Yesterday’s challenge was about cherished memories, and I left out part of mine. The memory was really the entire trip to Paris for my wife’s birthday, but the party was the most cherished part. It was not only our family but dear friends who joined us for the intimate dinner. That trip, and especially that evening, always makes me smile.
Today’s challenge is about the people in our lives. Being grateful is good for our emotional health, and the research backs it up. A 2025 review of 145 studies and nearly 25,000 people found that gratitude exercises improved well-being. The improvements weren’t dramatic, but they were consistent. The evidence for physical health is thinner, so I’ll stick with the emotional benefits. We also underestimate how much it means to someone when we tell them we appreciate them, and we overestimate how awkward it will be. So today, think about the people you are most grateful for. If they are still with us, tell them. A call, a text, or a note will do. Just tell them what they did and why it mattered.
Imagine if we all did this instead of complaining about the election.
Today, I am especially grateful for both of my parents. I didn’t thank them enough when they were alive. They were both gone before I fully appreciated everything they had done for me. The older I get, the more I understand the sacrifices they made, the lessons they taught me, and the example they set. I wish I could tell them that now. Since I can’t, I’ll say it here. Thank you, Mom and Dad.
Tonight, journal about who you are grateful for and why. If you reached out to someone today, write about how they responded and how it made you feel. And if someone you wish you could thank is no longer here, take a moment to remember them, too.
Yesterday’s challenge was to be present, and work was kind enough to keep me busy. I took a few short breaks to refocus, then spent the evening working on plans for my new home office, occasionally checking election results, and catching up on a favorite television show. The best part was dinner with my wife, enjoying a meal she prepared and talking about our day. I even put my phone down. Mostly. I’m also trying to carry the earlier challenges forward, noticing the little things, complaining less, and taking a few moments when I wake up and before I go to bed to reflect on what I’m grateful for. The idea is to build on each day’s challenge throughout the month.
Today’s challenge is about cherished memories. We don’t always recognize how special a moment is while we’re living it. Sometimes it takes a little distance, a photograph, or a story told years later to appreciate what we had. Think about the memories that make you smile, laugh, or maybe bring a tear to your eye. Better yet, share them with the people who helped create them.
One of my favorites is a milestone birthday for my wife. She wanted a birthday party in Paris. That seemed reasonable enough, so I decided to make it happen. We rented a flat in our favorite neighborhood and brought our children, our future daughter-in-law, my mother-in-law, and my sister-in-law. With the help of a party planner, I arranged a dinner cruise on the Seine. What could possibly go wrong? Well, Paris flooded. So much for the cruise. Fortunately, our planner found a wonderful private room at a hotel, complete with a bar and garden. We celebrated, laughed, and enjoyed being together. It wasn’t quite the party I planned, but it became one of my favorite memories.
Tonight, take a few minutes to think about the memories you treasure most. Maybe write one down in your journal or share it with someone who was there. What made that moment so special? And while you’re at it, remember that the ordinary moments you’re experiencing today might become the cherished memories you look back on tomorrow.
Yesterday’s challenge was to notice the little things. It was raining when I woke up, and Ginger wasn’t particularly interested in her morning walk. It would have been easy to complain about the weather, but instead I thought about how much we needed the rain. The window in my office, which has leaked more times than I care to remember this summer, stayed dry. I appreciated my windshield wipers on the drive to work and my coat for keeping me dry. On the drive home, the storm was moving out. Dark clouds filled the sky to the east, while to the west the clouds were breaking apart, allowing rays of sunshine to peek through. Ginger and I eventually got our walk. It was dark, but unseasonably warm for November. I thought briefly about the Halloween blizzard of 1991 and decided I was perfectly happy with rain. None of these things were particularly remarkable. But when you start looking for reasons to be grateful, it’s surprising how many you find.
Today’s challenge is a little different. It’s Election Day, and by tonight we’ll probably know the outcome of many of the races. Some people will be celebrating, and others will be disappointed. Regardless of which side you’re on, today is a good day to practice being present. Don’t spend the day worrying about what might happen or dwelling on what already has. Focus on what’s happening right in front of you. Give someone you care about your undivided attention. Take a few moments every hour to breathe deeply, look at a piece of art, or simply notice what’s happening around you. The world will keep turning whether you’re watching every minute of the election coverage or not.
There’s a lesson in tennis that applies here. Between points, you’ll sometimes see a player stop, look down, and collect himself. Maybe he’s just hit the best shot of his life. Maybe he missed one he should have made. Either way, that point is over. The next one is all that matters. It’s surprisingly good advice for life, too. We spend an awful lot of time replaying yesterday or worrying about tomorrow, sometimes at the expense of today.
At the end of the day, take a few minutes to reflect. Maybe write your thoughts in a journal. What did you notice when you made a conscious effort to be present? What did you learn? Did you feel any different when you stopped worrying about things you couldn’t control and paid attention to the things you could? Being present doesn’t mean ignoring the world around us. It means making sure we don’t miss the life happening right in front of us.
Yesterday’s challenge was to go an entire day without whining or complaining. I got lucky. I spent most of the afternoon photographing the MarketBeat Open tennis tournament, which meant I never watched the Vikings game. My wife told me afterward that they lost, and I said, “That’s OK.” What was I going to do, complain? Besides, my youngest son is a Lions fan, so I was happy for him. I can’t say that one day without complaining changed my life, but being conscious of what I was saying certainly changed the way I thought about things.
Today’s challenge is to notice the little things. We tend to take an awful lot for granted. A car that starts, electricity when we flip a switch, and hot water when we turn on the shower. Things we rarely think twice about until they aren’t there. And things that plenty of people around the world would be grateful to have.
The tennis tournament lasted an entire week, and after a while, photographing it started to feel a little like Groundhog Day. Thousands of pictures of essentially the same thing, just from different angles. Seriously, how many pictures can you take of a guy serving a tennis ball? But something interesting happens when I get home and start editing. I notice things I never saw while taking the pictures. A facial expression I missed, a familiar face in the crowd I didn’t realize was there, or something completely unexpected in the background. And then there were the little things the organizers did that made this year’s tournament special. Flags representing the players’ home countries hanging from the back of the grandstand (see picture), an in-house barista on several days, and even phone chargers available for the volunteers and people working the tournament. None of those things made the tennis any better, but together they made the experience better. Somebody thought about those details, and somebody made them happen.
So today, take a second look at the world around you. Appreciate the hot shower, the car that starts, and the people who do little things to make your day better. Maybe even thank a few of them. And when you sit down to journal tonight, think about the things you noticed and what life would be like without them. Funny how much you notice when you take the time to look.
Welcome back. Day 1 doesn’t ease anybody in, so here’s the assignment: from the time you get up until the time you go to bed, no complaining and no whining. Only positive words.
I picked a good day for it. We all got an extra hour of sleep last night, so nobody has an excuse for starting grumpy. Then again, it’s election season, which means my phone buzzes all day with text messages from campaigns that apparently believe we’re old friends, and the Vikings play this afternoon, which has tested my vocabulary for most of my life.
The final of the MarketBeat Open is today! It’s hard to grumble while watching two players chase a title in a town that doesn’t usually get professional tennis. But I know myself. Complaining is a reflex, and somewhere around the second quarter I’ll be tempted. When I catch a negative word on its way out, I’m going to swap it for something true and good and keep walking.
Tonight I’ll take two minutes to see how it went. Did my words change how I felt, and how did they land on the people around me? Try it yourself and see what you find. See you tomorrow.
I’ve been a little quiet around here lately. I didn’t exactly plan to take October off from writing, but sometimes life makes plans without bothering to consult you. There was a friend’s birthday to celebrate and a tennis tournament to help with, while the day job stubbornly insisted on remaining a day job. Somewhere along the way, a couple of Saturdays came and went without anything new from me. I’ve got a few pieces half written, and we’ll see if they ever get finished. If you stopped by looking for something to read, I’m sorry I wasn’t here.
Some of you have been reading long enough to remember November 2020. It was a difficult time in my life, and my wife knew I was struggling. She gave me a gratitude book that one of her coworkers had put together. That little book became the starting point for something that would make a real difference in my life. Over the years, I’ve used it as a framework, made some modifications, and added a few thoughts of my own. For five consecutive Novembers, I made a point of spending a little time each day thinking about the people and things I was thankful for.
The woman who created that book passed away in 2024. I don’t know if she ever realized how much of a difference her work made in my life, but it did. And while I’ve made the tradition my own over the years, I haven’t forgotten where it started. Last year, I never made the time for it, and I’ve missed it.
So, the Gratitude Challenge is back. Starting tomorrow, I’ll share something here every day that I’m grateful for. It might be a person or a memory, or something so ordinary that most of us walk right past it without giving it a second thought. Nothing terribly elaborate, just a paragraph or two each day. My regular Saturday essays will take November off and return in December.
I’d love for you to follow along. Read every day, catch up on the weekends, or try it yourself. You don’t need a special book or even a pen and paper. You can do it over your morning coffee or while you’re trying to convince yourself to get out of bed. There aren’t any rules, and nobody’s keeping score.
But here’s something I’ve come to believe. If you make a conscious effort to spend just a few minutes every day thinking about what you’re grateful for, something begins to change. Your problems don’t disappear, and the people who annoy you will probably still annoy you. But you start noticing things you might otherwise have missed. A little kindness here, a reason to smile on a day when you weren’t expecting one. And somewhere along the way, you begin to realize there’s an awful lot to be thankful for, even when life isn’t quite going the way you’d planned.
I could use that reminder again. Maybe you could, too. See you tomorrow.
The cloud service where I keep my photographs holds thousands of them, twenty-some years’ worth, and every time I log in it serves up a handful it claims were picked at random. I stopped believing that a while ago. Lately, nearly every one has been of my youngest son when he was four or five years old. This is his birthday week. I can’t prove the service knows what week it is, but I’m not going to argue with it.
In one, he’s about five, dancing across the carpet in camo pants and a T-shirt that reads “I’m with handsome,” an arrow pointing at his own face. He’s playing air guitar, eyes squeezed shut, mouth wide open, one sock sliding off his foot. Nobody in that house was going to talk him out of whatever song was playing in his head. In another, he’s about four, wearing a tiger cap, one hand on his hip and the other resting on the shell of a giant tortoise. He looks like he’s introducing me to an old friend.
I look at those photographs and wonder how that little boy could possibly be in his mid-20s. Somewhere along the way, the years slipped past, although I certainly don’t remember giving them permission. But the more I look at the pictures, the more I realize that while a lot has changed, much of what makes him who he is hasn’t. The independence, the determination, and the stubborn streak were all there from the beginning. They’ve just grown up with him.
“I do it myself” was his motto before he could tie his shoes, and it never really went away. Try planning something with him today. He’ll decide quickly whether he likes the idea. If he doesn’t, he’ll explain why the plan is wrong and suggest something better. If that fails, he’ll explain it again. Eventually, he’ll announce that he won’t be joining us. Some call that persistence. Others call it annoying. I call it stubbornness, and I know exactly where he got it, so I’m in no position to complain.
But there’s another side to that stubbornness, and it’s grit. At eight, he wanted to be the closer on his baseball team, the kid who gets the ball when everything is on the line. That’s a tall order when you’re eight. Tennis gave me even better evidence. I watched him play matches he had no business winning, except that he refused to lose. The one I remember best came at the state tournament. He was trailing 3-7 in an eight-game set, one game from losing. Plenty of players would have mentally packed their bags. He won the next game. Then he won the one after that, and the one after that, and eventually he won the set 9-7.
I’ve seen that same determination in high school, college, and now at work, where he gets up early, puts in the effort, and gets things done. He gets that grit from his mother. In fact, when I look at his best qualities, I see a lot of her. From me, he inherited his stubbornness, his height, and, of course, his handsome good looks. I think it’s fair to say his mother did most of the heavy lifting, although I made some important contributions.
This week, the boy in those photographs turned 24. He’s mostly off the payroll, which is a development his mother and I enthusiastically support. He enjoys his job, he’s fun to be around, and he cares deeply about the people close to him. That little boy with the imaginary guitar became a young man I’m proud to know. And looking at those photographs got me thinking about what I’d want him to know about the years ahead. So here’s what I’d say, if he’d let me finish.
The years go fast, ridiculously fast, and it feels like yesterday you were standing beside that tortoise. The next twenty years will move just as quickly, whether you’re ready or not. The trick is to make sure you’re doing something worth remembering while they’re passing.
So plan at least one big experience every year. Take the trip you keep putting off, and say yes to something that makes you a little nervous. Save for the future, certainly, but don’t spend your entire life getting ready to live. The nicest car and the biggest house won’t mean much when you’re looking through old photographs. The people and the experiences will. And while we’re on the subject, take the trip to London… on your own dime, not ours.
Set your goals high, but understand why they matter. Goals give you somewhere to go. Your why gives you a reason to keep going when you’re down 3-7 and everyone else thinks the match is over. You already know how to dig in. Just make sure you’re digging in for something that matters. Not every disagreement needs to be fought down to the last game, although I recognize that may be a difficult concept for you to embrace.
Find someone to share the journey. The right partner makes the good days better and the difficult days bearable, and the years will bring plenty of both. It’s a lot more fun to have someone beside you who remembers the stories, too.
Mostly, though, keep being yourself. The determination and the loyalty, and even the occasional stubbornness, have served you pretty well so far. When you were little, “I do it myself” could drive me crazy. Twenty years later, I realize that raising you to the point where you actually can do it yourself was the whole idea.
I’d tell him all of this in person, but he’d probably interrupt halfway through with a better plan. That’s fine. I’ve spent 24 years watching him figure things out for himself, and I suppose there’s no reason to expect that to change now. I just hope that somewhere along the way, he’ll take a few photographs of his own. Someday, he’ll understand why I keep looking at mine.
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.
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.
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.
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