Monroe Firestone

He was a mench, the kind of guy you’d meet for a blind date, marry six months later, and accompany to Pakistan in 1968 for your honeymoon (as my mother did). He spent something like 60 years on Wall Street, retiring only last year. Most of his workdays, he ate a turkey sandwich on half a pumpernickel bagel. Whatever the occasion, he always knew how to dress: floral bathing trunks with ‘70’s chest hair for the beach (see below); standard tux at our wedding (also below); or black turtleneck with a backwards black baseball cap as he took tickets at my high school graduation party at a NY club (sadly, no picture). He played tennis passably and golf almost passably. (Golf is, as he often reminded me, “a frustrating sport.”) He talked with his mouth full all the time, even though he had a condition during the last decade of his life that made him choke whenever he did. He liked to talk. He could convey the simplest information in the most complex way, like, if you said, "did you pick up those eggs from the store?" he’d make sure to tell you all of the people he saw at the Gristedes before he told you if he was able to make a decision about which eggs to buy because there are so many kinds of eggs and he didn’t know which kind we needed. He did not cook; he could burn toast. He made some good stock picks (Qualcomm before the turn of the century, Nvidia several years ago), but sometimes he held them too long because he was generally optimistic about the future. He used to talk about celebrating 100 years of marriage with my mom, when he would have been 135 years old. He genuinely believed it was possible. He saw the possible, the good. All it took was love, and he had a lot of that to give.