Yesterday’s challenge was about recognizing your strengths. If patience is one of yours, Friday provided a pretty good test. For the second day in a row, something major disrupted the country. This time, the FAA grounded departing flights nationwide, something that hadn’t happened since January 2023. Another opportunity to practice not complaining, focus on solving problems, and appreciate what was going right. Of course, that’s easier to say when you’re not sitting in an airport wondering if you’ll ever see your luggage again.
The second part of yesterday’s challenge was to ask someone close to you what they think your strengths are. Sometimes others recognize qualities we don’t see or appreciate in ourselves. Hopefully, they came up with something you hadn’t considered.
Today’s challenge is to appreciate our health. Not everyone enjoys good health, and some are dealing with serious illness. I’ve certainly gained a greater appreciation for mine this year. If you read my blog post about falling on the ice, my most viewed post of the year, you know I spent much of January, February, and March in significant pain. Things started improving in April, but it wasn’t until September that I felt mostly normal. By then, nearly another year of aging had taken its toll. Apparently, the aging process doesn’t offer extensions for time missed due to injury.
January was difficult for our family, too. My mother-in-law, my brother, and my son all had medical issues requiring attention. It was a reminder of how quickly things can change and how easily we take good health for granted.
As I post this, I’m just a few steps away from 2,450 consecutive days of walking at least 10,000 steps. Some days those last few steps are less about exercise and more about negotiating with my watch. But I’m grateful I’ve been able to keep moving, especially this year. I also recognize the importance of eating right, exercising, and getting enough sleep. Knowing what I should do and actually doing it, unfortunately, remain two different things.
Today, appreciate your health and the health of those around you. Drink a little more water, take a walk if you’re able, breathe deeply, and get some rest. We can’t control everything about our health, but we can make choices that improve our chances.
Tonight, journal about your health. What are you grateful your body allows you to do? What can you do to become healthier or maintain the health you have?
Yesterday was a beautiful day. We decided to walk around the University of Minnesota campus, assuming that since it was Veterans Day, we’d have most of the place to ourselves. You know what happens when you assume! Classes were in session, and the campus was buzzing with students. It’s a beautiful campus, although a little too big for my liking. The grass was still green, the leaves were falling, and the squirrels were preparing for winter. We even spotted an albino squirrel.
The university hadn’t forgotten Veterans Day. A poster noted that nearly 600 veterans attend the school, and the lawn outside the student union was filled with American flags. They honored the day while carrying on with business as usual. I suspect yesterday may have been the last real autumn day I’ll enjoy this year. And to top it off, the day ended with a spectacular sunset. The golden light reflecting off the buildings was a reminder that sometimes all you need to do is stop and look around. I’m grateful we took the time to enjoy the day.
Today’s challenge is about the words we use. Sometimes changing just a few words can change an entire conversation. We routinely ask people, “How are you?” and often don’t stick around long enough to hear the answer. Today, try asking, “What’s good today?” instead. See where the conversation goes. At work, try asking what’s good about your boss, your coworkers, your organization, or a project you’re working on. We spend plenty of time finding things to complain about. Today, look for what’s working. And when someone asks how you’re doing, try answering with one word: “Grateful!” You might surprise them. You might even surprise yourself.
Tonight, take a few minutes to journal about your conversations. Did changing a few words change the tone? Were you able to help someone focus on something positive? Sometimes a different perspective begins with a different question.
Yesterday was a great day. Beautiful weather, outdoor walks, time with family, and a football game. Well, the football game could have been better. Fun fact: I’ve never seen the Minnesota Vikings win at U.S. Bank Stadium. I’m beginning to think I might be part of the problem. Still, there was plenty to be grateful for.
Today’s challenge is simple. Pay it forward. Do something kind for someone else, preferably anonymously. It doesn’t have to involve money. Help a neighbor, do something nice for a coworker, leave an encouraging note, or find some other way to make someone’s day a little better. There are opportunities all around us if we pay attention. The idea is to do something thoughtful without expecting anything in return. No recognition, no thank you, and certainly no need to post about it on social media. Sometimes the best acts of kindness are the ones nobody knows about. And if someone really wants to pay it forward, perhaps they could find the Vikings a good quarterback.
Tonight, take a few minutes to journal about what you did and how it made you feel. Did you get to see the person’s reaction? Did it matter whether they knew who was responsible? Sometimes doing something good for someone else is its own reward.
Yesterday’s challenge was to smile, and apparently I got a head start. The weather was so nice that I took two long walks outside. I enjoyed watching the birds, the squirrels, what’s left of the fall colors, and the peaceful waters of Lake Harriet. It was hard not to smile, and that seemed to make everything else a little better. I’m beginning to think these challenges build on each other.
Today’s challenge is to appreciate nature. This should be easy. I’ve already watched a beautiful sunrise, and with the weather cooperating, I plan to get in another walk or two. I’ll end the day at an NFL game where they even make it snow indoors. Not exactly natural, but pretty cool.
Watch the sunrise and sunset. Look up and appreciate the clouds, the blue sky, or the stars. Tonight is a new moon, so it’s a particularly good opportunity to enjoy the night sky. And don’t forget to look closer to the ground. Find beauty in the animals, trees, and grass around you. Enjoy what’s left of autumn. We sometimes let the weather dictate our attitude, even though we have absolutely no control over it. We do, however, have some control over how we respond. A little rain doesn’t have to ruin our day, and a beautiful day doesn’t do us much good if we never stop to appreciate it.
Tonight, take a few minutes to journal about what you appreciated in the world around you today. Did you notice something beautiful that you might otherwise have missed? Sometimes gratitude is simply a matter of paying attention.
Two months into a new house, a Shawshank Redemption comparison, a treeless prairie, and a dog who can’t read the “no dogs on lawn” signs. On choosing change instead of just enduring it.
It’s been nearly two months since we moved into our new home, and the question comes from everywhere. Coworkers, neighbors, people I run into. How’s the new house? It reminds me of being a senior in high school, or a freshman in college, when everyone wanted to know the same three things. How’s the college search going? Where are you headed next year? What’s your major? I spent enough years around eighteen-year-olds fielding those same questions that I eventually started handing out advice about it. I used to tell my students the same thing every year. Nobody really cares what your answer is, they just want you to have one. Pick three schools. Pick a major. Tell people a job you’re exploring. Most won’t ask again, and the ones who do just want you to say you’re still exploring it. That’s the trick. Have an answer ready and move on.
I could always give the easy answer. “It’s great,” I’d say, and move on to the next question. That’s easier than explaining any of what’s actually going on. But a new home is different, and the answer is more complicated.
One of my favorite movies is The Shawshank Redemption. I’ve watched it enough times that I’ve lost count, and lately I keep coming back to Brooks. Fifty years in that prison, and by the end he knew every hallway, every routine, every hour of every day without having to think about it. When he finally walked out, the world was too big and too fast, and it broke him. I’d laugh at the comparison if it didn’t feel so true. Twenty-two years in the same house does something to a person. I knew which drawer held the batteries. I knew which stair creaked and which light switch turned on the outside lights. I knew how the sound traveled through the place. I knew where the cat used to hide. And I knew where the measuring cups were. I didn’t think of it as knowledge. It was just how the house and I moved together.
In the new house, I had to look up how to use some of the light switches. Seriously, I have had television remote controls that were less complicated. Turns out a few switches don’t do anything at all, and that’s on purpose, wired for a future we haven’t gotten to yet. I stood in my own hallway flipping a switch that controls nothing, feeling like Brooks staring at a world that had moved on without him. Small mercies exist, though. Garbage day is still the same day it always was, and I felt an embarrassing amount of relief the first week I didn’t have to relearn that too.
Here’s the thing about Brooks. He wasn’t a bad man and he wasn’t weak. He was human. We all get institutionalized by our routines eventually. The routine isn’t the enemy. It’s comfortable, and comfortable isn’t a character flaw. But most of us fight change instinctively, even change we asked for, because the old routine feels like safety, even when it’s stopped serving us.
That’s the part I’m determined to get right that Brooks never had the chance to. He didn’t choose to leave. I did. I chose this house, this neighborhood, this flat and enormous sky, and choosing it means I don’t get to spend the next year mourning the version of me who knew where the batteries were. I get to be the guy who learns where the new drawer is instead.
The rest of the disruption is quieter than a light switch, and harder to fix with a Google search. Twenty-two years builds a rhythm you stop noticing, coffee first, then the walk, then the day starts in whatever order it starts. That rhythm didn’t move with the furniture. Some mornings I catch myself standing in the kitchen waiting for a version of the routine that doesn’t exist here yet.
At the old house, rain meant the basement treadmill, no decision required, just walk down the stairs and keep the streak alive. That treadmill didn’t survive the move, so now rain means an actual choice. Drive to the gym, assuming I can find it, or accept the day off and try not to think about what that does to the streak. I haven’t built a replacement rhythm yet. I’m not sure you can build one on purpose. I think it just accumulates, one repeated morning at a time, until one day you look up and realize you’ve done the same thing enough times that it’s become the thing you do.
For the days when it doesn’t rain, I have found my path here, at least. Same time every morning, same loop, Ginger pulling ahead like she already trusts the route more than I do. There are almost no trees in this new development on the edge of town, and the sky just keeps going. When the sun’s up, I stop and look at it, something the old neighborhood never made me do.
The new neighborhood is flat. It’s flat like a table. There is no topography. Glaciers had their way with this ground thousands of years ago, so I suppose flat was the plan all along. I’ve never been comfortable on the prairie the way I am in the hills. There is nothing better than walking through the forest in the Black Hills, winding your way through the pines. The trees close in around you. You can’t see far, and you don’t need to. Then the trail turns and suddenly you’re standing on an overlook with the whole world opened up below you.
That’s the kind of open I understand. You earn it, and it comes with a place to stand. The prairie gives you the view with nothing around it… no trees to walk through first, no edge to stand on. Some mornings that feels like freedom. Some mornings it feels like exposure. Most mornings it’s both.
The neighborhood itself has its own personality, and it’s not subtle about it. It’s mostly multi family, several blocks of townhomes, rows of villas, a few twin homes, and some single family homes mixed in. It’s like a small HOA convention. Several lawns have signs planted at dog height warning that the grass underneath is not, in fact, a public restroom. I appreciate the honesty, if not the phrasing, though it’s hard to call it neighborly.
But the detail that actually stopped me was the security cameras. I did an informal count on one recent walk and lost track somewhere past a dozen, most of them mounted on townhomes and villas that couldn’t be more than fifteen hundred square feet apiece. Half of them, best I can tell, are angled at the lawns, apparently to make sure no dog commits an undocumented offense. Everyone seems to have a camera pointed at everyone else, but I’m guessing a Flock camera at the entrance would somehow be considered an invasion of privacy.
Ginger, for her part, is unbothered by any of the signage, mostly because we never taught her to read. She’s more adaptive than I am. Every walk is still an investigation for her, nose down, working every corner of the block. Fire hydrants and utility boxes get extra time, like they’re holding the important information. The rare tree gets a thorough interrogation, no branch or root left unchecked. She’s also already identified a couple of houses with dogs she’s decided are hostile, and she lets me know it every time we pass, no diplomacy involved.
She hasn’t found her favorite spot yet, the one she used to make a beeline for without thinking, the one that told her she was home before she got there. She’s patient about it in a way I’m trying to learn from. She just keeps sniffing, confident the good spot is out there somewhere. I keep waiting for the same thing to happen to me, some ordinary corner of this new place that quietly becomes mine without me deciding it should.
So if you ask me how the new house is, the honest answer is that it isn’t home yet. Part of that isn’t even philosophical. It’s literal. We ordered furniture back in July, and it still hasn’t arrived, so there are rooms in this house that are technically ours and still feel like they’re waiting for someone else to move in.
Summer meant the move. Fall means looking forward. Through both, one six-year streak — and one dog at the door — never stopped.
Earlier this week, the sun set at 8:00 PM. It won’t happen again until late April. From here, the days get shorter, the temperatures fall, and eventually the leaves do, too.
Labor Day weekend marks the unofficial end of summer here in the upper Midwest, and every year it seems to ask the same question: what was this season actually about? This summer, the answer was easy. The move.
It took the whole season and most of my attention. Preparing the old house, sorting through decades of our stuff and generations of family stuff, selling the house, moving, closing, learning a new neighborhood, and figuring out where the coffee maker goes. For a few months, everything else waited its turn.
Fall feels different. It turns the attention forward again, toward what comes next instead of what just got finished. New goals, new routines, winter coming, and the work of looking ahead instead of simply settling in.
Through both seasons, though, one thing never cared what I was focused on. Ginger doesn’t understand summer or fall, moves or goals. She just knows that 6 AM means walk.
She looks at me, then at the door. Back at me, then back at the door, tail wagging the whole time, as if she’s asking nicely. Then comes the stretch, front paws forward, rear end in the air, and the message changes: I’m not giving you a choice. You must walk today. If not for yourself, for me.
So we walk, now on a new path complete with strategically timed neighborhood sprinklers trying to take us out. It is not the walk we had before, but it is close enough, and most mornings, close enough is the whole point. For Ginger, there are new smells, new fire hydrants, and new trees. For me, there is the same thing there has been every day for more than six years: 10,000 steps.
Two thousand three hundred seventy-nine days, and counting. The focus keeps moving, from the move behind me to whatever comes next, but the streak doesn’t. It is just there underneath it all, the same way Ginger is at the door every morning, whether I’m thinking about a moving truck, a new goal, or nothing much at all. And we’re still walking, trying to enjoy the last moments of summer and the beginning of fall.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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