Let me explain. My 19-year-old son sent a family text last Sunday night confirming our weekly video call. He’d been working on a project all day at A.S.U. but was getting ready to walk back to his apartment so he could join us online at 9pm. Less than 30-minutes later, I was on the phone… Continue reading This Holiday Season, I’m Grateful for a Candy Bar
I must have passed a thousand of these little furry things on my bike ride today, most of them somewhere in the midst of crossing multiple lanes of traffic. I’m not sure why. From my perspective, one side of the road looked just as good as the other — a seemingly equal distribution of soil and foliage,… Continue reading Lost En Route Together
My 57-year-old neighbor lost his life in a heinous crime that has left our community reeling. The sound woke me from a deep sleep, but I really didn’t think much about it at the time. I listened just long enough to confirm it wasn’t coming from inside the house, then rolled over and went back… Continue reading I Heard a Murder this Week
I’m terrible at a lot of things, but especially at baseball. I know this because my Little League coach told me so when I was eleven. I was, perhaps, a bit pudgy and uncoordinated for my age, so things like throwing and catching and running were embarrassingly problematic. Still, I showed up to every practice… Continue reading Crying at First
My 5th-grader had to write a persuasive research paper on the advantages of same-sex schools. He included a lot of great points, like ". . . boys are sometimes trying to impress the girls so they will try to act funny and this ends up getting them in trouble." So true. He then noted that… Continue reading Just the Facts
Today my nine-year-old called me upstairs to witness the maiden flight of his latest paper airplane — the Triple X. He’d been working on it all morning so we both had high expectations for the flight. Unfortunately, it was short-lived. The “flight” was really more of a tumultuous freefall and what aviation experts would likely classify as… Continue reading I Often Lack the Right Perspective
My 11-year-old son is going through the infamous F.L.A.S.H. (Family Life And Sexual Heath) unit right now in school. Everything was going pretty well until they wrapped-up F.L. and then moved on to the A.S.H. segment. I’d prepped him for this day a few weeks ago, but he was still pretty traumatized by the sudden… Continue reading F.L.A.S.H. Back
Well, it’s done. I dropped my firstborn son off at college. In another town. In another state. 1500 miles away from “home.” And it didn’t go anything like I’d imagined. My wife and I flew down to Phoenix with him a week before classes started so we could get him settled into his dorm and… Continue reading Courageously Onward
I recently learned about the passing of a kid I knew from high school. Odd duck. He used to sit in the bathroom stall and chuck tissues over the door while making bird noises. That was almost 25 years ago. The obituary talked about his jobs, hobbies, friendships, and the loved ones he left behind.… Continue reading Odd Duck, Like Me
I’m rich. Yes, this came as a big surprise to me, too. I always thought I’d notice if anything like this ever happened because I’d start wearing a monocle and would be able to afford luxuries like cufflinks and name-brand cereal. Instead, I read the news in a rejection letter for a government loan that… Continue reading My Best Long-Term Investments
