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What It Will Always Mean

What It Will Always Mean | A Baseball Essay

I was stuck for three days. Since I posted last Saturday’s piece about the measuring cups, I sat down more than once trying to find this week’s idea and came up empty every time. Nothing rough, nothing I could fix later. Just nothing.

Tuesday was the first day of the baseball playoffs, and I missed nearly all of it. A long day at work ran well past quitting time. By the time I finally shut the computer down, the Yankees and Red Sox were playing, two teams I have never rooted for and never will. A few years back I saw them play at Fenway, and even without a rooting interest, there is something about that ballpark that gets its hooks in you. Watching two teams I do not like, it hit me. I needed to write about baseball.

Baseball. What it has meant, and what it still means.

Three days earlier, on a Saturday, I was sitting at a table inside Target Field with two friends I have known for most of my adult life. They both live in the Twin Cities, so getting the three of us together should really just be a matter of picking a date that works. Except this year even that turned into its own project. We started talking about it back in April, floated several dates in May, settled on two of them, and then had to change both. It was not until a few weeks before the end of the season that we finally landed on this Saturday, the second-to-last day of the regular season.

We spent part of the morning worried the game would be rained out altogether, a concern we never had in the Metrodome days. But as we have often done, we met at a bar near the stadium first to catch up before heading over. By the time we walked to the ballpark, the news was official. First pitch, scheduled for 3:10, had been pushed back to 5:10.

Our seats were in the Thrivent Club, which will always be the Delta Club to me no matter how many times the sponsor changes. Padded seats, better food, and an indoor concourse made the two-hour wait considerably easier to take. We wandered the club for a while looking at pictures and memorabilia of past Twins greats. With the rain, we needed an inside home base, so we found a spot along the third base line, got some beer and a basket of peanuts, and picked up the conversation from the bar.

We have been going to these games for nearly forty years now, and every so often we try to reconstruct how it started. None of us is entirely sure our memories match the actual facts anymore, but we all tell the story the same way, so we have decided that is close enough. We talked about the games we could still see clearly, 1987 and 1991, the two years the Twins won it all, along with a handful of others that have blurred together over four decades of sitting next to each other.

Mostly, though, we talked about our lives. What was going on, what was good, and a few things that were genuinely bothering one of us. We even got into Istanbul, the Ottoman Empire, and how it all connects to today. We brought up old romantic interests, the ones from before any of us got married, and agreed, all three of us, that we had each ended up marrying above our station. We chose wisely, and we know it.

We used to talk about what our lives would look like in thirty or forty years. Now we are living in that future, and somehow, every time the three of us are together, it still feels like we are back in college. Except the conversation has changed. We do not talk about dorm rooms anymore. We talk about what retirement might actually look like. We talk about aging parents, the ones we have already lost and what that loss meant, and the ones we are still watching decline. We talk about people we care about who are struggling, in ways none of us would have known how to talk about when we were twenty.

None of us knew it at the time, but while we stood there with our beer and our peanuts, waiting out a rain delay in Minneapolis, Justin Verlander was making the final start of his career several hundred miles away in Detroit. I did not see any of it until I got back to the hotel that night. I pulled up the video and watched it more than once.

Verlander was pulled in the sixth inning. His manager walked out of the dugout, and everyone in the ballpark assumed they knew what came next, a handshake, a pat on the back, the long walk to the dugout. Instead, the manager pointed toward the stands. Verlander’s seven-year-old daughter came sprinting onto the field and out to the mound ahead of him. Verlander, one of the most decorated pitchers of his generation, stood there and cried while his own kid hugged him goodbye in front of forty thousand people. Then he walked off holding her hand, toward his wife and the rest of his family waiting at the edge of the field.

Eventually, the rain stopped. We finished our beers, left the club, and made our way to our seats. The seats were still wet. Maybe that was another reminder that ballparks change, too. The Metrodome was gone. The Delta Club had become the Thrivent Club. The three guys walking toward their seats were pushing sixty instead of twenty.

The Twins scored first. Texas answered with four runs in the second, added a couple more, and by the middle innings the outcome was becoming fairly obvious. We left early and checked the final score the next morning. Rangers 6, Twins 2. None of us had been there to see the end of it, and none of us minded.

Maybe that is my answer. Baseball is slow, and the slowness is the point. The game unfolds in front of you instead of being handed over all at once, and you have no choice but to sit inside that pace and let it happen.

That pace gives you time. Time to see the strategy, argue about it, and talk it through with whoever is sitting next to you. For three guys who have been doing this since college, the pause between pitches has always been the whole point. It is not dead time. It is the time we actually get to spend together, second-guessing a bullpen call or talking about life, the same way we have for forty years.

Baseball is also, mostly, a sport built on failure. This season, hitters around the league managed a hit in about twenty-four percent of their official at bats. Three out of four times, the answer was no. The best players in the world fail far more often than they succeed, and the game asks them to walk back to the dugout, sit down, and do it again the next time their name is called.

I think that is why it has stayed with me for most of my life. It is slow, and most of what happens on a baseball field does not work. And still, every so often, something does. A ball finds a gap. A daughter sprints onto a mound to walk her father off it for the last time. A rain delay turns into two hours you would not trade for a dry forecast.

There is a reason Field of Dreams ends the way it does, with Terence Mann standing at the edge of a cornfield talking about memory, about all that was once good, and about the chance that it could be again. He is talking about a game, but he is really talking about everything the game carries with it. Three guys standing around a high-top table with beer and peanuts, forty years in, know exactly what he means.

Where the Heck Are the Measuring Cups

Two months into a new house, a Shawshank Redemption comparison, a treeless prairie, and a dog who can’t read the “no dogs on lawn” signs. On choosing change instead of just enduring it.

It’s been nearly two months since we moved into our new home, and the question comes from everywhere. Coworkers, neighbors, people I run into. How’s the new house? It reminds me of being a senior in high school, or a freshman in college, when everyone wanted to know the same three things. How’s the college search going? Where are you headed next year? What’s your major? I spent enough years around eighteen-year-olds fielding those same questions that I eventually started handing out advice about it. I used to tell my students the same thing every year. Nobody really cares what your answer is, they just want you to have one. Pick three schools. Pick a major. Tell people a job you’re exploring. Most won’t ask again, and the ones who do just want you to say you’re still exploring it. That’s the trick. Have an answer ready and move on.

I could always give the easy answer. “It’s great,” I’d say, and move on to the next question. That’s easier than explaining any of what’s actually going on. But a new home is different, and the answer is more complicated.

One of my favorite movies is The Shawshank Redemption. I’ve watched it enough times that I’ve lost count, and lately I keep coming back to Brooks. Fifty years in that prison, and by the end he knew every hallway, every routine, every hour of every day without having to think about it. When he finally walked out, the world was too big and too fast, and it broke him. I’d laugh at the comparison if it didn’t feel so true. Twenty-two years in the same house does something to a person. I knew which drawer held the batteries. I knew which stair creaked and which light switch turned on the outside lights. I knew how the sound traveled through the place. I knew where the cat used to hide. And I knew where the measuring cups were. I didn’t think of it as knowledge. It was just how the house and I moved together.

In the new house, I had to look up how to use some of the light switches. Seriously, I have had television remote controls that were less complicated. Turns out a few switches don’t do anything at all, and that’s on purpose, wired for a future we haven’t gotten to yet. I stood in my own hallway flipping a switch that controls nothing, feeling like Brooks staring at a world that had moved on without him. Small mercies exist, though. Garbage day is still the same day it always was, and I felt an embarrassing amount of relief the first week I didn’t have to relearn that too.

Here’s the thing about Brooks. He wasn’t a bad man and he wasn’t weak. He was human. We all get institutionalized by our routines eventually. The routine isn’t the enemy. It’s comfortable, and comfortable isn’t a character flaw. But most of us fight change instinctively, even change we asked for, because the old routine feels like safety, even when it’s stopped serving us.

That’s the part I’m determined to get right that Brooks never had the chance to. He didn’t choose to leave. I did. I chose this house, this neighborhood, this flat and enormous sky, and choosing it means I don’t get to spend the next year mourning the version of me who knew where the batteries were. I get to be the guy who learns where the new drawer is instead.

The rest of the disruption is quieter than a light switch, and harder to fix with a Google search. Twenty-two years builds a rhythm you stop noticing, coffee first, then the walk, then the day starts in whatever order it starts. That rhythm didn’t move with the furniture. Some mornings I catch myself standing in the kitchen waiting for a version of the routine that doesn’t exist here yet.

At the old house, rain meant the basement treadmill, no decision required, just walk down the stairs and keep the streak alive. That treadmill didn’t survive the move, so now rain means an actual choice. Drive to the gym, assuming I can find it, or accept the day off and try not to think about what that does to the streak. I haven’t built a replacement rhythm yet. I’m not sure you can build one on purpose. I think it just accumulates, one repeated morning at a time, until one day you look up and realize you’ve done the same thing enough times that it’s become the thing you do.

For the days when it doesn’t rain, I have found my path here, at least. Same time every morning, same loop, Ginger pulling ahead like she already trusts the route more than I do. There are almost no trees in this new development on the edge of town, and the sky just keeps going. When the sun’s up, I stop and look at it, something the old neighborhood never made me do.

The new neighborhood is flat. It’s flat like a table. There is no topography. Glaciers had their way with this ground thousands of years ago, so I suppose flat was the plan all along. I’ve never been comfortable on the prairie the way I am in the hills. There is nothing better than walking through the forest in the Black Hills, winding your way through the pines. The trees close in around you. You can’t see far, and you don’t need to. Then the trail turns and suddenly you’re standing on an overlook with the whole world opened up below you.

That’s the kind of open I understand. You earn it, and it comes with a place to stand. The prairie gives you the view with nothing around it… no trees to walk through first, no edge to stand on. Some mornings that feels like freedom. Some mornings it feels like exposure. Most mornings it’s both.

The neighborhood itself has its own personality, and it’s not subtle about it. It’s mostly multi family, several blocks of townhomes, rows of villas, a few twin homes, and some single family homes mixed in. It’s like a small HOA convention. Several lawns have signs planted at dog height warning that the grass underneath is not, in fact, a public restroom. I appreciate the honesty, if not the phrasing, though it’s hard to call it neighborly.

But the detail that actually stopped me was the security cameras. I did an informal count on one recent walk and lost track somewhere past a dozen, most of them mounted on townhomes and villas that couldn’t be more than fifteen hundred square feet apiece. Half of them, best I can tell, are angled at the lawns, apparently to make sure no dog commits an undocumented offense. Everyone seems to have a camera pointed at everyone else, but I’m guessing a Flock camera at the entrance would somehow be considered an invasion of privacy.

Ginger, for her part, is unbothered by any of the signage, mostly because we never taught her to read. She’s more adaptive than I am. Every walk is still an investigation for her, nose down, working every corner of the block. Fire hydrants and utility boxes get extra time, like they’re holding the important information. The rare tree gets a thorough interrogation, no branch or root left unchecked. She’s also already identified a couple of houses with dogs she’s decided are hostile, and she lets me know it every time we pass, no diplomacy involved.

She hasn’t found her favorite spot yet, the one she used to make a beeline for without thinking, the one that told her she was home before she got there. She’s patient about it in a way I’m trying to learn from. She just keeps sniffing, confident the good spot is out there somewhere. I keep waiting for the same thing to happen to me, some ordinary corner of this new place that quietly becomes mine without me deciding it should.

So if you ask me how the new house is, the honest answer is that it isn’t home yet. Part of that isn’t even philosophical. It’s literal. We ordered furniture back in July, and it still hasn’t arrived, so there are rooms in this house that are technically ours and still feel like they’re waiting for someone else to move in.

Both Things Are True

A son’s phone call, a course called Landmand, and a reunion photo that made one choice cost something even though it was still the right one.

The dream comes back often enough that I have stopped being surprised by it. I am walking the halls of my high school, the version that exists only in my head, and I end up in the fine arts center almost every time. Usually it is the band room. Sometimes it is the theater above it. I spent a lot of time there throughout high school, especially senior year, and those rooms were where I began learning who I was going to become before I had any real proof of it.

Sometimes I land in the lunchroom instead, and I always know why. That is where Mike Church told me the Challenger had exploded, and I did not believe him, right up until I did. Some part of my mind decided that moment belonged in the same building as everything else it was not ready to let go of.

I do not wake up from these dreams shaken or sentimental. I wake up and make coffee. But forty years later, it says something that my subconscious still knows the floor plan by heart, even though I could not tell you where any of my lockers were or what a single classroom looked like. Memory makes its own choices about what it keeps and what it allows to disappear. I wish there were a confirmation screen before something vanished, the way there is when you delete a file from your computer. Are you sure? One last chance to keep it.

I have been thinking about all of this more than usual lately, because the dream and the actual building finally had a reason to overlap. This past weekend was my 40th high school class reunion, and even typing that number, I still have to stop and do the math twice before it sounds real.

I have gone back for two reunions, the 10th and the 20th, and if I am being honest, I did not enjoy either one very much. I was never one of the athletes or the popular kids, genetics left me an NBA center trapped in a guard’s body, so there was only so much a name tag and a cash bar could do to manufacture a connection that was not really there the first time around. Do not get me wrong. I had friends, and I liked most of my classmates.

What I never really had was contact. Once my parents moved away, I drifted from most of them, mostly because I rarely went back, and long-distance phone calls were expensive. I suppose I could have written letters. I just did not form the kind of lasting friendships with them that I later formed in college and beyond.

The 10th landed just a few weeks after my father died. Some classmates knew and asked how I was holding up. Others did not know and asked how my parents were doing. Neither question was one I wanted to answer that weekend.

The 20th came a little more than a year after my mother died, and I brought my wife along that time. She did not know a single person in the room, and I do not think she had much fun. It is a strange thing, bringing someone you love into a part of your life she was never part of. She could see the building and hear the names, but she could not see what any of it meant. There was no way for me to hand that over to her in the space of one evening.

Going back for a reunion has always been a little different for me because my parents moved away four years after I graduated. There has never been a house to stay in, a childhood bedroom still holding my trophies, or family to visit while I was in town. You stay in a hotel. The reunion becomes the entire reason for the trip, not one stop on a longer visit home.

When my parents died and were buried in that same town, the tether became stranger. I go back now for a cemetery, not a childhood. Visiting their graves is usually one of the first things I do and one of the last, though I have never made the trip specifically for that reason. The cemetery is something I stop at on my way to something else, a reunion, a funeral, or a drive through town on my way somewhere farther. It is a ritual built around memory, the same names on the same stone and the same silence waiting for me.

None of that means I have lost interest in the people. I do not think I would go back to relive what happened forty years ago. Those years mattered, but I have never felt much need to step inside them again and pretend nothing has changed. If I went back, it would be to find out what happened after we all walked out of that building and into the rest of our lives.

The truth is that social media, Facebook in particular, has already filled in much of that story. Most of us got married. Some of us got divorced. Many had children. We built careers, changed directions, found success, and endured failure. Some became exactly who they imagined they would become when we were seventeen. Many of us did not. That may sound colder than I intend because it is not that I do not care about them. I do. It is simply that high school was forty years ago, and I am still trying to look forward. I remain curious about where life took everyone. I am just not sure I am curious enough to drive three hundred fifty miles for the chance that they might show up.

Even so, I was on the fence about going. My wife could not make the trip because a co-worker’s bachelorette outing had already claimed part of her weekend. If I went, I would be going alone, though maybe that was fine since she had never known any of these people to begin with. One classmate, whose wife was not coming either, offered to make me his plus-one for the drive. I appreciated it, but the offer did not move me any closer to going. It still meant a long drive there, a hotel room, and a long drive back.

I had not decided anything when my phone rang. It was my youngest son, the one who spent his high school years on the tennis court, calling from Nebraska, where he lives now. He asked if I had anything going on that particular weekend. I told him about the reunion, still undecided and still turning it over. He said he had a better idea. He wanted me to come play golf with him at a course called Landmand.

I did not need to think about it. The invitation checked boxes I had not realized I was counting. Time with my son, first and simplest. A round of golf with him, which does not happen nearly as often as I would like now that he lives in Nebraska. And a chance to play a course where people wait a year for a tee time and still come away empty-handed. It was not a difficult choice. It was barely a choice at all.

Landmand sits in the middle of nowhere by design, carved into steep, windblown bluffs outside Homer, Nebraska, on a stretch of ground so rough that architects told the farmer who built it to look elsewhere. He did not. Now it is one of the hardest tee times to get in the country, an entire season’s reservations disappearing in less than an hour whenever they open the book. My son had one, and on a Sunday morning in September, that mattered more to me than anything happening three hundred fifty miles away.

The day started cool and gray, with rain moving through in waves. At one point, we watched lightning far enough away that we decided to keep playing rather than duck for cover. Later in the round, the clouds broke enough to let the sun through, though they never fully cleared. We played the rest of the morning under that half-lit sky, with the sun and clouds trading turns overhead.

My son’s roommate came along, and his father did too. It was not one father and son on that course but two, trading shots and ribbing each other across fairways wide enough to lose a golf cart in. There was no ritual waiting for me at Landmand and no history I was expected to revisit. There was just a course my son knew and I had never played, a son who wanted me there, and a Sunday that had not yet decided whether it would rain or clear.

I played terribly at the start and improved only slightly as the round went on. It did not matter. A day on the golf course with my son is priceless.

When I got home after golf, the reunion photographs began showing up. Some appeared on Facebook, posted by classmates who had gone. A few more were sent directly to me by someone who thought of me while scrolling through a camera roll. I went through them slowly, forty years compressed onto a phone screen.

Most of the faces I recognized without much effort, aged but unmistakably themselves. A handful I could not place at all, people who had apparently once shared hallways and classes with me but had left no trace in my memory.

Then I reached a photograph taken in the band room, where I had spent so much of my high school life. Standing in the middle of the group was Mr. Winter, my high school band director, smiling.

A month earlier, I had written about what he meant to me. I had ended that piece by saying that if I knew Mr. Winter would be at the reunion, I would seriously consider making the three hundred fifty mile drive to see him. He was there. I just had not known he would be.

Of everyone I might have wanted to see that weekend, he was the one I wanted to see most. I stopped scrolling and took in the photograph. I wondered if anyone had sent him what I had written about him. What I felt was not regret exactly. It was the honest weight of what a choice costs, even when it is the right one.

The Stadium Was Never the Point

A walk to see a football stadium in Fulham turns into an unplanned discovery of Fulham Palace, a moated garden, and a centuries-old church on the Thames.

Years ago, our family rented a flat near the Parsons Green tube station in Fulham. Staying in a neighborhood instead of a hotel lets you pretend, briefly, that you live there. You find your restaurants, your coffee shop, and your preferred route home. Once you find them, you defend them like property.

We had a full kitchen and a Waitrose a block away, but we mostly ate out anyway because that is what you do when you are pretending to be a local. We had dinner one night at the Brown Cow, partly because we had heard Prince Harry occasionally socialized there, back before things got complicated. A couple of mornings, we walked to a small breakfast spot called Kafeinn (breakfast pictured above). It has since rebranded itself as the Hive. The sign changed, but thankfully the atmosphere and food did not.

Whenever I return to London, I try to find time to walk through that neighborhood again and, if possible, have breakfast at the Hive. That was how this particular walk began.

I was back in London several years later, this time running a study abroad program. I had an idea rattling around for a new course built around the business of football. The English football pyramid would provide the structure, with the Premier League at the top and the increasingly precarious tiers below it. The class would meet in January, during the season, so students could watch the business they were studying unfold in real time.

We had already toured Stamford Bridge as part of a course on Brexit. Standing inside Chelsea’s ground had advanced the idea further than any syllabus meeting ever could. Craven Cottage sits only about two miles away, close enough that you could walk between two Premier League grounds in less than an hour. I wanted to see another stadium and understand how clubs that close geographically could remain so different in identity, history, and culture.

On a free day, I took the tube to Parsons Green and stopped for breakfast at the Hive. After breakfast, I started walking toward Craven Cottage. I had no real plan beyond reaching the stadium. At that point, the stadium was still the point.

Fulham Road was busy, loud, and full of motor coaches and traffic that did not care whether a tourist was trying to get his bearings. It was not the kind of city walking I usually seek out. There was no room to hear my own thoughts over the noise, so I put my head down and kept moving, assuming the destination would make up for the ugliness of getting there.

About half a mile into the walk, the road gave way to green. I did not know it at the time, but I had reached Moat Gardens, a narrow strip of parkland beside what remains of the old moat surrounding the Fulham Palace estate. The traffic noise dropped away almost immediately. One moment I was dodging buses, and the next I was beneath the trees, with the Thames somewhere nearby but not yet visible. London works its magic this way.

A little farther in, there was a dog park tucked into the green space, where dogs ran loose and off leash, doing one of the things dogs in a big city rarely get to do. I stopped to watch them for a while. I usually do. The stadium was not going anywhere.

The path carried me farther from Fulham Road and down Bishop’s Park Road, past a row of tennis courts where people were playing through the drizzle. It was January, cool and gray, the kind of day that would be considered bad weather almost anywhere else. In London, it was apparently still tennis weather.

As I approached Bishop’s Park, I was planning to turn toward Craven Cottage. Then I noticed something to my left, and the plan stopped mattering. It was Fulham Palace.

I walked through the gate and into a Tudor courtyard that was quiet and almost completely empty. Craven Cottage could wait. There were no tour groups, no lines, and no crowd gathered around someone holding a flag in the air. The gate was simply open, as if the palace had stopped trying to be found and decided to let itself be discovered.

The Bishops of London had been connected to this place since around the year 704. Queen Elizabeth I was entertained there with a lavish banquet in 1601. According to the story, two thieves stole her silver salt cellar during the festivities before being caught, which is either a cautionary tale or the most 1601 thing that has ever happened.

Standing there alone, it was difficult to reconcile that history with how quiet the palace felt. There were timber beams, worn stone, and the sound of my own footsteps. It did not feel like a museum piece sealed behind glass. It felt like a building that had outlasted nearly everything expected of it and had made peace with that.

The entire time I was there, I wished my wife were with me. She was not in London on that trip, but I knew immediately that she would love the quiet, the courtyard, the Tudor architecture, and the weight of its age. She visited on her own a couple of years later and came back agreeing that I had been right, which does not happen nearly often enough for me to leave it out of the story.

Eventually, I remembered the reason for the walk, left the palace, and continued toward Craven Cottage. I had come to see a football stadium, after all, and you cannot design a course around the business of football by spending the entire day wandering through a bishop’s palace.

I walked around the outside of the ground, past the away end and along its neighborhood side. Craven Cottage looked slightly out of place there, squeezed between the neighborhood and the river. I saw a couple of people who looked like players go into the stadium, but otherwise the place was quiet.

A football stadium on a non-match day is mostly a large, quiet building. There was no crowd, no chanting, no match, and none of the energy that turns concrete and seats into something more important. After Fulham Palace, the stadium never had much of a chance. I had come to see it, and I had seen it.

Having accomplished the mission, it was time to head back to the hotel. I chose the path beside the Thames instead of returning along Fulham Road. The river moved slowly, going nowhere in a hurry, and I let the walk slow down with it.

I passed through Bishop’s Park and returned to the palace grounds, this time walking through the walled garden. Its old gateway was still standing, apparently unbothered by the centuries. It was winter, so the garden was not in full bloom, but winter in London is different from winter back home on the plains. The grass remained green, and a few flowers had held on against the season.

The garden opened almost directly into the churchyard of All Saints. The church caught me off guard in much the same way the palace had, which by then should no longer have surprised me.

I walked through the churchyard and then went inside. The site dates to the Middle Ages, and the tower survives from the 1400s, although much of the present church was rebuilt during the nineteenth century. Pieces of the older church remain inside, incorporated into the newer walls and stonework, as if the building could not quite bring itself to let go of what it had been.

Eleven Bishops of London are buried in the church or the surrounding churchyard. They once lived in the palace next door and, unlike the rest of us, never had to commute.

My relationship with religion is complicated, but old churches in England get to me every time. What I feel inside them is something closer to spiritual than religious. Maybe it comes from the accumulated weight of all the people who stood in that same quiet over hundreds of years. They came seeking comfort, forgiveness, answers, or perhaps simply a little peace. Whatever brought them there, it had nothing to do with tourism and certainly nothing to do with a football stadium.

When I left the church, I knew Putney Bridge station was somewhere nearby. I wandered until I found it, got on the tube, and headed back toward the hotel.

I had set out that morning to see a football stadium as research for a class I expected to teach. I finished building the course, complete with the English football pyramid as its spine, but I never taught it. I left academia not long afterward, and the Business of Football is probably still sitting on an old hard drive, complete and unused, which is where some of our best-laid plans end up.

I still think about the course occasionally, but I think more often about the walk.

I went looking for Craven Cottage and found a moated garden, an empty Tudor courtyard, and a medieval church tied to generations of people who had called that stretch of the Thames home. I am sure I took photographs that day, although I cannot find them now. Some walks do not need the proof.

That is the thing about walking through a city like London. You can choose the destination, study the route, and convince yourself that you know why you are going. What you cannot plan is what will make you stop, turn left, and forget the plan entirely.

The stadium was never really the point.

Still Walking: What Focus Looks Like When Everything Else Changes

Summer meant the move. Fall means looking forward. Through both, one six-year streak — and one dog at the door — never stopped.

Earlier this week, the sun set at 8:00 PM. It won’t happen again until late April. From here, the days get shorter, the temperatures fall, and eventually the leaves do, too.

Labor Day weekend marks the unofficial end of summer here in the upper Midwest, and every year it seems to ask the same question: what was this season actually about? This summer, the answer was easy. The move.

It took the whole season and most of my attention. Preparing the old house, sorting through decades of our stuff and generations of family stuff, selling the house, moving, closing, learning a new neighborhood, and figuring out where the coffee maker goes. For a few months, everything else waited its turn.

Fall feels different. It turns the attention forward again, toward what comes next instead of what just got finished. New goals, new routines, winter coming, and the work of looking ahead instead of simply settling in.

Through both seasons, though, one thing never cared what I was focused on. Ginger doesn’t understand summer or fall, moves or goals. She just knows that 6 AM means walk.

She looks at me, then at the door. Back at me, then back at the door, tail wagging the whole time, as if she’s asking nicely. Then comes the stretch, front paws forward, rear end in the air, and the message changes: I’m not giving you a choice. You must walk today. If not for yourself, for me.

So we walk, now on a new path complete with strategically timed neighborhood sprinklers trying to take us out. It is not the walk we had before, but it is close enough, and most mornings, close enough is the whole point. For Ginger, there are new smells, new fire hydrants, and new trees. For me, there is the same thing there has been every day for more than six years: 10,000 steps.

Two thousand three hundred seventy-nine days, and counting. The focus keeps moving, from the move behind me to whatever comes next, but the streak doesn’t. It is just there underneath it all, the same way Ginger is at the door every morning, whether I’m thinking about a moving truck, a new goal, or nothing much at all. And we’re still walking, trying to enjoy the last moments of summer and the beginning of fall.

Looking Forward

Friday, the sale closed.

Last week I told you the house had taken over my life and my cortisol. This week it finally let go. The signatures are done, the keys have changed hands, and the place where we lived for twenty-two years belongs to someone else now.

The new owners are wonderful people. My wife and I met them, and there was something familiar about where they stood. They are at roughly the same stage of life we were in when we built the place, standing at the beginning of a story that now belongs to them. I handed the keys to a house I know by heart to people who are about to learn it the way we did.

I keep thinking about another house. The one I grew up in sold thirty-five years ago to a family that still lives there. By any measure that matters, it is their house, and it has been for a long time. But my boyhood dog is buried in that yard.

You can sell the house. You cannot sell what you left in the ground.

Somewhere beneath thirty-five years of someone else’s life, a small part of that place is still mine. I suppose that is what I handed the new owners without telling them. Not only a house, but a claim they may feel someday too.

My wife and I talked briefly about what the closing felt like. For her, it was relief. Relief from the last two months and, if I am honest, relief from the whole year. We should have seen 2026 coming.

The fire alarm went off less than five hours into it. At five in the morning in London, the two of us scrambled down thirteen flights of stairs because we had wanted a room with a view. The price of the view was the climb down. We laughed about it on the sidewalk. We were not laughing by February.

My own reaction to the closing was harder to name. Relief was in there, but so was sadness, along with a few other things for which I still do not have good words. That is the strange arithmetic of selling a house you loved. You can be glad it is over and sorry it is over in the same breath. Both are true, and neither cancels the other.

The best part of the sale is what it finally makes room for. For most of this summer, I have been looking backward at old photographs, boxes of memories, and essays that all seem to begin with the word “remember.” It was time, but it is done now. The house is closed, and for the first time in a long while, I find myself wanting to look ahead.

Looking ahead, however, requires something to look toward. That is where the journal comes in.

I have kept one, off and on, for years. It went quiet after I was injured in a fall, and truthfully, it stayed quiet because this blog became the place where I did my thinking. If you have been reading, you have been reading my journal, though not all of it. There are parts of these stories I leave out on purpose. Some things are meant to remain private, and a journal knows the difference between what you tell people and what you tell only yourself.

Like everything else, the journal made the move. Unpacking it seemed like a good time to revisit what I had written at the beginning of the year and take another look at the goals I set shortly after the fire alarm.

I remembered making the list. What I had forgotten was what was on it.

There were seven goals, written in my own handwriting during the early days of 2026. I wrote them during a lull that winter, when we allowed ourselves to believe the worst of the year had passed. It had not. It was only warming up. But I did not know that yet, so I did what hopeful people do in a moment of calm. I made a list.

Reading it now, months later, felt like opening my own report card. Some of it made me wince. Some of it made me smile. A few entries made me wonder who, exactly, I thought I was in January.

Three of the seven are done. The big one, the goal that has taken over this blog for weeks, was to sell the house and find a new one. Checked, as of Friday. Two others are also complete, although they were admittedly low-hanging fruit, the kind of goals you put on a list partly because you already know you can reach them. I am not going to pretend they count for much, but a checkmark is still a checkmark.

Two more goals remain largely untouched. There is still time, although the calendar and I may have different opinions about how much. Then there is golf.

One of my goals was to get better at it. After the fall, I was not sure golf was going to be on the table at all this year, so the fact that I have played is its own small victory. I even worked on my putting, and my putting has improved. The rest of my game, however, has aged. Note to self for next year’s list: Make sure your goals are realistic.

And then there is the one I do not joke about, at least not entirely.

I want to lose weight.

That is not a new goal in my life. If I am honest, it has been a goal for most of my life. But five years ago, I got serious. I set a goal weight, and when the weight came off faster than I expected, I moved the number down.

When I reached the adjusted number, I kept going and said ten more. When I reached that, I said ten more again. That time I lost eight, not ten. Those last two pounds became the finish line I kept chasing. If people would stop bringing cupcakes to work, I might have caught them.

Then came a career change, a more structured and sedentary life, and some of the weight returned. For the most part, I have kept it within a range I can live with. It just is not as easy as it used to be, and the finish line is a little farther away than it was.

So 2026 was going to be the year. I even attached a nice dream to it. Wouldn’t it be something, I thought, to get down to my high school weight in time for my 40th class reunion this fall?

That is not going to happen, but not because of the weight. My son invited me to play golf that weekend, and I would rather look forward than back. The reunion is a room full of who we used to be. A round of golf with my son is who I get to be now. That was not a hard choice.

The weight goal is still on the list, and I intend to keep chasing those last two pounds. Here is what I know, and why I am not writing this as a confession: I have done this before. I know exactly how it works when it works.

When I lost the weight five years ago, I did one small thing every morning. I reminded myself of the number. Not with shame and not with a lecture. I simply looked at where I was headed before the rest of the day could talk me out of it. The mornings I did that, I made progress. The mornings I skipped it, I drifted.

The reminder was not magic. It was just attention. And attention, it turns out, is the whole game.

That is the real reason I am telling you any of this. The list had been sitting in the journal since January, waiting to be read. Now it has been. Three goals are done, two are barely underway, golf remains golf, and one still matters enough that I am willing to tell you about it.

The value was never entirely in the checkmarks. It was in picking up the book and asking the question out loud: What am I actually working toward?

So here is what I am going to do with the rest of 2026. Every morning, I am going to look at the list. Not to grade myself or turn breakfast into a performance review. I only want to make sure that, on any given day, I am working toward at least one of the things I said mattered.

That is the whole method. It worked when I lost the weight, and it stopped working when I stopped looking. A goal you do not look at is just a wish you wrote down once.

Before long, I imagine I will need some new lines on the page. I want to find time this fall to set a few fresh goals, some to close out 2026 and others to carry into 2027. That is the part I am making my peace with. The work is never really finished.

You reach a goal, or you do not. Either way, morning comes and asks you the same question again.

I spent the summer looking back at the photographs, the boxes, and the house that belongs to someone else now. I do not regret a minute of it. But the boxes are unpacked. The keys have been handed over. The journal is back on the shelf where I can reach it.

And every morning, I am going to reach for it.

Long Week

I’m sorry there’s no real post this week.

Life got hectic. We were getting the old house ready for its final send-off, and like it usually goes, not much went according to plan. The one thing that did go up on schedule was my stress level… higher than a Georgia pine.

I’ve got some thoughts written down for next week and I’ll start building on those. For now I need to decompress and get my cortisol back where my doctor would like it.

So to my readers: I’ll find you. Enjoy the weekend off.

And as you can see, Ginger is handling the move quite well. Not pouting at all.

I Thought I’d Handled It

* I apologize in advance is this one rambles a bit.

We bought the new house last Friday. It’s been ours for a week. We’d known for months we were going, but Friday made it real the way planning never does. It didn’t feel like paperwork. It felt like the old house had already become someone else’s.

The old house is mostly empty now. We’re selling what won’t fit in the new place, an antique dining set, some artwork, a couple of beds, a treadmill. I’ve been carrying the personal things over myself, trip by trip, because I don’t trust anyone else with them. Each load leaves the rooms a little more hollow, until they echo. Out on the driveway, the concrete still holds the faint mark where the boys once crouched down and tried to scratch their initials into it before it set. Inside, the dining room is unchanged, the one that held every holiday and birthday we ever ran. We built this house in 2004 for the life we ended up living in it. I thought I’d already made my peace with leaving it.

A few weeks ago I wrote the goodbye. I published it, a whole essay about learning to let go. I’d found George Howe Colt’s book about his family’s old place, and it handed me the words and the story I needed. I closed by saying the house had done its job and it was somebody else’s turn now. I meant every line of it.

Then Friday came, and I learned that writing the goodbye and living it are two different things. I’d said the words. I hadn’t done the leaving. It’s like being a Vikings fan. Even when you know how the season’s going to end, you’re still upset when it does.

Except this time we won. We sold the house. We bought another, and we’re mostly moved in now. I should be celebrating. But I’ve stood in this spot before, in a different room, and I know how I get. The knowledge was never the problem. I can see the line between discipline and drift without having to think about it. The signs are always right in front of me. And I stumble anyway. That’s the thing that needs forgiving. Nobody has to forgive you for what you didn’t know. The hard forgiveness is for the days you knew better and did it anyway.

I learned that a few years ago, when I lost the weight. Just over a month in, Christmas arrived, with a table that doesn’t take no for an answer. I could blame the cheese. I could blame the second helping of stuffing and turkey. I’ve long had my suspicions about the oyster stew. Whatever the cause, I stepped on the scale three days later and I’d gained eight pounds. Eight, in three days. I was devastated in the specific way you can only be devastated by a number you watched yourself earn.

Then I forgave myself, and it wasn’t hard, because it was Christmas. I dusted off, got back to the program, and most of that eight pounds turned out to be water. It came off almost as fast as it went on. The devastation had been real and the damage had not. I’d forgiven myself for something that mostly fixed itself while I wasn’t looking.

The slow one is harder. There’s no Christmas to point at, no single table to blame. It comes in quietly, a cheesecake here, an extra serving there, a few too many of the foods I know better than to eat. Nothing about any one night feels like a stumble, and that’s the trick of it. Then the clothes told me. The workout shorts first, then the t-shirt, both tighter than they had any business being. There’s a sting in that, because those are the clothes I put on to do the disciplined thing, and they were the ones that turned me in. I stepped on the scale, and I didn’t like the number. No water weight waiting to hand it back this time. Just the slow arithmetic of a body carrying weight I’d already lost once and let quietly return. I thought I’d handled it. I’d handled it the way I handled the house, which is to say I decided it was done and never noticed that deciding only gets you partway there.

That’s what I keep relearning. Forgiveness isn’t a single act. It’s something you do again. You forgive yourself, you correct course, and then some morning you find you have to do it all over. The morning the clothes are tight. The afternoon the empty house catches you off guard. You forgive the version of you who let the weight drift back, and the version who thought a published goodbye meant the leaving was done.

So this weekend my wife and I are going to dinner, and we’ll open the bottle of Veuve that’s been waiting in the fridge longer than I can remember, on an occasion I kept forgetting to give it. Selling a house after 22 years is reason enough. So is buying another. The bottle’s waited long enough.

The house is empty now except for what’s staying. We hand over the keys next week, and I still won’t be all the way done leaving it, because leaving, like forgiving, isn’t something you finish in one motion. I already know how it goes. When I go back to my hometown I drive past the places I used to live, on purpose or out of habit, I’ve never been sure which. I’ll do the same with this one. Some evening I’ll find myself on the street without meaning to be, slow down as I pass, and leave it one more time. I decided to let go months ago. Now I’m still doing it, a little more each day, until my life catches up to what I already said. That’s the hardest part. Not that it hurts, but that you have to keep doing it until it’s true.

The Path That Isn’t on the Map

What do you do when there are no directions, no signs, and no map? If you’re lucky, you go anyway. Some of the best days of my life started with no idea where I was going or how I would get back. You climb a hill that doesn’t tell you its name. You come around a ridge into a valley that stops your breath, and you stand in it not knowing a single thing you’re looking at. The names come later, at home, at a desk, with a map finally open. So does the meaning. I learned that on a day in the Pentland Hills, about twenty miles south of Edinburgh, in the summer of 2022.

It was a transition summer. One life was closing and another was about to begin. My years in academia were ending, and the work I do now in trust and financial services was still a few weeks off, sitting out there like weather I couldn’t see. Being between jobs is a little like trying to jump across a creek. You run and you jump and you pray you jumped far enough to make it to the other side. I knew where I was supposed to land. I just didn’t know if it was the right spot, or whether I should have jumped at all. Which is how I found myself in Edinburgh, a long way from any of it, with a few free days and no agenda.

My wife wanted to walk, and I wanted to walk with her. There are famous walks in Edinburgh, Arthur’s Seat rising right out of the city, and we could have done the sensible thing. Instead, the concierge told us to get in a cab, ride south to a place called the Pentland Hills, and just start walking. We had no idea what to expect, no idea where we were going, and no idea how we would get back. So we got in the cab.

The driver left us at a car park I would only later learn was called Threipmuir Reservoir. We followed the signs to the water, mostly because the signs said it was there and we could see it. These would be the last signs I remember seeing. We walked along the reservoir, and then around it, and eventually we looked up and there was a hill. A big one. There was a path up it, narrow and jagged, the kind that makes you suspect you don’t quite belong on it, but there were runners on it, several of them, moving up and along the slope with that easy purpose that tells you a thing is possible. They were the only sign we had, so we followed where they went and started up.

As we climbed, I found myself waiting for a feeling I already knew. Growing up in the Black Hills, I hiked a lot, though I hiked the way a kid hikes, aiming for the destination and not thinking much about the path. Mount Baldy, Little Devils Tower, Hippie Hole. Most of all, Harney Peak, which we would climb a few times each season. I first knew it as Harney Peak, and it was Harney Peak every time I climbed it. They call it Black Elk Peak now, renamed to honor the Lakota holy man.

When you reached that summit, you knew you were somewhere. You stood at the highest place for miles and looked down as the hills rolled away toward the plains. There was a destination, a summit, and a reward for getting there. So as I worked my way up that rocky Scottish path, some part of me was hoping for another Harney Peak. I expected the same bargain. Do the climbing and eventually the world would open beneath you.

What I got instead was better. The climb was hard, but the good kind of hard, the kind that empties your head while it works your legs. Whatever I had carried into that summer got quieter somewhere on the slope. I would find out later that the hill was called Black Hill, and of all the names it could have had, it was that one. I had spent my childhood among hills that carried the name, and here I was an ocean away, climbing another one without knowing it.

There was no sign announcing Black Hill. I learned the name later, tracing our route on a map, and when I saw it, I sat with it for a while. There was something about discovering that name afterward, at that particular moment in my life, that stayed with me. Some circles you don’t notice you’re walking until you’ve already closed them.

The path wrapped around the southern edge of Black Hill, and then the whole world opened. I came around that edge and looked east toward Scald Law, the highest of these hills, and it took my breath away. I had already fallen for Scotland by then, and for the Pentlands, but this was something else. This was not the Harney Peak feeling, the summit that looks down and flattens the world beneath you. This was almost the opposite.

The valley fell away green and folded and enormous, hill giving way to hill, the light doing what light does in that country, always moving. I had come up looking for a view that looked down on everything, and what I found looked out, and across, and into. I stood there and did not need anything to be different than it was, which, if you think about it, is as close to happiness as most of us ever get.

We came down the south edge into the valley below Scald Law and found another path, and this one didn’t test us. It ran north between the slopes, Black Hill on one side and Scald Law on the other, then Carnethy Hill, then Turnhouse. We passed two more reservoirs, each with a few people fishing, patient at the edge of the water. The air was clean in a way that felt like it was doing something for you. You could hear sheep and birds, and not much else. The climb was behind us now, and this was the long, easy after, the way the good stretches of a life sometimes feel when you’re finally not fighting anything.

Eventually we stumbled onto a rustic pub called the Flotterstone Inn. We had a couple of drinks, and I don’t know that a beer has ever tasted more earned. There was still one small problem. We had spent the day walking farther and farther from where the cab had dropped us, and we still had no idea how we were going to get home. Then, outside the pub, we found a bus sign.

I keep coming back to that small detail. There had been no signs on the walk telling us the names of the hills. Black Hill, Scald Law, Carnethy, Turnhouse. We had walked among all of them blind and would learn their names later. Yet there at the end was a sign telling us exactly when the bus would come. Maybe that’s about as much direction as we usually get. Not an explanation and certainly not a map of everything ahead. Just enough to keep going. A few runners disappearing up a hill, a path under your feet, and eventually a bus at the end to carry you home. The rest you learn later.

When I sat down to write this, I pulled up the official trail map because I wanted to retrace that day and make sure I remembered it correctly. That was when I found one more thing. The path my wife and I walked that day, up and around Black Hill, isn’t really on it. It isn’t one of the routes they tell you to take. We had wandered onto something unmarked, drawn up a hill by a handful of runners and a feeling, and it made all the difference.

The name of this blog is two words of Scottish Gaelic. Sireadh Toileachas. Seek happiness. I didn’t choose the language by accident, although I didn’t understand when I chose it how much of my own seeking would trace back to a country I keep returning to. I found some of it that day on a hill I couldn’t name, on a path that wasn’t on the map, in the summer when everything was about to change.

I knew where the new job was. I knew when it started, and I knew where I was supposed to land. What I couldn’t know was whether I had chosen the right path to get there. Four years later, I still think about that walk, but not because I eventually learned the names of the hills or because I managed to reconstruct our route on a map. Maybe it is precisely the opposite.

The path wasn’t on the map, and we took it anyway. I think there are stretches of life that work much the same way. We go looking for signs that this is the right job, the right move, the right time, the right path, and most of the time we don’t find them. You pick a direction, start walking, and hope there will be enough along the way to keep you moving.

Sometimes there is. Sometimes there are runners ahead of you, a valley on the other side of the hill, a pub when your legs are tired, and a bus when it’s finally time to go home. You don’t know what any of it means while you’re walking through it. The names come later. Sometimes the meaning does, too. And I have come to think that has always been the deal.

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.