Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

The secret to success just might be failure. Not abject failure, of course (although it’s always cool to use the word ‘abject’), nor consistent failure. But failure while pushing one’s limits or while exploring the new and the unknown might be the magic ingredient in the success recipe.

Why? Success is not simply the absence of failure, it is the defeat of failure. Success is over-coming failure. Indeed, without having failed at something some time, how do you know what success is? How do you know what it’s supposed to feel like?

Neither success nor failure need be any particular size. Small successes build confidence, and smallish failures teach. It’s important to qualify acceptable failures, though. Failure caused by sloppiness or laziness is ALWAYS bad. On the other hand, failure encountered while stretching beyond one’s limits, while reaching for something new, large, important…well…that’s the type of failure from which lessons are learned.

It takes a certain chutzpa to put one’s self at risk to fail while in the act of reaching further. I like Churchill’s take on it: “Success is never final. Failure is never fatal. It’s courage that counts.”

Be brave.

Quiet house. Quiet lake. Quiet mind? Not so much.

When you are riding high, hitting all of your numbers, looking out over a quiet lake as far as the eye can see and embarking on another stretch of smooth sailing, are you the type that rides the crest of that wave with the carefree joy it deserves? Or are you rather the sort that cannot shake the awareness that below your tranquil waters there lies a hidden reef that portends despair should you happen upon it? The question is more than just the old “are you an optimist or a pessimist” saw, I think. At its core lies one of the keys to happiness: can you live in a happy moment without simultaneously giving space to another darker, sadder moment?

During the dance are you always on edge waiting for the other shoe to drop?

None among us lives a life filled with only joy and happiness. Indeed, there are those whose lives are a proverbial slog from one tragic moment to another. Blessedly, in our developed world, these “treadmills of tragedy” are actually quite rare. Likely as rare as the Unicorn lives filled with nothing but rainbows and Skittles. No, for most of us it’s simply a question of degree leavened by, I dunno, attitude I guess. Do we approach the smorgasbord of our lives as ones of “quiet desperation” as so many novelists propose, or do we rather travel in a state of “careless joy”?

Beth and I are hosting friends this weekend at Casa Blanco, the invitation having come spontaneously months prior and quite amazingly accepted and consummated. The one, a classmate from college, I’ve known for 40 years. The other is my classmate’s relatively new love. How they’ve arrived together at Casa Blanco is quite fascinating. One has lived a life which from the outside seems to have been charmed beyond belief, while the other has struggled mightily to overcome significant childhood traumas. One looks back and muses on choices made and how things might have turned out if present day insights might have been available when earlier crossroads were encountered, while the other has doggedly worked through each treacherous road into and out of those crossroads.

What they have in common, at least this weekend, is the apparent ability to live fully within the joy of whatever moment they are experiencing right now, without allowing the intrusion of the “other shoe”. I am quite sure that each has some something that weighs on the balance toward the negative side of the ledger, but for the life of me I haven’t seen it. Pollyanna or a gift? I’m going with “gift” and furthermore I’m going with being able to watch this couple give themselves completely to each moment we’ve shared as one of the most meaningful “hostess” gifts Beth and I have ever received.

Those couple of things in my life (or yours, or my friends’) that are sitting there ruining your winning streak? That other shoe you just know will drop at an inopportune moment? Meh, they aren’t going away regardless of how you decide to engage with the joyful steps in your life, on your journey. Right now there’s a workout to plan and a lake to jump into. Bacon’s on the griddle while I watch the chickadees eat breakfast. Tapping or shuffling, the sound of the shoes is that of happy dancing, and I am taking my cue from our guests and simply listening.

That other shoe will drop whenever. I’m too busy dancing to worry about it.

“When he lost his life, it was all he had left to lose.” –from “Curtis Low” (Lynard Skynard)

At the moment I am in a hotel in Las Vegas preparing to depart. This weekend I congregated with some of my closest professional colleagues and friends as we prepared ourselves for a rather large cooperative project with one of the larger companies in my part of American healthcare. While the weekend seemed to fly by, now that I am alone in my room ready to travel alone to the airport on my way to fly alone along with 200 or so other folks, it seems like an awfully long time since I left home.

Vegas tends to make me feel that way. It’s hard to imagine the real people who live there for real (apologies to my good friends Eva and Doug who do, indeed, happily live there). It always seems to me that everyone is either arriving or departing. Maybe it’s because I was so deeply affected by the Nicolas Cage and Elizabeth Shue movie “Leaving Las Vegas”; Cages character went to Las Vegas in order to leave, forever.

Catching up on newspapers piled up while I was away I happened upon an article written by David Gregory, former moderator of “Meet the Press”. Mr. Gregory was on a bit of a spiritual quest, one that coincided with some turmoil in his professional life. As part of this journey he spent some time with an Erica Brown, a Jewish educator. After listening to his professional laments she offered this stunner: who would you be if you lost it all?

Stopped me right in my tracks, that one did.

Think about that for a minute. How the question was phrased and what she was asking. Not “what would you do?” or “how would you handle it?” but “who would you be?” The implication is that who you are at any given moment is only one version of who you might be capable of being given different circumstances, however wonderful or unpleasant.

Spend a few more minutes thinking about what it means to lose it all. For Mr. Gregory it meant losing his dream job, a job in which who he was became inextricably linked to what he did. I get that, but Mr. Gregory is still able to seek employment as a journalist, still able to work in his field. What if you could no longer do that? Say you’re a doctor and you lose either the ability or the right to practice medicine? Think “The Fugitive”. Trust me, doctors are way more wrapped up in the “what I do is who I am” thing than journalists. Just thinking about that makes me sick to my stomach. Imagine if you couldn’t work at all. Couldn’t support yourself or your loved ones and had to depend on others. That’s starting to close in a little bit more on “losing it all” I think. Who would you be then?

There’s no way of knowing if Ms. Brown meant to go this deeply, but in the developed world we live pretty well, and there’s actually a boatload of stuff we take for granted that could be lost. What if you lost your freedom? You are incarcerated, or in some way someone gains so much leverage over you that you must do their every biding. Who would you be, what part of who you have the capability of being would come to the fore if you were no longer free? Joe Coughlin, the central character in a Dennis Lehane novel I just finished compromised his father’s position as a police captain in order to buy favor and therefore survive in prison. He lost his freedom, and then he became a man without a moral compass, ruining and even taking lives in pursuit of other men’s goals.

But even at that, Coughlin hadn’t yet lost everything. What brought him to that precipice was the loss of his people. You’ve watched “Law and Order” I’m sure. I don’t remember many individual episodes of any series I ever watch, but one “Law and Order” dealing with loss comes to mind. The detectives discover a man in an institution who is mute, nearly catatonic. They need his testimony; he is the only witness to a heinous crime. In order to gain access to his memory they obtain a court order to treat him for his depression. His recovery is miraculous, and initially he is grateful for his awakening, grateful to meet distant relatives who are delighted for the return of an uncle they’d lost. All well and good until it is time to testify and we learn that he lost his job, his ability to work, and his entire immediate family in that heinous crime. Awakening means remembering that he has truly lost it all.

Who would you be if you lost it all? This poor man had nothing, and he discovered that without his people he was no one. Who would you be? His answer was no one at all. He refused treatment and slid back inward to nothing.

There’s a point here. A couple of them, actually. The first is that each one of us has much, much more of pretty much everything than we realize. Most of what we might lose is not really all that close to any type of “everything”, and that should inform how we view what we do have and what we are willing to do to keep it. Who would you be BEFORE losing something in order to not actually lose it? To know this is to know what we are willing to do if we need to fight not to lose everything.

Read this backwards from here. It hurts to lose stuff. It’s hard to get by with less money if you’ve tasted more, especially if you think you’ve become someone else because of that stuff, and worse if you kinda like that someone; losing that kind of job stings. Time and again, though, we see that true loss is less easily quantified than a spreadsheet or income statement or title. To lose your people is to truly lose everything. No amount of fight is too great to not have to learn who you would be after this type of loss. Losing your freedom makes it easier to lose your people. Someone else plots your every course. Who you are needs to be someone who does as much as humanly possible to remain free.

Mr. Gregory seems to have made this leap. In the end his job was simply what he did at the time for work. Losing it actually brought his spiritual quest home, to his people. That’s the other point, right? It’s your people. You’ve not lost everything if you’ve not lost your people. Know who your people are and hold them close. Cherish and nurture them. Do it out loud and without either fear or shame.

Do whatever it takes to never have to learn who you would be if you did, truly, lose everything.

I landed on “Cool Hand Luke” while surfing yesterday. Man, was Paul Newman something, or what? For all of his faults, and despite being guilty of whatever landed him in that prison camp, Luke was resolved to fight the injustice of his existence. He was resolved not to lose the essence of who he was, despite the hardships imposed on him by those who would break him, break his will, make him relinquish that which made him, well, cool.

Movies are usually an escape for me. I’m not often prompted to terribly deep thought while watching. But I wondered, what of my life that occasionally seems so hard, is actually hard enough that I must bend from a true course? And if it is, indeed, that hard, how long could I hold out against the constancy of the difficulty, like Luke, before I broke?

Luke, knowing that he may finally be broken, seeks answers in the church he forswore. He stands in a doorway. “What we have here is a failure to communicate”. A last act of defiance, or a capitulation? One is left to wonder: did He answer?

1. Summer. Since the dawn of empty-nesterhood I have maintained that without school-aged children in the household, summer is over whenever we decide it’s over. We took our little antique runabout “Jet Ski” out of the water yesterday.

Summer is over.

2. Why do you “put your 2 cents worth” in, but it’s only “a penny for your thoughts”? Where’s that extra penny going?

3. Plinth. A heavy base supporting a statue or vase.

No way I guess that.

4. Cellphone. The only question I have is why did it take so long for public schools to ban cellphones during the school day? It’s patently ridiculous to allow children to have anything that might distract them from the two tasks at hand: acquire the education that has been made available to you, and learn how to live peacefully side-by-side with people who do not live with you under the same roof. It’s ludicrous to expect that children who cannot be counted on to tie their shoes will demonstrate the discipline necessary to ignore this singular temptation of the present era.

Heck, when I was in grade school chewing gum in class was considered inconsistent with the ability to acquire familiarity with the 3 R’s. Somehow a cellphone is ok?

What is astonishing is that the only meaningful (if you can call something so ridiculous meaningful) push-back has come from parents who are concerned that they cannot contact, or be contacted by their children. When they are in school. In the classroom. Sorry, but this is patently ridiculous. Actually, not sorry at all. I simply cannot envision something so earth-shakingly important that I as a parent would need to text or call my school-aged child. Got a true emergency? Call the principal’s office. They still have a landline for Heaven’s sake.

Cellphones have no business in school. One could make the same case for literally any internet-connected device from kindergarten through grad school.

5. Discourse. How has it come to this? How could we as a country, as a people possibly have arrived at a place where people can respond to an assassination of an American citizen on American soil with anything other than horror and sorrow? Where once every such event was followed by universal calls for calm, for peace, for prayers for the deceased and their families, what are we to make of elected officials in our nation’s capital screaming at each other over whether they will offer condolences and prayers? How is it possible that we have people who openly rejoice that someone was shot and killed in public? Who share video of the killing as if they were there to witness it?

How has it come to this?

We have been here as citizens of a country at least twice before. A true Constitutional crisis in the 1860’s led to The Civil War. The 1960’s were a time of War, a time when a generational schism over an unpopular war in which thousands of Americans died, an unpopular draft sent thousands of young Americans into that War, was tinder for the embers of the flames that were lit during that Civil War. The battles over The Civil Rights Act and the rest of Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society legislation set large blocks of Americans against one another.

And yet the assassination of the Martin Luther King, Jr., the leading figure in the Civil Rights movement, did not lead to the kind of malevolent declarations from both public and private figures we witnessed either this past week, or when a legislator from Minnesota was killed. No, with the exception of small radical groups that spoke for a splinter of American citizenry, back then what we heard was universal shock, universal horror across all of the population. Leaders at all levels counseled calm. Pleaded for it. Robert F. Kennedy (v 1.0) gave a speech in which he fairly begged for peace, for the kind of respectful and measured public and private discourse that Dr. King was rightly famous for.

Those most deeply wounded by the assassination declined to take up arms. With only small exceptions, declined the urge to seek, or even speak of revenge. That RFK himself should perish at the hands of a madman was almost too painful to comprehend, and yet here, too, the nation responded not with revenge but with profound sadness. To be sure not everyone loved either MLK or JFK, and yet what we heard and saw after their horrific deaths was sorrow.

Where in the world has that instinct disappeared to and why?

None of this makes any sense to me. None of this “if you’re not 100% with us we are 100% against you” makes any sense to me. I do not pledge any type of fealty to any “100% or 0” group but rather live in the great center along with what I’m willing to bet is an overwhelming super-majority of Americans. It matters not whether I am center/left or center/right, like so many I seem to be able to find less radical aspects of both camps that make sense to me.

Even at times when I have a deep visceral dislike for an individual for whatever reason–I found, and continue to find former President Clinton to be a man without a moral compass, and yet some of his domestic positions seem almost Moses-like now–I am a man of ideas and I decide where I stand by parsing ideas. Because of this there are 100%ers who would say I lack the standing to comment on anything, let alone how to address what is today being called political violence.

I respectfully disagree. I am an example of someone with the perfect standing to respond.

To do so we must first discuss what it is that is so very different in the 2020’s compared with the 1860’s and 1960’s: today it is altogether possible, nay easy to become cloistered among others who skew 100%. We hold in our hands the key that unlocks a chamber that is no less secured from other voices than any medieval monastery, convent, or coven: the connected device. Where once you simply couldn’t avoid contact with what the elders of my wife’s youth would call “them others”, now all it takes is a cellphone and earbuds. What might begin as a bit of a leaning turns into an algorithm-driven echo chamber. One begins to see smaller and smaller deviations from that 100% fealty as the flag of otherhood.

Until “other” becomes “enemy”.

This is nothing new coming from me. I have said time and time again that those things that we share, the ideas that we have in common, overwhelmingly dwarf those that we do not. We do not need anyone’s help to find out where to start: start by talking about the things we agree on. We can start by agreeing that shooting people with whom we disagree is wrong. It’s just bad. This is really low-hanging fruit. It’s sad that it even needs to be said. When someone is actually killed over the stuff that is getting folks on both sides of our political spectrum shot, we can start by agreeing that the proper thing for everyone to say, especially our political and cultural leaders, is that such a death is wrong. It is a bad thing. It is something that we should be profoundly sad about, and we should say just that.

Out loud and often.

Doing this is something that literally all of us can do. Left, right, somewhere in the middle, wherever Libertarians would say they “live”, all of us can and should do this. Governor Cook of Utah got it right. Secretary Buttigieg got it right (Sorry, none of the prominent Libertarians weighed in on the Sunday talking heads shows). The other stuff is really hard and requires an equal effort from the spineless (most of our elected officials) and soulless (the cretins who deliberately set loose the algorithms that seduce and capture) to take actions that do not solely result in their own good fortune. While I continue to assert my standing I admit to the probability that I lack the knowledge and the expertise in things on a national or societal level to reverse the drive to dive inward, and to replace it with outward.

I confess that I do not know how to lead the movement to take interactions that happen over an electronic connection that is disconnected from geography and time and replace them with those that happen in person. At arms length. It’s just really hard to see nothing but “other” or enemy in someone who is sharing their ideas and their feelings while sitting across a table, staring over a couple of beers or a cup of coffee. It’s so much easier to remember how much we share with each other, how much more we have in common than not, when we get off our computers and our tablets, turn off our phones, and talk to one another.

Or maybe I do. Maybe all it takes is to talk to one another until arms length turns naturally and inevitably into an embrace.

I’ll see you next week…

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.

“Billy Ray (not his real name, of course) turned off his implantable defibrillator (ICD) yesterday. Billy Ray is 44.

In my day job I was asked to evaluate him for a problem in my specialty. I was told he was about to enter hospice care and assumed that he was much, much older and simply out of options. I admit that I was somewhat put out by the request, it being Saturday and the problem already well-controlled. Frankly, I thought it was a waste of my time, Billy Ray’s time, and whoever might read my report’s time, not to mention the unnecessary costs. I had a very pleasant visit with Billy Ray, reassured him that the problem for which I was called was resolving nicely, and left the room to write my report.

44 years old though. What was his fatal illness? What was sending him off to Hospice care? I bumped into his medical doc and couldn’t resist asking. Turns out that Billy Ray has a diseased heart that is on the brink of failing; without the ICD his heart will eventually beat without a rhythm and he will die. A classic indication for a heart transplant–why was Billy Ray not on a transplant list? Why, for Heaven’s sake, did he turn off his ICD?

There is a difference between being alive and having a life. It’s not the same to say that one is alive and that one is living. It turns out that Billy Ray suffered an injury at age 20 and has lived 24 years in unremitting, untreatable pain. Cut off before he even began he never married, has no children. Each day was so filled with the primal effort to stop the pain he had little left over for friendship.

Alive without a life. Alive without living. Billy Ray cried “Uncle”.

I have been haunted by this since I walked out of the hospital. How do you make this decision? Where do you turn? Billy Ray has made clear he has no one. Does a person in this situation become MORE religious or LESS? Rage against an unjust G0d or find comfort in the hope of an afterlife? Charles DeGaulle had a child with Down’s Syndrome. On her death at age 20 he said “now she is just like everyone else.” Is this what Billy Ray is thinking? That in death he will finally be the same as everyone else?

And what does this say about each of us in our lives? What does it say about the problems that we face, the things that might make us rage against some personal injustice? How might we see our various infirmities when cast in the shadow of a man who has lived more than half his life in constant pain, a man alone? The answer, of course, is obvious, eh?

The more subtle message is about people, having people. Having family, friends, people for whom one might choose to live. It’s very easy to understand the heroic efforts others make to survive in spite of the odds, despite the pain. Somewhere deep inside the will to live exists in the drive to live for others. The sadness I felt leaving the hospital and what haunts me is not so much Billy Ray’s decision but my complete and utter understanding of his decision.

Billy Ray gave lie to the heretofore truism that “no man is an island”.

Go out and build your bridges. Build the connections to others that will build your will to live. Live so that you will be alive for your others. Be alive so that your life will be more than something which hinges on nothing more than the switch that can be turned off. Live with and for others so that you, too, can understand not only Billy Ray but also those unnamed people who fight for every minute of a life.

Be more than alive. Live.”

What is the meaning of a marriage? More so, what does it mean to enjoy a long, happy marriage? Today is the 40th Anniversary of the happiest day of my life, the day I married the love of my life, Beth. 40 years! Big number, that. We’ve been together for 43 years in all. I’ve written and talked about our marriage and our decades-long love affair many times before. Today is a day to visit once again how wonderful it’s all been.

Much ink and many electrons have been spilled lately on the topic of marriage. The demographics of marriage are said to have shifted. Young people have been putting off marriage until they have reached certain very specific milestones in their lives. Education, job, savings, a self-defined state of security, and only then, marriage. This pattern has been dubbed the “capstone” marriage: once the structure of a life is built the celebratory “edifice” is added. As an aside since this leads to first marriages that occur after age 30, this pattern has been blamed, at least in part, for the decline in the national birth rate in the U.S., especially among the college educated.

For the most part our generation seemed to look at marriage more like our parents and grandparents had. Beth and I met at ages 21 and 22, dated, lived together for a bit, and then married at 24 and 25. In our extended circles of friends and acquaintances we were kind of in the middle of the Bell Curve age-wise. Judging by the number of weddings we attended together, admittedly a very suspect data source, it sure seems in retrospect that a majority of the weddings in an around our groups and our families took place around 24 or 25, give or take a couple of years. Likewise, when it came to starting our families, it sure seems like we all got to it within a year or two after getting married.

Pundits of today describe marriages like ours as “cornerstone” marriages. It’s not just that they are similar to patterns described in prior generations when it comes to things like age at marriage and first offspring, it’s that they are the primary building block of our lives as we became adults. Marriage and all that comes with it was, and is, both the foundation of adulthood and the gravitational center around which we lived our lives. For Beth and for me, and for our siblings and so many of our friends, this is pretty much nail on the head.

Our marriage began as our cornerstone, and for 40 years has been the touchstone of our life.

So what’s the secret? How do you stay happy, stay excited, stay married for so long? We both get asked this all the time. Have been asked since very early in our marriage, actually. When asked we both start with the leg up that we had from having parents and grandparents who had very long one-marriage lives. Having role models, especially ones you loved and looked up to was a huge head start.

From the gift of a good start what came next was the commitment to build around our marriage by putting it first whenever we had decisions to make. Beth likes to say that the adage that everything has to be 50/50 in a marriage is wrong by 50%; putting your marriage first means that you both need to be 100% committed to both the marriage and to each other. It’s 100/100! 50/50 might be a very workable strategy when you are divvying up the household chores, but it’s only a halfway commitment.

As much influence as our parents, grandparents, and their married friends had on our outlook on marriage we were also very aware of the classic life stressors that seemed to lead to divorce, especially in medical families. So many marriages that seemed so successful during the child-raising years seemed to fall apart just after the nest emptied. In my mind’s eye I imagined an empty-nester couple sitting at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. They turn down a corner of their newspaper and realize that they don’t really know the person sitting across from them as anyone other than their parenting partner. Without conscious effort it seems all too easy to expend most or all of your time and energy supporting and raising a family, with little left over to support the marriage.

How can a couple avoid having to start all over again? The cornerstone only supports the house you’ve built if you continue to revisit it, touch it, and remember what it means. For us we declared that our courtship had never ended and so we never stopped dating.

Those dates were comical in the earliest days of our lives as parents. In those days of no time and less than no money a date might mean playing board games, holding hands while we watched “Hill Street Blues” or laughing together at silly stuff like “Alf”. We declared that Wednesdays would be “date night”. Out together as boyfriend and girlfriend, perhaps with another couple of two, never with a child in tow. Our first dates were pretty spartan affairs. With enough money for either a babysitter or an activity we opted to spring for the sitter and get out of the house. I remember holding hands at Burger King while we shared a cup of coffee. A “fancy” date might be sharing a cappuccino and reading magazines at Barnes and Noble.

Date night took wing when we moved into our first real house in Ohio and a neighbor gave us the phone number for the sisters who would be our babysitters for more than 10 years. Kerry and Chrissy became big sisters to our kids and little sisters to us, so much a part of the family that our kids were invited to both of their weddings. Beth and I signed up for ballroom dancing lessons. The perfect date night activity: hug your soulmate for 90 minutes every Wednesday so that you can practice dancing in your furniture-free living room every night after the kids go to bed!

And we still go out on dates every single week.

Was it easy getting here to year 40? Meh, nothing in life is easy, right? It never felt hard, though, and looking back it sure seemed like almost all of it was fun. I mean, every week I went out on a date with my girlfriend! No matter what was going on at home or at work we went left Mom and Dad at home and went out as Mr. and Mrs. And now here we are, married for 40 years, 43 years together. Put marriage first, 100% commitment, and never stop dating. As I drink my morning coffees and I turn down the corner of my newspapers I look at the woman who gave me the first happiest day of my life on Saturday, September 7, 1985.

And every day since.

Happy Anniversary, Dollie. I love you to the moon and back.

I’ll see you, 7 more happiest days of my life later, next week…

My darling wife Beth spent many of her formative years living in what was once a one-room schoolhouse and went on the be the family home to 4 generations of the Hurst Family. It’s been 8 or 9 years since we lost both of her parents, and with them many of the memories they carried from their younger lives. Beth visited some of those memories as she cleared out all of the closets of one family’s history. Here, then, is “The Curator”.

An attic is in many ways similar to the vast storage facilities that lie hidden beneath and above every museum you’ve ever visited. The exhibits you walk through are like the life you see being lived right in front of you. If you are an experienced museum goer the existence of that treasure trove of unseen artwork is something you know is there somewhere. For the archivist, all of that art is there for the asking.

A life remembered lives in the attic or the basement or the back of a closet in the remotest room in the house. Beth spent 3 long days and nights pulling together the totems of her parents lives from the nooks, crannies and crevasses of what is literally the Hurst family ancestral home. No fewer than 4 generations lived significant parts of their lives in what was once a tiny one-room schoolhouse surrounded by Amish and Mennonite farms. What an incredibly daunting task, that.

Hearing her tell of her task (we were “together” on speakerphone) was what it must have been like if you could have been an open ear at the excavation of St. Paul’s Cathedral in Rome. The attic had an attic; each closet had a closet. Every step further into each space unearthed another layer of the family’s history. Here a deed to the original schoolhouse, there the wedding certificate for her great great grandparents. Was her Dad a good student? Well, he had a pretty solid 3rd grade judging by his report card.

And the pictures! Oh my, yes, there were pictures. Beth and her sisters Lisa and Amy fell straight down the Schaeffer family tree. Who knew how much they looked like their Mom when they were all younger women? I got to see pictures of the stunning beauty I fell in love with some 35 years ago, a literal restoration of the portrait in my mind’s eye of our days of courtship. Treasures unearthed in the attic.

Stories, journals, histories, legends…they all came out of the attic’s attic and emerged from the closet’s closets. Beth’s “legs” fairly buckled under the responsibility of curation. What to keep? What should go? They are the last of their line, these Hurst sisters. Whatever was consigned to go would be forever gone. There are no more attics; there will be nothing to curate. She felt the presence of not only her parents but of their parents, and theirs, and theirs as well.

Is this nothing more than a melancholy musing on memory and loss? Maybe. There was a lesson in there, though, one that Mrs. bingo and I stumbled upon as we “walked” through those archives together. It didn’t have to happen like that. As it turns out each attic corner, each tiny closet contained notes and stories that lead, like so many tiny treasure maps, to the next discovery. Why had my in-laws not taken us all in hand and walked us together along those pathways? For sure there were stories that should have been buried elsewhere, art not meant to be seen by generations hence (note to self: remember this lesson when it is time), but still, we thought of the joy we could have shared had we just known these treasures were there to share. That’s the lesson my friends, one that Beth would agree afterward was worth the lonely emotional lifting she did as she curated a life remembered, archived like so many art treasures in the attics and closets filled over generations and hidden from view.

Someone may be alive today who’s been filling those attics. Find them. There is joy in the attic. Like so much that is joyful, to share your discoveries with those who created them is just too wonderful to let it pass now that you know that you don’t have to.

1) New love. “My parents have been married for 40 years, and they don’t really talk to each other like newly in love people do.” Meaghan Brown in Outside Magazine, Spring 2025.

Beth and I will celebrate our 40th wedding anniversary next weekend. I typically wake up first (still working, and all), and I honestly can’t wait for her to get up so that I can tell her how much I love her.

2) Audience. “Know your audience but don’t underestimate them.” Sydney Sweeney, actress/producer. WSJ Magazine Fall 2025.

I like this. The better I know my audience the better I tend to connect with them. The better I tend to provide some sort of value to those listening to me. What I think I will take from Ms. Sweeney’s quote is a little strategic tweak: Having done my homework studying my audience I will assume that they are up to the task of keeping up with whatever I am transmitting. If it becomes clear that I have overestimated them, either through faulty research or some other miscalculation, I will pivot in a way that better aligns my transmission to their reception “bandwidth”.

One thing worse than underestimating your audience is to speak “over” them, especially if you’ve recognized that you are flying at a different altitude. Demonstrating your respect for the audience is as important as any other part of the transmission.

3) Odds. “Don’t look at the odds. If you look at the odds, you won’t try anything.” Hoda Kotb in the WSJ Magazine Fall 2025.

This is good. Kinda lines up well with another quote I like: “If you’re not living on the edge you’re taking up too much space.” The new stuff, the true change-agent stuff isn’t typically found in the middle where you and your ideas are odds-on favorites to be right. Just like everyone else. Sometimes you just have to have faith that what you know about yourself and your footing out there on the edge is all you need to know. Look within for the courage to not just buck the odds, but ignore that there are odds there in the first place. Winston Churchill’s classic quote clinches this: “Success is never final. Failure is seldom fatal. It’s courage that counts.”

It takes courage to ignore the very existence of the odds.

4) Value. Friendship has a cost. There’s a price for each friendship, a certain trading level if you will. Think about your friendships, where you are financially with regard to your friends, how you talk about money together, deal with money when you are together.

People are weird about money. I was reminded about a couple of stories from my younger years that illustrate this. I grew up with two small groups of friends, one older and one my age. We were all sorta middle of middle-class economically, and our folks made all of us work for our spending money. I don’t ever remember “owing” any of these guys any money, and I don’t ever remember any of them owing me. We kinda fell into this “it’ll all work out” kinda thing; whoever had money bought the beer and/or the pizza. Our young family once dropped in on one of these guys en masse a few years ago and nothing had changed. We stayed for a week. Our wives had never met one another. I don’t remember, but I’m sure we bought some food or some wine or something; I’m equally sure that Tom doesn’t remember, either. Tom and I just knew it was gonna work out.

All of the “investments” we made all of those years ago paid out in spades.

When I was a young physician in training, missing both nickels to rub, Beth and I chose to live near some college mates, all of whom were doing very well, thank you. We received many very nice invitations to spend time with them at some very lovely places in and around NYC, Dutch treat, all of which would have required both nickels and then some. We couldn’t go, of course, and our invitations for them to join us in our very modest apartment for burgers and dogs always found them busy.

Only one friend understood, the one who had less when I had more when we were youngsters. In New York his family accepted all of our invitations, and his invitations were either to his home or on his dime, making it clear that it was HE who was getting the better of the deal because we were together. He remains my closest friend on earth.

I’ve been fortunate as an adult in that I’m relatively free of needs, and there have been times when I could cover the wants of my friends, or cover my wanting to cover them even if my friends were able. What’s interesting is how difficult it can be to have it be comfortable when someone is “treating”, especially with friendships that were formed after your trajectory has sent you well beyond school and first jobs, etc. It can be a little trickier to pull off the same “it’ll all work out and be even” thing, even with your closest friends. Think about it a minute: do you feel owed when you treat or that you owe when you are treated? To be fair this is almost universally the default mode, at least the “owing” someone for a generosity extended to you.

Beth and I are best friends with a couple we met in grad school in the ’80’s. It took 10 years AT LEAST for my buddy to stop keeping score when I was the one more able, to understand that I was actually the one getting more out of the deal because he and I were doing stuff together. Over our 40+ years of friendship we have moved in and out of periods where one or the other of us has been at least one nickel short. And yet, once we managed to stop looking at the tab, we have been free to do whatever it has taken for the two couples to be together. Bill and Nancy did all of the legwork on our recent early anniversary trip to Italy.

I never gave the nickels a single thought.

Last weekend I enjoyed a wonderful example of friends doing whatever it takes to be with each other. There are 8 of us who were originally brought together by our wives and the local pre-school PTA back when our kids were too young for even kindergarten. It’s been 30 years since we met for couples nights out as our wives’ plus-ones. Interestingly, the girls don’t really hang out very much any more. We’ve been playing golf and going out to breakfast together for decades, most recently for five days of golf in central Ohio. Everyone did whatever it is that they do best in this group. For some that meant choosing a menu, shopping, and making a meal for 8, remembering that two of the guys have a special dietary thing to consider. Others, like yours truly, simply show up with wine.

What we didn’t do is keep score on the tab. With the exception of the one big ticket item, lodging, we honestly all pretty much assumed that the numbers were going to work out.

There’s a cost to every friendship, a trading range if you will, and the greater the range between those involved the more difficult it can be if you look at it this way. For me, with those friendships like my close friends from high school, college, and my life as a young father that have passed the test of time, the money involved is nothing more than a measure of how much that friendship is worth.

The more we ignore the cost, the more valuable we find the friendship.

I’ll see you next week…