THE FORTY-SEVENTH PAGE

Toward the end of the eighties, the financial markets experienced tremors unlike anything seen since the twenties. In the aftermath of a particularly painful October weekend, I got deliciously lucky. Another person’s adversity is usually my good fortune. I had amassed a foolish amount of money in my checking account. Ordinarily, this would have been folly, but the raw cash was protected from the crashed stocks. With these funds I bought the sundered remnants of stocks gone bad. As the market rebounded I hastily took my profits, which became my down payment for a new resting place for my books upstate in New York’s Ulster County.