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“It blesseth him that gives and him that takes… “
- Portia, in William Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, Act IV, Scene I
It was at a ping pong table that I first encountered a tall, lanky fellow student. We were both in high school. He played a mean game, which I later learned he’d honed abroad in the Far East where he’d been raised; his father was a missionary of sorts and his family moved about more than a bit.
Thereafter we drifted apart. I’d see him on the school campus carrying the books of a fellow student slung over a hip. She would later become his wife.
He attended college but didn’t graduate. This is in no way a comment of aspersion.
For, although I graduated college and attended graduate school and became a hospital-based healthcare professional, he took a riskier, less conventional path in business and became a successful entrepreneur. In one of his ventures, he sold supplies to the hospital in which I spent the bulk of my career. He was considerably more successful than I, as some measure success.
A long time later we encountered one another in another part of the state. By this time he was fully retired. And I? I was still working part-time.
