A Sandwich

These two people have something important in common. Aha! you say, the Yankees caps. Nope. The grandson couldn’t give a fig about the Yankees. Grandpa lent him the cap for for a day of fun at the ballpark. Grandson could give a fig about Grandpa’s Rule for such outings: Eat Whatever You Want. And it would not be figs, or other fruits, that would be eaten.

Both of these people, my father and my son, are entrepreneurs. My father is a nuclear physicist by training. When I was in high school, he left the company he was working for to start his own company. What kind of company does a nuclear physicist start? One that makes gauges to measure the thickness of materials like rolled steel. Gamma Instruments.

Less than five years after this picture was taken, my son left his “day job” (as a college student) to join a software start-up. That’s the kind of company that teenagers start in the twenty-first century. Argo, then Arktos, then ClearGraph.

You may have heard about about the sandwich generation, people in middle age caring both for their own children and their ailing parents. That’s not me. Our generations were too short for that predicament.

My situation is the opposite of being sandwiched between needy relatives: I am sandwiched between two highly independent people. For both Grandpa and Grandson, freedom from the nonsense in established organizations was (is) part of the appeal. By contrast, I operate inside an established organization with an extra helping of nonsense, a large public university. And when I need to vent about the absurdity in the meal I have served myself, I have two slices of bread to turn to.

Here’s another picture of those slices: