Take Off Your Shoes Read online

  “Let’s take a step back,” she said. “The thing we want most is to experience something new and exciting together as a family, right?” She tapped the sheet in front of us. “All of these are secondary.”

  True. I wanted us to reconnect with each other and develop bonds while the kids were still young. I had traveled around the world and experienced so much on my own. I was keenly aware that as sophisticated as New York kids can be, Manhattan could also be the beginning, middle, and end of their life experience. Underlying all our goals was the desire for our children to experience a part of the world that was vastly different from their own, to challenge their senses and identities. We wanted to expose them to diversity, not just in the American sense of the word, but also in the planetary meaning.

  Still, we needed to winnow down the choices. We looked again at the sheet. We wanted to skip winter on sabbatical and avoid the cold for one season. We needed a school that could support our children in English even as they learned a new language and experienced a foreign culture. Our destination needed to be central enough to allow us to travel regionally without too much hassle—New Zealand, for all its beauty, was out. Easy access to the outdoors was critical; we lived in a large city, and as exciting as a foreign city could be, cycling and hiking were priorities. We agreed to avoid big cities even though that would make it more difficult to find a suitable school for the kids.

  Our travel needed to be affordable. We easily eliminated many destinations in Europe and Japan as too expensive. The whole affair was going to be funded by renting our New York apartment for what seemed to us to be crazy-high rates. And we needed to be far away. After reading in A Year in Provence about a couple who moved from England to France for one year and spent their first six months hosting their friends and family who popped by to visit, we knew that if we were truly to get away, we needed to create some distance between ourselves and our lives at home.

  Our family observed many of our Jewish traditions and practices. New York City, home to a vast Jewish population, did not challenge our children’s identities any more than it challenged Victoria’s, born and raised in that liberal-tending city. Our children lived in a bubble and rarely felt like outsiders. They went to a Jewish school, had mostly Jewish friends, and were educated along Jewish themes.

  Victoria and I didn’t regret the way our kids were growing up. We had deliberately set it up that way. We aimed to imbue our children with a strong sense of heritage. But we recognized too the limitations of that goal if our children were to be thoughtful and full participants in the world in which they lived. We knew they could only benefit from leaving New York and experiencing the world, even if that meant challenging their sense of self. We knew too that finding a middle path of holding on to identity on the one hand while challenging it on the other was a difficult trick.

  Reviewing all these goals and comparing them to the information we gathered, a single destination had poked through our filters.

  I emailed Strauss and asked to meet in a week or two, whenever he had time on his schedule. He shot back within minutes: “How’s tomorrow morning at eight? I’ll come downtown.” We arranged for coffee at Le Pain Quotidien in Tribeca.

  Strauss and I had worked so closely together for nearly two decades that we could finish each other’s sentences. We didn’t waste a lot of time with pleasantries. “What’s on your mind?” he asked as we sat at a rustic wooden table.

  I was nervous. At various times, Strauss had been my mentor, partner, or boss—lately, all three simultaneously. He meant a great deal to me. I cared deeply about what he thought, about both the sabbatical idea and how his view of me might shift. For all I knew, he might want to change things too. I knew I needed a break but desperately wanted to preserve our relationship and what I could of our partnership.

  I had a sense of how this conversation might go. I thought I’d be able to pursue my plans to take a break and still leave the door open to returning to the firm. But I was prepared for other possibilities too, including Strauss insisting that I choose between staying with the firm and leaving for good. That would have terminated our partnership permanently.

  “I’ve done everything the board has asked me to do,” I said. “The turnaround is in hand; the company is in great shape and well positioned to grow. But I want to give you a lot of lead time about something I intend to do, something I need to do.”

  He picked at a callus just below his left ring finger, the inevitable result of disciplined weight training.

  “I owe my family some time. I’m going to take a sabbatical.”

  Strauss shifted in his chair and slouched slightly. “How long do you intend to be away?”

  “Six to twelve months.” I was flexible on the timing. A full year seemed like an awfully long time.

  I half hoped that he would try to convince me to stay or at least to gain some understanding of what was going on. He seemed upset by what I was saying but didn’t ask for an explanation. His quick mind was already navigating a path forward. He offered his support. We talked about an economic arrangement. It was unlikely that I could return to the helm of Take-Two, but we would try to persuade the board. If I chose to return to the partnership, the door was open. If not, there would be economic consequences. It took about two more minutes to hammer out some remaining details, but in the end, the conversation was straightforward and unemotional. I thought the arrangement was fair, even generous. I wondered if others who had a stake in the outcome, including the board of directors, would think so too.

  Then Strauss said, “Whatever’s happening at home, as far as I’m concerned, it’s not too late to change your mind.” He didn’t want me to go, and there was a limit to his patience. I looked into his eyes but could read nothing more. I flashed to the moment when I committed to Victoria and held firm now as I did then. There was no turning back.

  three |

  Victoria and I met Sam for lunch at Kitchenette, a diner on Chambers Street in Tribeca. At fourteen, Sam was one year away from entering his freshman year at the Ramaz School on the Upper East Side. Victoria’s friend who went on sabbatical in Barcelona had said her eldest son got so anxious when told of their intentions to travel that he vomited for days. Victoria and I steeled ourselves for Sam’s objections. We suspected he wouldn’t react well to the massive change we were about to lay on him. He was a bright student who thrived on routine and structure, and we knew the sabbatical that we were about to hit him with would rock his world.

  Sam sat across from us at a small, Formica-topped table. The pancakes he ordered had just arrived, and he casually sipped his Coke.

  “Daddy and I need to talk to you about something,” Victoria said. “It’s kind of big news, and we’re really excited about it.”

  I didn’t wait for Sam to respond. “I’m going to leave work for a while. We’re going to take a long break and live in a foreign country.”

  Victoria had prepared a list of sales points. Sam was a serious student and driven to get into a top college. She was concerned that Sam would resist anything that distracted him from his goal. Now without Sam uttering a word, she launched right into her pitch.

  “I promise you that while we’re away, school will be easier than Ramaz. It will be a great break from all the pressure. At a minimum, if you do well academically, your grades will count for college. Worst case, if you do poorly, the grades can be explained away and ignored by college admissions offices. I’ve already spoken to your college guidance counselor. She assured me that a semester abroad would have zero negative impact on your college applications in a few years. In fact, it may help you. Plus, apart from math and Spanish, there’s little in ninth grade that you’ll need to do well in tenth.”

  Sam had stopped chewing his food. He stared blankly at Victoria.

  “We haven’t told your siblings yet. We wanted you to be the first to know.”

  Devastating silence.

  Finally: “Wait. What?”

  “We’re not moving f
or good, just spring semester and the summer.”

  “Where did you say we were going?”

  “Mendoza, Argentina.”

  The background noise of tinkling cutlery suddenly came into sharp relief. Victoria and I waited for more from Sam, but he said nothing. He finished his lunch in a somber state and then asked to be excused so that he could walk around on his own.

  I turned to Victoria. “What just happened?”

  A few days later, Sam asked to speak privately to Victoria and me. “Can I come back for camp in the summer?”

  Victoria shot the final arrow in her quiver. “Absolutely.” She had no idea how that would be arranged. She would sort out the details later. Besides, she hoped, Sam might change his mind once we were abroad. Sam had warmed to the idea. He came to appreciate that the trip might actually be fun, especially if colleges wouldn’t look askance at it. He began to think of sabbatical as a long vacation and drummed up his own enthusiasm for it.

  Victoria turned to me. “Let’s hold off on telling the other kids. They don’t need to know yet.”

  Mendoza was the center of Argentina’s winemaking district and rested at the foothills of the Andes. We imagined it as the Napa Valley of Latin America, with great food; delicious, inexpensive wine; and long roads on which we could cycle for hours. The notion of disappearing into this world for the better part of a year was exhilarating. It ticked all the boxes: South of the equator, Mendoza basked in summer’s lazy days while New York shivered in winter’s doldrums; our kids would dramatically improve their Spanish skills; the Andes were a stone’s throw away; there were lots of places to visit in South America. And who could resist living in a wine region?

  Victoria tracked down a relocation consultant, and in July, we farmed our kids out to friends for a weekend and boarded a LAN Airlines plane bound for Mendoza via Santiago to check it out in advance of moving our family.

  It didn’t take long to discover that Mendoza wasn’t Napa Valley. Napa was a pastoral place, geographically confined to a relatively small region. The winemaking district of Argentina had no such constraints. It was huge, and many of the vineyards were the size of large industrial farms. The roads were shoulderless, with poor asphalt conditions for road cycling. Local cyclists told us that even areas suitable for road bikes were unsafe because of crime. When we chatted with locals about their country, they spat vitriol about the corrupt political leadership.

  Argentina seemed to be sliding backward. If we were looking for a dynamic part of the world for our kids to experience, Argentina certainly wasn’t it. To cap our disappointment, the flight schedule to and from the airport was light. There were a few nonstop flights to Buenos Aires and Santiago, but nearly every other destination in South America would require complex travel logistics.

  During our last night in Mendoza, over an inexpensive bottle of a local wine, I turned to Victoria. “I’ve had a lovely time. The food and wine are fantastic, and the mountains are beautiful. But there’s no way we can live here.”

  She gazed off into the night for a few moments. “It’s not perfect, but I know we can still make it work.”

  “Not a chance.”

  The next day, we hightailed it home to New York with more questions than answers.

  It was August, and Victoria drummed her fingers on our kitchen table. She was a planner and a doer. Not only would she plan vacations a full year ahead of time, but for as long as I’d known her, she also always had a running task list in her mind. While I could ruminate over trivial household purchases, she plowed ahead, got things done, and moved on to the next. She had resigned as president of the community center board and announced she would leave by the end of June. Meanwhile, she was working hard to prepare a friend and community member to take her place. Now she was getting impatient, not just with the slow progress of our sabbatical plans, but with me.

  “We leave New York in December,” she said tersely. “Where are we going?”

  I felt the pit of my belly tighten. It was getting late, and I had no backup plan. I wondered if I was inadvertently sabotaging the situation because I was nervous about taking a break and throwing it all away. As I had done so many times before, through sheer will, I recommitted. If I was going to take a risk, I needed to be wholehearted about it.

  My brother, Norm, suggested that I consider Bali, Indonesia, and reach out to his friend Richard who had lived in there in the 1980s, when both he and my brother had been part of a cohort sent to Asia on a fellowship sponsored by the Luce Foundation.

  When I called Richard, his enthusiasm for Bali leapt out. “I’m telling you, Ben, it’s heaven on earth.” I could practically see the tears well up in his eyes as he talked to me about Bali. I asked him more about what it was like to live there.

  With about 250 million people, Indonesia was the most populated Muslim country in the world. The country’s tiny island of Bali, consisting of about four million people, was mostly Hindu. “The Balinese are just about the friendliest people on earth,” he said. “They could be telling you that their mother died and say it with a smile.” He went on to describe the island, its powerful culture, and the expatriate experience there.

  I was skeptical. Elizabeth Gilbert’s Eat, Pray, Love had recently been published and connected broadly with readers around the world. With Bali being the final destination of her journey, I was concerned that the Island of the Gods, as Bali was known, had become a cliché or, worse, a circus. As my objections mounted, I considered the possibility that something in me was resisting going on sabbatical altogether. I asked Richard whether Bali had become overrun in the aftermath of Gilbert’s book.

  “Absolutely not. Honestly, Ben, you can’t go wrong.”

  “What’ll I do all day?”

  “Anything you want. Scuba dive, surf. You can write, read, or just hang out. Lots of foreigners live there, all doing their own thing. You won’t be lonely.”

  I asked about a school for our kids.

  “Check out Green School. A Canadian entrepreneur just built it. I don’t remember his name, but it can’t be hard to find on the web.”

  After hanging up, I researched the school on the internet. It took some digging to find Green School, but Google came through. The school’s mission statement talked about joy, leadership, and teaching kids to be global citizens. There were links to news segments about the school on BBC, CNN, and ABC, along with a TED talk the founder had presented.

  I showed the website to Victoria. She got the feeling we might be onto something. That night, she called the school expecting the regular runaround we had grown used to in New York: a rigorous application process for each of our four children that we would need to begin immediately if we had any hope of having our kids attending in a few months. What were the odds that they could accommodate all our children?

  Ben McCrory, the head of admissions, casually said, “Sure. We’ve got space for your kids. How can I help?” Ben hailed from Greenwich Village. He was one of our own, and we were in.

  “This time,” Victoria said to me, “no recon trip. We’re going to make a decision and live with it. We’ll make it great.” Within a few days, we had contracts signed with the school, sent in our deposit, and contacted a real estate agent that McCrory had recommended to find a place to live.

  We told Sam about our change of plans. By now, he’d come to see the sabbatical as a chance to slow down and not obsess about grades. Still, if he was excited, he didn’t show it. He shrugged. “Cool.”

  It was time to let the other children in on the plan. Victoria had earlier planted a seed in Rita’s mind to ask me to take some time off from work. She tried to make it seem to Rita as if it were her own idea. Rita was having a tough time in school, and I played along every time she suggested we move to Mexico for six months. If only we could find a baseball team for Oliver to join while away, she offered, we would be set.

  One by one, we told them. We showed them photos of Green School to get them excited, but the whole scheme fell f
lat. We pitched it as a family adventure. Nava wasn’t buying it. She didn’t want to leave her friends and teachers. Oliver was so horrified that he cried himself to sleep. And Rita, despite Victoria’s plans, had trouble processing the information. She remained speechless for days. Victoria and I hoped the kids would eventually come around, but they weren’t making things easy.

  Back at the office, too, the mood was less than joyful. The board of Take-Two had turned down my request to return to the top leadership role of that company. I couldn’t blame them. The CEO taking a leave of absence for an extended period must have hit them as goofy in the extreme, and this company had too much volatile history to tolerate more of it. While I hoped I could return to Take-Two, I realized it was a long shot and accepted that I would have to leave permanently. Still, I found it difficult because I had grown fond of the company and the people who worked so hard to make it great.

  The company’s announcement of my departure was straightforward. There was no trying to spin this news. Their CEO was stepping down to take time to travel in Asia with his family. It was so bizarre, as the truth often is, that the raw facts made the story immediately credible.

  From the team at Take-Two, some of the reactions were more positive than I’d expected. Some told me they admired my decision and that it was refreshing to see a CEO who could step away from bigger, better, faster.

  One day, I walked into the stainless-steel elevator of our headquarters on Broadway. Just before the door closed, the head of one of our business units jumped in. He gave me an uncertain smile and seemed to have something on his mind. After the elevator ascended several floors, he turned to me. “I just want to say I think what you’re doing is really cool. You’re making a statement, putting family ahead of work.”

  My announcement invited others outside the company to open up in similar ways. At lunch one day, I ran into a colleague from another firm with whom we had engineered several deals. He was known, as well as for his astute business acuity, as an acid-tongued cynic who spared neither foe nor friend. He gave me a crooked smile. “I hear you’re getting out.” That wasn’t how I saw it, but I let it go and braced myself for whatever came next. He patted my shoulder. “Better too early than too late.”