Three legged stools

A well run company is like a three-legged stool.

One leg represents capital. Without money a business can't survive. Capital can be provided by stockholders but a stool can't survive on that alone. Something needs to be done with the capital to make it viable.

The second leg is clients, who also provide capital. If the clients are not treated well they will go to a competive stool that has equal or better quality legs at prices the second leg deems reasonable. 

The third leg is employees. They do the work that produces the product or service that the clients buy. These employees sell their time, skills and energy to the stool. Ideally, the better they work, they will receive the rewards in money and benefits where they will be motivated to do the work the best way possible. 

It's costly (reduces capital) to replace a well-trained, well-motivated employee and it is wise to do everything possible that the employee does not take its time, skills and energy to a competitor.

A stool that is strong enough to be used to sit on, stand on, needs all the three legs: capital, clients and employees. To ignore two for the third means the stool is handicapped.

I think of the story of Market Basket, a New England chain of groceries considered by Consumer Reports as the second best supermarket in the U.S.

After years of infighting, Arthur T. Demoulas took over as head. The stores had the support of 5000 employees who backed him. The store is a good three legged stool. Prices are lower than the competition, money is being made for investors and employees are well paid with good benefits. 

A recent observation was that another supermarket, with the more traditional approach where everything went to the top, was next door.  Their parking lot was empty. Market Basket's was full.

Market Basket is a three-legged stool. I wish there were more of them under the capitalism system. We'd all be better off.
 

FREE WRITE -- TIME

The three Tuesday Free Writers are now in two different countries but used the same prompt: "Time was an idea: it had no beginning and had no end" from Kate Morton's The Clockmaker's Daughter.

D-L and Rick sipped Yorkshire tea and nibbled a mini chocolate muffin at L'Hostalet as they wrote. Julia was back in Geneva, but it still worked.

D-L'S Free Write

"Time was an idea: it had no beginning and had no end" or that was what Jmma's mother always said, Her mother paid no attention to time, which was why her Harvard Professor father hired a nanny more to make sure that her mother picked up Jemma from school and reminded her to start dinner.

He was of Swiss origin and always on time if not to the second, to the minute.

Jemma took after her father. Her almost-finished doctoral dissertation was on the use and attitude about time in three cultures: an American Indian tribe, the African Lobi tribe and Medieval farmers.

Today, she stood outside the family Cambridge home. She had three minutes until 11:35, the time designated for her arrival by her father.

They would pry her mother, his wife, from her studio and start eating at 11:55. During the meal they would talk about Jemma's dissertation, her father's article to be submitted to a scientific journal, and her mother's latest painting.

Jemma couldn't forget that throughout her life they did the same things every Sunday with minor variations.

Time may have aged them, but it didn't matter because time was only an idea.

 Julia's Free Write

Off to the mountains, for the umpteenth time that summer, she was happ.y

Although she had kind of grown up in the mountains as her family often “headed for the hills” after church on a weekend to hike, picnic build dams in the rivers, she particularly appreciated this period in her life.

A village that she had frequented with her husband most summers for at least a week since their eldest was born over 40 years ago. In fact, when they discovered this village, she was 5 months pregnant with said son, thanks to a childhood friend of his who later became that son’s as well as the second son’s godmother.

Both boys grew up swimming in the pool built between the rocks and it became synonymous with happy times.

So, when she had the opportunity to rent for first four summer months then later six, it was a spot she often headed for to relax, reflect and simply be.

Time – what a concept. Where does it start? Where does it end? The happy times are perhaps too short and the difficult never ending.

Rick's Free Write

I kept drifting in and out of consciousness. The first time I remember waking up, it was day, maybe slipping into dusk. The next time it was pitch black. Not even a light from a phone charger. Then bright morning, Then night again.

They must have given me something. Something powerful enough to knock me out but not enough to kill me. I was so disoriented I didn’t know where I was. Couldn’t remember where I had been when it happened. Wasn’t even sure who I was.

For days, it seemed, I was never conscious enough to focus for more than a few seconds. Sensed I was lying down on something hard but didn’t have the energy to get up. I could see shapes, straight lines, but nothing I could identify. And nothing moving.

Finally, one night; I started to regain some focus. Then I heard a sound. Were they back? Had they never left? Had they been drugging me regularly? What could they possibly want with me? I had no money, no valuables to steal. I had no enemies (that I know of). Why me?

I started to try to move but my muscles were slush. I had to move, somehow, to get away.

Julia has written and taken photos all her life and loves syncing up with friends.  Her blog can be found: https://viewsfromeverywhere.blogspot.com/ 

Rick is an aviation journalist and publisher of www.aviationvoices. com

 

D-L has had 17 fiction and non fiction books published. Check out her website at: https://dlnelsonwriter.com

 

 

Loving Boston and Prices to Be Paid

 

I lived in Boston for many years at 15 Wigglesworth Sreet named for Dr. Wigglesworth, who taught at Harvard Medical a century plus ago, and on The Riverway, the last apartment building before Brookline.

 

I loved both locations: the townhouses on Wigglesworth with their miniature gardens in front and fenced-in tiny backyards and later the apartment building where I knew all my neighbors, students and permanent owners. 

I learned to believe in coincidence on The Riverway. When my uncle and aunt visited me there, they discovered they had lived in my flat when they were newlyweds. Then when my daughter at 16 participated in an exchange with the Goethe institute, one of the German girls, told me her parents had lived there when her father was at Harvard Medical. She had seen a photo with the exact same view as from my living room window to prove it.

But it wasn't just the housing I loved. There was something about being surrounded by universities: Harvard Medical, Dental, Simmons, Emmanuel, Northeastern, Boston College of Art, Wentworth and 30+ more. Perhaps a little less fun when streets were clogged with moving vans as students descended for the school year.

I loved being in walking distance of the Fenway and having an allotment to produce less than bountiful crops.

There was a good choice of theater and music, greater than my budget, but we did have season tickets to the Boston Ballet. 

Shear Madness closed after 40 years. I usually took out-of-town guests to see it.

 

There was the Revels celebrating the winter solstice on years when we could get tickets. 

Likewise special Boston Symphony performances, Boston Pops and just plain street music made my ears happy. I saw most of the stage musicals over the years in the Theater District.

Across the Charles River was Harvard Square where we went many Friday nights to renew our book collections, eat at one of the many restaurants and listen to street musicians.

There was the Boston Museum of Art. I could get off at the T-stop and drop into a gallery or two. 

And there was the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum where I sometimes studied on a Sunday afternoon while I was doing a masters at Boston University.

The T was outside our door and down the block to take us anywhere in the city. 

I loved the ducks from the book Make Way for Ducklings first read to me at four. Someone dresses them depending on what is going on in the city. It didn't surprise me to find them  in pussy hats. Naturally the mother duck would be a feminist.

In the background was the golden State House dome that my grandfather had worked on as an engineer when repairs were being made.

Boston Common had the swan boats and the Frog Pond where one hot summer day, my four-year-old daughter waded even though she had on a pretty dress. Most blades of grass in Boston have memories.

I even loved Boston in snow. I remember a neighbor, an eccentric man who taught decoupage saying, "Kevin (the mayor) is running again." "How do you know," I asked. "Our street has been plowed twice," he said.

If I had not sold my condo, it would be paid for today and I still could do the things I loved doing. However, I would not have moved to Europe and had incredible other experiences.

Giving up my nationality so I could have a bank account meant I could never live in the U.S. again. At the time I renounced, there was a bill before Congress that expats who renounced could never enter the U.S. again. Fortunately, it went nowhere. Not that I would change my new life for the old.

Choices and change can expand life's experiences. It can also bury memories in one's heart and soul to take out and enjoy at will. There are always prices to be paid, but I've happily paid these prices on my living choices. They have been so enriching.

 

The Disappearing Mamies

In the 1980s, I first noticed the mamies after I shared a house with a couple of anthropologists in the French village of Argles-sur-mer, which has existed since before the time of Charlemagne.

Mamies were old women who put their chairs outside their homes on the narrow streets and chattered away in Catalan. They wore what my grandmother would call house dresses and  aprons. Some days they might watch their grandchildren (J.D. Vance would have loved that), snap beans, peel potatoes, chuck peas as they talked.

On subsequent visits, I noticed some of the old women had disappeared and were replaced by younger old women.

I bought an attic studio two blocks away, my dream, for my own retirement. It was then I got to know the remaining mamies. By then, I could speak French, although they told me I should learn Catalan. That will not happen.

The village has changed over the 30+ years I've been there.

The old gray houses have been bought by retirees from the north and for summer homes for people coming from all over Europe. Locals as well as interlopers like myself renovated the houses and their shutters were now gay blues, greens, red etc. One new owner, who designed stage sets for the London theatre, painted mini-murals.

The remaining mamies and I often chatted. I learned about their lives and their friendships since childhood. 

They told me who had owned the houses before: the man who made his living as an anchois fisherman, the family that had cork and olive trees that they harvested.

I married: my studio was too small for the two of us. We moved two doors down to another 400-year old house, once owned by Antoinette. 

According to the mamies, she was a shrew, not to be trusted with any secret. She made her husband's life a hell on earth but was devasted when he died visiting him almost every day in the cemetery, where she too now resided.

I learned the woman across the street who refused to speak to anyone had been an old maid school teacher but had lost her mind and refused to leave her home.

One by one the mamies died off. Madame Fernadez was one of two left. She'd been a good neighbor, watering my plants when I was gone. A widow, she had suffered her share of tragedy. Her son had shot himself in her living room, but she persevered. She has dialysis regularly with the local taxi taking her to the hospital for the treatments.

Rosemarie, who sat on her front steps and knitted countless sweaters, pocketbooks and hats, sang in the 14th century church at the end of the street. She was a regular at the town hall where she went to suggest improvements to village life. Her daughter moved her to a home when ill health made living alone impossible.

Unlike bygone times, the mamies's daughters did not become mamies as they aged. They left their childhood friends to develop careers and lives in Toulouse, Mantpellier, Lyon and even Paris.

I'm now older than most of the mamies, but I wear jeans and a sweatshirt more often than not. My friends are the locals, summer folk and retirees. I have a patio and do not put my chair out to talk to friends but meet them in the many small cafés.

The village in summer swells ten times and there are fests and entertainments along with the traditional celebrations. 

Sometimes on a Sunday afternoon when the village becomes a ghost town and I walk the dog, I feel the spirits of the mamies in their house dresses and aprons, sitting in their chairs and chatting in Catalan.

Free Write - The Car

Julia's Free Write

Ideas or not, we’ve got to do it: I hit the timer for our free write as I muttered the above phrase.

The idea of a free write is for someone to come with a prompt, then we write for 10 minutes on the spur of the moment.

I was the prompt provider this morning, with no clue as to what to say about my own prompt: “s__t happens” is one of my favorite sayings.

But back to the supposed subject.

Bright red and covered with fake vines, there it sat. No one in sight, no explanations provided.  Had the gods come and decorated it during the night? If so, why? Where were the owners? It did have a license plate.

Ah ha, I looked closer and read the very small plaque on the upper window “congratulations to the newly-weds”. The old, refurbished red deux chevaux – 2CV – was a get away car. I love the use of an antique to celebrate something new.

D-L's Free Write

Tom was stuffy, Debra decided, although it should have come as a surprise. She was an artist. He was a banker. 

He didn't quite put on a suit and tie to hang around the house on weekends but close. She wore jeans and a sweatshirt.

They had met at her exhibition where for once she wore her little black dress, her only dress, until Tom bought her others so he could take it to the fancy restaurants he liked.

Marrying after only three months was stupid, she decided. 

He had fought her turning the fourth bedrooom in his house into a studio.

They survived Thanksgiving at his parents. The food had been fantastic.

With Christmas approaching, he got out his decorations, red and silver balls and white fairy lights.

"That's it?" she asked.

He nodded.

They sipped champagne as they decorated an artifical tree.

"Too many needles," he poo-pooed her request for a real one.

When Tom went to work, Debra drove her little red car to the lot where a boys club was selling real tres.

She bought a tiny one for the back seat and decorated it with her handmade ornaments: Santas, reindeers, snowflakes and sleighs.

The salesman listened to her ideas for decorating the outside of her car with green branches. Together they fastened the branches so they wouldn't blow off.

Debra figured that she would be blowing off her marriage in the new year.

Rick's Free Write

Galdric’s truck was broken, in the carrosserie to be repaired, and he had this huge order of plants and flowers to deliver to the church for the funeral of one of the village’s most prominent citizens – Mayor ‘Oui,’ they used to call him because whatever anyone asked of him, he responded, “Oui,” with a big smile. No wonder he got elected 7 times in a row.

The funeral was at 2 and there was no time to rent a truck, so Galdric used the only transport available – his bright red Peugot with the little luggage rack on top. Rolling through the narrow streets it looking like a hanging garden – green shoots and long-stemmed flowers sticking out in every direction; hopefully he wouldn’t hit a ‘sleeping policeman’ too fast and bounce the whole load onto the road.

Mourners, gathered around the church entrance to sign the guest book and have a last cigarette, were aghast to see the cherry red car pull up, covered in greenery and colored blossoms.

Smiling, sort of, Galdric parked alongside the church in the spot where the hearse would soon pull in, jumped out, and started carrying the floral bundles into the sanctuary.

He had just finished and drove up Rue de la Republique when Mayor Oui’s body arrived. As the car hit a bump, a stray zinnia fell into Galdric’s lap. 

Julia has written and taken photos all her life and loves syncing up with friends.  Her blog can be found: https://viewsfromeverywhere.blogspot.com/                                     Rick is an aviation journalist and publisher of www.aviationvoices. com

D-L has had 17 fiction and non fiction books published. Check out her website at: https://dlnelsonwriter.com

 

Diversity is Good

 

One of the things that Project 2025 promotes is white males and discourages diversity.

Yuck!

May I never be trapped in a place where people who wrote 2025 rule. Besides the dangers, how boring life would be surrounded by the same old, same old.

Today, Rick and I went to Pages&Sips, our favorite English bookstore and café located in the Vieille Ville, Geneva. 

I wanted their scones and smoked tea for breakfast. Rick added hot chocolate to his order perfect for fall-cool weather after last week's heat wave. P&S's scones are the next best thing to eating scones on Princes Street in Edinburgh.

In the corner near where we sat were two families: Swiss French and Russian. They had two toddlers off the charts in adorableness. The children spoke French, English and Russian. They came over to show us their doll Gabbie and their stuffed rabbit whose name remained a secret. 

Think of it...pre-kindergartners who are already tri-lingual. What a leg up they have on opportunities.

We were next to the book display table, a dangerous place to be if one wanted to resist buying too many books. A couple, speaking German, were checking out the offerings for their weekly reading.

The contrast to people in the States who growl "speak English" when they hear a foreign language is huge. Living in a place that's 43% foreign is enriching. Cultures and languages intermingle.

 

Geneva wasn't always like that. John Calvin, whose church is around the corner from P&S, seemed to want to destroy anything beautiful or fun. Joy was to be found only in God, which is why he removed all the color from the church -- he missed one room. He did start a school 459 years ago, which is still educating Geneva's young today.

 

I wonder why white 2025 males, who believe in the 2025 report, so fear diversity.

 

 

Perspective

In these turbulent political times, perspective is major. The 6/9 debate is an example of how two people can look at the same thing and see two different things.

It was a lesson I learned in my late 20s. I was newly divorced and living with my mother and toddler daughter in a North Andover apartment  complex. The buildings were spaced far apart. It was nicely landscaped with lawns, bushes, and trees. A wood bordered it on one side and it was removed from the main road.

One night I had a date with a man, whom I described as coming from the wilds of New Hampshire. As we ate dinner he said, "I don't understand how you can live in a city like this. It's so congested."

A couple of weeks later I had another date with a man who lived in Boston's historic North End where we ate in an Italian restaurant. "I would go crazy living in the country where you live," he said.

What a lesson in perspective. Going back to the 6/9 debate each person is coming from their own experience and point of view and both can be correct as far as they know.

Where they are wrong is instead of thinking there's a 6 or a 9, one of them thinks that the number is a letter or a painting. Knowledge can be limited but reality isn't.

Bad Posters

Geneva is awash in posters, hanging above street level and along sidewalks where they can be seen by passing cars.

If the goal is to communicate, most of them fail miserably.

Here's some examples and why:

Even if you are stopped at a long traffic light, there is no way you can read what the 8 museums are and even less chance to see what is written under them. If you are local, you might recognize the buildings. The poster would make a good pamphlet.

What is this promoting? I do love vegetables but only with this photo, did I realize that they may be found somewhere in Carouge and even that wouldn't be easily visible unless parked nearby or stopping on the street to read. I do not have enough information to act on. The photo is appetizing though and made me a bit hungry.

This was a good reminder that I need to buy a new coffee pot, but nothing else in the poster gives me any information. I have no idea what it is about. Nice colors.

This poster was on a street corner. White type on orange is almost invisible from a distance, hard to read close up, especially the smaller type. As for the design, I haven't a clue what it is about.

Again, this would be better as a pamphlet, but as a poster, unless someone could stop and take notes, useless for a quick gathering of information.

I love the show Starmania, but we had to be stopped at a traffic light several times before I could see the dates and that it was at the Arena. I still have no idea what it says at the bottom.

 

I defy anyone driving by to know what this poster is trying to tell them. White type is next to always hard to read unless its large type on a very, very, very dark background.

Nichola Mulder is a force. How wonderful for him. Some dates show when he'll be a force. But where? Somewhere in Geneva, Switzerland, the planet?

Too much information impossible to read unless I stood in front of it and then probably would need to take notes. I suppose if I knew of the festival, I could go home to look it up on the internet, if I remembered.

As a professional communicator (journalism, marketing, PR) for most of my career, the goal was to communicate. Put yourself in the reader's mind and then write or design, three different mentors beat into my head.
 

Free Write The House in the Woods

Rick found today's prompt while walking the dog. As usual, Rick, Julia and I took ten minutes to Free Write about the prompt. Sometimes our Free Writes vary, sometimes there are simlarities. Today there's a similar thread. 

Rick's Free Write -- Abandoned House

I had passed the house several times before I realized it was abandoned. The weeds growing thicker and higher each time were a clue. It was odd, considering this was in one of the wealthiest communes in Switzerland.

I decided to buy it, knock it down, and build a complex of apartments. I figured I could make millions after the initial investment.

What I hadn’t figured on was the family inheritance laws in which just about every shirt-tail relative had a vote in the sale of a property. It took me months, actually a year and a half, to locate all the 100+ ‘heirs’ and then another year to convince the last ones to sell. At a huge cost in attorney and investigator fees.

Finally the property was mine, the architect plans were filed with the commune, the environmental impact studies approved, and the backhoes poised to knock down the structure.

Smugly satisfied, I folded my arms to watch, when I heard a sound, a whimper. ‘Wait,’ I called out to the machine operators, holding up my hands.

Following the sound to the basement, I found an emaciated black labrador and five tiny puppies. She had claimed the property as her own.

D-L's Free Write

Jemma shifted the weight of her backpack as she faced the house thru the trees.

The word desolate came to mind, nothing like her childhood memories with the rubber swimming pool, swings and slide. She remembered making mudpies and sand castles in the sandbox.

Twenty-five years had done a job on it. Strange that her mother had left the house to her and her sister, although they hadn't seen their mother for years. Her father had custody of both girls.

The lawyer had given her the key. Should she wait for Andrea, who was alway late.

"I'm here," a voice said.

The sisters hugged.

"Bamboo in Switzerland, weird," Andrea said.

Jemma had forgotten the bamboo but remembered the brown door. 

The key stuck, but Andrea had been able to get the door open. Jemma almost wished she hadn't.

The inside would qualify for one of those TV shows where people come in to clean a hoarder's house. Papers, books, clothes, dishes, six shovels (they'd need those to shovel things) covered every inch of space. 

"We should hire someone," Audres said.

Jemma agreed. They'd have to clear it out and redecorate it to sell it.

She wished she had some feelings for the house where she'd spent her first eight years.

She didn't.

She was out walking one day, no direction, no purpose other than to be alone and mull over her life.

Julia's Free Write

She was out walking one day, no direction, no purpose other than to be alone and mull over her life.

It wasn’t bad her life, just rather too full at the moment what with friends here, friends, there, tasks to be undertaken, never mind a spate of incidents requiring professional attention. Minor in themselves, taken together it was all a bit much.

She meandered, sticking to the shade and watching her feet as she was prone to tripping over most anything, including said feet!

There was the odd clearing, then back into the woods.

She stopped to look around and listen to the birds.

Then she saw it: an abandoned house. She traipsed around the mostly hidden fence and came to a rusting gate.

It suited her mood – how wonderful it would be to have this house as a retreat.

Hugging her secret to herself as she returned to “civilization” she started the search for the owner, determined to rescue not only the house, but herself with it.

Julia has written and taken photos all her life and loves syncing up with friends.  Her blog can be found: https://viewsfromeverywhere.blogspot.com/ 

Rick is an aviation journalist and publisher of www.aviationvoices. com

 

D-L has had 17 fiction and non fiction books published. Check out her website at: https://dlnelsonwriter.com