Turning 50

On Saturday I turned 50. It has been an incredible sprint to get here, even though I was in no hurry. Since my last posting in July, my family and myself have been through a lot of change and at a very fast pace. Let me recap it for you: when last I posted I was in the Latvian countryside enjoying a very slow and enjoyable 6 weeks. Then my wife, my dog (Capitan Spaulding) and I were driven two days with by my stepson and his girlfriend to Prague. We got Spaulding’s papers in order (from a ministry who was closed but accommodated us anyway) and flew to New York. During the flight we watched Marley and Me, which made my wife and I completely gilt ridden. IN New York we spent 5 days getting Spaulding over the flight by staying at my brother’s house. He has two German Sheppard puppies and the three dogs played and got along well. Spaulding’s healing from a drugged up flight was complete. We then packed again into a car and drove two more days to Florida, our new home. My son joined us the next day and started school the following Monday. My wife began getting her American green card paper work into place as I got our insurances and other necessary items in place. We had one and a half weeks, and then I left for Riyadh, Saudi Arabia where a start-up had asked me to help out.
My wife has since gotten her green card and social security card. She has also learned to shop effectively online and is refurnishing a house that used to be a beach house into a Moroccan style villa. My mother moved back from New York to her home down the street from us. She is a valuable shopping companion to my wife, using her twenty five years of aggressive shopping in this part of Florida to teach my wife non- online shopping art forms.
My son and I visited colleges the second trip home which is when we celebrated my 50th birthday. I keep threatening him with me going back to college too. The option is very attractive to me most days. Riyadh is a very tough place to spend a significant amount of time if you are holed up in a hotel. The local social and cultural norms are pretty unsatisfying to a westerner. Perhaps Saudi Arabia will be a future blog entry, but let’s just say American college is looking very attractive.
After these past few months I can hardly believe the level of change in my life. To add more disbelief to the mix, I am half a century old. How the hell did that happen? I am pretty sure I would be in shock if I was not so busy.

Vacation

I have never been very good at vacation. I am not a planner, so any vacation that requires planning is dependent on someone else doing it and including me. I am from a big, close family and I moved from where my family is centered over twenty years ago, so most vacation time from work and holidays go to seeing them and catching up with old friends from that part of the US. I can think of very few memorable vacations.
This year is very different. My future wife and I purchased an old school in the countryside of her home country four years ago. I have never had a real vacation home before. As I wrote in previous entries, we spent a lot of time and effort this spring getting married a few times. I knew last winter that this would be a summer of transition, so I planned six weeks at the country house. This house is really a project, with a lot done, but a lot still to do. But this is the first summer that it has enough infrastructures to stay in for an extended period of time. It required a ton of work from us, family members from her family, neighbors, craftsmen and others. For the past two weekends we felt confident enough to invite friends to visit or in some cases stay with us. We hosted seven different friends and family visits or stays over the last week and a half.
We worked our butts off (really, my wife’s butt is gone) on the house. The location if the house is quite rural, so pushing nature back required me sacrificing my body to the insect world. I am pretty sure I have encephalitis and limes disease combined. My guests this weekend came back from a smoking break laughing and shared with me that the thought of a New Yorker in this countryside is hysterically funny to them. It occurred to me that I am living in a close to Green Acres world (New Yorker, Eastern European wife, Mr. Haney, Ralph and Alph, the whole woks. I am having the best vacation of my life.

Crying at Movies

I am movie fan. I like old movies (even some silent ones), new movies and everything in between. I am interested in not only the story, but the acting, directing, producing and technical aspects of film making. I buy movies on DVD and used to buy VHS because since living overseas, I do not subscribe to cable or satellite TV. With the DVD’s I watch not only the movie, but the Special Features, especially the short film on making the big film, and often re-watch the film with the directors comments. I usually then run to my computer and read whatever Wikipedia has on the movie, follow the links for the director, actors and writers. I rotate my reading with a broad variety of book types (biography, history, theology, philosophy, fiction) and a regular in the mix is movie making or movie makers. To sum it up, I am interested in movies.
Now I need to tell you that, while I can get through most of life’s events without a good cry, I cry at movies. The medium touches me. Without any real conscious knowledge of it, I am wiping my eyes somewhere in the first hour of a good movie. It has nothing to do with the plot; it is about being touched deeply, and appreciating it. That ability, the strength of that medium and the director’s execution of telling the story really are a deep pleasure for me. Tears of joy just flow. I am pretty sure this state of euphoria helps me to sleep soundly through repeat showings of a movie for visiting friends or family. I very comfortably sleep through my favorite movies during repeat performance. I can attempt to watch my favorite movies over 20 times, but I only get through it a few times before I use the film as a drug to induce a fulfilling hour or so nap. The nap and the cry are independent of each other and not mutually exclusive. I am not sure if I cry in my sleep during movies, but I do not cry in my dreams.
Last night my wife had to leave the last part of a movie we were watching together. It was a movie recommended by her son. It was a recent movie release and had won awards for its director and actors. I finished the movie (with some moist eyes, pretty under control for me) and went up stairs to see her. She was crying in bed. I asked what was wrong and she told me her son had told her the main character dies at the end and she did not want to see that. I asked why she recommended the movie and she said it was because it was supposed to be a good one, and was. She just did not want to see the character die at the end. I comforted her for 15 or 20 minutes and when I she looked ready to fall asleep, I ran to my computer to finish my movie experience.
Now I can only say that whenever I watch that movie again, I will be too scared to sleep and to be too anxious to cry. I will worry about her the entire time (assuming she is there). Empathy is not something I had ever brought to the movie couch. My life may have changed forever.

When things go right

There is an old debate amongst business people about how to best run a business. One side claims that detailed planning, accounting for every variable and contingency, thorough documentation of the environment, industry, market and company with sales plans that flow into budgets, etc is the way to go. The other side maintains that execution is the primary focus. This theory is that all the planning in the world will not foresee all the things that the environment, industry market, government etc will throw at you so worry about and focus on execution. There is plenty of evidence for each side of this argument.
We hosted about 23 friends and family the past 2 weeks at our wedding. We had the church and reception places reserved and took care of a few hotel arrangements. Most of the guests stayed at our home and took public transportation to various tourist venues and meals not at home over a long weekend.
Here is the rub, planning requires consensus and agreement. Planning for a dinner out would require a massive amount of consensus building on an issue that most everyone can be easily satisfied. That goes for tourist venues too. So on the lead up to the visits; I was a proponent of minimal plans. My soon to be wife on the other hand needed plans in place. We abstractly had a plan to use public transportation or taxi to get everywhere (no too easy with 23 bodies), debated over restaurants and tourist venues and guessed at attendance levels of each. My spouse had the one meal she needed catered at the house arranged, the rest were trips to the supermarket. She tortured herself with the fear of delegating some kitchen duty to guests, where I was confident no one in my family would think twice about going into my refrigerator and using my stove, toaster, coffee maker or whatever.
Somehow, and I don’t know how, everything went alright. The plans were minimal with not hard set itinerary but a general; this is what we will do when (except the wedding and reception). We managed to more than survive, deliver a very enjoyable weekend in Prague for everyone who came.
I can only assume that opposites really do attract and that the debate over planning and execution gets no contribution from our wedding. But it is sure nice when things go right.

Politicians and dog pee

Politicians and dog pee

I walk my dog Captain Spaulding in the park most days. The park is enclosed by a large stone wall on 38 hectares of forest surrounding a medieval castle and is a very dog friendly place, allowing dogs to run free. Most dogs give each other a sniff and then either go about their business or play together for a few minutes before moving on. On rare occasions they growl at each other but I have never seen a fight. There is one habit that is not quite playing and not quite fighting, male dominance type dance. A dog, usually the smallest, will raise his hind leg and pee on a bush. He will be followed by the next biggest dog that will go through the same exercise, followed by each of the other male dogs paying any attention to the ritual. Sometimes one of the early peers will double back for a shot at that final pee. The ritual is fascinating and I am sure means something, but I am never quite sure what. The dogs usually go about their business afterwards, without much of a thought.
I notice on the television talking heads news shows, a very familiar ritual occurs. Someone (usually a Senator or Congressman) starts a dialogue about the story of the week and sure enough, he is followed by a gang that goes about and soils the same topic over and over again. Of course one must exchange opening a mouth with lifting a leg and the bush for the topic of the week (with the exception of the previous administration of course) but the activity bears enormous similarities.
I don’t really know what the talking heads go off and do afterwards.

Weddings

Weddings

Well today I head to Riga to get married, the first time this month. Two weeks from now I will get married again in Prague. I was married once before, 19 years ago, in Connecticut. You might be thinking that I may be a global polygamist. I am not. My first marriage ended three years after it started. There is one woman at both the Riga and Prague weddings. One is a civil marriage, one a church service. Two friends will be the only guests present at the civil ceremony in Riga, a Latvian couple we are friendly with will serve as witnesses. The second, a church wedding, will be at St Barbara’s Chapel at Saint Thomas Church in the Augustinian Monastery in Prague. The civil wedding was recommended to us by our priest at Saint Thomas. With both of us being foreigners living in the Czech Republic, the administrative risks for a purely church wedding was a bit too high.

We have been hosting friends visits to Prague for two weeks now, it’s nice to slow down and just get married a few times, although, for the church wedding we will have visitors from the U.S. and Latvia, as well as a few local guests. Most of the guests are Schaubs (my family) from the U.S.; they require no planning and are not capable of any. It requires a consensus, which is mathematically impossible. This is creating a lot of unnatural feeling for my future spouse, but she has been around long enough to know how manage through it. All things with my family have a bit of unbelievable quality to them. I scheduled the wedding during one brother and his wife’s tip to Prague, 16 family members and friends are coming.

We have two weddings, visits and a double relocation back to the U.S. and Latvia this summer. I will keep you posted.

Leadership and Eastern European Housing

Leadership and Eastern European Housing

The online dictionary definition of Leadership:
1. The position or office of a leader: ascended to the leadership of the party.
2. Capacity or ability to lead: showed strong leadership during her first term in office.
3. A group of leaders: met with the leadership of the nation's top unions.
4. Guidance; direction: The business prospered under the leadership of the new president.

I have been in Eastern Europe for eight years now, working in the mortgage industry, or using the more politically correct term; housing finance. My first employer was a technical assistance fund sponsored by the US government, my second a large US financial company. The technical assistance funds’ interest in the mortgage market was part of a program to assist in the transition from a planned economy (communist) to a market economy (capitalist). The mortgage market, which supports the housing market was a core program with the belief that home owners make better citizens, so the benefits of our work was both economic and civic. At my latest employer, we pushed “Housing Leadership” with a communication campaign which yielded over 400 articles in the local press across the region. From 2006 through the first half of 2008, mortgage was a core product.

Well times change. Hundreds of thousands and perhaps soon millions of new capitalists are losing their home ownership during this economic cycle. The benefits of home ownership, both economic and political are retreating.

So I am left with a question; what do leaders do during a retreat?

The Visit

Below is an article I hope you find interesting:
The Visit
In the spring of 2002, I was visiting my parents on the Easter holiday from Europe where I started working a new job the summer before. I was staying at my parent’s home in Vero Beach with my 9 year old son William. In my son’s nine years he had not met my father’s 2 brothers and one sister who all lived in Largo Florida, about 3 hours from Vero. So I offered to drive my parents to Largo from Vero Beach for a visit if they would arrange it. Arguing that with me living overseas now and my son having never met these relatives, it was important to me that he should have some knowledge of my fathers’ family. As I mentioned, he had never met them, even though we had lived in Florida until he was six, then Chicago until he was 9. My parents agreed to arrange the trip, which they needed to do anyway, my father had been a tax attorney during his career, and he prepared tax returns for his family every year, and Easter usually provided an opportunity to get together.
In some cultures there is identity in name. I have always felt a sense of who I am by knowing I was named after my father’s father. I am William Christian Schaub (Bill), no Jr., I am not to the son of the first one, nor did I ever co-exist with him, which is why I am not the second. He died three years before I was born. My son is William Christian Schaub III, the suffix a nod to this tradition of identity in name and tradition. My father appreciated this and thanked me at my sons’ birth. Uncle Bill sometimes went by Bill Jr. or Sonny, but his name is actually William Robert Schaub. Even without the middle name, I always had a special connection with him as my godfather.
Now I mentioned my fathers’ oldest brother, my godfather, above for a particular reason. My Uncle Bill provided us with a rarity that particular trip. It was an incredible experience for me, my father and my son. My Uncle Bill had been serving in the US Army in the Philippines when the Japanese invaded the Islands. He was taken prisoner, contracted malaria, was assisted by a fellow soldier on the Bataan Death March and spent three and a half years in a Japanese prisoner of war camp. My fathers’ family did not know if he was alive for over three years, and when they heard from the Red Cross that he was alive and had been rescued, he weighed 90 pounds (he was 5’10”). That was the sum total of everything I knew because my father would not permit me or any of my siblings to ask him questions about his experience in the war because my father said he did not want to talk about it. My father had softened quite a bit with his grandchildren, and my son received no such warning before the visit. He was somewhat aware of the story, having been told by me and made inquiries to my father. After dinner at my Aunt Clara’s house, out on the porch with me, my Uncle Bill and my father, my son asked the forbidden question to my Uncle Bill; what was it like and what happened to you in WW II?
My Uncle answered him immediately, and started a narrative that I will remember the rest of my life. His tone was of that of anyone of a certain age sharing their youthful memories, he was jocular and laughed at most of the anecdotes, showing reverence when appropriate for a lost colleague. The starting point was the propaganda the Japanese would recite to the prisoners every day. “We occupy the western United States and are moving on Washington” he said was the consistent theme of the messages. He said that when the war was over, the messages just stopped with no warning, they woke up one morning and all the guards and administrator were gone, the guns neatly stacked in the middle of the camp and the camp gate left open.
Soon after US airplanes dropped leaflets telling them the war was over and help would come soon. After the leaflets, he said they started dropping supplies. One crate dropped from a plane exploded on impact, decapitating one on the American POW’s. The first crates contained to his astonishment, chewing gum, not what they had been dreaming of or even expecting. At this point Aunt Clara walked in and offered some more coffee or cake. When she heard a bit of what he was talking about, she scolded him for talking about such things. Fortunately for us, he ignored her.
He was in what was known as Pine Tree Camp, which was not very far from Nagasaki, so after liberation but while still at the camp he and a few friends took a day trip to Nagasaki to see what the atomic bomb did. He was shocked to see a train engine half melted into the ground. He was awed by the sight.
When relocating him back to the US, the hospital ship was filled with wounded, so an Army troop ship to take the rescued POW’s whose primary malady was malnutrition was used. The ship’s scheduled route was from Japan to Pearl Harbor, then on to San Francisco. Once at sea, the ship got caught in a typhoon, which knocked out its engines. They drifted for three days. A British Navy ship finally found them and within a day had the ship repaired and on its way again. Having lost three days, the captain of the ship decided to bypass Hawaii and head straight to San Francisco. A few days prior to docking in San Francisco, the ship supplies ran out of most food groups, having not had the opportunity to resupply in Pearl Harbor. The POW’s were left with primarily rice to sustain them. This being the principle diet for three and a half years, they were pissed. They threatened mutiny and the Captain of the ship with hanging. Things fortunately got calmed down before anyone got hurt.
When the ship docked in San Francisco, the FBI was waiting for the POW leaders of the threatened mutiny. No charges were brought against the POWs; they were warned not to cause any more trouble.
The next phase of the trip was a hospital train to deliver the former POWs to a rehabilitation hospital in upstate New York. The train had doctors, nurses, rules and lots of very rambunctious former POWs. The soldiers were not allowed to drink alcohol. On a short late night stop in Chicago, my Uncle and a friend left the train, purchased bottles of booze, and to hide those purchased stuffed animals. They tore out the insides of the stuffed animals and hid the booze inside, and successfully got back on the train. The next day, when one of the soldiers went for his daily check up, the doctors saw that he was intoxicated and figured out the scam. They confiscated the alcohol and warned the former POWs to behave.
Once at the Rehabilitation Hospital, the POW’s were regaining their strength and energy by the day. They were getting into all kinds of mischief. The Head Doctor, who was military, began assigning them to light work details, mostly cleaning up and washing windows. The soldiers complained to the military and got the orders overturned. A former POW cannot be ordered to perform such tasks on a military base, which the hospital technically was. The shenanigans continued.
The soldiers had three and a half years back pay due them and they had at the hospital a cashier to provide them with access to that back pay in the form of advances on it. One troubled soldier took money every day and headed to town to drink. He drank excessively and everyone knew it. The doctors could not order him to stop and he did not listen to advice. He died of alcohol poisoning within months, never getting back home to his family.
That completed the night’s story. Uncle Bill was drained by the telling of the story, the last segment bringing him to a somber place. My son had been entertained enough and my father and I were dumbstruck. We all needed a rest from the visit.
My father that evening heading back to our hotel was in shock. He could not believe what he had heard. He had never heard any of those tales before. We discussed whether it was all the books and television shows about the POW experiences and broader WW II experiences made it okay to discuss these things, or maybe he needed to talk about it after keeping it to himself that long. Another thing that struck us was that the narrative began with the wars’ end, not being drafted, the details of Army life or capture, the Death March, the prison experience beyond the propaganda. The Japanese were mentioned only about propaganda, and the bulk of the narrative was him and his comrades in arms against the establishment trying to bring them back home. The memory and questions of that visit will stay with me forever. I will never know the answers to my questions, both my father and my Uncle Bill passed away in 2006. The lesson for me is; my perpetual advice to my son is; ask questions.