A MILESTONE DAY

December 29, 2006

It is 7:30 p.m. and I am driving to Boston from New York, listening to the 1955 Glenn Gould recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations, followed by his 1981 recording. That in itself brings back memories, it being my favorite musical composition, and one that blew me away when I first heard it performed by him at Carnegie Hall in the early 1960s.

Today is my final business day as a Partner in Wilmer Hale, as I change to Senior Counsel status on January 1. Fitting that I had a scheduled lunch with one of my favorite and my longest term client, Art Garfunkel, today at Cafe Boulud. Kim joined us, and Beau for a while; Art and Kim were in a particularly warm and loving mood. It was a pleasure to be with them, and Art and I enjoy the opportunities to catch up every few months, often at Boulud, and we both reveled in a professional and personal relationship that has continued uninterrupted for forty one years.

But this is also a sad day, as Wendy’s father, Mert Tarlow, entered the intensive care unit at Massachusetts General Hospital on December 24, and the prognosis is not good. This afternoon they removed the breathing tube, and don't know how long he'll hold on.

Mert always struck me as being quite remarkable. He is probably the nicest person I will ever know; soft-spoken, warm, welcoming, free and frequent with his puns, interesting conversation, and thoughtful advice, all of which flow with a rounded quality that makes you always pleased to be in his presence, for as long as I have known him, twenty-three years this Christmas week. I had been dating Wendy since early summer of 1983, and we went to London and Castle Combe over Christmas and New Year's that year, and planned for me to first meet Mert and Alma at a dinner party Wendy and I hosted at the Stafford Hotel in London. I had never met them before.

They were traveling with Mert’s sister Natalie and her husband Henry Glovsky, one of Mert's closest friends since they met at Dartmouth as undergraduates. The dinner was in the Rose Room at the Stafford, where we were staying, and set for a few days before Chirstmas. Then, as luck would have it, we all ran into each other around the corner at the Royal Academy. I don’t remember the art exhibition we were seeing. Mert’s words and gestures were welcoming, and always have been, and I am sure to almost everybody. Alma was just as warm as I was welcomed by them both, and we all expected that Wendy and I would get engaged and married fairly soon, as we did. If Mert ever hated anyone, I am not sure any of us would have ever found out about it, and I never even heard him express negative comments about others. I will miss him, as will everyone who knows him.