Gordana and Milorad Ristić, my parents’ dearest friends from Belgrade, came to see my mother today. They arrived in the morning and stayed through the evening. Their son and his family, whom they are visiting for a few months, live in London suburbs a bit more than an hour away by commuter train. I joined them for the feast my mother had prepared, and I stayed with them until their departure. Our conversation often returned to my father, whose absence was so much more palpable in their presence. At some point we remembered my father’s oft-repeated lament that he did not have a rich aunt who would leave him an inheritance of two-million dollars. According to Gordana and Milorad, that was the amount my father stuck with for some fifty years. Two million dollars is still a lot of money, but it is far from a fortune, which it must have been when he first quoted it. Nothing shows the ravages of inflation better than people’s wildest fantasies.

Addendum (April 26, 2000)

This morning I sent this piece to Lauren via electronic mail. I pointed out one funny connection between my father and her. Namely, the trust fund her grandfather had set up for her and her brothers some ten years ago was exactly to the amount specified by my father. A lot of money, but hardly a fortune.