Free The Monk and the Riddle: The Art of Creating a Life While Making a Living by Randy Komisar, Kent Lineback Page B
Authors: Randy Komisar, Kent Lineback
myself as a hard-nosed businessman, and Funerals.com is meant to be a business, I'd be upset if I left you with the impression that I'm merely a greedy opportunist. You saw only my business side. There's more to me than that, and I'll get to it after Funerals.com is a great success.
I hope you'll check out my site--URL below. It should give you a little more insight into me.
I still look forward to a chance to meet again. If you have any further thoughts, I'm all ears.
Lenny
----
I had indeed pegged Lenny as a greedy opportunist, but I hadn't expected, in the heat of all his bluster, that he was astute enough to register my impatience. Curiosity overpowered sleepiness. What the heck—I checked out his URL.
Adorned with digitized Polaroids of parents and siblings, Lenny's Web site took me back to the early days and all the commotion over the vast and messy democratizing eloquence of the Net. Every voice and community would have a place in cyberspace. The Web would foster paeans to the special talents of the family hamster, hipper-than-thou e-zines run by semiotics students, and gritty neighborhood joints for all manner of hobbyist. Shoot the middleman, free the masses.
All these highly charged, highly personal sites left you feeling a little strange at first, as though you were picking through the effects of another's life, peeking at someone's diary. I felt the same way looking at Lenny's site, even though he had invited me.
Lenny had quite a family—three brothers and a sister— each lovingly accounted for with pictures commemorating major life events: grammar school with its annual, grainy head shots; Scouts; the goofy haircuts of the seventies; high school proms; weddings; cheery toddlers with arms outstretched toward the camera. Nothing special here—just another family with its intimate history frozen in an uncomfortably public way.
About to call it a night, I noticed another picture. The characteristic black hair gave away the man's identity-Lenny's father, Jack Dolan.
Clicking on the photo opened a memorial site for Lenny's father, who had died almost eight months earlier. I recalled what Lenny had told me in the Konditorei. There were more family photos—Jack with each of his children and his wife—some pages of text, and, under the heading “At Play,” a group of pictures showing Jack Dolan working in a garden that was a riot of color. One photo showed him standing by a stretch of forsythia. Another showed him with spade and hoe, crouched over a flower bed, planting seeds in this suburban Eden. He was always smiling, hands working the earth in front of a small, one-family Cape Cod. Every corner and window was festooned with flowers like some intricately designed English garden. This house must have been the neighborhood attraction. Under the heading — “Taking Care of Business” — I came across a few more photos: Jack Dolan posed soberly behind a tidy desk or engaged in serious-looking work, his dark jacket framing a white shirt and a quiet tie. He was described variously as a “dedicated public servant” and a “faithful friend of the Commonwealth”—by the Governor, no less—and commended for more than forty years of service on his retirement, which the dates showed came less than a year before his death.
Connie's prescience scored again: she had rightly guessed that someone's death had given birth to Funerals.com. Jack's demise, so soon after retirement, and Lenny's decision to break out of his nine-to-five and go for the pot of gold at the end of the startup were probably not unrelated. Whatever Jack's true interests, it was clear from Lenny's site that he saw his father as a frustrated gardener, not a happy bureaucrat.
----
You only saw my business side. There's more to me than that, and I'll get to that after Funerals.com is a great success.
----
No question: Lenny was his father's son, taking care of business first. In what I presumed was Lenny's wish to
I hope you'll check out my site--URL below. It should give you a little more insight into me.
I still look forward to a chance to meet again. If you have any further thoughts, I'm all ears.
Lenny
----
I had indeed pegged Lenny as a greedy opportunist, but I hadn't expected, in the heat of all his bluster, that he was astute enough to register my impatience. Curiosity overpowered sleepiness. What the heck—I checked out his URL.
Adorned with digitized Polaroids of parents and siblings, Lenny's Web site took me back to the early days and all the commotion over the vast and messy democratizing eloquence of the Net. Every voice and community would have a place in cyberspace. The Web would foster paeans to the special talents of the family hamster, hipper-than-thou e-zines run by semiotics students, and gritty neighborhood joints for all manner of hobbyist. Shoot the middleman, free the masses.
All these highly charged, highly personal sites left you feeling a little strange at first, as though you were picking through the effects of another's life, peeking at someone's diary. I felt the same way looking at Lenny's site, even though he had invited me.
Lenny had quite a family—three brothers and a sister— each lovingly accounted for with pictures commemorating major life events: grammar school with its annual, grainy head shots; Scouts; the goofy haircuts of the seventies; high school proms; weddings; cheery toddlers with arms outstretched toward the camera. Nothing special here—just another family with its intimate history frozen in an uncomfortably public way.
About to call it a night, I noticed another picture. The characteristic black hair gave away the man's identity-Lenny's father, Jack Dolan.
Clicking on the photo opened a memorial site for Lenny's father, who had died almost eight months earlier. I recalled what Lenny had told me in the Konditorei. There were more family photos—Jack with each of his children and his wife—some pages of text, and, under the heading “At Play,” a group of pictures showing Jack Dolan working in a garden that was a riot of color. One photo showed him standing by a stretch of forsythia. Another showed him with spade and hoe, crouched over a flower bed, planting seeds in this suburban Eden. He was always smiling, hands working the earth in front of a small, one-family Cape Cod. Every corner and window was festooned with flowers like some intricately designed English garden. This house must have been the neighborhood attraction. Under the heading — “Taking Care of Business” — I came across a few more photos: Jack Dolan posed soberly behind a tidy desk or engaged in serious-looking work, his dark jacket framing a white shirt and a quiet tie. He was described variously as a “dedicated public servant” and a “faithful friend of the Commonwealth”—by the Governor, no less—and commended for more than forty years of service on his retirement, which the dates showed came less than a year before his death.
Connie's prescience scored again: she had rightly guessed that someone's death had given birth to Funerals.com. Jack's demise, so soon after retirement, and Lenny's decision to break out of his nine-to-five and go for the pot of gold at the end of the startup were probably not unrelated. Whatever Jack's true interests, it was clear from Lenny's site that he saw his father as a frustrated gardener, not a happy bureaucrat.
----
You only saw my business side. There's more to me than that, and I'll get to that after Funerals.com is a great success.
----
No question: Lenny was his father's son, taking care of business first. In what I presumed was Lenny's wish to
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