Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

“I’m in the twilight of my beauty. In a decade I’m going to need a lot of proof.” –Sarah Nicole Prickett

“I’m taking notes, Dr. White. Honest. I’m not just texting.” –Random Sales Rep

The question arises with some frequency: where do I find the topics on which I muse? In truth, most of the time “musings” arises from something that is either on my mind or in front of me just before I sit down to type. Oh sure, I occasionally have the foresight to jot down an idea or thought during the week, but as often as not I misplace a note as reliably as I misplace the memory of a really good idea.

If memory only did serve.

Last night was spent mostly in the company of a friend, The Dude, with whom I also do business. Sitting across from one another in a quite lovely restaurant we did just enough business to count, but mostly we just talked about our lives. I remember saying a couple of things that made me go:”Oh, that’ll make a great topic for ‘Musings'”; my friend made a point of identifying a couple for me. There’s this sense, this feeling, a kind of dim light in the mist of my morning mind that alerts me to the apparently fleeting existence of ideas I’m sure would have been brilliant once I’d committed them to electrons here, were they to have survived the night.

Alas, they did not.

I’m told that this need not be the case. Even as I hurtle through middle age, careening between the crevasses that keep cropping up in what was once solid (memory, muscle, et al), I’m told that I can remember everything if I want! Ms. Prickett would counsel judicious (one would hope) use of the “selfie”, the ubiquitous cellphone portrait or landscape that forever marks a visual memory. From there it would find it’s way to any number of memories. Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, wherever. Evidence freely shared that, alas, the twilight of my beauty has long since passed. If, that is, the sun ever shined there at all.

Random Sales Rep would show me his Evernote app, or some other portal to a virtual urn that I could fill with ideas that heretofore required either a more effective neural network or a more easily located notepad to ensure their survival. Once there I need only curate my little corner of the cloud. Just think of what Sunday musings could be if I could always remember everything.

Hmmm. About that.

You see, what I DO remember of last night is how I felt. How often and how easily both The Dude and I smiled. The mist that is so effectively hiding the more granular memories is actually emitting a rather warm glow. It’s much like the memories evoked as Mrs. bingo and I have unearthed the Kodachromes of our personal antiquity. They’ve faded, both the photos on paper and the finer details of that time the photo has frozen, but they, too, seem to evoke a glow within that is warmer for their lack of detail.

I think this is better. At least for me. What I might gain from the “selfie” or the endless shelf space of the cloud I fear I might lose in the feeling. You see, for all of the cracks that have appeared over time in my memory, it seems that I have retained a rather amazing capacity to remember feelings. Indeed, it almost seems as if my ability to recall emotion is enhanced by relying solely on what memory may lie only between my ears. What I remember of last night, without the aid of Evernote or Instagram, is that The Dude and I were really quite happy.

Give it a try.

I think about friendship a lot. Over the past couple of months I’ve experienced a huge slice of what we could think of as the contents of a desktop folder marked “friendship”. Good friends close by. Close friends a goodly distance away. Old friendships rekindled and newer ones revisited. And both, not, as well. Friends lost along the way glimpsed ever so slightly, reminding me that they, too, were once in at least one of my many circles of friendship. Perhaps the only classic friendship experience I’ve not had recently is the tragedy of losing a friend for whatever reason and by whatever route.

Big sigh of relief about that.

Beth and I are fairly well known as people who never consciously leave a friend or a friendship behind. It always makes us feel good when someone mentions that about us. As an aside, it’s always nice when folks you like think about you, or the version of you, that you like best, the same way that you do. Autumn is travel season for me. It seems as though we always find a reason to go somewhere or do something fun around this time. This year brought an epic family wedding in Maine; we are quite good friends with my siblings and their spouses. We would hang out with them all the time if we lived in the same area. It’s also the busiest time on my professional calendar. My biggest annual meeting was in Chicago this year. A couple dozen of my professional friends would be my very closest friends if only we lived closer to one another.

Unlike most times when I sit down to muse, especially if I’ve settle on a topic, I’m kinda all over the map on this one today. There’s so much to the topic, you know? Do I go back to the well on friendship levels? How important it is to have close friends close by as you get older, especially if you are a male? How about the important logistical details of a friendship and the mechanics of keeping it alive? All deeply important sub-topics for me, ones that I really enjoy exploring. I think I’ll fall back on my time-tested “Sunday musings…” strategy and ride the thought train that pulled into the station–my dining room table, that is–along with the weekend newspapers, courtesy of the columnist Rich Cohen:

How do you make a friend in the first place? How do you make a BEST friend?

Cohen’s article is titled “Luck of the Draw”. Sometimes you get born lucky. My folks presented me with a best friend when my brother Randy arrived, eventually to become my roommate for some 20 or so years. Cohen is thinking outside the family home as he compares and contrasts his experience as a freshman at Tulane with that of his son. Cohen senior had what anyone older than 40 would recognize as move in day as a college freshman: you discover who your freshman roommate is when the two of you walk into your room for the first time. “Hi, I’m Rich.” Contrast this with his son Nate who used social media to “curate” the process of “discovering” that freshman roommate: “Hey, I’m @Nate and I see you’re going to Faber, too.”

Cohen the Dad ended up with a close friend he seemingly found inconceivable in retrospect, so different were they in so many ways, while Cohen the son has chosen, and been chosen by, a carefully vetted doppelgänger. Rich had experiences with his roommate and the roommate’s buddies that he, Cohen, found unimaginable in retrospect. Will Nate’s experience be similar?

I guess lesson number one in Making a Friend 101 might be something along the line of “take a chance”. If you are in the middle of an experience that we could think of as uncurated, take a chance on the person who says “hi” back. Beth and I started a conversation with the couple who set up their beach chairs next to us on the first full day of our honeymoon, launching us on an epic week at “Camp for big Kids” in Jamaica. We are close friends with Dave and Suzi to this day. This winter we pulled off a pretty spontaneous weekend together on a beach far south of either of our homes. Our only regret is that none of us remember the rugby songs we sang in the swim up pool bar in Jamaica.

Outside of my family my very best friends arrived in similar, unplanned circumstances. Rob was introduced to me 2 weeks before we headed off to preseason football camp. Sadly, we weren’t roommates. Heck, we weren’t even in the same part of campus, let alone the same dorm. In a similar vein, Bill and Nancy are the couple version of our best friends. We have that wonderful friendship where husbands and wives like both husbands and wives. Beth and I met Bill and Nancy in graduate school, and as is the pattern in our particular world we went our separate ways for post-grad positions. It was the luck of the draw that landed us both in the same city some 30 years ago, a totally unplanned opportunity dropped in our laps and just sitting there waiting for us to take the reigns.

And there lies the second secret to making a friend: when a new friendship shows up, like a perfect horse all tacked up and ready to go, for goodness sake hop in the saddle! Take that friendship out for a ride. See where it takes you. Where you’d like to take it. Not every friendship can, or should, become a best friend or even a close friend, but who among us doesn’t have room for a new good friend or two. Or three. Some friendships are pretty easy, at least in the beginning. Kinda like a well-trained horse that doesn’t need a whole lot of riding, guidance, to give you a nice ride when you meet. But the best rides, like the best friendships, come from the effort you make to learn what kind of friend you can be. Where is the commonality, those areas where everything is in sync? What do you need to work on to keep the friendship growing?

I guess that’s it then. Sometimes I just need to sit down and start writing and what I was really thinking about just sort of finds its way onto the page. Friendship is equal parts serendipity and recognition that, you know, you’ve got a chance. Taking that chance, risking the possibility that you simply met an acquaintance but taking a chance and seeing if you’d both like to ride along in the same direction for a bit. Doing the stuff it takes to learn about your new friend and letting them learn about you. After that, who knows?

It’s been a busy Fall, like usual. I’ve spent time with friends older and newer, at home and away, and it’s been simply wonderful. What’s in store for me and my friends? For me and for Beth and the friends we have together? We are young yet. Might we be fortunate enough to expand our circles of friends? Heck if I know. We never let go of a friendship. Never leave a friend behind. Still, why not “take a chance”? You know, the luck of the draw. Perhaps a new friend.

You can never have too many friends.

I’ll see you next week…

1. Ideopolise. Post-industrial city wherein lives a populace driven only by ideas and feelings. Postulated as the home of cultural “elites” by Ruy Teixeira.

Should be a word.

2. Cultural Boutique. Safe space in afore-mentioned city. Also Teixeira.

Seems redundant.

3. Interregnum. A period of pause between two periods or eras.

No reason, just a super cool word.

4. Proximity. To greatness that is. What must it be like to spend your life in the presence or proximity of true greatness? I’ve long publicly held that I am not in possession of the genius gene. Rather I seem to have a rather dominant expression of the “Salieri” gene, that certain ability to both identify and promote the genius of another. Unlike the real Salieri I also inherited the gene that prompts me to protect any of those geniuses with whom I may come in contact (Salieri famously was said to have destroyed Mozart the man while promoting, and profiting from, his genius).

To be in the presence of the giants in any field is a privilege. In my day job I have reached a stage (I’m old enough) and have acquired enough status (a few people know who I am) where I occasionally share a stage with the giants upon whose shoulders we all ride. Just today I found myself sitting next to Marguerite McDonald, one of the pioneers in the tiny slice of eye care where I may have made my mark, and staring down at Dick Lindstrom in the audience, sitting in the front row. Not gonna lie, it was hard not to be a little bit starstruck up there.

Which makes me wonder what it must be like to spend your entire career recording the exploits and the thoughts on the same of some of the best “whatever” in the world. More than that, what if in so doing you become one of them, so good at how you let the rest of us into the world of whoevers, athletes or musicians, artists or scientists who are simply the best at what they do. Sometimes the best ever. Hemingway taught us about soldiers and war in his early works. Jimmy Chin and Jon Krakauer have likewise opened the eyes of flatlanders everywhere to what it’s like to stand on the top of the world. There’s really no one quite like that in the world of my day job recording the highlights of the Marguerite McDonald’s and Dick Lindstroms of my work world.

Pity, that.

Sportswriters are classic examples of individuals who spend their days in the presence of varying degrees of excellence. Of genius. Most give us a fair rendering of the facts, sometimes leavened by insight, but an occasional writer stands out among the others through their own sheer excellence. Grantland Rice, Red Smith, and Jim Anderson form a kind of Mt. Rushmore of pioneers. Perhaps Dan Deford and Bob Ryan belong there as well. If you follow athletics at all you have favorites. At some time, though, these men and women either pass from this life or simply pass from writing. My point, then, is a simple one: those who spend their working lives in the presence of other types of genius who are, themselves, the very best at putting together the words that let us, those who are at best a Salieri, see into the world of the best athletes, and should themselves be treasured. Recognized and enjoyed while they ply their gifts on our behalf. Their words, like “A Farewell to Arms”, will live on, but there is something special about reading those words when they are freshly off the pen or the keyboard of the living scribe.

Do yourself a favor. Pick up or surf to Sports Illustrated and read Tim Layden’s piece on Tommie Smith and John Carlos. It’s a story more than 50 years in the making that in the hands of Layden feels as fresh as last week’s news. Yet like so many of Tim’s pieces you know that it will feel just as important 5, or 10, or 50 years hence. Read it and be in the presence of greatness.

I’ll see you next week…

No wonder Sunday’s musings sounded so familiar! Looks like I was thinking the same thoughts 6 years ago, just, you know, thinking them better. Here you go…

“…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” –George Elliot (HT to my friend Bruce K.)

We in the U.S. have been bombarded of late with missives that declare that we are living in “historic times”, that we have a “historic opportunity” to participate in an election that will “determine our fate as a country in historic ways.” But is that really so? Are we truly at an altogether unique inflection point, one so different from all that have come before that our fate, our daily experiences to come will be affected in ways that we cannot miss or ignore? Or is this particular upcoming election simply the next in an unbroken series of political or governing evolutionary steps that has been unbroken since the end of the Civil War? Is the excitement and the drama simply an extension of the “Techquake” and its always on firehose of information?

Seriously now, if you are one who is on your soapbox (facing in either direction), are you really telling us that Election Day is going to change our nation to a greater degree than the one that brought us 4 years of LBJ and the Great Society?

As a people the citizens of the developed world have been swept along in the great rivers of effluent poured forth from that firehose of information that was spawned by the internet. Have we forgotten the accuracy and truthfulness of Elliot’s words? If so is it because we simply cannot get even a single pupil above the torrent of information to see what he saw? Or is it more that we have lost the ability to paddle even the tiny amount necessary to do so? No matter, the result is the same.

Literary fiction is taught as the study of quiet acts of desperation and the fall-out that follows. Life, on the other hand, is made up of quiet acts made out of sight of nearly everyone. Anonymous acts carried out with neither malice nor benevolence. These are what constitute the reality of life. It seems to me that at least a (very loud) portion of our people have lost the appreciation of this reality. For them each act is either an affront or a tiny step toward canonization. I do not believe they are correct. Elliot is only wrong in that he underestimates his object; that things are not so ill with you and me, is not half but mostly owing to those who lived that faithful life.

To what, then, is this anonymous majority faithful? This is quite simple, and because this is so it is all the more painful that it must be pointed out: they are faithful to one another. They live lives that are faithful to the belief that it is another person with whom they are living, not an opinion or a belief. This anonymous mass lives lives that are intertwined with other people, not other opinions. When they look to their left or to their right what they see is not a position or a platform, but a person. It is this, the acknowledgement that we are surrounded first by other people, that leads to salvation in this life.

You are surrounded by people who are faithfully living quiet lives, anonymous to all but a handful of others, whose lives will be remembered by even fewer, if at all. Unbeknownst to one another they likely crossed paths with someone with whom they would find little common ground in belief, someone who is close to you, about whom you care very much. Despite this lack of commonality the crossing was uneventful. It was peaceful. On balance it was marked by quiet goodwill, if it was marked at all. It was a moment that will have passed directly into an unvisited “tomb” in the memory of each of these individuals.

And yet it was that quiet faithfulness that behind whatever disagreement might exist between the two there lived much more than another opinion or belief. There lived another person. Another person living a life largely unnoticed, hopefully a quiet one with less desperation than more, on their way to an end noticed by few and mourned by fewer still. Lives that were lived in the faith that there exists much, much more good in others than not.

A faith that we, the living, must endeavor to keep.

I’ll see you next week (which will surely arrive, regardless)…

“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” John F. Kennedy

That seems such a long, long time ago, doesn’t it? So long ago both literally and figuratively that I can’t remember the last time I saw that clip played anywhere. Imagine, in our world of ever-available, ever-present video of, well, everything, a signature piece of what we might consider Peak American seems to have vanished. I can neither remember, nor recall reading about a time in our history when the people who propose to lead us have appeared so disconnected from such large swaths of Americans. No matter how wealthy, how “well-bred” or bootstrapped, there always seemed to be a thread that connected our leaders to even those with whom they had a fundamental, philosophical disagreement.

For want of anything better why don’t we call that thread “love of country.”

Now to be sure there have been countless inexplicable travesties carried out under the “love of country” banner. Let’s just stipulate that up front. We can all agree that stuff like the Viet Nam war was more than a bit of a stretch on the “for love of country” foundation. I’m reasonably sure that you have at least a couple of other examples that leap to mind. These, however, represent a failure of leadership rather than a failure of citizenship or residency; I hope to convince you that what we are experiencing now is the same.

Those who choose to bleat end-of-times themes, and who insist on an “edge of the apocalypse” due to “unique and unprecedented” events over the last 2 or 5 or 15 years are comically victims of perhaps the oldest societal commentary I can think of: those who choose to ignore or forget history are doomed to repeat it. I’ve been listening to, and watching archival video of such tumultuous times in America’s history as the ’60’s anti-war protests, rioting associated with racial strife, also in the ’60’s, and the devastation wrought by the drought-driven climate disaster that tragically coincided with the Great Depression. Those, my friends, were some dark times.

There does appear to be one possible difference between those days and the last 20 years or so, on the national level that is. We have been in an era where broadly defined opposing groups have been progressively more aggressive in the act of “othering” their opponents. I, and other writers of more note, have defined “othering” as the act of characterizing an opposing group as so far removed from a “right” manner of acting, or so far removed from possessing or living by a “right” code or morality that its members become viewed as something other than worthy of acceptance as even a member of the species.

Think about this for a moment. Where once people living within the borders of the United States could agree on one simple belief, that each was a part of a group we might call Americans, we now have rhetoric bandied about by our “leaders” on all sides of pretty much any issue that essentially says that to disagree is to declare that one is somehow no longer possessing of anything we might recognize as equality. People with a different opinion are bad, evil, ignorant or unintelligent. This is certainly not a truly new phenomenon; one need only watch tape of Klan meetings in the early and middle of the last century to know that. What is striking is the pervasiveness of it in public discourse.

Again, I feel that this is first and foremost a failure of leadership. We hear this from those at the top of every societal pyramid.

Have you ever watched one of those video studies that begin when a subject in the study is asked to describe some aspect of their worldview for the camera. Individuals with starkly opposed views are then asked to discuss those views with one another. Holders of views on both sides of the issue are asked before meeting folks on the other side what they think of them. While not quite “othering” it is not surprising that position holders on each side hold rather dim views of folks on the other side of the divide. In some cases strikingly negative views.

You know what happens next of course, even if you’ve never watched these exercises: when brought together one-on-one the twosomes manage to find common ground. Indeed, they actually seek it very early in their conversation, even after discovering that their table mate completely disagrees with them on whatever hot button issue was chosen by those who ran the study. Some even move a bit toward a middle ground, if not toward the other side of the issue, but even those who don’t budge even a little bit quite obviously have a clear change in how they view someone who disagrees with them. It’s hard to decide if this transformation is the most striking outcome, or if it is the fact that these transformations in how issue opponents view one another occur in pretty much every encounter.

They are having a discussion with a person, not an issue. It’s impossible to “other” a person sitting across the table from you.

And so we return to “love of country”. A country can be an idea, of course, but I choose to think of a country, at least the one in which I live, as simply another way to describe a people. In this case Americans. JFK asking what you can do for your country has always sounded to me like what you can do for your countrymen. All of those folks we loosely call Americans, whether they live around the corner, down the block, or on the other side of the Continental Divide. Americans who, hot button issues notwithstanding, have more in common with a super majority of every other American than we do with, say, Italians or Australians. Most of the things most immediately important to us are closer to neighborhood issues than grand global issues. For whatever it’s worth I think this is also true in odd numbered years where most of our ads are for bad nutrition and possibly good medications (with impossibly scary side effects), rather than folks approving an ad telling us that other folks are bad, or evil, or simpletons.

Since the Civil war we’ve somehow made it through each and every period of unrest and upheaval, our nation intact, our institutions standing. We have, as a people, lived quiet lives largely undiscovered by any but our families, our friends and neighbors, and those who pass quietly by as they do the same. The “influencer economy” notwithstanding, almost none of us gets our “15 minutes of fame”. We are all closer to anonymous than any kind of familiar, let alone famous.

What can we do for our country today, next Wednesday and each day after that? We could do much worse than simply seeing each of those other mostly anonymous travelers as much more the same as we are than not. Seeing them not as “other” but as simply the friendly acquaintance we’ve not yet met, only a block away from a conversation over a cup of coffee or a cocktail about all of the things we share, despite whatever there is that we don’t. Seeing each other as a person and not an opinion.

True leaders never ask any of their followers to do something they cannot do. I always felt that JFK had faith in the people he led that they would, indeed, seek the best for not only their country but also for all Americans with whom they shared it. Heaven knows that I am not JFK, but I have the same faith in all of us, that we, too, will rise together next week, and next month, and for all of the nexts that follow. We will see each other not as a position but as a person.

“…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” –George Elliot (HT to my friend Bruce K.)

For our country. For each other. For ourselves.

Come what may we will all be here next week. I’ll see you then…

How good is that phrase, eh? It comes to us courtesy of “Crankshaft”, the character from the comics. There are all kinds of ways to draw that particular curve. Crankshaft, a bus driver who had a cup of coffee as a minor league pitcher, limits himself to very rare occasions of reminiscing. He wanted more in those days, and he misses them terribly. Yet, in his tortured wisdom, he realizes that he can’t go back, and he can never change either what came before or what came after.

So he visits that time, opens a window to that little room tucked away in his attic rarely and for the briefest of moments, lest his yearning increase.

Times like those, times like Crankshaft’s stint as a pitcher for the Toledo Mudhens, are the classic double-edged sword. When distressed a quick visit can re-set your compass or fill your tank just enough to get through whatever it is that’s got you down. Spend too much time there, in Toledo for example, and nothing in the here and now might measure up. The yearning can overwhelm the living.

Some places and some times were so special that the yearning can become an irresistible force, driving you back in real time to bring your present day self to Toledo. The yearning curve as a boomerang, if you will. My in-laws gave in to this and re-visited Cap Ferrat in Southern France. They yearned to walk the quaint streets of their young marriage, to eat a breakfast of fresh milk and baguettes left in the box outside their tiny apartment while gazing at the impossibly blue waters of a harbor dotted with tiny sailboats. What they got, of course, was the hustle, bustle and hurley-burley of a modern tourist trap en Francais.

The yearning curve is never a circle.

One can also find themselves somewhere along a yearning curve for something that never actually occurred. A wish for a life that turned out very differently from what one was hoping for, for instance. You had hopes for a particular career, and unlike Crankshaft you never really even got as far as Triple A, let alone made it to the majors. Never even got the first job. You yearn for the life you thought you were going to have.

Or maybe you had a vision for how your family would turn out. Courtship and marriage would lead to a lifelong love affair. Children would arrive, grow and thrive, and then return, at least now and again, to your nest. Perhaps they would have their own children along, your grandchildren in tow. You had a young family and you looked ahead and saw your life as it should be. As yours was, if yours was that lovely. Some find themselves on the yearning curve due to tragedy; the life they yearn for was stolen by the death of a child, for instance. Still others, through no fault of their own, find themselves outside the hearth, all of their love there to be given silently, from afar.

All of them find themselves yearning not for the life they once had but for the one they had every reason to think they would have, now left only to share their love silently, from afar.

A very nice bunch of older college buddies, mostly football teammates, included me and a couple of other “youngsters” in an epic email thread dedicated to college memories. It’s been fun reading it these last 10+ years. When we allow ourselves to “remember” we all ran the 40 in 4.5 seconds or less. Everyone maxed his bench press each time we lifted. Each or us had a full head of long flowing hair, and we always got the girl. A magical place and a magical time, indeed. It can be easy to yearn for a place like that. In another place and another time I looked not back but ahead, and looked at a life that was such a normal expectation that it seemed inconceivable that it wouldn’t turn out more, rather than less, exactly that way. For sure that’s how it was in Beth’s family, and in mine as well. That our reality would instead be that the love we had, that we expected to freely share, would become little more than a never-made memory tucked away in a closet, like Crankshaft, there to be glimpsed rarely and sparely, at our own peril, well…

But those college days, like my in-laws’ Cap Ferrat ca. 1975 and Crankshaft’s cup of coffee with the Mud Hens, are no longer there. They only exist in a picture, or an email thread, or behind a door or a window in the attics of our minds, available for a brief visit when the yearning curve peaks. That life we imagined in which we shared love far and wide, openly and often, never actually occurred. It, too, exists now only in an old picture, a Facebook or Instagram post, a yearning for something that should have happened but somehow didn’t.

Like the yearning curve that brings you ever back to Toledo.

I’ll see you next week…

1 Newspaper. While I am certainly not above whining if my morning newspapers arrive in time for dinner, or Heaven forbid are totally AWOL, I do wish to give a virtual (and most assuredly unheard) huzzah to both of the folks who brought my Sunday tomes this AM. Pouring rain. Each paper double wrapped in plastic.

That there’s just nice peopling.

2 Mugwump. Fence-sitter or fence-sitting. British word. I know we Americans speak English, just like the Brits.

Sometimes they just do it with a bit more style, ya know?

3 Anniversary. It’s been a couple of weeks since I’ve had a chance to sit down on a Sunday and empty out my internal hard drive by musing. Missed writing about my 39th Wedding Anniversary! Beth and I were on the road for my nieces wedding in Bar Harbor Maine. Lovely place, that. Bar Harbor. Despite the fact that we have a number of places that we each wish to see for the first time, I think Beth and I agree that the coast of Maine was unexpectedly spectacular in all respects.

We plan to find a reason to return, for sure.

39 years married. 42 together. What a ride! I know I have written about this in the past, but we get asked all the time if there is a secret to our marriage. To our love. We have two, neither of which is all that complex, and at least for us, neither of which feels or felt all that difficult over the years. Marriage is not a 50/50 proposition, it’s 100/100; both partners make a primary commitment to the marriage. Never stop courting. Beginning when our firstborn was still a baby we have been on at least one date every week. One night at least, when we are simply two people in love, together, doing the stuff that people do when they are in love. Remember, the honeymoon isn’t over until you say it is!

I do so love you, Dollie.

4 Obituary. James R. Hagerty is the obituary writer/editor for the Wall Street Journal. Once upon a time he wrote a moving opinion piece about the value of writing your own obit. I think he may have included his most recent personal effort writing his own, but my memory may be foggy. No matter. Somewhere I wrote up a draft of my own which is long lost by now, although I did choose the picture I’d like included if I should depart in the nearish future.

Hagerty didn’t give any specific instructions on the picture thing, but the one I’m thinking about really reminds me of what I think I look like at this stage in life.

Writing in this week’s Sunday Times Opinion section Kelly McMasters sorta one-ups Hagerty in her piece: “Why I Write My Obituary Every Year”. It’s a gem of a piece, written around a tight prompt and literally brimming with delicious word nuggets that describe her rationale and her process. “Reflecting on your life isn’t as maudlin as it may seem.” Some of her autobiobituaries were little more than an accounting of the life lived, the most recent iteration simply an update of the previous year’s effort. After particularly unimpressive years she admitted to a bit of embellishment, inventing “facts” that would surely occur if only she lived long enough for them to make it into her last final word. It’s a funny little quirk, that: an aspirational obituary. A forward looking, backward glance.

Ms. McMasters quotes the Times reporter Margalit Fox from the documentary “Obit”: Obituaries have next to nothing to do with death and absolutely everything to do with life. McMasters: “It seems dreadfully unfair that we wait until after our deaths to write them and never get to read them ourselves. Writing your obituary while you’re still alive can offer clarity about your life and, mercifully, if you find something lacking, you still have time to revise.”

I really like this. As easy as it is for me to do most of the writing in which I indulge, I found it terrifically difficult to write the obituaries for my Dad and then my Mom, even though I knew exactly what I wanted them to say. The process was equal parts heartbreaking and gut-wrenching, so heavy was the weight carried while writing those final chapters. Perhaps writing my own might ease the pain that a loved one may feel if they were so chosen, even if my effort is just an outline for how my people wish to remember me rather than the last version of how I remembered myself.

Living is so much more than simply being alive. More than just not dying today. I was totally taken by surprise by Ms. McMasters’ piece today, and I’m not nearly well enough prepared to update my obituary in time for “Sunday musings…”, at least not this week. I don’t know exactly when I will do so, or if I will try to do it every year, but reading this piece was one of those times when I totally and completely got the author’s perspective, and felt like she knew I was here and was gently encouraging me to listen, to think about more than staying alive.

“[The] obituary exercise taught me the practice and value of holding death close, so I could remember to live.”

I’ll see you next week…

In my travels, and those of my oldest friends and acquaintances, I have come across scores of people who are truly happy. Capable of feeling and giving in to joy. It’s such a special thing to see, and even better to in some way feel a part of that joy, wherever it may be from and whatever may have brought it to life. It’s out there, you know. Sometimes it’s subtle, as gentle and quiet as the proverbial footstep of a butterfly landing on a leaf. Other times it is raucous and riotous and simply blasts through your space like a runaway train.

That’s kinda cool.

Sadly, there are others out there who resent the joy in others. Whether they are themselves happy or not so much, the happiness of another feels to them like losing. It’s more than envy in the unhappy. For these folks it’s as if there is a finite about of happiness and joy in the world; no matter how much of either they may have at any one time they cannot see another’s joy without feeling as if it is somehow draining the reservoir from which they may drink some time in the future. Weird, huh? They sometimes seem more fixated on the blessings of others than on their own, so much so that their own joy slowly seeps away.

Happiness and joy are not limited resources. Quite the contrary. My happiness, my joy is not predicated on your unhappiness or your sorrow, and vice versa. Heavens, if one person’s happiness could come only from another’s despair we’d have long ago slipped into a rather dismal anarchy. No, joy is the ultimate non-zero sum measure. More than that, joy is an exponential multiplier. When you find or see joy in someone else and that vision makes you happy, the amount of happy you get is a full order of magnitude greater than it should be. If that joy and happiness should come to someone who has lately had little of either, well, that’s just so much the better.

Life is pretty good around Casa Blanco right now, and as much as I’d like to think that means it will always be thus that’s not how life works. Regardless, if I should stumble upon you in the midst of something joyous you can be sure that no matter what happens to be going on in my little world I’m surely not going to resent you or your joy. Quite the opposite. I’m going to revel into your happiness and dive into the wake of your joy.

Whether the skies be cloudy or eggshell blue, a glimpse of the sun always warms everyone it touches.

Sunday musings…

It was a Tuesday. For sure. Tuesday is an OR day for me, and I was with my work people on what looked to be a pretty vanilla Tuesday morning. That’s how you like it in the OR: vanilla. A good day is no memory of the operations whatsoever. A great day is one where you remember some interaction with your teammates, something good or funny or nice.

9/11 was definitely a Tuesday. What I remember is being with one group of my people.

Everything about the day was going just like every other Tuesday. Fast cases with great results. Stories flying back and forth between doc, nurses and patients. Just a joy to be doing my job. Until, that is, one of the nurses came into my room and said a plane had hit a tower. To a person our collective response was something like “huh…that’s weird. How tragic,” and then back to work. Back to normal until that very same nurse came back and said a second plane had hit the second tower. We all stopped after that case and headed to the family lounge, a TV and CNN.

I remember being in a similar place when the Challenger blew up, surrounded by colleagues, patients and families. That’s where I was when the first tower collapsed. After that nothing was normal about the day at all. There is literally nothin in my memory banks about the rest of the morning. I know we finished the cases, but then everything came to a full and complete stop. Clinic hours were cancelled, schools let out, and the wheels of American life ground to a halt. The rest of the day was spent in tracking down my brother (traveling now by car from Chicago to Connecticut), and best friend (stranded in Brazil). The skies were empty for days.

Our new normal had just kicked in.

My parents worried about an attack on our soil from Germany to the east (U-Boats off the coast of New England) or Japan from the west (a friend posted the story of a Japanese pilot who actually fire-bomb Oregon!). As a child our politics and our lives were spent worrying about the specter of a communist attack. As an adult, a father and a grandfather, it is now the fear of Jihad unleashed. The post-Reagan/post-Berlin Wall years of relative peace and security seem so very long ago now, don’t they?

The reality, of course, is that we are far safer than we think we are. Yet our own personal realities are driven by the same psychology that led our parents to fear a coastal invasion, for us to fear Russian bombers. We march on each day, as we must. We march on so that each day’s completion becomes one more tiny victory in yet another long war fought for us mostly between the ears, so much like the Cold War before it. We seek victory once again in the daily act of living our normal lives.

We remember, though. Like I remember that it was a Tuesday. We never forget, nor should we try to forget. It is in the remembering and carrying on despite the remembering that we do our tiny part to honor those who were lost. Today is a day to take a moment away from normal to remember.

I remember.

Here is what I wrote on “Sunday musings…” 10 years after 9/11. I am re-posting it today. Really, this should have been an annual thing. 9/11 was, and should continue to be, a very big deal.

1) GPS. Where were YOU? 9/11/01 is the equivalent of “Where were you when JFK was shot”, or “Where were you when Pearl Harbor was bombed?” We chatted about this at dinner chez bingo the other night. I was in the OR with a full schedule when the first plane hit. I came out in time to watch the second one hit, and then was between cases when the second building went down.

Never forget.

2) Plain talk. 9/11 is almost routinely called a tragedy, especially now, 10 years on. This is pretty much the only way I’ve seen it described in all types of media, mainstream and otherwise. Well, it is, and it isn’t.

The killings of nearly 4000 people on U.S. soil was tragic for each one of them, and truly tragic for their friends and families. But a tragedy? I say no. A tragedy implies some element of fate, something about which no single person could have stood up and prevented. Think the Tsunami in Japan. Mudslides in South America. An avalanche or wildfire out of control. THOSE are tragedies resulting in death.

No, 9/11 was filled with a tragic loss of life, but the only fate involved was so banal that if beggars the definition of fate: did you go to work that Tuesday morning? The deaths of 9/11 are the direct result of pure, unadulterated EVIL. They represent nearly 4000 killings. Purposeful killings. Mass murder perpetrated on civilians so far removed from any war zone that to even call them “non-combatants” is a meaningless over-reach. Calling 9/11 a “tragedy” cheapens the word, cheapens the loss, puts the soft glow of unavoidable fate on what was nothing of the sort.

9/11 was EVIL. Call it what is was.

3) Press “up”. Funny, after 10 years you’d think we’d have heard all of the “hero” stories by now, huh? Apparently not. Seems there were some folks who did some pretty heroic things who just never got around to telling anyone. Like those 2 Air National Guard pilots who scrambled after the plane that eventually went down in PA with UNARMED JETS. Yup. No missiles or bullets on board. They took off with complete knowledge that they would not only have to face the specter of shooting down fellow citizens, but “shooting down” actually meant using their aircraft as missiles.

It’s crazy, even after 10 years, to think of how many heroes stood before life’s elevator or stairwell and pushed “up”. Safety was “down”, out, anywhere but “up”, and yet up they went. Cops, firefighters, and two unarmed fighter pilots who just happened to be a little higher when they chose to go “up”. These men and women, on the ground floor at several Ground Zeros, have been followed honorably by thousands of other American heroes toiling anonymously, and SUCCESSFULLY, to prevent other evil doers from killing other Americans.

I’m still awestruck, 10 years on.

4) Epilogue. So, what did you take away from 9/11? Did anything change? Anything stay with you? Couple things for me. The first thing, regrettably and to my great embarrassment, is that it took a tragic event like 9/11 for me to really look at a huge swath of Americans I’d never really paid much attention to before. This would be Police Officers, Firefighters, and any variety of men and women in the Armed Forces. This was still 4+ years before I discovered CrossFit mind you, but our collective respect for, and willingness to acknowledge, these men and women is a small positive outcome that I believe persists 10 years on.

I had an epiphany of sorts 10 days after 9/11. The particular trigger (I really disliked a certain golf course) was trivial, but I was primed by 9/11 to be open to the “Aha!” moment. I discovered that the things that make me unhappy make me more unhappy than the things that make me happy, make me happy. Seems kinda simple I guess, but it was like a bolt from the blue. I realized that, once identified as such, things that made me unhappy could be avoided downstream. You don’t always get to choose only the stuff that makes you happy (Polyanna doesn’t live here anymore), and you don’t even necessarily get to always choose to avoid stuff that makes you unhappy, but it’s amazing how often you CAN if you try just a little. A life changer that I was able to notice because, well, I was thinking a whole lot about life after watching so many lose theirs.

I’m not saying that anyone else should have had this particular epiphany on or about 9/11, or ANY epiphany for that matter, but I do wonder, is there something that changed, something you’ve carried with you since that day. Since 9/11/01? 10 years on?