I was home from college one summer when my parents asked if I could help take my grandmother to her cancer treatments.

I said yes without hesitation. I had the time. Classes were behind me for the season, and my days were mostly open. I didn’t ask how serious her illness was. I think I already knew and didn’t want to face it.

She was living in a rented room by then, in the home of a family she did not belong to. I remember walking through their house to get to her bedroom door, feeling like an intruder in someone else’s life. It struck me, even then, that the world can narrow quickly. One day you have your own place, your own rhythm, your own say. And then, quietly, those things are taken from you.

She opened the door with a cigarette in her hand and a faint smile on her face. She had smoked her whole life and was not about to stop, not even now.

We did not talk about the illness on those drives. She talked about the people she lived with, about the food she did not like, about the noise at night. I listened.

“Why don’t you come and live with mom and dad?” I asked her.

“Oh no, I don’t want to be a burden. And I like my independence.” She sounded firm in her words, but then she gazed out the car window, and I wasn’t sure she meant it.

I didn’t like the hospital with its pale walls, buzzing lights, and antiseptic smell. The waiting rooms were filled with people who spoke in low voices or thumbed old magazines or stared at the walls. Some had a vacant defeat in their eyes. I was too young to understand what it must feel like to grow old inside a failing body.

One day, after her appointment, I asked if she needed to get back right away. She said no. I told her I wanted to take her somewhere. It was not much of a plan. Just a feeling that we should step outside the routine that had dimmed her days.

We drove to a park not far away. There was a small train there, the kind that carries children and their parents in a slow loop through trees and around a lake. She remembered the place. Said she had taken me there when I was little, though I had no memory of it. I helped her out of the car and she took my arm as we walked. She was weaker than I expected.

When she saw the train, something in her changed.

It was subtle at first. A softening around the eyes. Then a smile. We bought our tickets and climbed aboard. The train moved slowly through the park, past tall trees and open grass, past a lake where ducks drifted along the shoreline. Children laughed in the cars behind us. Somewhere ahead the whistle sounded and we could smell the smoke from the steam engine.

I thought of our visit as nothing special, at least not in the way we usually measure things. No grand gesture. No great expense. Just an afternoon in the sun.

But she smiled. She laughed once or twice. And for a little while, she seemed less like a patient and more like herself again.

I did not think of it in any larger way. I thought I had taken my grandmother on a train ride. That was all.

She died not long after.

My parents told me about my grandmother’s death on the day I graduated.

They had waited so I could finish my finals without distraction. I remember sitting on the edge of my dorm bed as they spoke, already knowing what they were going to say. Later that evening I walked to the campus duck pond and stood on the bridge, watching the water move under me. I thought about that day in the park. The train. The ducks. Her smile.

I cried, but not only from loss. There was something else there that I could not name.

Over the years, I have come to understand it better.

There is a passage in Richard Paul Evans’s novel The Walk that has stayed with me. A woman who works in a diner says she meets dead people every day. Not the buried kind, but the walking kind. People who have given up. People who have stopped growing, stopped feeling, stopped looking for anything beyond themselves.

I have seen that in my law enforcement career.

People who numb themselves. People who stop showing up for anyone else. People who have decided, consciously or not, that it is easier not to feel too much, not to risk too much, not to give too much. They are still here, but you sense the absence of something that once might have been.

I understand the temptation. Life does not unfold the way we imagine. It takes things from us. It disappoints. It wears us down. If you are not careful, you begin to pull back. You protect yourself by giving less. You tell yourself it is a kind of wisdom.

But I think there is another kind of wisdom, quieter and more demanding.

It has to do with continuing to care.

Not in some grand or abstract sense, but in the simple, inconvenient ways that present themselves to us. Showing up. Giving your time. Listening when it would be easier not to. Taking someone somewhere when you would rather stay home.

These things do not look like much from the outside. They rarely earn notice. But they do something to us.

They keep us from closing in. They keep us from becoming the kind of person who has stopped growing.

I thought I was doing something for my grandmother that summer. And I was. But I can see now that something was also being done for me. In caring for her, in stepping outside my own small concerns, something in me remained open. Without those small acts, I might have become harder, more distant, more inclined to turn inward.

We don’t always recognize the moments that shape us while we are in them.

Months ago, I stood in the Presidio in San Francisco and looked at my grandparents’ gravestone for the first time.

My grandfather’s name faces outward, his rank and service carved into the stone. I never knew him. On the back is my grandmother, Ruth L., identified simply as his wife, along with the dates that mark the span of her life.

I stood there for a while, thinking about how little can be said at the end. A name. A few facts. The rest disappears unless it lives somewhere else.

And what came back to me was not the hospital or the illness or the rented room.

It was the train.

The ducks on the water. The sound of the whistle. The way she smiled that afternoon as if something had been returned to her.

This much I know is true. The time you give to others is never wasted. It is not only a gift to them. It is a way of keeping yourself alive in the deeper sense. In a world that offers many ways to withdraw and go numb, it is one of the few things that pulls you back into the current.

Make time for the people who need you. Not someday. Not when it is convenient. Now.

You will bring them a measure of light. And some of it will remain with you.

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She taught English at St. Thomas Aquinas Preparatory School for thirty years, shaping young minds to appreciate great literature and maybe aspire to write some of their own. A few of her students went on to creative writing MFA programs. One, a young man named Lane Scott, got into the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, but then fell in love with a farmer’s daughter and left the program. What a waste, she thought, the boy had real promise.

But then the paths we imagine for others may suit us more than them.

Since retirement, life began to close in on her. Days in the garden and reading in her home library brought pleasure and escape from the empty stretch of days, but a nagging sense of isolation and irrelevancy bore into her mind and soul.

Her husband George passed five years ago and while she loved the man, she couldn’t say their marriage brought the kind of fulfillment she’d hoped for. He had been a chemical engineer. His mind and manner were linear, logical, and devoid of poetry or artful expression. Sometimes after dinner as he watched sports she would share a moving line of prose from whatever new novel had captured her attention. George would grab the TV remote, politely mute it, and turn to listen to her, giving her his full attention.

Such was the case one night when she said, “George, listen to this and tell me what you think. It’s from Mary Ann Fuller’s new novel, A Glimpse at Eternity.” George muted the TV, turned slightly to face his wife and said, “Fire away, my love.”

She adjusted her glasses and read:

“He had a chest full of stacked asteroids.”

“Stacked asteroids? What does that even mean?” he asked.

“Heavenly, out of this world physique. The beauty and perfection of supermodels or Michelangelo sculptures,” she said.

She closed the novel on her lap. “A chest full of stacked asteroids. What do you think about that line, George?”

“Don’t make no sense. Why not say he was muscular?”

“Well, sometimes a peculiar metaphor captures the essence of a thing better than literal description,” she said.

“Yeah but stacked asteroids? Sounds pretentious. The author is trying to be clever. Hemingway didn’t get all flowery with opaque metaphors.”

“Memory is hunger,” she said.

“What? Is that the next line? It’s worse than the chest full of asteroids,” he said with a chuckle.

“It’s from A Moveable Feast,” she said.

“Well, you got me there. All I know is asteroid muscles don’t make no sense to me. Guess I lack all that fancy metaphorical sophistication. I’m just a simple engineer, but I love you.”

He winked at her and clicked off the mute button. The football game filled the room again.

She got up and left.

The memory stayed with her. Not because of disappointment, she had known who George was when she married him, but because of something she could not quite name.

At school, she found what she thought she lacked. Colleagues like B. Thomas Lynch, whose quick wit and command of post-modern literature seemed to animate every conversation. Once, after drinks, she had almost gone home with him, but something in the way he turned every topic back toward himself unsettled her. And so she had remained with George.

Once, they watched The Bridges of Madison County, and she cried at the end.

“What’s gotten into you, honey?” George asked.

“Oh, nothing,” she said.

But she had not been thinking of Francesca. She had been thinking of Francesca’s husband.

The phone rang. It was her sister Ann in Coralville, Iowa.

“Come visit,” Ann said. “Your favorite author is going to be here next week, Mary Ann Fuller.” To her surprise, she said yes. On the flight, she read The Sense of an Ending, and as she looked out the window she thought how easily we misinterpret our lives, how often we fail to see them clearly.

Ann was waiting in a pickup truck outside the small airport. They hugged and talked easily on the drive back to Coralville. The late afternoon sun stretched across the open fields, its soft glow soothing and serene.

At the house, Ann’s daughter Allison came out to greet them, and soon they were all gathered in the kitchen. Later, they sat on the back deck with tea, looking out over Ann’s garden.

“Do you ever regret it?” she asked. “Leaving California. The plans you had.”

Ann smiled. “Sometimes. But not in the way I thought I would. Life just changed. Doug needed to come back after his father died. The business, his mother. It wasn’t the plan. But it became our life.”

“And you’re happy?” she asked.

Ann nodded. “Yes. I think if you don’t fight it, the life you end up with can become the life you were meant to live.”

That evening, Doug came home tired but cheerful, and they ate together at the kitchen table. There was nothing remarkable about it. No grand conversation, no performance. Just the easy movement of a shared life.

She watched them, the quiet familiarity between them, and felt something she could not quite name.

A few days later, after the Mary Ann Fuller reading, she sat alone in a campus coffee shop with a vanilla latte. The room hummed with quiet conversation. She closed her eyes and saw George across from her.

“Hold on,” he said. “Let me mute this so I can give you my full attention.”

She saw it clearly now, the way he turned toward her, not halfway but fully, the way he listened without interrupting, without needing to respond. The memory brought tears.

“Are you alright?” a voice asked.

She looked up. “My goodness… Lane Scott?”

“In the flesh,” he said, smiling.

They sat together with their coffee and talked about old days at the school. She told him how often she had thought about him over the years.

“I never understood why you left the Workshop,” she said. “You were so talented.”

“I fell in love,” he said.

“With Penny. I remember.”

He nodded. “I think I just wanted a life that felt real to me.”

“Do you ever miss it? Writing?”

“I still write,” he said. “Just… differently.”

They sat for a moment.

“Your husband,” Lane said. “I remember him bringing pizzas to that poetry night when the caterer didn’t show. He was a good man.”

She nodded. “Yes. He was.”

Weeks later, on a quiet Saturday morning, she was in the garden. She planted a few bulbs, wiped her hands on her jeans, and went inside for a glass of lemonade. In the library, she picked up A Glimpse at Eternity and turned to the page she had marked years ago.

He had a chest full of stacked asteroids.

She read it again, more slowly this time, letting the words settle. Then she closed her eyes and saw George seated across from her, the television muted, his body turned toward her, waiting.

“I’m just a simple engineer,” he had said. “But I love you.”

She had spent a lifetime teaching others how to read, and had somehow failed to read the man who sat beside her.

Outside, chickadees moved in and out of the feeder George had built years ago. She cut a few flowers and tied them with twine, then stood for a moment holding them in her hands.

She would drive out to the cemetery. Not to explain anything. Not to correct anything.

Only to sit with him a while.

Note: The line “a chest full of stacked asteroids” came to me in a dream. It made sense then, the way things make sense in dreams. I wrote it down when I woke and kept it, not knowing what it meant, only that it felt like something.

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There are people who go away.

Away from the crowds and pressures and expectations of conventional life. They go away to calm something inside themselves, or to find something missing, forgotten, or needed.

You might think they are lonely, but they are not.

As a boy, I used to retreat into the woods. There was little thought as to why. I was simply drawn to winding deer trails, towering oaks, birdsong, and the quiet serenity of the forest.

I built a rickety treehouse in one of my favorite oak trees halfway up an embankment. I would slowly climb the tree, hand over hand, far past the treehouse until I reached a place where the branches spread wide enough to cradle me.

There in the high canopy of leaves and branches, the tree would sway softly in the wind, and I felt like a baby rocking gently in loving arms. Sometimes I’d spy a doe or fawn in the thin trails below. Curious squirrels would study me from nearby limbs, and the scratching cries, guttural calls, and melodic warbles of scrub jays echoed through the treetops.

I’d sit there in my arboreal nest, hidden and alone, hypnotized by the leaves dancing in the light as sun filtered through branches to warm my face. Something beyond limbs and branches held me. I would not have used the word then, but it felt like God.

Nothing outwardly happened in those quiet moments in the woods. There was nothing to show for them, no mark left behind, and yet I did not want to leave.

What doesn’t last is more important than you think.

I recently read Guy Stagg’s excellent book The World Within: Why Writers, Artists, and Thinkers Retreat.

Stagg writes about three individuals who sought distance from the conventional world: Ludwig Wittgenstein, David Jones, and Simone Weil. Each of them moved, in their own way, to places set apart. Monasteries, religious houses, quiet edges of the world where fewer demands were made of the self.

They did not flee because life had failed them. They went because they wanted to understand what life was, without the noise and interference.

Some people possess a hunger that cannot be fed by company. Or they have wounds that deepen in the press of crowds. The only answer is retreat. To find a quiet refuge where silence can open a doorway to understanding, or a deer trail into a kind of spiritual clearing.

Wittgenstein’s refuge was a small cabin he built along the shore of Lake Eidsvatnet in Skjolden, Norway. It was his favorite place to think and write. Stagg describes it beautifully:

“Curtains of forest drawn across mountain slopes, the pine boughs textured like velvet. Inland fjords turning turquoise from their silted water, shading to deep green where the mountains were reflected. A wooden cabin balanced above a lake, like the ark cast ashore after the floodwaters receded.”

Wittgenstein came to the fjords five times in his life. He was often lonely there, but he kept returning. He needed the solitude. He believed that philosophical insight and moral improvement were linked. He needed this kind of retreat to know himself better, as reflected in his notebooks:

“Whoever is unwilling to descend into himself, because it is too painful, will of course remain superficial in his writing…If you are unwilling to know what you are, your writing is a form of deceit.”

Wittgenstein may have wanted to leave his life behind, but David Jones wanted to hide away.

Jones was a brilliant, hermit-like British modernist painter and poet who used solitude to process trauma. He suffered severe shell shock during World War I, particularly at the Somme and Passchendaele, before finding refuge at a Benedictine monastery on Caldey Island in the 1920s and 30s. In his final years, he lived as a recluse in a London bedsit, eventually dying in 1974 after time in a nursing home.

Jones seemed happiest on Caldey Island, where the quiet allowed him to paint. Even after he left, the island remained with him. He never married, never owned a home, and possessed very little.

Beyond the peace he found there, all he had left to retreat into was his art. It meant everything to him. Stagg recounts a visit from the composer Igor Stravinsky, who found Jones living in his cramped bedsit, his possessions kept close to the mattress like a wartime bunk. To Stravinsky, he looked like a hermit in his cell.

The walls were covered in paintings. When Stravinsky asked to buy one, Jones refused. After the visit, Stravinsky told a friend, “I have been in the presence of a holy man.”

And then there was Simone Weil, whom Stagg describes as a kind of martyr, someone who sought spiritual clarity through withdrawal and a deliberate embrace of suffering. During her time at the Abbey of Saint-Pierre de Solesmes, she developed the idea of attention as a form of prayer, a complete focus on reality and the suffering of others.

Weil believed the self could be reduced, not erased, but quieted, so that something truer might come through. It is not a fashionable idea. We are taught to become more, to assert and accumulate, to build a visible life. But Weil turned in the opposite direction, toward less.

There is a kind of relief in that. In the wisdom of less being more.

On a recent trip to San Francisco, I saw two men sitting side by side in the back of a pedicab, being carried through the city streets. The driver turned and told them they were welcome to take photos, just to be careful not to drop their phones. One of the men laughed and said they were not going to take pictures. They didn’t want the distraction. They just wanted to take it all in and experience it.

It struck me how rare that is.

We are taught to keep everything. To record it, store it, and build a life out of what can be retrieved later. But some things are not meant to last. Their purpose exists in the moment itself. And strangely, it is the essence of the moment that remains with us. Not as images we can revisit, but as something felt. Something carried.

Consider the artist Andy Goldsworthy, who makes his work from what he finds in the world. Leaves, stones, ice, branches. He builds something and leaves it where it is. The wind takes it, or the water carries it away, not unlike the sandcastles we built as children. The work is not meant to last. It is meant to be made, seen, and then returned.

This is not loss. It is the point.

The people Stagg writes about understood this. They sought retreat not because the world had nothing to offer, but because they wanted to meet it without so much of themselves in the way.

Most of us will not go that far. We will not enter monasteries or leave our lives behind. But there are smaller paths.

A walk without purpose. A quiet hour with nothing to show for it. A moment where you let something be enough without trying to keep it, photograph it, or hold it in place.

These are small acts, but they change something in you.

I return in my mind to that tree I used to sway in, and to those men in the pedicab moving through a city they chose not to capture. The tree will fall someday, just as I will. The streets will change. The moment will not return.

What remains is not the thing itself, but the fact that it was lived fully, without interruption.

It was enough. It did not last.

That is why it mattered.

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Bruce and I ambled into the coffee shop like we do most every Wednesday and stood at the front counter. The usual crowd was there. Hipsters and high schoolers and coders glued to their laptops and lattes.

The two young women behind the counter chatted with one another, oblivious to our presence, or perhaps just choosing to ignore us. One laughed and her nostril ring caught the sunlight coming through the windows. The other turned her back to us, revealing an array of animal tattoos just above the edge of her tank top.

Eventually one of them sauntered over.

“What can I get you?” she said quietly, offering little eye contact. We gave our orders and she flipped the screen around for me to see the total and, more importantly, the tip options.

The tip. That perfunctory step at the end of nearly every transaction.

No greeting when we entered. Ignored while they finished their conversation. Even the act of ordering felt like we were interrupting something more important. I don’t know why I selected 20 percent. Maybe I thought it might lift her mood, that somehow the service might follow.

It didn’t.

Bruce and I waited while the two behind the counter resumed their conversation and then called out to one of the young fellows working by the roasting machine for his opinion. He said something back and all three laughed.

Eventually our drinks came.

I complimented the young woman on the artfully drawn foam leaf atop my coffee, but she said nothing and walked away. Bruce and I sipped our coffee, shared a pastry, and talked about the things old men talk about. Travels, health, money, and the latest movies we’d seen. Bruce excused himself to the men’s room and I sat quietly sipping my coffee.

Two high school girls sat nearby, scrolling their phones.

One spoke about a boy at school, her words laced with profanity. The other agreed, adding her own commentary about a teacher or another girl. I tried not to listen, but it was difficult not to hear.

When Bruce returned, I found myself drifting into memory, talking about our days at the department and the relative simplicity of small town life. It reminded me of my time as a juvenile detective, teaching safety programs to fifth graders.

They were good kids.

At recess they would grab my hands and pull me toward the playground for tetherball and games. They told jokes and laughed so hard they would spit out half their peanut butter and jelly sandwiches. By the end of the day, I would find dried flecks of it on my uniform.

Even the high schoolers back then seemed, on balance, good natured and engaged. There were always a few angry ones, but most were a pleasure to be around.

When Bruce and I got up to leave, we carried our mugs and plate back to the counter. The two behind it watched. “Thanks, ladies,” I said.

“See you,” one replied in a flat voice.

Later that day I went online to order business cards.

I used the Walgreens app, as there are several stores in my area. The closest location showed a weeks long delay, likely due to staffing, so I chose another store across town with a 4 p.m. pickup.

I had time to kill and found myself returning to the morning. The girls, the language, the indifference. The subtle sense that something was off.

What is this a reflection of? A lack of hope? A quiet resignation? Parents who failed them?

Or something broader, something harder to name? The steady drip of social media, the comparison, the performance, the sense that nothing is quite real or quite enough.

I wondered what might happen if their teachers had them write poetry. Poetry as a way to make sense of things, to name what aches, to discover what is still alive inside them.

Rilke wrote in Letters to a Young Poet:

“You have had many sadnesses, large ones, which passed. And you say that even this passing was difficult and upsetting for you. But please, ask yourself whether these large sadnesses haven't rather gone right through you. Perhaps many things inside you have been transformed; perhaps somewhere, someplace deep inside your being, you have undergone important changes while you were sad. The only sadnesses that are dangerous and unhealthy are the ones that we carry around in public in order to drown them out with the noise; like diseases that are treated superficially and foolishly, they just withdraw and after a short interval break out again all the more terribly; and gather inside us and are life, are life that is unlived, rejected, lost, life that we can die of.”

If only those young people understood, and maybe they will, that sadness must pass through us if we are to deepen, to grow, to become something more than our worst moods.

If we repress it, we risk caging the bluebird, that fragile and essential part of ourselves that longs to turn pain into something beautiful. Bukowski understood this.

I hope they come to understand it too.

My phone buzzed with a text alert that my cards were ready.

The Walgreens was unfamiliar and a little run down. Debris scattered the entry carpet and no one stood at the front register. A voice called from the back, directing me to the photo department.

The young woman there took my name, found the order, and told me the total without looking up. Then she shouted past me to a coworker, greeting him loudly as he approached. The two began talking and laughing about something work related as if I were not standing there.

I swiped my card, took the receipt, and left, wondering briefly if anyone was in charge. Judging by the condition of the store and the tone of the place, I doubted it.

I try not to get like this.

I try not to see the world as quietly unraveling, because I know better. I know there are good people and good moments, and that youth has always carried confusion and rough edges.

Still, sometimes it feels different.

I should have checked the cards before leaving.

When I got home and opened the box, I saw that the top edge of each card had been cropped poorly, leaving a thin white line, and the font on the back, which had looked fine on screen, was tiny and hard to read.

I shook my head and decided to take my dog to the park.

Nanuk is sixteen now. He is deaf and missing teeth, with a failing pancreas and a tremor in his back leg. He does not complain. He takes each day as it comes, and park days are his favorite.

We walked slowly as he stopped to sniff everything. Grass, trees, bushes, the faint scent of a distant barbecue drifting on the air. There was a breeze and fading sunlight, and I felt something in me settle.

That is when I heard a voice.

A young girl saying she liked my dog. Two girls approached, and the older one asked if they could pet him. I told them his name and they knelt beside him, smiling. One of them said he was beautiful, and Nanuk leaned into the attention as if he had been waiting for it all day.

I had my camera with me, as I usually do, and asked if I could take their picture with him. They agreed, and after I snapped the photo, they thanked me politely and walked toward the playground.

And there it was.

The other half of it. The part that is easy to miss if you are not paying attention. The grace that waits just beyond irritation and disappointment.

Rilke’s words came back to me, about sadness passing through us, about what it can change within us if we allow it. There will always be sullen teenagers in coffee shops, poor service, broken systems, and small frustrations that accumulate if we let them.

But these things are not the whole story.

If you let them pass through you, if you refuse to let them settle and harden, something else reveals itself. Just when you think the world is dimming, two young girls will stop and smile and ask to pet your dog.

The dog will wag his tail. They will laugh. And for a moment, everything will feel as it should.

And you will remember that there is still grace in this world.

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Lately I’ve begun to feel like a man who has outlived his era.

It took a while to come to this conclusion. For a long time I couldn’t quite put my finger on it, until clues began to accumulate.

Like the melancholy I feel whenever visiting the town that held my law enforcement career for twenty-six years. Something about it feels distant and foreign now.

And the tyranny of technology, with its infernal apps and notifications and sign-ins. Also the coarsening of society, where people forego conversation to exist inside blinking screens of digital distraction, algorithms, and noise.

It’s harder to phone people now.

It seems folks prefer a text, that layer of digital insulation through which one must probe for availability. If you break convention and phone directly, the call lands in voicemail where the message can be prioritized and inspected before committing to a response. And if it’s too much trouble to call back, just text a curt reply.

Go into a bank with questions and the skeleton crew will smile and suggest you check your bank app.

“You know you don’t need to come in, you can do that on your app,” one will say.

The grocery store is down to one or two human cashiers. That’s where the old folks line up, those lonely souls longing for human interaction to break the monotony of the day. Everyone else scans their items at the self-checkout rows. In and out. No need to talk to anyone, except when you can’t figure out how to enter produce or need an employee to approve your alcohol purchase.

Visit San Francisco and the streets are flowing with Waymo driverless taxi cabs. It’s all computerized. No need to speak to anyone. You can scroll cat videos on TikTok while your robot cab drives you across town.

This is modernity.

It’s nothing new. Technology evolves. Advancements happen. To the young, this is the world they know. To older generations, it’s the world they must adapt to. And for some, there comes a time when it all feels alien and unfriendly and frightening.

I think the fear comes from a sense of existential loneliness. A feeling that one has outlived one’s era.

Sometimes I envy the alabaster sculptor I met in Volterra, Italy.

My wife and I were part of a small tour group. Our guides arranged a private visit to the sculptor’s shop and studio, which was filled with stunning works of art. The back studio and equipment were covered in a fine film of powdered alabaster dust. The artist, smiling and happily engrossed in his work, sculpted a perfectly shaped bowl for us.

What struck me was his countenance.

He never stopped smiling. An inner radiance illuminated his presence. He was surrounded by tourists with smartphones and digital cameras, snapping photos and filming. Everyone was chattering. But the sculptor was blissfully immersed in his artisanal craft.

Volterra is a walled hilltop town, a human settlement dating back to the 8th century BC. It was a major Etruscan city-state. And it was the Etruscans, in the 3rd century BC, who discovered that the locally available “chalky” alabaster was much easier to carve than marble.

No wonder the sculptor was smiling.

He was part of an ancient craft. An artist still sculpting alabaster just as they did thousands of years ago. His joy came from the pleasure of working with his hands and making works of art that still held relevance and value in this age of glowing screens and digital artifice.

The sculptor was a man in the modern world who had found a way not to outlive his era.

Last year I read Denis Johnson’s poignant and beautifully written novella Train Dreams.

Train Dreams tells the story of Robert Grainier, a day laborer in the early-20th-century American West who works on railroad and logging crews in the Pacific Northwest. The novella follows his quiet life marked by brief love, devastating loss, and long stretches of solitude, reflecting on memory, grief, and the fading of the old frontier world.

This year I watched the film adaptation of the novella and was deeply moved by it. The cinematography, the acting, the narration by Will Patton, and the poignant end credits song performed by Nick Cave. I loved the movie so much my wife bought the DVD for me. I’ve probably watched it five or six times now.

I asked myself why the novella and movie resonated so deeply. It’s because I feel, like Robert Grainier, like a man who has outlived his era.

I grew up around my father’s vast library of books. I watched my father write legal decisions on long yellow legal pads with his Parker 21 and Waterman fountain pens. On weekends my father sometimes painted in oils, the turpentine wafting through our family room. As a family, my parents, my sister, and I would sit in the living room watching evening television together. It was a shared experience. Not like today, where each family member is lost in an electronic device.

I used to play in the woods after school, on weekends, and during those long summer vacations filled with sunburns, poison oak, deer-trail exploration, treehouse construction, and the feeling that you would live forever. I loved the woods, not unlike Robert Grainier in Train Dreams.

“He liked the grand size of things in the woods, the feeling of being lost and far away, and the sense he had that with so many trees as wardens, no danger could find him.”

― Denis Johnson, Train Dreams

During my teenage years, friends would meet at the shopping mall and then skate Friday and Saturday nights at the indoor Ice Capades Chalet where I eventually got a job as an ice guard. There were no cell phones back then. Just music, conversation, dancing, exercise, and the warm glow of human connection.

My law enforcement career took place in a small town that used to celebrate weekend ice-cream socials in the park, Thursday “Nostalgia Nights” where classic car enthusiasts lined up their restored jalopies to the music of the 1950s, and annual Fourth of July fireworks shows. There were still horses corralled in the rolling meadows behind one of the grade schools.

As a young patrolman on night shift, I’d sometimes park by that meadow and carry a few sliced apples into the field and whistle. Before long I’d hear their hooves, and soon the entire herd was surrounding me as I passed out treats to their soft muzzles.

I know it’s not healthy to live in the past, but I’m not so sure.

There’s a lot there that I miss. Especially the loved ones who are all gone now. But beyond that, it’s the era I miss. It felt like we were more connected then, connected to one another, to our work, to our passions.

Now it often feels shallow, distracted, and foreign.

I was recently in San Francisco with my wife.

We visited my grandfather’s grave at the Presidio, met some wonderful old friends for dinner, and spent a little time exploring Chinatown. My father used to work in the city, and so it holds a special place for me. So many memories.

I brought my trusty rangefinder camera to take some street photos.

As I meandered from one street to another I heard the mournful, almost human-like sound of a Chinese violin known as an erhu. Rounding a corner, I saw an elderly Chinese gentleman seated by the curb, eyes closed beneath the brim of his sunhat, skillfully playing the instrument.

He looked like a man out of time. A man from a different era.

I imagine the world is vastly different for him, too. And yet there he was, sharing something beautiful and enduring with today’s world.

I fished some cash from my wallet and placed it in the little tip box in front of him. He looked up at me with an appreciative nod. I held up my camera, looked at it and then back at him, and he nodded again.

I’m glad I took the photo, because that moment opened a sliver of grace in my melancholy heart.

I suspect we all, if we’re blessed with a long life, arrive at this vertiginous place in time. Where we feel a bit lost and far away.

We miss the people and places and events that defined our era, yet here we are in this new generation of rapidly evolving technology and cultural change. And so we must figure out how to navigate unfamiliar terrain.

I have a novel in mind.

I’ve been sketching out ideas and notes and themes. Loosely, it will be about an aging cop who is still on the job but growing in despair. He doesn’t like where the world is today. He sees the erosion of institutions. The decline in standards. The societal narcissism and growing purposelessness afflicting the culture.

But amidst the crime and loss and despair, he still sees moments of grace.

Instances of people being kind. Neighbors being thoughtful. Business owners helping the less fortunate.

And he arrives at a thought. A mantra. Maybe even a prayer:

“Posts change, the watch remains.”

The line was inspired by the pragmatic “do your duty” philosophy modeled by my father and various mentors during my police career. But it is also inspired by the most austere and cloistered monks in the Catholic Church, the Carthusians.

They live in cells and speak only during the offices of Mass or during a once-a-week nature walk. The Carthusian order was founded in 1084 by Saint Bruno of Cologne. Bruno and six companions established the first monastery, the Grande Chartreuse, in the French Alps near Grenoble, to lead a life combining strict solitude and communal prayer.

The Carthusians have a motto, Stat crux dum volvitur orbis, a Latin phrase meaning “The Cross stands steady while the world turns.”

Their motto represents the contemplative order’s dedication to remaining spiritually anchored in their faith amidst the constant, changing, and chaotic shifts of worldly life.

And so, for an old cop like myself, “Posts change, the watch remains” has become my motto.

It reminds me to remain anchored in the belief that beyond the constant, changing, and chaotic shifts swirling through this modern age, most people are good.

And that we mustn’t give in to romanticizing the past or vilifying the present or wallowing in despair. Where we live, what we do, and who we associate with may change.

So be it.

Each day is a gift. The sun still rises. Birds sing. And whether I’m in San Francisco photographing old musicians or skipping the self-checkout aisle to talk with a grocery store cashier, I carry a quiet thought with me.

My private mantra.

My holy prayer:

“Posts change, the watch remains.”

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I was waiting in the airport for my flight home when I noticed her.

She was a small woman pushing a wheelchair that held luggage. The chair looked oversized against her frame, and she leaned against the handles as if nursing a bad back or relieving some invisible pain.

She appeared to be alone.

I watched as she paced slowly about the terminal in a meandering pattern. She did not seem to have a destination in mind. I assumed she was passing time while waiting for a flight, or perhaps walking to loosen stiff muscles.

Airports are full of movement. People hurry through the corridors dragging suitcases behind them or staring into their phones while the loudspeaker announces departing flights. The whole place becomes a blur of peripatetic humanity.

Yet this diminutive woman moved differently through the terminal. Something beyond her small stature caught my attention. She seemed slightly adrift, or perhaps searching for something beyond her travels. There is an expression sometimes found in the faces of unsettled souls, and she carried it quietly.

A kind of stoic resignation.

Watching her, I began to wonder about her life.

Moments like that invite reflection. When you see someone moving through the world in such a solitary way, you begin to imagine the roads they must have traveled before arriving in a crowded airport filled with harried travelers, busy airline employees, and indifferent vendors. You wonder what their earlier years might have been like, especially those fragile school days when hormones rage and children can be cruel.

As I watched her move slowly through the terminal, an old memory surfaced.

There was a boy at the small private school I attended in the 1970s. His name was Skipper.

Skipper had a physical disability and was tiny compared to the other kids. He was stooped over, walked with difficulty, and his arms had limited motion. His voice carried a strange gravelly pitch that made him sound like an old sailor.

During our lunch breaks the owner and principal of the school, Ralph Denman, played softball with us. Denman always pitched. Whenever Skipper came to bat, Denman would subtly adjust the speed of his throw so the ball arrived slowly enough to give Skipper a fighting chance.

Many times Skipper swung and managed to connect. The ball would dribble five or six feet toward the pitcher’s mound, where Denman often took his time bending down to pick it up. By the time he straightened and threw to first base, Skipper was already halfway down the line.

Denman was a Navy veteran with a gruff exterior, but we all recognized his softer side.

Sometimes Skipper made it safely. Other times he was tagged out. But he never complained and never sought pity. He played as best he could, and in doing so he won our hearts. We admired his quiet determination in the face of adversity.

It is funny how a small woman in an airport, decades later, can call up those old memories of Skipper. Yet what I felt while watching her was much the same feeling I had about him all those years ago.

Everyone is carrying something.

A wound, perhaps. Regret. Disability. Sorrow. Pain. Despair.

And maybe hope as well.

Standing there in the airport, these thoughts moved through my mind as I watched the woman lean into the wheelchair and continue her slow circuit around the terminal. Her luggage rested easily on the chair, but I could not help wondering about the weight of the burdens people carry inside themselves.

Does that weight slow them down, or strengthen their resolve?

A quote by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross came to mind:

“The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”

Skipper was beautiful, and so was the woman in the airport.

Their beauty is not the kind displayed on the covers of fashion magazines. It is deeper than that. It is the beauty of composed serenity, the quiet dignity of people who move through the world carrying their burdens without bitterness.

Their strength reminds me of the Japanese art of Kintsugi, where broken pottery is repaired with gold lacquer. The fractures are not hidden. They are illuminated. Broken pieces are joined together in a way that creates something stronger and more beautiful than before.

But we will never see that beauty if we do not take the time to notice.

I watched the small woman lean into the wheelchair and continue her slow circuit through the terminal. The great black wheel rolled beside her like a quiet companion.

People hurried past and flights were announced, but she kept moving through the terminal, leaning into the chair as she made her slow circuit across the floor.

Carrying something, like we all do.

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Anthony Doerr’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel All the Light We Cannot See contains the following line:

“Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.”

The line is delivered by a Frenchman on a radio program and serves as a central thematic idea for the entire book. It speaks to the importance of perception, appreciation of life, and the fleeting nature of time.

I love the line because it’s about the art of noticing, which is the reason I enjoy street photography and writing. Both disciplines help me open my eyes and take in the world around me more deeply.

Whenever I travel, I take my Fujifilm X-Pro3 rangefinder-style camera. It rests by my hip, dangling from a thin leather strap. It’s unobtrusive, and I can quickly raise it when a subject or scene captures my attention.

I pair three small, discreet Fujifilm lenses with the camera. A 23mm f2, 35mm f2, and 50mm f2. The 23mm captures wider scenes, whereas the 50mm is great for isolating subjects. Most of the time I use the 35mm, which blends the qualities of the other two.

I also carry a tiny Ricoh GR IV point-and-shoot camera, which captures beautiful black-and-white images. The Ricoh is handy when I want something even more discreet to capture candid scenes.

Street photography forces me to slow down and notice the world around me.

When I go on photo walks, I let my creative and aesthetic instincts take over. I study people, architecture, and the play of light and shadow. Sometimes I get lucky and amazing scenes unfold. Other times I get a whole lot of nothing.

But something else happens, too.

The people and scenes that capture my attention frequently spark images, memories, feelings, and the unfoldment of imagined stories. For this reason, I always carry a pen and notepad.

It’s not uncommon for me to snap an image and then immediately find a coffee shop to scribble down my thoughts, impressions, or even the nascent lines of a story. To be honest, sometimes I have no idea where the story came from. It’s as if I’m merely a conduit and the images were meant for me to observe. Once captured, something begins to whisper.

And if I’m quiet, it turns into a story.

I’m not a superstitious man. But I understand what creative thinkers like Rick Rubin mean when they talk about artists as antennas receiving ideas from a universal source.

Whether that’s true or not, developing a practice of closely noticing the world around you can lead to creative breakthroughs and deeper, more resonant work. It can also take your mind off the worries and vicissitudes of life, reviving your spirit and perhaps even your outlook on the present and future.

That’s the power of opening your eyes and noticing.

I was in San Francisco recently and spent time wandering the streets with my camera.

I noticed a woman wearing a sweater and cap, lugging a small cart behind her. As she crossed the street, I captured the moment. It was immediate and instinctual.

Later, when my wife and I stopped for lunch, I viewed the image and scratched the following thoughts in my pocket notebook:

“Mary came to me today on the busy streets of San Francisco. She came to me as a Chinese woman rolling her little cart through the bustle and noise and energy of Chinatown. And for a blessed moment, I felt her Irish spirit and the love and sweetness that defined her.”

Mary was my maternal grandmother.

She lived in a small apartment in Los Gatos, California, the town where I was raised. Whenever my parents and I drove into town, we’d often spot her strolling past the shops with her little cart in tow. Even in winter, she’d be bundled in a warm sweater and beanie, pulling her cart.

And so, when the writer in me photographs a Chinese woman in San Francisco with a shopping cart, I begin to conjure stories.

Stories of grandmothers and immigrants and ingredients bought in small shops and lugged home in handcarts. Ingredients to create meals inspired by the old country. Meals that comfort and preserve memory, reminders that no matter how much the world spins away from what’s familiar, one can still buy a few ingredients and find solace in yesterday’s dishes.

The random people and candid moments I photograph become inspiration for stories and essays. At the moment the aperture clicks, there’s no guarantee the image will unveil something deeper.

But when it does, it often feels as if it was meant to be.

Not far from Chinatown, a cowboy caught my attention.

I don’t know if he was a real cowboy or simply dressed like one. But something about his hat and jacket, set against concrete and glass and urban modernity, struck me.

He seemed like a man out of time.

Maybe he was a rancher on business in San Francisco, away from his Texas land. Perhaps he was thinking about his beloved quarter horse, Bouncer, anxious to get home, saddle up, and disappear into high grass trails that led to the peaceful creek behind his property.

The city cowboy reminded me of Jonce Thomas, a real-life cowboy turned real estate developer who lived down the road from my parents’ house. As a boy, I would watch Jonce race his horse around barrels in the meadow behind his home. He had two quarter horses. One was named Texaco.

The other was named Bouncer.

Jonce was salt of the earth. He would do anything for anybody. He spoke slowly with a deep raspy voice burnished by years of cigarette smoke. And he carried a sadness in his eyes. He had gone into construction to make a living, and with his wife’s sharp business instincts, they built a company and made millions.

But I don’t think his heart was in it.

I think Jonce just wanted to ride horses. To disappear onto backcountry trails where life slowed and the sun and wind could cradle his soul in a kind of enduring serenity.

Somehow my cowboy-in-the-city photograph conjured all those memories.

This is how the art of noticing becomes a creative tool. It connects present observation to buried memory. Once those memories are unearthed, they awaken old feelings. Old dreams. Old hopes.

Those old feelings remind us where we’ve been, what we’ve seen, and perhaps where we want to go. There is a quiet peace in that. A sense of direction.

In this way, the art of noticing builds resilience.

We see in others how much we share. How the past shapes us all in different yet similar ways.

The art of noticing reminds us we are never truly alone.

Near the end of my San Francisco trip, I watched a family preparing to cross a busy street. The group included adults, adolescents, children, and a toddler.

It was the toddler, giggling and waving a juice cup in his stroller, who sustained my attention.

He seemed to be having a grand time, unaware of the fast-moving cars and dangers inherent in any city. His family hovered nearby, keeping him safe and moving forward cautiously but confidently.

I remembered flying with my infant son to Washington, D.C.

I pushed his stroller past the Lincoln Memorial, the White House, the National Archives, and more. At one point, one of the stroller wheels broke, making everything more difficult. I was tired, frustrated, wary of traffic and commotion.

But my boy was having a ball.

He waved his little bag of Goldfish crackers and giggled at strangers and buildings. When ice cream fell onto my jeans, he laughed, which caused me to laugh.

There are stories in these moments.

There are stories in our noticings. It does not matter whether we find them through a camera lens, a sketchbook, or a travel diary.

The invitation is simply to slow down.

To settle into a place. To look around. To drink in the environment and the people and the unfolding stories. To let present moments brush against old memories.

If we allow it, something within us begins to awaken.

We begin to see our connection to others and to our past. We sense that we are part of a larger fabric. In that noticing, creativity stirs. In that noticing, resilience quietly grows.

When life is observed closely and with care, it becomes harder to believe we are alone. We share the same joys and sorrows, successes and failures. We are fragile souls doing our best to navigate our stories. Our paths differ, but we walk them together.

The radio voice was right. We only get so many openings and closings.

The world is already alive with scenes and people and small unfolding dramas. They wait patiently for someone to see them. And in seeing them, we sometimes see ourselves.

Open your eyes and see what you can with them before they close forever.

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I watched a woman on the airport tram during a recent trip to San Francisco.

She stood near the window, the city sliding past in a gray blur. Her hands rested on her bag. She was not looking at her phone. Not scanning the advertisements overhead. She seemed to be looking somewhere else entirely.

Inward.

There is a way the face settles when someone drops beneath the surface of themself. The muscles soften. The eyes fix on nothing in particular. It is not sadness. Not distraction. It is a kind of pleasant descent.

I have been doing more of that lately.

George Will once wrote that memories are roses in our winter. I have always liked that line. It suggests that the past is not merely something we once endured but a fragrant gift when today’s air grows stale.

Of course, some people warn us not to live in the past. We are told that if we dwell too long in yesterday we will miss today entirely.

But is that always true?

After the San Francisco trip, my wife and I stopped at a garden center. In the back rows, among the rosemary and lavender, I saw an older man moving slowly among the plants and flowers.

He bent over here and there, running his rough fingers across the leaves as if he were reading braille. His touch was careful, almost reverent.

He did not seem to be shopping. He seemed to be remembering.

Perhaps he once had a garden of his own. Maybe he planted bulbs with someone who is no longer beside him.

I do this sometimes.

I invent stories about the people and places I witness. But their observed truth always informs my imagination. I do not know the backstory of that man in the garden center, but I do know that he touched those plants with tenderness. And that tenderness came from somewhere.

Gardening is an act of faith.

You place something small into the earth and wait. T. S. Eliot wrote of breeding lilacs out of the dead land. Even in wasteland there is the stubborn insistence of life.

Maybe the woman on the tram was tending something similar. A memory. A regret. A love that has changed shape but not entirely disappeared.

Each of us carries an unseen garden.

Seasons pass within it. Some corners are bright and newly planted. Others lie fallow, holding what once bloomed. We walk through it quietly. Sometimes we kneel and touch what remains. Sometimes we clear a small space and begin again.

I find great peace and sustenance there.

The past is not simply something to revisit. It is soil. It holds what has grown before, what has withered, what has taken root and refused to die. It carries both nourishment and debris. We do not choose the weather that shaped it. But we do decide what we plant next.

There is danger in neglecting the garden.

Untended soil hardens. Weeds take hold. Memory, left unattended, can sour into regret. But tended soil stays open.

There is much to be said for solitude. Solitude is the quiet hour in the garden. The moment when we kneel, turn the earth, and consider what might grow here still.

As I age, I do not mind these descents.

I do not feel lost when I wander there. I feel acquainted. Accompanied by the boy I was, the police officer I became, the man who now reads and writes and notices.

The visible life goes on.

The tram arrives. The cashier asks if we found everything we needed. The day moves forward. Beneath it, something continues to root.

We carry our winters with us.

But we also carry seeds. Even now, late in the season, the soil remains willing.

And that is reason enough to keep tending the garden.

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What do we owe the dead?

What is our responsibility to those who came before us? The ones who began or carried forward our family line. The ones who worked, endured, sacrificed, and loved in ways that made our lives possible.

I believe we owe them three things.

First, remembrance. We tell their stories. We speak their names. We teach our children and grandchildren that they are part of something older than themselves. There will be light and shadow in every family story. We learn from both.

Second, honor. If they lived well, we carry that forward. If they fell short, we improve upon what we were given. We mend what was broken. We build something steadier from what we inherited. There is a quiet redemption in that.

Third, forgiveness. Beyond anger and disappointment, we try to see them as they once were. Children. Before life hardened them. Before fear or failure reshaped them. Forgiveness is not approval. It is the decision to let mercy land somewhere.

Sometimes that is the only peace available to us.

I never knew my paternal grandfather. He died eight years before I was born.

John Joseph Richard Weiss was a Colonel in the Army Air Corps, later the United States Air Force. He served in both world wars. After retiring from military service in his fifties, he enrolled in law school and became the oldest graduate in his class.

He passed the Florida Bar and opened a small office. A new chapter had begun.

Then he started dropping his water glass.

There were tests. A brain tumor. A rapid decline. He never practiced law. He was buried at the Presidio in San Francisco. I assume it was his wish. Perhaps he once served there. I never asked enough questions.

When my parents were alive, we often visited my maternal grandparents’ gravestone at Madronia Cemetery in Saratoga. We lived nearby. It was easy to bring flowers. But for reasons I cannot explain, we never made the drive north to visit my paternal grandfather’s grave.

When my grandmother died, I was away at university during my senior year. It was finals week. My parents waited to tell me until after graduation so I would not be distracted. There was no funeral for me to attend. I had never set foot in the San Francisco National Cemetery at the Presidio.

Until last weekend.

My wife and I flew to Northern California to attend the twentieth anniversary Fallen Officer Foundation Ball. I am a founding member of this organization, which supports first responders and their families in times of need.

Since we were already there, we extended our stay so I could finally visit my grandfather’s grave.

San Francisco has always meant something to me. My father worked for many years as an Administrative Law Judge for the California Public Utilities Commission. During my university days I sometimes visited him in his office. Later, my wife and I made many trips to the city together.

But this visit was different.

When we parked at the Presidio and stepped out, the air felt softened, as if the fog had taken the edge off the morning. The lawn rolled gently downward toward rows of white marble. Tall cypress and eucalyptus stood along the margins, their branches leaning inland from years of coastal wind. The fog drifted sideways through the trees and across the grass. In the diffused light, the stones held a steady glow. The place was orderly and quiet.

When we reached my grandfather’s headstone, something rose in me.

Sixty-one years had passed before I came. I stood before the name of a man I never met, yet whose life shaped my own. He raised my father into the man who later raised me. I have tried to do the same for my son, who now serves in the military.

After a time, my wife walked back toward the car, leaving me alone on the hill.

A cool breeze moved through the trees. I felt a stillness settle in my chest. Not dramatic. Not overwhelming. Just steady. I thought of my father, gone since 2004. I imagined him standing beside his own father, watching me there.

Before I left, I gave a small salute.

The rest of our trip included dinner with a childhood friend and his wife, walks through Japantown, and hours of street photography. But the visit to the cemetery stayed with me.

I miss my father. I regret never meeting my grandfather. Yet standing there, I felt something close to gratitude. Gratitude that I had finally come. That I had remembered.

This is what we owe the dead. We remember them. We honor them. When necessary, we forgive them.

And we continue to love them.

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Noticings.

She took him by the hand and together they walked the esplanade among early evening shoppers. The boy stood out in his dinosaur pajamas, though these days even adults board planes in sleepwear, so no one paid them much attention.

She bought him a lollipop when he said he was hungry and they kept walking.

“Where are we going, Mommy?”

“I don’t know yet, sweetheart.”

And she didn’t.

The air felt better than the apartment. Cleaner. The breeze against her face made her feel, at least for a few minutes, that she had done the right thing.

Then it began to rain.

They walked faster. The boy was getting tired.

“Just a little further,” she said.

At the end of the esplanade stood the casino complex, glowing and busy. A man near the entrance glanced up from his phone as she pulled open one of the heavy doors with both hands.

Inside it smelled of smoke and stale beer and old carpet.

“It smells like Daddy,” the boy said.

“Yes,” she answered, tightening her grip on his hand as they moved past blinking machines and people leaning over green tables with drinks in front of them.

The boy slowed and then began to cry.

“What’s wrong, honey?”

“I lost my lollipop.”

She saw it bent on the carpet near a cigarette butt.

“It’s okay,” she said. “We’ll get something better.”

She picked him up and carried him down a hallway away from the noise, past shops and bars and restaurants where she didn’t bother reading the expensive menus.

They found a bench. She counted the cash in her wallet twice.

“Man, I love them dinosaurs,” a voice said.

A casino security guard stood nearby. His name tag read Floyd Jefferson.

“Always been a dinosaur man myself,” he said, nodding toward the boy’s pajamas. “They don’t allow them in the casino. But I’ll tell you what, we don’t see enough dinosaurs around here.”

“We’re just passing through,” she said.

“I got you,” he replied. “There’s a place down the hall. Mabel’s Café. It’s quiet.”

He crouched to the boy. “You take care of your momma now.”

The boy smiled for the first time that night.

Mabel’s Café looked like it had been waiting for 1957 to return.

Black and white tile floor. Red vinyl booths. Chrome stools. Behind the counter stood a soda fountain and old milkshake mixers. Everything felt solid and worn, as if it had been there longer than the casino around it.

A waitress in a pink dress led them to a booth. Across the room an elderly cowboy sat alone with a milkshake in front of him.

“Best chocolate shake you’ll ever have,” the waitress said softly to the boy.

They ordered grilled cheese sandwiches and one milkshake to share.

Rain slid down the window. In the rear parking lot a stray cat ran for cover beneath some bushes.

“That kitty’s like us,” the boy said.

“How’s that?”

“He doesn’t know where to go.”

She watched the rain for a moment before answering. “Maybe he does. Maybe he’s just figuring it out.”

The waitress walked over to the old gentleman’s booth.

“You trying to fatten me up again?” he said, smiling into his milkshake glass.

“Well, Jonce, an old cowboy like you needs to keep his strength up,” she said. “Never know when a bull might come looking for you.”

Jonce chuckled and tapped the side of his empty glass. “These days this is about all the riding I do.”

The cook laughed from the kitchen. It was an easy laugh. Nothing sharp in it.

The waitress brought crayons and paper. The boy bent over the table and began drawing dinosaurs with careful attention. She dropped a quarter into the little jukebox and let an old song play low between the booths.

The rain against the window and the low music from the jukebox blurred together. The milkshake glass sat empty between them. The boy leaned into her and closed his eyes.

They had only meant to rest for a minute.

Morning came softly.

Sunlight lay across the booth. A blanket covered them.

A thin cook in an apron stood nearby.

“Carl put that over you at shift change,” he said. “Didn’t want you catching cold.”

“I’m sorry,” she began, reaching for her purse.

“Don’t you worry. Old Jonce picked up your supper. Said he’d cover breakfast too.”

She stopped.

The cook scratched the stubble on his chin. “He told me he’s been around long enough to recognize a couple calves wandered off the ranch. Said to tell you you’ll find your way.”

The boy was already at the window, watching the stray cat sitting in the sun, licking one paw as if the rain had never happened.

She stood and joined him. The light pooling across the checkered floor looked different in the morning.

“Are we going somewhere now?” the boy asked.

“Yes,” she said.

She took his hand and together they left the diner.

Outside, the day waited.

They stepped back into it.

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Noticings.

I have been photographing people who are alone.

Like the young salesman pacing the front lot of a car dealership and stopping now and then in his solitude to stare down at his shoes, lost in thought. Or the short-sighted man sitting in a women’s clothing boutique among voiceless, frozen mannequins.

I thought maybe he was waiting for someone, but then he got up and left alone.

Or the woman walking in my neighborhood who lingered by a stop sign to look at the trees, then at her hands, then down at the ground, as if confused or disoriented or gripped by sorrow.

And yet none of these people looked abandoned. Or broken. Or lost.

They seemed to be looking inward.

In an outdoor shopping mall I photograph a man on a bench. He checks his phone, perhaps reading emails or listening to music. Then he puts the phone in his pocket and sits there, looking down at his shoes.

A breeze lifts his hair. Palm trees sway behind him. People and cars move past.

He remains still.

Where has he gone, I wonder. What is this place we retreat to in quiet moments, when the outside world dissolves like vapor and we traverse an inner landscape of memories and fears and dreams and passing thoughts.

What is this thing that pulls us there?

I have seen the woman by the stop sign in my neighborhood before.

Once she stood planted like a statue beside an old tree, bent forward slightly, as if the tree were whispering secrets meant only for her. Then she looked up at the blue sky, or maybe at the house finches in the branches overhead.

She stood there awhile. Then she resumed walking, as if steadied by whatever had passed through her.

On another day I lift my camera and capture a chef leaning over a kitchen counter.

He is motionless as servers and patrons pass by. It is as if something has frozen him in time. He has stopped preparing meals and appears briefly lost within himself. Before I leave the window, a waitress says something to him, and he straightens and returns to his work.

I wonder where he went in that quiet moment.

These photographs are ordinary scenes. Nothing announces itself as remarkable or meaningful.

Yet when I look at them, I sense that each person has briefly stepped away from the visible world. As if they wandered down a forest path into an open meadow of sunlight and grass and warmth.

An interior sanctuary where the noise recedes and something older begins to breathe.

I recently read Denis Johnson’s novella Train Dreams. Then I watched the film. It affected me so deeply that my wife bought the DVD for me, knowing I would return to it.

I have watched it several times now. Each time it leaves me with the same hush.

The story follows a man whose life becomes shaped by long stretches of solitude. Work in forests and along train tracks. Loss that cannot be repaired. Years that pass without spectacle.

His aloneness is not dramatic. It is simply the terrain he walks.

At one point a woman who lives in a forest watchtower tells him that the world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit. Like him, she has lost someone she loves. She understands pain.

She understands the healing power of solitude.

I have been thinking about that line while looking at my photographs. About how often we become hermits without intending to. An afternoon alone. A season after loss. A job that requires waiting. A quiet shift when no one comes through the door.

Perhaps our souls need that more than we admit.

On a cold, windy day I came across a feral cat in a commercial parking lot.

Its fur lifted in the gusts. It moved cautiously between cardboard debris and scrub. When it noticed me, it approached partway, not boldly but with tentative hope.

It paused a few feet away and studied my face.

There was hunger in that pause. Or perhaps a question.

We regarded one another across the distance. Then something in the cat shifted. Maybe my voice frightened it.

It turned and began to walk toward the darker edge of the lot, toward brush and shadow. Not hurried. Not frightened. Not unlike the way we sometimes retreat from the world.

I stood there after the cat had gone, longer than I needed to.

When I was a boy, there was a destitute man my father helped. His name was Ted Strollo. He had come from Italy many years earlier and lived mostly in the woods outside town.

One evening he wandered into town and was struck by a car.

My father witnessed the accident and went to the hospital with him. Later he brought Ted home to recover. My father, an attorney, helped him secure modest state benefits and a small apartment.

But Ted remained a hermit at heart.

He argued with a small radio in his apartment as if it were an adversary. He distrusted most comforts. Even in that small room he carried the woods with him. There was something in him that felt old and weathered and slightly feral. Not broken. Simply shaped by long companionship with solitude.

As a boy I did not understand Ted.

I only sensed that he belonged to another landscape. Now, when I think of the man in Train Dreams moving through forests and loss, I think of Ted. I think of how some people never fully leave their wilderness, even when they live among us. And I wonder if we mistake that for damage.

Perhaps there is dignity in remaining close to one’s meadow in the woods.

When I look at the man outside the dealership, or the woman beneath the stop sign, or the chef frozen over his counter, I do not see loneliness. I see small forests opening inside ordinary lives. I see people briefly held by the quiet breezes of their own thoughts.

Cars move through intersections. Doors open and close. Screens glow. The world marches onward with its mechanical noises and relentless pace.

Yet in parking lots and quiet shops and kitchen counters and neighborhood sidewalks, something necessary is happening. A listening. A pause.

A return to the self beneath the noise.

The world may need preachers and blinking screens and constant change. It may need commerce and technology and endless advancement.

But it also needs its hermits.

And sometimes, without naming it, that hermit is us.

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Noticings.

There comes a moment in most lives when staying begins to feel more dangerous than leaving. Nothing dramatic has happened. No crisis has arrived. And yet something inside begins to press.

The ground you have been standing on for years starts, quietly, to feel unreliable.

It may feel like restlessness or boredom or fear. More often it is simply the knowledge that the shape of your days is no longer enough.

The old stories say the young eagle is pushed from the nest.

I have never believed that. I suspect it goes on its own. There is a time when the nest, warm and safe, becomes too small for what the bird must become.

Safety has a way of disguising itself as wisdom. Nothing made to move can remain forever in still water. A ship may be safest in harbor, but that is not why it was built.

Fear appears then. It always does. The mind begins to reason. It weighs cost and timing and risk. It offers caution as wisdom.

Fear has only one argument, and it repeats it faithfully.

Do not go.

Most of the meaningful turns in my life did not come through careful planning.

They arrived when something in me grew tired of waiting. When caution loosened its grip. When I stopped asking whether I was ready and stepped forward anyway.

Years ago I was afraid to fly.

Not the ordinary unease, but the kind that quietly edits your life. Trips declined. Invitations refused. Maps folded back into drawers.

Then an opportunity came to study landscape painting with Scott L. Christensen. The reasons not to go assembled themselves easily. Money. Time. Work. Sensible excuses, all of them.

My wife listened and then shook her head. She knew what the excuses concealed.

So I packed my brushes and boarded the plane.

I remember every tremor of that flight. Every warning chime. Every tightening of the seatbelt. But I also remember the landing. The moment the wheels touched ground and I realized the world had not ended.

What followed were years of travel, study, and a widening life. Not because the fear vanished, but because it had been answered once and could be answered again.

Later the fear changed its form.

In street photography the risk is smaller but more intimate.

To lift the camera toward a stranger is to risk rejection, embarrassment, misunderstanding. The hand hesitates. The moment passes.

Until one day it does not.

You learn to speak first. To smile. To show the image. To let yourself be seen. Slowly the street opens. Faces appear. Stories offer themselves.

Life reveals itself in motion.

Not every leap leads upward. Some end in bruises. Some in regret. Some in lessons learned slowly and at cost.

But there is a particular sorrow reserved for those who never leave the edge at all. For the lives arranged entirely around safety. For the careful days that accumulate into a careful life.

Teddy Roosevelt wrote of the man in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood. He understood what most of us discover eventually. Error is the price of participation, and the only true failure is to remain untouched by effort.

The critic will always be present.

The cautious voice will always offer its counsel. But the life you want rarely waits for certainty.

What holds you now may be heavy.

Fear. Habit. An old wound. An old love. A body not yet forgiven. A past not yet released.

The nest, however warm, was never meant to be permanent.

At some point the fear of staying grows larger than the fear of leaving. Then, quietly and without ceremony, you step forward.

The ground loosens its hold. The air receives you.

And for the first time in a long while, you remember what it feels like to live in motion.

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Noticings.

Carmel-by-the-Sea was where we went to mend ourselves.

It was where the abrasions of ordinary life were softened by sand and sun and salt air. We went there to feel whole again, if only for a day or a weekend.

My father would fire up his Lincoln Continental, a car that otherwise slept quietly in the garage and emerged only for occasions that mattered. Relatives in town. A trip to the coast. My mother and I would climb in with our sweaters and books and suntan lotion, and I would bring my sketchbook, already imagining the day ahead.

The drive over Highway 17 was always an ordeal.

Curves. Hills. My father’s impatient, jerky driving. I held my breath through much of it. But once we turned off Highway 1 onto Ocean Avenue, my mother and I would exhale together, as if the town itself had taken us in and said we were safe now.

My father would find a parking spot near the Mediterranean delicatessen, where he bought lunch meats, cheeses, rolls, and sodas.

We would stop at the bakery for cookies. Then we would ease back into the Lincoln and roll down Ocean Avenue toward the beach parking area, unhurried and ready to enjoy our lunch.

From the trunk my father would pull his old green army blanket.

We carried everything across the warm sand and down the slope until we found a place that felt right, usually near one of the windswept cypress trees. The soothing breeze moved through the brush and branches.

We ate our sandwiches and cookies and drank our sodas. California chipmunks appeared, their striped backs flickering through the bushes. They crept closer, fearless and hopeful. I would hold a small piece of food in my hand and wait until one of them gathered the courage to take it.

Then we read. We let the sun work on us.

The surf moved in and out. The breeze cooled us. Full bellies and warm light conspired to pull us toward sleep. Even my father’s snoring could not prevent it. We lay there on the army blanket, motionless, probably looking like a trio of exhausted drunks.

We were not alone. Carmel had that effect on people.

Eventually we stirred. My father lost himself in one of his war novels. My mother walked the shoreline, studying the grand homes along the coast. I sketched the chipmunks and stole glances at the bikinis passing by, thirteen years old and keenly aware that something in me had begun to wake up.

The afternoon spent itself easily.

Then the sun dipped and the air cooled. We packed up, brushed off the sand, and climbed back into the car. My father drove us up the hill and toward dinner at the Hog’s Breath Inn, a favorite spot owned by Clint Eastwood.

I was a devoted Eastwood fan and always hoped we might see him there, pouring drinks behind the outside bar as people claimed he sometimes did.

But we never saw him there.

Inside, we studied the menu and tore into the warm French bread. My parents talked. I studied the paintings on the walls and the people around us. Across the table sat two young couples, early twenties maybe. The women were radiant, long-haired and tan and impossibly assured. I stared longer than I realized until my father interrupted.

“Don’t worry, Johnny,” he said with a small, knowing smile. “Your time will come.”

I felt embarrassed and strangely buoyed all at once. We ordered dinner. I kept scanning the room, still half-expecting Eastwood to appear. After dessert my father paid the bill and we stood to leave. I must have looked a little deflated. My mother placed her hand on my shoulder.

“Don’t worry, Johnny,” she said. “Someday you’ll bump into ol’ Clint.”

We never did, not during all those years in Carmel.

My father was right about the other thing, though. Time did come. There was a lovely girl in high school, and then others, and eventually a career in law enforcement and a marriage and a life that moved steadily forward, carrying me farther from those afternoons on the beach.

Years later I returned to the area for a two-week law enforcement management course. I was newly promoted, still learning how authority sat on my shoulders. One evening a few of us went out for drinks. I suggested the Hog’s Breath Inn, half joking about finally meeting Clint Eastwood. One of the others laughed and said Eastwood owned the Mission Ranch now. A beautiful place, he said.

So we went there instead.

In the piano bar I mentioned that I used to sing and play in a band in college.

One of my classmates pushed the idea that I should play something. The pianist said customers were not allowed to touch the piano anymore. Apparently someone had ruined that privilege long ago.

My friend mentioned that we were all police lieutenants in town for a class. He showed his shield. He bought the pianist a drink. I protested weakly.

Eventually the pianist spoke to a man in a three-piece suit. The man looked over at me. I waved, a ridiculous little gesture. The pianist returned and asked if I was any good.

“I’m decent,” I said.

“One song,” he said.

I slid onto the bench, nerves buzzing. The bar was full. People gathered close. I began playing Billy Joel’s “Piano Man.” Somehow my voice held. People sang along. Even the pianist surrendered the bench. For a few minutes the room belonged to me.

When I finished and stepped away, applause followed. The pianist leaned toward me and spoke softly.

“Clint enjoyed it,” he said. “He’s over there.”

In a dim corner Clint Eastwood sat with two men, a glass of red wine in his hand. I was surprised we hadn’t seen him earlier. I approached, heart pounding.

“Mr. Eastwood, thank you for letting me play your piano,” I said. “I’m John.”

He stood, shook my hand, and smiled.

“Nice job,” he said. “I hear you’re all policemen.”

We talked briefly. He wished us well. It was polite. It was surreal. After all those years, I had finally met him.

And for reasons I could not yet name, it left me feeling oddly hollow.

Later that evening I drove through Carmel alone. On impulse I turned up San Carlos Street and parked beneath a familiar lantern and sign.

Hog’s Breath Inn.

I walked the narrow path to the outdoor bar, past the dining room, past the table where we once sat together, my parents and me, full of food and longing and promise.

I took a seat at the bar and ordered a Diet Coke.

I thought of my parents. Of the beach. Of the blanket. Of my father’s steady reassurance. Of my mother’s quiet faith.

Meeting Clint Eastwood had been something, but it was not the thing.

The best things in life are not the idols we chase or the names we finally touch. They are the people who know us completely and love us anyway. The ones who shape us without asking for credit. Even when they are gone, they remain. Their voices. Their hands on our shoulders. Their confidence in us.

I finished my drink, looked around one last time, and walked back to the car.

The long way home felt right.

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Noticings.

The two old men met regularly for breakfast at the local café.

They sat on the outside patio where one of them smoked and they talked about careers and politics and faith. One was a retired pastor who co-founded a local Christian school. The other was an attorney and former mayor who led the effort in creating the city’s high school. They were elder statesmen of the city, though newer residents knew nothing about them, because change and modernity have little time for history.

The two contributed much to their community, but that mattered less than their deep and enduring friendship.

During my years as a local police officer I’d see them often, holding court in the shadows of the café’s side patio, far from the madding crowd of diners and noise and distractions.

They’d often lean in close to one another as if whispering long-held secrets or deep confessions.

I used to wonder what old men talk about in the winter of their lives, when careers wane and kids have grown and the cadence of life resembles the serenity of fog drifting through a park, passing slowly to reminisce and bask in the wonder and splendor of it all.

My life and career had just begun, but for these gentlemen time had grown thin.

They seemed to cherish their breakfast ritual. It was a refuge to welcome their lifelong friendship. The café servers would tell me how close the men were, how they’d drink gallons of coffee and hold marathon conversations.

Sometimes they’d embrace before leaving.

My dad always said cherish your friends.

Friends are gifts in life who touch you more deeply as the years accelerate and your past evaporates and you’re left wondering where it all went. Friends are the ones you count on when everyone else is gone and the world’s indifference comes into unwelcome focus.

Friends are like a warming campfire to escape the blizzards of life.

That’s what the café patio was for the old pastor and the graying attorney. It was a campfire where two old friends could huddle about the fire’s warmth, maybe share a blanket over their shoulders, and stave off the chill of aging and loss and the specter of mortality.

The attorney died first of cancer at age seventy-seven. Cigarettes probably caught up with him.

The pastor died nine years later at age ninety-one, surrounded by family. I like to think that when he crossed over that great expanse between this world and the next, his chain-smoking buddy was waiting on the other side with open arms.

And maybe they found a café with outdoor seating.

Friendships are sanctuaries.

Friendships are places of refuge between life’s commitments and obligations. And like any holy place, friendships need to be maintained and protected. Because jealousy and one-upmanship and neglect and insecurity and ingratitude can creep in and quietly do their damage.

If you don’t vanquish those forces they will threaten even the most sacred friendships. And lost friendships are a sad thing that can lead to loneliness in the winter of one’s life.

Friendships take effort.

People get busy or tired or neglectful. They take friendships for granted, which is dangerous, because people can walk away, and because no one lives forever, and you might run out of time.

Don’t neglect your sanctuary.

I meet a group of old guys every Wednesday in a local sushi joint.

They’ve been meeting for many years. I joined the group about eight years ago. I’m the youngest among these aging lions, and I’ve grown to cherish their wisdom and stories and grounded views of life.

We celebrated our friend Joe’s eighty-ninth birthday at one of our recent lunches.

Joe still goes to the gym every day and has all his wits about him, but he says there are balance issues now and his voice grows softer every year.

I remember in my twenties spying old gents in coffee clutches and pub gatherings and wondering what these stooped agelings would talk about, maybe slipped discs and uncooperative prostates.

But I was wrong.

Old men do commiserate over the indignities of aging, but such topics are mere ice breakers. The good stuff comes later. Talk of children and coffee in sunlit gardens with beloved spouses and dreams realized and others lost and mortality and regrets and most of all, for the ones who have allowed wisdom into their hearts, appreciation for life and longevity and love.

Joe blew out his candles, laughed at our terrible singing, and dove into his dessert.

The twinkle in his eye could be summed up in one word.

Gratitude.

A few years ago my wife and I booked a trip to Scotland.

We signed on with a small tour group of about ten people led by Mario and Shannon. We stayed in bed and breakfast spots, castles, and bespoke hotels. We piled into two mini-vans that zoomed all over the country, from Edinburgh to remote stretches of countryside and even the Highlands.

Our group breakfasted every morning together and at the end of each day we’d reunite for dinner. Sometimes we’d dine out, but often Shannon, a talented chef, cooked for us. And we’d sit around the table and share stories of our adventures past and present. And we’d laugh and sometimes even cry and we began to feel very much like a family.

Near the end of the trip our group enjoyed a luxury three-day cruise aboard the Glen Etive.

We dined together each evening, made stops along the voyage to motorboat ashore and visit a whisky refinery and other sights. The rest of the time, when not napping in our quarters, we’d read in the ship’s library or climb upstairs to the top deck and take in the breathtaking scenery.

One chilly afternoon I set aside the novel I was reading and ventured above deck.

There I found my wife and another lady in our tour group. They were seated together, sharing a blanket, contentedly reading and enjoying the fresh air.

I lifted my camera and took a photo.

Looking back on that trip, it occurs to me now that strangers can become sanctuaries too.

You can travel and dine together with strangers and before you know it they become like long-lost friends, people you can laugh and cry with, people you’ll hug when your journey is over.

And it doesn’t matter if you stay connected or not.

Companionship and human connection are sanctuaries we all need. They’re most easily found in family and close friends, but they also exist in the eyes and hearts of people you don’t know, people who, like you, crave the warmth of a campfire to escape the blizzards of life.

Offer to share your blanket.

Sit down beside them next to the fire. Let them know they’re not alone, that we’re all in this together. And then, in that blessed sanctuary, look into their eyes and you’ll see it.

Gratitude.

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Noticings.

There was a man singing with an accordion in Italy.

I was walking the sampietrini cobblestones when I came upon him, an aging busker serenading tourists and shopkeepers with a smooth tenor and upbeat melodies. He was dressed smartly in a jacket, crisp white shirt, necktie, and polished shoes. A cardboard Coca-Cola box, nearly empty save a few coins, sat on the ground beside him. Nearby rested a slender handcart and bag for transporting his accordion and folding chair.

He looked like a man from another time. A vestige of something refined and elegant, largely forgotten.

Tourists in shorts, tee-shirts, and flip-flops passed by without much notice. Most were peering into shop windows, taking selfies, or staring into their phones for directions. One woman giggled, tossed a coin into the box, and disappeared into a souvenir shop.

I felt sorry for the old fellow.

He was boxed in by a row of shiny motorbikes and scooters. A shopkeeper behind him stood absorbed in his phone, indifferent to the music and the lyrics. The man played on.

I raised my camera and took the photograph.

Days later, on the flight home, I scrolled through my images and stopped on the accordionist. His elegant suit. His polished shoes. His Hohner Verdi accordion. His folding chair and humble tip box. A man outnumbered by modern machines, ignored by shopkeepers and tourists, yet still performing.

Still chasing the dream, like Santiago and his marlin.

Except the old accordionist’s foe is not a shark. It is modernity.

This year I sent out sixty personalized Christmas cards.

I have fond memories of my father filling out Christmas cards at the kitchen table, addressing envelopes with his Parker 21 fountain pen. He always wrote a short note inside each card. I loved the mail that time of year. Colorful envelopes. Interesting stamps. Distinctive handwriting from family and friends. Each card felt like a small act of attention.

Of the sixty cards I sent, only a handful were reciprocated.

A few people sent holiday greetings through social media. Thoughtful, perhaps, but unmemorable. I do not print out digital messages and place them in the small Christmas card sled that sits on our hallway bureau. Digital messages are ubiquitous and require minimal effort beyond typing a few words. They carry little of the sender’s humanity. No handwriting. No tangible presence.

More and more, it seems people are cutting the thread.

Severing the strands that once bound them to history, friendships, and neighbors who once mattered but have drifted with time and distance. I do not know if this drift is benevolent or intentional. Perhaps some conclude that if you no longer live nearby, it is time to let go. Focus on those close at hand. Focus on the new.

Why invest in the past.

My son came home for Christmas, and I asked whether he planned to see a friend from his ROTC detachment.

“No,” he said. “He doesn’t reply to my messages anymore.” There had been no argument between them. No falling out. Just silence. The friend remains active on social media, despite no longer replying to my son.

Ghosting has become ordinary.

Which is strange, given our era of constant presence. Texts. Updates. Images. Proof of life offered every twenty-four hours. Photos of lunch. Photos of pets. Photos of workouts. Documenting the obvious and the unremarkable.

The tyranny of show me.

Yet people think nothing of cutting the thread. Dropping old friends because of distance, inconvenience, or quiet disinterest. And it is not only the young.

I have a childhood friend. Our families spent holidays together for years. I attended her wedding and got to know her husband. Eventually they moved out of state.

Each year I send a Christmas card with a note and return address. This year I added my email and wrote, “How are you doing? I would love to hear from you.”

Nothing.

Maybe there is a new social contract and I missed the memo.

Maybe Christmas cards, letters, and the effort of staying tethered to one’s past are now disposable. Perhaps busy lives excuse us from even trying.

Yet we still find time to scroll. To comment. To post. To react.

Some will argue that digital communication is more efficient, less wasteful, and more practical than cards and letters. Maybe they are right.

Maybe I am an anachronism. Maybe I am romanticizing the past.

Or maybe I simply refuse to cut the thread.

Letters and cards take time. That is the point. They require effort. They carry voice and presence. They become objects that can be kept in a shoebox and rediscovered years later, like perfumed letters from college sweethearts or a father’s handwritten advice.

This once mattered. Maybe it still should.

I wondered whether I should stop sending Christmas cards. Whether I should retreat into a small circle of immediate family and nearby friends. Whether I should ghost everyone else.

But the idea left a bad taste in my mouth.

I may refuse to participate in the exhausting modern maintenance of online presence, with its superficial digital ephemera. But I will continue to write my letters and send my cards, even if they go unanswered.

I do it because this once mattered. Because attention, time, and effort are not inefficiencies. They are signals.

You are telling someone they still matter. That you remember. That you will not abandon the friendship, the history, or the shared past.

You are saying you will not cut the thread.

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Noticings.

The statue stands in the yard without complaint.

Her name is Clarice. My wife and I adopted her years ago, drawn to the quiet, stoic serenity she carries with her.

Rain comes sideways.

Wind presses hard through the palms. The sky lowers itself into a single dark thought. Still she stands there, stone robes gathered in her hands, face calm, eyes cast downward as if she has already accepted what the day will bring.

She does not brace or resist, she simply remains.

I filmed her for a few seconds that afternoon. Nothing dramatic. No movement beyond what the storm provided. The camera held steady. The statue did the rest.

There was something mesmerizing in it, this idea of endurance without display, of stillness that does not ask to be admired.

Later that night my phone rang.

It was an old friend calling from a care facility. His voice was thinner than I remembered, worn down by age and illness and something harder to name.

He told me the television in his room didn’t work. He told me the nurses were curt. He told me he could no longer text because his eyesight had failed him. It was late on Christmas Eve, and the halls were already quiet in the way that makes a person feel set aside.

He had called others, I learned later. Many did not answer.

I turned the conversation toward photography. About the years when he carried a camera everywhere. How he documented events no one thought to remember. How he gave away prints like gifts without expecting anything back.

He laughed a little and for a moment the weight lifted. The past gently opened itself the way it sometimes does. I told him something I’ve come to believe, that memory can be a place you visit on purpose.

Close your eyes, I said. Go somewhere good. Call it up slowly. Let it take shape.

I told him about Carmel-by-the-Sea. About lying on an old green wool Army blanket my father brought with him wherever we traveled. About cold-cut sandwiches wrapped in wax paper. About glass bottles of Coke pulled from melting ice. About the sound of waves and the long pull of evening light.

He hummed softly to himself. We stayed there awhile.

Eventually he said his wife would be visiting soon. He said he was tired now. We said our goodbyes the way people do when neither is quite sure what the future holds. I told him I would call in a few days.

After we hung up, I went back outside.

The storm had not relented. Clarice still stood there, rain darkening the stone, wind threading its way through the garden. She did not look brave and she did not look afraid.

She looked resolved.

It occurs to me that growing old is not simply the loss of strength or speed or clarity of sight. It is the slow surrender of independence. The handing over of ordinary decisions. The reliance on strangers to be gentle when gentleness matters most.

Time does not pause out of courtesy. It does not slow for holidays. It keeps its pace, the same as it always has.

What remains, I think, is the manner in which we stand.

Not with clenched fists or speeches meant to impress, but with a quiet refusal to disappear. With memory, when memory is what we still possess. With kindness offered where it is still possible. With a phone call answered when others let it ring.

To stand. To remember.

We are on the cusp of a new year. For some, like my old friend, time grows thin and precious. For others, years and years remain to be shaped, misspent, redeemed, or carefully made into something that will one day sustain them.

Perhaps if we choose well now, if we pursue both grand adventures and small, ordinary moments worth remembering, we may stand a little firmer when the storms of aging arrive and when the long, echoing hallways of care facilities are all that remain.

To endure without spectacle.

And perhaps also to smile at those we love, to let them see a glint of appreciation in our eyes even when the body fails us or the spirit runs low. To offer gratitude when it costs something. To offer love even when we are tired and nearing the end of what we know.

These things matter more than we admit.

Gratitude and love go a long way in the late hours of a life. They sustain us, and they linger. They are contagious in the quietest way. They steady the people who remain after we are gone.

And so when the time comes, when we return to whatever it is we came from, perhaps something of us still stands. Not in grand monuments or remembered achievements, but in a simpler radiance. A warmth others feel without quite knowing why. Like a stone figure in a garden that has weathered many storms and still offers a sense of calm to those who pass by.

Something solid. Something upright.

Something that says, without speaking, that love was present here.

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Noticings.

I was in a coffee shop with a friend. We sat at a small table with our cups between us and spoke of ordinary things. His swimming workouts. Gatherings with friends. The coming holidays. Nothing pressing. Nothing urgent.

We listened. We answered. Our phones stayed in our pockets. The coffee cooled.

Time moved in its old, unhurried way.

Behind me a woman sat alone at another table. She held her phone in both hands and scrolled. I left for the men’s room and came back and she had not looked up. When my friend and I stood to leave I glanced over my shoulder.

She was still there. Still scrolling.

I understand it.

People sitting alone often turn to their phones. It fills the space. But there was something quietly sad about it.

People once brought books. She had them with her, unopened. People used to look up and take in the room. Sometimes eyes would meet. Sometimes kind words would pass between strangers. Coffee. Work. Life.

And now and then that brief exchange would widen into something lasting. Lifelong friendships. Marriages. Years later they might recall the afternoon when they first spoke. The coffee shop. The ordinary hour. How they decided to linger over a second cup and how they are still lingering twenty years later. Maybe their children know the story about the coffee shop.

All because Mom looked up.

I have not stopped thinking about that scene because it feels like a true picture of the moment we are living in. We are surrounded by distraction and fed without end. We are entertained. We are occupied. And yet something essential is thinning. Not information or convenience but attention and presence.

The slow pleasure of being human with one another.

The same thinning has entered our creative lives. Machines now produce sentences that pass for writing and images that pass for seeing. For many writers and artists a question has begun to surface.

What is the point?

Why labor over words or wait for the right light when the world seems satisfied with faster substitutions. Why pour out your soul or burn the candle perfecting your artwork. It can begin to feel pointless in a world consumed by trivial videos and endless distractions.

Yet I do not feel that way. I feel the opposite.

I believe this is the moment when making things matters most.

There is a writer named Paul Kingsnorth who has spent much of his life pushing back against what he calls the machine.

He began as an environmental activist and grew disillusioned, not only with politics but with the deeper story modern life tells itself. The story of endless progress. Endless growth. Endless solutions.

Over time his resistance widened. It was not only the destruction of the natural world that troubled him but the way technology reshapes how we see, how we live, how we understand what it means to be human.

Kingsnorth does not argue for abandoning tools or retreating from the world. His concern runs deeper than that. It is about what happens when efficiency becomes our highest good. When speed replaces depth. When convenience replaces meaning. When the machine begins to tell us who we are.

I think he is onto something.

When everything is smooth, people begin to crave texture. When everything is optimized, they begin to hunger for soul. When everything is abundant, meaning becomes rare.

We are surrounded by content and starving for substance. We are flooded with images and aching for something that bears the mark of a living hand.

People will become hungry for work that smells like a person made it. Not perfect. Not optimized. Not algorithmic. Human.

Creation, at its core, is an act of self-rescue.

A way of paying attention. A way of staying awake in a world designed to lull us into passivity. It is a way of saying I was here. I noticed. I lived inside this body and this hour and tried to give it shape.

If you feel called to make something, make it. Even if it does not sell. Even if no one notices. Especially now.

Sharing comes second. Applause comes last, or not at all. And that has to be enough.

This way of thinking has shaped how I try to live.

It is why I am drawn to minimalism and simplicity. Why I keep shaving away the extraneous and unnecessary. Not out of austerity but out of care. I want fewer distractions between myself and the people I love. Between myself and the work I feel called to do. Writing. Photography. Noticing the world and responding to it.

I am not interested in winning a race against machines. I am interested in remaining human, and in honoring the mysterious source from which our making comes.

Optimization promises ease, but it exacts a cost.

It trains us to value speed over depth, output over meaning, convenience over care. It rewards what can be measured and ignores what cannot. Attention can be captured at scale. Depth cannot. Presence cannot be automated.

Love resists efficiency.

An optimized life leaves little room for silence, for boredom, for the patience required to notice anything worth noticing. It fills every pause. It crowds out the interior life. And when that life begins to thin, so does our capacity to make anything honest or true.

The unoptimized life is not inefficient by accident. It is inefficient by choice. It lingers. It waits. It accepts friction. It leaves space for conversation, for reading, for walking without purpose, for making things slowly and often imperfectly.

It makes room for the human.

I try to live this way where I can. I simplify. I remove what distracts.

I choose fewer tools and deeper attention. I spend my time with people I love. I write sentences slowly. I walk the streets with a camera and wait.

I am not interested in keeping up.

I am interested in noticing. In bearing witness. In making something small and honest out of the hours I am given. I do not claim to have all the answers, and I am not opposed to using technology where it genuinely serves us, so long as we do not lose our humanity, flaws and all.

I am not interested in winning a race against machines. I am interested in remaining human, and in honoring the mysterious source from which our making comes.

Do not give up. Do not believe there is no point, because there is.

The world does not need more derivative content or frictionless perfection. It does not need prose polished into lifelessness or images scrubbed of human presence. It needs work that bears the marks of its maker.

What the world wants, what we all deserve, is the perfection of human imperfection.

Pay attention. Make something honest. Leave behind a trace of having been here. In a world rushing toward efficiency, choose presence. In a culture chasing perfection, choose the human.

That’s where the life is.

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Noticings.

Note to readers:

This short story appears in my book The Morning Fox: Stories of Love, Loss, and Hope. I offer it here to share something special.

Michael Williams is a musician and a ten-year Army combat medic. He composed, performed, and recorded an original song inspired by this story. It is stunning and beautiful.

Read the story, and then at the end listen to Michael’s moving piece.

One wrong turn can change the entire trajectory of your life.

Exhausted, sipping a bitter cup of gas station coffee, I was determined to get home by daybreak. I don’t like driving through the night, but the writer’s conference I attended for the last three days ate up most of my accrued vacation time. I needed to get home, leaving just one day to unpack, do laundry, and sleep before work the following day.

Not that I love my work.

Being a copywriter for a digital company is a means to an end. A bridge to the future, when my novels hopefully reach a broader audience and financial success.

GPS is a wonderful thing when it works. But sometimes high mountains, poor cellular range, and the alchemy of fate set you on a different course and a wrong turn.

The turn off the main highway felt astray, but whenever I ignore GPS, I usually regret it. So I kept driving for miles, as the road narrowed and the surrounding countryside disappeared into curtains of pitch black.

“Where the hell am I?” I said to myself. Then the GPS went haywire and its little voice blurted out “Re-calculating…proceed to the nearest route.”

“Great.”

There was a gravel driveway in the distance, leading to a small house and a delapidated barn. An old tractor sat in the yard. The house was dark, but a light shined in the barn.

It was nearly 10 PM, and I didn’t want to startle whoever lived there. I parked near the barn. I heard classical music (a waltz) when I opened my car door. It was coming from within the barn.

I walked over to the closed barn door and called out, “Hello? Sorry to bother you, can you help me?”

Nothing.

I knocked loudly on the barn door. “Hello, is anyone here?”I was about to knock again when a deep voice startled me from behind.

“Can I help you?”

I spun around, barely able to make out the dark figure standing in the shadows nearly ten feet from me. His raspy, baritone voice bore a slight southern accent.

“Yes, hello. I’m so sorry to interrupt you at this hour. I’m afraid I’m lost. Made a wrong turn.”

“Hard to say if turns are wrong or right. I’ll wager they’re just turns. It’s up to us to decide what to do with them.”

I couldn’t decide if the man’s response was odd or wise. He stepped forward, out of the shadows, into the ambient light from the barn. I felt like I was in an episode of The Twilight Zone.

He was a bear of a man. Bald, bearded, wearing overalls. A large leather glove covered his left hand. Perched on the glove was a magnificent white barn owl.

“Penelope and I were about to dance together, but then the motion detector went off in the barn, and we knew we had company. We don’t get company, especially at this hour, so we slipped out into the night. We’re both comfortable in the dark.”

The owl repositioned slightly on the glove, spinning its head around to look directly at me. The man came closer. Despite his size, he moved silently and gracefully.

“I’m sorry, you and the owl were about to…dance together?”

“Yes,” the man said with a half grin. “We’ve been dancing together for a few years now. The music and movements seem to calm us both. See, we both have a little PTSD. But then I guess no living thing in this world escapes life’s slings and arrows.”

Part of me wanted to run back to my car, lock the door, and get the hell out of there. But my writer’s brain kept screaming, “This is gold! You can’t make this up. Maybe you should go dance with the big guy and his owl!”

“Can’t say I’ve ever danced with an owl before,” I said, surprising myself.

“Jake,” he said, extending his meaty right hand.

“Pleased to meet you. I’m Patrick.” His rough hand swallowed mine.

We entered the barn, which surprised me. I expected farm equipment, or maybe a woodworking shop. Instead, there was a large painting easel beside a desk that held a palette, brushes, sketchbooks, and various containers for mineral spirits, mediums, and paint tubes.

There was a lovely landscape painting on the easel, depicting a sort of nocturne mountain scene, in muted colors. It was beautiful, haunting, and solemn.

“Wow, is this your work?”

“Yep. Painting relaxes me. And it’s a great way to channel what I feel when I’m out there, in God’s country.”

“Do you sell your work?”

“Here and there. Mostly, I paint for myself. Galleries are about commerce, and collectors are sometimes about vanity. Neither helps an artist in pursuit of truth and authentic expression.”

Jake walked over to a large record player on a table next to a stack of old vinyls. He slipped a record off the player and placed a new one on it.

“I like Tchaikovsky, but Penelope prefers Strauss. Whenever I play ‘The Blue Danube,’ I swear her eyes get bigger,” Jake said.

I pointed to the record player and said, “I see you’re an old-school guy. Do you prefer vinyl music?”

“Vinyl records have grooves that allow for an open, resonant quality. Digital compresses sound. It lacks open space. And you need open space to hear the warmth, richness, and depth of the music. Especially the divine music of Tchaikovsky and Strauss.”

“Who is this guy?” I thought to myself.

There were some pops and cracks as the record began spinning, and then the music opened up and filled the barn.

Jake ran his right hand across Penelope’s neck and back, looking tenderly into her eyes and saying, “Are you ready, my dear?”

And the two of them began a sort of slow waltz to the music. I could hear Jake hum slightly, and the owl seemed to twirl and sway on the glove as they gracefully crossed the dusty barn floorboards.

It all felt so surreal.

Jake worked his way over to me. He slid the glove off his hand and said, “Give me your left hand.” I reluctantly held out my hand, and he slid the glove on it, with the owl repositioning along the way. Her weight on my hand and forearm felt solid and strangely satisfying.

“Now, hold her close, and feel the music,” Jake said. “Feel her presence, her spirit. And when you’re ready, do your best to sway, step, and waltz to the rhythms of the music.”

I closed my eyes for a moment and felt the owl move slightly. As if she were saying, “Go on now.”

Before long, I was swaying and moving to the music. My self-consciousness gave way to the moment, the music, and the presence of this magnificent owl who was riding across the barn floor to my waltzing.

I felt a twinge of emotion, fullness, and joy.

“Yes, now you’ve got it,” Jake said. “You feel it, don’t you? It’s like a divine peace. I think it’s good for the soul.”

We took turns for another half hour, waltzing with Penelope. And finally, Jake strolled over to the record player, switched it off, and said, “Well, let’s make you some coffee for the journey home.”

We walked across the yard. The cloud cover gave way and the gibbous moon illuminated the pathway to the house.

For the first time, I noticed a sign above the front door to the house. It said, “Jake’s Backcountry Tours, Birdwatching & Restoration.”

“So you give tours,” I said, pointing to the sign.

“Yep. After my military service, I retired out here to paint and heal. I went hiking and birdwatching. It’s how I found Penelope, injured and stuck in a barbed wire fence. She was little back then, and I mended her wing as best I could, but she can’t fly very well, so she lives with me now. We give tours for out-of-town folks. Teach them about the birds, and help them heal a bit too.”

“Heal from what?” I asked.

“Life’s injuries. The noise and blinking screens and keeping up with the Joneses. The people we see are all a bit broken inside. They’re searching for some peace. Some hope. And nature has all of that, in spades,” Jake said.

We stepped inside the house. I noticed rows of bookcases, a huge leather reading chair, and notebooks. Jake said, “Make yourself comfortable,” before he disappeared into the kitchen to brew coffee.

I picked up a leather journal on Jake’s reading chair and opened it to a random page. The handwriting was immaculate. There were random notes, thoughts, poems, and quotations. I read one in the middle of the page:

“Every night the owl with his wild monkey-face calls through the black branches, and the mice freeze and the rabbits shiver in the snowy fields—and then there is the long, deep trough of silence when he stops singing, and steps into the air.”—Mary Oliver, New and Selected Poems, Volume One

Jake poked his head around the kitchen doorway. “Want anything in your coffee?”

“A little milk or cream, if you have it.”

He disappeared and I flipped to a different page in the journal, feeling guilty for snooping. Another quote was penned neatly at the top of the page:

“We are healed of a suffering only by experiencing it to the full.”—Marcel Proust

“Ah, Proust. Have you read him?” Jake startled me. He was right in front of me, holding two mugs of steaming coffee. He handed me one, nodded at his journal, and said, “It takes a lot of patience to get through ‘In Search of Lost Time.’ Talk about a guy preoccupied with the minutia of experience.”

“I read a bit of Proust at University…Swann’s Way, I think. All I remember were Proust’s long sentences,” I said.

“The German Jewish philosopher and essayist Walter Benjamin called Proust’s writing ‘the Nile of language’ which ‘overflows and fructifies the regions of truth.’ I found Proust a bit long-winded. Hemingway suits me better,” Jake said.

We sat in Jake’s living room library. I told him that I was an aspiring writer stuck working as a copywriter. I talked about the writing conference I spent the last three days at.

“I wouldn’t spend a lot of time at those conferences,” Jake said. “They’re all marketing sessions, commercialization, and genre piffle, platform discussions, ethics and artificial intelligence talks, cultural appropriation handwringing, book cover design strategy, and agents and publishers bloviating about what they think the reading public, shrinking though it is, actually want to consume. You’d be far better to read great literature, let it percolate in your creative brain, and then channel the results into your prose.”

“How do you know so much about all this?” I asked.

“Well, I read…and I dated a woman who was a novelist,” Jake said. “She was disgusted with the industry, where publishing is going. Best-sellers today are mostly celebrity tell-alls, shallow political rants, insipid self-help twaddle, and formulaic thrillers by the same established authors. People lost their attention span for great literature. They’re too busy watching cat videos on YouTube to tackle Dostoevsky or Kafka. And the schools, God help us. They don’t teach kids how to read and write. They’re too busy exploring gender, race, class, and sexual orientation. Talk to a university graduate today and ask what they’ve read. They know ibram x kendi, but never heard of the Brontë Sisters.”

“Well, it’s important that young people read today’s thinkers. Contemporary thought. Not just the old, white, dead guys. Right?” I said.

“Sure, a broad perspective is good, but not at the exclusion of the Western canon. So many of today’s writers are wrapped up in dreadful politics. Eloquence, elegance, and artful prose are fading. As well as deep thought, about life and purpose and meaning. A lot of today’s writers omit what they don’t know.” Jake sipped his coffee and stroked Penelope, who was perched next to him on a stand.

“Omit what they don’t know?” I asked.

Jake reached and grabbed another of his notebooks. Scraps of paper with handwritten notes fell out of it as he opened the pages. “Ah, here we are,” he said, clearing his throat. “Ernest Hemingway.”

And then Jake began reading:

“If a writer of prose knows enough about what he is writing about he may omit things that he knows and the reader, if the writer is writing truly enough, will have a feeling of those things as strongly as though the writer had stated them. The dignity of movement of an ice-berg is due to only one-eighth of it being above water. A writer who omits things because he does not know them only makes hollow places in his writing. A writer who appreciates the seriousness of writing so little that he is anxious to make people see he is formally educated, cultured or well-bred is merely a popinjay. And this too remember; a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer. A serious writer may be a hawk or a buzzard or even a popinjay, but a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.”

“Forget about all those popinjays at the writing conference, Patrick. Read the best books. Travel. Talk to interesting people. Keep journals. Write it all down. And then, when you think you’re ready, publish your stories. If they’re good enough, if they move people and make them think, you’ll find an audience,” Jake said.

“I hope that’s true. I mean, you said yourself, people are losing their attention spans. They’re all on social media now,” I said.

“Yes, but there’s still enough of us left. The ones who crave something more. Something truer, deeper, and life-affirming. The cream rises to the top. Good books still get published. And maybe, just maybe, it’s not too late to inspire others to dump the YouTube nonsense and feed their minds and souls with something far better.” Jake stood up and motioned to follow him.

I took one last look at his library, and Penelope, who was napping on her perch.

In the kitchen, Jake poured another cup of coffee for me into a travel mug. “Keep the mug, Patrick, I’ve got several.”

Jake drew a little map with his fountain pen on a scrap of paper, walked me to my car, and said, “I’m glad you turned down my driveway and danced with Penelope and me. Fate’s a funny thing, isn’t it? Also, remember what Hemingway said, ‘a serious writer is not to be confounded with a solemn writer’ and ‘a solemn writer is always a bloody owl.’ I think Penelope would concur.” And then Jake laughed heartily.

“This has been quite an experience. It was a pleasure meeting you, Jake, and Penelope too.”

He patted my shoulder reassuringly as I got in the car. I backed up, drove down the driveway, and saw him waving in my rearview mirror.

Jake’s map lead me back toward civilization, and soon I was on the main roadway. I stopped at a gas station to fill up, use the bathroom, and buy some snacks.

At the cashier stand, I noticed a framed photo on the wall of Jake and Penelope above brochures with the words, “Jake’s Backcountry Tours, Birdwatching & Restoration.”

The cashier noticed me and said, “People from all over book weekends with Jake. He used to be one of those special forces dudes in the military. I guess he saw some serious shit. It affected him. But now he’s like this wise philosopher/artist,” the cashier said.

“Yeah, I met him. I made a wrong turn, or maybe it was fate. Anyway, he helped me out,” I said. “He gave me a lot to think about. Especially about my writing. How to become a solemn writer.”

“Did you dance with the barn owl?” the cashier asked.

“You know about the owl? Yeah, I danced with the barn owl. It was…I don’t know. It was…” but before I could finish the cashier interrupted.

“It was magical, wasn’t it? People who visit Jake always say it’s a life-changing experience to dance with the barn owl. My wife says there are angels on this earth. Sometimes they’re people, and sometimes they’re animals. Maybe even an owl?” the cashier said.

“Maybe even an owl,” I said with a smile.

I got back in my car, entered the highway, and settled in for the long drive home.

I turned on the radio, spinning the dial to find a station amidst all the crackles and static. Finally, I landed on one, strong and clear, as the announcer said, “That was Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1. And now, settle in, relax, and enjoy the classics here at KCBN 89.5 on your FM dial, home of the magic of classical music.”

I’m not a religious man, and what some people call magic or fate, I call coincidence.

But that was before Johann Strauss’s ‘The Blue Danube’ waltz began playing on the radio, and I could feel the magical Penelope on my hand again, and that same feeling of peace and quietude filled my heart.

In that instant, I knew I would become a solemn writer, and that sometimes taking a wrong turn is how you find your future.

The following song was written and shared generously by Michael Williams.

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Noticings.

One of the quiet gifts of travel is not what you plan to see, but what you stumble upon when you are unhurried and slightly lost.

That was the case years ago in New Orleans, a city held between river and lake, memory and music. My wife and I had arrived for a few days of wandering. Jazz floated from doorways. Beads clung to balconies, remnants of forgotten celebrations. There’s an old presence about the city, its ghosts and their stories hovering beyond sight but felt nonetheless.

On the afternoon of our arrival my wife wasn’t feeling well, so I set out alone. I found a coffee shop, ordered a latte, and sketched quietly in a Moleskine notebook. There is something grounding about the scratch of pen on paper in an unfamiliar place. It slows you down. It reminds you that you are a body, not a browser.

Walking back toward our hotel, I noticed a pair of large wooden doors on Orleans Avenue. Locked. Dark. Above them, a simple sign: Arcadian Books and Art Prints. I could not tell whether the shop was closed for the day or closed forever, but I filed it away the way one does with promising thoughts.

That evening, my wife felt better. After dinner we wandered beneath the galleries and trees, the air cooling, the streets loosening their grip on the day. When we turned onto Orleans Avenue again, the doors were open.

Warm light spilled onto the sidewalk.

The proprietor stood outside, and without a word, we stepped in. Crossing the threshold of that bookshop felt like crossing time. Every inch of the interior was filled with books, stacked, leaning, bowing under their own weight. There was no clear order, only a kind of elegant chaos. Narrow passageways wound between towers of forgotten words. Dust hung in the air. The smell of paper, age, and neglect was unmistakable.

This was not a place designed for efficiency. It demanded patience. Attention. A slow hand.

As more people entered, the space tightened. Books shifted. Somewhere behind us a soft thud, another volume giving up its place on a high shelf, surrendering to gravity after years of being ignored. Some fell cleanly. Others landed awkwardly, spines twisted, pages flared open as if in protest.

I remember feeling an unexpected pang of sorrow for them.

In an age of glowing screens and endless feeds, books have become almost archaeological. Analog containers from a slower civilization. They ask something of us that modern technology does not: time, silence, sustained attention. They cannot be skimmed without consequence.

And yet, here they were, waiting.

An electric fan had been wedged improbably between two book arches, defying logic. Prints lay stacked against the walls. Black and white photographs stared back from another century. It felt less like a shop and more like a sanctuary for ideas that refused to disappear.

Old bookshops know things.

They know about grief, because they house the words of those who have lost children, spouses, entire worlds, and lived to write about it. Somewhere on those shelves was a battered copy of Joan Didion, holding vigil.

They know about guilt. Dante waits patiently. Dostoevsky, too.

They know about love, its longing, its ruin, its endurance. Austen. The Brontës. Poets who understood that the heart has always been a difficult instrument to play.

They know about childhood, and the ache of remembering who you once were. A worn copy of Charlotte’s Web can undo a grown man if he’s not careful.

And they know something else, something harder to articulate.

They know that wisdom is not optimized.

These days we are told by algorithms, by platforms, by the architecture of our devices that faster is better. Shorter. Louder. More visual. We are encouraged to watch rather than read, to scroll rather than sit, to consume rather than contemplate.

The historian Yuval Noah Harari has warned that we are no longer merely dealing with artificial intelligence, but with something closer to alien intelligence. Systems that do not share our biology, our slowness, our need for meaning, but nonetheless shape what we see, what we believe, and eventually who we become.

Information can now be generated, altered, personalized, and erased at a scale the human mind was never designed to navigate. Reality itself begins to feel provisional.

Books resist this.

A printed page does not update itself overnight. It cannot quietly change its mind. Its errors and insights remain fixed, accountable. A book is a moral object in this way. It stands behind what it says.

I thought of my father.

He used to tell me about evenings gathered around the radio, listening to voices conjure entire worlds. No screens. No images. Only imagination. When I was young, I dismissed this as nostalgia. Memories of a dinosaur.

Now I understand.

I have my father’s books. Sometimes I open them and find his handwriting in the margins, notes, underlines, small disagreements with the author. Long after his death, those markings feel like messages slipped forward through time. Proof that he was here. That he thought. That he wrestled with ideas the way we all must.

You can’t take a fountain pen to a screen.

Standing in that old bookshop, surrounded by dust and stories and quiet endurance, I felt the same connection. Human thought, suspended. Waiting for another human to meet it halfway.

We are organic beings.

We think best with our hands involved, turning pages, loading film, filling notebooks with ink. Cameras that force us to wait. Pens that slow our sentences. Journals that do not autocomplete our thoughts.

There is something almost divine about that friction.

Technology will continue to advance. It always has. But the human condition remains stubbornly the same. We still ache for meaning. For beauty. For truth that has been lived, not synthesized.

Old bookshops know this.

They stand quietly, holding the accumulated testimony of centuries, asking only that we enter without rushing. That we listen.

That we remember who we are before the doors close for good.

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Noticings.

It’s not every day you meet a real cowboy.

One who rides angry two thousand pound behemoths full of muscle and violence and horns anxious to maul. The average bull rider, still in his late teens or early twenties, weighs little more than a hundred and fifty pounds. The enraged bulls they strap themselves to are ten times their weight.

Creatures built to break men.

Consider Lane Frost. He died of massive internal injuries after a bull named Takin’ Care of Business struck him in the back with its horn. He had completed a successful ride and dismounted. He landed in the mud within the bull’s line of sight. The beast struck him with a force that broke ribs and severed an artery. He managed to stand and take a few steps before collapsing.

He was twenty five.

His death is why professional bull riders wear protective vests now. Still, death is never far when you tempt fate on the back of a behorned monster.

I did not know these facts the day I met the young cowboy.

My wife and I were wandering the south hall of the Las Vegas Convention Center during the annual Cowboy Christmas show. I had my Fuji rangefinder with me and was clicking away when I spotted the PBR booth and a real cowboy standing beside it.

“So you ride those beasts?” I asked.

“Yes sir,” he said, offering a firm handshake.

“You have my respect,” I said.

“It’s a hoot, sir.”

Like a starstruck teenager I asked for a photo. There was something in the young man’s eyes. A reserved politeness. A radiance beneath it that felt like goodness and life affirmed.

I handed the camera to my wife. She took the shot.

It felt good to meet a real cowboy. I respected his courage, despite the fact that I view bull-riding as cruelty to animals.

My wife knows when to wrest me away from myself. I have monastic habits. I like the sanctity of my office, my books, my quiet places where words gather and stories take shape. She knows this. She also knows that a writer cannot rest forever on past adventures.

A creative saw grows dull if it never cuts new wood.

“Grab your camera, we’re going out,” she’ll say. I have learned that she is right about these things.

Writers need experiences. Which is how I found myself at Cowboy Christmas. How I met that young cowboy and felt the clarity in his gaze.

The eye is the lamp of the body.

Whenever I follow my wife out into the world, I look into the eyes of the people I meet. As a young cop I was taught to watch the hands but also the eyes because they tell you much.

Like the morning a frightened girl told the principal she had almost been abducted. Patrol officers scoured the town for the suspect. I was assigned to interview the girl and produce a composite sketch.

I knelt to meet her gaze. I saw fear and uncertainty and something else I could not name. She fed me details. I drew quickly. Each time I asked if I had it right she nodded with earnest conviction.

“Yes, that’s him. That’s what he looked like,” she said.

It was too easy.

I set the sketchpad down and looked into her eyes. She looked away. I said her name softly and she returned my gaze. That was when I saw the thing behind her fear. The thing shaping this story she had told.

Calculation.

“You know, sometimes we don’t want to get into trouble,” I said. “Sometimes we say things to save ourselves.”

“Yeah.”

“And if we make a mistake, it’s best to own up to it before things get out of hand.”

“Yeah.”

Her eyes softened. The calculation faded. Soon the truth poured out. She had been late before. She got distracted that morning. She feared more trouble. So she invented the story.

Relief washed through her. The eyes tell you when the burden lifts.

All that remained in her eyes was a kind of quiet penance.

Composite art school taught me to hear truth behind unlikely words. To listen for the soul behind the eyes.

Part of the training focused on interview skills. A sketch is only as good as the witness describing it. We were taught to do more than gather facial features. We were taught to study the person’s eyes as they spoke.

People’s souls reside behind their eyes.

Sometimes the eyes tell you there are lies beneath the surface. More often, in the case of victims and witnesses, the eyes radiate with truth. We were taught to trust that truth even when it seemed impossible.

For the final exam in composite art school we interviewed fellow students who had been given a photograph of a “suspect.” They had one minute to study the image before it was taken away. Then they described the person to us and we drew the composite.

My partner described a man whose general features were ordinary enough. Afro. Scar on his forehead. But then she added something that stopped me.

“His eye was all messed up,” she said. “Like one eye was bigger and pushed toward the end of his face. Almost like an elephant sat on his head and squished it.”

I set aside my disbelief and drew the man she described.

The result looked strange. Artistic ego has no place in composite work. The job is not to make a pretty portrait. The job is to draw a memory.

When I finished she looked at the sketch and said, “You nailed it.”

I doubted her. Until the instructor held up my sketch beside the original photo and smiled. She handed them back to me and said, “Well done.”

Those two images appear here for that reason. To show how truth sometimes arrives in unlikely form, and how the eyes can guide us even when the mind hesitates.

Ever since composite art school, I pay closer attention to eyes.

Another night my wife took me to an outdoor center filled with holiday lights and music. Performers played violins under the glow of Christmas decorations.

Even from a distance I saw the glint of joy in the performers’ eyes. It radiated outward, warming the gathered crowd.

Nearby, a woman held a small dog in a sweater. The little creature seemed as mesmerized as the rest of us. His eyes were bright and content.

“You two look great, do you mind if I take a photo?” I asked.

The woman hesitated. I saw the question in her eyes. Can I trust this man.

“I’m a writer,” I said. “I take candid street photos. They inspire my work. Only if you are comfortable.”

Her eyes shifted.

Wariness eased and she agreed. I took the photo and thanked her. As we walked away I wondered what stories lived behind her cautious, intelligent gaze.

It was chilly and we were getting ready to go home.

As we crossed the street there was a beautiful, white, horse-drawn carriage parked by the curb. Folks were getting ready to climb aboard for a ride through the center. It was quite festive.

I raised my rangefinder and captured the moment.

We looked in some shop windows and strolled around a little longer and finally made our way back to the car. The horse-drawn carriage had circled around the center and stopped not far from where we were parked.

And that’s when I saw him.

An old cowboy. Seventies perhaps. Rugged jeans. Scarf. Weathered hat. He looked cut from another century. He kept to the edges of the crowd, slipping behind beams and trees and reappearing without notice.

Our eyes met for a breath.

His were blue and watery from the cold. Intelligent and tired and wise. There was kindness in them. The same kindness I had seen earlier that day in the young bull rider. A quiet readiness. A willingness.

The eye is the lamp of the body.

I am grateful my wife pulls me from the cloister of my study.

I may grumble, but I am better for it. After hours of reading and writing, I sometimes wash my face and look into my own eyes in the mirror. I see contentment there. Gratitude. The tired happiness of a man who knows he has been given much. Family. Work that matters. Memories of those who shaped him and now reside in the heart.

In the end, this is what we seek in the eyes of others. Love, even when unspoken. The glint of goodness in neighbors. The warmth we sometimes glimpse in strangers.

It is what I saw in the young cowboy and the old one. What the frightened girl felt for her parents. What dwells in my wife’s eyes even when she is irritated with me.

Love burnishes the eyes from within. Its warmth lifts others. Makes them feel less alone. The eyes become lanterns leading us through the darkness toward whatever light remains in this world.

Pay attention to eyes. Yours and theirs. They hold great power if used with care. They are the nearest doorway to the soul we possess.

Use them wisely, before they close forever.

Before you go

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