Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

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…

1) Pood. Russian measurement for weight, usually applied to kettlebells. 16Kg or roughly 36 lbs.

No reason. Just been thinking about CrossFit a bit and it came up. Thought you should know.

2) Louche. French. Ish. Disreputable or sordid with a weird, inexplicable and altogether wrong attraction.

No reason. Like everyone else just reading about Epstein and his liege of powerful friends and the word came up in a email exchange with Lawrence Summers who was asking for advice. Thought you should know.

3) Polycene. A word to describe a world that is no longer binary but can only be described in terms of polythis and polythat. “With/and” vs. “either/or”.

Read it last week in the NYT and it stuck. I have a feeling that it will stay stuck until I sit down and really explore what the writer (whose name I have regrettably forgotten) was getting at.

4) Orphan. As in Holiday Orphan (seems like that should be capitalized, doesn’t it?). You find yourself away from home and unable to get to the primordial table for Thanksgiving kind of orphan. Or you are sitting at the primordial table and everyone who once filled the assembled seats is gone, or misplaced, or simply unable to make it kind of orphan. Perhaps you have a full table but you remember a time when you were unable to get home orphan.

And there was someone there to open a door and save you a seat.

The topic came up on one of the morning news shows. A grandmother mistyped a number while texting a grandchild and ended up inviting a young man far from home who had nowhere to go for Thanksgiving. Nice story. I think they are now on year 10 or 12 or something like that. Pretty sure it inspired her to invite Holiday Orphans she actually did know to join her family for the holiday. Grateful for that family, she extended her grace to others who for whatever reason would otherwise be having a turkey sub and potato chips alone in front of a meaningless football game.

If we are lucky this year we might be joined by an orphan or two. There’s room, and we have enough to share. I’m pretty sure my siblings and I will all share the story of the year my Mom decided to “orphan” herself and my Dad because she hadn’t received an adequate invitation from any of her kids. Any orphans at our table will laugh as they pass the turkey in one direction and the stuffing in the other.

Bet you have room to spare and enough to share.

5) Harmony. As I mentioned in my Midweek Memory, I stumbled upon a post from some years back that began both my quest to understand “having it all” and my ongoing conversation with my daughter on the concept that we have called “harmony”. The whole “work/life balance” canard. Megan’s core understanding is that WLB is a false construct: work is part of life and cannot be peeled out any more than eating or sleeping can. Life is as much a whole as an air squat, and you can no sooner isolate and balance your glutes in a squat than you can work in your life. Her critical insight is that what we refer to as balance is actually a complex, fluid interaction between and among all of the aspects of a life, including work.

Life is good when these interactions are harmonious.

My contribution in the early days of our conversation was to use this idea to address the other great and also inaccurately labeled concept of “having it all”. Here I reflected on conversations with two young friends inspired by Barbara Streisand’s song “Everything”. These two women were juggling three full-time gigs–parent, spouse, and professional career–all during the days of “lean in”. Having it all really meant at the time having EVERYTHING. After pondering this for a moment one of my young friends offered this: ALL is what you say it is, you just can’t have it all at the same time, and no one can have everything.

Megan and I put all of this into our little intellectual pepper pot and came up with a fully fleshed out way to address WLB using our idea of harmony in an actionable manner. There is a certain definite, definable and quantifiable measurement in each of us we can call “enough”. I’ve touched on the Taoist approach to this in the past. “The man who knows when enough is enough will always have enough.” Food, clothing, shelter. A tribe of family and friends. The ability to keep oneself healthy and well.

Someone, I can’t remember who, once said that all unhappiness comes from wanting. Wanting more than enough. There is some wisdom in that. For us this became “have what you need; want what you have.”

You’ve read the rest if you’ve been reading stuff here. You CAN have it all, you just have to be very clear about what ALL is for you and yours. You must acknowledge that not only can’t you, or anyone, have everything, you also can’t have it all, whatever that means to you, at the same time. Some parts of your all have to be in play at a certain time so that other parts can come to the fore at another. Using our Harmony metaphor, there’s a time for a drum solo, but most of the time that drum is just working with the bass in the background laying down the rhythm of the song.

It’s Thanksgiving week, a wonderful time to reflect on how one is doing on the Harmony front ,and to be grateful that the music still plays. Maybe that pesky brass section keeps threatening to drown out your lead singer, or perhaps the woodwinds have gone missing right when you would have expected them to jump in. No matter. You can’t have it all at the same time. All you can do is keep the music alive and seek harmony in the parts that are making music now. It does always seems easier when you are grateful for that.

Having it all for me means having this time to think and to share, and I am, indeed, grateful for anyone who has found themselves here. I’ll see you in a couple of days, on Thanksgiving…

“I want to grab the big brass ring…”

There are a number of artists who hold dear philosophical and political views with which I can find little common ground, and yet I still find great pleasure in their art. Springsteen, of late, is a good example. An older, longer enjoyed example is Barbara Streisand. After breakfast this morning I found myself humming one of her classics, “Everything”, as I headed off to my next meeting.

[As an aside, I am presently at a huge convention for my day job. Did you know that 3 out of 4 doctors say that Las Vegas is bad for your health?]

You see, I’d just spent some time with a 30-something CEO of a really cool company who just returned to work after the birth of her first child, and just outside the restaurant I’d bumped into a 30-something rockstar among eye surgeons with whom I’d shared a drink last night and discussed how she was managing the work life balance of being a mother of two, busy surgeon, and in-demand expert in our field. We all agreed that balance was unobtainable for any of us, but all the more so for the women; the bar is pretty low for the family side of the balance for men. Old news.

Then, an epiphany. I’ve oft written that you can’t have it all, no matter who you are or what you do. Man or woman. But one of the women, the CEO, after a bit of thought disagreed. You CAN have it all, you just can’t have everything. The trick is in defining what “all” means for you and those closest to you. “All” must be examined, its content vetted and negotiated among the parties involved. Once fleshed out in this way “all” becomes an obtainable entity.

“All” is about balance; everything is about never, ever being in balance.

Needless to say the conversation with both of these very impressive, highly accomplished women pivoted instantly, all of the pressure and intensity of the balance challenge dissipated. Seriously, this is the first time I’ve been able to feel comfortable with some of the very famous women–think Sheryl Sanders, for example–who proclaim loud and long that you can, indeed, have it all. They are at the same time just as wrong as I’ve long held, but they may be more right than I’ve given them credit if they are talking about “all” and not “everything”.

I think my young friends are right, you can have it all as long as you are very clear about what having it all comprises. It’s when you confuse having it all with having everything that makes it not only impossible to have a life in balance, it may actually mean eventually not having much of a life at all.

“…give me everything, every thing.”

1) Cataract. No, not THAT cataract. The non-eye doctor cataract. A large waterfall or sudden downpour; a floodgate or deluge.

Just thought you should know.

2) Familylect. The intimate, group-specific dialect that emerges within a family. As often as not these words or phrases emerge and enter the family’s lexicon as language emerges in a child. “I’na huggy” ( I want a hug), “hangaburger” (hamburger), “by next to me” and “by near me”. “All’ve it” (all of it). “Just a quickie” (a short note or call), “Mary Poppins” (babysitting) and “jelly beans” (everyone gets the same gift).

Bet you can come up with a dozen from your family. Go ahead and share a few!

3) Leo. As in Pope Leo, the unlikely inspiration for a totally new Halloween costume craze for little boys who share the name. Admit it, in a world of K-Pop whatevers and Mini-Marvel superheroes, you got a kick out of all the 3 and 4 foot tall popes ringing your doorbell a couple of weeks ago.

Extra treats for them in return for those smiles.

4) Subdudes. Two for Tuesday, our bi-annual music project on my college email thread, is another gift that keeps on giving. Twice a year our “conductor” (who prefers to remain anonymous and unnamed on all things social media) sends us a prompt reminiscent of a long-lost radio program that played two songs from a single artist each Tuesday. We are tasked with finding and sharing our finds with the group. Some of the themes are just for fun (memorable covers, second acts), while others are purpose-driven (cheering on a beloved thread member). All serve us well by driving us closer together despite 10’s of thousands of cumulative miles between us.

Our prompt for this version was a list of some 33 “under-appreciated” singers or bands and a call to listen to as many of them as we could. From there we share what we’ve found with each other. This was new, as was the inclusion of a “guest host” for the first time, an incredibly kind gesture from our primary host to a friend in need of engagement and camaraderie. From him I received the gift of discovery: The Subdudes are a revelation.

There is at the same time no real lesson here, and a couple of very profound ones if you look just a tiny bit below the surface. My buddies and I are tasked with opening our ears and our hearts and our minds to new music, risk and judgement free explorations that also serve to bring an incredibly diverse group closer. Some of it hits the mark (The Subdudes); some not so much (The Jayhawks). All of it stems from a little bit of the same sauce: love.

Big shout out to DS and NN for all of that.

5) Friended. “Are you still writing?”

It’s been a little while, but I once again find myself drawn to the topic of friendship. Those of you who have given me the gift of readership know that this is a deeply meaningful topic to which I am drawn again and again. My prompt this weekend was a someone I befriended 20 years ago from whom I have heard almost nothing for 8 or so years who was in town at the invitation of a mutual local friend. Once close, we’ve added all sorts of distance to the geographic distances we once worked so hard to surmount.

Proof? I not only write, but I my scribbled drivel has lived at the same addresses for some 20 years. A friend would have no need to ask.

Friendship is seldom forever. Those that survive and thrive the tests of time are certainly the exceptions, as much as we might hope and believe otherwise. A once upon a time friendship may become so through any number of things, most of them bordering closer to the banal than fodder for Broadway. Distance and time likely account for a super majority of these lost or abandoned friendships, the vastness of both an insurmountable challenge. Rare is the friendship roadkill, a victim of some cataclysmic accident along the way. It takes time and effort; one must choose to invest both.

What of this friend, so long “abroad” who visited close enough, and remembered past closeness fondly enough to reach out? We had a very comfortable visit to a time and a friendship we both remembered with fondness. And yet it became clear that what we were doing was just that, remembering. We’d grown differently these last many years. What we shared was a lovely past. The divides in our present seem as wide as the chasms of time and distance that have separated us these many years. We share so very little now.

And what of me? What did I learn from this tiny trip to a different time and perhaps a different me? It will probably take me a bit to unpack all of it, but I can think of two things this Sunday morning. Looking out at friends found and lost, I find myself a bit more forgiving of those who not only moved away in one way or another, but who moved on from our friendship. Everyone deals with time and distance in their own way. Where once I couldn’t shake the thought that a lost friendship was a statement about me, this morning it feels more likely that it is more about the state of the friendship. I can look at friendships like the one I revisited yesterday with more fondness and more warmth. I should look at them that way.

Looking inward I continue to hold that one can never have too many friends, but I may need to edit that in one tiny way: one can never invest too much in truly good friends. Friends for whom time and distance are not obstacles, just speed bumps along the trip we are sharing. What it means to be, or to have a good friend is certainly for me to say only about mine. How do you know what makes a friend a forever friend, one you travel over any length of time and distance to be with?

Well, for me at least, my friends know that I do, indeed, still write, most Sundays at least, right here where I’ll see you next week…

Have you dipped a toe into the whole 23 and Me world? You know, the company that will analyze your DNA and tell you about your heritage. What percentage you are of this or that. Think for a moment about how you answer the question “what are your?” when someone is asking about your nationality. How do you respond? It’s a terrifically important question, more precisely your answer is terrifically important, especially in these fraught times of machine gun-toting police officers in airports.

How do you respond?

Confession time first, or course. Up until yesterday I typically answered with something along the lines of “I’m a mutt, but I’m mostly Irish.” Accurate enough, at least in terms of heritage back some long time ago, if just the tiniest bit dismissive of my maternal grandfather who was a first generation American of 100% German lineage. And there, in that last word–lineage–we find the linguistic accuracy necessary for each of us to begin to structure a better answer. Better for us, and better for everyone who shares a country to begin to think about how we answer the “what are you?” question.

Henceforth I shall interpret that as a question about my nationality and my answer shall be “I am an American.” Full stop.

To be sure I will be happy to engage in a conversation about lineage because there are some pretty neat stories about my grandparents and their parents to be told. But me? It’s been many, many generations and much more than 100 years since my ancestors left whatever shores and became Americans. As soon as they married outside of their ancestral tribe they became, and more importantly identified, as American. Isn’t it time the rest of us follows suit?

Put me down as a vote to drop the hyphen. You know, the ( – ) between “X” and “American” we so often hear when “what are you, what nationality are you?” is floated. Whether born here or bourn and chosen, you are an American. This is not a “my country right or wrong” or “love it or leave it” kind of thing. Not one bit. It’s about how you identify, and then by extension how you support. I am an American. I live here, work here, vote here, and pay taxes here (boy, do I pay taxes). Sure, it’s a big country, and the experience of being an American is certainly different in NYC where I am sitting, Cleveland where God willing I will dine at home tonight, or in LA. But Americans we are, one and all. I hope for and will work for a better America, as I hope you will, too. We can keep the entire spirits and coffee industries afloat discussing what “better” means.

As Americans.

“…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” –George Elliot (HT to my friend Bruce K.)

We in the U.S. have been bombarded of late with missives that declare that we are living in “historic times”, that we have a “historic opportunity” to participate in an election that will “determine our fate as a country in historic ways.” But is that really so? Are we truly at an altogether unique inflection point, one so different from all that have come before that our fate, our daily experiences to come will be affected in ways that we cannot miss or ignore? Or is this particular upcoming election simply the next in an unbroken series of political or governing evolutionary steps that has been unbroken since the end of the Civil War? Is the excitement and the drama simply an extension of the “Techquake” and its always on firehose of information, the internet?

Seriously now, if you are one who is on your soapbox (facing in either direction), are you really telling us that Election Day is going to change our nation to a greater degree than the one that brought us 4 years of LBJ and the Great Society?

As a people the citizens of the developed world have been swept along in the great rivers of effluent poured forth from that firehose of information that was spawned by the internet. Have we forgotten the accuracy and truthfulness of Elliot’s words? If so is it because we simply cannot get even a single pupil above the torrent of information to see what he saw? Or is it more that we have lost the ability to paddle even the tiny amount necessary to do so? No matter, the result is the same.

Literary fiction is taught as the study of quiet acts of desperation and the fall-out that follows. Life, on the other hand, is made up of quiet acts of both desperation and delight made out of sight of nearly everyone. Anonymous acts carried out with neither malice nor benevolence. These are what constitute the reality of life. It seems to me that at least a (very loud) portion of our people have lost the appreciation of this reality. For them each act is either an affront or a tiny step toward canonization. I do not believe they are correct. Elliot is only wrong in that he underestimates his object; that things are not so ill with you and me, is not half but mostly owing to those who lived that small, unseen faithful life.

To what, then, is this anonymous majority faithful? This is quite simple, and because this is so it is all the more painful that it must be pointed out: they are faithful to one another. They live lives that are faithful to the belief that it is another person with whom they are gathered, not an opinion or a belief. This anonymous mass lives lives that are intertwined with other people, not other opinions. When they look to their left or to their right what they see is not a position or a platform, but a person. It is this, the acknowledgement that we are surrounded first by other people, that leads to salvation in this life.

You are surrounded by people who are faithfully living quiet lives, anonymous to all but a handful of others, whose lives will be remembered by even fewer, if at all. Unbeknownst to one another they likely crossed paths with someone with whom they would find little common ground in belief, someone who is close to you, about whom you care very much. Despite this lack of commonality the crossing was uneventful. It was peaceful. On balance it was marked by quiet goodwill, if it was marked at all. It was a moment that will have passed directly into an unvisited “tomb” in the memory of each of these individuals.

And yet it was that quiet faithfulness that behind whatever disagreement might exist between the two there lived much more than another opinion or belief. There lived another person. Another person living a life largely unnoticed, hopefully a quiet one with less desperation than more, on their way to an end noticed by few and mourned by fewer still. Lives that were lived in the faith that there exists much, much more good in others than not. An unspoken faith that they kept each day.

A faith that we, the living, must endeavor to keep.

1) Halloween. Maybe 40 or 45 kids came by Lovely Daughter’s house in South Carolina last night. Beth and I joined Megan, Ryan, and two neighbor households who set up shop in Megan’s driveway and handed out candy. After some 11 or 12 Halloweens at home on a childless little street with no trick or treating at all, it was a nice little blast from the past.

Does anyone still give out 250-300 pieces like candy like we did when our kids were little? Are those days gone everywhere?

Those were good days indeed.

2) Classic. Did you catch last night’s Game 7 of the World Series? The same two teams that brought you an 18 inning classic and perhaps the best single game performance by a player in World Series history delivered what may go down as the best game 7 ever. It was almost enough to make you ignore the fact that this was a battle between the J.P. Morgan vs. CitiBand of MLB.

Still, aficionados of the game will be debating that Blue Jay slide at home on a force play for decades. My take: he runs across the plate and the parade is in Toronto.

3) Prohibition. Savannah, Georgia never fails to entertain. We made a quick visit yesterday for brunch and a visit to the Prohibition Museum. Did you know that the first federal income tax was instituted shortly after the start of national prohibition? No? Me either. Turns out almost 70% of state and federal revenue was from taxes and other fees levied on the producers and purveyors of spirits in the U.S. Legislators and other government officials somehow missed this little detail about how the government was financed back in the day.

Of course, the passage of the 21st Amendment officially calling off prohibition did NOT mean the end of income taxes. Shocking, I know.

If you do make it to Savannah–and I highly suggest you do–make sure to put this museum on your list. Come thirsty; there’s a “secret” speakeasy at the end of the exhibits and they serve up some legit versions of the classic cocktails of the age.

4) Handbook. As in “The Preppy Handbook”. Written by Lisa Birnbach and three other authors who somehow never got any attention and published in 1980, this tongue-in-cheek pretty much nailed a certain group then in residence at my tiny little liberal arts college, their siblings and their parents. Although deep down I realized that there was a whole world that I’d never really seen, The Handbook was kind of a “how to” and “you shoulda” for those in and out of the loop. Imagine my horror when I discovered that wearing tan cotton pants did not automatically mean I was sporting chinos.

Even if I took the “Dickies” tag off the pocket.

In the end all it took was graduating, getting a white collar job, moving to a city, popping that collar on the weekend and becoming a young urban professional or “Yuppie”. Even a public school kid like me was a member of that tribe, with or without reading The Yuppie Handbook (Piesman and Harlee). What Yuppies and Preppies did definitely share was a tendency toward navel-gazing and self-satisfaction, whether born to it (Preppy) or acquired of it (Yuppie). This inevitably led to caricature and open scorn, especially toward those who didn’t get the message that imitation via Handbook was not really the greatest compliment.

Still, the truest of Preppies who grew up to be Yuppies always seem to show up dressed just right for pretty much every event and occasion. Sartorial aging in place, as it were.

5) Head shot. It’s been a minute since my last official set of head shot photos for professional purposes. You know, website bios, promotions for speaking gigs and the like. I tend to show up in candids pretty well, my smile straight and both eyes open and all atwinkle. Posed shots? Meh, not so much. The files that landed in my inbox with the most recent photo session are uniformly execrable. When I’m out and about I am regularly and routinely told I look much younger than my calendar age. And if I catch a glimpse of myself in the mirror I’m not all that young, but I’m also not as old as that batch of headshots makes me look.

Although my wardrobe is definitely, how shall I say it, dated.

Not only do I look like the aging Yuppie wanna-be Preppie that I am, I have obviously spent nearly zero time and effort to either dress my age, or dress like a particularly good specimen of someone so generously endowed with years of life. Stuff is a little too long or a little too loose or–yikes!–a little too tight. My daily “uniform” of slacks, button-down and bow tie is just fine; it’s my brand and makes introductions quick and easy: “you DO wear a bow tie.” Even there, though, stuff could fit a bit better.

Does it really matter? Or is this just a coping mechanism for the shock of a truthful camera? Frankly, I don’t really know. What is clear, though, is that I could stand to be a bit more thoughtful and proactive in both looking my age, and what it means to do so as you get older. Neither fat nor particularly thin, I certainly know how to become more fit. If memory serves, the fitter I felt, the better I tended to feel about my “look”, whether or not I was in sync with either contemporary or classic style. Every 8 or 10 years brought a rather natural reassessment and re-set, usually driven by a proactive move toward better health and fitness.

Driven by the hard turn at mile-marker 49, somehow I just drove past marker 59 on auto-pilot.

In my defense I had my first hip replacement at 59 and before I really got reacquainted with my midsection my second hip gave up the ship. Before I knew it I was 6 years away from the end of my CrossFitty years and all of the health benefits that accrued therefrom. Gone was not only levels of fitness I’d not seen since college, but the desire and will to continue chasing them. Worse, it seemed my attention to style and the like went right out with them. And if someone has published the go-to Handbook for Aging Yuppies, I somehow missed that, too.

It’s too soon for this, of course. Too soon to be truly only doing deadlifts and squats so that I can get my arse off the loo without a hand up. Between the ears I still think like a Crossfitter. I’m deficient in all 10 essential characteristics or skills in fitness, especially strength. My buddy Jeff has done an excellent job of staying fit in 9 of 10 (he hates running and all things long, slow, aerobic); he still likes me and would be happy to help, I’m sure. The better you feel, the better you look.

My better 95% Beth has always had a fine-tuned sense for what it takes for me to look good without consulting any type of Handbook, Preppy/Yuppie or otherwise. She’s already started to make suggestions that look promising. If round one of updating to stylish old Yuppie ends up not cutting it long term I’m sure she’ll be happy to contribute v1.0 to Goodwill and set us off on v2.0. The better you look, the better you feel.

Those pictures turned out to be a stiff kick in the can. It’s too soon to capitulate to the calendar. Too soon to train for anything other than the continued effort to be a little better tomorrow than you were yesterday. To look like you could be a model on the page whenever those old Handbook authors get around to publishing their guide for the mature Yuppy. Pop a collar or two on top of a pair of real chinos that fit just right. Thumb my nose at those lousy professional head shots and just use one of the crazy good candids taken by Beth any time someone asks for a photo.

Maybe just go ahead and write that damn Handbook myself.

I’ll see you next week…