Leaving Missouri For California – One Chapter Ends and Another Begins
Two Fridays ago, at a little past noon, Aaron and I climbed into our car, buckled our seat belts, and looked out of our garage into the driveway and the road beyond it. The second, and final, shipment of our furniture and other items had left for California the day prior, bound for our new place in Newport Beach. The past quarter had been a whirlwind, running Kennon-Green & Co. during the day and spending our evenings checking off items on the relocation task list – there were nights we hardly slept at all as I handled the regulatory approvals for the firm to enter the State of California and Aaron worked on extricating us from the seemingly innumerable entanglements that had arisen in the roughly thirteen years that had passed since we returned from the East Coast the summer after graduating from college. Sitting behind the driver’s seat, he held out his hand for me to grab. He turned to look me in the eyes, his head tilting and his voice cracking. “It’s like the end of a drama.”
It was. As he went on to say, yes, we were making the right choice and we were going to an even better chapter in our lives, but pulling out of the driveway for the last time was a line of demarcation because it represented the closing of a chapter that we will look back on when we are much older; a chapter that spanned nearly a decade and that began when we bought the place in our mid-twenties. We shared part of that journey with many of you, inviting you into our homes as we conversed about some of the books or articles we were reading, showed you pictures of the recipes we were making, talked about everything from politics to video games, and gave you a glimpse behind the scenes as we came out of semi-retirement to build the institution we fully expect will be vehicle through which we seek to preserve, protect, and grow the capital we have accumulated through years of hard work and prudence.
But, as Aaron said, a house is not a home. For seventeen years, our home has been wherever he and I are together. Now, we have to think about our family – our future children and the firm we are building. We have to put both in a position to prosper and thrive, building foundations that not only for the rest of our lives, but for long after we’ve left this world.
