EMA Journal • Fall 2025 • Legal Briefs

“We’re going on The Queen Mary II (QM II) from Brooklyn to Southampton,” Sof said a few months ago. And it somehow struck her to take Zack, Jared, Chris and me (except Jared bowed out). Setting off in a relatively tiny vessel and sailing more than 3,600 miles across the “pond” still stirs some part of my lizard brain. But the trip, which reprises one Sof and I made in 2019 (I still remember the 15-to-20-foot clearance under the Verrazzano Bridge), creates a Rubicon we will pass through in moving into the next stage of our lives. It’s what people do. Live!

You remember living, don’t you? The wonder, hopes and dreams you had as a child. The pony or the fairy princess wand. That’s how life works. The hopes and dreams draw the effort and accomplishment. Sometimes the results can be significant. Most times, just progress. And that system for living has given civilization so much. Our history is replete with inspiring tales (ignominious ones as well).

As I get ready to stop doing something I’ve done for several decades, I too sense a major passage and not the one on the QM II. I’ve been going to the same office building for the last 24 years, and the same job the last 46. And while I have been “winding down” the last 10 years or so, a full break would be traumatic.

But that’s what seems to be looming in the not-too-distant future. Given how little I’ve been doing lately, it probably won’t be a huge change. The psychology of it, however, is a different story. After doing variants of this one thing for the last 53 years, the break will require some type of an attitude adjustment.

So, what does a 77-year-old “retired” attorney do? Sof and I have already done more traveling than most. In 1978, we quit our jobs, took Pan Am’s — you remember Pan Am? — “Round the World in 80 Days” fare, which consisted of 11 countries, phew. And she has put 220,000 miles (including going transcontinental both ways) on her 2001 Subaru wagon!

We’ve been in our house for almost 38 years. It’s been a great place to live and raise a family, but it’s really too big and the upkeep (like this summer’s costly heat pump) is becoming an issue. Maybe I’ll get with a realtor friend and come up with a plan. The problem is our three-bedroom condo a mile down Connecticut Avenue will probably be too confining. No place to really get away.

Over the years, our lives developed an annual pattern of trips with the spring and fall meetings of the associations I represented. A year began with the January EMA Executive Committee meeting where Al and I would roast the outgoing chairman, something I began with Jack Pester in 1976. It continued in February or March with SOJC; May in D.C. for EMA’s Day on the Hill (we used to throw parties at the house for attendees); October in Hershey or Penn State with PPA; later NACS (usually in Vegas), this year in Chicago; then CTPMA, mostly at the Broadmoor. Without those obligations, my dance card will be pretty empty. I guess I could take up golf.

Between NOJC, EMA, Sof’s job at ABC News and her travel writing, we’ve had the opportunity to see D.C. in depth — from the White House to the Capitol; from the cherry blossoms to “A Capitol Fourth.” We’ve been privileged to take the boys to Easter egg rolls at the White House and 10 years of terrible Redskins football games at FedEx Field, to running over to Annapolis for a Navy game in October — my 56 years in D.C. have given me much.

We probably will move, but not out of D.C. Sof and I have lived and/or worked in this neighborhood for 55 years, and we love it. My problem is that both my favorite watering holes near my office and home have closed, and, as of yet, I have not found suitable replacements. That and having to find a new barber and auto mechanic because my old ones retired are the problems confronting me. Talk about first-world problems.

So, as I close my suitcase and head for New York-London, I want to wish you all the best. Hope to see you when we get back!

by Robert S. Bassman, Of Counsel to Energy Marketers of America, EMA Silver Corporate Partner