2008 Holiday Letter

2008 began with copious amounts of snow, ... and looks to be ending with more snow. The year has certainly been “interesting”. There were national elections in both Canada and the US. Conservative political figures managed to unite the left in both countries. Sarah Palin was a powerful force, uniting opposition to the conservatives in the US. In Canada, Stephen Harper played a not dissimilar role, convincing all the opposition parties to unite against his government.

 

 

This year, Mira was vigorous in her support of the Democratic candidate. She maintains her US citizenship (I switched and am now firmly a Canadian). She made sure to vote for Obama, and went to the Toronto Democratic election-eve party. The first black US President is an important step. Obama may be untested, but he seems open to new ideas and new solutions. He's less likely to try yesterday's solutions to today's problems. Canada's Conservative PM has effectively forced a strong leader on the opposition Liberal party and is now being forced to reach out to all parties for advice on how to address the Canadian version of the global economic crisis. That economic crisis continues to unfold.

This has been the first year in which I paid active attention to stock markets, made possible by our broadband Internet connection. The derivatives chaos and its unfolding market consequences seem to be challenging the underpinnings of our financial system. The past is not always a good indicator of the future – there are discontinuities which can invalidate any smooth mathematical model. We're living with the consequences triggered by the sub-prime discontinuity.

We are in reasonably good shape. A few years ago, we simplified things by flipping most of our assets to annuities. We lost the recent market gains, ... but have also lost the more recent, and dramatic, market declines. Which leaves us in not bad shape, with only a nagging concern that governments may inspire high inflation to reduce the debt they are acquiring in their efforts to turn around the economy. The outcome is uncertain, but not overly worrisome.

Spring arrived, with little hint of the economic chaos that the Fall would bring. Paul and Jonathan made their way to Toronto for what has become a welcomed annual visit. This year, Vinnie came along – he's part of their extended family group. The snow disappeared from our cottage, and the waterfowl returned to the lake. It was warm enough for an early Spring meal in the sunshine.

 

 

 

Our “big” trip this year was a few days with Mira's cousins in Germany and then a week in Budapest. Mira's cousins are ethnic Germans who repatriated back to West Germany after the war in 1970. They settled outside Heilbronn (near Stuttgart). Most of Heilbronn was leveled by allied bombing, but the central church has been fully restored. Here's a photo of Mira and her cousin, Maiti, talking in that church. This was also an opportunity for Mira to see some of the family photos that her cousins had brought with them as they left Romania.

Budapest, and Hungary, have always been significant for us. My parents were born in Hungary and Hungarian was one of the languages spoken as Mira was growing up. But we had never been for a visit. We didn't know quite what to expect. Mira's Hungarian was good enough that native speakers regularly answered her in Hungarian when she spoke to them. And Budapest is a beautiful European capital, albeit not fully recovered from its Communist interregnum, nor fully adjusted to the global free-trade economy.

I don't have any active connections to family in Hungary, but Mira has multiple connections through her sister Doris and her husband Zoltan. Zoltan's brother Laci and his wife Kati invited us for a meal in their home in Budapest. This was a high point of our visit – it was great to connect to “family” in a foreign city. We went to both an opera and a symphony concert. The Hungarians complained that all of their best singers were bought out by the West, but it was still a solid, international class opera performance.

It was just about the right amount of time in Budapest. We had enough time to explore several interesting parts of the city, but not so much time that I would begin to pine for Toronto. Back in Canada, Mira's attention turned to the cottage and its need for an internal face lift. Mira painted the first level a light color (I really did offer to help, but she wanted to do it herself) and we replaced the two couches that we acquired with the cottage. The new look includes a great Serbian cilim wall hanging, a gift from Mira's sister. I was more fixated on replacing our old boat – last year, it failed in a way likely to be expensive to fix.

With Mira's help, I acquired a new used boat from a dealer just down the road. It's just a bit larger and just a bit more comfortable than the old boat. The cottage and the new boat were ready for visitors. The first to arrive was Dora, Mira's niece, her husband, and their twin boys. This was their second visit to us and, fortunately, they were able to stay long enough that we could spend time with them in the city and at the cottage. We hope this will become a regular annual visit. We're looking forward to watching the twins grow up.

This year also saw Doris and Zoltan visit with us for a week. Mira and Doris have always been close, and we feel privileged to be included in many of their family events. But this was the first time that we had a chance to spend an extended period of time together – one of the important benefits of being (semi-) retired. It was a good visit. We spent a day and night at Stratford, seeing an excellent production of the Music Man. And we spent time at the cottage.

There's an interesting story which accompanies this photo. The maiden name of Mira's and Doris's mother was Bertani. A few years ago, we found this box (with wine inside) in our local Liquor Control Board Outlet. It was too good to pass up. Doris and Zoltan had never seen it. This led to an Internet search, which identified the country estate near Verona, Italy shown in this photo. Zoltan was convinced that this must be the Bertani family estate, and should be open to an ancestral claim by Doris and Mira. Interesting speculation.

We returned to Stratford, this time to see a production of Hamlet. Priscialla, an old friend from our days in Cleveland came to visit and we took advantage of her visit for a second trip out to Stratford. Both Hamlet and The Music Man had received excellent reviews. This Hamlet did not disappoint. It's interesting how we seem to reconnect to our past as we get older. For years, we didn't see Priscilla. Now we're fortunate to see her more or less regularly. And other old friends from the past have reconnected. Anita Klein, whom I knew back in high school, came for her first visit to us in Toronto. Must be another of the benefits of being (semi-)retired.

It seems somehow fitting that, given the financial mess in which we find ourselves, we looked to cleaning out our septic tank at the cottage. We've owned the cottage for almost eight years now (how time flies) and had yet to clean out the tank. With considerable encouragement from Mira, I finally located the tank, ... under the deck at the entrance to the cottage. Once I knew where it was, it was a simple process to clear enough room to allow it to be pumped out. It happened on one of the last days before the temperature began to drop. It should be good for another few years.

Would that the process of cleaning out our global financial mess were as simple. It looks like we're in for continued financial turbulence. Fortunately, the simpler things of life continue to satisfy, ... like the sunset at our cottage.

 

 

Bob Fabian
2008 December 21