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The System Before It Had a Name

It’s been a busy week. Moving. Work. Life. I don’t have as much time to write as I would like to. But the wanting to write hasn’t gone anywhere.

Last week I told you about Mr. Winter, and I spent most of that thanking him for what he did with that saxophone, a small office, and three years of weekly lessons. But the saxophone was never really the point, and I think I’ve known that for a long time without ever saying it out loud. What he gave me in that room wasn’t music. It was a way to walk up to something too big to take in all at once and not turn around.

The first time I remember it showing up again was in constitutional law, during college. The course was taught by another of the people who leave a mark on you, my pre-law advisor back then and, later, once I started teaching myself, a mentor all over again. Like every good teacher, he took us where we were and expected us to become something more. The reading was heavy and the volume was heavier, and there were nights it looked like a wall with no door in it. So I did the only thing I knew how to do, the thing Mr. Winter had taught me without ever putting a name to it. I worked at it a little each day. I didn’t try to understand all of constitutional law by Friday. I just tried to understand a little more than I had the morning before, and then I did that again.

The same lesson followed me into law school, where nearly every course began with more material than it seemed possible to absorb. Contracts, property, civil procedure, torts. Each one had its own language, its own rules, and its own way of making you feel behind before you had even started. There was no way to understand all of it at once, so I stopped trying. I read the next case, learned the next rule, and came back the next day. By then, the method had become familiar, even if I still didn’t understand where it had come from.

The bar exam was more of the same, only bigger. I sat down in front of a body of law that no one could hold in their head all at once, and I pounded at it. Each day I knew a little more than I had the day before. I never felt myself getting ready. There was no afternoon when it all came together and I suddenly knew I would pass. I just kept moving forward a little at a time, and when the results finally came, I found out that all those small mornings had added up to something.

In school, the lesson was easier to see. There was always a syllabus, a test date, or a professor telling you what came next. Life isn’t nearly so organized. It doesn’t divide itself into chapters or tell you when you’ve learned enough to move on. Most of the time, you don’t even recognize the lesson while you’re living it.

The version of it that mattered most, though, started with this blog. A few years ago I took an honest look at where I was, and I knew I wasn’t happy there. I knew what the outcome had to be. I’ve told you the why before and I won’t tell all of it again, because the why was never the hard part. The hard part was smaller than that. All that was left was to start.

So I started. I did one thing on one day, and then I did it again the next day, and again the day after that. I didn’t stand on the scale every morning waiting for something to happen, because nothing happens that way. What happens instead is a slow line you can’t see while you’re on it. You only see it when you turn around.

That’s the part nobody told me. I never felt the progress arrive. I felt the work, and most days the work didn’t feel like much. The change happened quietly, out of sight, while I was busy doing the next small thing. Then I looked back and there it was, sitting in a photograph or a pair of pants or a few thousand mornings of walking, and I realized there was never going to be one dramatic moment. There were only ordinary days that accumulated into a different life.

Over the years I’ve read a lot of people who put names and systems around the same idea, that nothing real changes all at once. James Clear writes about habits. Tony Robbins talks about decisions followed by action. The Stoics remind us to spend our energy on what we can control and let go of what we can’t. I’ve read them, studied them, underlined them, and tried to apply what they taught. It took me a long time to realize they weren’t introducing me to a new way of thinking. They were giving language to something I’d already learned decades earlier in a little office with a saxophone. Mr. Winter had already shown me the system. He just never called it one. Decide who you want to become, then act on it, even if the action is small, because deciding and acting are the only two things you ever actually control. Everything else, how fast the change comes, whether anyone notices, what the world does while you’re busy showing up, was never yours to manage in the first place.

It’s why I’m still deciding to sit down every Saturday morning and make the next one. The time is shorter now, but the method hasn’t changed. A little at a time is the only way I’ve ever built anything worth keeping. Mr. Winter never talked about habits or discipline or Stoicism. He just kept pointing at the next measure and saying, “Again.” It took me most of a life, and more than a few books, to understand that he wasn’t only teaching me the saxophone. He was teaching me how to live.

From Worst to First, and Beyond

A last-chair saxophone player’s slow climb to first chair, and the band director who never let contempt into the room. A long-overdue than you

We are downsizing, and my wife has asked me to do a bit more of the sorting than I’d prefer. That’s how I ended up on the floor of a closet with a box of photographs across my lap, the kind of box you mean to go through quickly and never do. Many of them were from high school. There were pictures of family and friends, but a surprising number were from band. We were standing on football fields, sitting on buses, and wearing uniforms I’d forgotten we ever wore. The faces of the people I spent those years beside were all there, and looking at them made me think about the man who’d stood behind nearly all of it.

Mr. Winter was one of the most influential people in my life. I hadn’t thought about him in a while. Once I did, I couldn’t stop.

I came to band the way many children come to things. I wanted to belong before I fully understood what I was joining. My sister was already in high school, and one of her best friends played saxophone. The band at our high school had been good for years. People came to football games as much for the band as for the team, and more than a few left after halftime, once the show they’d come to see was over. It was a program with a reputation, and even as a child I understood that being part of it meant something.

It wasn’t just the locals who thought so. While I was in the band, it received the Sudler Flag, an award recognizing the finest high school bands in the country, and ours was the first in the state to earn it. The honor reflected what the program had built long before I arrived, but I was there when it came, and that felt special. It was exactly the kind of thing a child wants to be part of, even before he understands the work required to belong there.

What captured my imagination most, however, was the traveling. Every third year, the band went somewhere significant for a competition or a tour. My sister’s friend had gone to Europe, which seemed impossibly glamorous to a fifth grader growing up where I did. The band would later become the first from our state to march in the Rose Bowl parade, and during my sophomore year we were scheduled to travel to Washington, D.C., for the Cherry Blossom Festival. I didn’t know any of those destinations when I chose the saxophone. I knew only that if I joined and stayed long enough, I’d eventually get on that bus and go somewhere that felt much larger than the world I knew.

So I chose the saxophone and imagined the rest would follow. I’d become part of something great, take the trip, and collect the kind of experience that seemed to belong to older and more interesting people.

The problem was that I didn’t enjoy band, at least not in junior high. I didn’t like to practice, it didn’t come naturally to me, and as a result I wasn’t very good. It was a reliable formula. I avoided the work, remained bad at the thing, and then used being bad as further justification for avoiding the work. Junior high is difficult enough on a child’s confidence. Your body is changing without consulting you, and whatever certainty you possessed a few years earlier quietly disappears. Practicing at home, where someone might hear me, wasn’t something I wanted to do.

It didn’t help that my father was both a perfectionist and a genuinely gifted musician. The person most likely to hear me could also hear exactly what I was doing wrong. So I didn’t practice, and because I didn’t practice, I remained at or near last chair for most of those years. There is no hiding a thing like that. The seating chart announces it for you.

By the end of junior high, I’d developed a plan. I’d stay in band through my sophomore year, take the major trip, and then quit. The band was going to Washington, D.C., and I’d already endured too many uncomfortable years to walk away before the reward. In my mind, the arrangement was settled. I’d hang on long enough to see Washington and then put the saxophone away for good. The trip had always been the goal. Band was simply the price of admission.

None of this was a plan I shared with anyone. So when I went to my parents, sooner than my own schedule called for, and told them I wanted to quit outright, I wasn’t really asking. I knew what they’d say. It was the kind of thing teenagers do, rattling a door to see whether it’s still locked. It was.

My father believed in what music education could do for a person, and he wasn’t prepared to let me leave simply because I was frustrated. He was a surgeon, and surgeons aren’t inclined to reopen a decision once they’ve closed it. I resented the rule at the time, but he was right. Had he allowed me to quit when I wanted to, the story would have ended there, somewhere near the bottom of a junior high seating chart.

My mother was different. She looked for another solution, and the solution she found was private lessons. Somehow, my parents persuaded Mr. Winter to teach me. He didn’t take many students, but once a week for the next three years, he took me.

I’ve never known exactly why he agreed. Perhaps he saw something in me, although there wasn’t much evidence available at the time. Perhaps it was simply a little extra money on the side. Years later, after I became a teacher myself, I came to think there was another explanation. Good teachers don’t reserve their effort for the students who make teaching easy. They work with the student sitting in front of them and try to move that person forward. Mr. Winter had done that for the students who came before me, and he’d do it for those who came after, because that was the kind of teacher he was.

His house wasn’t far from the school, an ordinary home with a black trumpet standing near the entrance. The trumpet was his instrument. The saxophone, unfortunately for both of us, was mine. The lessons took place in a small office where we warmed up with scales in different keys and then worked through whatever the band was rehearsing. I’d play a passage, and he’d interrupt. A missed note, a rhythm I’d gotten wrong, or a phrase that bore only a passing resemblance to the music on the page, and we’d stop.

He figured out fairly early that I learned by ear. If I heard something played correctly, I could usually imitate it. He’d pick up the trumpet, play the phrase, and have me play it back to him. Sometimes he made me count the rhythm aloud, which felt childish but worked. He could become frustrated. I could see that. But he never once let contempt into that room. He corrected me without humiliating me. He didn’t get angry, and he didn’t make me feel small, which wasn’t always how correction felt at home.

Don’t mistake his patience for softness. In that small office, and later in the band room, he pushed me harder than I’d have pushed myself. He was demanding, structured, and occasionally intimidating. Some people thought he bordered on authoritarian. I eventually came to believe there was an important difference between an authoritarian and a disciplinarian. An authoritarian pushes for control so that the person in charge remains at the center. A disciplinarian pushes the group, and every person within it, toward excellence.

With Mr. Winter, it was never about him. It was about us. He believed that through discipline, hard work, and consistency we could become great, and he ran the room like a man who meant it. He demanded excellence, and we wanted to give it to him. I wanted to be excellent, and I think most of the others did too.

I remember him telling us once that we needed to be at the practice field by five o’clock. He let that sit for a moment, and then he explained what he actually meant. If you arrived at five, you were late. If you arrived at four fifty-five, you were also late. You were expected to plan for the unexpected, the flat tire, the fender bender, the train that might hold up traffic, whatever might keep you from where you needed to be. To this day, when I have somewhere to be, I arrive fifteen to twenty minutes early. He wasn’t really teaching us about punctuality. He was teaching us that showing up late let down everyone else who had already arrived on time.

Even when we were certain we’d improved, he found the small thing still wrong. The spacing was off in the marching formation. The trumpets were too loud in the jazz band. Someone had missed an entrance. The clarinets needed to give more. Everything was held together by structure, and all of us were accountable to it. There was no false praise in that room. If he told you something was good, it was good, which is exactly why it mattered so much when, on the rare night we truly put everything together, he’d tell us the performance had given him goosebumps. He wasn’t a man who traded casually in that kind of praise, so it meant the world. You worked an entire season hoping to hear one sentence like that. I understand now that he tended to say it in the day or two before a concert or a competition, which meant it was less a report on what had already happened than his way of telling us we were ready.

I don’t know exactly when the lessons began to work. There was no single morning when I woke up able to play. The improvement arrived quietly. Through the challenge system, I’d sit across from the player ahead of me, and we’d compete for the chair. I began to move up, one seat at a time. I moved out of last chair, climbed through the ranks, and eventually moved out of the lowest band.

One of those moves meant more than the others. Throughout junior high and the beginning of high school, I’d played the second part, the harmony, which never made much sense to my ear. I wanted the melody, the line the song seemed to be built around. When I finally won my way onto a first part, it felt like more than another chair. It was the difference between singing lead in a rock band and standing in the back with the other harmonizers. I was carrying the tune now.

As I moved upward, something happened that mattered more than the seating chart. I gained confidence. For the first time, I began to enjoy not merely belonging to the band, which was all I’d originally wanted, but the music itself. I enjoyed reading it, interpreting it, and performing it. The thing I’d spent years avoiding became something I looked forward to.

I started practicing. The high school had small practice rooms, and that was where I did most of it. At home, I learned to find times when the critical ears were elsewhere. I was finally doing what my father had always hoped I’d do, but I was no longer doing it because he expected it. I was doing it because I wanted to improve.

The trip to Washington came during my sophomore year. For years, it had been the finish line. I’d planned to endure band long enough to take the trip and then quit. By the time we returned, however, I no longer wanted to leave. The lessons had changed the bargain. They had taken something I was merely surviving and turned it into one of the greatest experiences of my life.

Sometime during my junior year, I made the permanent jump from the junior varsity band, the concert band, to the varsity, the symphonic band. Make no mistake, symphonic was the A-team, the place you wanted to be. The move came with a small indignity. Climbing into a stronger band meant returning near the bottom, which put me back on the second part again. This time it didn’t bother me. I’d stopped keeping score of first parts and second parts and started caring about the music. I trusted that if I continued to work, the climb would come.

By my senior year, I reached first chair. I’d gone from worst to first, although I’d never describe myself as an outstanding musician. I was good, and I felt good about what I could do. Somewhere along the way, I’d come to love all of it: the band, my friends, the performances, the trips, the music, and the life that surrounded it. That was the real distance traveled, farther than the chairs could measure.

That same year, Mr. Winter gave me another responsibility I hadn’t seen coming. Before each concert selection, I stood in front of the audience and explained what they were about to hear. He wrote out the introductions and made me rehearse them until they were right, the same way he made me practice everything else. The boy who’d spent years hoping no one was listening was now the person he placed in front of the audience to speak.

After graduation, I thought about playing in college but decided against it. I didn’t believe I had enough ability to justify the time it would require while keeping my grades where they needed to be, so I let it go. I still have the saxophone. During the current purge, I’ve considered selling it so that another child might get from it what I eventually did, later than I should have, but not too late.

College led to law school, and through both I found myself relying on lessons Mr. Winter had taught me without ever intending them to apply beyond the band room. I learned the discipline required to work toward a goal, the value of preparation and repetition, and the importance of refusing to settle for work that was merely adequate. Nearly a decade after I graduated from high school, his influence was still shaping what I did every day, which is probably why running into him in a hallway in Madison, right after I argued my first case before the state Supreme Court, felt like something closing a circle.

The court was holding a traveling session that year, hearing cases in a college theater with members of the public seated in the audience. I was nervous. When the argument ended and I walked into the hallway, Mr. Winter was standing there.

He told me he was in town to fish and had seen that the court was holding a session, so he decided to come. I don’t think he drove to Madison specifically to see me. I suspect he noticed my name and decided to stay, which is somehow the better version of the story.

We spoke for only a minute. He told me I’d done a good job, and then he said something I’ve remembered ever since. You were always a good speaker, he told me. He was right. Years before I stood in a courtroom, he’d placed me in front of concert audiences and made me practice speaking until I could do it well. Like a good teacher, he’d recognized something in me and pushed me to develop it long before I understood that was what he was doing.

We talked briefly about where life had taken us. He said it was good to see me, and then we went our separate ways. That was approximately thirty years ago, and I believe it was the last time I saw him.

I cherished those three years in that band as much as almost anything else in my life. I’m still in touch with a few of the people who stood on those fields and stages beside me, though I’ve lost touch with most of them. A fortieth reunion is coming this fall. I don’t know yet if I’ll go. But if I knew Mr. Winter would be there, I’d give serious consideration to making the three hundred fifty mile drive to see him.

Mr. Winter is still alive. He’s in his nineties now and, as far as I know, still lives in the same house with the small office where I sat across from him all those years ago. I can’t repay him for what he gave me. I’ve tried to carry the lessons forward, applying them to my own life and passing them along when I later stood in front of students of my own. What I never did was thank him the way he deserved to be thanked.

Perhaps he’ll read this. Perhaps someone back home who still knows him will see it and place it in front of him. I hope so, because this is the thank you I should have given him a long time ago. Thank you for taking on a student who wasn’t very good and didn’t yet care enough to become better. Thank you for demanding more without making me feel small. Thank you for seeing something in me before I knew it was there. Thank you for turning an experience I intended to abandon into one of the defining experiences of my life.

It began with a box of photographs and all those faces from band. Mr. Winter appeared in only one of them, and even there he was just a figure in the background. But he was in every picture, all the same.

The 8.3 Miles We Keep Walking

Someone I was dating in college made me watch a movie I had no interest in seeing. Somewhere in Time. I went along with it the way you go along with things in college, more interested in the company than the film. Then Christopher Reeve fell in love with a photograph, Rachmaninoff started playing, and somewhere in the middle of a story about a man traveling back through decades for a woman he’d never met, I stopped being polite about watching it and started actually watching it.

The hotel looked like something from another century, which it was. I didn’t know its name yet, but I knew I wanted to stand inside it someday.

Not long afterward, I bought some cologne, and four mugs came free with the purchase, each printed with a different historic hotel. I couldn’t tell you the other three today, but I still have the fourth. The print has faded from years of dishwasher cycles and daily use, but it still says Grand Hotel, Mackinac Island.

That mug’s made every move I’ve made since. It went with me through law school, to Pierre, to Canton, to Sioux Falls, and then to another house in Sioux Falls. Almost forty years have passed, and it’s never once been left behind.

Years later, my wife and I were trying to decide where to go on our honeymoon. I suggested Mackinac Island. When I explained why, she told me she’d seen the same movie. Not a similar movie. The same movie, with the same hotel and the same Rachmaninoff. Neither of us knew anyone else who’d watched it, so we booked the trip.

The day we first crossed over was cloudy, late May, with fog low enough to swallow the island whole. Standing on the shore in Mackinaw City, I couldn’t tell which direction to look because there was nothing out there to see yet. Then the ferry pulled away from the dock, and somewhere in the middle of the strait, the fog thinned enough to let the island through.

Fort Mackinac appeared first, high on the bluff. Then came Grand Hotel, long and white and exactly like the movie, except it wasn’t a movie anymore. It was real, and we were finally close enough to walk to it.

We stepped off the ferry into the combined smell of horse manure and fudge, which isn’t something anyone warns you about but is something you never forget. We didn’t know which way to walk. There were signs pointing travelers toward Grand Hotel, but half a mile feels different when you’re new somewhere and don’t quite trust the directions.

We kept walking and waiting for the hotel to appear the way it had from the ferry. It took longer than it should have for a half mile covered on foot at a reasonable pace. Excitement does that. It stretches distance instead of shortening it.

Grand Hotel has a dress code for dinner, including a jacket and tie for men after six, and walking into its dining room for the first time was its own kind of time travel. Some men wore sport coats, while others wore tuxedos. Women arrived in evening gowns, and the entire room had a formality that’s difficult to find anywhere else now. Nobody seemed uncomfortable with it. It felt like the natural way to end a day on an island where nothing else moves very fast either.

My wife loves to dance. After that first year, we signed up for lessons so we could actually do it properly, the foxtrot, the waltz, the jitterbug. She took to all of it. I took to it the way a man takes to something his wife loves more than he does, which is to say I learned the steps and stopped complaining about them. We still dance when we’re there, though not every night anymore. Some nights one of us is simply too tired, and we’ve reached the age where we admit it.

That first trip belonged entirely to discovery. We splurged on a bottle of French wine with dinner one night, the kind of extravagance that felt enormous to two people just starting out. We walked more than either of us had walked in years, enough that my legs ached in a way they never had before, but every mile felt worth the ache. The island made us feel as though we’d discovered something no one else knew about. That feeling remained even with a hundred other honeymooners making the same discovery a few feet away.

The boys came a few years later, and with them came a different kind of walking. The first time we covered the full 8.3 miles around the island, we did it on bicycles. Our older son was ten and pedaling behind us on a bike with no gears. He was working three times as hard as we were to cover the same ground, and somewhere along the shoreline road, he began narrating the injustice of it out loud. I couldn’t tell you whether he was whining or simply providing an accurate report of his circumstances. It was probably a little of both.

The perimeter loop was only part of the walking we did during those family trips. We walked to the Woods, not for the restaurant but for the duck pin bowling alley next door. We walked downtown for fudge and whatever souvenir had become that trip’s obsession. We walked to the fort and actually toured it, including the reenactors, cannon fire, and entire production, which is exactly the sort of thing my wife and I tend to skip when it’s just the two of us. On ambitious days, we walked to British Landing on the far side of the island. It was about as far as small legs could go before turning back made more sense than pushing forward.

The shape of the day depended on the weekend. Memorial Day, when we first visited, had very little scheduled around it. We’d begin with an enormous breakfast in the Grand’s dining room and spend the rest of the day working it off. Lunch was wherever we happened to find ourselves. Then came a nap, because you can’t dance all night without one, followed by dinner, dressed properly, and dancing afterward. Labor Day eventually became our favorite. Mornings belonged to walking, while midday brought a cookout and jazz concert. Then came the nap, dinner, and dancing. It had the same bones as our first Memorial Day trip, only now there was usually a saxophone playing somewhere in the background.

The weather never signed on to any of it. We’ve packed for one season and lived through three, worn sweatshirts in the morning, rain gear by noon, and shorts by late afternoon, sometimes all in the same day. You learn to bring everything and expect to use it.

That kind of day, replayed with small variations, is what comes to mind when people mention books I’ve never actually read. I’ve never read James Joyce’s Ulysses. I’ve read enough reviews and commentary to understand the idea, and several people whose judgment I respect consider it one of the greatest books ever written. I don’t know whether I’ll ever actually read it. But if I ever tried to write a book in that style, following people through the ordinary events of a single day, my day would take place on Mackinac Island. It would begin with breakfast in the Grand’s dining room and move through the paths, the fort, the horses, the fudge shops, and whatever lunch presented itself. There would be a nap in the afternoon, dinner after six, and music somewhere in the evening. Nothing extraordinary would have to happen, because on Mackinac Island the day itself would be enough.

Earning that kind of day on foot, though, took years. For a long time, walking the full 8.3 miles in one stretch seemed excessive when a bicycle could cover the same ground in a third of the time. It wasn’t until we were older that walking became the point rather than the obstacle. The perimeter is flat, paved, and wide enough to walk beside each other, but the interior is different. Paths climb toward the cemetery, the fort, Sugarloaf, the natural arch, and the governor’s summer residence. Some narrow into dirt trails just wide enough for one person. Others open into gravel roads where we can walk side by side again. Five minutes from the shoreline, the island becomes a completely different place.

The Woods has changed too. It was once where we took two tired boys to go bowling. Now it’s a quiet place where the two of us walk for dinner. The fort is still there, but we no longer feel compelled to tour it. Downtown still smells like fudge and horses, although we’re less likely to come home with a souvenir. The island has remained much the same, but we’re the ones who have changed. The walking that once seemed like something to endure has become one of the reasons we return.

Our last two trips came after Covid and after Grand Hotel changed hands, sold by the family that had owned it for nearly a century. There have been updates, some we like and some we don’t, but the bones of the place remain the same ones we fell in love with from a ferry deck in the fog. We stopped booking the basic room somewhere along the way. On one trip, we upgraded to a suite so magnificent that it remains one of the nicest rooms either of us has ever stayed in. Another trip put us in the Teddy Roosevelt room, and I’ll leave you to imagine what that involved. No two rooms at Grand Hotel are decorated alike. That may be the whole point of the place. We can walk the same 8.3 miles a dozen times and never have the same day twice, and sleep in a different room on every visit and never run out of ways to see the same hotel again.

The far end of the island is where it gets quiet. Most people never make it out there, and if you time it right, early enough or late enough, you can stand at the north shore and have the whole thing to yourselves. The water stretches north toward Canada, and there’s nothing to hear but the wind and the water against the rocks. We stood there on our last trip, the two of us, not saying much.

I don’t know what my wife thinks about when we stand there. I’ve never asked. I think about the Ojibwe who crossed this water long before there was a hotel or a fort or a fudge shop, the early travelers in canoes making the same crossing we made on a ferry, looking at the same strait we were looking at. Twenty-five years of marriage and I still can’t tell you what’s going through her head at that railing. That’s not a complaint. It might be the reason we keep coming back.

When we first started coming to the island, we were some of the youngest people staying at the hotel. The crowd has always skewed older, and back then we noticed it. We don’t notice it the same way now, because we’ve become it. The clientele never really changed. We did. These days I find myself watching the young couples, the ones on their honeymoons, and hoping a few of them are falling for the place the way we did, so that someday they’ll be the older ones standing at the north shore, wondering where the years went.

In a few weeks, we’ll move into a new home, and the faded Grand Hotel mug will make the move with us, just as it’s made every move since the mid-1980s. It’ll be wrapped in paper, placed in another box, and carried into another kitchen. The hotel on its side is harder to see than it once was, but it’s still there, holding the memory of a movie, a honeymoon, two boys, many trips, and all the miles we’ve walked together.

The House Did Its Job

For many years, I have loved going to bookstores. The new releases. Certain topics. The sale rack. The ritual of browsing without knowing what you will find. It was probably around 2007 when I was in one of those bookstores and a title caught me: The Big House.

I pulled it off the shelf thinking it was about Michigan Stadium, about the Wolverines, about the kind of place that holds a region’s memory and sells overpriced sweatshirts to people who should know better. I don’t know why I thought that. The jacket made clear I was wrong almost immediately. It was George Howe Colt’s memoir about his family’s summer home on Cape Cod, the house his great-grandfather built in 1903, the Atkinson house, the place that held five generations before the family finally decided to sell it.

Even though the book was about something completely unexpected, something I ordinarily wouldn’t have picked up, I bought it anyway. I didn’t know it yet, but this was the book I needed.

What I didn’t know then was why I needed it. I had left houses before. College houses. Rental houses. Temporary places where you owned a few dishes, a bad couch, and the confidence of someone who did not yet understand compound interest. But the first real house I lost was the one I grew up in, and I didn’t choose to lose it.

My parents built that house from the ground up, the same way our family would later build a cabin and, eventually, the same way my wife and I would build our own dream house. I watched it go from a foundation and framing to something we actually lived in. I got a say in it too, or at least the kind of say a kid gets. I picked my carpet. I picked a football mural wallpaper for my room, the kind that seemed like the most important decision of my young life at the time. It was mine before I understood what that meant, and it stayed mine right up until it wasn’t.

That understanding arrived all at once. I learned around Christmas of my senior year in college that my parents were leaving Rapid City. My dad got a job that required a move, three hundred and sixty miles away. My parents would sell the house I had grown up in. When I came home for Easter, it had already sold. I walked through it knowing I would never see it this way again. It was the house where most of my memories lived, or at least where I thought they lived then. I had never been through losing a place like that before, and deep down I was afraid the memories might disappear with it.

Something did die with that sale, or at least it felt that way at the time. My dad had always had a house to go back to, and he took us with him. I assumed I would have the same thing to give my own kids someday, that I could walk them through the house I grew up in the way my dad had walked me through his. I didn’t know yet that a homebase isn’t something someone simply hands you. You build it, and eventually you lose it. My grandparents lived in the same house for over fifty years. I understand now how rare that actually is. What died with the sale wasn’t the house. It was that assumption. It was, in a way, my youth.

Graduation was on a Sunday. That night, I moved out of my college house and drove to my parents’ new house. A couple of days later, my parents arrived with everything else from the childhood home. My dad would die in that house years later, but it was never home to me. It was the place where the furniture landed after the life had already happened somewhere else.

I never got to pack my own things. I never got a final walkthrough alone. I never got to say goodbye the way I wanted to say goodbye. It wasn’t cruel. It was life. My parents were doing what needed doing, and I was old enough to understand that, but not old enough to know what to do with the ache of it.

That is how it happens sometimes. People come and go. They die. They move away. Houses sell. The world doesn’t pause so you can stand in an empty bedroom and negotiate with the wallpaper. You don’t always get the closure you think you’re owed.

What I got instead was everything my parents couldn’t let go of. My parents were raised during the Depression. Their parents lived it. Nobody in that lineage looked at a coffee can full of screws and thought, “Well, that has served its purpose.” A few months after my dad died, I bought my first house and acquired many of my parents’ things, especially the kind of things you need when you are starting out in a home of your own. Furniture. Dishes. Tools. The practical leftovers of a life already lived, now put to work for a life just beginning.

Six months later, my grandmother died, my mother’s mother, and I inherited some of hers as well. Less than a year after my dad died, my mother downsized to a small two-bedroom condo and gave me the practical Midwestern version of estate planning: come get it or it’s getting thrown away. That was when the books came. The voracious reader’s library. His slides and eight-millimeter movies. His tools and his father’s name tag from Firestone, which I still have. Artwork and furniture and knickknacks. Dishes and silverware. A Vikings helmet lamp. A trumpet lamp. Complete sets of nails and screws and bolts that I would never use.

Even my fifth grade spelling book came along.

It all traveled from the childhood home to my parents’ new home, then to my house in Canton, then to my first marital home, and finally to the dream house. I moved it from one location to another, rarely using it the way it was meant to be used. Deep down, I believed that holding onto their things would keep them alive. If I let the objects go, I feared I would lose them all over again.

When my wife and I got married, there were tense moments. She said no, not everything comes with us. My fifth grade spelling book had to go. But I got to keep the report on the platypus, because a man has to draw the line somewhere.

My wife was not so much happy with the purge as she tolerated the settlement. She was practical. She saw boxes. I saw my father’s hands, my mother’s handwriting, and my grandparents’ stubborn Depression-era refusal to throw away anything that might someday be useful to someone, somewhere.

I tried to explain to my wife what it was like to lose a parent. Both of hers were living then and are living still. Mine have been gone for most of our married life. That wasn’t her fault, of course. It was just one of those uneven facts marriage has to absorb. She could sympathize, but she could not yet know the strange arithmetic of grief, how a useless object can feel heavier than it is because it seems to contain a person you are not ready to lose again.

So she did what practical spouses have done since the beginning of time. She shoved my stuff into a closet so she didn’t have to look at it and waited for me to become a little less ridiculous.

Over the years, I did get better, although not quickly enough to be confused with personal growth in real time. About five or six years ago, I finally admitted another purge was necessary. Not a gentle Saturday afternoon of sorting. Not three tasteful donation boxes and a cup of coffee. I rented a full-size construction dumpster and gave myself about ten days.

I gave some of it away. I sold some of it. Most of it, if I am being honest, was junk that needed to go. I moved fast. I made decisions. I threw things away before memory could hire a lawyer and file an appeal.

That purge helped. It made the house lighter. It made me lighter too, although I probably wouldn’t have said it that way at the time. But it didn’t solve everything, because by then the collection had stopped being just theirs.

Over time, my wife and I added our own layers. Wedding gifts. Baby furniture. School projects. Sports equipment. Christmas decorations. Books of our own. Photos. Framed art. The boys’ trophies, toys, drawings, games, blankets, stuffed animals, and mysterious plastic things that apparently mattered deeply for six weeks in 2009 and then became permanent residents of the basement. The house became part grandparents, part parents, part us. It held four generations of memory, some of it beautiful, some of it useful, and some of it waiting patiently in a storage room for a purpose that was never coming.

That is what made the purging harder. We weren’t just deciding what to keep from my parents. We were deciding what to keep from everyone. Every box seemed to ask the same question in a different voice: Is this still part of the story, or is it just something we have been carrying because no one wanted to be the one to let it go?

Long before that final purging started, though, there was another house that taught me the same lesson the hard way. The cabin arrived when I was about twelve and remained in the family until I was in my mid-forties. We built it from scratch, another place meant to hold us. We skied. We snowmobiled. We did things there that I won’t itemize here, mostly because my parents are gone and I still prefer not to disappoint them retroactively. My dad had his first heart attack there shoveling snow. After that, we got a phone.

We gathered there sometimes for Christmas, often for New Year’s. College friends came. Law school friends came. I lived there one summer. The cabin became more than a structure in the Black Hills. It became the place I went when I needed to remember who I had been before life got complicated.

I brought my future wife there while we were dating. It was a test, although I doubt I admitted that out loud at the time. She needed to love the cabin, maybe not as much as I did, but at least a little. I tried to explain how important it was to me and how important the Black Hills were to me. She came from the plains, so naturally I called her a flatlander, because romance has many languages and mine apparently included mild geographic condescension.

She passed. She understood what the cabin meant, or at least understood that I needed it to mean something. We got married in the Black Hills, and we spent our first night together as husband and wife at the cabin. It wasn’t the first time she had been there, but it was the first time as my wife. I now shared the one place I had always felt at peace with the person I had chosen to spend my life with.

We went back often. We walked and hiked in the Black Hills. We took our kids there from the start. They loved it, except for the time my oldest hit a tree skiing and cracked his skull, which is the sort of family memory that starts as trauma and slowly becomes a story everyone somehow gets to tell at dinner. There was also a Christmas Eve when we drove to a small Episcopal church in Lead and experienced one of the most intimate and spiritual services I have ever been part of. The cabin was still the one place where everything felt right.

But the geography had shifted. When I was young, the cabin was only an hour away. It was a natural gathering place, close enough to be refuge rather than project. As I got older, as my own life expanded, five or six hours became the new distance. Every holiday and school break required a pilgrimage. What had been a refuge began to feel like an obligation. When my parents passed the cabin to me and my sister, and then eventually to me alone, I understood that I could not hold it the way they had.

Before we sold it, the cabin frequently appeared in my dreams. The dreams were not subtle. I would be there again, walking through rooms, looking for something, trying to keep the place intact. Sometimes, in the dreams, we had built additions. Other times, there were secret rooms I had somehow forgotten, or we had made modifications that changed the place without changing what it was. It was bigger, stranger, and not quite real, but it was still the cabin. I understood even then that the dreams were the part of me that could not let go.

Then I read Colt’s book. A family held a century-old summer home on Cape Cod through five generations and finally decided to sell it. The book understood the weight of that kind of place. It understood the guilt, the inheritance, the obligation, and the quiet relief that can come when a family finally admits that love and ownership are not the same thing.

It wasn’t quite the same attachment I see in my professional life, the kind a farmer feels for land that’s been in the family for generations. But it was an attachment. Different scale, same root.

Something in that story gave me permission. We sold the cabin. The dreams stopped. The letting go was real.

That lesson mattered because, by then, my wife and I had already built the next place we would someday have to release. In 2004, we decided to build our own house. We had gone to countless open houses looking for something that would work for our family, and nothing did. We hired an architect friend who listened to what we wanted. We found the builder. We found a lot in a new neighborhood. We extended ourselves beyond what we probably should have because we believed it was worth it.

It was a farmhouse with a Grand Hotel-inspired porch, modeled after the porch at the Grand Hotel on Mackinac Island, where we honeymooned after our wedding in the Black Hills. Each boy helped design his room. My wife had her space. I had mine. We built the house to fit us, not the other way around.

Christmas mornings happened there. Birthdays happened there. We gathered around the dining room table for dinners that mattered and around the kitchen counter for most of the meals that made up actual life. Both of our boys graduated from high school while living in that house. We took prom pictures there, everyone dressed up and pretending not to be nervous while parents took too many photos. My mother’s ashes spent a night there before we took her to Rapid City for burial. The boys had friends over and made noise in the basement. The house filled with the sound of boys becoming men.

But we always understood, at least in theory, what the house was for. We built it to hold a family while that family grew. We built it for bedrooms full of laundry, backpacks in the wrong places, friends in the basement, shoes by the door, and the daily racket of raising children. We didn’t build it as a museum. We didn’t build it as a monument. We built it for a chapter.

When our youngest left for college, we came home to rooms that were too empty, too quiet, and too big. We did some remodeling. The house remained the gathering point during holidays and school breaks, and for a while that was enough. But my wife and I had always talked about moving once the boys were gone. The house had done what we built it to do, even if admitting that felt like betrayal.

Four months ago, my wife and I looked at each other and said it was time. We got serious about fixing things, cleaning things, sorting things, and facing all the things we had carefully placed in closets so we could pretend they didn’t exist. We talked with a realtor. He gave us the comps. Then came the work no one puts in the real estate brochure: decluttering, painting, repairing, deciding, and standing in the garage wondering how two people had acquired enough stuff to provision a small expedition.

In the middle of that work, I found a stack of letters. My parents had written them to each other years before they married, back when they were dating and living in separate cities. I held them for a moment. I knew what the younger version of me would have done. He would have kept them without thinking. He would have placed them in a box, moved them three more times, and told himself he was preserving something sacred.

I resisted the urge to read them. They weren’t mine to read. Whatever my mother held onto them for, whatever reason she had for keeping them all those years, that reason had nothing to do with me.

I threw them away.

That wasn’t what made us decide to sell the house. We had already made that decision. But it felt like confirmation. My parents’ love for each other didn’t live in a stack of paper. It lived in the fact that I existed, that they built a life together, and that everything after those letters became the actual story. Keeping them wouldn’t have preserved their marriage. It would have given me one more box to carry.

And then, last week, the decision became real. The realtor came at 1:30. We sat at the kitchen counter, the same counter where we had eaten most of our family meals over twenty-two years, saving the dining room for special occasions, and we went through the paperwork like it was any other Tuesday. He asked if we were ready. My wife and I looked at each other and said yes.

The house had never looked better, which felt like its own strange joke. Twenty-two years of raising boys, and somehow the place looked its best on the day we decided to let it go.

The photographer showed up within the hour. She moved room to room while I stood in the kitchen not quite knowing what to do with my hands. The realtor left at 3:00. By 3:30, a text came through: a showing scheduled shortly after five. By 3:45, another text came, another showing shortly after six.

We couldn’t be there for it, so we did what we do. We grabbed Ginger and drove to the brew pub, the one we always end up at on Halloween, and ordered a couple of beers while trying to act like people who weren’t waiting on the biggest phone call of the year. Another text came in about a third showing. We stayed for three hours, longer than we meant to, because leaving felt like admitting something.

We got home. Not long after, the phone buzzed. We had an offer. Five hours. The house we built to raise a family in took less time to sell than it takes to watch a Vikings game go sideways in overtime.

Once we signed the purchase agreement, the work shifted immediately. We had done some preliminary looking already and had a basic idea of what we wanted next. Our realtor sent us fifty-six more choices. My wife and I went through every one of them, built a scorecard, made checklists, and narrowed the list to three we wanted to see in person.

But we already knew. A week after we sold our house, we made an offer on another one.

It won’t have room for all our stuff. That’s fine. We will make new memories there instead of trying to force the old ones into every closet and drawer. There will still be enough room for the boys to visit, even if it’s smaller than what they grew up in. My dad grew up with four siblings in a house that would make this one look enormous. You can fit a lot of people into a house when the people matter more than the square footage.

The letters are gone. The spelling book is gone. Most of the nails and bolts and knickknacks are gone too. What remains is what matters: my wife, the boys, Ginger, and thirty years of memories that never really lived in a box or a drawer or an attic in the first place.

My wife keeps asking me which things I want to keep. For a long time, that question would have sent me into a spiral. Now I tell her the truth: it doesn’t matter anymore. We keep what we need to keep. We throw away what we need to throw away. We give away or sell the rest. It’s not indifference. It’s the opposite of indifference. It’s finally understanding what the things were never able to hold in the first place.

I am sure I will be emotional over the next few weeks as we say goodbye to this house room by room and closet by closet. But I have been through this before. I know now, in a way I didn’t know at twenty-two, that leaving doesn’t mean losing. The memories come with me because they never needed the house’s permission in the first place.

Most of what I write is for me. It helps me think through things I haven’t fully worked out yet, and if someone else reads it and takes something away, that’s a bonus I don’t take for granted. But this one is different. This one I hope my boys read.

To my boys, if you ever read this: the house is gone, but you are not. Christmas morning still happened. Your friends still laughed in that basement. Your mother and I still watched you grow from boys into men inside those rooms. A sold sign cannot change that. A deed cannot erase it. A key can be handed to someone else, but a childhood cannot.

You can sell a house. You cannot sell a family. We are still us. We will always be us.

Colt taught me that in a bookstore in 2007, before I understood why I needed to know it. The cabin taught me again when the dreams finally stopped. Now, with boxes half packed and a new front door waiting, I know it one more time.

The house did its job. It’s somebody else’s turn now.

What We Owe the Next Generation

I was still staring at a blank screen when the first one went off.

It wasn’t a gentle reminder that the Fourth was approaching. It was a concussive bang, the kind that travels through the window glass and lands somewhere in your chest before your brain has time to process it. Then several more in quick succession. I pushed back from the desk and looked outside, already composing the old man complaint in my head. In another neighborhood, in another part of the world, I might not have assumed fireworks. That thought crossed my mind before the ordinary explanation arrived, which probably says something about the times we live in and the age I have reached.

Then I saw the kids running across the yard, my yard, chasing the parachutes, those little plastic soldiers drifting down through the summer air. Every one of them was laughing. Pure, uncomplicated, this-is-the-best-day-of-my-life laughing. The kind you can hear through glass. I had to actively suppress the get-off-my-lawn instinct that apparently arrived sometime in my fifties without asking permission. The old man complaint dissolved before I could finish writing it, because the sound had annoyed me before I understood it, and their laughter corrected me.

It pulled me back to the version of myself who would have run just as hard across someone else’s grass, because parachutes falling out of the sky felt like a miracle and property lines were an adult invention. I remembered, not as an abstraction, not as something that happened to someone younger who used to be me, but the way you remember something in your body first. A lake. A trailer that my grandparents called a cabin, which was generous. Fireworks reflecting off the surface of Mina Lake while the summer dark came down around us, and a boy who would have been running too.

* * *

Mina Lake is different now. The cabins have become homes, the kind with proper foundations and square footage and lake frontage that costs what it costs. But when I was growing up, my grandparents had what they called a cabin, which had been, as best I can tell, a repurposed food trailer. Small enough that changing clothes required optimism about personal space. I’m told it was the first cabin on the lake, which I choose to believe makes it historic rather than humble.

Every Fourth of July, we drove six hours to get there. One uncle lived nearby and was always there. My uncle from Michigan often made the trip. My aunt came from Missouri. Another uncle moved wherever Boeing needed missiles pointed at something, Montana, Wyoming, Washington state, and he came too. Most of the cousins came, not all, but most. My grandpa had some contraption rigged for fishing that would alert him when something took the line, which struck me as ingenious. One year, one of my uncles brought a boat, and the lucky ones got rides. I still remember that as the year the lake got bigger.

Mostly, I remember everybody being happy. I know this partly because of photographs. Everybody smiling. The lake behind them. A boy squinting into the summer sun who would grow up to be me. At some point the day would wind down and we’d head back into Aberdeen, to Grandma and Grandpa’s house or a hotel, and the lake would go quiet behind us.

My grandpa died in 1982, and the tradition died with him. I don’t remember anyone announcing that. Families rarely hold a meeting to declare that something beautiful is over. One year it is simply gone, and only later do you understand that what felt like a place was really a person. Mina Lake was the cabin, the cousins, the boat rides, and the fireworks on the water. But mostly it was Grandpa, and when he was gone, the lake was never quite the same.

* * *

When Mina Lake faded out, the Fourth did not disappear. It relocated. Families do that. Traditions rarely announce their retirement. They just move to another yard, another grill, another set of adults pretending they are in charge. For us, that meant family friends in Rapid City, people whose lives had been braided into ours long enough that the distinction between friends and family was mostly technical.

Our families had been neighbors once, built our houses at the same time with the same builder. The houses were similar without being the same, the same era of carpet, comparable doorknobs and railings, enough shared DNA that walking into their house felt familiar in a way you couldn’t quite explain. All the parents have since passed. Most of the kids moved away. But one still lives in that house, nearly fifty years after it was built, which is either a testament to loyalty or to really good construction, and probably both.

Their house was a beautiful ranch sitting above a canyon, with a swimming pool and a view that made you feel like the whole Black Hills had been arranged for your personal enjoyment. The Fourth of July there was simple in the way that only childhood can make things simple. Kids swam. Kids shot fireworks into the canyon under the loose supervision of adults who were doing what adults do at summer parties, which is to say they were drinking and preparing food and pretending to watch us more carefully than they were. In retrospect, it’s amazing there were no fires.

One of us dropped a lit punk into a bag of fireworks once, which nearly caused several simultaneous cardiac events among the adults who were supposedly supervising. At some point the food appeared. At some point we ate. At some point we went home. The fireworks arced out over the canyon and disappeared into the dark, and nobody thought much about what any of it meant. That was the point. You didn’t have to think about what it meant. It just was.

That is how the Fourth felt to me then: noise, food, water, cousins, smoke, and adults who seemed to know what they were doing. I had no sense that the country itself could be tired, or divided, or unsure of what came next. I had no sense that adults were often improvising while hoping the children mistook it for confidence. I had inherited the celebration before I inherited the complication.

* * *

I remember the bicentennial. I was under ten, which meant I understood the festive parts and none of the complicated ones. Red, white, and blue everywhere. Commemorative quarters that felt like holding history in your palm. The $2 bill made a comeback that year, and people collected them because they were certain the bills would be worth something someday. I still have several. They never really caught on, except at a small bar in Pierre, South Dakota, where you can still spend one today, which feels like exactly the right fate for a $2 bill.

What I didn’t understand at the time, though I’ve since filled it in, was that the country was in rough shape. A president had resigned in disgrace two years earlier. The fall of Saigon had happened the previous spring, a war ending not with victory but with helicopters leaving a rooftop. Inflation was eating at everything. It was an election year, and nobody felt particularly good about their choices. The country was celebrating its 200th birthday with the enthusiasm of someone who needed the party more than the cake.

And yet, the flags were everywhere. The quarters were in every pocket. That fall, my family got on a plane and flew to the British Isles for three weeks. Even the passport was bicentennial themed, red, white, and blue, as if the government wanted to make sure you remembered what year it was every time you opened it. A kid from South Dakota visiting the people we’d spent 200 years being independent from. If that isn’t optimism, I don’t know what is.

* * *

Years later, when Wanda and I had children of our own, I don’t think I consciously set out to recreate any of that. Parents rarely do. We just reach for the pieces that still glow and hope our kids will remember them someday with more grace than accuracy. The place changed again, because traditions keep moving until they find a place to land. For us, for a long time, that place was Mackinac Island.

Wanda and I spent our honeymoon on Mackinac Island and went back every year for the next thirteen years. We’ve returned a few times since. The island gets into you that way. Someone told us early on about the Fourth of July celebration at the Grand Hotel and Fort Mackinac. An old-fashioned picnic and carnival, they called it, and that’s exactly what it was. Kids playing games from the late 1800s. Hot dogs and hamburgers. Nathan’s Hot Dog Eating Contest on whatever television they could find, because some traditions require witnesses. The kind of carnival where you swung a hammer as hard as you could and tried to ring the bell at the top, which nobody ever did, but that was never really the point.

One year our youngest played the same carnival game over and over until he won a Detroit Lions football. The determination required for that achievement was either admirable or concerning, and probably both. We took our oldest when he was about ten. Later we brought the whole family. And when our youngest was about ten, he got his own trip too.

In the evening you dressed for dinner, because that’s what you do at the Grand Hotel, and afterward everyone gathered on the long porch to watch the fireworks launch from barges out on Lake Huron. The barges were hidden behind tall Norwegian pines. You’d hear the launch, sometimes catch a trail of light climbing through the dark, and then wait for the explosion to bloom right in front of you, eye level with the porch, which is as close to fireworks as a person should reasonably get.

The year we brought the whole family it was foggy. You heard the launch. You saw a bright flash somewhere in the gray. That was mostly it. Our four-year-old rendered the official verdict: rip off. He wasn’t wrong, but we went back anyway, because that is what families do when they are building memories. They overpay, overdress, misjudge the weather, take the same pictures, tell the same stories, and hope that some small part of it sticks.

* * *

But inheritance is not only made of lake water, canyon smoke, porch lights, carnival games, and children declaring things a rip off. Some things are handed down because they are joyful. Others are handed down because forgetting them would be dangerous. Eventually, if we are lucky, someone teaches us that the celebration and the complication belong to the same story.

In my senior year at Augustana, a January term capstone course took a group of us to Minneapolis for a few days. One morning we visited a Holocaust center where survivors came to speak. I remember a woman who survived Auschwitz. I remember she rolled up her sleeve. I spoke with her. I don’t remember exactly what she said. What I remember is that she chose to be there, and that it cost her something to show up, and that she did it anyway.

I think about my dad’s cousin who shot down 24 Japanese planes in World War II. I think about a former law partner who never knew his father because he was killed before his son was born. I think about standing on Little Round Top and Cemetery Ridge at Gettysburg and trying to understand what it cost to hold that ground, and failing, because some things can’t be understood from a distance. You can only stand there and feel the weight of it.

Freedom isn’t free. That phrase gets said so often it’s stopped meaning anything, which is its own kind of tragedy. The people who actually paid for it didn’t get to say it. They just paid. These aren’t abstract debts. They’re personal ones. She showed up anyway. She kept saying not today. And because enough people across enough generations made the same decision, we’re still here, still arguing about what the experiment means, still shooting fireworks into canyons and watching them explode at eye level over Lake Huron.

* * *

Maybe that is why monuments matter when they are doing their job. Not because they settle the argument, but because they force us to stand still long enough to remember there is an argument worth having. I grew up thirty miles from Mount Rushmore, close enough to stop seeing it and old enough now to understand that was my mistake. I’ve seen it hundreds of times, in every season, in every light. There’s a version of it you stop noticing, the way you stop noticing anything that’s always been there. And then something shifts and you see it again, really see it, and it stops you cold.

Years ago I was fortunate enough to get a private tour that took me to the top of the monument. I sat on George Washington’s head. I don’t say that to be glib. I say it because there is no way to be in that place and not feel the full weight of what was carved out of that granite, and why, and what it cost. At some point I also appeared in a scene filmed there for General Hospital, which is either the most South Dakota thing that has ever happened to me or the least, depending on how you look at it.

What Gutzon Borglum started in 1927 transformed Western South Dakota. It still does. Every year millions of people make the drive through the Black Hills and stand at the base of those four faces and feel something they didn’t expect to feel. Last night, on the eve of America’s 250th birthday, Mount Rushmore became one of the places chosen to mark the moment. Of all the places in America, it was there. The Black Hills of South Dakota. Four faces carved into granite. A monument to an experiment that was never supposed to work and somehow keeps working anyway, imperfectly, stubbornly, at great cost.

There ought to be a day, at least one, when the labels get set down for a while. Not because everything is fine. Not because we agree on what the country has been or what it should become. We don’t. We never have. But in 1976, when the country had real reasons to doubt itself, people put on their bicentennial shirts and collected their quarters and celebrated anyway. Not because everything was fine. Because the alternative was unthinkable.

But countries are not preserved only at monuments. They are preserved, or neglected, in neighborhoods. They are preserved in whether we remember that the kid running across the lawn is not an interruption of the day, but part of the reason the day exists. They are preserved when someone keeps lighting the grill, keeps inviting the cousins, keeps making the drive, keeps telling the story, keeps showing up even after the person who started the tradition is gone.

* * *

By the time you read this, I will have clipped Ginger’s leash and we will have walked. The neighborhood quiet, the way it only is before the day remembers what day it is. Flags on porches. An empty street. The smell of something someone is already putting on a grill at an unreasonable hour.

This is what I’ll think about. A boy at Mina Lake watching fireworks reflect off the water. A canyon in Rapid City and a lit punk dropping into a bag of fireworks and several adults suddenly remembering they were supposed to be supervising. A foggy night on the porch of the Grand Hotel and a four-year-old’s verdict. A woman in a room in Minneapolis who survived Auschwitz, who rolled up her sleeve, and showed a kid from South Dakota what the cost of forgetting looks like.

Two hundred and fifty years. The experiment continues. Not because it’s easy. Not because we always get it right. But because enough people, in enough generations, decided to show up anyway.

Tonight, throughout America, kids will be out with sparklers and firecrackers, chasing parachutes across their neighbors’ lawns. There will be people annoyed by the noise. There will be people wishing everyone would just get off their lawn. That’s part of it. That’s always been part of it. Let them have the noise for a night. Let them have the parachutes. Let them believe, for a few more years, that the whole thing is as simple as sparks in the dark and people gathered nearby.

Show up anyway.

* * *

The Bridge at Henley

A few weeks ago I wrote about a walk to Paddington Station, and then a walk back. The reason for the trip, I said, was to buy train tickets to Henley-on-Thames. That was true, as far as it went. But if you’ve been reading this series, you might have wondered what Henley actually meant. The tickets were the cover. My friend was the reason. She was also, if I’m being completely honest, the reason for the course itself, and every course I tried to build before it, and every course I’ve sketched out since. She just didn’t know that until now.

Henley-on-Thames had no particular connection to Brexit when I chose it. If I’d been purely academic about it, I might have taken the students to Birmingham or Coventry, cities in the West Midlands that recorded some of the highest Leave percentages in the country. That would have been genuinely instructive. The area around Henley, as it turns out, voted roughly 55 percent to Remain. I could have taken them somewhere that felt the full weight of the Brexit argument, somewhere that might have actually changed how they understood it. I didn’t. I picked Henley.

The Brexit connection was there, if you wanted to work hard enough to find it. Theresa May represented nearby Maidenhead, Boris Johnson once held the Henley seat in Parliament, and I once spotted Rishi Sunak at the Leander Club in Henley. But I didn’t know any of that when I chose it. That came later, the kind of justification you construct after the fact to make a personal decision look like a professional one. The real reason was simpler. None of those other places had her in them.

None of that mattered on the morning of the trip. What mattered was twenty students in a hotel lobby near Waterloo, two tickets each, and a train to catch.

We did this three times. Three different courses, three different years, but it always started the same way, in a hotel lobby near Waterloo, me handing out two tickets to each student. One for the way out, one for the way back. I told them every time: lose either one and the train fare comes out of your own pocket. Nobody ever lost one, not in three years, though I watched a few of them pat their jacket pockets all the way down to the tube just to be sure.

I had some unpopular rules on my courses. No jeans, no trainers, no hoodies, no baseball caps. I wanted them to blend in rather than stick out, and I know it frustrated plenty of them at the start. By the time we got there, I think most of them understood why. Henley was a different level. Just short of a black tie affair. It was the one day of the course I put on a jacket and tie myself. In that same lobby, before we headed for the tube, I’d give them the rest of it. Nice dinner tonight. Old friends of mine. Be gracious guests. Don’t be the ugly American. Come with at least one question ready, something real, something that shows you were listening and not just eating. A couple of those questions I planted myself, quietly, with a student I trusted to ask them well. I never told them how nervous I was. The day needed to go right, the tour, the dinner, all of it, but underneath that I was about to see my friend and her family again, and some part of me was always braced for the year that wouldn’t go as smoothly as the last.

From Waterloo we’d take the tube to Paddington, then the train out toward Henley, changing at Twyford for the last short hop in. I’d count heads at every handoff like a man counting cards, watching backpacks and the occasional dress shoe shuffle across the gap between trains. We never lost anyone. Not once.

She was waiting at the station every time. Forty-some years since she’d lived in our house the year of the Jubilee, since she’d been the exchange student who became something closer to family than guest, and there she’d be on the platform at Henley, easy to spot, easy to find. She’d arranged much of the day herself, never once complaining about any of it. I knew it took real work. I’m not sure I ever adequately thanked her.

I’d put my hand on a shoulder or two and start the introductions. My students, my friend. My sister, in the only sense of the word that really matters.

She’d walk us into town herself, City Hall first, almost always. Main Street the whole way, small shops on both sides, the street sometimes set up for market day in a way that reminded me of Lower Marsh back in London. City Hall sat at the far end with its clock tower, red brick, pale stone, and the quiet confidence of a building that knew exactly what it was. The tour was another favor, one phone call from her that meant the world. Most years it was the Mayor waiting for us. One year the Mayor was unavailable, and we got the utility superintendent instead, which turned out to be just as useful, maybe more so, because he could explain how the town actually worked. Inside, the building had dark wood, old portraits, and a hall upstairs that looked as if it had hosted a century of dances, council votes, and arguments about parking. Whoever led the tour would explain what was on the docket that month, and then, almost every year, offer the same gentle punchline: Brexit, the whole reason we were there, wasn’t going to change much of anything in Henley. I watched that land on their faces every time, the small recalibration of a student who had assumed the thing they came to study was the only thing happening.

More often than not, the local paper was waiting for us when we came back down. A reporter wanting a few words from the Americans, what they’d come to study, what they made of the town so far. They ran stories about it in the Henley Standard more than once — the first year and again in the second. I never asked whether she’d contacted the paper. But I have my suspicions. It had her fingerprints on it, the same quiet phone call that got us the tour in the first place, one more thing handled before I even knew it needed handling.

Then I’d turn them loose. A couple of hours to wander, to find shops, to find a pub if they were old enough and bold enough. Most years they ended up down by the water, with the church tower standing watch beside it and the rowing clubs lined up along the river like they’d been waiting two centuries for the next regatta. The students would lean against the balustrade in their dinner clothes, taking pictures of each other with the Thames behind them. I’d see the photos later. Always the same easy grins, always a little wind in someone’s hair, always that river. Before they scattered, I gave them one more instruction: there’d be more guests at dinner, and they needed to be on their best behavior. I never had to say it twice.

That was my window. For a couple of hours, the trip changed shape. Her husband was there, and so was my co-teacher, but it no longer felt like I was leading a course. I don’t remember the specific conversations anymore. What I remember is how welcome we were made to feel, every single time, the same way my own parents had made her feel welcome in our house all those years ago when she was the one far from home. It evens out that way sometimes, across forty years and an ocean, without anyone planning it. It was the one stretch of adult conversation in three weeks otherwise spent keeping twenty-year-olds alive, punctual, dressed, fed, and pointed in the right general direction. I loved being around my students, but three weeks is a long stretch, and we were at different points in our lives wanting different things from the day. Those two hours were the quiet in the middle of all that noise.

For years before Brexit ever entered the picture, I wanted to teach a study abroad course mostly so I could get back to England and see my friend, my sister in every way that matters, under the respectable cover of academic purpose. I spent a long time trying to come up with course ideas that would actually fit a business program at a small liberal arts university. Comparative management. Comparative law. A course tracing Charles Dickens through legal London, courtrooms and debtors’ prisons and all. None of them ever quite found a curriculum to live in.

Then Brexit happened, and the course found me instead. A country legally untangling a forty-year marriage, businesses scrambling to prepare for a divorce nobody had a precedent for. It was real. It was academic. It belonged in a business law classroom, and I could defend every line of it without blinking. The course was genuinely about Brexit. But the reason I’d spent years looking for a course in the first place had nothing to do with the EU at all.

The quiet part of the day always had to give way to the official part again. The students would come back from the river and the shops and whatever pub they’d decided they were mature enough to enter, and I’d become the professor again, counting heads, checking collars, reminding them that dinner was still part of the course even if it came with better wine than anything listed on the syllabus.

Dinner was at Hotel du Vin every year. She recommended it, and for a long time I assumed it was just a place big enough to fit the group. It wasn’t until I dug a little deeper that I learned the building sits on the old Brakspear Brewery grounds, brick and beer and old English usefulness still there underneath the polish. It tied the dinner to Henley as something more than a pretty riverside town: commerce, beer, brick, work, reinvention. The hotel is modern. The bones aren’t. I don’t know for certain, but I can’t help thinking it was intentional all along, one more thing she’d quietly arranged without ever mentioning it.

The room barely fit us, every year, and it was often quite warm, the way old buildings get when you pack too many people into a beautiful room and then pretend candles and wine are a climate-control strategy. My friend and her husband joined us every year, along with anywhere from two to four other local adults she’d brought in to sit with the students. On a good night we had nearly thirty people in a room that was meant for twenty. Stone walls scrubbed pale, low black beams strung with tiny lights, candles down the center of a long white table. Same wine selection, same students cleaned up and trying hard, sitting a little straighter than usual and pretending they ate dinner like that all the time. We all knew most of them would have been just as happy with the McDonald’s at Waterloo Station. The conversation changed every year, because the country kept changing. One thing never did. We always ended up ordering a few more bottles than we’d planned on.

The dinners were never lectures, and they were never debates in the way we think of debates now, with everyone waiting for their turn to reload. People disagreed about whether Brexit was wise or foolish, whether it would be painful or merely inconvenient, whether it was about sovereignty, economics, immigration, nostalgia, or some combination of all of it. But the conversation stayed civil, polite, and entirely British. Nobody shouted. Nobody performed outrage for the room. People listened, answered, disagreed, and then reached for the wine bottle like grown-ups.

The first year, Brexit was still young enough to argue about in the abstract. Henley came near the end of the course, the day after Paris, which had only a loose claim on Brexit beyond the EU connection but the students loved it anyway. I’d recruited most of that group myself, and they were quieter than the ones who came after, more curious than opinionated. The British guests at the table were, on the whole, hopeful. It might not be that bad, someone said. One man put it more honestly than anyone else managed all three years: in my heart I was for Brexit, but in my head I knew it was bad. Nobody at the table disagreed with him out loud.

The second year, Brexit had moved from theory to machinery. We went to Henley early, while the students were still fresh and fully engaged with the material. Parliament was in the thick of it, and I watched a student prop her phone against a water glass during dinner, earbuds in, watching the vote happen in real time an hour away while the table talked around her. The optimism from the first dinner had curdled into something closer to exhaustion, though there was still hope a good exit deal could be found. More wine that year too.

The third year, Brexit was no longer a question. It was a date on the calendar. Henley came toward the end again, but this time as the first stop on a three-leg road trip, Henley, then Paris, then an overnight in Chester, the only year we ever made it there. We were within two weeks of the UK formally leaving. Nobody was hopeful anymore, just tired and practical, working through the logistics of a thing that was already decided. The highlight of that dinner, for me, had nothing to do with Brexit at all. One of the students that year had gone to the same high school I had, the same high school my friend had gone to the year she lived with us. Three of us, decades and an ocean apart, all from the same hallways, sitting at the same table in Henley. A reminder of how closely we’re all tied together in this world. We ordered more wine that night too.

I always knew the train times. I always knew exactly when we needed to leave. As that moment got closer every year, some part of me wanted time to slow down, and every year it refused. There was never enough time. There never is. We’d reluctantly finish the last bottle of wine, say our goodbyes at the door, and walk back through town to the station for the long ride home to London.

Three dinners, three years, three versions of a country trying to decide who it wanted to be. That was the course I put on the syllabus. But the part I remember best was never the vote or the lectures or the long train rides back to London. It was a friend who showed up every time without being asked twice. It was students leaning into the river wind, dressed better than they wanted to be, and then showing up at dinner with more curiosity and grace than I probably gave them credit for ahead of time. They asked better questions than I expected. They listened more carefully than I expected. They treated my friends with the kind of care that made me proud to have brought them there. Henley was not just a place I took them. It was a place they helped me see again.

Aged Thirty Years

I had a birthday this week. Tomorrow is Father’s Day. This is always a complicated time of year, and this one has been harder than most to put into words.

If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you’ve heard parts of this story before. The golf course. The note. The phone call. I’ve written about this day before. But thirty years asks for more. This year I wanted to go further. Not just what happened, but who he was. And what it’s like to figure that out without him.

Thirty years ago, my birthday fell on a Saturday. The next day was Father’s Day. I was on the golf course when someone handed me a note written in red ink. Five words: Paramedics called. Call your mom at home.

I went back to the clubhouse. This was before cell phones were common, and they let me make a long distance call to my mother. I think they knew what I was about to learn. She told me “Your father had another heart attack and he isn’t doing very well.” We said a few more words. I don’t remember all of them. Then she told me the ambulance was taking him to the funeral home.

I drove to my parents’ home. Twenty-five minutes. When I arrived, my birthday presents were sitting out. We had been planning a celebration. There wouldn’t be one that day. There was a funeral to plan instead.

Grief, it turns out, comes with logistics. Two services in two towns 350 miles apart. Countless people to notify, arrangements to make, decisions that shouldn’t have to be made at all. His death was so sudden there hadn’t been time to plan anything. We found ourselves picking out burial plots in the cemetery where I had learned to ride a bike. Four of them, side by side. Three are now occupied. One remains. A lot of that planning happened on Father’s Day.

In the middle of it, I needed to get away for a little while. Not far. Just somewhere I could breathe without answering another question or making another decision. I went back to my own home, an apartment attached to a monument shop. That’s when I found it. The Father’s Day card I had already bought, signed, sealed, and set aside. That was not like me. I am usually the guy buying the card the day before, or the morning of, hoping the selection has not been picked clean. But that year, for reasons I still don’t know, I had bought it early. I had written in it. I had done the responsible thing. And now the last Father’s Day card I would ever buy had nowhere to go except with him. It was buried with him.

Father’s Day has never been simple since. Neither has my birthday. They arrive within days of each other every year, and every year they carry the weight of that one. Four times since he died, including the very first anniversary, my birthday and Father’s Day have fallen on the same day. I don’t have a word for what that feels like. I’m not sure one exists.

I don’t know that I can say I know who he was. Maybe none of us ever fully know our parents that way. But thirty years of life have given me more perspective than I had then. I understand more about him now than I did as his son standing in the wreckage of that week. Two of his siblings are still alive, and they could probably tell me even more. That is part of the strange work of grief, too. You keep learning about someone after they are gone. Family. Old friends. Coworkers. Former patients. I’ve heard stories about him from people I barely know. My favorite came from a man who shook my hand and said, “I knew your dad. He did my vasectomy.” I didn’t know what else to say, so I asked how it turned out.

My dad’s name was Russell. He was the oldest child, or so I always believed, and he acted like it his whole life. It wasn’t until we buried my grandfather, his father, that I learned the truth. There had been another child born before him. A baby who didn’t survive. My dad had spent his entire life as the oldest surviving child, carrying that weight without ever fully being the firstborn.

He was a surgeon, and like a lot of surgeons, he was gifted with his hands. He could build things, fix things, figure out what was broken and make it right. He was also a perfectionist. That is exactly what you want in a surgeon. It is not always what you want in a dad.

He tried to teach me some of what he knew, but teaching did not come as naturally to him as doing. I remember being about ten years old, mowing the lawn, and having him inspect it afterward with a surgeon’s eye for the imperfect line and the missed blade of grass. These were errors in a side yard at the end of a long private driveway. Nobody would ever see them. But to him, they mattered. Every project was like that. I never developed any real interest in working with my hands, building things, or fixing things. It wasn’t that the work itself felt beneath me. It was that something in me tensed up every time I picked up a tool, already worrying about the feedback if it wasn’t perfect.

When he died, I kept most of his tools. At the time, I told myself it was practical and valuable. Good tools are worth keeping. He certainly thought so. Every Sunday he would comb through the Sears newspaper ads looking for a deal on a new power tool. If he found one, he would dream up a project that justified the purchase. The tool came first. The reason came after. But the truth is, I kept his tools mostly as a way to keep him.

Over the years, I gave most of them away to people who would use them. That felt better than I expected. There is something good about knowing his tools are still fixing things, still building things, still in the hands of people who know what to do with them.

I still have some of them. This week, I used a few to fix a leaky faucet. I wish I were better at that kind of thing. I wish I cared more about it. But I don’t, not really. Maybe that is because of how he taught me. Maybe it is because of how I am made. Most likely, it is some combination of both. What I know is that even now, standing by a sink with a wrench in my hand, I can still feel the old pressure to get it right on the first try.

And when my own sons were old enough, I didn’t make them mow the lawn. I didn’t teach them how to build things or fix things, either. Maybe that was the wrong choice. But I couldn’t teach what I didn’t know how to do, and I didn’t want them to feel what I had felt. I didn’t want a missed blade of grass, a leaky faucet, or a failed first try to become something larger than it needed to be.

Times are different now. If they need to fix something, they can find a video, ask a question, or follow instructions I never had at my fingertips. But part of me still wonders whether I protected them from frustration or quietly passed along my own fear of it. How do you know what you should teach, what you should push, and what you should let them learn on their own? That is the kind of question I wish I could have asked my father.

What he left behind was not only tools, and the inheritance was not only fear. He left behind standards too. Some useful. Some heavy. Some I wanted to carry. Some I spent years trying not to pass along. And I also remember who he was when he was there.

My father believed in hard work. Not the performance of it, not the talking about it, but the actual showing up and doing the thing in front of you until it was done right.

I remember trying to learn how to water ski. I didn’t enjoy it. I wasn’t having fun. I wanted to be done. My father yelled at me and said that wasn’t the point. The point was learning a new skill, learning how to do something difficult, and taking pride in knowing you could do it. He was right, probably. I did learn how to water ski. But I never learned to enjoy it.

That was one of the complicated things about him. Sometimes the lesson was right, even when the delivery made it harder to receive. He believed competence mattered. He believed doing hard things mattered. He believed there was value in knowing you could do something, even if you never particularly wanted to do it again.

He also believed in integrity, in treating every person you encounter with basic human respect regardless of who they are or what they can do for you. Those weren’t lessons he delivered in speeches. They were just how he lived.

He was generous in ways he didn’t always announce. Our home was open to my friends. He would be there in his chair after a long day, a cigarette in one hand, a book or newspaper in the other, and a martini, scotch, or whatever drink was in rotation sitting not too far away. In hindsight, the fire safety plan may have needed some work. He might pull you into a conversation about politics, argue his side hard, and still expect everyone to be friends the next morning. If we went out to dinner, he paid. Every time, without discussion.

We also had two foreign exchange students live with us for a year. That is not a small thing. Adding another child to a house is expensive, inconvenient, and disruptive in ways people don’t always see from the outside. He did it anyway. He welcomed them, included them, and made them feel like family. That was his generosity, too. Not loud. Not sentimental. But real.

He was not without contradictions. He understood some of his own shortcomings, or at least enough of them to try to warn me away from the same mistakes. I came to think of those warnings as Russisms. He would point at me with a lit cigarette, take a deep drag, and tell me not to smoke because it was bad for me. Or he would swirl a martini, take a sip, and pronounce the dangers of alcohol and why I should avoid it. At the time, I probably heard the hypocrisy more than the wisdom. Now I hear something else. A man who knew his own weaknesses and hoped his son might not have to carry them.

Looking back, I think the Russisms were less about the cigarettes and the martinis and more about something harder to say out loud. They were the advice he wished someone had given him. The mistakes he had already made, handed back to me in the form of a warning. He couldn’t always fix what was broken in himself. But maybe I could avoid some of it. That was the hope, anyway. It usually is.

He was a dedicated physician in ways I didn’t fully understand when I was young. You don’t appreciate that kind of commitment when you’re a kid watching your father leave for the hospital at strange hours. You understand it later, when you’re the patient, sitting across from a doctor and hoping with everything you have that this person actually cares about what happens to you. My father was that doctor. I know that now in a way I couldn’t then.

In his later years, after four heart attacks and a forced retirement from medicine, my father began to soften. He tried breadmaking. It didn’t go well, and I think part of him knew it, but he made it anyway. That was new. The man who had inspected a lawn with a surgeon’s eye for the imperfect line was now standing in a kitchen, covered in flour, making something that didn’t turn out right and living with it.

He also showed more outward empathy. He let things go that he wouldn’t have let go before. And in the weeks before he died, he called me just to talk. No agenda. No news to deliver. Just his voice on the phone, checking in. The dad I grew up with never did that. I didn’t know how much I needed it until it wasn’t there.

So what he left behind was also unfinished. The conversations that never happened. The phone calls I never got to make when life got hard. The chance to ask whether he had felt the same doubts, made the same mistakes, and wondered in the quiet moments whether he had gotten it right. I never got to tell him about my own shortcomings and hear him say he understood. And I never got to thank him. Not really. Not for the sacrifices he made, or the strange hours he kept, or the dedication he gave to his patients. I understand now that he did those things so our lives could be better.

He never met my wife. He never met my boys. He would have loved them and probably invented a couple more Russisms. They know him only through stories and a middle name. My youngest carries Russell as his middle name. It’s the closest thing I had to introducing them. It’s not enough. It never is. But it’s something.

Thirty years is a long time to figure something out on your own. Long enough that the figuring becomes the thing itself. I don’t know if I got fatherhood right. I tried to show up. I tried to work hard and keep my word and treat people the way my father taught me. I tried to pass along what was passed to me, even when I wasn’t sure I was doing it correctly. I may not have gotten everything right. But my boys have never once been anything other than the best thing I’ve done. And when I failed, which I did, there was no one to call who had walked this particular road before me.

My father was a connoisseur of scotch and other spirits. Maybe connoisseur is too fancy a word, but he knew what he liked and took some pleasure in understanding it. I have taken an interest in scotch, too. Some of that is taste. Some of it is ritual. Some of it, I suspect, is another way of keeping a small conversation with him going.

A thirty year scotch is not simply older than a fifteen year scotch or a ten year scotch. Time has done something to it. The sharper edges have softened. The heat is still there, but it does not hit the same way. What remains is deeper, smoother, more complicated. Still scotch, but different than it was.

Grief works that way, too. Thirty years have done something to this. Not all of it has burned off. Some of it never will. But the raw pain of that first Father’s Day, the one spent planning a funeral in a cemetery where I learned to ride a bike, has changed. What remains now is grief, yes, but also gratitude, understanding, and a kind of love that has had a long time to age.

Somewhere today there’s a golf course, and a note written in red ink, and a young man who doesn’t yet know what he’s about to learn. I think about him every year on this day. I think about what I’d tell him if I could.

Happy Father’s Day, Russ. I still have things to tell you. And thirty years later, I am still finding things you left behind.

The Long Way Back from Paddington

The tickets were sorted. Now came the long way home.

Last week I wrote about the walk from Waterloo to Paddington, four miles across London on a free day while my students attempted to set the Guinness record for pub crawling. I had gone to Paddington for train tickets to Henley, but the walk back was never going to be the same walk in reverse. London had changed by then.

By the time I started back, the city was louder, the parks were fuller, and the quiet errand had become something closer to a full day’s walk. I was not trying to make good time. I was trying to notice. I reentered at the Italian Gardens, the formal ornamental garden at the northern tip of the Serpentine where Hyde Park and Kensington Gardens meet. The boundary between the two parks is blurry here, which is part of the charm. Stay west and you are in Kensington Gardens. Go east and you are in Hyde Park.

I usually went west first, toward Kensington Palace. The Albert Memorial comes into view on your left, an elaborate gilded monument with Royal Albert Hall rising behind it across the road. Then I would turn back east along the Serpentine. If instead you head south from the Italian Gardens, the path takes you past the Peter Pan statue, which has been standing there since 1912 and still draws people who stop longer than they expected to. Either way, you end up along the Serpentine, which by then was an afternoon walk, with the park busier, the light different, and my feet beginning to understand London better than my map did.

Keep your eyes up while you walk. Hyde Park has parakeets, bright green ones, darting through the trees. They are not native to England, and nobody knows for certain how they got there. The stories range from Jimi Hendrix releasing a pair on Carnaby Street in the 1960s to escapees from a film set. The truth is unclear. The birds are not. Eventually the park releases you. You come out near the back side of Buckingham Palace, which is where I would duck through rather than past the front.

Walking behind the palace, you find yourself in a neighborhood marked by a surprising number of international flags, the kind that signal embassies and consulates. If you know your flags, this is a good stretch to test yourself.

Eventually the consulates of Belgravia give way to Victoria, where each street seems to have been designed by a different century. Turn a corner and you move from Edwardian to Georgian. Turn another and you are in late Victorian. Turn one more and someone has dropped a modern building in without asking. London has always been like that. It should not work. It does.

The street names alone are worth the detour: Petty France, Buckingham Gate, Queen Anne’s Gate. Tucked among the townhouses are pubs with names that feel like they belong in a novel: The Old Star, The Adam and Eve, The Two Chairmen, The Feathers, The Phoenix. More than once I stopped for a late lunch, an afternoon snack, or a local beer. Nobody was in a hurry. Neither was I. Eventually I settled the bill, stepped back outside, and kept walking. A few blocks later I reached into my jacket to make sure the tickets were still there. They were. A few days from now, those tickets would put my students on a train to Henley, and me a few hours closer to someone I had been looking forward to seeing since before the term began. Then, without much warning, Westminster Abbey appeared above the roofline as if it had simply decided to be there. It stopped me every time. It still does.

I usually worked my way behind Westminster Abbey and then to Victoria Tower Gardens, a small park tucked at the south end of the Parliament building that most visitors never find. The gardens take you naturally down to Lambeth Bridge, which is nothing like Westminster Bridge and better for it.

Earlier in the day I had crossed Westminster Bridge, the green one, the postcard one, the one crowded with selfie sticks and people trying to prove they had been there. Lambeth Bridge is different. It is painted a deep red, supposedly to echo the benches of the House of Lords, just as Westminster Bridge echoes the green benches of the House of Commons. Maybe that is true. Maybe it is just one of those stories London tells because it sounds right. Either way, from the middle of Lambeth Bridge you get Parliament and Westminster Abbey without the crowd. The same landmarks, but from a quieter angle.

Once across, you have a choice. Head toward Lambeth Palace, the official London residence of the Archbishop of Canterbury and reportedly so for 800 years. I never saw him there. Or turn and walk along the Thames toward Westminster Bridge.

I usually took the river. The walk along the Thames after Lambeth Bridge is quiet and thoughtful in a way the outbound journey never is. The city has changed pace by now. Fewer people, a handful of street vendors, but no hustlers, no tour groups, and no one performing for anyone. The river moves beside you, and London lets you alone for a while. You follow the river until Westminster Bridge comes into view, and that is your signal to turn. From there it is a short walk back through the familiar landmarks: past the London Eye, back through Leake Street, up through Lower Marsh, and finally the hotel. By the time you walk through the door, you have covered nine to ten miles of one of the great cities in the world, more if you wandered, and your feet know it.

When I got back to the hotel, I carefully sorted and stored the tickets for the trip to Henley. After nine to ten miles of walking, I was ready to join my students for a pint at a nearby pub. Most of them had a head start. Though I should say, some of them had actually used the day the way I had hoped. A few went to the V&A Museum. Others made the pilgrimage to Abbey Road. There were always a couple who did something Harry Potter related, which I understood completely. Many went to pubs. We compared stories about our day.

I told them I had walked to Paddington to get the tickets to Henley. Then I told them a little about my friend. The woman who had lived with our family during the Silver Jubilee. The one who had made my life immeasurably better. Not the whole story. That would come later. For now, it was enough that Henley was getting closer.

A Walk to Paddington

A professor, a free day in London, and a four-mile walk across one of the great cities in the world. From Lower Marsh to Leake Street, Westminster Bridge to Hyde Park, and finally Paddington. This is walking London the right way.

Every course I taught in London included free days on the weekend. The idea was simple. Let the students explore the city on their own terms. In practice, this meant most of them spent the better part of the day on an unorganized pub crawl, apparently attempting to set the Guinness record. As a professor I found this frustrating. But truth be told, when I was 20, I would have done the same thing.

On one of those free days, I had my own agenda. It was my favorite day of the course, just me and London getting to know each other a little better. The walk to Paddington was, on the surface, a practical errand. I needed to purchase train tickets so the students could visit Henley-on-Thames, a small and beautiful town about an hour outside the city, home of the famous regatta and, more importantly to me, people I deeply care about.

One of them had come into our family years earlier as an exchange student and somehow became something closer to a sister. I am not going to name her here, but she knows exactly who she is. She lived with us for a year during the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, and what started as a temporary stay became one of those rare relationships that keeps deepening instead of fading. Over the last twenty years, she and her family have become one of the better things in my life. The train tickets were the reason for the walk. She was the reason for the trip.

The walk is about four miles each way, but that number is misleading. Four miles in London is not four miles on a treadmill or four miles around a suburban walking path. It usually took me a couple of hours to get to Paddington and a couple of hours to get back. You do not rush a walk like this because there is too much to see. You stop for photographs. You pause on bridges. You stand in front of buildings longer than you planned. You let a street, a park, or a memorial interrupt you. That was the point.

Waterloo Station was about five minutes from the hotel, and I could have taken the Bakerloo line directly to Paddington and spent the rest of the day in a pub. But where’s the fun in that. If you have a free morning in London and a decent pair of shoes, this is how I would suggest spending it.

Before any long walk you need fuel. The Hampton Inn near Waterloo put out a full buffet breakfast, and I worked my way through it with some purpose. The scrambled eggs were, I’m fairly certain, made from powder, but after a cup of tea nobody was complaining. I passed on the beans. I understand this is a beloved British tradition. I have never understood it and I’m not going to pretend otherwise. The potato rounds, essentially flattened tater tots, were almost as good as a McDonald’s hashbrown, and that is not faint praise. I finished up, got myself sorted, and stepped outside into whatever London had waiting.

I turned right out of the Hampton Inn and headed up toward Lower Marsh, one of those streets guidebooks mention in passing and then move on from. That is a mistake. In the morning it is a market waking up. Stalls are being assembled. Vendors are arranging things. The smell of food is beginning to organize itself. The sights and smells remind you of a local fair or carnival from childhood, except this version has better coffee, better food, and no livestock barns. Lower Marsh feels more local than the better known markets, less performed, the kind of place where people actually shop rather than pose for photographs. When I was there it ran Monday through Saturday. These days it is weekdays only, probably another casualty of Covid. Come back on a Tuesday for lunch. You will not regret it.

From there I found my way to Leake Street, which is easy to miss and worth finding every time. At its most basic, it is a tunnel running underneath the outbound tracks of Waterloo Station. The entrance is unremarkable, which is part of the point. You step in and the city changes register entirely. Leake Street is maybe 300 yards long, and every wall belongs to graffiti. Not the scratched-out signatures of people marking territory, but actual art, full murals, color from floor to ceiling, work that changes regularly because other artists paint over it and start again. It smells like spray paint and old concrete. It sounds like your own footsteps. Walking through it early, before anyone else has found it that morning, is one of the genuinely strange pleasures London keeps tucked away.

Leake Street eventually opens onto York Road, near the London Eye and the Aquarium. From there you weave your way toward the Eye and eventually the Thames. This stretch of the South Bank is busy at almost any hour, but early on a Saturday morning in January you can have it largely to yourself, which makes it ideal for photographs. Westminster Bridge is worth visiting once. After that, unless you enjoy navigating around selfie sticks, wannabe influencers staging endless photo shoots, and the occasional pickpocket, there are better ways across the river.

But stop in the middle on your first time. The bridge is painted green, which is said to echo the green benches of the House of Commons, the chamber nearest the bridge. London loves that kind of detail, the sort of thing you can walk past a dozen times before finally noticing it. Then look upriver toward Parliament, the Elizabeth Tower with Big Ben rising over everything, and the water moving underneath. It is the postcard version of London, and the reason postcards exist.

The far side of the bridge drops you into Westminster, and you should take a moment before you go anywhere. You are standing at the heart of England. Parliament is to your left, Westminster Abbey just beyond it, the UK Supreme Court across the square, Whitehall stretching north. Not all of it packed into one view, but close enough that you can feel the weight of the place. Early on a Saturday morning in January you may have most of it to yourself, which is the only way to properly appreciate it. From here you have choices. Head up Whitehall and cut across the Horse Guards to reach St. James’s Park from the north, or head due west and arrive at the southeast corner of the park directly. Either way works. I usually went west. And that is where Churchill finds you.

Tucked at the southeast corner of St. James’s Park, nearly in the shadow of Parliament and Downing Street, are the Churchill War Rooms. If you have any interest in World War II, this is not optional. The War Rooms are the secret underground bunker where Churchill and his senior commanders spent the war years monitoring, planning, and trying to hold a country together when certainty was in short supply. When the war ended in 1945, they sealed the facility and walked away. It exists today almost exactly as it was left. The maps are still on the walls. The phones are still on the desks.

A city like London never lets you walk only in the present, and on June 6 that was especially true. Eighty-one years ago, the largest seaborne invasion in human history launched from Britain and landed on the beaches of Normandy. Some of it was planned in rooms like the ones a few hundred yards from where you are standing. The men who went ashore that morning did not all come home. A morning walk through a peaceful city is not a small thing when you remember what left from these shores. It is worth a moment of your time to remember that.

St. James’s Park is worth walking through, not around. Follow the path along the lake and take your time with it. The waterfowl alone are worth slowing down for. Ducks, geese, and swans move around in numbers that suggest they know they own the place. Henry VIII used it as a deer park. James I turned it into an exotic animal park. Charles I walked through it on his way to his execution. Now it is nearly sixty acres of paths, water, birds, and one of the better views in London. From there, Green Park carries you toward Hyde Park.

Hyde Park deserves its own moment. St. James’s Park belongs emotionally to monarchy and ceremony. Green Park belongs to quiet passage. Hyde Park belongs to the public, which means it is sometimes beautiful, sometimes noisy, sometimes odd, and almost always alive. By the time you arrive you have already walked a couple of miles, Paddington is just on the other side, and you might be tempted to think the hard part is behind you. It is not. Hyde Park covers 350 acres. Walking across it is a little like driving through Montana on I-90, where you are absolutely certain it is never going to end.

Henry VIII took this land from the monks of Westminster Abbey in 1536. The man had a pattern. It stayed private for a century until Charles I opened it to the public in 1637, giving Londoners a place to promenade, argue, protest, and occasionally listen to each other. History remembered him poorly regardless.

Every November through January, a corner of Hyde Park transforms into Winter Wonderland, a sprawling Christmas festival with roller coasters, a Ferris wheel, ice skating, a Bavarian village, and enough mulled wine to get through a British winter. I always wanted to go in but never had anyone to go with, and frankly the admission price gave me a convenient excuse. So I walked around it. London’s giant civic backyard. It takes a while to cross. I never minded.

And then, sometime around noon, after nearly four miles, three parks, and more pauses than I could count, I arrived at Paddington. For many, Paddington is where London begins. If you fly in from Heathrow you take the Express straight here. There is a bear named after this place, which tells you something about how deeply it has worked its way into the culture. It is a vast station of steel and glass, with none of the grandeur of Union Station in Washington or Grand Central in New York. It is open and cold and relentlessly busy. Frankly, it is overwhelming.

But I had a job to do, and I did it. Tucked into one corner was the ticket office. Because it was Saturday, there was rarely a line. I ordered the tickets with the group discount and tucked them into my jacket. I always found it odd how satisfying that moment was. I had walked nearly four miles across London for a stack of paper tickets, which made no sense and perfect sense at the same time. They were not just tickets. They were one step closer to Henley, one step closer to my students meeting family, and one step closer to seeing one of my best friends.

The tickets were sorted. Now came the long way home

Advice I wish I had Given My Younger Self

The question is not really whether you would go back. The question is what you are going to do today with everything you already know.

Lately, scrolling through the noise that social media has become, I keep running into a certain kind of post. You have seen them. They usually start with a photograph, a high school hallway, a gymnasium, a parking lot that looks like every parking lot from 1984. And then comes the question. Would you go back? To a specific year. To a specific moment. To a specific version of yourself you have not been in a very long time.

The comment sections on these things are something. People arguing with complete strangers about which year they would choose and why. Some of them are serious. Some of them are heartbreaking. All of them are trying to answer the same question underneath the question, which is: was there a version of this life that went better?

I think about that question more than I probably should. When I see those posts I think about the 1980s with genuine nostalgia. It was a simpler time. We were not being bombarded around the clock with news and noise and everyone’s opinion about everything. But nostalgia is not the same as regret, and when I am honest with myself I do not look back at what I had and feel like something is missing now. My life is good. Arguably great. My wife is my best friend. My sons turned out amazing. My work has mattered, for the most part. My friendships have lasted longer than most things I own. And Ginger meets me at the door every single day like I have been gone for six months.

So the long and short of it is I am not going back. But I would send a note. That note, it turns out, has existed for years in rougher form, tucked inside syllabi and first-day-of-class remarks and the things I said on the last day when I thought nobody was writing anything down. It was shaped by the mistakes I thought I had made and the opportunities I thought I had missed and the things I wished someone had told me before I had to figure them out the hard way. Since I do not have a DeLorean with a flux capacitor, I will have to settle for what I have written here.

Find time for the people who will be gone the soonest. Now, if we are being honest, I would absolutely go back knowing what I know. I understand I might be tinkering with the space-time continuum, and I have made my peace with that. Yes, I would probably look into a few investments. Apple. Walmart. Amazon. Netflix. I am not a saint. But that is not actually why I would go back. I would go back to sit with my parents for a while. Hug them more. Ask them questions I never thought to ask. Ask them about their parents and grandparents, their cousins, the family stories that were actually told. Because they were told. I just was not paying attention the way I should have been. Storytelling is how families survive themselves, and I let too many stories go in one ear and out the other because I was young and thought there was plenty of time. The same goes for a few friends and family members I did not know I was running out of time with. In 1986, I did not know there were only ten years left with my dad.

Pay attention. Most of life does not announce itself as important when it happens. The random Tuesday night dinner when everyone somehow made it to the table. The walk with the dog. The conversation with your dad the night before he died, not knowing it would be your last. The family story you have heard a dozen times before and assume you will hear a dozen more. The big moments are easy to spot. Graduations. Weddings. Births. Retirements. Life has a way of putting those on the calendar for you. The smaller ones require more effort. They slip by quietly, and only later do you realize they were part of something larger. Take the picture. Ask the question. Stay a little longer. One day you will discover that what looked like an ordinary day was actually a gift. The trick is noticing it before it is gone. Turns out Ferris Bueller was right. Life moves pretty fast. If you don’t stop and look around once in a while, you could miss it.

Take the trip. Both of them. The one you cannot afford and the one you can. You will find reasons to wait on both, and the reasons will sound responsible and they will be wrong. Think about what you actually remember. Not the gifts. Not the things. The trips. The British Isles with my parents and grandparents. Switzerland for a dear friend’s twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. The thirteen-hour drive to Mackinac Island with my family, and somewhere in the middle of Wisconsin one of my sons looking up and announcing, “You people are the worst family ever. You people are not my family.” I remember all of it. If I had it to do over, I would rethink every holiday, every birthday, every Christmas morning. Less stuff under the tree. More stamps in the passport. Experiences last forever. Most everything else ends up at Goodwill.

Travel does something else too. It exposes you to different cultures, different people, different food, different ways of looking at the same world you thought you already understood. It hardens some of your beliefs and softens others, and both of those things are good for you. French wine tastes better in France. And most of all, you learn that a mother in South Dakota loves her child just as much as a mother nearly everywhere else in the world.

Ask her out. In my wildest dreams I did not think she would say yes. She said yes. We are married. There were others along the way, there always are, but she was the one, and I almost talked myself out of asking because I was certain I already knew the answer. I did not know the answer. That is the part nobody tells you. You are a terrible predictor of outcomes involving your own life. Ask anyway. Apply anyway. Start the business anyway. Have the conversation anyway. The worst outcome is rarely as bad as you imagine, and the wondering lasts considerably longer.

Read more than you think you need to. Not for school. Not to finish. Read because, like travel, it opens your mind and calms it at the same time. It expands curiosity and makes you better in ways that are hard to measure and impossible to fake. Every good book teaches you something. Find an author you enjoy and spend time with them. Doris Kearns Goodwin taught me about leadership through Lincoln and Team of Rivals, perhaps the greatest lesson in leadership ever put on paper. Oddly enough, my favorite book of hers is not about Lincoln at all. It is about growing up as a Brooklyn Dodgers fan in the 1950s. David McCullough took me to Paris in The Greater Journey. Michael Lewis taught me to see the world differently. Mitch Albom reminded me that kindness still matters. John Grisham kept me up far too late reading The Firm.

Books are inexpensive travel. They let you borrow someone else’s life for a few hundred pages and return to your own a little wiser than when you left. Ted Lasso once quoted Walt Whitman on this subject: be curious, not judgmental. There is essentially no evidence Whitman ever said that. But the line made me curious enough to go read some actual Whitman, which I suppose proves the point entirely. I have learned something from almost every book I have read. Some lessons were profound. Some were useful. Some were simply that Clan of the Cave Bear is still not making my top ten.

I baked reading into my syllabus every semester, mostly through Wall Street Journal articles, but it was intentional. I wanted my students curious about the world beyond the classroom and beyond the case law. Whether it worked I cannot say with any certainty. Some of them listened. I choose to believe more of them did than I will ever know.

Start saving. Now. Not instead of living, not instead of the trip or the experience or the night out that becomes a story you will tell for thirty years. Alongside all of it. Compound interest is the closest thing normal people get to magic. The problem is that magic only works if you start early. Start by at least matching what your company puts in. Then think about more. Ten percent of your pay is a good number. You will not miss it, and I say that knowing you think you will. Every time you get a raise, increase your savings rate by half. If you get a four percent raise, save two more percent before you ever see it. The math on compound interest is not complicated, but it is unforgiving. Time is the one ingredient you cannot buy back. You do not need to save everything. You need to start. There is a difference, and younger me confused the two for longer than I would like to admit.

Move your body. I want to be clear about something. I have never liked working out. The gym, the weights, the person grunting next to you at six in the morning, none of that was ever me. But I do like moving, and it turns out that is enough. Walk. Swim. Bike. Dance. Tai chi. Golf without the cart. Run, if you are that particular kind of crazy. It does not have to hurt and it does not have to be impressive. It just has to happen, and it has to happen again tomorrow. I have now walked more than thirty million steps, one day at a time, and I did not do it because I love exercise. I did it because I love moving. The body keeps score longer than we think it does, and small, consistent habits compound the same way investments do. Small. Consistent. Long term. The math works the same way in both places. Trust it.

Worry less. I mean this practically, not as a bumper sticker. You are lying awake at 2am about the student upset about his grade, the client upset about his case, the beneficiary upset about not getting enough money. You cannot fix any of it at 2am. And if you are being honest, most of it was never yours to fix in the first place. I used to tell my students there were three kinds of problems in the world. Your problems. My problems. Our problems. And most of the problems keeping people awake at night belong firmly in that first category. Not mine. Not ours. Yours. The sooner you learn to hand them back, the better everyone sleeps, including you. So plan for what is actually yours. Adapt when you need to. Handle what is genuinely in front of you. But the 2am rehearsal of every possible outcome, that is just energy leaving the building with nothing to show for it. I stumbled onto a meditation technique once where you imagine a river and you place each anxious thought onto a boat and watch it float away. You keep going until the river is empty. The first time I tried it I was skeptical. By the fifth boat I was nearly asleep. Five minutes of watching your thoughts drift downstream will do more for you than two hours of staring at the ceiling. Put it on a boat. Let it go.

Take the chance. This one is broader than the trip and the girl, though it includes both. I mean the job you are not sure you are qualified for. The idea you have not said out loud yet. The conversation you keep rehearsing and never having. The version of yourself you have not introduced to anyone yet. Younger me was careful in ways that younger me thought were wise. They were not wise. They were fear with better posture. I tried to tell my students that, in so many words, every chance I got. I am not sure they believed me. I am not sure I would have believed me either. And if it does not work? Pay attention. Failure usually has something to teach you. More often than not, the breakthrough is sitting just on the other side of the thing that did not go according to plan. Some of the best things that happened to me came immediately after something I thought was a setback. At the time I could not see it. Looking back, it seems obvious. Looking forward, it never does.

Forgive yourself. You will make mistakes. You will say the wrong thing to the wrong person at the wrong moment. You will lose friends, money, and maybe a job. Some of it will be your fault. Some of it will feel like your fault and will not be. Either way, carrying it does not fix it. Learn what it has to teach you, resolve not to do the same thing twice, and put it down. It just makes everything else heavier.

There is a particular cruelty in advice. It arrives, almost without exception, after the moment it would have been useful. Four years ago I wrote something called The Last Lecture, my final words to my students at Augustana on my last day in the classroom. Reading it now alongside this is an interesting exercise. The curiosity is still there. The belief in showing up is still there. But that piece was written from the front of a room to people just starting out. This one is written from inside a life, to myself, with the benefit of forty years of evidence. What strikes me most is that the advice is not all that different. Which means one of two things. Either I have not learned as much as I thought, or the fundamentals were right all along and the only thing that changes is how personally you feel them. I choose to believe it is the latter. And I suspect that everything I just told younger me applies just as much to the students who sat in my classroom over the years as it does to the man who stood at the front of it.

Here is the thing I did not expect when I started writing this. Most of this list is not finished business. It is current business. The people who are still here will not always be. There are trips not yet taken and chances not yet seized and worry that still needs to stop. The body still needs to move tomorrow and the day after that. The math on all of it still works, but only if you start. I wrote this as advice to a younger version of myself and somewhere in the middle of writing it I realized I was also writing it to right now. That is what the social media posts never tell you. The question is not really whether you would go back. The question is what you are going to do today with everything you already know.

Most of the chances I took turned out better than I deserved, and most of the ones I did not take I cannot quite stop thinking about. The balance sheet is not even close. My life is good. It could have been good sooner, and with less hesitation. But it is not too late for any of it. Not for me. Not for you.

Do the thing. Take the trip. Ask.

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