Connection
Hali Geller
Daughter of Steven Geller, trader at Cantor Fitzgerald
MY DAD AND I USED TO cook together. When we went out to our house on Long Island, we’d make marinades and huge numbers of courses, with lots of starters and things to pick on. In the city, we mostly made weeknight things like pasta with spinach and Italian sausage. There was always room for spaghetti and meatballs—we’d make the meatballs, of course.
Shopping at Zabar’s with my dad was really special. He knew everyone’s names and they knew his. It set such a good example of how to treat people. The man behind the fish counter mattered as much to my dad as his bosses at Cantor Fitzgerald.
When the planes hit the World Trade Center, I was 12 years old, in class on the Upper West Side. I was in denial at first. As a kid, you’re going to have dreams of the person you love walking through the door again. I leaned on my friends a lot because they’d known my dad. And even though not everyone in New York City lost someone on 9/11, all of us went through it together. That helped.
The hardest part was when a therapist encouraged my mom to send me to a wilderness program in northern Maine. It was eight weeks long, in the dead of winter, and then I was sent to a boarding school for troubled kids. I had yet to be exposed to people who had major traumas from sexual or mental abuse. Suddenly, I was surrounded by kids who’d been self-harming, using drugs, participating in crimes. Maybe those programs helped some people, but for a kid like me, being thrown into them was almost harder than losing my dad. I put on a brave face for my mom, but looking back, it would have been much better for me if I’d gotten local support while just living my life. Instead, I spent much of my teenage years simply trying to survive.
Everything changed the summer before my junior year of high school when I did a program at the Julian Krinsky Cooking School outside Philadelphia. Cooking made me feel close to my dad. When I started touring colleges, I only looked at programs that were culinary-focused. My dad would have been so jealous. I kept thinking, “Man, I wish he could see this!”
For years, when I’d go to Zabar’s or our corner bodega, there were people who remembered me. They knew what happened to my father and always treated me with the utmost kindness. It was nice to go there and see a familiar face and feel a flash of connection with my dad. Because they knew him too.
My dad would have been so jealous. I kept thinking, “Man, I wish he could see this!”