And time goes marching on...

There was something that I felt some urgency to get done before year's end that I hadn't gotten to and really had to apply myself if it was going to happen. I remembered that my old client, Rick S. was in the habit of spending the Christmas holidays at his home in California and I didn't want him to be gone for 2 entire weeks without having touched base with him again, so I made a pilgrimage out to see him at his office. This time, I went especially well prepared. I photocopied a dozen different articles, made complete records of the meetings that I had and even put together a notebook of my thoughts concerning conservation easements. I wanted this to be something of a technical conversation, coalescing all that I'd learned. In retrospect, I might have been using the occasion of meeting with someone I respected to demonstrate my consolidation of all that I'd learned in the past 4 months. In my own mind I passed the test because, even in from of this extremely accomplished real estate magnate, professionally trained accountant I had become a self taught authority on the subject of the tax benefits of conservation and this was saying something as we had generally found few articulate spokespersons for the field. Oh there were lots of lawyers, accountants and ecologists that knew about easements and their effectiveness but we hadn't met anyone who had actually built a business around the concept. Rick acquiescence that we were on just such a track and that the admission that he might be willing to invest in it were two goals that I had for the meeting. I thought that we had both by meeting's end as he agreed to change a appointment that he had made for the day before Christmas eve to join us at a meeting with the only investment banking firm that we could find in Atlanta that made a secondary market in conservation easement tax credits. We adjourned for the weekend confident that he was about to make us an offer to set up an office in his complex, be able to use his company's medical benefit program and maybe even collect a salary - evn if that meant giving up a big percentage of the profits from our own efforts. (OK, I'll admit that we hadn't made a dime yet, but by now we all felt sure that we'd get hired as soon as the new year began - by somebody) I can't entirely explain it but I still felt the need to have an institutional presence around me, despite all of the bad experiences that I had had with banks. I wasn't convinced that I could create a business out of whole cloth that would pay all of the bills just like a parent company would. I was about to get a very abrupt wake up call.

Monday morning of Christmas week - a pretty quiet week traditionally Mark and I met at a now very familiar, Einsteins Bagel shop to go over our presentation material for the investment bankers and my e-mail chimed. I looked at my Blackberry to see that Rick S. had sent me a message that fairly succinctly said that he'd thought about it over the weekend and that he was now unconvinced that our business proposition had sufficient promise for him to devote any more time to it. He wasn't coming to the meeting that morning and he thanked me for offering him the insights that I had but, as of now he was utterly, out. We went on to the meeting, which was inconclusive but encouraging and then went home to begin the Christmas holiday. While I was completely stunned by Rick's position, I was even more surprised by my own response. I was actually relieved. I had almost too much energy invested in seeking his approval for what I was doing and somehow it made me mad that he was being so obtuse. In no time I made my mind up that he was the one that was wrong and that we, I could do this without him or his money. I grew up a little bit that day, having weathered an emotional storm that I hadn't seen coming. I am still amazed at how I relaxed and enjoyed the rest of the week off, after such turbulence.

keeping up with my sanity

By mid-December Mark had begun to wonder out loud about the efficacy of the equestrian piece of the puzzle and his logic gave me still more heartburn. I give credit to Dallas for reaching out to me at just the right time and he inspired me with talk of well heeled investors from the Rolodex that he's built from decades of transporting horses for some of that sports most glamorous participants. He also spoke to my heart with his reverence for the land, his perceptive insights about the people around us and his resourcefulness that he attributes to life on a completely self sustaining ranch. Yet, Mark and I had been together a long time and I had come to trust his business acumen. Its true enough that Mark struggled with an apparent addiction to the pain killers he took to help him through the misery of a marginally functional back, despite remarkable success in our early real estate dealings he'd been responsible for little productivity lately and I knew that he was having marital problems, he was seldom wrong about business things. The model that we were now using was Belmont Downs and at the end of the day it was true, that neither the developer nor the bank absolutely needed to have a horse farm on the property in order for our plan to organize a conservation effort to produce tax credits sufficient to reward investors to come into the transaction and pay off the existing loan. It was also true that four and a half months into trying to tease a business out of the souring economy we both saw Dallas as a formidable net worker and one was a consistent source of encouragement but not much in the way of ideas that got us any closer to making money. It was also true that in this era of virtual businesses, Dallas had other sources of income that seemed to sustain him. Mark and I didn't and we were singularly pouring ourselves into this. Yet, I needed both of these good guys in my midst to keep me psychologically composed and that neither of them Fully shared this predisposition about the other, worried me. But in true Scarlet O'Hara fashion I chose to worry about that tomorrow.

I'd read somewhere that during periods of great stress, exercise was unusually important. I suppose that beyond the ordinary good that exercise did, that of increasing heart rates, enabling weight maintenance and assuring that appetites remained normal, exercise helped in some inexplicable way to keep one sane. Since adolescence, I have skied, played tennis, ran 10Ks and 2 marathons but now I ritually walked 3 miles a day, usually at some absurd hour in the morning. Stress effects everyone differently, for me it robs me of the ability to sleep. So, I was often up at 4:30 or 5am, I might as well use that time wisely and get some exercise. What was accompanying me these days on my predawn regimen was one of my most prized possessions, my I-Pod. Like most teenagers, I collected record albums as a kid and kept up the practice until I was well into adulthood. The most cherished of these recordings, the ones not easily found or rarely heard on the nostalgia stations I had put on CDs and later transferred to my I-Pod. I like to think of it as the complete soundtrack of my life. I not only held in my memory the recollections of trying times long past and obviously endured, I had dozens of albums that bolstered me during those same difficult periods which served as an especially effective reminder of historical events and reminded me that, or how I coped with each phase. As I had begun to deconstruct this as yet another phase in my life, having my music with me was especially comforting, though during the mornings of especially difficult days I might ultimately reject even this most familiar distraction and just take my thoughts with me and I bundle up and trudge on, hopefully toward revelation. This particular year it was the expansive collection of Christmas music that kept my spirits buoyed. While I have the standards that everyone would expect, my collection includes contemplative arrangements of hymns and carols, orchestral works, both contemporary and ancient, elegantly simple works of piano, cello and organ and choral masterworks, some secular but mostly sacred. Again with my wife's full compliance we'd worked to shed the materialistic expectations from our Christmas experience this year leaving us with just family, food, OK - a good bit more wine than usual and this very special music. With all of this and good health in hand, Christmas wasn't simply saved this year, it was priceless and thankfully experienced.

Possibilities of the conservation easement

Even as I slogged toward the Christmas holidays the business bug kept buzzing around. By now, Dallas, Mark and I had a clear idea about the possibilities at Belmont Downs. We were going to propose to Tim and the First Commitment Bank - the bank that held the $10 million dollar, non-performing note but on which they could not foreclose due to the bank's own solvency problems, that they reserve 10% of the property for exclusive home site but put everything else, all 400 residual acres in a conservation easement, give the easement to a land trust and harvest the tax credits and deductions for use by bank investors who had a vested interest in seeing that the bank stay in business. The problem now became, what land trust? There were lots of them chartered in Georgia but was there a perfect one? The answer came, as so many of the big ones had so far: from a remarkable source. Mark and I were eating breakfast together one rainy morning and I was looking at the survey and the appraisal that Jim Rice had given me. Having had some prior experience with appraisers, I decided to call the guy who had done the work on Belmont Downs and go pick his brain. His name was Dennis and he turned out to be an odd but remarkably articulate fountain of information on easements. he volunteered almost immediately that the Trust for Public Land and their local Director, Ken was who we needed. I liked Dennis right off as he had a big sign beside the door to his very cluttered office that read, "Nobody gets to see the Wizard, Not Nobody, not No How." he was the wizard alright. And man, was he right about Ken. The Trust for Public Land is a huge, old land trust that has as its mission "Land for People." And Ken was a disciple of the religion of conservation but he had a can-do attitude that seemed to suggest that he could think in technicolor. He listened carefully to our plans, made a few thoughtful suggestions and gave us every indication that we could count on this land trust to help execute Belmont Downs and perhaps many more. In his office in downtown Atlanta, I saw for the first time that our process could work, it could work in lots of different settings and circumstances and we could make money helping people with broken land deals either using the equestrian facilities idea or not. The outline of an evolving business was emerging right in front of us.

It seems the right time to say that i am a firm believer in a variation of the Protestant work ethic. My theory goes: work hard at something constructive and something good comes from the effort. it might not be the good you intended, but it'll be good never the less. My idea of starting a business to save broken real estate projects, and community banks in the process was picking up momentum and I was beginning to believe it, despite the fact that we had no proof that it would even work outside a couple of exotic examples

Runnin' on Empty

The first of December brings a confluence of emotions, feelings and worst of all, apprehensions. We'd had a pleasant Thanksgiving having actually succeeded in not thinking too awfully much about my economic fortunes. But, as December came on, frigid and bleak my mood began to mirror the weather. I had been off the payroll for 4 months now. The Christmas season was in full boil and I was flirting with the blues in ways I hadn't in years. When you spend most of your professional life working, even conscientiously in a bank its easy - no, I'll go so far as to say normal to lose track of what it means to be truly, economically productive. In a big, mature organization transactional business happens largely because customers know to call when they need a financial problem solved. A responsible bank employee simply takes the call and fashions a response from the ample resources that employee has at his or her disposal and that's called "sales". By using just a little initiative that employee might even qualify for sales rewards - a trip or a campaign prize and if you're really well employed, incentive compensation. Well, during my banking career, I had come to fully understand how that process worked and was, not only paid enough to keep my comfortable life style in tact, I'd gotten completely used to making bonuses on top of the ordinary compensation that did everything from enable consistent philanthropy, to treating my family, including young adult children to extraordinary trips and of course living well. (By upper middle class standards, anyway) But there is a dark psychological aspect to becoming accustomed to receiving such compensation without ever truly processing what it means to earn it. Its called entitlement. I had come to believe that I was entitled to be so compensated and that the things I chose to buy, creature comforts, admiration from others for doing so "well," a tangible sense of accomplishment and above all a feeling of security all get rolled together. I had become a person disconnected with self reliance because my well respected employer assumed that position. Now, all of that was gone. Only now was I beginning to understand how a slave could get comfortable with his circumstances and not want to change them, even if he could. The hardest reality though was my professional identity, my professional self concept was dissipating before my very eyes and, on the darkest of days I was terrified that I didn't even begin to know how to get it back. I realized that the irrevocable loss of such self respect meant certain failure. On some days this reality motivated me but by early December I was nearly depressed, longing for the salad days of working at the Bank, planning the office Christmas party, looking forward to shopping for others, the Christmas feeling. The only person who seemed to understand as well or better than me was my wife, Jill. its a long story but her adolescence was rudely interrupted when her Dad, a well respected football coach lost his job and simply couldn't find another one. Her nuclear family nearly disintegrated as a result and each carries the scars from that trauma, even to this day. The prospects of a merry Christmas seemed just as remote to her as it did to me. Oddly though there was real comfort in knowing that my wife understood. And, comprehending that she too was suffering psychologically was completely motivational. I simply could not let the blues over take me as I had too many looking to me to solve this problem. Of all the things that I couldn't afford, feeling sorry for my self, the ages old indulgence of the entitlement generation could not be the option I chose. I had to find some way to force-ably reject that.

Running on empty
Everyone I know, everywhere I go
People need some reason to believe
I dont know about anyone but me
If it takes all night, thatll be all right
If I can get you to smile before I leave

Looking out at the road rushing under my wheels
I dont know how to tell you all just how crazy this life feels
I look around for the friends that I used to turn to to pull me through
Looking into their eyes I see them running too

Running on - running on empty
Running on - running blind
Running on - running into the sun
But Im running behind