Moments That Stay – Sireadh Toileachas

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.

From Worst to First, and Beyond

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The House Did Its Job

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Even my fifth grade spelling book came along.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I threw them away.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Bridge at Henley

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Aged Thirty Years

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Long Way Back from Paddington

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Long View of Friendship

Every spring, I send the same text. Just a few words asking whether they are in this year. Same message for thirty-nine years. Only the delivery has changed.

It started with a floor in Bergsaker Hall, a shared love of the Minnesota Twins, and a World Series nobody saw coming. What followed was nearly four decades of games, road trips, bad food, one covert operation that would have impressed the CIA, and conversations that always end up somewhere back in college.

The scores are gone. The games are not. This is a story about what stays.

I sent a text this week. Nothing complicated. Just asked whether they were in this year, and we started working on a date. It used to be a face-to-face conversation, then a phone call, then an email, and now it is a text. Same basic message for thirty-nine years. Only the delivery changed.

We met freshman year of college, a group of us living on the same floor in Bergsaker Hall. Different hometowns. Different majors. Different ideas about where life was headed, most of them wrong. We probably do not find each other without college doing what college does best, throwing a bunch of strangers together and letting time do its work. If you are lucky, a few of those strangers become people you are still texting nearly four decades later.

What we had in common, as it turned out, was the Minnesota Twins. That was enough. In 1987, that was more than enough.

For most of our lives, the Twins had been mediocre or worse. Then suddenly they were not. They played in a dome built for football, with plexiglass in left field, the Baggie in right, and acoustics that made the whole place feel like a washing machine on spin cycle. Other teams complained about it. We took that as a compliment.

They barely got into the playoffs. Nobody outside Minnesota thought they were real. Then they won the whole thing anyway. If you were college age and a Twins fan that fall, watching it happen with people who mattered to you, something got locked in.

* * *

Thirty-nine years of going to Twins games with friends, and I could not build you a proper box score from more than two of them. The first was September 27, 1987, that same fall, before the World Series run was even finished. It was the final home game of the year, and you could feel the buzz because everybody was hoping the Twins were headed to the playoffs. Sunday game. One o’clock first pitch. We got up early, stopped at Mr. Donut, piled into a car, and drove four hours like this was an entirely reasonable use of a weekend. Somewhere I still have the ticket stub.

There was a double play in the top of the first inning, ground ball to third, force at second, throw home, a 5-4-2, which is a weird little baseball gem. The Twins scored five in the bottom half before half the crowd had settled in. I had to look up the five runs. I did not have to look up the double play. That seems about right. I could not tell you what I had for breakfast yesterday, but I can still see that play. The Twins won. They clinched a playoff spot. More than 53,000 people went home happy.

Then there is Game 7 in 1991. Jack Morris. Ten innings. No runs. One of the best baseball games ever played, and somehow we were there. How we got the tickets involves a romantic subplot, and at this age I think it is better left slightly blurry. Another Sunday. Another four-hour drive. Then a celebration in the streets of Minneapolis, followed by turning around and driving four hours home because Monday was still coming, and apparently we were still pretending to be responsible people.

Everything else has blurred, which is fine. Blur has its own value. There was a game where the Twins were losing by so much that we started rooting for the other team, just to see a better brand of baseball before the day was over. There was one of the last games in the Metrodome, sitting right down the third base line in front of the visitors bullpen, close enough to hear everything and probably say a few things we should not have. There was one of the first games at Target Field, when the place was still new enough that we were wandering around like tourists, and somehow we ended up in the Legends Club.

You do not accidentally end up in the Legends Club. Somehow we had acquired two tickets even though there were four of us, and this was before the sophisticated scanning devices you see at ballparks now. So getting everybody in required a plan. And we had one. The kind of plan that would have made a CIA operations officer nod with quiet approval. Timing, nerve, precise execution, and the kind of straight-faced confidence usually reserved for people with actual credentials. We divided roles without discussion. Each person went in at the right moment, no hesitation, no eye contact, no deviation from the plan. A Navy SEAL team could not have done it cleaner. We were absolutely not supposed to be there. We stayed as long as we could. That remains one of my favorite life skills, the ability to act like you belong somewhere just long enough.

The scores are gone. The games are not.

Some things have changed. We started in the three dollar general admission seats, upper deck, outfield, way out where the baseball looked more like theory than sport. That was college. Cheap tickets, long drives, no money, no hesitation. Now we often pay more than one hundred dollars each for a game, and more often than not we end up in the Legends Club. The same place we once slipped into like it was a minor covert operation. Turns out if you live long enough, some of the places you used to sneak into will eventually just let you buy a ticket.

The food changed too, and not always for the better. That day in the Legends Club was the first time we learned stadium food could mean a lot more than hot dogs and Cracker Jack. We still like to inspect the ballpark menu, which is not a sentence our younger selves would have seen coming. When we do end up in the Legends Club — which has had enough corporate sponsors over the years that keeping up with the current name feels like a part-time job — we still usually come back with basic stadium fare because change is hard. But games have never quite been the same since the Hormel Dome Dog failed to make the move to Target Field. That comes up too, usually right after someone has settled for something that is not a Dome Dog and knows it.

* * *

In the beginning, the conversations were about college. What was happening on campus. What we were going to do with our lives. Who we were dating and how that was going, which was a mixed bag at best. We thought we were fascinating.

Then the years did what years do. Jobs. Cars. Spouses. Kids. Aging parents. Politics, when everyone felt sufficiently rested and charitable. The whole messy architecture of adult life, covered inning by inning over three decades. But we always end up back in college, because that is what happens when people have known you that long. Nobody lets you stay in your current form for very long. Somebody always remembers the earlier draft.

We still talk about professors we loved and professors we endured. Classes that mattered and classes we survived. Basketball games and football games that once felt like the center of the universe. Former romantic interests always make an appearance. They always will. And sooner or later, somebody brings up Nite City.

Nite City was a dance club near campus that we were convinced was sophisticated. It was not. But it had drink specials, and it had people from our college, and at that age that is really the whole formula. The facts are usually off now. The feeling is still exactly right.

* * *

The season started this week, and my hand reached for the phone before I had thought it through. That is all it takes. The Twins play a few games, and thirty-nine years of the same reflex kicks in.

For most of that time, the core group has been the same three of us. Others have joined in different years, depending on schedules and seasons of life. But lately it has settled back to the three, which feels about right. The text goes out. The replies come back. Then at some point we are sitting in that ballpark, talking about this year, then 1987, then somebody’s kids, then something dumb we did in college, then some old story that gets less accurate and somehow better every time it gets told.

I probably will not remember this year’s score either. That is what scores do. They fade. But I will remember who was there. I will remember what we talked about that had almost nothing to do with baseball. I will remember the feel of Target Field on a summer night when the season is still young and hope is still allowed to be a little irrational.

We were college age and convinced the Twins would just keep winning. They did not. But we kept showing up anyway, which turned out to be the more important habit.

Thirty-nine years. One text. Still working on a date.

Some things you just keep doing. Not because you mapped it out. Not because you saw the whole arc coming. Just because somewhere along the way it became part of your life, then part of your identity, and finally just part of you.

* * *

That is the long view of friendship. It does not look like much from the outside. From the inside, it is everything.

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