different places.

No, not every bottle poured sweet and clear. The dregs of the past two vintages continue to give this year's a bittersweet finish, but now they are more minor flavor notes, not skunked cans of beer.

More importantly, this is the year I cleared my throat; the year I danced with strangers; the year I filled out.

And yes, Frank, it was also a good year for small town, city and blue-blooded girls...

The Fund

ears ago investment groups started socially responsible investing (SRI). These funds invest solely in companies that have green policies, treat their workers well, practice fair trade and only feed their unicorns whole-wheat Lucky Charms. As of 2010, investors had poured $3.07 trillion into such funds (the global economy for 2011 was $69.99 trillion).

Shortly after SRI appeared so too did not-so SRI. And they called them sin funds. Sin funds invest in tobacco, weapons, alcohol and refuse to invest in any company that does not adhere to strict North Korean labor laws. A fast and loose smart-ass argument could be made that any dollar not in a SRI fund went the other way.

As people put their money where their hearts and beliefs are, this got me thinking about investing as an emotional endeavor. Naturally, I then took emotional investing to an extreme. You know, for fun.

Investors take comfort in products that have been around a long time. Traders make money off of volatility. What's the most volatile emotion that you can think of that's been around forever?

Love.

And so I wrote a screenplay about an investment group that starts a Love Fund and the public's reaction to it.

On Deck: Is love a limited or an unlimited good? A sloppy love story told around the one good Chinese micro-brew.