The person who got me started was my daughter.
Rebecca is two years older than Todd. She lives in Portland, Oregon. She’s a high school chemistry teacher, and she’s the most direct person I’ve ever known. She gets that from her grandmother.
About two years before that Christmas, she flew home for a long weekend. She took me to lunch at a little diner near my house. She waited until the waitress brought our soup.
Then she put down her spoon and looked at me across the table.
“Mom. What are you actually doing with your time?”
“Oh, you know. This and that.”
“Please don’t say gardening.”
I laughed.
“I’m serious,” she said. “You ran some of the biggest accounts in the state for eighteen years. You can’t just stop. You’ll lose your mind. What are you actually doing?”
So I told her. About the folder. About the three sectors. About the things I’d been watching for years and never had the chance to act on, because I was always acting for somebody else.
Rebecca listened to every word. She asked good questions. She’s always asked good questions.
When I finished, she picked her spoon back up.
“Good,” she said. “Do it. And don’t let anybody talk you out of it.”
“Nobody even knows about it.”
“Even better.”
After that, every few months, she’d call and ask, “How’s the folder?”
And I’d tell her.
Six months before that Christmas, she asked, “Are you getting close, Mom?”
“Closer than most people would expect,” I said.
She laughed on the other end of the phone. A big, happy laugh.
“Good,” she said.
By December, the number in that folder had changed. Considerably.
I knew it the way you know anything you’ve watched grow slowly. Not all at once. Not in one dramatic moment. Just a quiet pile-up of certainty, month after month.
One holding in particular, I had been watching for most of a year. A company called Meridian Rural Health Systems. They built and ran diagnostic centers in small towns across the Midwest. I’d bought my first shares when nobody had heard of them.
I had a feeling about Meridian. The kind of feeling I used to get at Hargrove, looking at a spreadsheet, when the numbers started lining up a certain way.
The acquisition announcement came on December 28th. Three days after Christmas.
One of the largest healthcare companies in the country was buying Meridian. At a price that made the financial reporters use words like “stunning.”
By December 30th, the market had settled.
By New Year’s Eve, I knew exactly what the number in my folder was.
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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