Mr. Betar seemed willing to give me serious consideration for a summer involvement with the FDIC, were I willing to follow up on his letter. The \u201cvibes\u201d from his letter seemed positive (but I\u2019ve attached a copy, so that you can decide on your own whether I was imagining this or not). This one looked real.<\/p>\n
And that gave me pause. A door was found to not be locked. But where could it lead? Obviously, it would have led back to the federal government and Washington DC. A situation where I had experienced some career and social success over the past 3 years. If I did well, perhaps I would be invited for a second summer assignment the year after. And maybe that would have led to a full-time job with the FDIC legal office in DC after graduation. I might well have been embarking on a career path that I could have done well with. I would never have worked my way to the top, I wasn\u2019t going to give Sheila Bair<\/a> (who is about my age) any competition when President Bush appointed her FDIC Chairperson in 2006. But I may well have worked my way up to a respectable middle-management role at either the FDIC, or perhaps back with my old employer, the US Treasury. I could imagine myself then fitting into a stable marriage situation with 2 kids and a mortgage on a split-level in suburban Virginia or Maryland. Quite a different scenario than where my life has actually led me.<\/p>\n But I decided not to answer that letter. This wasn\u2019t a well-thought out decision, but it wasn\u2019t a casual decision either. I recall that it did bother me. In many ways, I wanted to go back to the Washington area, I had built up some good friendships and involvements over my 2 \u00bd years living and working there; I liked metro DC with all its diversity and educated people and cultural offerings. I still knew my way around DC back in 1979, having just left the year before to move \u201cback home\u201d to where I grew up in northern New Jersey, living with my mother and my brother. And yet . . . I just didn\u2019t feel right about \u201ccoming home\u201d just to get a law degree and then leaving my mother and brother in the dust once I got the degree. <\/p>\n Sure, DC isn\u2019t that far from New Jersey, I could have visited quite frequently (I spent about one weekend a month there during the time that I was working for the Treasury printing bureau). And yet, my mother was still getting over my father\u2019s passing five years before, and my brother was fully committed to taking care of her. He was dating a lot of women and doing some traveling, but he was not about to pack up and start over in a different place, even if within reasonable visiting distance. He stayed with her and took care of her throughout her long decline, right until the day of her death in 2009, some 30 years after my letter from the FDIC. <\/p>\n I wasn\u2019t willing to do from my mother what my brother did. I didn\u2019t want to stay under the same roof with her once I re-started my career after law school. But on the other hand, I didn\u2019t feel right about putting a large distance between us. I decided to stay in the NJ area, to play out my future in more-or-less the same towns and counties from my youth. I wasn\u2019t there when my mother died, but I got to the house to help my brother about 10 minutes after she was declared dead by the EMS crew. That would not have been possible had I gone the FDIC route.<\/p>\n Still, sometimes I wonder what would have happened had I answered that letter. Things got really intense at both FDIC and the Treasury in 2007 and 2008, when the big banks and finance companies and insurance firms were on the brink of collapse. Treasury and FDIC management were staying up very late to help save the US economy from collapsing in the wake of Bear Sterns, Lehman Brothers and AIG. Would I have been in the midst of that effort? Would I have been in on the emergency meetings and world-wide conference calls involving Ben Bernacke, Hank Paulson (and later Timothy Geithner), Jamie Dimon, Loyd Blankfein, and yes, Sheila Bair? In other words, would I have been more important, in the sense of big government and big world-wide affairs, versus the more-or-less \u201cunder the radar\u201d, quotidian life that I actually lived both before and after law school? <\/p>\n Well . . . I know that the life I actually lived was not \u201cunimportant\u201d. I don\u2019t feel that my life was wasted. I know that sometimes the things that turn out to be really important don\u2019t make the front pages of the NY Times or Washington Post or Wall Street Journal. And perhaps never will. I\u2019ve become something of a Zen student, and that little passtime in itself supports the notion that what\u2019s really important isn\u2019t always all that important. Hmm, this sounds a bit like a Yogi Berra quote<\/a>!<\/p>\n
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