Tag: memory

The 8.3 Miles We Keep Walking

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What We Owe the Next Generation

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

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

* * *

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

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

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

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

Show up anyway.

* * *

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 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.

The Stories That Remain

I know I’m dating myself with this story, but still stories matter. Lately, I worry we are losing our ability to connect through them.

When I was in high school, Chicago released a song that became a staple at every dance. The lights would dim, and somewhere in the opening line—I guess I thought you’d be here forever—the gym suddenly felt much larger and much quieter. Teenagers stood shoulder to shoulder, unsure where to put their hands, hoping the song would end before anyone noticed they weren’t moving at all. Standing a little closer than usual felt like progress.

“You don’t know what you got until it’s gone.”

Forty years ago, those words were about a breakup. A boy and a girl. A slow goodbye.

Age changes lyrics. It sharpens them.

Both of my parents died when I was relatively young. Now I’ve reached the age where friends and colleagues are experiencing what I went through decades ago. I recognize the look. The stunned quiet. The way the world keeps moving while something essential has stopped.

When my parents died, I was devastated. They were far from perfect. But they were my parents, and I believe they did the best they could. As children, we only see one version of our parents. Mom and Dad. We don’t see the other hats they wear.

My parents held high-profile roles in our town. I understood that in theory. In practice, they were the people who packed lunches and asked about homework. My father wasn’t a public figure to me. He was the man who sat in the stands.

After they passed, people began telling me stories.

One day, a rancher came to see me. He was nearly six-foot-four, with large hands that looked like they had done real work. He had a military haircut and an imposing presence—the kind of man who fills a room without speaking. I had only ever known him as unshakable.

He stood in front of me and cried.

He told me how my dad had saved his life. Then he told me how my dad had saved his wife’s life too. He said he thanked God for Doc Harris and for what he did. Then he looked at me and said, simply, your dad was an amazing man.

I had never heard that story.

In that moment, my father became larger—and somehow closer. I learned about the quiet ways he showed up for people. The unseen hours. The choices I never knew about. And I understood that sometimes saving a life mattered more than making it to a baseball game.

When people die, all we really have left are the stories. If we don’t tell them, they disappear.

That’s why it matters to speak them out loud. To share them while we still can. Stories are how we keep people alive—not as they were in one role, but as they truly were.

You don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone.

And sometimes, you don’t really know it until someone tells you the story.

So maybe today, reach out to someone and tell a story—about a parent, a friend, a moment that mattered—because maybe, just maybe, it will remind us of our shared human bond.