Point of View: Always With Us

I feel like one of Emily Dickinson’s birds that stay, now that someone whose advice I valued and whose actions in my behalf over the years to a great degree have contributed to the feelings of good fortune I entertain these days has died.

An amiable genius of gentle good humor, Bob Wolf would often talk over my head when it came to financial matters, trusting that I understood. Yet he was patient — another of his virtues — and would always wait until I, stumbling along in trying to catch up, would arrive at the gist of it.

I made money in the first crash because of him, because he’d leveraged what I had inherited from my father — with puts, as I recall — so that when things tanked, as he had predicted, I was, wonderful to tell, left high and dry. He was one of the few in the country who did so. The Wall Street Journal wrote it up.

Thus when news of the crash came tumbling down during the course of that day, in 1987, I ran through the office like Catherine of Siena rejoicing amidst the mourners that her father was finally with God.

And Bob was always with us — with his keen intelligence, reflective turn of mind (he’d been a philosophy major in college), his market savvy, and with his constant good humor. “I think your dad thinks you’ve become irradiated by The New York Times,” he once said when I told him my stepfather — his law partner for many years — thought New York ought to be hauled out to sea and deep-sixed.

He was always in our corner — we dweebs of East Hampton.

’Tis not that Dying hurts us so —

’Tis Living — hurts us more —

But Dying — is a different way —

A Kind behind the Door —

The Southern Custom — of the Bird —

That ere the Frosts are due —

Accepts a better Latitude —

We — are the Birds — that stay.

The Shiverers round Farmers’ doors —

For whose reluctant Crumb —

We stipulate — till pitying Snows

Persuade our Feathers Home.

In the name of the Bee —

And of the Butterfly —

And of Bob — Amen!