Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Lake Wobegone, where every child is above average. Remember that? It’s a joke, of course, but it’s funnier if you have even the tiniest bit of comfort with numbers, statistics, and probabilities. Every parent wishes for that, right? To have raised a child who rose even just a little bit above.

What does it mean to be average? It begins with the cohort, the population you are evaluating, and the particular variable that is to be measured. The average Division 3 cornerback is a decidedly different specimen than the average guy playing on Sunday. The average working vocabulary in a room filled with Pulitzer Prize winners is quite a bit different than that of, say, the Green Bay Packers booster club luncheon yesterday. On the other hand, the average VO2 max in those latter two groups is likely pretty similar.

Along with average comes a range in any curve. Some groups are tightly bunched around the mean, the average; being average is an expectation. On the line at Ford your performance has to be average at worst. If you are above or below the average in any other group it probably is helpful to know how big the range of differences is in that group. For example, if we are measuring 400M run times at the Olympics there’s a pretty skinny range beyond which below or above average makes you stick out, good and bad.

Average does not necessarily mean mediocre.

I got to thinking about this yesterday when I heard from a bunch of my college buddies sending along birthday wishes. In my life there have been two places where I’ve been average: Williams College and CrossFit. Both here in the CrossFit world and in my college years at Williams it has taken everything that I have just to be in the middle of the pack. This is a double-edged sword. It’s humbling to have to literally give it your all just to hit the mean. However, placed into a group or given a task in which you have the potential to excel, to bust the curve if you will, the experience of having to work so hard just to be middling should drive you to do the same when you have a chance to be the best.

My Mom and Dad did, indeed, raise kids who were above average. It appears that Mrs. bingo and I may have done so, too. If we are lucky, the Man Cub and his cousins will follow suit. The only way I will know is because I had the privilege of struggling to be average in the company of two very extraordinary groups of people.

My classmates and teammates at Williams and my fellow CrossFitters.

1) Saddle. As in “back in the saddle” this week. For Beth, to be taken quite literally as she has been astride her horse “Hero” almost every day, riding for fun, fame, and glory. For me? Well, it was back to work, each day astride my trusty stool as I steer through a microscope.

Riding for everyone who came in.

2. Edwin’s. Beth and I joined close friends to celebrate my 66th birthday at a rather unique restaurant named “Edwin’s”. I’m afraid I can’t remember why “Edwin’s” but the story behind the restaurant’s concept I do remember. Once upon a time when BC the owner of the restaurant was a teenager he ran afoul of the law in some way or another. Again, I don’t remember the exact details of this part of the story (it’s findable online as BC is quite transparent about his youth), but I do remember that it was a nonviolent mistake.

When brought before the judge BC was quite contrite. The judge, exhibiting astute powers of character assessment, realized that BC was hardly on a course toward a life of crime. He admonished the youth to stick to the straight and narrow, and warned him that he, the judge, would be watching over him, lest his character assessment be inaccurate. Should he break the law again the judge assured BC that he would face a maximum sentence for both the original and subsequent crimes.

As it turns out, not only was the judge correct in his assessment, but BC silently vowed on the spot that he would find some way to repay the judge. How? After a decade or so managing prestigious restaurants BC left the world of the employed and opened a restaurant almost entirely staffed by the formerly incarcerated. Chefs, waitstaff, hostesses and bartenders, all with time spent behind bars. So, too, the bartenders, valets, and bussers. (See below)

A huge hat tip and “good on ya” to BC, who we know casually, on paying back a man who gave him a mulligan. It was a privilege to dine at Edwin’s.

3) Service. As I get older, and reflect that I have spent my entire working life in the service of others, I find it more and more difficult to tolerate poor service when I am on the receiving end of the continuum. I once wrote an essay in which I stated that every doctor should spend 6 months learning what it means to provide service by working as either a caddy, waitstaff in a breakfast joint, or selling shoes. To understand the serving side of the continuum you should spend time in the act of one-on-one service. It’s harder and harder not to call attention to poor service when I am the one paying for the service.

Of course, how we perceive the quality of the service we receive is dependent on our expectations in any given situation, or at least it should be. For example, if I am buying shoes in person I have an entirely different expectation of what my service experience will be if I am shopping at a DSW outlet vs. Nordstroms. One should make it a point to know the “story” about any place you might seek service so that you are prepared.

There is often a financial correlation between the experience extremes, dismissive to flawless, and we quite naturally expect a level of service that is closer to flawless if we are paying a premium. Many’s the time that you can accurately assume what to expect simply by looking at the “menu”. A “destination” restaurant that specializes in classic French cuisine typically has prices that will curl your hair. Naturally you expect a dining experience commensurate with the quality of the food, and in the overwhelming majority of cases this is precisely what you will get. Dismissive or inattentive service would be unacceptable.

Edwin’s is a case in point where one must do a little bit of research before making a reservation. While the food is, indeed, outstanding, and the prices are full-on fancy French restaurant prices, there are parts of the dining experience that are entirely expected given the main mission of the restaurant, to provide training and employment in an unexpected arena to an unexpected cohort of employees. Here the expectation is about effort and attitude. Or it should be. Ten minutes to take dinners orders at a four-top? You could just see how hard the waiter was trying not to make a mistake. Tiny little white wine glasses for the massive Bordeaux? The guy fairly sprinted to the bar for replacements. We waited a long time for our dinners to arrive.

No way was Chef sending out a plate that was less than perfect. We tipped big.

Healthcare is a more complex experience than buying a pair of shoes or sitting down to a dish of Cocque aux Vin. Much of what is dispensed in the U.S. is done so in the absence of local pricing power: insurance companies and the government effectively set the “price” of care for the vast majority of Americans. Interestingly, the larger the healthcare organization the more likely it is that it is paid MORE for the care provided (a result of the Affordable Care Act), all the while providing a care experience that is typically closer to, say, an Au Bon Pain chain restaurant than The French Laundry, despite receiving French Laundry “fees”.

There are segments of American healthcare that behave more like other retail service spaces like the above-mentioned shoe shopping and dining. Cosmetic plastic surgery, refractive surgery, and veterinary medicine are all cash-pay businesses that must justify the prices on their “menu” by achieving excellent outcomes and a flawless experience. A plastic surgeon will struggle to survive in a market if they do not have excellent results, and those who have excellent results but do not provide a French Laundry experience will find it difficult to charge top of the market fees.

I have spent my entire professional career as a refractive cataract and laser surgeon. Some of what I do is largely or entirely paid for by insurance of some sort or another. However, there are some things that I do that are not recognized by health insurance policies as medically necessary, however desirable a patient might find them. In my case the most common of these are refractive surgeries like LASIK, the intraocular contact lens, and specialized lens implants to reduce or eliminate the need to wear glasses after cataract surgery. These are “cash pay” procedures just like cosmetic plastic surgery procedures, and because of this people expect not only an extraordinary outcome but also flawless “service” along the way.

A refractive cataract and laser practice that does not achieve excellent results or does not treat its patients like visitors to a fine restaurant may very well struggle to justify its prices.

This long-winded dissertation is a prelude to our family experience with a 100% cash-pay medical experience that was very disappointing to say the least. Do you have a pet? If you do you then know that, with few exceptions, veterinary medicine is a cash-pay business. Ever have a pet with an emergency? Man, then you REALLY know that vets are in the cash-pay business. It doesn’t matter how long your family has been seeing a particular veterinary practice (for us it’s been 13 years), or how busy the doctors happen to be on the day your pet has an emergency (lots of open slots in the schedule in our case) you are writing a hella big check just to have them seen in an emergency-prompt fashion.

You are probably looking for me to exclaim that these “enhanced” fees should come along with some sort of enhanced services. After all, they will do the same exact stuff they would do on a scheduled visit, just with a premium added to the bill because your pet couldn’t wait for the next available visit to be seen after they got hit by a car, or bitten by a snake, or whatever. For any resentment at a business model that takes advantage of the emotional trauma suffered by the pet owner I might have, I am actually jealous of their ability to charge for their availability. So nope. What I find unbelievable, bordering (as a fellow healthcare worker) on amoral, is care that falls below the basic level of expectations that every patient or patient-equivalent has a right to expect when seeking and obtaining care on a regular basis. Care that is universally provided whether it is covered by insurance or cash, whether the office is a tiny boutique private practice or a massive medical institution.

Whether doing a facelift, selling a pair of shoes, preparing and serving food, doing cataract surgery, or caring for a dog with an injury, there are basic levels of service that must be provided. Operate in a sterile setting, disinfect a shoe that has been tried on previously, be mindful of food allergies, do everything to ensure the proper implant is inserted. Things so basic that they are “table stakes”, the ante you put up just to be in the game. Even more basic than that is to communicate clearly and accurately with your patient, and to provide ongoing communication if the care is ongoing.

Yup, I’m on the receiving end of the service continuum on this one. There’s no backstory, no feel good story here to explain why our family and our dog have received bad service. Which has resulted in substandard medical care. No apology or explanation. We have a long history with this practice and I was led all along to believe that I was in the equivalent of a fine dining restaurant, and I was charged accordingly. I expected to be treated accordingly. I certainly expected to receive the most basic care and feeding, to be informed of a diagnosis and a plan, not to be gaslit that we had, indeed, been contacted and informed. Table stakes, all. Hardly the stuff of fine French dining.

The older I get the harder it is for me to stomach poor quality service when I am on the receiving end of the service continuum. I was a caddy as a kid. Even as a young man I understood the concept of basic standards of service. Table stakes. It’s been almost 5 days and I don’t feel one bit better about what we experienced at the vet. It’s harder and harder not to call attention to inexplicable bad service when I am paying for the service. Especially when someone stiffs me on a table stake.

It’s becoming less and less likely that I will be able to keep myself from picking up the phone.

I’ll see you next week…

1) Magi. As in the O. Henry short story “The Gift of the Magi.” You remember it, right? A young couple so in love they each sell their most priceless possessions in order that they may afford to buy each other a most personal, meaningful gift. Della cuts her hair and sells it so that she can buy a chain for Jim’s treasured pocket watch. Jim, of course, sells the watch to buy beautiful combs for Della’s exquisite hair.

All at once rendering their gifts useless, and yet as priceless as the sacrifices they made to obtain them.

2) Seeing. Remember the story I told last week when I was re-telling the tale of Beth explaining how Santa is, was, and always will be real? About the Dad who taught his son the true meaning of giving a gift? The son was tasked with thinking deeply about someone who would be lifted by a gift that was given from someone who had done just that, thought deeply about the recipient.

To give a truly meaningful gift does not necessarily need to involve sacrifice, like Della and Jim, nor does it require anonymity as the father insisted in order that his son become a true Santa. What it does need is the kind of deep knowledge about the recipient of your gift in such a way that they feel seen. Known. Understood.

Such a gift need not be practical in a way that it fulfills a need, nor does it necessarily need to be impractical in a way that it fulfills only a want. It could, of course, do both, like a hair comb or a watch chain, but my conjecture is that it is the transmission that you know, really know the recipient that is the truer essence of the giving.

This past week I have been on the receiving end of many, many gifts. Each one, however small (thin peds to fit into stylish new beach shoes) or large (IYKYK!) sent the message loud and clear: “I see you!”

3) Loved. If you celebrate Christmas (or Hanukah for that matter) you probably did a bit of gift giving recently. Sure, some of it probably felt kinda like an obligation, but at least of bit of that gift giving was really more about the expression of love behind the gift. That’s the easy part, at least for me, expressing love. I spent so much time thinking about the people who would be receiving my gifts. Once I gave myself permission to freely express love it really became pretty easy.

And it was fun, too!

The receiving end of the gift thing is a lot of fun, too, of course. I mean–come on–who doesn’t like opening up gifts?! One in particular left me standing and staring and just repeating “holy shit” over and over again! The video is hilarious. Lots of funny stuff around getting a gift, too. Think of all the funny “re-gifting” stories you have, or the last “White Elephant” party you attended. In the White house the philosophy of “it’s OK to say you probably won’t use that gift” became “REJECT THAT GIFT”! Seriously, toss it back under the tree right in front of the gift giver reject it. That got to be quite funny. We still talk about my sister Kerstin and her multi-year streak of having her gifts rejected, and the year of redemption where each of her gifts was everyone’s highlight of the year.

In reality, accepting a gift is really rather easy. It’s accepting the love behind the gift, accepting another’s love that’s a little more complex. Maybe you didn’t know. Maybe you are worried it’s conditional, with strings attached. More often, though, the problem is that you aren’t really sure HOW to accept the love, or even if you are deserving of such a thing. That’s it, isn’t it? That’s really what you’re thinking. “They can’t possibly love me, love me that much. If they only knew the truth.” Or something like that.

Here’s the truth: they really DO know. Know you. And because of that they really, actually, truly DO love you. Most importantly there’s not even a little bit of a mistake here, and more than likely there’s not even the tiniest thread of a string attached. Not only are you loved, not only has someone in some way told you that, you deserve every little bit of that love. Carry that thought into the New Year. That you really are loved. That you deserve that love. Resolve this year to believe that. Resolve in 2026 to be openly thankful for that love, just like you are for that beautifully gift-wrapped present under the tree or the Menorah.

Resolve to let yourself be loved this year.

I’ll see you, well, next year…

Once again on this day of days I offer this verse from “An Olde City Bar” by the Trans Siberian Orchestra.

“If you want to arrange it

this world, you can change it.

If we could just make

this whole Christmas thing

last.

By helping a neighbor,

or even a stranger.

To know who needs help

you need only just

ask.”

Merry Christmas my friends. May the Eastern Star light your life today, and every day.

I’ll see you on Sunday…

1) Assumptuous. Adj. One who is wont to make assumptions.

Should be a word.

2) Sissu. Finnish word for stubborn resistance.

Whole lotta “sissu” in the world, eh?

3) Cookies. Yesterday was Christmas cookie day at Casa Blanco. Beth and I come from two vastly different families in some ways, but in one very special, important way the White and the Hurst families have always been the same: we have Holiday traditions that include an activity around which we all gather. Beginning with Beth’s Grammy, passed on through my mother-in-law Sandy, and now practiced in the homes of all three Hurst girls. One of our next generation families with children joins us each year to continue this lovely event.

The house was warm. Casa Blanco is tiny. Much smaller than even the once-upon-a-time one-room schoolhouse that grew to became the 4-bedroom, 3 story Hurst family home. Kids and adults were crammed into our kitchen as the little ones took turns cutting out the dough and then decorating the sand tarts. The four adults held off on the first cocktail until the second of four kids finished decorating. Beth shared the fin des biscuits: her Grammy always capped off a successful cookie baking day with a glass of red wine, and so, too, did our own Grammy, Beth.

Our collection of antique tin cookie cutters sits ready for another generation.

4) There are 4 of us in my generation. Each year one of us (and our sainted spouse) hosted Mom and Dad for Christmas. Have I ever told you how this came about? Forgive me for I know this is a repeat.

Many years ago, after all four of the White kids had fledged the nest, we all casually asked my folks what their plans were for the Christmas Holiday. Each of us, in our own way, said something along the lines of “we’d love to have you come visit us.” Not hearing back from our parents accepting what we all thought was a heartfelt invitation we each just assumed that Mom and Dad had accepted the invite from one of the siblings and went about planning the Holiday with only our own nuclear families in mind.

A week or so before Christmas my younger sister Kerstin, so much younger than we older three that she had been a quasi only child, just as casually asked my Mom what she and Dad were doing for Christmas. Mind you, Kerstin was expecting to hear that they were going to a sibling’s house, but what she got was equal parts hilarious and shocking:

“Your Father always wanted to see the Rockettes’ Christmas show so we are going to spend Christmas in New York.”

Now this was outrageously out of character for my parents, and Kerstin wasn’t quite sure where Mom was going with this: “Oh…that sounds nice! How are you getting there?”

SNAP! Mom closes the trap: “Oh, we’re taking a bus, along with all of the other parents who weren’t invited to spend Christmas with any of their children.”

Ooooo, ouch. Kerstin doesn’t quite recover quickly enough and continues with polite conversation: “What are you doing for dinner?”

Mom moves in for the killshot: “Typical Christmas stuff. There’s a very nice brown bag turkey sandwich dinner that we will have on the bus. With all of the other parents who didn’t get invited to Christmas dinner by one of their children.”

By this time Kerstin is equal parts incredulous, offended, and just plain pissed off. “That’s total BS! You were invited by every single one of us. That’s it. From now on you will be assigned a child to visit each year. I will PERSONALLY tell you at Thanksgiving where you are going on Christmas.” And thus began the “Christmas Rotation” for Anne Lee and Dick.

Christmas 2023 was our last Christmas with one of our parents. Beth and I spirited Mom our of her new home in Devon Oaks for a Holiday visit with us and a few of her great-grandchildren. It was a very special treat, even though it wasn’t officially “our turn” to host. We’ve now lost all four of our parents; we will now be hosted ourselves.

If it looks like a brown bag turkey sandwich on our Christmas horizon we are planning to show up at Kerstin’s house!

5) Once again I re-post Beth’s classic take on Santa and Christmas, lightly edited to remain current.

“Santa is the Spirit of Giving. He is always real.” –Beth White

Once again Beth knocks it out of the park. We have a couple of little ones again in the White family, and because of that we will have a healthy dose of Santa in our lives. While I realize that Beth and I will not really have a say in whether or not the whole Santa Claus story plays out in our grandchildren’s houses, what he stands for is important. Important enough for us to have had him in all his splendor and glory when Danny, Megan and Randy were growing up. Important for us to draw out the time before Randy came to the realization that Santa was not a real person for as long as possible, so deep was his love for the furry fat guy.

Rest assured, the parental units in White family did struggle with how to handle the inherent subterfuge that is necessary to have the Santa Claus story as part of our children’s upbringing. From the very beginning, though, the message was about the giving, about generosity and caring enough about someone else that you not only gave them a gift, but you gave them a gift that let them know how much you cared about them. You know, the “spirit” in the Spirit of Giving, if you will.

No matter how you massage it, that day of reckoning when your child finally realizes that the character Santa Claus is nothing more than the figurative representation of that concept can be fraught with all kinds of emotional trauma. For sure you might get a dose of “you lied to me”, but in my now decades of experience being around parents it’s actually rather rare for this one to pop up. What you generally face is sadness, with maybe a touch of disappointment and even mourning tossed in just to add a little sting to the moment. Like so much else about parenting, or even just about kindness, these are times when you get to talk about and teach really important lessons. Here the lesson is about giving of yourself, with or without a physical gift to actually give.

While thinking about this Beth and I stumbled upon a lovely little story about how one family handled both the “Santa isn’t real” revelation and the “Santa is real” in spirit thing. Heck, the story may even be true! A Dad sensed that his son was pretty much on the cusp of discovering that the guy in the red suit wasn’t really the real deal. His approach? He talked to his son about how he sensed that he, the son, looked like he was not too sure about the Santa Claus character. The Dad complimented his son on being a caring young man: “Everyone who cares, who is generous, can be a Santa. I’m very impressed by how kind you are. I think you are ready to become a Santa, too.”

The Dad went on to ask his son to think about someone in his world who looked like they were sad. Maybe a bit lonely even. He tasked the boy with thinking very hard about what that person might really like as a present. Something they needed, and something that would express that whoever gave it to them realized this need, and cared enough to give them a present that helped to meet that need. There was a catch, though: the recipient was never to know who gave them the gift. For the son the satisfaction was in the caring and in the giving, not in the recognition and praise that might follow.

It doesn’t really matter who the child chose or what he gave; you can trust that the story–true or not–is just lovely right to the end. What matters is that this very young boy is escorted through what can be a very sad stage in a young life by a caring and thoughtful parent. On the other side of this journey emerges a young man who has learned the true meaning of Santa Claus in the secular Christmas story. He has learned that what matters about Santa Claus is real indeed, and always has been. That my darling Beth is right, and always has been.

Santa Claus is the Spirit of Giving. He will always be real.

I’ll see you on Christmas…

Reactive. Sunday mornings are quiet mornings chez bingo. Re-rack after feeding the dogs, catch up with newspapers that have piled up in addition to the Sunday news, a third cup of coffee just for the linger. Over the course of a week I collect thoughts and ideas for either musings or an eventual longer piece, but as often as not it’s something that I read over coffee that turns up in my little Sunday piece. One fertile hunting ground is The Ethicist in the Sunday NYT Magazine, and it is here that I found my muse this week.

I have offered, here and elsewhere, that it is perfectly proper to make an enemy as long as you do it with forethought and on purpose. In my long-held opinion to make an enemy by accident is the second greatest insult one can extend to another human being; it suggests that the newly formed enemy was not significant enough to even consider that they existed prior to your actions (or inactions). This leads, of course, to the single greatest insult that you could ever foment: to actively and purposely choose indifference to the existence of another.

This is a part of a topic addressed by The Ethicist today. He defines a “decent person” in part by whether or not they have what philosophers call appropriate “reactive attitudes”. In short how we react to others, and by extension how we react to what they in turn display toward us. The philosopher Peter F. Strawson mentions resentment, gratitude, and anger that we may have in response to how we perceive that others have treated us, or someone who we care about. Simply feeling these emotional reactions acknowledges that we feel the others are a part of our lives. They matter.

This time of year is fraught with the entire spectrum of emotions as we come into close contact with family and others with whom we share history. The simple fact that we come together means that we are not, cannot be, indifferent to either them or their feelings about us. Now to be sure there are some among us who have family members who are truly disturbed and either cannot or will not extend any type of goodwill or positive emotion whatsoever. Those, I believe, are rare exceptions, and to you who may be in this position you have my deepest, heartfelt sympathy. For the rest of us, though, in North America the Holiday season presents us an opportunity to re-boot our “reactive attitudes” toward family and friends.

Do you remember what it felt like to go home those first couple of years after you got out of high school? Remember how excited you were to see your folks, your grandparents, and your siblings? There was a buzz in your circle of friends as you conspired to sneak away and re-convene right where you left off the last time you were together. Remember? Trust me, the feeling was at least mutual (if not even stronger) on the part of your parents (and grandparents). They, we, couldn’t wait to see you.

Families are complex and messy, but for all of that no matter what your particular story may be, families are never indifferent. You could certainly take the position that we should always be connecting with family, and that the pressure of the Holidays would be lessened if we made more of an effort to be with those who trigger our “reactive attitudes” throughout the year. I’m OK with that. Actually, as a son, brother, in-law, father and grandfather I’d be thrilled with that. But here we are in Hanukkah, with Christmas a week away, so how much we see folks over the year is a topic for another Sunday.

Today, it’s time to go home.

Imagine, if you will, that each day, precisely when you awaken, 86,400 pennies are deposited into your bank account. Every. Single. Day. Each night when you go to sleep whatever is left of that 86,400 pennies is removed from your account; every day you have to find some way to spend 86,400 pennies. What would you do? Would you put it in another account and let it grow slowly over time? Invest it in stocks or some other long-term plan? Get a bigger mortgage or a fancier car and use your pennies to make payments? Or would you perhaps give your pennies away, or even use your pennies for your own daily expenses and therefore buy the freedom to do, or be whatever it is that makes you (or those you love) happiest?

Would you spend a penny for the freedom to use your own time?

Of course many of you knew exactly where this little ditty was going to go as soon as you saw “86,400”, the famous number at the heart of Jim Valvano’s famous ESPY Awards speech as he was dying from cancer. There are 86,400 seconds in each day. No more and no less. You can’t bank them and save them for a rainy day. Each second has precisely the same value in that each sentence can only be filled by that which you choose. Valvano asked “how are you going to spend your 86,400?”

Another way to look at this is to ask what is your time worth to you. We’ve all heard the time-worn trope that “time is money”. Interestingly, the more affluent we become as a society, and the more affluent individuals become, the less time we all seem to have. Odd…ironic…isn’t it? I recently came across new terms: time poverty and time affluence. Interestingly, those at both extremes of the income scale can have either. It is striking that even the wealthiest among us, man and women who can (and do) pay to have all manner of the messy and menial tasks of their lives done by others (lawn, laundry, livery, etc.) find themselves swimming in an anxious and ever-shallower pool of time.

To be sure many of these time-poor individuals who are resource-rich are buying time to be busy at that which made them resource-rich in the first place, and those who are time-wealthy cannot use their time to acquire resources for whatever reason. For most of us, though, we do have some measure of control over how we spend those 86,400 pennies. Sometimes you must put a real number, a real value on your time.

This weekend I attended a meeting of a very special professional group that includes some of my very closest professional friends. It meant time away from my practice, time that produces on average some $1000/hour of revenue when you look at all of my activities (note: this is revenue to the practice that mostly goes to overhead, sadly not income to me!). Our meeting was generously supported by some 16 companies that do business in my space, companies for whom many of us consult. One of our guest speakers pointed out that the government has decreed that consultants in healthcare cannot be paid more than $500/hour (though most make much, much less than that), an arbitrary number when you are talking about a physician who might generate $5000/hour (think neurosurgeon). Still, it is possible to “price” time.

In reality our time is much less expensive in dollar terms but much more expensive and valuable in, well, life terms. My real responsibilities at this meeting ended around 6:30 Friday evening. But these are my people; this is my professional “tribe”. I chose to spend the evening with them, and they with me. Doing so meant another night at the hotel so I shaved some pennies off of my expenses by booking a flight home the following evening at 8 (the meeting was completely done at noon on Saturday), something I instantly regretted the minute I got on my outbound flight. What did I do about that? I found an earlier flight at 4 and “bought” myself 4 more hours with my darling wife for $50/hour.

A bargain, at least for me.

So why stay at all on Friday night you might ask? Well, everyone around you is also making the exact same kind of decisions about their time. Most of my friends chose to spend Friday night together out to dinner just down the street from our hotel. Not only that but at least a couple of them spent a few of their collective pennies playing a joke on me. I didn’t even notice that all 60 or so of them in the restaurant had gathered around the table where I sat as the waiter brought a “Happy 70th Birthday” cake, complete with candle and a whole restaurant serenading me! The fact that I am 58 and my birthday is in January is irrelevant. My friends spent their “pennies” to make me laugh.

There are 86,400 seconds deposited in your account each day until the day when they’re not. Each one of us gets to decide, at least some of the time, how much each one of those seconds is worth and how we will spend them. Sometimes, like my first 70th Birthday Party, those seconds are the perfect gift.

Each in its own way priceless.

1) Radar. Wouldn’t it be cool to have your very own radar gun? You know, just whip it out and take a speed reading on random stuff zipping by on an otherwise nothingburger day?

Just gonna put this here in case Santa reads “Sunday musings…”

2) Mark. “You don’t want something you did at 18 to be your high water mark.” Ethan Hawke

I had a pretty OK year at 18. Thankfully, the best was definitely still to come. You?

3) Babe. “Every strike brings me closer to the next home run.” Babe Ruth.

You’re gonna connect. Keep swinging.

4) Haven. “Friendship is the vehicle that delivers innocent people to that space between the rock and the hard place where comfort might be found.” D.E. White

5) Memory. Like the Babe I’ve taken my swings, often and hard, at the corrosive effects of communication technology on human communication. For every time I’ve hit it out of the park–face to face over a glass of wine with Beth, a close friend, or one of my kids–I’ve whiffed on one that was low and outside, hurled by new tech. For instance, Snapchat came and went and got sold for a Bazillion $$ before I even really knew how to use it. I got singed, a full in-person facial a couple of months ago about someone’s recollection on something I was quoted as saying but don’t remember on a platform I only casually use.

I do not have an Instagram account.

Now, I’m hardly a Luddite. I’m sitting at a kitchen table littered with droppings from Steve Jobs’ imagination, pecking away at one of them while another serenades me, yet one more beckons for a response, pinging away impatiently behind me. It’s all really pretty OK though, because there’s no one here, really physically here, who wants or needs to talk to me at the moment. Even Bohdi, the world’s most mischievous Australian Shepherd, isn’t interested in chatting.

This is not a “be here/be now” lament about focusing on the real, live person who is physically with you rather than your phone and its irresistible access to someone who is somewhere else. Nope. I lost that battle as spectacularly as any swing and a miss by the Bambino, at least on a societal level, and for the most part in any group setting as well. For sure, every now and again, I hit a bloop single and get one of my kids to put down their phone and “be there” for a whole meal or make it through a business dinner without someone breaking away to manage said IG, but no grand slam big picture win on that one. (As an aside, who wouldn’t love to see a Sesame Street re-do of “Put down the Duckie” substuting “iPhone” for Duckie? Google it.)

This is about the most ongoing tech attack on the human experience as we know it–the “Selfie”. It’s not real unless you took a picture of it. You weren’t there unless you have a picture of wherever there was, whatever that was. And the most damaging of all, it wasn’t significant enough, it wasn’t truly magnificent or epic, unless you shared it with at least your first 4 degrees of separation on no fewer than three “platforms”.

The camera on your phone is stealing your memories.

But how can that possibly be? How can memorializing the momentous make my memories disappear? There are two insidious effects of the nearly compulsory grab for the phone and the shutter. The first is simply that you’ve stopped the moment in question, interrupted whatever is wonderful about that singular now. Everything stops for the camera. You’re frozen, right then, right there, in that exact click. Your flow is gone. What might have come next, following as naturally as your next breath, is forever lost as soon as the camera appears. The re-boot is as jarring as emerging from the breath hold of a frozen dive. It’s not really that I don’t get any pleasure out of the selfies per se, just that the “taking” is interrupting the memory making.

Memories, the good ones at least, are like poems. Returning to those memories over time is like re-reading a beloved verse. The basic facts, like the words in the poem, remain the same; it’s around the edges of the memory that we find the smiles. In poetry it’s the message between the lines. In music it’s the space between the notes. This is where the magic lives. We shrink these spaces in the memories that hurt but won’t fade, and we try enlarge them, to spend as much time as we can engulfed in the happiness that lives in the space around our best memories. How and what we were feeling right then. The potential for growth here, in this space, is being fully engaged in simply living in each “now”, feeling that now as fully as you can rather than engaging your cellphone camera to let what you were doing, rather than how you were feeling, be the memory.

You can’t really take a picture of how you feel, and in the end isn’t that what makes the best memories?

I’ll see you next week…

1) Brevet. Temporary military promotion, traditionally given in the field during combat. Came up in a brief commentary about U.S. Grant.

Still have to read his autobiography.

2) Stuffers. As in stocking stuffers. Doesn’t it seem like this should be the easiest part of the whole Christmas gift thing?

Trips me up every single year.

3) Carols. I love Christmas music. I mean really and truly and probably pathologically loooove Christmas music. So much so that we have an unbreakable rule around the house: no Christmas music until the day AFTER Thanksgiving. Which is now.

You have been warned.

4. Range. Came upon a new term for me while reading the Sunday papers: “home range.” It is meant to denote the diameter of a circle center of which is a family home and the perimeter of which defines the distance that children are allowed to roam without adult supervision. While I like the term very much–it fits the bill for my never-ending quest for accurate vocabulary with which to frame a discussion–what I went on to discover about the arc of the home range over history is kinda sad actually.

Turns out it has been shrinking without objective cause for decades.

I am a child of America, born and raised here as were my parents and as was Beth. In the 1950’s the “home range” was measured in miles, and it became “open” to children as young as 7 or 8. This was largely the case for me and for my siblings in the 60’s suburbia of our youth. We had the run of our neighborhood in early grade school; heck, we walked about 3/4 of a mile to our elementary school. Once we got our first banana bikes we could ride pretty much anywhere on our side of “downtown” without so much as a “I’ll be at so-and-so’s” to our Moms. The run of the town arrived with 10-speed bikes around age 12 or so.

There was nothing particular or unusual about our experiences. Pretty much anyone in my generation had the same story to tell. Nor was this a rural or suburban experience. I vividly remember stories told by friends and acquaintances of riding the NYC subways solo as young as Middle School. We weren’t exactly completely “free range”, but our particular version of “in the wild” gave us a pretty wide berth.

The “stranger danger” responsible for the declining home range available to today’s children is almost certainly overblown by several orders of magnitude. If children are taken by an adult it is dramatically more likely to be a family member and done as part of a domestic dispute. I think the way the author of this particular article put it was you’d need to use 750 years of total episodes to objectively explain this decrease in home range.

What then, you might ask, is the downside of having children always under the eye of a family member? Well, there are theories that “free range” play without the intersession of adults leads to less anxiety and more self-confidence in children. Let me admit that I am way over my skis when it comes to this; not even remotely an area of expertise. Except, it does make some sense, no? Especially in light of my experiences as a child. Yes, for sure we had stuff like Little League baseball starting at age 8. But at least in my little dying mill town with three elementary schools we also had neighborhood vs. neighborhood 9 on 9 baseball games on random fields all over town. We swam in the town pool, but we also swam in any number of backyard pools and random reservoirs. We watched over each other because, well, that’s just what you did.

We only called in the adults when some kind of emergency came up and we just couldn’t grok it and solve it on our own.

Was it a different time? Sure. For one there were no drugs being dealt on the playgrounds. Still, we collectively managed not only ourselves but any conflicts that arose. We learned how to compete and then leave that competition on the field. How to make friends with total strangers, all the while totally unaware that a year or two or three we’d be sitting together in English class at the Junior High School when our home range had effectively grown to include the entire town.

Maybe this is just the nostalgic musings of an old man coming off a holiday that is designed to trigger such stuff. I dunno. Still, if you close your eyes and think back, wasn’t it just like this when you were a kid? Sitting on the lawn of a friend’s house when the street lights came on and saying “see ya tomorrow”. Your bike as much of a freedom chariot as any ’50’s roadster in a Happy Days episode (google it!). Slowly, over time, your home range extended to all four corners of your home town. Your turf, the same. You learned how to meet and befriend people through pedal power. Maybe even got an extra piece of Thanksgiving pie along the way.

I’m way past the stages where I was “ranged in”, or indeed any of mine were. But I remember. I remember that the lessons I learned on the outer edges of my rather large home range sent me out into the world well-equipped whenever I met someone on the other side of whatever town I found myself in. I ate a lot of pie.

Our kids and our grandkids could surely do the same.

I hope you and yours had a very happy Thanksgiving. I’ll see you next week…

Here is my annual Thanksgiving Day post, inspired in part by the late Dick Feagler’s Christmas memories, lightly edited to be current.

Thanksgiving is by far and away my favorite holiday. Not even close. Maybe it’s because I’ve always had much to be thankful for, always had pretty much everything I need and at least a bunch of what I (thought I) want. Seriously, I can’t really remember a single Thanksgiving in my entire life where I thought the ledger was tilted to the minus side, where I just couldn’t find so much more to be thankful about than not.

You?

Oh sure, there’s always something to gripe about. I’m not really sure what it is at the moment, but Beth called me out last night for basically being an edgy grump. Waned to know what all of the heavy sighs were all about. Guilty, but cluelessly in retrospect, even though I managed to come up with a reasonably coherent attempt at an explanation at the time. Still, it’s almost Thanksgiving, and I’ve gotta get my…ahem…stuffing sorted out.

One of the attractions for me to the day is that there are no real obligations. No gift giving. No “X shopping days until” stuff. Heck, I’d love to see a bit of Thanksgiving cheer around town, in stores and restaurants and such. Like we didn’t know all of those Christmas lights were already up the week before Halloween just because you didn’t plug them in?! Sheesh. Throw me a bone. Gimme a turkey and maybe a pilgrim hat in the window, just for a couple of days. Let me revel in the holiday where there’s really no revelry, just for a moment.

Oops…edgy grumpy again. Sorry.

Thanksgiving is so much more precisely because it’s so much less. Your family, such as it is at any given time, gets together and you eat turkey. Simple. You gather around a communal table, pass around whatever traditional fare constitutes your family’s meal, and talk all over each other with your mouth full. Everyone is more pleased to be together than not, even your cranky aunt who always–ALWAYS–tells you to swallow your food before you answer. Even she is OK on Thanksgiving.

There’s a sameness to Thanksgiving, at least in our minds, and I think that’s part of the joy, the comfort of the holiday. Close your eyes, sit back, and just for a moment think about Thanksgiving at your house. Don’t pick a particular life stage, just let it happen. What do you see? Man, it’s like seeing my life scroll out before me in countless little pictures and video snippets. My timeline is notable for one very important thing: at no point, in no image that flashes before me, am I alone.

What do you see? There’s football in mine. Lots and lots of football. The first memory in line is football. It’s so cold at the Southbridge/Webster HS game my hands feel numb typing. I had my first cup of coffee that day; they were all out of hot chocolate. You played and then came home, or went to the game and then came home. Yup, football and fires in the fireplace, and so, so much food. And there’s always that one, strange, once-a-year food, right? Ours? Peanut butter filled dried dates, rolled in pure sugar. Like a bite-sized PB&J. That’s the one I remember. It was always up to just one or two of your family members to make that weird little treat, too. I flash on my youngest sister as she rolls the dates in the sugar, feigning anger as her siblings snitch them off the plate as quickly as she rolls them. My tongue sticks to the roof of my mouth at the memory of those little sugar bombs.

As you sit there and move through your Thanksgiving montage you begin to notice something, though. At intervals that are not really regular, but they are there just the same, something changes. Maybe you moved, and the dinner table is different. There are some new characters around the table, a girlfriend here, a husband there. Sometimes something is missing. You run back the tape. You look and you look, but try as you might, someone isn’t there. All kinds of reasons for this, of course, but the first time you scroll through a significant change–venue, menu, cast–it shakes you a bit, right? Your brother got married and has to share the holiday with another family. Your sister was deployed; no FaceTime back then to sorta, kinda, fill the space. Mom or Dad, Grandma or Grandpa, someone is no longer here to be there at all.

Here, I think, is where edgy, grumpy Darrell is probably coming from. If you’ve been around long enough, and Heaven knows I certainly have, you’ll scroll through more of these changes, these inflection points if you will, than you really realized were happening at the time. New families. In-laws. Someone lost or misplaced. Another generation arrives. If you could somehow go back even further, before your own little Thanksgiving memory tree started to grow, you’d find that there’s nothing really unique at all in this little part of Thanksgiving. Change, growth and change, are also part of the magic of the Holiday. What was it like for my Mom to move with her new family to a Thanksgiving in her own home? Family lore has it that my Dad’s family was more than a little unhappy with his move all of one county away. What was he thinking those first couple of Thanksgivings at his and my Mom’s house? For that matter, what was it like in their homes at Thanksgiving when they were the same age as their grandchildren are now?

Did they have peanut butter-filled, sugar-rolled dried dates?

Every day is new. Each one is different from the last, and Thanksgiving can be no different. This week there will be much that feels like so many Thanksgivings of yore, yet it will be new as well. New babies and new lives and new places. New additions brought into our oldest traditions (really old Tawny Port!). Things and people to adopt and love as much as all we’ve loved before. Edgy? Well, it’s almost certainly because so very much will be new this year in our little Thanksgiving at Casa Blanco. New brings a bit of uncertainty, doesn’t it? Yes, for sure, it does. But with certainty I can say that once again, as with every Thanksgiving, I will have much more to be thankful for. The ledger will be long on thanks, needs comfortably covered, wants undoubtedly as well. I will be surrounded by those I love; when the scroll is run in the years ahead I will see my people. Of this I am quite certain.

And there will be dates. Sticky, gooey memories to begin the next generation’s Thanksgiving story.

Happy Thanksgiving. I’ll see you next week…