Remember September.

I've written before about coincidences, or that they are nothing of the sort, but something more significant. Something clicked in my head a couple of weeks ago, when I was in New York, at the US Open tennis tournament. The first night's games were due on and as part of the ceremonies, Earth, Wind and Fire were due to perform live--having forgotten about retirement, aching limbs, the need for Viagra, etc. By some quirk, my wife and I had to leave the Arthur Ashe Stadium to get to our dinner reservation elsewhere in the tennis complex. So, we missed the live EW&F performance, but saw them performing on TV in the restaurant, without sound. For a long time, one of my favourite songs has been "September", by EW&F, and now I got spooked. I remembered the opening lyrics:

Do you remember the 21st night of September?
Love was changing the minds of pretenders
While chasing the clouds away

Our hearts were ringing
In the key that our souls were singing.
As we danced in the night,
Remember how the stars stole the night away

Or, just boogie along to the video:



What is so weird about that? Well...

I left Jamaica as a six year old boy and went to England on the night of September 21.

My parents were married on September 22 (after the night of September 21)

My youngest daughter, a child no one planned for or expected after a second marriage, was born on September 21--after a night when Washington DC was hit by a hurricane and no power was available in our house for three days. Now, she is a near five year old in Barbados, as September 21 approaches.

While September has had its momentous moments in my personal life, it is also turning out to be momentous in many other ways. Our generation will remain fixated by the horrors of the planes crashing into the Twin Towers on September 11, 2001. Today, in another phase of life, I lived through perhaps the most bizarre day in modern financial history as two iconic pillars of New York's Wall Street came tumbling down. One independent investment bank (Lehman Brothers) declared itself bankrupt, a victim of a credit crisis it helped create, and after the US government and central bank refused to offer a bail out. Another independent investment bank (Merrill Lynch) sold itself to a commercial bank (appropriately named Bank of America) to avoid a financial calamity. All of that happening one week after the US's major mortgage finance institutions, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the mortgage lenders that help people get lower housing costs and better access to home financing, had to be nationalised.

A year ago, in mid-September, I started to dabble in foreign exchange trading, and now a year on I call it my mainstay income earner. Would the trepidation that I felt personally over the weekend, last night, and early this morning as financial markets seemed to teeter on the verge of collapsing have been there if I had remembered some things about September?

I liked it when all that concerned me about September was going back to school, and getting back into the academic schedule. Putting on new shoes and sporting new uniform and hair cuts. Last week getting back to school was enough of a challenge when a four year old had to be convinced that she was old enough to go into her third year of school. But, after school started so smoothly, in just a few days look at the mess that has started to unfold in the rest of life. I think that for the rest of September I will be on holiday.