Golden Apples...and Teddy Bears

Don't get your hopes up...this is not a full story, just a little anecdote I thought I'd share with you all...I just sent it around to the attorneys at my firm on my last day here (as you know, I don't write about work, but just to relieve some of the guilt you've been making me feel at not posting for a while, fyi I'm changing jobs and moving cities...tomorrow...so I've been somewhat of a decapitated chicken lately). Hope this holds you all over till the next one is done!

**************************

A few weeks ago I was having dinner with my friend Lisa, who is somewhat older than me (but don't tell her I said that, as I'm pretty sure her Pilates-trained arms could turn me into a pretzel) and very accomplished in her career. It's not important what her career is; suffice to say, getting to where she is today was a risky venture and her success was not at all assured. After a drink or two had loosened my tongue a bit -- it doesn't take much alcohol to do that these days, not that it usually takes any alcohol to make me ask vaguely inappropriate questions -- I asked her how she dealt with the fear of failure in pursuing her dreams (or, in my vaguely inappropriate way, "how the ____ did you get where you are today without freaking out everyday of your life?").

"When I was 28, my grandfather passed away," she said, in between bites of clams casino (apparently her career was not the only area in which Lisa preferred to take risks). "In his will, he left me a painting that had been in his basement for decades. When I took it to get appraised, the appraiser told me that it was an original Picasso, and worth several million dollars."

At the time, Lisa was working in a job she didn't like very much, living in a city she didn't care for, and looking forward to a life that, while not entirely unpleasant, was not what she really wanted.

"But when I found out that I owned a painting worth several million dollars, all that changed. I quit my job, moved to a new city, and started a new life," she said, now ordering two different types of cheesecake, both for her to eat alone as I had forgotten to take my Lactaid that morning. I worried a bit how the two pieces of cheesecake would sit with a large helping of clams casino, but she seemed to know what she was doing.

Lisa continued her story, telling me about how she struggled for several years before she broke through in her new career.

"It was tough, sure," she said, again in between bites of cheesecake, "but knowing that I had that painting under my bed made it possible. I never worried, because I knew that if worst came to worst, I'd be ok."

After several minutes of my berating her for keeping a multi-million dollar painting under her bed ("have you ever heard of burglars? fires? alien invasions?"), Lisa finished dessert and called for the check.

"Well, thank god for that painting," I said, marvelling at her apparent good health after the binge fest I had just witnessed. I also thought to myself how the story sounded somewhat smug -- anyone can take chances when they have something like a multi-million fortune to fall back on -- but luckily I had stopped drinking by that point, and so retained a modicum of tact and kept my mouth shut. Still, I found myself supremely jealous at Lisa's good luck, and had begun to settle into a kind of simmering discontent as we walked out of the restaurant.

"Yeah, but a few years ago I took the painting to another appraiser," she said, as we stopped for ice cream (or, she stopped for ice cream and I watched her eat it), "a world-famous, Antiques Roadshow-kind of bigwig -- and he said the painting was a forgery, and it was actually worth $50." She laughed, as chocolate ice cream dribbled down her shirt. "Imagine if I had known that years ago, who knows where I'd be right now?"

When I got home that night, after looking up the recipe for clams casino on the internet (she really seemed to enjoy it), I thought about Lisa's story, and the security she thought she had that never really existed, except in her own head. Except, that's really the only place security can exist, because at any moment you can find out that the original Picasso under your bed was really just a forgery.

I went into my bedroom and found my most prized possession, a teddy bear that my grandmother had bought for me when I was 2 years old.

"This teddy bear is worth $4 million," I repeated to myself several times. I said it so many times, I started to believe it. And now each morning I get up and say "this teddy bear is worth $4 million," and each morning I convince myself a little more that it's true.

May you all live like you have a teddy bear stuffed with gold on top of your bed, or an original Picasso under it. But if you do have an original Picasso, keep it in a safe deposit box. There's calculated risk, and then there's stupidity.