Moments in Time, Volume 3: Family, Gratitude

By Peter Cavelti

This final volume of "Moments In Time" is all about Peter Cavelti's quest to build a family, share experiences and build memories. As episodes of undreamed-of elation and deep tragedy unfold, we meet colourful characters from all walks of life - from cab drivers and bus boys, to mystics, artists and criminals, to world-changers in business and c

• Language: English
• Publisher: Legacy Editions
• Release date: May 1, 2023
• ISBN: 9781778031656

Peter Cavelti

Peter Cavelti was born in Switzerland and spent his early adult years backpacking through Africa and Asia. In 1972, he emigrated to Canada, where he still lives. His early writing focused on investments and geopolitics, topics he was very familiar with from his successful career as a financial executive. In 1997 his widely acclaimed cultural study of the South Seas, "Tuiavii's Way", was published in Canada, Australia and Japan. He also has a novel, "A Dangerous Remedy", to his credit. He loves the outdoors, adventure travel and family life.

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Cover: Moments in Time, Volume 3 by Peter Cavelti. Blue-green background image with bubbles of various sizes containing images of the author.Back cover: green gradient with the floating names of serveral cities, countries, and regions significant to the story.

MOMENTS

IN TIME

Also by Peter C. Cavelti

Tuiavii’s Way: A South Sea Chief’s

Comments on Western Society

Legacy Editions, Toronto

and Sanseido, Tokyo

A Dangerous Remedy

Legacy Editions, Toronto

How To Invest In Gold

McClelland & Stewart, Toronto

and Follett Publishing, Chicago

Gold, Silver & Strategic Metals

McClelland & Stewart, Toronto

and McGraw Hill, New York

Title page: Moments in Time, The Experience of my Life by Peter Cavelti. Volume 3: Family, Gratitude

Peter C. Cavelti was born in Switzerland. He lived in Africa and Asia, before immigrating to Canada, where he pursued his career as a financial executive and writer. His books have been published internationally.

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Copyright © 2022 by the Author

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior written permission by the Author.

ISBN 978-1-7780316-5-6

Library and Archives Canada

Cavelti, Peter C. (Peter Christian), 1948-

Moments In Time: The Experience Of My Life / Peter C. Cavelti

Volume 3

Cover Design: Richard Moore Associates, New York, Hanoi and Saigon

Content Design: Laura Brady, Toronto

Family

Now that our grandchildren are in their teens, I frequently look back at how we raised Melissa and Krista. There are things I’m proud of and others that I regret. What it comes down to is this: while I loved both girls deeply and always did what I thought was best for them, some of my judgments could be qualified as too lenient, others as tough love, while yet others appear harsh, perhaps unnecessarily so.

Let me start with Melissa, whose progress through private school, then university was breathtakingly linear and unaccompanied by the kind of defiance that typically characterizes adolescence. If Melissa needed to define herself she did that by excelling at her classical music. She was a serious and reserved girl, sometimes bordering on the awkward, tending to internalize the chaos of growing up, but Caroline and I never doubted that she was capable of deep love and loyalty.

When Melissa graduated from Northwestern University, summa cum laude and with two degrees, we expressed our delight. When she told us how some of her peers were getting BMWs as recognition for their success, I reminded Melissa that I’d just paid a quarter million dollars for her university education, explaining that was equivalent to more than $500,000 in pre-tax earnings. Caroline and I talked about how we could honour Melissa’s accomplishments while staying true to our values. We decided to buy her a backpack, an airline ticket to Zurich and a railway pass so that she could explore Europe to her heart’s content. We also gave her a gift of $3,500, with the proviso that she had to stay abroad for at least six weeks. We were concerned that Melissa, loving comfort, might otherwise stay in a luxury hotel for a week and return home.

After her trip, Melissa asked me whether she could come to work at Cavelti Capital. I handed her a yellow pages phone book, recommending that she call banks and financial advisors and arrange interviews. When she asked me whether I could call some of my highly connected friends who were in the business, I explained why I preferred not to do that. Not only would she be among the most qualified applicants any given firm would be interviewing, but if I employed her or arranged for a job for her and she did well, she’d never know whether she’d made her own success or whether it was all due to my connections.

I’m incredibly proud of those decisions. Melissa, now in her late forties, uses them as examples of good parenting when talking to her own daughters, Alexandra and Abigail. She explains how, first staying with my family in Switzerland, then travelling eastward, she became truly independent. She loved Salzburg and Vienna, then got onto a train to Prague, always hot on the trail of her favourite classical composers. At the border to Czechoslovakia, in the middle of the night, she got thrown off the train because she didn’t have the proper visa.

I remember Melissa calling me from Vienna the following day, crying. She was livid about the injustice and inconvenience the Czechs had subjected her to. When I asked how badly she wanted to see the city in which Smetana, Dvoràk and Mozart had once lived, a resilient and determined Melissa took only seconds to respond. She’d travel all the way back to Berne, tell the Czech consular employees how they’d inconvenienced her and get the right credentials. No one was going to keep her from seeing and experiencing Prague.

When Melissa’s trip was over and she settled back in at my mother’s house in Herisau, I flew over to surprise her. Together, we explored some of my favourite places. We hiked in and around Herisau; I showed her Chur, where I’d spent so much time with my Grossmami and Grosspapi; and I took her to Sagogn, the place where all Caveltis come from, the gravestones in the tiny cemetery almost invariably making reference to the life and death of one my distant relatives, both husbands and wives often sharing the same birth name.

I’d recently adopted Melissa, which meant that she now was a Cavelti and a Swiss citizen too, which added significance to the occasion. We crossed the Alps to the Ticino and briefly entered Italy, Melissa laughing when the border guards declined to see her new passport: she was a blonde and looked distinctly Swiss, they joked, and that was sufficient. And finally we headed North again, taking a brief excursion to the lake lands near Gruyeres and Murten, where Melissa badly beat me in a round of mini-golf.

Getting back home was more traumatic for her, yet I’ve overheard Melissa talking about how my refusal to employ her, or help her find a job, empowered her. Somehow, she landed a job as a research analyst at Dominion Securities, the Royal Bank’s brokerage subsidiary. She worked long hours at an offensively low salary but, before too long, was promoted. And that’s when her compensation went from sub-par to exceptional, at least for someone her age. As any successful career, Melissa’s was made up of consistently great performance and a few lucky breaks. Eventually she joined my firm, but not before having been a Managing Director at Bank of Montreal Nesbitt Burns, where she supervised a highly successful portfolio management and research team.

Yet, while most of the decisions I made were good ones, I can now see that I made mistakes, too. Based on my own experience of leaving home, an act which I feel contributed positively to my own evolution, I thought the girls should have the same experience. When we returned from Switzerland, Melissa thought she was entitled to some down-time, during which she could look for a job. Caroline and I disagreed; we shared the view that she needed to find employment and a place of her own right away. This led to considerable tension. For the first time, Melissa was seriously upset with us.

What I completely missed was that I’d had a stable and loving upbringing, while Melissa’s childhood had been a nightmare of tension and instability. No wonder she wanted to cling to the memories of her teen years at Haddington—how could I have missed it? That we also kept reminding her that we’d soon sell the house made the situation only worse.

When Melissa secured her job and Krista unexpectedly quit university, the two sisters moved in together. I remember visiting them and being deeply disturbed by what I saw. Their place was grimy and their landlord was nasty, but it was all they could afford. They were truly independent now and we had contributed to that, but I felt we could have achieved the same result in a more sensitive way.

If Krista resented having to be on her own, she didn’t show it. For her, it had always been about living an independent life. While Melissa loved to nest at home, Krista wanted to sneak out as often as possible. Her elder sister observed boundaries, but for Krista rules were there to be renegotiated. If we set a midnight curfew for a night out, she’d immediately contest it, arguing that her friends could stay out until two. Caroline had figured out how to handle this: while resolutely declaring that two o’clock was unthinkable, she asked Krista what she thought was reasonable. The second proposal was usually quite acceptable, and because it had come from her, Krista would honour it.

Given our preference to be in bed reading by 10:30, how did we know when Krista actually returned home? I came up with a system that did the job for quite some time. Here is how it worked: I set an alarm clock for five minutes after her curfew and placed it outside our bedroom door. If she failed to be back in time to turn it off, Krista was in trouble.

One of the remnants of my army training is that few things escape me, even when I’m asleep. Weekend after weekend, I’d hear Krista come up the stairs, turn off the alarm clock, then return to her room. She had a boyfriend then, an impressive and responsible fellow named Dan who was two years older than her. We credited him for Krista’s impeccable behaviour.

Then, one Friday night, the pattern changed. Half-asleep, I heard Krista return as she always did, congratulated myself on my resourcefulness, turned over and fell back into a state of deep relaxation. Later, not sure what the time was, I heard a click, which I dismissed as an outdoor noise, since our window was open. It wasn’t until the next morning, when I left to take Charlie the retriever for a walk, that I heard the same sound again. It was opening and re-closing our kitchen door, located exactly below our bedroom, that had produced it. I shared my impression with Caroline, who was in disbelief. I decided to follow up at the next opportunity.

The sequence of events repeated itself the night after: Krista, at her most considerate, tiptoeing up the staircase; Krista picking up the clock and putting it back down; Krista returning downstairs. For twenty minutes or so, nothing happened. And then, the click of the closing kitchen door. I waited for two minutes, got up and left the bedroom quietly, made my way to the downstairs hall closet, slipped my raincoat over my pajamas and put my running shoes on. Next, I left the house through the main door, stepping into the clear, moonlit September night.

I hugged the cedar hedges that surrounded our property, peaking down Haddington Avenue. And there, parked fifty meters away, was Dan’s Nissan Stanza wagon. Two people were inside.

I walked around the block so I could approach the vehicle from behind, snuck up its side and entered through the back door. When she realized what was happening, Krista lost it. She accused me of being underhanded and embarrassing her, then left the car and ran back home.

Then I spoke to a speechless Dan, telling him that I was too upset to talk. I suggested we’d do that at 7am the next day at the McDonalds not far from us. When we had coffee together he proved that he could be the man we’d come to appreciate, apologizing and guaranteeing me that his relationship with our Krista was the most important thing to him. He’d never again disappoint us.

There were three things that distinguished Krista. In most things she did, she was at least two years ahead of her peers. When she made a mistake, she made it at least twice, sometimes three times. And once she absorbed one of life’s lessons, she moved on, never admitting to the shortcomings of her approach, but never slipping back.

After dropping out of her first year of university, she worked as a waitress and steadfastly saved for a car. In time, she bought what was probably the least practical vehicle she could find. I tried to help her buy something that would last, but she insisted it had to be a Nissan ZX sports car. The one she found and could afford with her $2,500 budget was a run-down heap of rust. She spent days sanding down the fenders and touching them up with the help of a cheap can of spray paint. The vehicle looked better, but soon after broke down.

By now, she’d taken a bartending course. The tips she banked were impressive, often amounting to $200 or more a night. That allowed Krista to buy another Nissan ZX, which, like the first one, ended up with the mechanics far too often, before it was totalled by a drunk driver while parked on the street. In the end, she bought a Toyota 4-Runner, not much to look at, but practical and mechanically reliable.

Caroline and I knew that Krista would succeed at anything she took on, but we also understood that her evolution would be littered with false starts. While she studied at Concordia, she became a scuba instructor, which allowed her to spend paid holidays at various Club Med resorts. After graduating, she became a digital designer, then a head-hunter with an employment agency. Eventually, her image popped up at bus shelters and on the top of a couple of buildings. She was one of Toronto’s most successful realtors.

Melissa and Krista taught me many things, but the most intriguing lesson was that two sisters can grow up with the same parents and the same conditioning, yet tackle the challenges life throws at them in unthinkably different ways. I shouldn’t have been surprised. After all, in terms of behaviour and personal traits, I’m not remotely similar to any of my siblings. What I do have in common with them are shared memories, but even there we frequently differ.

I believe that our frequent absences from Toronto and their living together brought the girls closer. I also fear that part of their growing friendship grew out of resentment; they weren’t happy that we cut them loose and spent significant time in Colorado and, increasingly, on journeys to exotic places. They seemed more detached, often making it known that they thought of us a selfish.

Caroline and I, in turn, found it difficult to relate to that. We thought we’d done an extraordinary job. Getting the girls through university and seeing them succeed in the workplace were accomplishments that, a few years ago, had seemed impossible. How could they not be grateful?

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Everything is humming along at Cavelti Capital, allowing us to settle into a new routine. Whether in Toronto, at the cottage or in Colorado, I devote five to six hours a weekday to my financial work, half in the early morning and half in the afternoon. The middle part of each day and the evening are spent on other pursuits.

We’ve taken on new creative challenges. Caroline produces encaustic paintings, takes ceramics and jewelry-making courses and learns Spanish. She’s even visited San Miguel de Allende, where she’s lived with a family and attended language classes. I’m working on the Tuiavii project, write short stories and build a serious tribal mask collection. For fun, I create my own masks to compliment the classic indigenous designs, mostly out of cut-in-half plastic bottles adorned with electronics parts, spent coffee cartridges, newspaper clippings and a few dozen other things.

We’re physically more active, too. I’ve been on my skis more than a hundred days this winter, and at the cottage, spend a lot of time cutting down dead trees and splitting wood. When with us, the girls ask their mother, What on earth is Peter doing out there? And Caroline answers, He’s cleaning up the forest. My own story is that interspersing my mental gymnastics with mindless physical work makes for a perfectly balanced day.

Translating the South Sea Chief manuscript turns out to be only half the battle. I think I’ve succeeded in revealing Tuiavii’s message in simple, incisive language appealing to a contemporary audience. The responses from the experts have been more than encouraging.

Yet, most of them have suggestions on how I should proceed from here on. You must accompany the chief’s speeches with a cultural and historical perspective, a British professor tells me, giving me the names of possible sources. Another academic suggests that I should write a foreword about the linguistic challenges I’ve been facing, after I tell him how impressed I am with Tuiavii’s use of similes to describe things that don’t exist in his culture. Calling money the round metal and the heavy paper has particularly got to me—how perfectly these terms evoke the burden money can impose on us!

I’m learning that there are a dozen or so authorities on early 20th century South Sea culture worldwide. Some lecture at universities, some are museum curators, others are experts on art and literature. Each has a new idea for me and gracefully reveals the name of someone who can help me along. I’m deeply grateful for their insights. I can see that my objective to familiarize a new generation of readers with Tuiavii’s thoughts requires more than just the body of his speeches: it wants context.

In the end, I decide to bookend the chief’s eleven speeches with a lengthy prologue and epilogue, covering most aspects of South Sea life circa 1900 in one, and devoting the other to the many controversies about both Chief Tuiavii and his translator, Erich Scheurmann, which are still much alive nearly a hundred years later. It’ll take me another year to get everything together and link each part into a cohesive and captivating narrative. So be it. It’s what I want to do.

✧✧✧

A few years ago, I was first invited to talk to a group of Toronto Rotarians. I was stunned when, at the onset of the meeting, their leader articulated their belief system, part of which is that whatever interaction takes place, it must be fair and beneficial to both sides. It’s what I’d come to believe all by myself and what I’d practiced during my business life. Hearing it as the mission statement of a worldwide movement of professionals impressed me.

I never joined the Rotarians, mostly because the Canadian chapters of the Rotary Club wanted me to raise my water glass and pay allegiance to the Queen, while the Americans paid homage to their flag. Still, I never turned down an invitation by the Rotarians and made myself available whenever invited.

Why was I so surprised to learn that a group as influential as the Rotary Club espoused the same value system I’d adopted? Because it’s something that hasn’t been taught at business schools for a long, long time, at least not as a guiding principle. A business proposition must benefit both sides.

A couple of weeks ago, the new managers of Personal Finance, one of America’s largest investment magazines, called to announce that I, along with other contributing editors, would no longer be paid the $5,000 I’d been receiving for every published article. Their rationale: they had lots of brokers and investment professionals who’d happily make contributions without charging. When I pointed out that anyone writing without being compensated would probably use their platform to promote their products, they said that was fine with them. Their code of ethics, which until now had prohibited promotional content, was being revised. They hoped I could continue in my past role under their new set of rules. I turned them down.

And now I’m sitting in our board room, facing a man in his mid-thirties. I’m with Kevin MacLean and Heinz Thoma and our guest represents First Union, the sixth largest U.S. bank. He reminds us that the bank’s Evergreen Investments subsidiary has just acquired Sheffield Management Company, which operates the Blanchard group of mutual funds whose assets we manage. He also states that he is not an employee of the bank, but of McKinsey & Company, the management consultants. Then he states that he wanted to meet because we are being paid far too much money and that he’s here to change that. What’s remarkable is that the young man doesn’t look at any of us while he says these things. His eyes are firmly trained on the screen of his laptop computer. Neither Kevin, Heinz nor I have ever been in a meeting where someone read from a screen.

I interrupt him, pointing out that it takes two parties to change anything. I also challenge him to explain what he means by far too much money. He briefly raises his eyes to look at mine, then lowers them again, as if to look for guidance on his machine. Next, to my surprise, he shuts the lid of his laptop, stares at each one of us for a long moment, as if he’s just become aware that we’re in the room. I wonder whether this is a tactic he picked up at McKinsey.

Then he delivers his message, explaining that we’re currently billing the Blanchard funds well over a million dollars a year. First Union is willing to pay us up to $100,000. That, he elaborates, is what their cost would be if the bank brought the management in-house. When I counter that our staff and administrative expenses directly related to the fund are at least half a million dollars, he decides to lecture me. Look, the one thing I’ve learned at McKinsey is that there is no difference between a milk store and a money management firm. If you’re not competitive, the business goes elsewhere. I notice Kevin shaking his head, mumbling.

I invite our visitor to look at it from our perspective. A million dollars is roughly one tenth of one percent of the assets we manage. The funds group, soon to be owned the bank you represent, charges fifteen times that much to the client. Yet we do all the research and actual investing. And remember, our performance history has been tops.

His response stuns me: My client realizes that once the fund is managed in-house, performance will suffer. I ask him where he thinks that’ll get them, predicting that they’ll soon have a fund without investors.

And that’s where you’re wrong, he counters. Yes, investors will call to complain and the sales staff will express their sympathy. And then they’ll recommend a switch to one of the group’s best performing funds, and everyone will be happy.

It’s the most callous statement I’ve heard in my nearly three decades in the financial business, but I have to acknowledge that our visitor may be right.

1998 marked the end of Cavelti Capital Management Ltd. We could have continued, and profitably so, but with a sharply lower revenue base I would have had to trim the staff and go back to year-round, twelve-hour working days in Toronto. Now that I’d found a nice balance in my life, a return to the regimen that dictated my Guardian years was unacceptable.

I announced a wind-down period of nearly a year and helped my staff find suitable positions. Next, I sold the managed account program, offering the clients a transfer to Adrian Day Asset Management in Annapolis or to our Swiss affiliate, Camafin Trust. I’d admired Adrian for years and I’d known and trusted Roger Badet since I first arrived in Canada. The three of us shared highly compatible investment philosophies, which gave me comfort that our managed account clients, many of whom had been with me for more than fifteen years, were well taken care of.

Yet, to my surprise, about thirty of my longest-standing clients balked at being transferred to another firm. It was a reaction I hadn’t expected and it threw me into a state of inner chaos. I’d worked hard to find continuity for our managed program, but that was obviously not enough.

One of the clients, Fritz Bollinger, the Swiss-Canadian owner of a large transportation business, insisted on a face-to-face meeting, even though he had to drive all the way from Kingston. When we met, he bluntly suggested that I had to find a way to honour his loyalty—walking away from our long-standing relationship was simply not an option. When I explained my dilemma he politely repeated his demand: I had to find a way to be true to myself and handle a bunch of client portfolios and he was confident I could do so. I