Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

1) Commute. Spent 13 hours in a car, mostly riding shotgun, mostly under a 35 lb. dog.

It would be so much easier if there was a single podcast that could keep my attention for more than a single hour.

2) Telepathy. Having said that, we listened to 4 episodes of a podcast dedicated to the possibility that non-speaking autistic individuals have the ability to read minds. Not only that but have the ability to communicate with one another without geographic limitations. The experiments provide compelling evidence that it is real. You really, really want to believe it.

The only problem? Science. Not only is there no proposed mechanism of action discussed, none of the principals make even a perfunctory effort to come up with one.

Faith and hope are lovely concepts, but if you want me to get on board you really gotta give me a bit of science.

3) Soldier. As in Canadian Soldier, a 3/4″ bug that looks very much like a tiny little replica of the plane flown by the Wright Brothers that invades the southern coast of Lake Erie every year on Father’s Day. By the millions. They live just long enough to provide a weekend treat to the thousands of Walleye swimming just off the coast. Except for the 10’s of millions that end up in piles in parking lots and as pancakes on American cars. Here and gone in less than a week.

Every. Single. Year.

4) Nail. “Did you nail it, or did you get away with it?” Andy Stumpf. Retired Navy SEAL, Wingsuit Flyer, Podcaster and Author.

I met Andy in April of 2005 or 2006 when he was running the 2nd phase of BUDs training at the SEAL NSW on Coronado Island. My earliest written pieces that showed up in the CrossFit world each Sunday had attracted the attention of a couple of active duty SEALS including Andy, and he invited me to visit NSW when I was in San Diego at a professional convention. It was an incredibly meaningful invitation and experience, one for which I am eternally grateful to Andy and his fellow SEALs.

And so it was that I stumbled upon his guest appearance on the podcast hosted by Andrew Huberman, the self-described Ambassador of Health Science to the lay population. Andy made the above comment in the context of describing the paper thin line between actually being good enough to have pulled off an incredibly difficult feat, or catching just enough lightning in your bottle to have gotten away with it. The topic he and Huberman were discussing was whether or not the most experienced wingsuit flyers were really that good or just that lucky.

There’s a lot of meat on that bone, no matter what you do for work or pleasure.

Think about Andy’s first job, active Navy SEAL. Turn a corner in an active theater and encounter another human. Friend or foe? Think about a trauma surgeon encountering a bullet fragment near the spinal cord. Adjacent or abutting? Less dramatic but certainly impactful, you have your finger on the button that buys or sells $10BB worth of oil company stock. Are those tankers moving through or stuck?

Some people really ARE that good. When they make a decision that goes well they more than likely really DID nail it. Other times, no matter how good they might be, when Scottie or Rory leave the pin in and a putt that’s destined to end up 10′ by slams into the pin and goes in, well, even they know that they got away with it.

Again, lots to contemplate here, but my take away is that the men and women who really are so good at whatever it is they do they nail it almost all the time, are also the men and women who know deep down when they just go away with it.

5). 95. Today would have been my Dad’s 95th birthday. It’s pretty good to be a Dad, or to have a Dad whose birthday comes around near, or on Father’s Day. It’s especially cool if you and one or several of your kids share something that you are passionate about, even more so if you can do it together. And I am quite sure it doesn’t matter what it is. For instance, I discovered that my buddy Karl’s birthday was yesterday. Karl and his son were both extraordinary high school and college baseball players. What are they doing? I got a picture of them sitting together today at the NCAA Final Four game between Oklahoma (Karl’s alma mater) and UNC (home town team).

Our game with my Dad, at least for my brother and one of our brothers-in-law, was golf. It’s such a cliche it’s almost comical, right? Father, and or grandfather puts a club in a boy’s hand at–pick it–2 or 4 or 10 years old in the hope that one day at 12 or 14 or 30 he might stand beside the tee box and watch that same son launch one. My brother saw my nephew get his first ever hole-in-one last month. If memory serves my Dad saw one of my brother’s. Full circle, that. I know that the same kind of thing happens with a father and a child sitting on a boat holding fishing poles, or walking in a pheasant-filled field with shotguns at the ready. The first time a son or a daughter aces Dad on the court. Same feels.

But for my brother and for me it was golf. On the course with Dad as playing partners or caddying for him and his buddies. Golf was our entré into his world. Again, it’s so often the venue it’s almost trite. I’m sitting here watching the U.S. Open, just me and Beth and the dogs, and I stumbled across a clip from the Golf Channel of one of the Amateurs who qualified into the field and then made the 36 hole cut. He would get to play the weekend at the U.S. flipping Open as a 17 year old amateur. Are you a golfer? Did you ever dream such a dream? You played in the U.S. Open and made the cut. Did you win? That’s just so outrageous I couldn’t even dream it. But make the cut? Sure, I dreamed of making the cut and what it would be like walking up to the green on the 72nd hole.

So there I was, getting ready to muse and watching the Open on NBC while I surfed around Twitter and LinkedIn and Facebook ( I don’t have the bandwidth to add Instagram or TikTok). Up comes a video on the Golf Channel of 17 year old amateur Miles Russell walking up the fairway of the 72nd hole. As the talking heads told the audience that young Miles had been introduced to golf by his Dad, who’d been gifted the game by his GrandDad, the camera pans to Miles’ caddy outside the rope taking his caddy vest off and putting it on Dad. The caddy ducks under the ropes and off the course as Dad shoulders the bag and makes the walk up 18 side by side with his son.

I tried…I really tried to tell Beth why I was crying.

11 years ago I went to Rhode Island to be with my Dad for his birthday and Father’s Day. Dementia had stolen him from us. He lived in a world that alternated between times of comfort not seen in more than 50 years, and panic-stricken moments when he was unable to find the GPS coordinates of the here and now. Unaware that we would lose him in 4 short months, I was blessed with a brief moment of clarity. A tiny gift of time my Dad and I got to share, memorialized in “A Brief Father’s Day Visit From My Dad”. Here it is, again, 11 years later.

“My siblings and I only need to remember one weekend each year when it comes to celebrating my Dad. His birthday almost always falls within a day or two of Father’s Day. So it was that I found myself in Rhode Island the past couple of days, in the company of my Mom and a guy masquerading as my Dad, a guy who was very curious about the new fella who’d dropped by for a visit.

Getting old is not for sissies, my friends.

Somewhere inside, deep inside, there’s still some of my Dad in the jumbled up connections of his mind, carried by the body that failed him in such spectacular fashion 2 ½ years ago. Dad is extremely intelligent, the only family member in his generation to have gone to college. Quite the athlete, he used football and the GI Bill to pay for school. Like so many in his generation he then worked, raised a family, and put himself through grad school. He won his club championship in golf twice at the ages of 50 and 60. No typo. Beat the reigning RI State Amateur champ on his home course for the first one.

As we sat on the porch of his house overlooking the 14th hole, I had an ever so brief visit from that guy. From my Dad. Like a citizen of Brigadoon he came slowly through the mist of his mind to join me for a bit. We’d always bonded over golf. My brother and I never turned down an invitation to join him on the course, either as partners or as caddies for him and his buddies. It was quite a privilege to do either; my Dad’s most elemental essence was expressed on the golf course.

A light breeze was blowing through the forest in the back yard just beyond the rough. We chuckled at the golfers who failed to take the wind into consideration, sheepishly trying to sneak into the yard to retrieve their out-of-bounds second shot. Dad talked about caddying as a kid in the Depression. We both noted the absence of caddies as the foursomes passed in and out of view. It was really very nice.

I quite like the Dad of my adulthood. Quick to smile, slow to anger, unfailingly loyal and kind. It’s hard to imagine how distant he was when I was a boy, his friendship as an adult is so easy. I’m not sure how long we sat there to be honest, nor when I noticed that he was slipping away. As surely as the village of Brigadoon disappears, the mist had returned to claim him. I got up, walked over to his chair, held his hand and gave him a kiss. I wished him a Happy Birthday and a Happy Father’s Day, hoping that I’d made it on time. That he was still there. That he knew it was me, Darrell, his oldest child. I told him I loved him.

He smiled and gave my hand a little pat as he disappeared into the mist.”

Happy 95th Birthday Dad, and Happy Father’s Day. I miss you every day; it just seems like it’s always a little bit more today.

I’ll see you next week…

This entry was posted on Sunday, June 21st, 2026 at 6:01 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.