Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

Sunday musings (Memorial Day version)…

It’s the stories. The stories matter. Whether they died in the heat of battle or in the cold of infirmity, the warriors all have stories. The stories are all important.

It’s remarkable how difficult it is to get at those stories, though. The ones that were the most formative, the ones that turned that one soldier or that one sailor into who s/he became, they tend to be slow in coming, if they come at all. Yet those are the ones that matter most.

The warriors among us tend toward silence. It’s not so much a secret thing (although there is a small group who simply mustn’t tell their stories) I don’t think, as it is a continuation of the protector role our airmen, sailors, soldiers and marines assume. They don’t so much keep the stories secret as they shield us from the effects of the stories, so powerful were those effects on them when they happened. Yet again, to understand those who remain, and to try to know those who have departed, the stories matter.

I drive by a cemetery filled with the graves of those who fought, some who died while fighting, and I try to conjure their stories. It’s pure folly. Dead men tell no tales, eh? Humanity learns of conflict and war from the stories told about both, and humans learn about each other the same way. Asking to hear the stories is an act of respect. Listening to the stories can be an act of love. Telling the stories is a little of both.

The stories of the men and women who have fought our wars are important.

A friend from my youth, a coach not too very much older than I once broke down and cried over his story. A very junior officer, his story of leadership and loss comes to me every year on Memorial Day and Veteran’s Day. I know him so much better, understand who his is so much better because I heard his story. So, too, is my knowledge of the men and women younger than I who have served and fought and graced me with their stories.

Life is long unless you are unlucky, but even the lucky run out of time. We have no Civil War survivors, no one from WWI to tell their stories. Those few from WWII still here are reticent, and time grows short. Even Korea fades ever quickly to time’s passage. My Dad is marooned by his illness somewhere between 1947 and 1974; much of his “time” seems to be spent in Korea at the moment. The smallest of consolations for us, his progeny, is that we may learn his story.

This Memorial Day let us all remember not only those who served and those who died in that service, but let us all remember their stories as well. Let us ponder the lessons those stories teach about not only humanity but also about the warrior, the person we remember. Let us encourage those who still walk among us, especially those whose journeys have been long and must be soon ending, to tell us their stories while they still can. Let us listen to those who know the stories behind each headstone as we gather in their honor. We have much to learn from the stories, about war and conflict, about the people who fight, about ourselves.

The stories matter.

1. 64. Happy 64th Birthday to my brother Randall who is almost certainly on the upper deck of his home away from home, sipping coffee and dreaming avian dreams of glory.

2. Orioles. One of the wonders of our home here on the North Coast of the U.S. is the annual arrival of a flock of Baltimore Orioles, a real bird, not just a perpetually underperforming baseball team. This year our early summer visitors seem to be channeling their MLB brethren: they have failed to show up for the game.

“Where are my Orioles?” Beth and several of her birding friends have been lamenting the absence of our colorful friends. We’ve not been able to discern the reason, though we all surmise that it may be due to our unseasonably cold and wet spring. Perhaps they are channeling the “snowbirds” of NE Ohio, the smart ones at least who looked at the weather and stayed down south.

Plates of grape jelly sit unattended as we await their return.

3. Sprezzatura? Beth and I are prepping for our next great adventure, this one a trip to Italy with our great friends Bill and Nancy. We four were married a month apart almost 40 years ago. Bill has been after us to visit Italy, the country of his ancestors, for some time now. An experienced visitor to Italy, Bill has assembled an itinerary presented in a Powerpoint and outlining our agenda. Historic sites, restaurants, wine tastings, accommodations and logistics, all there.

In Italian!

Why “sprezzatura” (nonchalant, convention-flouting)? Bill is also an experienced packer when it comes to Italy. Conscious of the space limitations of the cars he will drive as he squires us around the “mid-south” of the country, Bill has reached out no fewer than 3 times to ask about our luggage status. He also had some “helpful” advice for me regarding appropriate garb for an elderly-adjacent American tourist in Italy. While very practical (“it’s gonna be hot in southern Italy in June”), his advice is hardly sprezzatura (“men don’t wear shorts”).

There’s a strong sense of deja vu in all of this. When Beth took me along for her grand Portugal riding adventure I was very concerned about looking like an American tourist. 57 years old at the time I made a bunch of purchases, many towards the effort to look like a “native”. Now, at 65 and facing the Italian summer? I don’t know if I will be able to describe my style for the trip as particularly sprezzatura, but I say for sure it’s gonna be practical.

Shorts take up less room in the suitcase, too.

4. Durable. My longstanding interest in health and activity monitors has flared once again, this time in a fairly comical way as has been my wont. When my Biostrap became non-functional–the company has decided that it is a research endeavor now, no longer interested in the individual customer–I found myself adrift. Honestly, as silly as that sounds, that’s really how I felt. I’ve come to really enjoy waking up and checking on some of the hidden aspects of stuff like HRV and basal HR, PO2 and sleep stages, and comparing them with how I feel upon awakening, and I without my Biostrap I kinda missed that.

This is not in any way a new phenomenon. Beginning with my beloved Nike Fuel band more than a decade ago, I’ve been deeply interested in not only the area in general, but also in the fairly meaningless minutiae about the differences between the devices themselves. For those not so afflicted, what matters is not so much the actual readings that one obtains from your tracker, but rather trends that you uncover and track to other parts of your Healthspan plan (diet, alcohol, exercise, stress, etc.). All you really need is a device that is unobtrusive enough to ignore, and the willingness to wear it.

Nevertheless, off I went on yet another “journey” into the weeds of tracker land. This time I had the dubious advantage of all things internet and search. Dubious, of course, because there is so much more opinion out there than anything that could be described as solid fact. I did manage to find a couple of reasonably knowledgeable folks who were close enough to me philosophically to be helpful and to save me a little bit of time. Fitbits and Apple watches and Whoops and Ouras, all mixed in with smaller niche players.

In the end it boiled down to Whoop vs. Oura. Wrist strap or ring. I promised myself just one. Honest. Really tried. But just like the reviews, all of which said basically the same thing (Whoop for activity, Oura for sleep), I found that just one wasn’t going to really replace the Biostrap. I started out with a Whoop, felt I needed more granular night time information, and ordered an Oura. Just in time to learn that the latest version of the Whoop would be out 3 days after my ring was delivered and would probably handle everything.

Foiled, despite my good intentions.

I have no idea how it’s gonna play out. For the moment I am parsing the differences in the information I’m getting from each and hoping that one or the other will be sufficient. Honestly, it’s still one part true intent as part of my Healthspan project, and one part pure hobby. I’ll keep you posted.

5. Friendship. Last week’s family wedding in the Low Country was all the more fun because it brought together bunches of friends, men and women, who got to enjoy the festivities together. If you’ve been reading my drivel over the years you know that friendship is one of my pet topics. I find reason to return to it again and again. I am very fortunate in that my siblings and their spouses are also my friends, so the wedding and surrounding activities brought together not just family but also friends.

Watching, I was reminded of some of the differences between male and female friendships. We’ve covered this before, but it’s always interesting how this particular truth bears up under the test of time: men and women enact their friendships very differently. In a nutshell, women tend to anchor their friendships around shared feelings. When you watch a group of female friends they spend most of their time interacting face-to-face. While close proximity always makes for stronger friendships and better interactions, the ability to share feelings over the phone, by text, and through any number of social outlets seems to make facilitating friendships a little easier.

Men, on the other hand, form friendships and bond over shared experiences. Yes, for sure as we age and (presumably) mature, we too solidify our friendships through the sharing of feelings, however sparingly. But it is in these shared experiences that our friendships blossom and grow. Indeed, if you watch men in the act of friendship, after the handshake or bro hug of greeting, we can most often be found standing shoulder to shoulder rather than face to face. Long stretches of silence are interspersed with breaks of high energy interaction. Watch us; it’s just like that.

This rather fundamental difference in both the orientation and “activity” of “doing” friendship is often put forth as the reason women are typically so much better at making friends as adults of any age. Once we’ve left the structured environments of our youth, the locker rooms and barracks and training grounds, we lose the easy access to experiences for us to share. This is one of the reasons that CrossFit found so much success with men (and women to be sure) of pretty much any and all ages: the shared experience of (mild) suffering in pursuit of a common goal, all occurring at the same time and place. Men and women worked out side by side (it helps us make friends with women, too!), and then we all talked about it. (IYKYK)

This week’s Sunday Times Magazine has a story about a man who has many guy friends, but wonders why they don’t hang out together. He takes an incredibly circuitous route to the conclusion that anybody paying the least bit of attention over the years comes to as soon as they think about it: he, we, put way too little emphasis and assign way too little importance on the blocking and tackling of friendships already made. It was so easy when we were younger. It just was. Everyone was there, all the time, doing the same stuff as you were, right there. We had school and class, sports or clubs, silly kid jobs which felt kinda like school or sports or clubs.

Real jobs with real responsibilities could be an obstacle for sure, and work friendships have all kinds of booby traps (hiring and firing, corporate hierarchy, etc.). Looking back, the stuff we all tended to blame, getting married and having kids, was actually really more of the same; we were just sharing a different space with the other men in and around our lives. We went to games and concerts and plays, they just weren’t OUR games and and concerts and plays. But we were still there, standing side by side, being friends.

It’s what happens next, after the kids have graduated, after you’ve become an empty nester that it really becomes an issue. No longer is there an institutional shoulder to shoulder experience. The garden analogy is an apt one for friendship. A garden requires tending and so, too, does a friendship. Left untended, left to chance, it is certainly possible for a garden to flourish. All too often both gardens and friendships ignored too long have a beauty that is but a cherished memory, seen only with the mind’s eye.

For all of my literary legerdemain when addressing the ongoing challenges of friendship in advanced adulthood, my prose can hardly be described as actionable advice. Today’s NYT column authored by Sam Graham-Felsen, is quite the opposite. Adrift and lonely despite a very happy home life with spouse and child, Sam enlists the help of a couple of podcasters, Aaron Karo and Matt Ritter, who provide a very practical “how to water your friendships” guide they call TCS: text weekly, call monthly, see quarterly. The hack as described by Karo is to create a regular event that happens automatically. It doesn’t matter what that event is, only that it happens on schedule.

I really like everything about this. The garden analogy is one I have used often when discussing friendship. An ongoing need to work on friendships no matter how old or young they may be. All three of the available contact methods engaged: text, call, see. It probably doesn’t matter what intervals you choose (they go weekly, monthly, quarterly), only that you set up a general schedule and keep to it. Especially the “see” part, scheduled in ink in everyone’s calendar. I like that very much.

We men are still lousy at making new friends in adulthood unless we are somehow thrown together in a way that we can have those shared experiences. The women in our lives still crush us in this endeavor. For sure we should take advantage of any and all opportunities to make a new friend if one arises. You can never have enough friends. But we DO have friends. We have a lifetime’s worth of friends to call upon, many of whom are just as ready as we are to get back in and tend to the garden of those friendships. It’s not that we don’t need new friends, it’s that we cannot really say that we don’t HAVE any friends.

We all have a lifetime’s worth of friends. We just need to pick up that watering can and get to work.

I’ll see you next week…

1. Limerick. Last Monday was National Limerick Day. Really. We have a national day of recognition for limericks.

Can’t make this stuff up.

2. Recondite. Definition: little known; abstruse. Came up in a limerick “written” by ChatGPT prompted by my friend Monie who’d informed me of our special day of recognition.

3. Abstruse. Definition: little known; wait for it…recondite.

I just love that.

4. Mate. My daughter and SIL live adjacent to a little pond and nature preserve, each teaming with, you know, nature. This being the Low Country of the South Carolina coast this little kingdom is ruled by a rather large alligator the kids have named ‘Seabiscuit”. This queen is a rather prolific generator of next gen gators, each spring welcoming a new suitor of suitable size with no discernible fidelity to any particular partner. Sharing space in the pond are several pairs of Black Bellied Whistling Ducks, each of which is mated for life. They are as darling together as Seabiscuit is deadly alone.

We were brought to Bluffton for a wedding. Our nephew and his fiancé were married on the grounds of his parents’ new home, a place that he and his siblings seem to have quite quickly adopted as the family home (more in a moment). It was a lovely ceremony, officiated by the bride’s grandfather and witnessed by 150 or so family members and friends. “You are my person” was a very moving moment as they said their vows. Weddings can be pretty stressful events, and like most this one was not without its share of tensions and drama. But thankfully, like most weddings, the event seems to have gone off without a hitch.

And like those Whistling Ducks in our kids’ pond we wish for them a lifetime as mates.

5. Home. As I mentioned above my sister Tracey and her husband Steve moved their home from New Hampshire to South Carolina a couple of years ago. Steve’s career took them from MA to NH to Buffalo and back to NH. Their kids were home for both NH v1.0 and Buffalo, and judging by the number of friends they made and kept from their years in both I think the Godin family would consider that they had been “home” in both New London and Buffalo.

Home, of course, is more than just where you happen to live.

There’s no question that Tracey and Steve have found a real home in Bluffton. Like Whistling Ducks to water, they both seem truly happy. At home in all respects. It’s harder to know how it will feel for my nephews and niece; all three are in the very early phases of their careers on the small scale and their adult lives on the grander. Will they look at their parents’ home as just the place where their parents live, or will it feel more like the singular family home? It’s a fine point, perhaps even a bit of gilding the lily, and one that is likely a much bigger deal to those in my generation, if in fact anyone other than me even thinks about such things.

When Beth and I moved on from the house where our kids grew up, traveling the longest 7 miles I’ve ever traveled, everyone was so young that our little cottage seemed to naturally take on the mantel of the family home. Not just the house where Mom and Dad live. There were enough years before they married and moved to their own homes that Casa Blanco was still home. In our favor was the fact that those 7 miles didn’t seem nearly as long to the kids as they did to us, and we didn’t make a NH to SC magnitude move. Our “ancestral” homes feel more like “where we grew up” than “home” now that they are no longer home to ancestors.

Home is really about who lives there.

So it is that Beth and I find ourselves thinking about what home is going to look like as we embark on our third act. This week in Bluffton was about more than just a wedding for us as we prepare to build a wing on the southern side of our home. 10,000 steps through 1.3 million square feet of furniture showrooms (not a typo), walking through the electric plans and strolling “inside” the staked out lot made the winter wing of Casa Blanco start to feel very real, indeed. Real, but not yet a home. At least a full-time home, that is.

You see, I’ve actually been home all week. I am home right now, hurtling north at 80 MPH on I-77. Home is about who lives there, right? My person, Beth, is sitting right next to me. I am as “home” here as I am anywhere in the world. As home as I will be no matter where Casa Blanco may be at any moment because, like Tim and Kate, and so many other Whistling Ducks this weekend, I am with my person, and that means I am already home.

I’ll see you next week…

1. Root. As in Square Root Day. May 5th was Square Root day, when the date represents the square root of the last two digits of the year. 5 x 5 = 25.

I dunno. Just thought you should know that.

2. Gloaming. $0.50 word for “dusk”. Perfect for describing the scene last week as the 151st Kentucky Derby came to a close. Brought to you courtesy of one Tim Layden, sportswriter for NBC after a 25 year career with the nearly late, nevertheless much mourned Sports Illustrated.

A perfect word as the mud-caked winner, Sovereignity, faded into the mist after his conquest.

3. Parvenu. A person of obscure origin who has gained wealth, influence, or celebrity.

I have occasionally come across “parvenu” over a lifetime of voracious consumption of words of all types in every manner possible, and yet I just recently decided to discover what it means. It would have been fun to toss it around over the years, if for no other reason than a descriptor for the destination for a life’s quest, if you will.

You know, like “Sorry, but I can’t be your huckleberry. Too busy trying to be a parvenu.” Or something like that.

4. Success. Two weeks ago I enjoyed what was likely the most successful large conference experience in my professional career. I got to do some stuff I never dreamed I’d get to do (interview a Hollywood celebrity!), and provide support for colleagues as they worked to see their creations come to life. Accolades for past contributions were sent my way so often it seemed liked it happened hourly, and I was mentioned in the same sentence as folks I’ve always looked at as being generational leaders. It was all heady stuff, all the more so because it was so unexpected. It was very nice, and I am very grateful.

But the thing that made the conference a true success is something much quieter and much more personal. Some 30 years ago, during a time when I pretty much just went to work and did the job of tending to patients in the office and the OR, I noticed that the decision makers in the world of eyecare didn’t see me or the other eye doctors who just went to work. Policy was made based mostly on the lived experience of academicians who were often little more than clinical hobbyists. Decisions made in the C-Suites of industry were likewise informed by “experts” who did not really represent, let alone understand the experiences of doctors who spent 95% of their time simply taking care of patients.

It was readily apparent to me that no one in my role as a “working doctor” would ever have any influence in academic medicine, even though training programs were working to create my future colleagues. We “country doctors practicing in the villages” were thought of as potential referral sources (pre ACA, that is) if we were thought of at all. What bugged me about industry was the sense that the denizens of the C-suites were failing their products and their companies by not seeking the insights and counsel of the thousands of doctors “in the villages.” We were prescribing medicines and implanting lenses at a level that was several orders of magnitude greater than the academicians.

Why wouldn’t they want to know what we thought about their products and their place in our practices?

So began a decades long quest to lead an invasion of the C-suites of companies large and small in the eye care industry by “regular” doctors. I started with regional executives and slowly moved up the ladder. Over and over I said that it didn’t have to be me, but they should be asking somebody LIKE me how their stuff was, or wasn’t working in the real world. What we wished they would add to our quivers. Slowly, over almost 3 decades, we came to what I saw two weeks ago in LA: roughly half of the doctors on the teaching podiums and seated around the tables advising those senior executives were doctors who have spent the overwhelming majority of their time taking care of patients in the clinic and the OR.

It is and was a very personal quest, one that was likely being carried out by others unbeknownst to one another, but one that has made my professional world better at the core task before it: save vision, make vision better. It’s a story that won’t be told, but it’s real and it happened, and I got to see it in Los Angeles during the best convention of my professional life.

You don’t get stuff like that very often, and I am very grateful that I got to see it.

5. Mom. It’s Mother’s Day in America. That one single day when we pretend that it’s all about Mom. At the moment I am sitting at the counter of our daughter’s house in Bluffton, in town for a big family wedding. It’s another first for our family, the first Mother’s Day without my Mom here for us to celebrate. Like my niece’s wedding in September we will all have a big hole in our hearts today. A big open time slot that each of us set aside on Mother’s Day to call her, to retell favorite stories, to tell her how much she means/meant to us and that we loved her.

We still have a whole bunch of Moms to celebrate today, though. My own darling Beth, the woman who made me a father, is here with me chez Megan and Ryan. We’ve circulated through the five moms in our generation via texts that reached as far as Mexico to the south and Connecticut to the north, and as near as down the street here in Bluffton. Closer to home I will do precisely what I have tried to do for almost 36 years of Mother’s Days in my own house: find a way for Beth to do pretty much whatever it is that SHE wants to do today! Unlike Father’s Day, a day on which I believe each father should totally give himself over to being Dad for every minute his kids will have him, Mother’s Day should be one where Mom gets to choose how she will spend each moment.

And if she chooses “being Mom” for some of those, we should let her have that, too!

Mother’s Day and Father’s Day seem to line up differently for me. In homes manned by both a father and a mother it seems as if fathers mostly get a pass; any dadly stuff we do gets Oscar-level praise. On the other hand, Mothers, at least the ones I’ve known and loved, are entirely engaged in being a Mom pretty much every waking hour of every day. On the long drive to South Carolina from Cleveburg Beth and I were listening to Smartless, a very funny podcast series in which Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, and Sean Hayes surprise each other with a mystery guest each week. Amy Poehler was the guest on this particular episode (aside: I was Friday years old when I learned that she and Will are married), and she had some pretty cool things to say about her journey as a Mom.

Amy and Will have kids who are about to fledge. Not surprisingly, she described the process of parenting them in show business terms. When they are young you function much as a producer on a movie or TV show set would, organizing and facilitating for the actors and directors. Once your kids become teenagers this is no longer how it works. Now you are more like a consultant invited onto the set by the actors, your kids, available to give advice on demand but expected to simply dwell quietly and unobtrusively on the sidelines until your counsel might be requested. It’s a jarring transition, and in Amy’s telling one that comes without warning and on someone else’s schedule.

The other description shared by Ms. Poehler was also really spot on. She describes the life of a Mom as being inside a series of short stories that begin and end without any rhyme or reason. You find yourself a part of a new story arc after a couple of chapters have gone by. If you are lucky it’s a nice story, one in which you would be happy to spend a very long time. And then, just when you’ve got the hang of it, when you have figured out how your part interacts with the other characters, it’s over. Amy describes the sadness: ” I don’t want this one to be over. I’m good at this one.”

Until one day all of the other actors are gone, and you sit in repose with your memories and hope for an occasional cameo in a chapter here and there.

That’s what I always tried to give my Mom on Mother’s Day each year. A few memories of how wonderful it was being her son. Those calls were really quite lovely. Like watching a re-run of a favorite episode from your favorite TV show, only edited to take out any of the scary or tense or sad parts. We had lots of those calls all year long, actually. It just seemed like they were, I dunno, happier or something on Mother’s Day. I’ve probably reached for my phone a dozen times today to remember a story, or 10, with my Mom.

So Happy Mother’s Day to each and every Mom I know, especially my darling Beth, our sisters and sisters-in-law, and the mothers of our growing collection of grandchildren. I hope each and every one of you gets to do exactly what you want to do today. Tears and only the happiest of memories for the orphans among us, like me, for whom only the memories remain. We all had a mother; Happy Mother’s Day to all of you fortunate to still have a Mom. Time flies by until one day your Mom is no longer there, not even for a cameo appearance.

It’s Mother’s Day. Pick up the phone. Call your Mom.

I’ll see you next week…