With Bonhoeffer: “who am I, who men say I am, or who I know myself to be,” and does it really matter anyway?  I know I am moving beyond my origins, my education, my business successes and failures, my interpersonal delights and disasters, my public personae, my varied obsessions, and to a time when meta-realities and relationships  dominate.  My two families, Biological and Jesuit, and my personal friendships grow ever more significant.  I still love the great game that is business,and I have no intention of hanging up my skates, but I now see the game as just another pseudo athletic endeavor, and I have always been athletic in aspiration. Neither am I beyond my desire to acquire and transform another business. I am now just very grateful to be who I am and where I am.   I love post secondary education, and I am privileged to be allowed to play a small role at my beloved University of Toronto, and that has become increasingly more important as I contemplate four years hence and the  seventh inning stretch.  

Some of my friends are already well ensconced in retirement, and for some I can no longer even remember what they did. They have redefined themselves totally, and there  is a lesson there for those of us who have not.  But then, I have no desire not to do what i love doing, and it would be dishonest of me to suggest I am envious of those who have so redefined themselves It is simply not so!  I am just become more comfortably and peacefully driven and obsessed.

I have also become more aware of genetic inheritance. My oldest son, the aspiring screenwriter in LA, will receive a MBA at Christmas, a concession to his father who has forever preached the practical. He now tells me that while he will always be a writer, he intends  to attend  Law School in the Fall.  I want to say, about time, but then I recall my own many and varied career paths, and remember that I was older than him when I began Law School.  I see that genetic inheritance  even more in my second son, and I am grown so grateful to have these two men in my life. I walk my treadmill for sixty minutes every day because I really want to be around to be with them. We are never grateful enough, but I am so so grateful.

So perhaps I will not take that seventh inning stretch.  It seems  unnecessary. I just want to keep playing.