We celebrated our 43rd
wedding anniversary last week, and decided to do something a bit different.
Aside from an initial trip in early 1991 when Mount Sinai was wooing Barry to
join their faculty and brought the whole family for a week in New York, the two of us have never stayed overnight in Manhattan. We do
sometimes talk about how different life would have been living in the City. We
sometimes have fun thinking about how much we could now sell one of those $300,000
apartments we looked at, though could barely afford, at today’s prices. As a Midwestern
girl, the high crime rate and garbage everywhere simply did not feel like the
place for me. Of course much of that has changed, and we would be lucky to find
a studio apartment we could afford after selling our 4-bedroom house in
Riverdale. The wonderful thing about Riverdale is that it is about as close to
the City as you can be and still have a private house, grass, and trees. So while
it was nice being in Manhattan, we both came home after our two day adventure
and realized how happy we are right here.
We had bought tickets
to an Off-Broadway play, “The Effect.” This turned out to be interesting for me
because it involved two young people who were participants in a
pharmaceutical-company-sponsored study of an anti-depressant drug in
development. This is precisely the type of project I first worked on when I
joined Pfizer in 1992! In the play, there was no easy happy ending for either the
young people or one of the psychiatrists looking after them.
Relative to this, our
ending was rather benign: in three independent trials, the new drug addressed
neither the symptoms of depression nor some of the side effects seen with existing
compounds. The leader of the Clinical team asked me to present the results to
our senior management. I assumed it was because he did not wish to be
associated with these three negative studies. So I did the presentation, and
what the head of Clinical and Scientific Affairs has stuck in my head all these
years. “We had a question, and we set out to answer that question. We ran a
good study, you did a fine job analyzing and presenting the data, so now we
have our answer. That is what we needed.” Perhaps this is not strictly verbatim
but I think it is fairly close to what she said.
Ordinarily we might
have bought tickets to something a bit more upbeat, but we have been shying
away from live musical presentations as part of the traditional observance of
the year of mourning for Barry following the loss of his mother. This summer
when the grandchildren come, we bought only two tickets for each of the shows,
and Barry will just be our chauffeur.
The next day, we had
planned to go to the National September 11 Memorial & Museum followed by a visit to the Whitney Museum, but that second part never happened. The 9/11 Museum was far more extensive and beautifully moving than we could ever have expected. If not so emotionally draining there is easily a full day or more to see there, but we were drained after three hours.
If you are interested
in learning more about the museum, you can look on:
We did not really
know anyone directly who was in the Towers that day, but we did have three
names we looked for and found. The first was Mark Rosenberg, the husband of the
niece of one of our close friends.
The second was Andrew
Zucker, a friend of our neighbor’s son, who left behind a loving and pregnant
wife.
And the third was one
of whom we had just learned, Christopher Quackenbush, the father of the
delightful young man who led us on the tour of Citi Field; CJ was just 9 years
old in 2001.
What more is there to
say?
Love,
Rebecca
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