Orientation, part 2

The next morning Amy’s mother came to pick her up, and then Anna’s parents, Amy Levine and Eric Gronningsater, stopped in to meet us before taking their daughter home. Mike and I sat down with them to get acquainted.

“Eric started here in January,” Amy said, “but the girls and I just came this summer. We have an eighth-grade daughter, too. We live near Bernabeu Stadium.” That was the neighborhood where Mike had lived before we’d arrived.

“Where do you work?” Mike asked Eric.

“Banco Santander,” he said.

“That’s my client!” Mike exclaimed. “What kind of work do you do there?”

“I’m in risk management,” he said, and my jaw dropped. That was exactly Mike’s area!

The four of us quickly found that we had a great deal in common. Eric and Amy had met while working on MBA degrees at NYU in the late '70s—and Mike was doing the same thing at the same time at the same school. Eric was the same age as Mike and me, though Amy was several years older. They were happy Manhattanites who loved theater and museums as much as we did, and we were all equally excited to be in Spain.

A genial, baby-faced Yale graduate, Eric was the son of a Norwegian and an American. He grew up in Dobbs Ferry, NY. Amy, petite and animated, was from Boston and had been at Berkeley during the Free Speech movement. Fiercely intelligent and loaded with intellectual curiosity, she was a human compendium of knowledge and spoke several languages—though, like us, she was learning Spanish for the first time.

I found Amy to be a thoroughly impressive person. She was a librarian, she’d worked in corporations and in schools, she knew some of the rich and famous of Manhattan, mainly through her daughters’ exclusive private school. She’d traveled extensively in Europe, and she was well versed in anything she wanted to be well versed in, because she read voraciously.
“We’ll have to get together for dinner!” Amy said, and I agreed eagerly before they scooped up Anna and headed off to their older daughter’s basketball game.

“Can you believe the coincidence?” I asked Mike. We were both amazed. But things became even more amazing over time, as during the next year Mike’s boss, Juan Pujadas, left Price Waterhouse and went to work for Banco Santander—as Eric’s boss. A couple years later he came back to PW as Mike’s boss, and eventually he hired Eric to work for PW as well.