Goose Busters
I gave my college-aged son, John, a copy of “Backyard Ballistics” for Christmas and together we assembled a four-foot-long “spud gun” – 2” and 3” PVC, a compression chamber with a barbeque sparker inserted in the end. Ram a potato into the barrel, squirt a 5 second (the book recommends no more than 2 seconds, but what fun is that? – blast of hairspray into the compression chamber, screw in the end cap and fire away. Very gratifying results: a loud boom and the potato flies three hundred yards down the creek (don’t try this in your living room). Our local population of nuisance geese do not like it one bit. The women in our life seem to find John’s and my glee in setting it off a bit, er, juvenile, but manly men know different!

18 Simmons Lane
This huge house just sold for $18,500,000, which is impressive. But it sold five-and-a-half years ago for $18,000,000. Deducting what I assume was a five per cent commission, the seller lost $425,000 on the deal. So is this a mark of the dreaded bubble bursting? I doubt it; I think it is more a reflection of how very, very thin the high end of the market is. There just aren’t that many buyers out there for $18,000,000 houses, even in Greenwich. And, if it flopped as an investment, the house provided some very comfortable shelter value – dividing $425,000 by the sixty-six months the seller lived there, the “rental cost” was a mere $6,400 per month.

Not a Creature Was Stirring
Unlike the week preceding it, the Holiday period between Christmas and New Year’s was just about silent (but wasn’t it nice to so effortlessly get around our nearly-empty town?). Five houses went to contract during those ten days (new construction at 96 Husted, asking $7,825,000 led the way), four new houses came on and sixty-seven listings expired or were withdrawn. I wouldn’t worry about the latter category – they’ll all be back soon with brand new listing dates.

Ryan Zimmerman
On Saturday night, December 17th, my daughter Sarah hit black ice on Glenville Road, spun out and, while hitting trees, stone walls and telephone poles, demolished her car. She seemed perplexed when her mother and I told her that we couldn’t care less about the car so long as she was safe. That confusion was resolved, alas, when just a week later her close friend, Ryan Zimmerman, had a similar accident and died as the result. I didn’t know Ryan, but Sarah tells me that he was “the nicest boy from the nicest family in Greenwich”. An A student at the High School, he enlisted in the Marines both to serve his country and to pay for college. Ryan faced the risk of death or dismemberment in the Marines but who knew that he’d die in a car crash in his home town? This is not a lecture on eighteen-year-old driving – we were all there and we will all be parents of kids that age – rather, it’s a reminder to hug our kids, every day, tell them that we love them and pray for their survival. Ryan’s father told me, “we lost a good one.” I’d say that our country did.

Patrolman Mark Zuccerella
It is easy to be annoyed with some of the petty, chip-on-their-shoulder attitudes of some of our local cops and I do wish they’d be a little slower with their citation books when dealing with kids, but just when I think there’s little good to say about them they’ll respond to a real emergency and perform heroically. Mark Zuccerella did just that last week. He was, as I understand it, the first officer on the scene of Ryan Zimmerman’s fatal accident and, seeing the car upside down and in the water and with no way of telling how long the car had been there or whether its driver was still alive, plunged straight into the ice-cold water and attempted to rescue Ryan. Zuccerella suffered hypothermia from his exposure and ended up in the hospital; I am awed by his willingness to put his own life in danger for another. The shame of it all is that the two men sound very much alike, and now will never meet. But hats off to Mark Zuccerella – I’ll think of him next time I’m tempted to criticize his colleagues. Him and, to be fair, the various other cops who have responded so ably to the various crises and tragedies that have cropped up in our family over the years.