Rosh Hashana

With Rosh Hashana approaching I have… in the past days… received a number of emails wishing me Happy New Year… and those who new about Tikva... wishing me a better year…

That made me think…
"Why do these wishes bother me…"
I then realised... that i felt, and still feel, Tikva's presence…
and her passage as a blessing... of the holiest kind...
Happy New Year Tikva..
You are nearer and nearer to my heart…
Love
Nonno

Friend or Foe

Friend or Foe


In one of the trips to Europe I was scheduled to go to Greece and interview a prospective distributor… It was quite a while since I was in Athens… so I decided to spend the week-end and go and see Bouli Kazis who was a classmate at BBS in Alexandria… we spend the time catching up on our lives and that of other classmates…

At one point he brought out some old pictures amongst whom there were some boy scout pictures… One of them showed a classmate called Mohamad Galal… Galal and I had been together in the same class since sixth grade… and even though we were far from being close… the fact that we were in the same scout troop… we spent quite some time together… I asked Bouli if he knew where was Galal…

“Galal died” said Bouli… “He was killed in the six day war”…

I was in Israel during the six day war…

Mohamad Galal was the enemy… or was he?

That left me in such a distress… that I remained in shock for a very long time…

Japan

Japan

When I moved here, I started dealing with the Japanese… Having studied Japanese economics in college… and having written my thesis on The Japanese Electronics Industry… This gave me some familiarity in dealing with the Japanese…

Our business with the Japanese was growing into a joint development and manufacturing of a low cost disk drive… and… as they say… the devil is in the details… the work was tedious… and one must be very attentive during the negotiations…

On one of these occasions, negotiations were proceeding at snail pace they were probably trying to wear us out… the procedure was as follows…
There was an easel pad at the head of the table… we were sitting on one side and the Japanese across from us… We took turns on writing on the easel our position… when we finished with a pad we left it on a side table and started a new one… After four days we had finished five pads and started a sixth… I was tired and wanted to finish these dreary negotiations and fly home… It was at that moment that I noticed my Japanese counterpart write on the easel their latest position… and I remembered that this was the position he had written three or four days before… realizing that this was my chance for a breakthrough…

I jumped out of my chair… and looked through the old pads while shouting to the Japanese… our hosts… that the deal is dead because they are dishonorable… without any respect for our integrity… At that point I found their position in an older pad… and they were both identical… proving that they really were wearing us… or trying to…

As I was packing… ready to leave… my Japanese counterpart pulled out his white handkerchief and waved it… meaning “I surrender”…
At that point the rest of the negotiations went smoothly and rapidly…

Finance Money and Debt

Finance, Money and Debt

During the past ten years my tremors were very intense and I was taking large amounts of Parkinson medication… called Requip… little did I know that this medication had a side effect of causing compulsive behavior…
When I heard that I realized that my cocaine addiction… added to my loose spending of all my lifesavings… to the tune of one million dollars… were “my compulsive behavior”

Luckily my Neurologist had me cease taking Requip… and after my Deep Brain Stimulation (DBS) surgery I was able to instantaneously cease “all drug activity…” To say that I ceased all loose spending is superfluous because I had already spent all my money… living on my Social Security monthly check…

In these days… all I hear on the news is on how our finance genii managed to spend, and/or will spend, sums in excess of a trillion dollars to ”bail out the banks”… They informed and assured us (the citizens) that these are monies well spent… otherwise the global economy will crash into a major disaster…

During my loose spending days I managed to max out all my credit cards… five or six of them each with a fifteen thousand dollars credit limit…
I wonder what I can do to have this debt “bailed out”.

Paradise

Paradise

I had found Paradise… The Paradise to be precise… It lay in my back yard… It was a hammock… it lay hanging between two trees…
I would often lay on the hammock… sometimes with Sharon, sometimes with Gal… Some of the times Tofu, my cat, would jump up and lay next to me… but often I was on my own… Lying down and contemplating the peace and quiet around me…
I could see it when I opened the shades in my bedroom… or from my living room… It was there… as if to say I am here…
We often had the visit of raccoons… I noticed them swaying and playing on the hammock too…
If there is one regret that I have on my past… If there is one feeling that I miss it’s the sense of serenity that I drew from my laying on my hammock…
I remember once I had a friend over from Milano… Pietro Bonoldi… When he saw and tried laying on the hammock he said:
“Now I understand why you are without a vacation home… you live in one.”

I am writing this while I listen to some news program… I am listening to the abhorrent news of thousands of small children who have been knowingly poisoned with tainted powder milk… For The Sole Reason Of Increasing The Companies’ Profits…
Where has this world gone to…
Can I put this paragraph on the same page… of course… You need all types to make a world… Welcome to the world…

Peace

Back in eighty two I was in Galveston for a sales meeting… Driving across town I noticed the street names by letters A street B street etc., then there were half streets… names like N1/2 street and P1/2 street were found… I was told that after a hurricane reconstruction in the sixties they came up with extra streets…
I guess the City of Galveston may resort to proper names…or go metric.

“How is it that we exist…” this is one of the principal questions asked by the CERN colider staff… just imagine if they succeed… how shall we know that we have an answer… or many answers…
I just heard that the colider has a helium leak and may need a couple of months to fix it… I guess that we will have to wait another two months before we know the answer to our existence… will we… I wonder…
If we knew how we exist… then we would have less questions to ask on our existence… shall we have answers as to how is it that we keep killing each other… since that entails to the destruction of whoever we are killing… how is it that we exist…

When in Paris, we used to spend Saturdays at my aunt Lina for lunch… we were watching the lunch news on TV… Gal was around five when we were watching some violence on the news when Gal said “Why are they fighting, they can do like Sadat and Begin and make peace.”
That was Gal’s first involvement with peace… A decade later she started a Peace Club in high school… and raised money to go to the Soviet Union and participate in a group called Peace Child.

Generation Gap

Generation Gap

I read the news today… oh boy… yes, that is, or was, my generation…

Of course I can put it (the music) in an I-Pod and voila… Now all I need are earphones… and I have the complete attire for this new generation… The next step is to text message some people on a when where and what time…to meet…
Then at the precise time and place… the people start dancing to the music… music in their I-Pod…
So if you pass by a park or square and see a bunch of young people moving in silence… they are I-Pod dancing… or whatever they call it… One thing though… they are sure to respect any noise ordinance…

America

America


So we moved to America… land of opportunity… and we left France…land of holy food… I remember making the rounds telling the key customers I was moving to the USA… One of these customers Mr. Claude Maurice gave me an unexpected answer… he was a traditionally French businessman… “vieille France”…
He said “Mr. Adam you are right to leave France, because in this country… you are either a crook or a fool…If you succeed you must have done something illegal… and if you fail you must be a fool for failing… “

Why did I move to California… leave a land with such history… a land with such culture… and ultimately a land with such good wines… As I tell the people who ask… culture goes with wine very well… when you sit with a friend and a bottle of wine… the discussion as always full of culture… as far as history… what history… the only really historical artifact I can see in Paris is the Obelisque in Place de la Concorde…

Having said that… I was moving in the opposite of Kafka… Italy translated Kafka into Latin first… then into Italian… and tried to adapt it to the Pax Romana… Israel took Kafka as the Jewish Guide to Government… While the French are still believing that Charles De Gaulle’s “Grandeur” is still the guiding principal ruling France…

What I found coming to the United States is a “can do” attitude throughout the Silicon Valley… without any prejudice on being a fool or a crook…

Never a Dull Moment...

Never a Dull Moment….

“Life with you is never monotonous…” said Orit…
“You mean life is interesting…”I responded…
“No, I said not monotonous… and there is a difference…”
I guess, in her way, she wanted more monotony or more structure… while I was going gung ho… ready to conquer the world…

When we moved to Paris… Orit was elated… being born in France it was a homecoming… she knew the language (French was her mother tongue)… she knew the brand names in the supermarket… in the markets etc. … We often went to the movies,… and to dinner after… Paris had a multitude of cinemas… and more restaurants to explore…

Work was hard in the first couple of years… I traveled a lot… I counted one hundred and eighty four flights in the first year… unfortunately in that era frequent flier mileage were yet to be invented…
I had appointed a network of distributors throughout Europe… and I kept hammering on their heads to go after every single customer… my hundred percent doctrine…
We were successful… and these distributors made a lot of money… the other reason for our success was my switching focus… Once the smaller customer’s needs were taken care by the distributors… I focused on the larger customers… by utilizing the distributor as local agent… since the distributor was so successful with their hundred percent… they cooperated very willingly…

Once we were successful throughout Europe… I reminded my boss that he had promised to sponsor my move to California… when we get a majority of the European business… and I showed him that, after three years, we had sixty five percent of the market…

So I moved to the US… It was the summer of Seventy Eight…

Things...

Things…

There are two types of things in this universe…
The ones that die… and the indestructible...
Actually the indestructible should be called unscheduled…
The ones that die are all the plants and animals…
They are the ones who have a predestined end of life…
The unscheduled are the rocks and other material in this universe…
If I am correct, the unscheduled are the ones without DNA…
Without DNA means they are without life…
What is the meaning of without life…
Without life in the concept of a rock…
A rock that came out of a volcano…
As molten lava… or as gas in the air

But my Tikva had a DNA… she had a body that was fighting…
Fighting to stay alive… until she was so exhausted that she went away…
But she stayed with us as gas in the air… or as molten lava…

Disk Drives

Disk Drives

I am in computers… that’s my answer when asked about my job(s)… and to say it… it’s the truth I joined IBM in 1962 and I’ve been in that business ever since…

Computers can be divided in three parts… the processor and memory… the storage device or disk drive… and the software…
The processor and memory are the engines that runs the computer… and are built into computer chips…
The disk drives are the note pads you take your notes on…
The software is the language that gives the instructions to the processor…

I was in the note pad business… i.e. disk drives…

SDSI

SDSI


Scientific Data Systems, Israel… was a disk drive manufacturer founded by Max Palewski, owner of SDS… After the euphoria which followed the Six Day War, the Israeli Finance Minister went to wealthy Jewish businessmen asking them to help Israel get into Hi Tech development and manufacturing…

SDS was a mainframe computer manufacturer… they also designed and manufactured head per track disk drives for their computers… Mr. Palewski founded SDSI, this Israeli subsidiary, with the vocation to manufacture the current, and future, fixed head disk drives.
A few months after SDSI’s manufacturing started... Max Palewski sold SDS… including their share in SDSI to Xerox… this implied that SDSI had lost its major customer… before even starting…

By 1971 the company had developed a new product, the Minidisk, specifically designed for the Digital Equipment, PDP market… out I went to sell the Minidisk in Southern Europe… My territory was France and Italy… being a start-up, coming from a country unknown for Hi Tech production… the market was impenetrable… almost…

The job at SDSI brought me back to Europe… in more ways than one… Life in Israel was hard in the seventies… full of tension… the optimism of the post Six Day War era dissipated… mostly because of political bickering… and inability of the leadership to offer a solution for a lasting peace… Adding to the tension was the cost of living difference between Israel and Europe…

For that reason, I actively seeked employment in Europe… and found it… in Paris…

Hebrew University

Hebrew University…

Life in academics… a vacation from everyday life pressures… almost…
In addition to my TV repair… during the second year I secured a job as research assistance with my favorite professor… initially, I had to go through the University Microfilm publication and find anything dealing with Japanese economics… I also used the mainframe computer tabulating data… it was very interesting and tempting… tempting to go for a Masters in Economics…

One day Professor Blumental called me in and asked me if I would be interested in going to Japan for a four year period… apparently he was in discussion with Moshe Zandberg (later Zambar) who was Director of the Ministry of Finance… his offer was to send to Japan, as Commercial attaché… a person who is well versed in Japan’s economy and who could focus on promoting commerce between the two countries…
It sounded appealing… so I said yes, lets continue to explore…

Unfortunately Mr. Zandberg was promoted to Director of the Bank of Israel… and his successor had other priorities in mind…

I was still looking at going somewhere for a Masters… but I had to finish my classes… One class that I disliked was Managerial Accounting… At the eve of the final exam… I tried to join some friends for study… and I almost abandoned… I went to the test anyway… There were two questions worth 20% each… and one question worth 60%… I answered the two small questions… and wrote on the test sheet…
”Please note that my daughter was born four days ago and it was impossible for me to prepare for the test”…
…I passed the test with 51%… Thank you Gal…

The birth of my daughter changed a lot… in my perspective of life…
It’s time to take life seriously and find a job… a real job…

Luckily, Robi called me from Haifa and offered me a job in a new computer company called SDSI… they were making disk drives and needed a Sales Engineer…

Jerusalem

Jerusalem…


Jerusalem… a holy city… or a very holy city… a lot has changed in the demographics of this city in the last half century… it is therefore more adequate that I stay with the times and look at my life in the late sixties…
In those days there was a state of euphoria… the mood was much less bellicose and the whole population… Jews… Arabs and Haredi (Religious Jews) were learning to live with each other… with respect.
I remember having some cabinets done in my kitchen and sitting and drinking coffee with the carpenter (the one in via dolorosa) who was a Christian and his helper, who was a Moslem and me the Jew… sitting quietly sipping the coffee together…

Back to school… I enjoyed being a student where the major worry is to finish a paper… or study for an exam… we were still going to the movies… we saw “Yellow Submarine” and “Woodstock”… “A Man for All Seasons” and “Tora Tora”…

As new immigrants we had the right to an apartment from the Jewish Agency… so off we went to stake our claim… we were told to “Get Married First”… and I said “What guarantees will you give me… that I will get the apartment then…” “You give us an apartment and we get married”… we played tug of war for a few months… then I got the call… I ran to the Jewish Agency (luckily only a dozen blocks from home) and was given an address… “You will get this apartment if you get married within two weeks”… I went to see the apartment and liked it…
Next… I called my mother (who was living in Haifa) and told her we would be getting married the next Tuesday… “I am busy Tuesday… I have a cocktail party”…said my Mom…
So I said… “OK let’s make it Wednesday”…
At this moment Orit walks in and says “What’s new…”
“We are getting married next Wednesday… and we have an apartment” said I….

Eilat... and Beyond

Eilat… and Beyond

That is how I met Orit…. On the beach… we were in Eilat for three days… and when it was time to go back Robi asked me if Orit was coming with us… I asked her if she wanted to come to Haifa… and she said Yes!

And that is how it started… she was living in Tel Aviv… which is an hour drive from Haifa… we were taking the bus… or a sherut (cab) constantly… we almost crossed each other a couple of times… so we decided that it was better for her to move to Haifa… and stay together till University starts… Orit too was planning to go to Hebrew U.
In all these years… it was the first time that a girl “move in” with me… yes I had a multitude of women stay with me… for a few days… or weeks… but that was a first…

It was fun… we really enjoyed each other’s company… went to the movies a lot (it was the golden period of French and Italian movies)… from “L’Aventura” to “A bout de souffle”, from “Clockwork Orange” to “2001 Space Odysseus”… from “Blow Out” to “Jules et Jim”… we also liked going to the beach… and went almost every other week-end to Nof Yam, a kibbutz run beach bungalows resort in Caesarea, on the beach amongst Roman ruins… Caesarea was a main port for the Roman navy some two millennia ago…

Through some friends we found a room in Jerusalem, in Rehavia of all places (one of the most plush districts in Jerusalem)… the room had some furniture but needed a bed… so I went to the old city and found a carpenter on the via dolorosa… which I found very appropriate… a carpenter on the via dolorosa… (via dolorosa is the way another famous carpenter, Jesus, walked carrying his cross) and three days later we had our cheap bed…

School started and I had to overcome two problems… the first is to become a student… seven years had passed since I was a student… I had to get used to studying… that was the hardest… luckily I was studying with Orit in the same room… and watching her study gave me a boost of encouragement… and I got into the mood… The second problem was find a job… it was easier than I thought… I walked to a few TV stores asking if they were looking for a repair technician… and found a job immediately…

Meanwhile we kept going to the movies… and saw amongst others “Les Jeux Interdit”… Sergio Leone’s “Il Buono il Brutto e il Cattivo”… the British movies “The knack” and “Morgan”…

Eilat

Eilat…

As I decided to become a university student I left the kibbutz and returned to Haifa and to Elbit….I needed money for my studies so I went back to work… I was excited to know that I was going to university in less than a year… meanwhile I was a twenty four years old happy camper…
One day as I was working my boss came in the lab with a young guy… clearly a volunteer who came to Israel after the six day war… and looking at the possibility of settling in Israel… my boss said “Ivo this is a volunteer from Italy”… It turned out that the volunteer was Robi Osimo with whom I went to ORT school in Milano…
Robi met Helen in the kibbutz they were volunteering and decided to get married… Robi got a job at Elbit and settled in Haifa… where he still lives… with his three children and a multitude of grandchildren…

In the spring of sixty eight, together with Robi and two other couples we decided to drive to Eilat for Independence day week-end… I was the only one single… but that was the last of my worries… “I’ll pick one at the beach,” I said… And that is exactly what I did… I eventually married Orit… and we remained a couple for eighteen years…

Haifa

Haifa…

So here I am… new city, new country… new friends… new language… new life… I guess that’s how gypsies feel when they move…and move… and move…
For that reason it was hard for me to detach myself from the kibbutz… I was visiting almost every week, hesitating on whether I wanted to return and apply for full membership… was I ready to become a farmer…
I made new friends in Haifa though… and the job was interesting… I found a neat apartment… and became famous for my spaghetti parties… I was detaching myself from the kibbutz… going there less often…
And then the war came… it lasted less than a week…. six day war, they called it… but with a lot of impact…
People die in wars… and in a small country where everyone knows everyone… it affects everyone… in one way or another…
Looking for a deeper meaning in life… I tried to going through the process and decide what I wanted to do with my life…
To decide I went to Netzer Sereni and asked them to accept me as a temporary member for a few months… I also asked to work on the second shift… just to be alone and think… naturally I quit my job at Elbit… I just found it difficult for me to see myself behind an oscilloscope for the rest of my life… design was fun… but it became boring after a while…

It was in the kibbutz… discussing with a visitor… that the idea of going to university came about… Although the idea of going to university appealed to me, the tuition cost was always an obstacle… What I found out from this visitor was the possibility of getting a scholarship form the Jewish Agency as a new immigrant… being assured of a scholarship I had to maneuver getting admitted in the Department of Economics…
I first went to the ORT school in Tel Aviv and have them ratify my diploma from ORT Milano…
With that done… I registered to the Physics Department at the Technion… pending passage of entrance exam…
With that done… I transferred to Physics at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem…
With that done… I transferred to Physics and Mathematics at the Hebrew U…
With that done… I transferred to Economics and Statistics at the Hebrew U…
That is what they call working the system…

Design a Computer

Design a computer…

That’s the job I found in Haifa… Elbit Computers was a start-up whose ambition was the design a commercial mini computer… by using DTL chip technology… Having zero experience in chip based design… my boss gave me a book on logic design to read… it was practically the first technical textbook in English I had to read… and understand… Since I left Egypt… all technical literature I had read were in Italian… with this book I managed getting back to technical English… actually I liked the subject… I found it very interesting…

As for the languages I used… it is in itself a story…
When I was born, the first language I learned was Italian… I still count in Italian… When I was four, my mother (at the advice of my great uncle Edmond) put me in an English kindergarten, called the Home-Craft House… at age six I went to the British Boys School and stayed in that school until I left Egypt…
English became my principal language from age six to fourteen… I multiply and divide in English… which became my mother language… also because I spoke English with my mother…
Italian remained my first language… but as time passed… and at my school (BBS)…in Egypt, they taught French as second language… and Arabic as third language…

I read my first Italian book when I moved to Italy… what I lacked was a basic grammatical knowledge of the Italian language… but that was overcome…

English was quickly becoming my surrounding’s language of choice…
Later on, when I was in the Hebrew University in Jerusalem… I noted that practically all the textbooks were in English…

My knowledge of English helped me at the kibbutz to understand and decipher Bob Dylan… LP records (now called vinyls) at that time lacked the lyrics in the back of the record… I ended up being an expert in deciphering Bob Dylan’s intonations…

After the kibbutz, as I spent more time in Haifa, where I developed my knowledge of Hebrew… while reading books and weekly magazines in English…

Life in the kibbutz was totally new to me, it was village life… but a different type of village… the children in the kibbutz all live in a dorm till the age of eighteen,… when they go to the army… They then move to the young single’s section… where they live either in single or dual occupancy apartments… till they get married and move to the married section…
Another difference between European village life and life in the kibbutz is the level of education of the kibbutznik (a person from a kibbutz)… The people who settled, and founded a kibbutz, were ideologists who made it a lifetime goal to found a Jewish state. .. Most of these members had one or more college degrees… very pleasant and interesting people. Other older members were liberated from Buchenwald concentration camp,.. and they had also very interesting stories to tell…
The younger members (my age) had all finished high school, and were very interested in world affaires.

One event which I remember… occurred in the mid sixties when a retired Israeli general, Moshe Dayan, visited South Vietnam… at the invitation of general Westmorland… Dayan went as a journalist… He ended his report with one question… If the USA asks Israel to send Israeli troops in Vietnam… would you go and fight… I remember the hours we spent discussing this hypothesis…

Years later I was reading David Ben Gurion’s (the father of the State of Israel) memoir… and there was a section where Ben Gurion was in Paris discussing France’s support of a Jewish state… He was staying on the top floor of a small hotel in Rue de Rivoli… In the room next door was another guest of the French government… Ben Gurion and this gentlemen spent hours discussing their mutual problrms… At the end of their discussion, the gentleman said to Ben Gurion… “If you run out of luck with the establishment of your Jewish state… I will give you a piece of Vietnam”… the gentleman was Ho Chi Minh.

Kibbutz

Kibbutz

Arriving in Israel, I took a bus to Tel Aviv and went to the kibbutz organization and asked to join a kibbutz… For how long they asked and I frankly said, I imagine a few months… I came this far (from Milano…). So they sent me to Kibbutz Netzer Sereni, which was an Italian kibbutz, i.e. had a percentage of Italian members who founded this kibbutz…

Here I am after having lived in big cities all my life… learning how to be a farmer… wake up at six o’clock and on to the fields, or orchards, till three in the afternoon… with only half an hour for lunch… in Italy we had two hours break, while in Greece we had a four hour siesta… Eventually I got used to it… and I made some lasting friends…

Language wise I spoke mostly English… Italian with a few… and French with others... but there were some members who spoke neither… One day I ended up pairing with Mordi, who spoke only Hebrew… we were working with the bee hives… I got suited with a mask on my face, and so did he, but his hands were gloveless… he was telling me something in Hebrew which I failed to understand… after some time my hands were itching… but I ignored it… we ended early and I went back to my room and crashed…
When I woke up, I noticed that both my hands were swollen… I saw Mordi in the dining room that evening and he laughed saying… I told you to wear gloves… at that point I decided to learn Hebrew…

Life in the kibbutz is very sheltered… sheltered from the hustle and bustle of the big city.
Life in the kibbutz is like a vacation from the preoccupations of career, money, etc.,
In the kibbutz the concept of money is lacking... if you need something you go to the store and get it, whether it is cigarettes or tubes of paint for a portrait…
The kibbutz protects you from all that…
But in the kibbutz you live with thirty to three hundred people… and these are the only people of the village… coming from the city it was very hard for me adapt to this village life…
I lasted almost two years in Netzer Sereni.

Greece

Greece…

Greece, the birthplace of democracy… it’s good to be back with history… yes I know there was lots of history in Italy… both Ancient Roman and more modern… but having been born in Egypt… and having lived most of my life across the street from the Museum of Antiquity in Alexandria… antiques are a sign of history… and history is life…

The Greeks live their life with history omnipresent… with any act they may perform… they always remember history and mythology… it is fascinating to be surrounded with history people… all the time…
With the possible exception of the French (and the Bostonians)… the Greeks are the only people who believe that they “are history”…

Other than admiring the beauties of Greece, as in feminine beauties… I started looking for work… and through some persistence and good luck, I found a job with the Univac agent… as a computer operator… which, in those days was very important… After a month or so of doing nothing… I finally was given a “very important work”… I needed to print a list of all Greek owned cargo ships… to collect the data I was given two books, which contained about half the data… the other half were hand written notes… and newspaper clippings…
The first part was data collection… to create a punched card for every ship… and then there was the various tables of data to print…

I was told that the work was needed in ten days… I said impossible… I’ll need that much just to punch the data… so my boss intervened and assigned me two typists for that… so I figured that I would try and make it…
During that job, the customer (working for an insurance company) was keeping putting pressure by asking me is it ready… is it ready…
On the review date of day twelve I decided to surprise both my boss and the customer by presenting him with the complete work…
I remember saying to him… “I hope you are satisfied” he laughed and said
“Yes thank you, but I meant thirty days when I asked for ten days.”

I had just finished reading Exodus by Leon Uris… and for once I felt something inside me… Zionism…

I quit my job, and took the first ship to Haifa, Israel.

At IBM

At IBM

Here I was in the world of IBM… It felt like entering the holy temple of IBM… In the orientation class they speak about Senior Management as if they were Saints (with capital S)… and Saints in Italy were considered the genii of the holy cross…
There were two signs on almost every wall… the picture of Thomas Watson… and THINK, the company motto.
This extended family is one you belong forever, even after you leave the company.

It had been over twenty years since I had worked for IBM, and I visited IBM Florida R&D facility for a meeting… At first they were very cold and formal… but after a few minutes I tried breaking the ice and told them that I had worked for IBM Italy as a CE on the 632… I noticed a much more relaxed atmosphere during the rest of the meeting.

Living in Milano offered numerous diversions… and I roamed in various districts until I found one to my liking… it was called Brera, name of the art academy next door. I found much more affinity with the people there… also artists, or wannabe artists, were much more open… especially if I compared them to the IBM crowd I was working with…
Leading a conservative life during the day… and follow it with Bohemian nights was fun, but was getting strenuous… Lack of sleep forced me to take wake-up pills… Metedrine.
I took these pills during the week and slept on week-ends… that lasted for a while…

At work they trained us to write down the time we started a job and when we finished. I remember starting a job, and marking the time, and when I finished I looked at my watch and discovered I had spent two hours on that job… that job usually took twenty minutes…
I realized it was the effects of the Metedrine pills (the precursor to Metanphetamine, or speed), and I had to stop this life… I went to the office and handed my resignation, telling everyone that I was going to Greece on a long vacation… I spent the night celebrating till the wee hours… it was around three o’clock in the morning and I was exhausted… as I was close to a park, I found a piece of cardboard and went to sleep amongst the bushes…
It was some bird tweaking which woke me up… I opened my eyes and saw a few birds about five centimeters away… they were looking at me, as if to say good morning, how are you today…

Two Years

Two Years…

Yesterday at noon I went to Horizon South Detox Center for a meeting… there was a weekly meeting and a Chip meeting… And when asked who had two years sobriety, I proudly stood up and got my two year Chip…
This was particularly important for me, especially since the past weekend I had my (Cyborg II) generator broken and I was shaking all over… it would have been impossible for me to go anywhere, especially at Horizon South…
Looking beyond this generator incident… it has been over TWO YEARS that I have been without drugs… of any kind.
During my addiction, before I realized that I had a compulsive behavior, I was so apathetic that I tried a variety of “highs”… but (luckily) they left me as indifferent as before… so I stopped everything but Crack cocaine… until my Neurologist took me off the medication which caused my compulsive behavior (called Requip and Mirapex)… and thus ending my drug addiction.
Two Years…
Happy Birthday, Ivo

I Remember

I remember
Once I came to see you and you were awake with your eyes open… so I read you goodnight moon… showing you the pages… those colorful pages of that wonderful book.

You were soo happy to see these colors, following every page with attention… you broke my heart my sweet little Tikva… I felt you so close that our hearts touched each other…
Rest in peace my little angel…
You will always be in my heart… in your Nonno’s heart… forever

Seven Years

Seven years…

Seven years is the time I was made Italian… or to be precise…
Seven years is the time I was made Milanese
Ninety three… that’s the number of ties I have in my closet… proof of my Milanese identity…
When I was in Milano I realized that life needed passion… and although I had my share of adventures they lacked that “je ne sais quoi”…

One afternoon I was in the “centro” (downtown) and I stopped by a flower vendor and bought a rose, a single beautiful red rose…
I then walked around the centro looking for someone to give it to…
I saw an elegantly dressed woman in her forties window shopping…
I told her that I bought this rose because it was too beautiful to be alone…
Would she accept it… she was hesitant but she accepted and… thanked me with a big smile… I gave her the rose and left.