Category: Essays

I leave work, and the problem is that I have not actually left work in the way people imagine when they say “leave.” Physically, yes, I’ve evacuated the premises of my employer and am strapped into my little automotive cocoon. But mentally I’m still marinating in the day’s endless cycle of people who can’t decide whether they want this or that, which somehow means they want both simultaneously, and also can you “just put together a quick deck?” and maybe “loop in finance?” Which is shorthand for “turn your evening into a war crime against your own sanity.” And then you hit the highway and the entire concept of forward motion is replaced with what can only be described as a series of still-lifes in brake lights.

The people around me, and by “around” I mean literally boxed-in like I’m part of a giant human terrarium experiment where the theme is congestion, are not driving. They are performing traffic as an avant-garde art form. They are lane-changing with all the grace and deliberation of a walrus sliding off a rock, except slower, and with turn signals used as confessional statements: not actually meant to inform you but to soothe their own conscience.

And there’s this inner voice, not mine, reminding me that I too have probably been the walrus at some point, nose pressed dumbly against the glass, oblivious. Except in my case the glass is the windshield, and the dumb nose is still mine.

By the time I detour to the hardware store (because the pool-cleaning company has taken the novel approach of being in the business of not showing up at all, which makes firing them feel less like a punishment and more like releasing them to fulfill their destiny), I’m already simmering. And the store employees — lovely people, I’m sure, but in this context about as useful as origami canoes — cannot begin to fathom the thing I’m describing. “No, not that sealant. The pool kind. The one that actually prevents water from leaking, not the one that just makes you feel like it might prevent water from leaking.” Blank stares. Shrugs. One guy wanders off and doesn’t come back.

And of course, because entropy has a sense of humor, this is when my phone rings: my son at school. Its been a qeek since school started and he STILL csnt log.into.his laptop. The office ladies (plural, because they appear to travel in administrative packs) explain that it has been over a week since classes began and somehow he still can’t log into his portal, which is the portal, the gateway to education, the whole point of sending him there. I go in person because phone calls are clearly designed to deflect responsibility, and what I get is a buffet of platitudes: “first week chaos,” “we’re all adjusting,” “these systems are complicated.” What I don’t get is an actual solution. I am, in fact, made to feel that my frustration is the problem, like I’m some kind of bureaucratic Karen for daring to expect baseline functionality.

And so there’s this anger building, this catalog of human incompetence and indifference, the realization that everywhere I go people are obstacles, gum on the sole of my day.

But then (and I hate how trite this sounds even as I narrate it to myself) God interrupts. Not with a thunderbolt but with the casual aside of a friend in the passenger seat.

“That’s pride talking. Weren’t you the guy who left the garage door open last week and only realized when the raccoons got into the recycling?” 

He reminds me the commuters are exhausted too, the store clerks are undertrained and underpaid, the school office staff are drowning in a tidal wave of parental panic. 

“They’re not obstacles,” He says. “They’re opportunities.”

“Opportunities for what?

“For Caring. For Worship. For Love.” 

And of course this sounds like something off a church sign. The problem is it’s also annoyingly true.

I nod and say, “Yeah. You’re right.” Then immediately a guy cuts me off, and I shout words that rhyme with “duck shoe,” which sort of undermines the whole revelation. 

“It’s hard,” I tell God. “I want to be better, but I’m not very good at it.”

“My grace is sufficient,” He says.

“That’s one of your go-to sayings, isn’t it?” I mutter. “I bet you say that to everyone.” And I swear I can hear Him laugh, which is both comforting and slightly insulting.

By the time I finally reach the bar where my family’s waiting for Wednesday Night Boozie Bingo (yes, it’s a thing, don’t judge), the air feels looser. I hug my son, Breccan, and in that hug the whole day’s static dissolves a little.

I remember a friend from work who’s Mom had surgery, so I text him for a while. His mom is okay. We joke a bit. 

“See?” God says. “There you go!”

“That’s it?”

“That’s it,” he says. “That’s all you need to do to be better.”

“That’s easy. And it’s great because I want to.”

“Sometimes you won’t want to,” he says.

“What do I do then?”

“My grace..”

“..Is sufficient,” I say. “Yeah, I know.” I sound mad, but I’m not. This, too, is annoyingly right. If God has business cards, he could probably write annoyingly right a lot of the time on it. But he wouldn’t, because not doing such a thing is also the annoyingly right approach.

After a beat, He speaks again. “Just don’t write about it in the post you’re thinking of writing,” He says. “That defeats the purpose.”

“Sure,” I say, and I mean it. For a while, anyway.

 I order drinks, carry them back, and of course bump into someone, sloshing his beer.

“Oh no, I’m so sorry!”

He waves it off: “No worries, friend. We’re all just getting through.”

And then, as if curated by some benevolent DJ, Tears for Fears starts piping through the speakers. Everybody Wants to Rule the World. Suddenly it feels like we’re in on some cosmic joke. The traffic, the store, the school, all of it shrinks down to background noise. 

For a moment, everything is exactly, absurdly right.

When I was in high school, my Grandpa on my dad’s side got sick. He was in his eighties then, in and out of the hospital often enough that part of me knew the end was near. But knowing and believing are two very different things. So when, in my sophomore year, Grandpa went into the hospital for surgery, my mom asked if I wanted to visit him beforehand. I said no, assuming he’d be back home in a few days. Same as always.

The day after surgery, his health turned. Before I even had the chance to regret my decision, he was gone.

At the funeral, I walked in next to my Grandma. As we turned the corner, saw him lying in the casket, she let out a sound that I first thought was laughter. 

“This is a serious thing, Grandma,” I thought. “Canyou not laugh?”

 Only then did I realize: she wasn’t laughing. She was wailing. For the first time in my life, I saw someone so overcome with grief that it swallowed the room whole.

Two years later, it was Grandma’s turn. Emphysema and lung cancer is what took her. This time, I knew the end was near, and I wasn’t going to make the same mistake.

But when I walked into her hospital room, I nearly turned back. Tubes everywhere. Her mouth wide open as she struggled for breath, even with the machines. I thought she was asleep, until she opened her eyes, saw me standing there, and smiled. Not just with her face, with her whole body, with whatever strength she had left. It was terrifying and it was beautiful at once. And I lost it. I told her I loved her and ran from the room.

She died two days later.

By my senior year, I had become the field commander for my high school marching band. This meant standing in front of the band, along with the entire Friday night football crowd, every halftime show. I was a nervous wreck each time. But Chris, a freshman saxophone player, had this little ritual with me. Right before we started, he’d catch my eye, make a goofy face, and I’d laugh. That laugh carried me through. It was small, but it meant everything.

One Friday night, while my friends and I were probably at our usual post-game blues-and-barbecue hangout, Chris went home and took his own life. We got the news days later, and I remember asking God if death was supposed to feel this way: so unreal, so impossible to believe.

Whether it comes with warning, like my grandparents, or without, like Chris, some part of me always refuses to accept it. Weeks passed before I really believed Grandpa wasn’t coming home. Even after watching Grandma gasping for breath, part of me thought she might still make it. And almost thirty years later, I still can’t quite believe Chris’s young life just ended on that Friday night.

It feels wrong. Like it isn’t supposed to be this way.

If you’re a person of faith, and I try to be one as often as possible, there’s scripture that says the same. Death wasn’t part of the original plan. But even the best-laid plans of mice and men go awry, as the poet Robert Burns once wrote. And here we are, forced to live in this unexpected unreality whether we want to or not.

Just last weekend, a friend of ours passed away. He was still a young man with a wife and kids. It was completely unexpected.  I won’t share details because they’re not mine to share, but he was part of our lives and our kids’ lives for more than a decade. He was family in a way; not by blood, but by choice. The kind you build around yourself over years.

In Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut calls these kinds of families a Karass. These are the people bound together to do God’s will in your life, often without ever realizing it themselves. Vonnegut was not a man of faith, at least not in the traditional sense. Yet what I’ve always admired about him (which is something I also admire in many of my friends who wear labels like atheist or agnostic.) is that he carried a deep love for people: a love that, to me, mirrors the very kind of love God calls us to have for one another. A Karass, as I see it, is the embodiment of that ideal. And the friend we lost was, in every sense, the embodiment of it too.

Walking into the house last night, my wife shook her head. “I can still hear his voice,” she said. “I still expect to see him next week.”

I knew exactly what she meant. Everyone in this chosen family, this Karass, said the same. Shock. Sadness. And that sense of unreality that always lingers after someone’s gone.

So what happens next?

When my Grandma died, the funeral stretched on, people we didn’t know drifting in and out, saying all the things people say. That’s when my friend Sean Hinken called.

“You want to go bowling?” he asked.

“Sure,” I said.

And we did. Brentwood Bowl, the place where I wasted too many hours as a kid. We bowled game after game. We didn’t talk about Grandma being “in a better place” or “free from suffering.” We didn’t talk about my parents or the future. We didn’t talk about anything. We just bowled. And somehow, that made it better.

In the Bible, Job is remembered for suffering. He loses everything: his wealth, his servants, his ten children. And, he is struck with a debilitating illness. His friends come to visit. Later, they’re rightly criticized for saying all the wrong things about God. But at first, before they opened their mouths, they did something right: they sat with him. No talking. No lecturing. No empty comfort. Just silence and presence. In Jewish tradition, it’s called sitting shiva. That’s what Sean did for me when Grandma died. He did it again when my mom passed years later. He’s good at it. Everyone needs friends like that.

The people in our Karass gathered last night and, for the most part, simply sat together. A few stories were told, a few memories shared, but mostly it was an unspoken agreement to carry the weight together. And in that quiet, shoulder to shoulder, perhaps take the first small, halting steps toward healing.

Maybe that’s the point. Death will always feel unreal, whether it comes like a slow dusk or a lightning strike. What makes it bearable isn’t explanations or scripture or platitudes. It’s the people who show up. The ones who sit with you. The ones who bowl with you when words won’t do. The ones who make you laugh when your chest feels like it’s collapsing.

We don’t get to choose death. But we do get to choose how we live with it: together.

That’s what my Grandma taught me with her last smile. What Chris taught me with his mischief. What Sean taught me with a bowling ball. And what our friend taught us just by being part of our Karass.

The loss never stops feeling unreal. But the love? That’s as real as it gets

Back in my youth, coffee at the office came from a single, hulking metal beast that looked like it had been forged in the basement of a post-war shipyard. Its surface was mottled with decades of brown stains, as if it had been gently marinating in coffee since the Nixon administration. The pot itself was so infused with the ghosts of brews past that it probably could have walked out of the building on its own, perhaps hitchhiking to a better life, where the only demand on it was to hold rainwater for a modest rooftop garden.

And yet, there was something honest about that coffee. It tasted like it had fought in a war and lost. You drank it not because it was good, but because it was there, and it was hot, and you were too polite or too desperate to say no.

Then, the world changed. First came the one-pot drip machines, clean and plastic and smelling faintly of hope. Then the “multi-temp” contraptions, as if coffee needed the same precision heating as sous vide salmon. Offices installed enormous chrome monstrosities that could’ve been stripped straight from the deck of a steampunk airship. Each machine arrived with more buttons, more lights, more ways to look like you were preparing for liftoff instead of a morning meeting.

But this wasn’t the end. This was just intermission before the true revolution: Keurig-style machines. Suddenly, coffee was not a communal act. It was personal. A kaleidoscope of K-cups appeared, each promising a bespoke caffeine experience: Vanilla Biscotti, Dark Magic, Jamaican Me Crazy. The break room became a coffee Eden. Everyone had exactly what they wanted, exactly when they wanted it.

And then came the fall.

As in all Edens, there was a serpent. Or rather, several. People began taking K-cups home. Just a few at first, hidden in the lunch bag. Then a sleeve. Then whole boxes vanished overnight. The Keurig became a liability. The machines were replaced with “coffee packet systems,” devices so expensive that no one could afford one at home. They were safe from theft but developed … personalities.

Now, before you could brew a cup, you had to engage in a humiliating checklist. Empty the packet bin. Refill the water tank. Clean the drip tray. In some offices, the machine made you sign a pledge of loyalty before dispensing Colombian Medium Roast. One intern told me he had to swear fealty while kneeling, though to be fair, he’s the kind of kid who’d kneel if a printer jammed.

If this continues, I see our future clearly: the office coffee station as an American Ninja Warrior course. You start on the warped wall, sprint across the foam lily pads, and dangle from the monkey bars over a pit of decaf. Then, jousting with senior leadership (foam lances only, because HR), and finally strapping on a jetpack to soar over the cubicle farm and press the Brew button before your competitor does. All this for a cup you could’ve made with a $15 Mr. Coffee at home.

Is this who we are? A people willing to strap into corporate jetpacks for the privilege of mediocre caffeine?

I yearn for the days of the old pot. Yes, the coffee was burnt. Yes, the last inch at the bottom was mostly radioactive grinds. But if you drank it, you stood a decent chance of developing superpowers by lunch. And that, my friends, is worth more than all the single-origin artisan roasts in the world.

The week before school starts is not so much a week as it is a campaign. There are logistics, supply lines, financial planning, and the kind of last-minute crises you’d expect if we were invading Normandy instead of sending children back to public education. My wife, who teaches, has been moving what I can only describe as an entire school supply section at WalMart into her classroom, one tote at a time. The sheer volume defies reason. I’ve been in that room. It’s like any other classroom. And yet, everything she brings in disappears into it, as though she’s found the doorway to Narnia and is slowly filling it with laminated posters, mechanical pencils, and paper towels.

Several of the kids apparently decided to spend the summer growing like bean sprouts, because suddenly every shoe in the house was a size too small. This required an emergency pilgrimage to various stores where, I’m convinced, the school shoe market is run by the same people who control diamond prices. Except that diamonds last longer than three months before someone’s toes start curling over the edge.

Then the washing machine joined the back-to-school festivities. It began flashing cryptic error codes: strings of letters and numbers that looked like they’d been randomly assigned by a drunk Soviet engineer. I spent hours disassembling it, crawling around on the floor, making little puddles of water like a human fountain. The machine beeped at me softly, as if to say, “I know, buddy. This life thing is hard.”

That’s when Eliott wandered in.

“Need some help, Dad?” he asked, in the same tone you might use with a neighbor struggling to carry in a heavy bag of mulch.

We ran through possible fixes together, searched online for what I imagine is the internet’s only Mandarin-to-COBOL translation tool, and, miracle of miracles, got it working again.

Eliott grinned, and in that grin I saw the problem with time: it’s rude. He’s a junior now. We’re entering the season of SAT prep books, college tours, and financial aid calculators that give you an ulcer just by looking at them. He doesn’t need me the way he used to. These days, our talks are less father-and-son and more man-to-almost-man, which is fine, except I didn’t realize how much I’d miss being indispensable.

Micaiah isn’t far behind. He had his sports physical yesterday. Six-foot-one, 250 pounds, and trying football this year. He’s a freshman in high school, and he’s already enrolled in a Health Science program that will have him spending part of his day at a community college in two years. He’s barely started and he’s already halfway gone.

When they’re little, you assume their need for you is permanent. The constant “Dad, Dad, Dad” is exhausting, yes, but it’s also the air you breathe. Then one day, without much warning, you look around and realize you’re standing there holding a half-empty oxygen tank.

This morning, for the first time in years, I didn’t have to bellow through the house like a deranged town crier to get them moving. Eliott and Micaiah were up when I was. Dressed. Ready. Helping the younger kids find shoes and zip backpacks.

“If you make Dad late,” Micaiah warned, “he will throw you to school instead of driving you.” Everyone laughed, which I took as a good sign that my children still find me occasionally funny instead of merely annoying.

We have one more First Day of School like this with everyone at home, all five kids crammed into the same daily launch sequence of chaos and misplaced clothes. One more morning when someone screams, “I can’t find my pants!” and someone else, without missing a beat, shouts back, “Then go without them!”

After that, the house will start emptying. After that, they’ll be gone.

That’s the way it’s supposed to go. It’s not tragic. It’s just different. And I’ll still be here, fixing the washing machine when it breaks, deciphering its cryptic messages. Only instead of a kid beside me with a grin and a solution, it’ll just be me and the soft beep of a machine saying, “Yeah. I feel your pain, buddy.”

After losing 200 pounds, people expect the changes to be seismic. They expect fanfare, balloons, a scene from Rocky where I sprint up the steps of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, arms raised triumphantly above my now-visible waist. And yes, there are obvious benefits. My knees don’t scream like a haunted Victorian child every time I bend down. My back no longer files daily complaints with Human Resources. And I can walk up a flight of stairs without clutching the railing and wondering whether I’m experiencing cardiac arrest or just dying of shame.

But there are subtler changes; changes you don’t read about in Men’s Health or see on an inspirational Instagram reel narrated by Morgan Freeman. Like how people look at me now. Or more accurately, how they don’t.

At 5’11” and over 400 pounds, I used to have what polite folks might call a presence. I didn’t walk into a room so much as materialize: an eclipse of man. Mothers would draw their children close as if an impending storm had just rolled into Target. Men would eye me with caution, unsure if I was going to buy socks or body-slam them through the seasonal aisle.

I was a teddy bear, of course. A hugging, apologizing, perpetually-aware-of-my-body-in-space teddy bear. I tried not to be in anyone’s way, but when you’re the size of a refrigerator with opinions, avoidance has its limits. Sometimes collisions were unavoidable. And when it came down to it, between me and some 145-pound dude with a vape pen and something to prove …. well, physics has no loyalty.

I’d knock people over. Not maliciously. Not even often. But once in a while, usually after they attempted to assert their presence through the sheer force of misplaced confidence, I’d bump into them and watch them bounce off like I was a pinball bumper in a bowling shirt.

“Sorry!” I’d yell after them as they tumbled backward, wondering what it felt like to have been hit by a wrecking ball with social anxiety.

My favorites were the tiny, furious men. The kind who walked like lowercase bulldogs, arms bowed wide, as if perpetually ready to either fight or enter a body-building competition for ants. They had what I like to call “budget Vin Diesel energy.” They took up more space than physics allowed and aimed directly at me like we were in some kind of unsanctioned boss battle.

I don’t see those guys anymore. More accurately: they don’t see me.

Because now, I’m average. No longer big. No longer scary. Just some guy. Which is oddly disorienting. You don’t realize how much of your identity has been wrapped in “presence” until it’s gone.

I walked into a hotel lobby today (my family and I are staying there while we wait for the AC in our house to be resurrected), and came face-to-face with one of those formerly-beloved angry chihuahuas in human form.

He squared his shoulders and walked straight toward me, the way they used to. I tried to move, but my knee had other ideas and locked up like a reluctant safe. He slammed into me and, to my shock, I stumbled back a step.

He fell. Of course he did. Physics still leans in my favor.

But it hit me then, like he hit me now: I’m not who I used to be. I’m still bigger than average, sure, but no longer looming. No longer a walking colossus that makes children wonder if they need to say “excuse me” or call animal control.

And it’s nice. Mostly.

Nice not to feel like a novelty act every time I walk into a room. Nice not to be the before in someone else’s imaginary weight loss ad.

But also, it’s strange.

Because in losing the weight, I also lost the armor. The perceived power. The ability to part a crowd just by approaching it. Now I’m just a middle-aged guy with knees that only occasionally betray him. I don’t make people nervous anymore. I don’t make them anything.

Maybe that’s a good thing. Maybe now I’ll be seen for who I actually am: mostly kind, sometimes funny, occasionally winded, and deeply afraid of hotel buffet eggs.

Or maybe I’ll get mugged. Who knows?

When we lived in Ohio, a 95-degree day was the stuff of local news alerts and ice cream shortages. I’d step outside, inhale a lungful of wet, corn-scented air, and say, “Whew, it’s a scorcher.” Our air conditioning would wink at us, wheeze like an asthmatic pug, and promptly give up. Sometimes it was a Freon leak. Sometimes a clogged return vent. Sometimes it just needed “a little kick,” which is Midwestern for “percussive maintenance by someone in Crocs.”

But Ohio was child’s play. Ohio was one of those little ball pits at Ikea where your toddler gets a rash and a new worldview. Florida? Florida is The Show. Florida is what happens when the Earth leaves the oven on and forgets to set a timer. It’s the big leagues of atmospheric despair. It’s like getting called up from a single-A ballclub in Omaha to pitch against the Yankees in The Bronx, only every player is the sun, and every pitch insults your will to live.

Our first Florida house was a rental owned by a couple in the UK who’d apparently studied thermodynamics by licking the inside of a tea kettle. The AC unit never really worked. It leaked through the ceiling like the house was weeping with us. When we asked the owners to address the issue, they recommended we not use the AC at all, except for a few weeks in August. “That’s when it gets hot,” they said, from their foggy perch somewhere in Sussex.

He added, “If you want real heat, try a London heatwave sometime. Twenty-seven degrees!”

Celsius. They always say Celsius. Europeans measure things in Monopoly numbers. Kilometers, Celsius, kilograms, days since their last war with France. I did the math: 27 degrees Celsius is about 80 Fahrenheit.

“That’s what we try to cool it down to,” I told him. “In winter.”

Our next house was another rental. The owner lived just up the street and fancied himself a DIY savant, the kind of man who believes duct tape, twine, and faith can build a bridge. This would have been fine, except he was in New Jersey for most of the year. At one point, our AC had been dead for two weeks. When he finally stopped by, he discovered the filter was the wrong size and lectured me on the importance of using proper supplies.

“You’re the one who installs the filters, dumbass,” I reminded him. “You explicitly told me not to intervene.”

“Oh,” he said, as if meeting me for the first time. Then he vanished to Canada for three weeks. We called a service. Again.

Eventually, we bought a house. This is the part of the story where hope flutters in like a moth toward a porch light. It’s also the part where that moth bursts into flames.

The windows were bad from the start. Insulation? A suggestion, not a feature. Our AC unit sounded like a 747 crash-landing into a Walmart parking lot. It leaked. The ductwork came undone like five-year-olds at a birthday party, expecting candy from a paper mâché piñata. The inside coil clogged up. We fixed it again and again, each repair a whisper of impending doom. It had that familiar feeling you get with an elderly pet. No one says anything, but everyone starts googling cremation options.

Two weeks ago, the drain pan started leaking. Again. We cleaned the coil. Flushed the line. Sacrificed a goat. Nothing helped. A tech came by and said it needed an acid wash, which – let’s be honest – sounded more like a Metallica song than a maintenance plan. I pictured the xenomorph from Aliens melting its way through our coil, hissing with approval.

We scheduled the wash for Friday morning.

Last night, the external unit let out a sound I can only describe as a scream from the soul of a wounded wildebeest. Then it clicked twice, like it was trying to remember something. and went silent

This morning, the technician gave us the verdict: Dead. Not “resting,” not “in need of parts.” Just Dead.

And so, we will now spend the GDP of a small European nation (one of those tiny ones that make goat cheese and resentment) on a new AC system. Hopefully, it will bring peace, if not to the world, then at least to our living room. The cool comes on Tuesday.

Unless, of course, it doesn’t. This is Florida, after all. Where the lizards outnumber the thermostats, and your only true weather forecast is: “moist.”

It was my son’s birthday, and we had pizza for dinner. He’s sixteen now, but still a child, and one day his metabolism will betray him. Not a dramatic, film-worthy twist, mind you. Just in a quiet, creeping way that announces itself by making the waistband of your shorts feel like a judgment. But for now, he is young and delighted, and the smell of pepperoni grease and melting mozzarella still clings to the air like incense in a church that worships tomato sauce.

The sky was doing its summer opera with clouds dancing in extravagant ball gowns, sweeping across a stage of blue and flaming tangerine. I sat with my wife on the back porch, a glass of wine sweating in my hand. It too was overwhelmed by the beauty of the evening. The kids ran barefoot in the yard, tossing a football and yelling at each other in that affectionate, sibling tone that hovers between “I love you” and “You’re dead to me.”

It should have been perfect. It was perfect. And yet …

There’s a certain kind of sadness that doesn’t earn the dignity of a cause. It’s not the kind that arrives because you lost your job or your dog died or your pants shrank. No, this is the quiet, sneaky sadness. The kind that sidles up next to you in the middle of a sunset and whispers, “Yes, this is all very nice, but what if you’re just…not feeling it?”

I call it the Summer Sadness™, a very specific brand of melancholy that arrives only when things are too good, when you’ve actually had time to write and some of it, shockingly, doesn’t completely suck. When your health has finally stopped acting like a gremlin with a grudge. When the days are long, and the mornings are lazy, and you have no real complaints except for the existential dread that buzzes in your chest like a refrigerator you forgot was plugged in.

It’s the calm before the chaos of the school year begins. Soon, we’ll be setting alarms again. Lunchboxes will demand packing. Papers will go unsigned. And someone (probably me) will forget about picture day and send a child to school in a ketchup-stained Minecraft shirt. But tonight? Tonight, it’s just us and the evening.

I played catch with the kids. I laughed. I drank my wine. The rain began to fall softly, as if trying not to ruin the mood. The sunset lit the sky like the ending of a movie we didn’t want to end. And yet, sitting there, I felt like I was watching it through a pane of glass. Present, but not. A spectator in my own joy.

I don’t think anything’s wrong, exactly. Sometimes your soul just doesn’t get the memo that things are okay. Sometimes it wants to lie in bed with the curtains drawn, even when everything outside is glowing.

Tomorrow will be here soon. And soon there will be backpacks and bus stops and the return of things that are loud and necessary. The world will start spinning faster again. Maybe that’s what the sadness is: the preemptive mourning of the slowness, the sweetness, the pizza-scented sacredness of a warm summer night.

Or maybe I’m just tired. That happens sometimes.

They say parenting is the hardest job in the world. But those people have clearly never tried to accomplish something while parenting five children, while ankle-deep in toilet water, while wondering whether an ER window replacement comes with a punch card.

Earlier this week, I had to remind myself multiple times, through gritted teeth and damp socks, that I do love my kids. I do. I have to keep saying it like a mantra. Like I’m trying to hypnotize myself into not running away to Montana and starting a new life as a fly-fishing instructor named Doug.

It started, innocently enough, with a toilet. A clogged one. Now, I’m no stranger to clogged toilets. We have five kids. I own a plunger like some people own a car, but instead of using it, my kids decided the solution was: more water. Just keep flushing. Over and over. Surely, if the water sees how committed we are, it’ll change its mind and go down.

Spoiler: it did not go down. 

It came up. Then it came out. Then it migrated down the hall like a cheerful salmon in a spring flood. Ten loads of laundry later (because of course it soaked into the towels, the rugs, and three of the kids somehow) I reminded myself again: I love them. I do. 

Then there was the root canal.

SK2, he’s 14 now, high-functioning autistic, and engaged in an ongoing Cold War with dental hygiene. It’s a contentious relationship. He brushes like he’s trying to gently pet a ghost. The result? A $1,000 root canal that doubled as a ransom payment to the Tooth Mafia. I could’ve spent that money on a new couch. Or a downpayment on next year’s vacation. Or enough plungers to build a raft and sail away from all of this.

But then came last night.

My wife and SK4 were off learning CPR. They must have had a premonition because, back at home, SK3 decided to spice up our evening by tripping and falling through a window. That’s not a metaphor. That’s an actual thing that happened. One minute, we’re watching YouTube, and the next, it was Die Hard: The Suburban Years live and in person. 

Glass everywhere. Blood. Screaming. SK5 crying in the corner like an extra from a war movie.

Then something amazing happened. SK2, the dental delinquent himself, sprung into action. Calm. Focused. First aid kit like a mini paramedic. He kept his brother still, talked him through the pain, patched him up while I was still Googling “how to tell if your child is made of glass.” It turns out the real health and safety lesson wasn’t happening at CPR class. It was happening in my living room. 

They’re often like this. Beautiful in the chaos. This morning, for example, SK4 … sweet, responsible SK4 … helped my wife set up her classroom for the new school year. SK1 texted me from Philmont, all excited to come home. “Miss you, Dad,” he wrote. And I nearly cried. Until I remembered the window.

And yeah, SK3? As I sat with him in the ER last night, he looked at me, all stitched and bandaged, and asked, “Dad… have you ever done something like this?”

“Well, there was that time I lit my best friend’s house on fire.”

His eyes widened, and I told him the story: how we put the fire out, how my friend went to the hospital, and how I sat in a smoke-filled living room waiting for his dad to come home and decide whether to murder me or adopt me out of spite.

And we laughed. Right there in the ER. Me, thinking about smoke. Him, thinking about glass. Both of us, bleeding in our own way.

And in that moment, I realized: They’re gonna be okay. They really are. Even when they destroy everything. Especially when they destroy everything. They’re good people with good hearts. Somewhere under the bandages, the dental bills, and the gallons of toilet water, there they are. My kids.

And I do love them. I swear I do.

Even if I keep the plunger on a leash now. Just in case.

There are places in the world that feel mythic before you ever set foot in them. For some, it’s Paris. For others, it’s Machu Picchu, or that one Target that still has a working Starbucks inside. For me, it was Philmont Scout Ranch in Cimarron, New Mexico.

When I was a teenager, sunburned and underpaid, I worked at Camp Friedlander Boy Scout camp just outside Cincinnati. My job was mostly mosquito-based: attracting them, swatting them, then explaining to scouts the difference between “first aid” and “bad luck.” We had a staff t-shirt, a walkie-talkie that only worked when you weren’t holding it, and a collective dream.

Philmont.

Philmont was our Everest. It was where the real scouts went. The ones who drank iodine-flavored creek water and told time by the sun. We told stories about it as if we’d read them in The Odyssey. 

“Did you hear about Ryan’s cousin?” someone would ask, huddled around a lukewarm pudding cup. “He summited Baldy Mountain. Saw a bear. Came back different.”

A friend worked a whole summer there, once. He came back thinner, tanner, and with an expression that suggested he had seen God, pr at least someone who resembled Him, and smelled like freeze-dried beef stroganoff.

I, of course, never went. The opportunity just never aligned. There was always school, or a job, or a pressing need to gsther financies that never seemed to materialize. Eventually, Philmont faded from dream to regret, settling into the quiet cabinet of adolescent longings, somewhere between “owning a motorcycle” and “learning how to flirt.”

Fast forward a few decades. Five kids and, oh yes, 200 fewer pounds later, and my son is going. Not just going; returning. His second trip. Like he’s a regular. Like it’s his summer home in the high desert, and he’s just popping back in to see if the trout missed him.

He’s lean, strong, and almost sixtee . His backpack is bigger than my dreams. He’s not worried about anything. Not the altitude, not the weather, not the rattlesnakes. He texts me a photo from base camp. He’s grinning. Behind him: blue sky, mountains so sharp they could slice you, and a gang of scouts who all look like they know how to build an emergency shelter out of two sticks and a dirty sock.

I look at the picture and I feel the strangest sensation. It’s not envy, but something adjacent. Longing’s more mature cousin. I think they call it “joy.”

Because this is the thing they don’t tell you about parenting: it’s not just watching your kids grow up. It’s watching them walk through doors that were locked to you, and cheering instead of knocking.

I’ll admit, I Googled “Philmont adult treks” once. A flash of hope, maybe. I thought: You’ve lost the weight. You could train. You could do this. But the training would have to be so intensive that I’d have to quit my job, abandon my family, and maybe replace my knees with something titanium. I’m in better shape now, but I’m not in Philmont shape. I’m in “carry groceries without wheezing” shape. “Chase my kids one block and then gice up” shape. Not “twelve days above 8,000 feet with 45 lbs on my back shape.

So I don’t go.

Instead, I sit on my couch in Central Florida where the altitude isseven feet above sea level, scrolling through photos my son sends when he has service. I see pine forests and rocky ridgelines. A mule deer. A panoramic of Tooth of Time. And in every picture, he’s smiling. Tired, sunburnt, radiant.

I smile too. It’s enough.

Because the truth is, we all have a “Philmont.” A place we dreamed of going, a peak we didn’t reach. And if we’re really lucky, we get to watch someone we love climb it instead.

That’s the trick, I think. Knowing when to let go of your old dreams, and how to hold on to theirs instead. Not with bitterness, not with wistfulness, but with a quiet, campfire-lit joy.

Besides, somebody’s got to stay behind and wait for the stories.

One of my biggest struggles as a writer over the years has been figuring out how to handle the cavalcade of “asides” that show up in my writing. My rough drafts are a dizzying landscape of ideas so haphazard, it would be like the worst, ADHD-fueled, Seth MacFarlane nightmare of a storyline that consists of a main character saying one thing, followed by a complex web of nested pop culture references that continued, Inception-style, all the way to the end. 

It’s bad.

To handle this, I would almost always use parentheses (like this, but with multiple ideas and paragraphs therein (which is a great way to confuse people (but can also be fun because it FEELS vaguely math-y (even though it isn’t because no numbers are involved (which is a great way to do math, if you ask me (at least until you’re trying to engineer something like a bridge or an airplane, because all these words and no numbers is how you end up killing people (and that’s bad (usually))))). 

To handle this – and cut down on parenthesis inception – I landed on the em-dash. I had avoided it for years, because it felt strange (and also: I didn’t really understand it all that well (my elementary school teachers did a poor.job teaching me that (they are all dead now, so I can say that without angering them (probably))). 

I settled into it, I figured it out, and my writing got better. 

“This is what growth is!” I told myself. I was happy. 

Then ChatGPT happened. Now, all those people who WANTED to be grammar Nazis (but never had the balls to do it (because they are cowards (stupid cowards (stupid, lazy, selfish, cowards!)!)) came out in force to let everyone know that any instance of em-dashes AUTOMAGICALLY means you used Chatty Geepts, Cope Pilot, Clawed, or some other AI to generate your post. 

How dare you!

Yes. I generated my LinkedOn, FaseBok, or InstantGram post – which got three whole likes (and a retwit from someone in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia!) – with [enter your AI], and will now use my newfound glory to take over the world!

Things are going to start happening to me, now! (*cue evil laughter*).

Here’s the kicker (<— a phrase of which our good friend, Chatty Geepts is quite fond).

I don’t use AI to generate content. Ask anyone I write with. Ask my bosses at my various jobs over the years who have suffered through my weekly status updates (one of them said “You don’t write updates. You write Testaments).

I LIKE to write. Why would I give that up?

But also: I use AI to evaluate some of what I write. It gives me good feedback, helps me see my blind spots, and in a pinch, it can help me spell words like “pulchritudinous” AND find ways to work it into a post! That works for me. 

I’m not judge-y. If someone out there can find a way to make their ideas make sense by prompting AI, so much the better. It’s just a faster and more efficient way for all the Stephen King clones or Stack Overflow Engineers that had already been flooding the market for decades to keep on doing what they’re doing. 

If you’re not using AI to help your job in SOME way, you’re going to be the guy in waist-high pants and thick glasses, screaming at the neighborhood kids to get off your lawn, and that’s going to happen fast. 

AI is innovative, but true, revolutionary innovation still exists solely in the human realm. It might evolve one day, but if we ever DO get to a point where the robots are more creative than us—hell, that sounds like a party to me.