Every year about this time I send out an unofficial end of year investor's letter -- "unofficial" because 1) it does not get sent to my investors and 2) it usually has little to do with investing. (This is not an official business correspondence)
 
I’ll get to business in a bit. 
 
But first a story.
 
It's just after 7:00 on a December morning at the 50th Street subway stop in Times Square. The line outside the Stardust Diner stretches to Broadway, rounds the corner and stops just short of the stage door of the theater where The Music Man is playing. The Stardust is where the waiters and waitresses stand on the counter and sing show tunes. 
 
Rachel from Friends worked there. 
 
As I walk by the Stardust on my way to work, the Spotify algorithm serves up an old Cat Stevens song.
 
I left my happy home, to see what I could find out
I left my folk and friends, with the aim to clear my mind out
 
One hundred and eighty miles to the northeast, there's an iron gate at Brown University. New students go through the gate onto campus the first day of school freshman year and go back the other way at graduation. In between the gate stays locked. 
 
The name of the song is On The Road To Find Out.
 
Depending on traffic, state trooper presence and the beat of the music playing on the car sound system, it takes between two and a half and three hours to drive up I-95 to get to Providence. The most memorable drive was the Covid evacuation pickup in March of sophomore year, the cars double-parked, clothes stuffed into Hefty bags -- students now refugees fleeing the oncoming viral army. 
 
Well, I hit the rowdy road, and many kinds I met there
Many stories told me of the way to get there
 
The Stardust opens at 7 and it's already full, so the people I see on line will be the second sitting. There are no reservations. Lots of strollers on line and lots of sweatshirts and varsity jackets. Ohio State, Arizona. Lots of accents and dialects. 
 
Tarana mentored two sisters from a Providence grade school, recent immigrants from Senegal. She'd pick them up and take them to campus and one day they decided to do field research, studying (if I remember right) something like the relationship between mood and sleep. They surveyed students and staff and professors, then tabulated the data and came up with a conclusion.
 
The sisters were 11 and 13 years old.
 
My office is about a ten minute walk from the Stardust diner, and that particular morning, with Cat Stevens singing in the background, I envision drives to airports in Texas and Colorado and Dublin and Madrid, taxis from JFK to the Marriott Marquis, QR coded tickets to Phantom of the Opera and Wicked and bookmarked pages from Trip Advisor that summarize which days the museums close and which hop-on hop-off bus tour stops where. 
 
Cat Stevens released Tea for the Tillerman in 1970, when I was in middle school. I first heard it when we visited by father's old friend Carl Tasch, who had a son, Ira, who was my age. He played the album start to finish, which relieved us of having to find something to talk about. 
 
On the Road to Find Out is the fourth song on side two. 
 
I reach the office. A card in my wallet unlocks the elevator button to our floor, an action that creates one more data point in the building's security log. 
 
What was the relationship between mood and sleep in a sample of the twenty or so people surveyed one Spring afternoon in Providence? How was the data analyzed? What was the conclusion?
 
The elevator opens, the work day starts.
 
Well, in the end I’ll know, but on the way I wonder
Through descending snow, and through the frost and thunder
I listen to the wind come howl, telling me I have to hurry
 
I listen to the robin’s song, saying not to worry
 
Of course the sleep data was never the point, and neither is the total amount of time spent on lines on a trip to New York. What matters is that two young girls will remember how easy it was to approach a bunch of older and very foreign acting people, to talk to them and to ask them questions a couple of miles and a world away.
 
So on and on I go, the seconds tick the time out
There’s so much left to know and I’m on the road to find out
 
Regarding business?: Not a great year, but it will be fine.
 
Wishing you all a happy and fulfilling holiday season, a successful and engaged 2023, and forever safe passage on the road to find out.
 
 David
(Previous letters in the series: www.dbsable.com) 

 Reliable Deli is on the north side of East 54th Street, midway between Park and Madison. It has a rust-colored awning with white lettering, with a string of Christmas lights strung around its edges that blink on and off year-round. I've gone there four or five times a week to take out breakfast or lunch for the past 8 years. It's a bustling place, one of those places where you can get hot food, cold food, toothpaste, batteries, boxes of cereal, sandwiches, wraps, spicy Korean chicken, fake crab meat, and real duck. Deep metal pans under heat lamps. Sneeze shields over the buffets.
 
You get the idea.
 
Reliable has two tall glass doors that can swing in or out, like saloon doors, only much thicker and much heavier. One day this summer I must have had difficulty deciding which way I wanted to open the door so I just walked into it as if it wasn’t there. Right knee and forehead met the thick, thankfully shatterproof glass while I accelerated from a standing start. I bounced off the door, shook my head back and forth like a puppy hearing itself bark for the first time, while soaking up the collective concern and secondary embarrassment of everyone inside.
 
The staff sprung into action. A small stack of clean napkins was quickly applied to my forehead. A first aid kit appeared, its contents probably long expired. A heavily accented New York voice repeated over and over: “Get him to an emergency room. He needs an MRI. I'm a nurse. I know”
 
I had no intention of going anywhere except back to my office across the street. I felt okay. I am not a stranger to concussions, having suffered one while ice skating with my son years ago, and I somehow knew that the door had enough give to have not made my brain rattle around inside my head. The skin on my forehead, however, was not so fortunate. Just to left to the midline on the mild frontal bossing over my eyebrow there was a terrific gash, the result of  the impact followed by a little bit of a smush and tear. I folded the stack of napkins to hide the soaked-through part, applied pressure again and this time successfully exited Reliable Deli.
 
I was quite a sight in the elevator, going back to the office, holding a white plastic bag containing  the styrofoam container with my lunch in one hand and the other hand pressing the folded stack of bright napkins against my forehead. Thirty minutes later I sat in the exam room of a nearby urgent care center. A half hour after that I am back on the sidewalk, having replaced the paper dinner napkins with a folded stack of sterile gauze pressed against my forehead, dismissed from the Urgent Care Center and directed to the nearest emergency room. (“Too deep. And you need an MRI.”) I stood on Second Avenue, left hand against head, right hand holding cell phone, speaking to a helpful representative of my insurance company, who reassured me that as far as United Healthcare was concerned, I could choose between the equidistant emergency departments of Cornell Medical Center and NYU Medical Center, confident in the knowledge that my co-payment, deductible, access to care for the rest of my life, and future list of pre-existing conditions would be the same.
 
I went north to Cornell. “I used to work here,” I said over and over, eliciting a flash of semi-interest from the security guard at the door, the triage nurse, the admitting nurse, the intern who took my history, the attending who retook my history, and the volunteer whose job seemed to be to observe me for any signs of rapid cognitive decline.
 
I turned down the MRI and was content to let the intern place four interrupted stitches (it may have been silk or vicryl but I forget) into my forehead, although I was offered a plastic surgery consult. At that stage in my training, I could have thrown those stitches in my sleep. The intern’s handwriting was good so I figured his hands were steady.
 
I returned to the office with a bandage wrapped tightly around my head, returned to the ER a few days later to have the stitches removed, filled out a nice evaluation online about the quality of my treatment at the hospital, and ignored the monthly solicitations for donations that came for the rest of the year.
 
The next day, I was a celebrity at Reliable. Breakfast was on the house, as was lunch. The cashiers, the short order cooks, the stock guys all greeted me with warm smiles and curious glances to the scar on my forehead. Menus were taped on the glass doors at eye level. 
 
I made a point of joking about the incident and repeating over and over again that I had been careless and preoccupied and stupid and that it was my fault. And that I was fine, no crazier than before, no ringing in the ears, and certainly no intention of talking with a lawyer. 
 
After a few weeks, the menus came off of the glass doors, and the customers of Reliable Deli were again trusted to use their hands or back sides to enter and exit. The scar slightly to the left of the midline just above my eyebrow faded away. The Intern, who by now has rotated to the Intensive Care Unit or to one of the med-surg floors, had done a good job. Whatever acute or chronic damage that my brief violent encounter with the glass door may have caused will forever remain undetected by the MRI scan that I refused to have done. 
 
Every  semester, as my students get to know me better, their questions get more and more personal. Towards the end of each semester I get asked wisdom questions, about success and happiness. I’m no expert, but I do think that humility and the ability to laugh at yourself are good places to start. Also: the fund did just fine this year.
 

Monday Morning

Distracted by a report by an analyst I do not know about a company I do not own in an industry I do not cover, with Claudio Arrau playing Chopin in my head, oblivious to a truck backing out of a hidden garage, I felt the nudge of a fellow pedestrian’s shoulder just in time to look up and veer out of the way. 

It’s a relief when unseen forces erase danger, reinforcing that child-like feeling that God or the government or some all-knowing future mentor exists, solely for my protection and guidance. 

Of course before I reached Fifth Avenue the magical thoughts were gone and I knew that I had better keep either my eyes or my ears on the road ahead. So I clicked away the analyst report and let the music play.

I like Chopin when played on an almost out-of-tune piano half an hour before last call in an nineteenth-century Parisan tavern, drunken and romantic. My near collision with the truck coincided with the horn fanfare that transitions the Andante Spiniato to the Grande Polannaise. Soon after the piano returned: a sad song from the right hand balanced by ringing, triumphant chords from the left. The two themes danced around each other, sorrow and triumph; the pianist taunting us with almost-missed entrances and barely audible notes. The music floated to an inevitable conclusion of sprints up and down the keyboard, and grand chords that pushed open the revolving door to my building and made me smile. I arrived at work, chastened for my inattention but grateful that triumph and sorrow together can still equal joy.