Here is a recipe for a great way of life: Low taxes.  Lower government regulation.  Abundant public transportation.  A strong currency. Low unemployment.  City along a temperate lake.  Mountains for hiking and skiing one hour away. Financial center of the world.  No buildings over six stories high.  The best shopping in the world for shoppers without a budget who seek the highest quality goods.

This is Zurich.

It is also true that prices of everything are astronomical.  (A Big Mac is $15 and a hamburger in a fancy restaurant can be $72.)  People seem to smoke in public a lot (or maybe that’s just a consequence of using public transportation, because people who smoke need a hit just before they get on the tram and just after they get off.)  It’s hard to get someone on the street to return a look in the eye, much less to smile at you.  Everything is very precise, so when something does not go according to form, the wheels can come off of the tricycle of the locals pretty quickly.  (Because I left my luggage cart in the wrong place, I incurred public scorn from the small man in the big uniform who checked my passport at the airport.) Because everything is precise, you’d better be on time….or else.  One suspects that the precision of the place just might have a little impact on the creativity and individuality of its citizens.

A friend and I spent three days in Zurich recently.  Our goal was to learn how the financial services industry works there.  We got to meet a number of highly professional bankers, attorneys, accountants, venture capitalists, family office managers and financial advisors.  My favorite visit was with two of the partners of Emerald Technology Ventures.  The business community there works like a Swiss watch, if you’ll pardon the use of an obvious pun.

We were sad but not surprised to learn that for most of the people we met, the United States is an afterthought for business.  The emerging markets of Asia and Africa are where capital is flowing right now.  In spite of the political uncertainties in those markets, especially compared to the relative stability of the American political and social scenes, capital is flowing to markets where it can get higher returns.  That’s probably because those markets are starting from a lower point and so the percent growth rates can be much higher than in the developed economies.

On our last night in town, we finally saw a different side of Zurich.  After attending the opera we headed for the piano bar at the Hotel Widder.  After waiting a few minutes for a table, one opened up in the corner.  I plopped down on the red leatherette and proceeded to upset the table cards on the table of the two women sitting next to us.  They got a large charge out of this and that’s all it took to start a conversation.  (Maybe the fact that they were on their second or third drink helped a bit?)

We discovered that both of them are self-employed.  Maria is a photographer who helps advertising agents show their clients’ products and people from the best angle possible.  Eva is a tailor.  They are both doing what they want to do and have moved to Zurich from the small towns in Switzerland where they grew up.

They explained the kinds of things that we would have learned if we’d met them during Language Study Abroad in our sophomore years of college.  What kind of music did they like?  Why in the world do men and women kiss each other three times on the cheek when coming and going?  How could they possibly find a place where they could afford to live?  Do the natives really eat the melted cheese dish called raclette or is it just designed to slow down the tourists who eat it?  How often do people get to ski in those ever-present Swiss Alps?

After three days of laughing only between ourselves, Fred and I finally got to laugh with the natives.  And even the short but unpleasant encounter at the airport passport check couldn’t ruin that laughter.

I never miss a reunion.  It could be college, high school, graduate school, my mother’s cousins and their children or my mother-in-law’s siblings and offspring.  There’s something irresistible about having all of these people together in one place at the same time with the sole intent of reconnecting with each other.

The most recent reunion I attended was for all of the living alumni of the men’s a cappella singing group from my college years.  We get together every three years in Hanover, New Hampshire just as the long winter is starting to turn to spring.  In northern New England, this equates to the weekend containing the first Saturday in May.  One of the wide-eyed freshman in the current group is recruited to run the reunion under the tutelage of a wizened senior, who himself was the freshman in charge three years ago.

This a cappella group was the center of my universe during those four years of college.  I had times that were good, bad, scary, exhilarating, intoxicating and everything in between.

During my four years of college, I shared time in this singing group with thirty five other men.  Some of them only shared the group with me for one quarter.  One of them joined the group when I did, in the fall of our freshman year, and we went across the finish line together four years later when we graduated.

At our recent reunion, twenty of those thirty five people returned to Hanover for the weekend.  As a cohort, we constituted over a third of the total attendees.  What caused my contemporaries to show so strongly, I wondered?

A few of them told me that the singing group was their true fraternity in college.  They skip the reunions of their college class but not the reunions of this singing group.  Others live close enough to be able to attend for a day or two and see a select group of old friends.

At the end of the dinner on our last night together, we all stood in a large circle on the porch of the college skiway and sang the group’s signature song with our arms around each other.  The song is Leonard Bernstein’s “Somewhere” and it is arranged in a way that is moving and resonant.  Ever since it was added to the group’s repertoire in 1968, it is the song that the group has used to welcome its new recruits during a 3 a.m. visit to the new recruit’s dorm room.  (“There’s a place for you, somewhere a place for you.”)

As we prepared to sing this song on the last night, I blurted out “hey, you young guys: take a good look at us.  This is what you will look like in thirty five years!”  That’s when it hit me: I have more yesterdays than tomorrows, as Bill Clinton famously said on the occasion of his fiftieth birthday.

So, why keep coming back to an event that shows you in stark terms just how you are aging?  Do you do it to slow down the hands of time?  You do feel younger when you go back and recreate your past, or at least try to recreate it.  But maybe you’d be better off to avoid the reunion and ignore the signs of aging.

I go back time after time because memories of shared experiences are one of the most precious things in life.  With luck, we will know the people with whom we shared the stage in college for sixty or seventy years.  That is longer than most of us will know our parents, spouses or children.  Only our siblings will know us longer than these friends.  That’s why we call it a brotherhood.

I don't what what it was that made the owner of the boat decide he had to try to rescue it from the beach instead of letting the tide carry it out to sea again.  Earlier in the day, we had seen the boat, which was not more than 15 feet long and no prize, sitting up on the beach near the house where we were staying on Drake's Island in southern Maine.  Now it was 10 p.m., and the boat owner's pickup truck was stuck in the sand at the beach with the waves sloshing in and out around it.  Not only that, but the boat owner's buddy's truck was out in the water, too, along with a rudimentary boat trailer.  It did not look good for the two trucks or the trailer, though the boat looked just fine.

There was a light shining from the firetruck about 200 yards away from the scene of the mistake.  It made the area look like a scene from the movie "ET".  To top it all off, there was a full moon shining down on the ocean and a sky full of starts to light the way.  A crowd of at least fifty vacationers had gathered around the vehicles.  If you closed your eyes, you could imagine that they were keeping watch on a beached whale that was gasping for life.  This was the kind of entertainment that money could not buy.

The trucks were going through their death rattles.  First the headlights and safety blinkers started coming on and off intermittently.  Then the horns started to blow.  It didn't take long for the sea water to undo what Detroit had done.

The word on the beach was that the boat owner had called the police earlier in the afternoon when the boat had gotten stranded.  He told the police he would try to free the boat later that night when the tide came in, and they suggested that he call back so that the fire department could help.  Either he didn't hear that part of the message, or he forgot it after an afternoon of drinking beer on the beach with the Labor Day weekend crowd that was up from Boston or down from Quebec, because instead of the fire department, he'd enlisted a friend with a boat trailer to help instead.

The fire department was here now, and they decided they'd wait until high tide the next morning to rescue the four stranded vessels.  I went to bed willing to bet $100 that the trucks would be swept out to sea.  But I was wrong.

The morning came bright and clear, and there were the trucks, the boat and the trailer, stuck in the sand with no sea water to restrict the rescue.  Another crowd was gathered around.  This one featured parents with coffee mugs and their young children, instead of the older crowd with wine glasses from the evening before.  It looked like the pivotal scene from the book Mike McGillicutty and the Steam Shovel where the townspeople of Popperville stood around to see if Mike could dig the basement for the new town hall in just one day (or he would not get paid.)

The bobcat came, and in fifteen minutes, it was all over.  The truck owner was last seen removing the license plates from his truck.  It was not clear if he did it out of sheer embarrassment or if he was planning to use the plates again.  If it was the latter, that was the only thing he was going to be able to use.

One of the hardest things for a human to do, especially the male species, is to take an offer of help when it is given.  We made this mess, we'll get ourselves out of it by ourselves, thank you very much.  If that boat was worth $3,000, the two trucks had to be worth two to three times that much.  There but for the grace of God go I.

I expect that the good folks from Carfax will be using this as the premise for a commercial soon.  If you are watching, Mr. Carfax, here is the photo you need.  Call me.

Every group needs one.  The person who takes charge, sets the rules, keeps people in line.  Some people resent The Organizer; most people silently thank TO for being charge so they don’t have to.

TO rarely gets credit for what he or she has done.  TO usually only gets the blame when something isn’t exactly right.  TO has to work while others are playing.

TO gets rewards in different ways.  If TO is also The Boss at work, he or she presumably gets paid more for being in charge.  In a family, TO gets to set the rules more often than not.  In a voluntary group setting, the rewards for TO are all psychic.

Our TO for the Klatt Brothers and Friends trip to Ireland was Peter Pavarini.  By day, he is senior partner and health care attorney at a Columbus law firm.  By night, he plays music with the Klatt Brothers (now in their fourteenth year) and volunteers at a health clinic he and his wife helped to start in Delaware County, where they live.

Peter and Colleen first went on an Enchanted Way tour with Tom Piggot in the fall of 2007.  They really enjoyed the vibe and the focus on music.  On that tour, the music was provided by Wisconsin singer/songwriter JohnSmith.  When Peter asked Tom if he could book a tour with his friends in the Klatt Brothers providing the music, Tom agreed.

Peter did a fantastic job of organizing the trip.  He called a meeting over a year ago to get a commitment from two of the other founding members of the Klatt Brothers band and from me to go on this adventure.  He communicated relentlessly with Tom Pigott and the twenty four people who eventually agreed to accompany Peter and his wife Colleen.  He collected money from us and wired it to Tom right on schedule.  He set up conference calls so that everyone could get to know each other and could get questions answered

For this, Peter got the reward of seeing his friends and family discover the joys of musical Ireland, as he and Colleen had done two years earlier.

Thank you, Peter.  You can be TO any time in my book.

Don’t forget to thank TO in your life.

I had a feeling this place was going to be trouble.  It was too antiseptic, not like the other Irish pubs where we’d visited and performed on this tour.  And we were going to be competing with the big screen TV, which was showing local hero Padraig Harrington as he tried to beat Tiger Woods to the finish line on the last day of the PGA Tournament.

We’d eaten dinner in a private room upstairs, and Betsy ran back up from the first floor with news that a real live Elvis imitator was sitting at the bar downstairs.  When I ran down to get a glimpse, he was gone, and I joked with Betsy that he was just a figment of her imagination.

Now here we were, playing in the front of the pub with the fluorescent lights overhead casting a sickly glow on us and lending a less-than-romantic setting to our friends and the few locals who’d wandered in.  Although the latter may have seen our posters plastered all over the billboard outside the club, it became pretty clear that they were hoping for another dose of the Irish music rather than a gullet full of Americana music from The Klatt Brothers and Friends.

Still, the show must go on, even if you are paying to play rather than being paid to play.  But I could not take my eyes off the guy sitting right in front of us.  The Elvis imitator had returned, and he was watching our every move.  He looked like Barney Rubble with an Elvis haircut.  His wife was sitting next to him, looking like……well, she looked like Betty Rubble, I guess.  He had on a Hawaiian shirt that had an airbrush painting of Elvis on the back.  The guy himself had sideburns that looked like they’d been glued on with Elmer’s.  And Betty kept trying to catch my eye, which made Barney more and more resentful and frustrated as the evening went on.  At least that’s the monologue that was going on in my head.

But the Elvis guy was the least of our worries.  Now, your honor, comes The Guy in the Green Shirt.  He was a solid 225 pounds, had at least one of his front teeth missing, and he’d come to the club for two things.  Neither of those things was to listen to music.  One was to get as drunk as possible, and the second was to start a fight with someone.  I’d seen this guy before in my nine years of playing music for a living.

First he asked me a question in a language that I could not understand.  It was not English; it may have been Irish or Esperanto.  Then he walked up to Colleen Wulf Pavarini in the middle of her tour de force duo with her husband Peter, “We’ve Got An Old Love.”  He stated that he wanted to kiss Colleen, and then he did.  Peter could only stand by and try not to antagonize TGITGS any further by confronting him.  Understand that Peter grew up in New York and could have ripped this guy apart verbally….if only the guy was not speaking the language that only hard drunks can speak.

That was it for me.  I took off my guitar and told each of the bartenders that this guy was trouble and that until they got him out of their pub, we were not going to play any more music.  They tried their best to shuffle him out, but they were not up to the task in either courage or bulk.  So TGITGS remained.

Now, your honor, comes our splendid tour guide Tom Piggot.  Tom was bigger than TGITGS, at least as tough, and Tom was sober.  As I later learned, Tom ran a pub for years before he started Enchanted Way Tours (www.enchantedwaytours.ie).  During the first two years his pub was open, Tom had thrown at least 210 people out of it, and those were only the ones he counted on the log his insurance company required him to keep.  So Tom was out last line of defense against TGITGS, our Maginot line.  Except, we didn’t really know about that part of Tom’s background.

Eventually, Tom and the two skinny bartenders made a final push.  TGITGS resisted, and for a second I wished for a straitjacket to thrown over his head.  Then he relented and let himself be led out the door for good.

We had a much better night musically than our first night in Clonakilty, because we used no amplification this night and could actually hear each other play.  We turned in a spirited, if wary, set.  (What if TGITGS returned with a gang of drunks and smashed up the place?  Would my son Alec ever forgive me if I ruined his Fender bass guitar by defending the honor of our women?)

Finally, mercifully, it was time to end the evening.  We finished with “Elvis Imitators”, the great song by Steve Goodman and Michael Smith that I’ve adopted as my traditional closing song.  The Elvis guy was still sitting up front, and I could tell that I’d finally won him over.  He came up to me as we were packing up and said “Man, I’ve just got to get the words of that song from you!”  I said “Just answer me one question.  Are those sideburns real?”  He took my hand and guided it to one of the sideburns, then prompted me to grab them and try to shake them loose.  Nothing doing; they were the real thing.

Music is its own reward.

Heroes come in all shapes and sizes.  Some of them are people we know personally; others are people we cherish from afar, maybe even from another time.  My parents are two of my heroes for everything they have done for my sister and me and for their community.  James Taylor is a hero for creating a style that is instantly recognizable and for making you feel you're listening to him in his living room when in fact you are one of thousands of people in the room with him as he plays and sings in concert.

I have a new hero as of Friday.  His name is Masoud Nemati, and I was lucky to play a round of golf with him at Ballybunion Golf Club in Ireland.  It is said that you can learn a lot about a person by playing golf with him.  If you are really lucky and you're paying attention, you can learn something about yourself as well.

I wasn't planning to play Ballybunion on this trip, because they do not allow riding carts, and since I had both of my hips replaced in 2001, I have only played golf with a riding cart.  Hip replacement surgery is a wonderful thing because after you've recovered from the rather traumatic surgery, you have mobility you've either never had or have not had in many years.  Walking five or six miles across 18 holes of golf is a bit outside of what you expect to be able to do, even though no doctor had ever told me that I should not walk that far.  In fact, I walk one and a half miles three or four mornings a week to stay in shape and clear my mind.

When one of our tour members canceled out of the round at Ballybunion, I knew in my heart that I wanted to give it a go, even though I'd have to walk the course.  I'd played in in 1987 with best friend Dan Wright and wanted to try it again.  I decided that I'd simply walk as far as I could and then head back to the clubhouse, whether I'd finished 18 holes or not.

Ballybunion is a wild, ancient golf course built into a series of dunes beside the Atlantic Ocean in County Kerry.  Five or six of the holes run directly alongside the ocean.  (In a cruel twist of fate, the ocean is always on your right as you step up to the tee on these holes.  So if you hit the ball to the right more often than not, which is the case with me and many other golfing friends, a sliced ball is going to wind up on the beach down below or even in the water.)  Many of the fairways take you through valleys formed by the ancient hills above, so if you do not hit your first or second shot straight, you have to climb up the hill to look for your ball in the gorse.  And if you are so lucky as to find it, you have to stand at a strange angle to hit it back down onto some short grass and try to get home with a reasonable score.  In other words, it's not really a place for a below-average golfer with two artificial hips.

I had gotten to know Masoud a little bit before we began our round that day.  I knew he'd grown up in Iran and had left in the 1970's because his family was aligned with the Shah before the revolution.  I also knew that he was fighting cancer and had completed his most recent round of chemotherapy less than two weeks before beginning the trip to Ireland.  I could tell from the fact that he came on the trip that he was going to live his life to the fullest and not sit around feeling sorry for himself.  So I didn't think twice about the fact that he was going to play Ballybunion with his friends Michael, Marc and Sam.

Masoud and I were in a threesome with Doug Morgan (www.twowheeling.com).  Doug is another one of my heroes, because you always know what Doug stands for.  He is the kind of friend you'd want to have along in any situation.  Read his blog and you will see what I mean.  Suffice it to say that Doug spent a lot of time going up and down the hills looking for my lost balls and reminding me as I was addressing the ball on the tee to keep my swing smooth.  Doug is in better shape than anyone I know because he rides his bike to and from work almost every day.  So he was prepared for the task of helping me, and he was more than willing to help.

I could tell that Masoud was starting to struggle about the fifteenth hole.  He'd told me a little more about his cancer treatment during our round, and about some of the surgery he'd had to prevent the cancer from spreading.  I had started to struggle someplace around the twelfth hole and thought about being sensible and giving up.  But Masoud inspired me by his words and by his actions.  If a man facing down death could finish this challenging march through the hills and dunes, I was going to walk with him.  Several times offered to pull his cart up a hill, and each time he refused.  He showed me how to live this experience to its fullest.

When the round was over, I stood on the hill leading up to the 18th green, took off my Yale Golf Course hat, placed it over my heart and thanked God for giving me this day.  I vowed to start walking my own golf course back home in Ohio and not let my life be limited by some imaginary constraints or excuses.  That's what happens when you get inspired by a hero.

I love Ireland.  Seems that almost everyone you meet here has a sense of humor.  You just have to look a little deeper for it in some people than in others.

Yesterday we we being driven out to visit a scenic beach in County Cork.  Some guy in a rented Ford tried to pass us on a narrow beachside road.  When he pulled back in behind us without passing us, he slammed into the back of the 27-passenger van that our driver Paddy Downes is using to drive our group around Ireland.  The sound it made when it hit the van and then bounced against the stone wall was better than a cup of coffee for waking us up after a short night.  Fortunately, nobody was hurt, but the rented Ford is probably headed for the clunker pile of Ireland today.

We decided to get out and walk the remaining mile or so to the beach.  A line of traffic was stopped on the other side of the road.  When one of the drivers leaned out of her window to ask what happened, we told her "there was a car smash but nobody was hurt and the Garda are on their way." She smiled a wry smile and said "they should be here by tomorrow, then."

The French guy who was driving the car had his own sense of humor.  He tried to tell the people gathered around his smoking hulk of a rental car that our bus had been stopped on the road when he hit us.  What did he think the 27 of us on the bus would say to the Garda about that?  Maybe he would claim we were all suffering from a shared hallucination.  Now, that's blarney!

Tom Pigott, our tour director, told us the first day that "most of what I tell you the next ten days will be true." Today he told us that St. Brendan the Navigator discovered America in a leather boat several hundred years before Christopher Columbus did.  He also believes that the Irish Famine of the 1850s could have been a form of genocide.  Who am I to say he is wrong or right?

The Klatt Brothers had a fun and sweaty night performing at Shanley's Piano Bar in Clonakilty, County Cork.  Our travelling party of 27 people practically filled up the place.  Phil Shanley, the owner of the venerable institution, had been talking up the evening with the locals.  So the house was packed.  Even though we could not hear ourselves very well, the crowd were primed to enjoy themselves, and so they did.  Three of the most sustained rounds of applause we got were on songs on which we were joined on stage by guests.  Tom Pigott got up and sang acappella and brought the house down.  Brendan our van driver (yes, we have a van to go along with our bus!) got up and sang a blues song with us, complete with a series of scorching harmonica solos.  Finally, Matt the erstwhile soundman got up and played his fiddle to great effect on a song we'd never heard but managed to back him on with a sentence of instructions.  It was an evening to remember.  My black gig shirt was still wet when I woke up the next morning.

Our tour organizer Peter Pavarini made a great observation about the Irish sense of humor.  He pointed out that it is delivered in a wry way that is rarely cynical.  They choose to overcome tough times by trying to find humor in just about every situation.  The laughs come easily in this country, and that's no blarney!

Tomorrow.......Ballybunion.  There are no riding carts (or buggies, as they're called here), so I'll walk until I can walk no more.  I may have discovered the best way to lower my golf score.