Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Greg Popovitch, former coach of the San Antonio Spurs, has a pretty good handle on what it takes to get a team to function as a unit rather than a collection of individuals. At the core of his strategy is the necessity for teammates to care about not only the team but also about one another. Before this can happen, though, they must first be interested in each other. They don’t need to hang out; they don’t even really have to like each other. Just be interested in who the other folks are and what makes them tick.

Interesting, huh?

Makes some sense, and seems to be a pretty actionable thing for any of us who work in or with a group. You know, like an small fitness club. Or a doctor’s office. Or whatever team you might be on at work. Think about your gym. Chances are you really know all kinds of stuff about the people you work out with. You probably know more about them than your neighbors, co-workers, or even some family members. Not only that but you’ve come to really care about whether they are meeting their goals not only in the gym but also outside. This wasn’t anything you set out to do, but once you were interested it just kinda happened as a matter of course.

Popovitch has found that when his players have some degree of caring about and for one another, they tend to be more successful. This is probably a universal truth if you think about it. Caring about your teammates means being concerned about not only your success but also the general success of your team. My bid is that this is just one more bit of the CrossFit experience that is transferable from the Box to everyday life, bringing that interest in your teammates out into the world and letting that interest morph into caring.

It’s easy; all it takes is a little interest.

When did a difference of opinion become a de facto conflict? When did the evaluation of another come down to whether or not they hue to a fine line of agreement on a single, or a few, or G0d forbid every issue? When did this phenomenon then morph into one in which a difference of opinion then becomes the basis for labeling another ‘good’ or bad’?

Am I the only one who’s noticed this?

I’m not talking about a difference of opinion which is then followed by a concerted attack, one that forces you to identify the holder of the other opinion as ‘bad’, and enemy. There’s nothing new to see there. One only has so many cheeks to turn. Eventually you need to fight or flee an attack, but that’s not what I’m talking about.

On a personal, local, and national level we could once identify broad stroke issues on which we could generally base a level of agreement or disagreement, very few of which would be a ‘deal-breaker’ when it came to civil discourse. The first part of this, the existence of broad stroke issues, remains true. What is fundamentally different in my mind is how un-moveable many of us have become on ever more minute details as we drill down from the 30,000 foot view. All well and good, I suppose, to seek fidelity to an ever more granular level of agreement on whatever issue is at hand, especially in this age when we have ever greater ways in which to find and connect with people of a like mind.

What I don’t get is the subsequent labeling of any and all others as “bad”. Unworthy. Lesser in some way because they do not agree at every level with a particular–very particular–point of view. As I remember it the “80-20” Rule pretty much applied to belief systems as well as business: if you shared 80% of your beliefs with another that was plenty good enough to allow a friendship, and certainly enough to inoculate against a conflict. Now? Seems like something more like the “980-20” rule: only the smallest amount of the most trivial difference of opinion is permissible. Anything more than nuance between people and they’re going to the mattresses. Anything more than nuance and we’ve identified something other, something lesser, something to destroy.

What’s up with that?

You could say that anything other than full devotion to a cause or a concept or a worldview is not pragmatism but something more akin to weakness. An inferiority of spirit, perhaps. You could say that nothing other than full devotion to some grand theme or concept is acceptable and brook no deviation from a one, true path. I would say that the world is infinitely too complex to approach life in this manner. I would further say that to do so needlessly isolates you from people who might very well bring infinite joy to your life despite differential nuance or even a fundamental disagreement on one issue. Living and letting live rather than identifying a different opinion as identifying the other as an enemy might just mean a more pleasant life filled with more people who might be better described as friends, or at least friendly.

At the very least perhaps we could just agree to disagree and be on our way.

Death has made a visit to our family once again. Not unlike the passing of my brother-in-law Peter’s Dad, the departure of “Poppy”, my sister-in-laws Dad was a familiar “Circle of Life” event that was just around the corner for some time. Beloved grandfathers to our nephews and nieces, Mr. Keith and Dr. Spector hadn’t been well for some time. If memory serves both men were in, or nearly in their 90’s. Their passing, as inevitable as it may have been, still caught everyone unaware. Unprepared. My sister-in-law Joanne had just been with her father. Like my experience with my Gama, Poppy died while Joanne was trying to get to him one last time.

I’ve told some version of this story many times. When I eulogized Gama I told the story of the young girl, perhaps 5 years old, standing in front of her grandfather’s coffin, stomping her feet in anger. “He CAN’T be dead. I wasn’t DONE with him yet.” That’s surely how I felt at 18 when my Gramp died; I sure wasn’t done with him yet, and neither do I think was anyone else. I never thought Gramp was done with all of us, either. Gama, though, alone for more than 15 years was almost certainly done. I didn’t know Mr. Keith all that well, but I know Joanne very well.

Joanne would have wanted more of her Dad, for sure. I was struck by the pain in my brother’s voice when he said that only one member of our parents’ generation is left to witness our children’s milestones. All but two remain.

But I’m comforted by the fact that, knowing Joanne, she quite naturally had said what I have also written as the things that might make that last goodbye, or more pertinent to this story not knowing that your recent goodbye was the last, a goodbye that might at least leave you peace. Credit for this goes to the sage hospice specialist from Dartmouth who gave the inaugural Ken Lee, M.D. memorial lecture, whose name I have sadly forgotten. The four things we should all say to our loved ones long before they are on the precipice. Long before we find ourselves sprinting to the finish line lest our loved one leaves before the saying.

Thank you.

Please forgive me.

I forgive you.

I love you.

We ought not wait to say these things. They can be hard to say, especially the “I’m sorry” one. Indeed, we probably could stand to say them to those we love early in their (and our) lives, and often. As hard as the loss of Poppy is for my brother’s wife and their family there is the inevitability of death in the elderly; it focuses one’s attention. Not so my friend who lost her daughter to a cardiac arrest while studying for finals in college. Or the friend who lost her son to leukemia before he was old enough to shave. The parents of the little girl who fell off her horse, alone in the gloaming, gone before anyone knew to look.

In reality we are all going to die someday. Everyone we love and everyone we know will, too. But the other really important reality is that, for almost all of us, we are not going to die today. Nor will our loved ones, our friends, or our acquaintances. Unless we are either very old or very unlucky, will all have some living left to do.

I find inspiration in the memory of my father-in-law, Beth’s Dad, who upon receiving a medical diagnosis with a nearly 100% imminent fatality rate went right about the business of living. After getting the diagnosis the guy went to his CrossFit classes for a couple of months for goodness sake. Bob had control of his faculties until the last day or two of his life and darned if he wasn’t going to spend them alive, not “not dying” among his loved ones.

I find inspiration in the dogged determination to milk life for every drop of its glory despite the fact that living now means communicating through blinks of his eyes interpreted by the wonders of a computer chip, a camera, and recordings of his voice made in preparation for these days when he can no longer muster the air to pass through his vocal chords. Nick sent almost 200 men, some friends, some friendly acquaintances met later in life like me, a collection of songs he declared were too important, too lovely, too alive to miss the opportunity to share them, his dwindling minutes remaining be damned.

And I find inspiration in the memory of a little girl who spent her last moments doing the thing she loved more than anything besides the love she had for her parents and her family. She was alive. Like us. Like my father-in-law and from what I know of him Mr. Keith. Life, you see, can be taken by the reins and ridden for all its worth. We need not sit back and let life come to us like a horse at the far end of the field. It may, come for us that is, but it just as well may not. Like that horse, though, we can go right over and get it, hop on, and ride like hell.

That’s the beauty of life. Of living. Of what we the living all have. Being alive is a full-contact participatory sport. Every day you get to wake up is just chockablock filled with literally herds of horses just there for the riding. Some days you’re ready for literally anything and it’s off after that fire-breathing stallion and a gallop for the ages. Others, it’s all you can do to pull yourself into the creaky old saddle of a ancient herdy-gerdy pony barely able to put one foot ahead of the other.

No matter. You’re alive. You woke up again and you looked into that pasture at all of those horses, chose one, and started to ride.

Death may have paid a visit, may indeed be stalking us, stalking you and me, but today is not our day. Uh uh, not today. Today we are alive. We are surrounded by our people, here and everywhere. Hopefully you have told each one of them those four precious things. Thank you. Please forgive me. I forgive you. I love you. Our circle is full. Today you still have your people, and your people still have you. This is not a day to be “not dying”, this is a day to be living.

Choose a horse. Take the reins. Today, once again, we ride.

I’ll see you next week…

Every Saturday and Sunday I catch up on all kinds of information sources I just didn’t get to over the course of a typically bandwidth hoovering week. Work and all it means to be a doctor who mans the front line in any specialty. Exercise, perhaps the most effective “medicine” when it comes to extending not just lifespan but more importantly, healthspan. News of the world; news from and about friends near and far.

Ah, friends.

Anyone who has spent any bit of time here inside this particular restless mind knows that friendship in all of its iterations and at all stages of life is a touchstone to which I return time and time again. You should know that I think about it every day, not just when I happen to be moved to write about it. I had a rare opportunity to play golf with 3 long-time friends on Friday. Since I hadn’t swung a club in about 6 months I went to a small indoor range to work out the kinks on Thursday. So much for good intentions; I pulled an intercostal muscle warming up and couldn’t make the tee time. My disappointment had nothing to do with the golf and everything to do with missing 4 hours with men whose friendship goes back 30 years.

Durable over decades or discovered last week, friendship in all its manifestations never fails to inspire. This morning my Sunday prompt came, as it so often does, from a random article in the Sunday paper titled the “A to Zed Project”. Six men, friends from boyhood and gathered at one of the group’s bachelor party, looked at each other with a shared realization that this first wedding in their closest circle was the first of many forces that would put pressure on this classic friendship.

That extraordinary insight was striking in a bunch of guys in their early to mid-20’s. Most of us just emerging from our college years were blissfully and soon to be painfully aware of our ignorance of how easily we made friends in the constant contact of school and all that came with it. We were surrounded by friend-making opportunities in class, in the locker room or backstage, and in the myriad non-career jobs we held down each summer. Admit it, you were just like me; you figured it would be like this forever. Yet here we have 6 buddies literally on the launch pads of adulthood who looked around and realized that they needed to do something to push them together as everything else (job, marriage, parenthood, geography) conspired to push them apart.

My Dad tried to warn me about this one summer. After my junior year in college during the one week my siblings and I were given to goof off after the last day of school and the first day or our summer jobs I told my folks I was headed to North Carolina for a beach week with college friends. Dad could think of nothing more foolish and frivolous, even before he heard the details of my travel plan (hitchhiking out, pretty much wing-it back). “These are not friends. 10 years from now you won’t have a single one of them in your address book.” Man, I kinda hated him for that as I stuck our my thumb on the Mass Pike, but sure enough when I turned 31 only one of the 10 or 12 guys in that house was still in touch.

Perhaps this tribe of Irish kids all had a Dad who preached the same gospel so they decided to do something to change how the story ended. “Why don’t we have a ‘bachelor party’ of our own every year?” They argued over how this would work and settled on getting together in a different city every year. Starting with Aberdeen they arrived on a Friday with only one thing scheduled, a fancy dinner (in mandatory black tie!) on Saturday night. The rest they just winged it. A roving bachelor party without the tawdry stuff, open to the adventure of discovery as they moved from pub to pub. Somewhere around “Q” they found less enjoyment in the pubs and more in the quiet comfort of each other’s company.

This past September, in an Airbnb in Zaragoza, Spain they completed their trip through the Alphabet.

Once upon a time Beth and I were out to dinner with another couple and mutual friends came up in conversation. They’d moved away a couple of years prior. Moved a couple of times, actually. “Have you heard from so-and-so?” “No. You?” “Uh uh.” “Huh. That’s funny. We thought maybe it was just us.” “Yah, I call every now and again. Text every so often. Crickets.” In an odd way it felt a bit better, for all four of us, that we weren’t the only ones who’d been left behind as it were. Better, but still a bit sad and still a bit hurt. We had expected the friendships to last.

Friendship is a bit of a journey. That’s not really news, though the journey evolves not only as one gets older but also in relation to societal evolution. T’was a time when the maintenance of a friendship forged on the battlefields of youth was almost expected to fade away, with only the faintest embers of memories still burning. It was natural. Same thing with friendships made during other natural “gathering places” like offsprings’ schools. Common to the point of being expected, especially if friends moved far afield.

What these preternaturally mature young men knew was in order to keep the fires of friendship burning you need to stoke them. We marvel at the long-distance friendships of our forebears, brought to light in the letters they sent to one another. Can you imagine? Friendship maintained at the whim of the postal service? And yet maintain they did, at least those friendships that were meaningful enough to make the effort. The dawn of the telephone age made it somewhat easier to do this, but expense was a barrier often too high to surmount, trumping the immediacy and intimacy of hearing a friend’s voice.

Friendships at the mercy of distance and time were friendships most often destined to become little more than memories.

Ah, but the world is so very different now. We have, each of us, a device that allows us to talk to anyone we have ever known, right now, for pennies. Some in the Irish 6 didn’t even have an email address. Now, a text can be sent with an effort so trivial that we have laws to regulate when we should know better than to fire one off. As if that’s not quite enough, Facebook and Twitter, Instagram and WhatsApp are there for the asking, and the original “reach out and touch someone” revolution that is email will alert you when someone has messaged you on either of them if you wish. It is now easy, the effort necessary to remain in contact is now so minimal, that what it means to stoke the flames of friendship has been turned on its head. Along the way it seems that our expectations of what will become of our friendships has changed as well.

We will have to re-order that, I think.

One of the Irish 6 described friendships as if they occupied the space inside a dart board. His 5 buddies were in the bullseye, sharing that special spot with no more than one of two others. Long time readers will recognize this as just another way to depict what I have called the friendship universe. In the very center is our home planet, the place where our dearest, closest friends, the people we count on and who count on us reside. Around this orbits our friendly acquaintances, that group we really enjoy and make a sincere effort to see but have no real expectations of the friendship beyond that. If you are lucky this is a fairly large group and if you are very lucky there is more movement from this group into the center than there is from the center out. Surrounding this little planetary system is a much larger group of acquaintances, which is in turn engulfed by people we’ve not met.

Beth and I have a number of friends with whom we shared many, many things, who have moved away from the little burgs we called home. In truth, most were little more than friendly acquaintances if we are being honest with ourselves; people we were thrown together with because of stage of life stuff like schools or sports or jobs. Turns out that Dad’s advice was not limited to friendships made in school. “Moving away” for these friendships is simply another way of saying the school calendar has flipped, and these fade just like friendships in the days of the Pony Express. That’s OK, too; they are meant to fade because most of them weren’t really friends, people in whom you confided, people who confided in you, counted on you.

Our new world of easy access to one another changes how we feel about people we really did consider friends when they move away. My Irish 6 intuited this and forged their contract to protect their friendships. It takes only time, well, time and desire, to stay in touch. To stay friends. Ah…there’s the rub, eh? It’s so easy now–no hoping that they will pick up the phone, return the voicemail, reply to the email/text/PM–that our expectations have changed. That resignation inherent in the historical timeline of all but the deepest, most meaningful friendships has been replaced with some kind of new expectation that we don’t have to let go, let the friendship go, simply because someone has gone somewhere else.

Dad would likely not have seen any distinction, by the way, between my early snail mail and rotary phone days and our present always-reachable world. Even young me would grudgingly admit that he would continue to be right.

And it hurts, doesn’t it, when friends who really were friends in person make it clear that moving away is actually just the same today as it was in the days of the letter and the rotary dial telephone. Those Irish lads looked around the table a couple of nights before the first nuptials in the group and sensed that this would be so. I think the ease with which we can be in contact might make it a bit more painful, to be honest. All but the truest of friends move on, and what we have now is not a gentle resignation and wistful sadness about our mutual loss, but rather a more acute and personal type, especially if we’d decided that the friendship had been worth the effort necessary to keep the fire burning.

There’s a story, the memory of which was triggered by my Sunday reading, but I won’t trouble you with it. You’ve got one too I’ll bet; only the details are different. There’s also a lesson I think, one that is grounded in the wisdom of yesteryear. Our world has changed, and continues to change, in ways that were unimaginable to our parents and grandparents. Heck, in ways that those Irish kids never could have imagined. Friendship, however, has not. It doesn’t matter even a little bit that it takes so little effort to connect in today’s world.

What matters now is the same as what mattered when connecting meant eagle feathers and inkwells: having a friendship that was meaningful enough to make the effort. Friends reach out, and they reach back when you reach out, whatever reaching means on any given day in any given era. You don’t need a grand event tied to the alphabet; all it takes is the reaching out.

Despite the ease with which we can do that, the arc of a friendship still ends most often as nothing more than warm memories, like the tiny embers of even the most magnificent bonfire in a dawn to come.

We are all happier when we accept that most of our friendships will still be like this. That most of us weren’t as wise as those six 20-something Irish lads. My Dad continues to be right, and I have long since forgiven him for this. Lucky are we to have even a single friend who feels just the same about our friendship, whether we stoke our fire in black tie standing side by side or bridging the cross-country divide on Zoom. Friendship was, is, and will always be about the desire to remain friends, not how easy it might be to express that desire. Remember this, and we steel ourselves a bit more against the sadness of a friendship lost to time and distance.

Remember this, and we can allow ourselves to be warmed by the memories that remain of the friendship that once was as we celebrate every friendship that still is.

I’ll see you next week…

We lost my Mom a couple of years ago. It was just as hard as I imagined it was going to be while I watched Mrs. Bush’s funeral in 2018. Every day when I get to the office the last thing I see before I walk in the door is the path I walked at the other end of the parking lot to visit her in the assisted living facility where she spent her final months. This is what I wrote while I watched the Bush family say goodbye to their beloved matriarch.

Admit it, you cried too. You found yourself in front of the TV for whatever reason at noon on April 21, 2018 and watched the Bush family say goodbye to their matriarch. My Mom turned 81 on April 21st, and quite frankly I am not ready to think of her being gone. Not even a little bit. So I watched the grandchildren. Rather than putting myself in the minds of Mrs. Bush’s children I channeled her grandchildren. Listening to Jeb Bush describe “Ganny” sent me back in time to the days when I was the best-loved grandson in the history of all mankind.

My birthday is January 7th, 1960. Gama* was “born” about a year later–I couldn’t get my one year old tongue around the word “grandma” and it came out “Gahmmah”. Now, the White family is really big on precedent, and since grandchild number 1 called Mom’s mother Gama, Gamma it was for everybody. Subsequent grandchildren, great-grandchildren, friends, neighbors, heck a few Romans who lent an ear for all I know, called Jane Knopf “Gama”. (This precedent thing turned out to be not so good in the next generation when my nephew, grandchild number three, called my parents “Bam” and “Bamp” and it wasn’t allowed to stick, but that’s another story.)

As the first grandchild in my Mom’s family I had the perfect set-up, and the fact that I was the first male in a generation didn’t hurt one bit. My brother was born 17 months after I was, and with the two of us so close together it was apparently a burden for my folks. Turned out to be quite a break for me, though, because my brother was born in May; at the end of June I was shipped out to stay with Gama and Gramp at the Jersey Shore, the first of countless solo visits with my grandparents. Thus began a most privileged relationship with my maternal grandparents, especially with my beloved Gamma.

It’s hard to describe, especially in these days of ultra mobility where extended families live apart, how critical it was to be loved by a family member without condition. Accepted and supported with no strings attached. Time spent with Gama was time spent in a guilt-free bubble. You behaved because it just felt so good to be in that bubble, and if you misbehaved forgiveness came in waves a very brief instant after any punishment. I visited my grandparents for weeks at a time, especially in the summer. My aunt Barbie, 16 years my senior, made it OK for the rugrat to be around even though I was clearly messing up her “only child” status in the house. Those were good times. I had a very special and unique relationship with Gama and Gramp. If I close my eyes and it’s very quiet I can still hear them…”Dar”.

Apparently everyone in my family saw what a special relationship I had with them and sought to preserve and protect it. It does no good to share any family secrets, but every family has some, eh? I was the last to discover any of the family’s darker secrets, long after my siblings, long after the cousins 10 and 12 years my junior. I was 30 when my aunts visited us in New York at the end of my residency years when I became aware of how much I’d been “protected” over the years, protection so effective that any present day revelations cannot dim or diminish the memories of my life with Gama and Gramp.

We lost Gramp when I was around 17 when he succumbed to his nth heart attack. That whole time is really just a blur, from the phone call I took in Rhode Island with the news from my uncle to the memorial service in Miami where I stood next to Barbie as she tried to read her farewells. What I remember–indeed all I really remember clearly–is Gama saying over and over, “I didn’t get to say ‘goodbye’.” I didn’t get to say ‘goodbye’ either. Maybe that’s why I can still hear Gramp every now and again…”Dar.”

Gama stayed in Florida at King’s Creek for a couple more years, living in the same apartment I’d visited so many times. I even made one last solo visit when I brought my new college buddy “Kid” for a week of spring break fun during freshman year. Every family seems to have one adult who’s cool, don’t they? Yours does. Admit it. There’s a parent or an uncle or a grandmother who’s just cooler than all of the other adults, right? Well, in our family it was Gama. My Gama was cool! As the years went by as more and more of our friends got to know her it seemed she just got cooler. Just ask Kid.

It turns our that Gama was ALWAYS cool. She entered college as a pre-med student in the days when women did not become doctors. Almost got away with it, too, until her mother found out and transferred her into education. She dated the gay boys when she was younger because they took her to the best clubs and they were the best dancers (and she didn’t have to worry about getting pawed on the train home from New York). Yup, Gamma was cool.

After a few solo years in Miami Gama moved in with my folks in Rhode Island, spending several months each year with my aunts and their kids in Florida. She never called us just by name, it was alway “MY Dar”, my Ran, my Tracey, my Kerstin. My Jenny, Rick, Mike or Ed. All eight grandchildren now clearly had a unique and special relationship with Gamma since she was now living with all of us. She was still my biggest fan, my brother Randy’s defender (Ran was the “black sheep” by choice when we were younger), Tracey’s cheerleader and Kerstin’s confidant. Even though I can’t describe them as well I know that each of my Florida cousins had some version of that same specialness.

Some time ago, I was in my early thirties, Gama fell and broke her hip. Word came from the hospital that she was failing–a broken hip is often the end for older women. Beth called me on the way to the OR to do cataract surgeries. Numb, stunned, I couldn’t think. I did what we have always done in my family, I went to work. It was Beth who knew better, who cancelled my patients and put me on a plane to Miami. Beth who let everyone know that I was on the way, alerting everyone in Florida when I was delayed in Greensborogh so that Barbie knew where to to leave the message. I sat sobbing in the airport after the gate attendant told me Gama had died. I wouldn’t get to say goodbye.

My Mom and I spoke at the memorial service representing the children and grandchildren, Mom all icy control, me crashing, burning and choking my way through. I told one of my favorite stories, the one about the little girl who was standing in front of her grandfather’s casket, stomping her feet, clearly angry. “He can’t be dead. I wasn’t done with him yet!” That’s how I felt when Gramp died. I think if we’d had the chance to ask him Gramp would have told us that he wasn’t really all that done with US when he died, either. I definitely wasn’t done with Gama, either, but Gama was done with us. She was ready to go, so long after Gramp left, so long living alone among all of her special grandkids. I said then, and I still wish to this very day, that she hadn’t been in so much of a hurry. I would very much have liked to say goodbye.

Maybe that’s why even now, when it’s very quiet, if I close my eyes, I can still hear her…”Dar.”

I’ll see you next week…

–bingo

*There is some question as to the spelling. Since she signed all of her cards and gifts “Gama” I’m going with that.

1) Heroes. I’m on the back end of quite a weekend here in D.C. One of our two big conventions took place in the Nation’s Capital, our first return since 2022. My world is littered with generational giants. Some of the true pioneers among them are still among us. Dick and Eric. Vance and Dave. The Steves (there are, like, 6 of them).

But there’s only one Marguerite. I live in a couple of worlds populated by giants, but I have no real heroes in any of them who remain. Except for Marguerite. Against monumental odds and man-made barriers (literally, made by men), she forged through and created one of the most impactful surgical innovations in our field: laser vision correction. She is a hero in all respects.

She is now my only remaining living hero.

2) Coach. Dick Farley, my beloved football coach, he of the infinite number of of quotable quips from the collective memories of the hundreds of athletes he coached and thousands of athlete-adjacent students he knew and cherished, passed away last week in Williamstown. I probably shared one or two of his more famous sports-related quotes here and elsewhere.

The stories that have circulated this week about Coach are all a bit different. Athletes who were never coached by him, never on a team that he coached telling about the times they came across him on campus, either before or after they graduated, and he greeted them as if they’d played for him since freshman year. Men and women who graduated and sent a child or three to Williams College, hoping that they would find their way, only to discover that Coach had been checking in with the more often than not non-athlete progeny to make sure that they were OK.

Aside from my Dad and my maternal Grandfather Coach Dick Farley was the most impactful adult male in my young life. My Dad, my Gramp, and Coach were my heroes.

3) Teacher. “Give your people their flowers while they are alive to enjoy them.” Ryan Brown

Man, I love every part of this. The people you care about cannot enjoy the flowers that adorn their casket or spill over the edges of the altar. Their closest relatives surely appreciate the veritable rainforest that takes up temporary residence in someones abode, but really, they’d rather have their dearly departed repatriated to the loving room couch, thank you very much. My friend Ryan’s quote is spot on:

Tell your loved ones that you do, indeed, love them while they are alive to hear and see and feel you loving them.

My Dad learned this lesson from a dear friend who happened to be his personal attorney. As a very young student from a very poor family, a “cardboard in the shoes kid” as he would describe it, Dad was placed in the “trades track” in high school along with all of the other poor blue-collar kids. Thing was, though, that Dad was really, really smart and had all the makings of college material. This typically didn’t really matter in the 1930’s post-Depression Boston suburbs. Your neighborhood and your lineage pretty much determined your destiny. Your father showered when he got home from work and so would you.

But Dad caught a break. One of his teachers, Miss Nolan, plucked him out to that trades track and insisted that he belonged in the college track along with the kids with fathers who showered before they went to work. Miss Nolan was right. Dad thrived in school. His natural leadership qualities found the air they needed to grow, too. Miss Nolan bought him his first pair of new shoes so that he would look the part when he walked up to accept his diploma. Although his poverty necessitated a detour in the Army during the Korean War, he eventually graduated from the University of Vermont with a degree in what we would now know as industrial engineering and eventually added an MBA from American International.

What does this have to do with flowers? Despite rather modest goals for what success might look like (it’s very hard to fully escape everything it means to “repair” a hole in your shoe with a piece of cardboard) my Dad became a very successful businessman. One day he was chatting with his attorney friend and asked how one goes about creating and funding a trust. Dad told his buddy that he planned to honor Miss Nolan’s great gift and her legacy with a scholarship in her name that he would announce at her funeral.

The lawyer’s response was precious: “Why would you wait? Do it now so that Miss Nolan can feel your love and so you can see how happy she will be to watch the winners of the scholarship go off to college.” Pretty cool, huh? My Dad’s friend was essentially telling him to give Miss Nolan her flowers while she was still there to enjoy them, and that’s exactly what my Dad did. Dad sat with her at quite a few of those graduations, Dad showered with Miss Nolan’s gratitude and both aglow in the love from the kids who won the scholarship.

Give your people their flowers while they are still here to enjoy them.

I’ll see you next week…

1) Joselyn. As in “Joselyn and the Sweet Compression”, a funk/soul band fronted by Joselyn, a powerhouse voice capable of handling everything from Whitney to Keith. No kidding. She crushed a couple of Whitney Houston songs and then just knocked “War” by the Stones out of the park.

Do yourself a favor and check them out on YouTube. And if they ever get near your town check them out. You’re welcome.

2) Riesling. Wine and food pairings are a fun undertaking. Beth and I have played around with the topic for some 40 years now. Some pairings are simply classic and bare no trifling. Think Filet of Sole and Chablis. Others remain mysterious and resist all efforts to make a match, usually around a Holiday in my experience. Case in point: roast turkey. Not unlike a medical problem that has 10 or 20 different solutions, all of which have ardent supporters, which means that there really isn’t a solution to the problem.

I mean, no one can even make the “red vs. white” call on turkey.

The Easter ham felt the same for me. It’s the salt. I tried everything. White wines of all types. Rosé. Heavy reds like cabernet sauvignon or zinfandel, light reds from any and all countries. But I think I finally nailed it: dry Riesling. From anywhere. It just works.

You’re still welcome.

3. Free-Range. As in free-range children. Apparently there was a guest editorial in the NYT on March 22nd by Sara Wildman about the free-range childhood experience enjoyed by the boys in Rob Reiner’s film “Stand by Me”(no idea who she is or why she was invited to write the piece). The movie takes place in the era in which I grew up. During summers, weekends and vacations, my siblings and our friends were evicted from our homes shortly after breakfast each morning. We exited into the wild with instructions to return at the sound of the “dinner bell”, on our own for lunch.

Suburban kids, all, our bikes gave us the run of the town.

Today in the Sunday NYT a number of letter writers chime in with declarations that our ’60’s and ’70’s childhoods were some version of the best childhood one could have. Not sure about that, of course. It’s tough to make a call on that since I was too busy having a pretty good childhood to be too terribly introspective about the experience. I suppose there was stress and anxiety, but honestly it all seemed to be solvable with a quick fistfight (no injuries) or an ice cream cone.

It’s a fascinating topic, one that I think I will spend a bit more time on in a future “musing…”

4) Competition. Some years ago a Jewish friend posted a very funny video of Jon Stewart of the Daily Show beseeching his fellow Jews to “step it up” in the battle between Easter and Passover for the hearts and minds of children. Look for it. It’s just full of funny lines. For example, Stewart laments that Christians can count on luminaries such as (former) NFL quarterback Tim Tebow to spread the word, while there has yet to be a superstar Jewish NFL quarterback. As an aside, raised as a Catholic, I would reply that Mr. Stewart’s people are killing it in the comedy realm vs. Christians, but you get the idea. He lays down his trump card right at the beginning: chocolate vs. matzo.

Coulda dropped the mic right there.

5) There is certainly a much, much deeper meaning to both of these religious time of course. So, too, in the case of Islam and Ramadan. The death and subsequent ascension of Christ is the single most significant aspect of the Christian faith: humans are saved and a path to Heaven is opened through the miracle of Christ rising from the dead. Passover is also a story of salvation, albeit a less ephemeral, more concrete one: God, through Moses, leads his people out of slavery through the miracle of the parting of the Red Sea. Ramadan marks the first showing of the Quran by the Prophet Mohamed. All three stories invoke a God who is present in the daily life of his people. All three religions celebrate this on holidays around which a part of their calendar revolves. All who follow these religions are asked to believe that the stories are factual.

Are they? Could they be? Are the stories of the death and resurrection of Christ, the parting of the Red Sea by Moses or the presentation of the Quran the AP news accounts of their day? Or are they allegorical, fables meant to teach the underlying principle of a kind and gracious God who awaits us at the end or our days? Here, I would say, it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter whether you are weak, powerful, or somewhere in between, because it is the viewpoint that matters, not necessarily the facts. You either believe in something that came before and will be there after, or you don’t. The facts, in this case, don’t really seem to matter.

In the end it still comes down to faith.

On this day when Christians join in worship to celebrate an empty tomb while Jews gather around a table with an empty chair in the hope that Israel will join them, as Muslims emerge from their month of fasting, today at least we see the best of what religion can offer to people of faith. There is a certain hopefulness in Easter, Ramadan, and Passover, a hope that there IS a God, and that there IS something to come. Faith, though, is not limited to the Christian or Jewish or Muslim religions, nor is it limited to these highest of holy days. The religious have faith 24/7/365, right? So, too, do those of faith who are not necessarily religious in the Judeo-Christian or Islamic sense. One thinks of the deep spirituality of indigenous peoples around the world, for example, or the other great religions of the East like Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism and the like. In all there is a deeply felt faith that there is more, in the end, than 3 squares and a place to lay your head.

I the end it still comes down to faith.

Happy Easter. Happy Passover. Blessed Ramadan. I’ll see you next week…

Easter Sunday is soon upon us, the holiest day in the Christian year. Christians “celebrate” the ultimate sacrifice, the ultimate expression of altruism in the “history” of mankind. Men and women are tasked with following Him as the ultimate role model for how we are to live our lives.

If one does, indeed, believe, and if one does follow Him as the role model in one’s life, then all other talk of role models is irrelevant. Like so many other goals and targets, though, the Lamb as role model is ultimately unachievable by any and all, and thus we have the all too human phenomenon of other, human role models.

What then constitutes a role model? Who is qualified to fill this role? Who would be willing to do so? How do we find these people, these role models?

In a world that was much less heterogenous, where people of all stripes had more in common than not and acknowledged that fact, role models seemed to be a little easier to come by. Audie Murphy. Stan Musial. Jackie Robinson. Heck, even a politician (Ike, JFK) or two filled the bill. Every town had a teacher or a coach or a cop who everyone looked up to. Why then and not now? Partly because of that sense that we were all more the same than less, but partly because we only knew the good stuff about our role models.

And on top of that we only really wanted to know the good stuff, ya know?

Once upon a time to be a role model meant to be always trying to do the right thing for the right person at the right time. In those days without social media we didn’t really know that much about anyone, heroes included, and we forgave the occasional slip because we saw the effort and appreciated the ongoing efforts. It inspired us to do better ourselves. We forgave the occasional failure because we knew how hard it is to always look to do that favor, to offer the helping hand, to put forth the best effort. Our sense of our own humanity was extended to our role models as a gift to them in the hope that they would continue to lead us.

The perceived lack of role models in society today says more about us than it does about any role models that we may have discarded. This is undoubtedly at least partly due to the afore mentioned social media. We accentuate our differences rather than our commonalities, no matter how far on either end of the curve those differences might lie. We not only accept too much information about our all too human potential role models, we actively seek the “smoking gun” that will bury them. We are all the lesser for all of that, for we deny ourselves the potential that could come from having a role model just a little bit better than ourselves. Someone to lead us to a better version of ourselves.

The only perfect role model to have walked the planet continues to set an unachievable goal, however noble might be our effort. And He has been dead for more than 2000 years.

1) Vacation. Funny, I know. Start a “musings…” with “vacation. Still, here I am, slowly coming down from the high of a week away with Beth, her sisters, and their husbands. Gearing up for a week of work ahead.

Vacations are good. Vacations help make the work, you know, work.

2) Mexico. My in-laws loved Mexico. Loved everything they ever learned about it. To explore Mexico they purchased a couple of timeshares, adding one in Maui some years later with a plan to will one each to their 3 daughters. Timeshares aren’t really terrific assets to inherit, their most notable aspect being 99 years of financial responsibilities. Realizing this the Hurst girls combined the three assets into one and turned it into a 10 year asset.

A lovely, special asset that we 6 visited for the last time this past week.

We are very lucky. 3 couples joined by our 3 marriages, all close friends who enjoy each other’s company and travel quite well together. As an aside the 4 couples created by my siblings and I have similar friendships and enjoy travels together. Over the week we managed to fit in something of note for each one of us, all while honoring both the gifts and the memory of Beth’s parents.

It was a great run. We are all thankful for the gift of family.

3) Work in progress. A life’s work. Work to do. Much to my surprise I find myself fully engaged in work.

“When nothing seems to help, I go back and look at a stonecutter hammering away at his rock perhaps a hundred times without as much as a crack showing in it. Yet at the hundred and first blow it will split in two, and I know it was not that blow that did it–but all that had gone before.”–Jacob Riis

There is a certain nobility in work. A certain expression of self. It matters not what work we consider, and it certainly matters not what job we might occupy. It is the work that matters. The working. Riis observes and verbalizes an eternal truth, that the result of work done does not always illustrate the amount of work actually done.

No matter. The more essential lesson is one of hope. Hope and resolve. Each task before us must be approached with the hope embodied in Riis’ tale. Each strike upon the stone must be delivered with the conviction that it will be the one to finally render the stone in two. Watching someone else succeed gives one hope.

Hope is a uniquely human characteristic. Some tasks defy hope, and it is reasonable to turn away from work that generates only despair. Still, it is the hope inherent in the task at hand, the hope that our work will succeed that brings us ever back to the stone. There is still work to be done. For however many times I have managed to split the stones before me, at least one more stands between me and repose. The task at hand is doable. Hope abounds; I go to work.

However stones may remain will ne’er be split otherwise.

I’ll see you next week…

March Madness is upon us. The first four days of the NCAA Men’s Basketball tournament is famous for its plucky underdogs. Occasionally one actually nips a much higher ranked opponent, ruins a couple billion brackets, and makes us all believe in the little guy.

The guy who believes. The guy who never gave up.

Which reminds me of a video that has made its viral rounds on various social media places of a rather earnest-looking professor-like guy talking about the power of a tiny domino falling and hitting a bigger domino on its way to the ground. He starts the dominoes tumbling. The cascade of 15 ends with the fall of a domino weighing 100 lbs. and measuring >1 meter in height.

All from a domino so small he needs tweezers to place it.

The Professor ends the video with the observation that a 29 domino cascade would finish with the fall of a domino larger than the Empire State Building. Pretty vivid. As is so often the case on Sunday mornings I let the video rumble around between my ears for a bit. What I saw first was a vast space filled with thousands, nay millions of those tiny dominoes, falling down over and over again, never striking anything but the ground. Every now and again a tiny domino would fall against a massive domino, either bouncing or slowly sliding off, eventually finding its way to the ground either way.

It was discouraging to think about. It made me a little sad, to tell you the truth.

But as I thought about it a little more, spent a bit more time in my imaginary vastness filled with tiny dominoes perpetually falling, it occurred to me that in order to fall over and over again it was necessary for each of those tiny dominoes to somehow rise up to stand. More than that, each time one fell it moved a little bit. Sometimes further into the vacuum of the vastness, but sometimes closer to another tiny domino. Another domino falling.

In my minds eye I see that tiny, first domino all alone, surrounded by a vast nothingness, falling ever so quietly over and over again. I see thousands, nay millions of them, all falling again and again, striking nothing on their descent. On first blush it makes me a little sad. A bit discouraged.

I keep watching and after awhile it dawns on me that in order to continue to fall over and over again, each tiny domino must somehow rise up, pick itself up to stand once again. Over and over they must rise. And it’s the little ones that persevere; once tumbled the larger the domino the less likely it is to rise again of its own accord.

The greatest flow, one that might topple a domino the size of the Empire State Building, must start from the movement of one of those tiny, lonely dominoes. The ones that kept getting back up.

Another domino that kept getting back up.

It’s probably trite–some would say I specialize in trite–but what stayed with me in the end was not the image of the massive domino falling at the end, but that of the tiny, delicate, fragile domino in the front of the line. The one that started the whole thing. What most of us ever see is the last couple of dominoes falling, the last tumblers settling into place. Who knows how many times that first, tiny domino fell and struck nothing but earth?

And got back up.

I’ll see you next week…