I don’t think I’ll ever forget the chickens.

When I was but a small lad, my father got to work one weekend at the edge of the woods behind the house. He fashioned a collection of old telephone stumps, boards, and chicken wires into a coop.

The next day there were chickens inside.

Chickens clucking, kicking, roosting. Gold ones, black ones. There was even a friendly rooster that my sister named “Skippy.”

I don’t recall where my father got the notion that we should have chickens, but I loved the idea.

I was a sensitive boy who loved animals and so the chickens were a delight. My favorite part was when we got to hold them and feel their warm feathers and life-force close to our chests. I’d cradle one in my arms as she clucked and settled into my protective embrace.

One day we found the coop’s door ajar. It had been improperly latched.

Skippy was missing. Somewhere on a deer trail beyond the house we found clumps of his feathers scattering in the breeze.

I remember my father’s cursing and my sister’s tears.

I listened to a podcast last night. It was an interview with one of my favorite authors, Mark Helprin.

If you don’t know him you may know the film Winter’s Tale, based on his epic novel. The story is set in a mythic New York City. It invokes magical realism, a flying horse, and deep philosophical themes.

I suppose the flying horse represents many things, like destiny, love, grace, and the soul’s freedom.

That’s what I’ve been ruminating about lately.

The soul’s freedom. The deep longing for release from things that hold us back. Things that oppress the light within our souls. Things that feel foreign and complex and stifling.

In the podcast Helprin laments the decline of readership today. Where once his novels fetched over a million readers, now he’s lucky if he can achieve a fraction of that.

It’s a common lament among writers.

People don’t read like they used to. Focus and concentration have atrophied. It’s easier to watch Netflix or mindless videos on YouTube.

I’m aware of this every time I see my readership decline.

A retired teacher walks her dog through my neighborhood and often stops to visit with me and my dog. I mentioned a book I was reading and she said, “Oh, I used to love to read. I read to my students, too. But now I can’t seem to concentrate. It’s more of an effort, so I just click on the television instead. Isn’t that terrible?”

Yes, it’s terrible.

But I didn’t say that. I nodded in agreement.

Mark Helprin came on the podcast to discuss his latest novel, Elegy In Blue.

The book’s protagonist is an unnamed 82-year-old man. He’s was once a Wall Street professional who now lives alone in a studio apartment in Brooklyn. He has lost his wealth and previous home.

He also lost the ones he loved.

From his father to his son and then his beloved wife. Stolen from him by war and violence.

Reviews for the novel hint at an act of self-defense or vigilantism. The old man becomes a recluse, his only allegiance to ghosts from the past.

The themes in the novel include grief, remembrance, and enduring love. As well as public rage and justice.

But the most important theme, at least for me, revolves around this:

Helprin is writing about himself and the passage of time.

Not that he’s experienced the selfsame losses as his protagonist, but at 78 years old, Helprin has lived long enough to know the weight and fear and loneliness of losing the things you love.

Helprin is writing a love letter to his generation.

I’ve been thinking about leaving Substack.

It’s noisy here and I don’t like the bloat and app intrusions and clunky comment system. I loathe subscriptions, unreliable delivery, endless recommendation games that complicate email signups, and the sense that I don’t have control of my website.

I moved to Substack to escape my antiquated, time-consuming, frustrating old website. Not to mention all the spammers leaving self-promotional blog comments and malware.

I guess no setup for online writing is perfect.

But I may move the show to my new, primary website at johnpatrickweiss.com. Add a decent email newsletter provider like Kit or MailerLite. Reclaim my independence. Continue my audio narrations. Add my cartoons and a street photography gallery.

Of course, there would be some pain.

I’d have to “clean” my current Substack email list of dead weight. The subscribers who aren’t engaged and don’t open my emails. And, whenever you switch providers, you always lose a certain number of people.

So be it.

Seems lately I’m feeling the sense of an ending. Or maybe a beginning.

The need to simplify. Get back on my own website. Engage with a smaller audience who want to continue our wonderful relationship. I’d have to explore new ways to grow. Ask my audience to help with recommendations? Write some more guest posts?

All I know is that I’m restless.

I’m tired of technology. I hate apps. Notifications. Endless menus. AI and eye strain and blinking screens full of superficial content. I’m much happier in my home library with a good novel.

So we’ll see.

Maybe I’ll throw caution to the wind and make a change. Maybe I’ll settle back into one website for everything. Go back to a simpler model, when life marched to a slower cadence.

And maybe, if I’m lucky, some of you will follow along.

My father had a huge library in our home.

I can close my eyes and see all the shelves, arranged by classics and history and fiction and more. I used to sit by the floor heater with a sketch pad doodling in our library. My sister played with her Breyer ponies on the carpet as my father read his books. And my mother sipped tea and scanned her magazines.

My grandmothers would visit and we’d enjoy dinner in the dining room and then have dessert in the front yard. The same front yard where so many childhood birthday parties took place.

You never realize how magical those times are until they’re gone.

I remember all my sister’s friends laughing and singing at her birthday party. My parents, grand mothers, relatives and friends all there. I was so little then, crawling around on the front yard. Taking it all in on those warm, summer, California days.

Basking in a cocoon of safety, belonging, family, and love.

So maybe that’s part of what’s going on.

The Mark Helprin novel. The frustrations with technology. The loss of loved ones and the passage of time.

Maybe even the roadrunner I saw on a recent dog walk, its long tail feathers reminding me of Skippy. Of a simpler time and days gone by.

An elegy for a lost life.

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“What the heck are bun bites?” the man said.

“Honey, they’re Japanese steamed bao buns. They’re soft and stuffed with greens and pork belly and chicken or whatever. I’m pretty sure we had them in Seattle,” said the woman.

“Really? I don’t remember that. I thought ramen was noodles and soup and stuff.” He looked at his Rolex watch, held his hand above his eyes to shield the sun, and scanned for other dining options.

The couple were off to my left outside the Marafuku Ramen restaurant in San Francisco. I was changing the aperture on my rangefinder camera but couldn’t help eavesdropping.

“So you don’t want to eat here?” she said.

“I didn’t say that. I don’t know. What about a sandwich shop? Something less messy that I won’t get on my sweater,” he said.

“We can have sandwiches at home.” She looked annoyed.

“Yeah, I know, but steamed bun bites?” he said.

“It would be nice if you could step outside of yourself once in a while.” She fished in her purse, pulled out a pair of sunglasses, and slipped them on with resignation.

“Outside of myself?” His brow furrowed in a look of irritated confusion.

He was well-dressed.

Crisp white shirt, fitted cardigan sweater, pleated slacks, and Bruno Magli loafers. She was fashionable but in a comfortable, relaxed way. He came off as performative, as if he needed to project money or status or importance.

You could say he wore his ego.

The couple moved on but the woman’s words remained.

“It would be nice if you could step outside of yourself once in a while.”

I thought of my wife, who once told me that she gets to be whoever she wants to be when she travels. She might dress like the locals, enjoy their cuisine, and blend in. She might let loose her slight New York accent, acquired from time spent there in a past relationship.

When she travels she gets to step outside of herself.

I was once a part-time editorial cartoonist for the county newspaper. I attended the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists’ annual convention in Ohio. I was a full-time police officer, but during that trip to Ohio I was an editorial cartoonist.

A woman on the plane to Ohio asked what I did. “I’m an editorial cartoonist,” I said, which was true. It wasn’t the whole truth, but I didn’t care.

I had stepped outside of myself.

The late novelist Iris Murdoch was an Irish-British philosopher. She developed her own moral philosophy and a concept called “unselfing.”

The website philosophybreak.com shared the following:

“Murdoch thought our inner lives are too often clogged by what she calls the ‘fat, relentless ego,’ but that by contemplating beauty in nature and art, we can deflate the brooding, grasping self and open our eyes to reality.”

That foppish man in San Francisco, worried about messy bao buns dripping on his sweater. When he’s alone, gazing at a mirror, does he see his brooding, grasping self? Do his eyes ever fasten on the fat relentless ego that resides, to varying degrees, in us all?

In Murdoch’s moral philosophy, transcendence involves stepping outside of ourselves. Once the self is out of the way we can see the beauty of reality.

Murdoch focused on nature and art to help us step outside of ourselves, but I’d include travel, literature, spiritual pursuits, and new experiences outside the familiar.

Every year, Pico Iyer visits a small Benedictine hermitage high above the sea in Big Sur, California. He’s made over 100 retreats there.

Iyer has navigated many challenges in his life. Houses have burned down. A parent died. A daughter diagnosed with cancer.

Iyer leads a busy professional life as a best-selling author, TED talk presenter, and journalist. Yet, despite the successes and challenges in his life, he keeps returning to the inner stillness and solitude of monastic life.

The retreats help him step outside of himself.

The inside dust jacket flap of his book Aflame: Learning From Silence, describes the monks he communes with as “…a group of selfless souls who have dedicated their days to ensuring there’s a space for quiet and recollection that’s open to us all.”

We hold so much of the world at arms length.

We hide behind facades. Our professional titles. Our social roles. The many faces we wear in different situations.

Sometimes, out of necessity, we need boundaries and a degree of professional detachment. And in a world where crime and dark hearts exist, we learn the value of caution and projected strength and even an aggressive posture.

We slip off our masks and drop the performance only when we feel safe. Only when we’re around loved ones.

But even then, sometimes we don’t.

There are some who rarely let down their guard. Who seldom step outside of themselves. Who forego a chance to be like a child again, free of performance and pretension and role playing.

They are hostage to their egos. Cut off from the beauty and light of authentic being, new experiences, and self-discovery.

All of us do this from time to time. But some are full-time prisoners of their egos, afraid to drop the mask, frightened by what true intimacy with the world really means.

Pico Iyer, writing about the monastery:

“Intimacy, I think, can be such a treacherous thing in the world: whom are you getting close to, and with what intent? Here it’s only the opposite—distance—that can feel like profanation.”

Everyone has a social self and a silent self.

We see the silent self sometimes in candid street photography. Whenever I go for a photo walk with my rangefinder camera, I look for people lost in thought.

Such images capture the real person, devoid of performance. There’s a stillness in them, and in those moments. We long for the peace of that stillness throughout our lives.

We long to be ourselves.

Iris Murdoch was on to something.

Everyone struggles with their fat, relentless egos and brooding, grasping selves. Yet everyone longs to experience beauty and goodness in their lives.

But the world’s accelerating technology and artificialities and seductive algorithms conspire against our better selves. They summon our selfish consciousness to lord over us.

I wish that couple in San Francisco, especially the gentleman dandy, had stepped outside of themselves and found a seat at the Marafuku Ramen restaurant. I wish they’d ordered delicious, messy, unforgettable, steamed bao buns.

I wish the guy had dripped the food all over his cardigan sweater and then laughed and asked his wife to take a picture. I wish he’d pierced the veil of his selfish consciousness and talked about his dreams. I wish he’d told her how much fun he was having, and that he never wanted their San Francisco trip to end.

If he did those things, he would have discovered a stillness in his heart.

He’d have found the peace that comes from finally being yourself.

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The first letter arrived in Rose Swanson’s mailbox two weeks after the death of her beloved husband, Vern.

Married for forty-one years, Vern and Rose were devoted to one another. They often walked around town holding hands. In today’s world of divorce and broken families, it was nice to see two people whose love thrived and deepened over the decades.

But then Vern experienced dizziness.

Tests and scans were taken, and Vern was told the bad news. An aggressive Glioblastoma Multiforme. Near the end, which came quickly, Rose held vigil beside Vern’s bed.

With a box of photographs on her lap, Rose reminisced and showed Vern images of their life together. The photos made Vern smile, but eventually, he fell into a coma. The following night, as Rose held Vern’s hands, his breathing slowed, and then he slipped away.

The funeral was well attended. In the days that followed, folks dropped off food and made sure Rose was doing okay. Rose put on a brave face and said she was holding up, but she wasn’t.

How can anyone be okay when the love of their life has departed, and the home they once shared becomes a vessel of memories and daily reminders of loss and loneliness? How can anyone carry on, when all you want to do is escape the pain and find a path back to the one you love?

Rose hid it well.

She told friends and acquaintances around town that she was adjusting, and that time heals all wounds. But she knew such words were only platitudes to appease others.

Platitudes to buy time, until she could summon the courage to finally do it. To finally end her life and begin the journey to Vern. She resolved to do it that weekend. She had it all figured out.

The car in her garage. A hose connected to the tailpipe. A painless end, and a pathway to wherever Vern had gone.

Sometimes, when people decide to end their lives, their mood improves. Relieved, perhaps, to finally have an escape plan from their emotional pain.

On Friday afternoon, Rose went to the mailbox at the edge of the driveway and bumped into her neighbor, Judy Bloom.

“Hello Rose, how are you doing?” Judy said with a smile.

“Pretty well, Judy. Finding my rhythm,” Rose said as she opened her mailbox and collected the bills and letters.

“It’s good to see you out and about. Let me know if you need anything,” Judy offered.

“Thank you, Judy, I appreciate that,” Rose said. As she strolled back to the house, Rose imagined Judy telling her friends the following week, “I can’t believe it, she seemed fine. I spoke to her Friday at the mailbox.”

Back in the house, Rose sat down in the living room and went through her mail. It was the usual bills and belated sympathy cards.

But then there was a cream-colored envelope addressed to her in exquisite handwriting. The envelope had no return address, and the back contained a red wax seal with the stamped letter “H.”

“I wonder what this could be?” she said.

Rose carefully opened the back of the envelope and pulled out the neatly folded stationery. She unfolded the paper and was struck by the immaculate penmanship.

She read the following:

The letter nearly took Rose’s breath away, as tears flowed down her cheeks. She had no idea who Hope was, or how Hope seemed to know so much about Vern and herself.

But it didn’t matter, because the letter awakened something inside Rose. For the first time since Vern’s death, Rose felt like she could breathe a little. Grief’s vise grip on her heart loosened. She sensed the truth of the letter, that Vern would want her to live on.

For the first time since Vern’s funeral, Rose felt like maybe she could craft a meaningful future. She could honor Vern by helping others and finding her best self.

For the first time, Rose felt hope.

Stanley Carlson had never been to jail before.

There were other low points in Stanley’s life like the day his wife left him and filed for divorce. Or the day his boss fired him because Stanley was late to work again and “increasingly unproductive.”

But then, Stanley was a survivor.

He wasn’t about to let his ex-wife or unforgiving boss ruin his life. He was going to show them all. He found a new job and celebrated. He bought everyone at the bar a round. He even got the phone number of the blonde woman sitting next to him.

It had been a fantastic night until he noticed the emergency lights in his rearview mirror.

The officer was efficient, professional, and quickly noticed Stanley’s glassy eyes and slurred speech. She ordered Stanley out of his car and put him through various field sobriety tests.

He failed them all and ended up in a pair of handcuffs.

The back of the patrol car was uncomfortable. “Why are your backseats made of plexiglass? They’re totally uncomfortable,” Stanley complained to the officer. “It’s harder to clean puke out of cloth seats,” the officer said.

They parked in an enclosed sally port at the rear of the jail, and the officer led Stanley out of the car and to the jail’s locked security doors. She pressed a button, and after a moment, there was a buzzing sound, and the door unlocked.

They entered a hallway, where two uniformed jail staff met them.

“Drunk driver, mostly cooperative,” the officer said to the jail personnel as she handed them paperwork.

The jail staff patted Stanley down. They removed his wallet, keys, an empty flask in his left pocket, his belt, and shoes. They told Stanley that all his possessions would be recorded and returned to him upon release.

It was noisy.

There were loud voices, the clanking of doors, buzzers, loudspeakers, and people yelling in holding cells.

And the smell.

The drunk tank they put Stanley in held five other inebriated souls. Two were passed out, and the others were mumbling to themselves. It smelled like a stale brewery mixed with vomit and body odor.

Stanley sunk against the wall in the corner. He held his face in his hands and wept for the marriage he once had. He wept for the jobs he had lost. He wept for the little boy he once was, who dreamed of great things.

He wept for the better man he had failed to become.

When Stanley was sober, they released him from jail. His things were returned to him, and he was given a court date for his DUI offense. He arranged an Uber ride home since his car had been towed and impounded.

Back home, Stanley swallowed several Advil and drank lots of water to assuage his hangover. He sunk into bed and slept all day.

When he awoke he found several messages from his new boss, asking where he was. Great, he thought, I’m going to lose another job. Why does this keep happening? But then, he knew the answer.

And for the first time in his life, he said the words, “I’m an alcoholic.”

Stanley denied this all his adult life, until now. Stanley’s father was a binge-drinking alcoholic, so it seemed to run in the family. And life did not end well for Stanley’s father. He developed liver cirrhosis that led to an early death.

“Ah Dad, I’m so sorry. Looks like your son followed in your footsteps,” Stanley said. And then he sank into his living room chair, waiting for the Advil to ease the pounding in his head, and he dozed off.

His father came to him in a dream.

Stanley’s father may have struggled with alcoholism, but he was a gentle man who loved his family and son. Yet he carried demons in him from the Vietnam War, and alcohol was the only tool he knew to cope. But in this dream, Stanley’s father was sober, and he whispered in Stanley’s ears, “Son, you can change. Be the man I wasn’t able to be.”

And this is how it began, thanks to one dream in the throes of a hangover.

Stanley showed up the next day at his first Alcoholics Anonymous meeting. He was nervous and felt strange sitting in that old church conference room amidst an eclectic mix of locals. He was surprised at some of the people there. For example, the president of the local bank. And a dentist he recognized. But then, alcoholism doesn’t discriminate. It affects people of all genders, races, and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Everyone was encouraging, and the dentist ended up being his sponsor.

“Call me anytime, Stanley. We’ve all been through what you’re going through. You can do this,” the dentist said.

Stanley threw out all the booze in his house. He joined the local health club. He sat down with his new boss and told her everything. About his drinking problem. The DUI arrest. And the meetings he was attending. Much to his surprise, his boss didn’t fire him. Turns out she was in recovery, too. Twelve years sober, she said.

The letter arrived one month into Stanley’s recovery.

He came home one afternoon from the gym and checked his mailbox. Among the bills and junk mail sat an elegant, cream-colored envelope, bearing Stanley’s name and address in exquisite penmanship. On the back of the envelope, a red wax seal was affixed, with the letter H stamped in the middle.

“What the heck is this?” Stanley asked himself as he sat in his kitchen and tore into the envelope. He slipped on his reading glasses, and read the letter.

Stanley was so moved by this letter from a stranger that he shared it with everyone at AA. He asked, “Does anyone know someone in town named Hope? Is she involved with AA?”

But no one knew who Hope was.

“Maybe she’s an angel?” someone in the group said.

“Yeah, maybe she is. Because man, the letter just blew me away. It uplifted me, you know?” Stanley said.

Everyone nodded in agreement.

The mysterious letters showed up all over town.

Tommy Johnson’s dog, Duke, was struck and killed by a car, and a few days later, Tommy received a cream-colored envelope in the mail with that same immaculate cursive and the encouraging words:

When Army Sergeant Brianna Jackson returned to town after a training accident that ended her military career, she decided to study and take the state exam to become a grade school teacher. She wanted to begin a new career in education and inspire young minds.

After she was certified and began her new position as a third-grade teacher at Fairmont Elementary School, a mysterious letter arrived in her mailbox. The copperplate penmanship beautifully expressed the following words:

The town’s newspaper published an article about the letters, followed by a story in the local television news.

Opinions varied.

Some felt that the letter writer was creepy like a voyeur spying on folks and then sending letters about their lives. But most people in town thought the letters were benevolent and beautiful.

As one local said to the news reporter, “Don’t you think, with all the bad things going on in the world, we deserve a little encouragement and love? Imagine if we all started writing each other letters like that?”

And so that’s the way it was for some time.

The letters kept coming to those who seemed to need them the most. And always with words of encouragement and hope. Some felt the letter writer’s name wasn’t Hope, but rather a pseudonym that captured the purpose of the letters.

A few town sleuths tried to figure out who the letter writer was. “Probably an old person, because young people don’t know how to write cursive like that,” one local said. According to a few postal workers, the letters were dropped off in various outgoing mail slots around town, so no one knew who the author was.

And then one day, a few years later, the letters stopped coming.

“Mayor Carlson, I have a phone call for you on line one. It’s Dan Miller, the producer at the local news station,” Wendy, the mayor’s executive assistant, said over the phone intercom.

“What’s it regarding?” Mayor Carlson asked.

“They found out who the letter writer was,” Wendy said.

“Put him through.”

“Hi, Dan. Wendy tells me you know who the mysterious letter writer is?” Mayor Carlson said.

“Well, Mayor, we know who he was. I’m afraid he passed away last week. We might never have known, but one of his caretakers stumbled on some things while she was looking for his DNR order,” Dan said.

“His DNR order?” Mayor Carlson said.

“Yeah, a ‘Do Not Resuscitate’ order. A lot of older residents at the assisted living center have them. That way, if they have a stroke or heart attack, the emergency responders don’t have to take life-saving measures. I mean, when you are old and infirmed, sometimes death is a welcome reprieve from suffering,” Dan said.

“Yeah, I get it. So what did the caretaker find?”

“She found a wooden box in his closet full of cream-colored stationery, several fountain pens, ink bottles, red sealing wax, a lighter, and a stamp with the letter H on it. And there were some unfinished letters, too. All written in that beautiful, elegant cursive we’ve seen in the letters around town. Anyway, we’re doing a story on it at 5 o’clock, and we wanted to give you a heads-up. And we’re sending a reporter and cameraman over to get a statement from you if you don’t mind. After all, you were one of the lucky people who received a letter from him.”

“I appreciate the heads up, Dan. And sure, I’m happy to talk to your reporter. But I’m curious, who was he? Why did he send out all those letters? How did he know about so many people in town?”

“Well, turns out he was a retired literature professor. He used to teach at the university. He lost his wife to cancer years ago. His caretakers said he never quite got over her death. For a lot of years, he was mobile and used to take the bus all over town. And I guess he was adept online, and followed the local news and even social media closely. I think that’s how he learned so much about folks here in town.”

“I wonder why he stopped writing his letters?” Mayor Carlson asked.

“He had a stroke and was no longer able to write. He did leave behind a diary, and one of the caretakers peeked at it, even though she wasn’t supposed to. Apparently, he started writing all those letters to honor the memory of his wife, who he wrote was a Saint on Earth. And she was. She used to work at the county orphanage and volunteered on weekends at the animal shelter. Really, they were quite a couple,” Dan said.

“Wow, I’ll say. Okay, Dan, send over your reporter, and thanks again for the heads up,” Mayor Carlson said.

Rose Swanson and her neighbor Judy Bloom enjoyed tea at Rose’s house that afternoon. They had become close friends over the years, ever since Rose received that mysterious, beautiful letter and shared it with Judy the next day, crying together.

They enjoyed gardening and often sold the squash they grew at the local weekend farmer’s market.

“Hey, can you switch on the 5 o’clock news, Rose, I want to see if it’s going to rain tomorrow,” Judy said.

Rose clicked on her television, and the two sat back on the couch to watch the news. A handsome young anchor opened the broadcast with the following:

“I’m Phil Carter, and this is your five o’clock news. Now, our lead story. For years, locals received mysterious, beautifully handwritten letters in the mail. Letters of encouragement, wisdom, and advice. And they were always signed, ‘Sincerely yours, Hope.’”

Rose and Judy looked silently at one another and leaned forward to watch the rest.

The anchor continued:

“His name was Professor Theodore H. Flannery. He taught English literature for many years at the county university. A few years after he retired, Professor Flannery’s wife, Helen, known locally for her work at the orphanage and animal rescue, passed away. The couple had no children, so Professor Flannery spent the years reading, walking about town, and writing. We take you now to the university, where our reporter, Juan Sanchez, spoke with one of Professor Flannery’s colleagues, Professor Emeritus of Biology, Eleanor Foster.”

“This is unbelievable,” Rose said. “I can’t believe I was one of the people who received one of his letters.”

The news segment cut to reporter Juan Sanchez, standing next to Professor Eleanor Foster on an expansive front lawn of the university.

“Professor Foster, what can you tell us about Professor Flannery?”

“He was a wonderful, kind, gentle man. Devoted to his wife and his students. He was an amazing literature professor. But you know, he did have a touch of sadness in his eyes. He wanted to become a novelist and inspire people with words, but somehow his manuscripts never found a willing publisher. That happens, you know. Sometimes we’re better teaching a subject,” Professor Foster said.

“Why do you think he wrote all those letters to total strangers?” Juan Sanchez asked, holding the microphone up for Professor Foster.

“I think he wanted to honor his wife’s memory. Helen was such a splendid woman. A true humanitarian. She believed the highest calling we can have is to help others and improve the world around us. So I think Teddy, that’s what his colleagues called him… Teddy wanted to follow his wife’s lead and use his writing ability to help inspire others. In a way, his letters are better than a novel. They’re his magnum opus. His love letters to humanity,” Professor Foster said.

“Love letters to humanity. Well said, Professor. Thank you. Back to you in the studio, Phil.”

Rose and Judy weren’t the only ones watching the five o’clock news. A few miles away, Tommy Johnson and his rescue dog Skip had the news on.

“Mom, come quick,” Tommy yelled.

“What is it?” his mother said.

“You won’t believe it. Remember the letter I got after Duke died? Well, they figured out who wrote the letter. He was a retired English professor. And get this, his wife used to work at the animal rescue where I adopted Skip after Duke died.”

“That’s amazing,” Tommy’s mother said, as she sat down to join him and watch. The news anchor, Phil Carter, said, “Thanks again, Juan. Let’s go now to reporter Elizabeth Traynor at City Hall.”

“Thanks, Phil, I’m here at City Hall with Mayor Stanley Carlson. Mayor Carlson, you were one of the people who received a letter a few years ago from our mystery letter writer, Professor Flannery. Your reaction?”

“Well, Elizabeth, all I can say is that Professor Flannery’s letter changed my life. Back then I was down on my luck. I was divorced. I had a drinking problem. As most people know from my opponent’s smear campaign during the mayoral election, I was arrested for DUI. After I started attending AA meetings and cleaning up my act, that mysterious letter arrived. I keep it framed in my office.”

“That’s amazing,” the reporter said.

“Yeah, I’ll never forget one line in the letter. He wrote, ‘When we stop caring, something inside us dies.’ And I decided right then and there that I did care. I cared about my life. About becoming a better person. So I got sober. I volunteered. I got into local politics. And, well, here I am today. But the weird thing is that I always thought the letter writer was a woman because it was signed ‘Hope,’” Mayor Carlson said.

“Well, Mayor, our sources tell us that the Professor’s middle name was Hope. According to a University associate of his, Professor Flannery’s late mother struggled with alcoholism. She gave her son the middle name of Hope because he seemed to radiate a kind of loving grace. A kind of hopefulness,” the reporter said.

“Well, his mother’s instincts were spot on. Because Professor Flannery gave hope to so many of us in this town. Hope to overcome our struggles and live better lives,” Mayor Carlson said.

“Thank you, Mayor Carlson. Back to you, Phil.”

“Thanks, Elizabeth,” Phil Carter said, adding, “And thank you, Dr. Theodore Hope Flannery. You may not have realized your dream of becoming a novelist, but your letters gave hope to many in this small town, and your legacy will never be forgotten.”

The station cut to a commercial break.

Another person watching the 5 o’clock news that afternoon was Brianna Foley, who excitedly called out to her husband, Draymond.

“Draymond, you won’t believe it!” she yelled.

Draymond came into the room. “What is it? Is everything alright?”

“Yes! Remember that letter I showed you years ago? After I got discharged from the army because of my injury. Before we got married, when I was just starting my teaching career,” Brianna said.

“Yeah, someone named Hope sent you a handwritten letter of encouragement.”

“Exactly. Well, it was from a retired literature professor named Theodore H. Flannery. And his middle name was Hope. After his wife died, he wanted to honor her kindness and legacy by encouraging others. How cool is that?” Brianna said.

“You know, that name sounds familiar. I’ve heard it before. At work, I think,” Draymond said.

“You work in a publishing house in the city, miles from here. Why would his name be familiar?” Brianna asked.

“I don’t know. Let me call Jill in the office. I know I heard that name recently, and Jill has the memory of an elephant,” Draymond said.

He phoned Jill, the senior editor at the publishing house, and told her the entire story about Dr. Theodore Hope Flannery and that he remembered hearing the name somewhere.

“That’s because I mentioned him two weeks ago, Draymond. Don’t you remember? We found a few of his old manuscript submissions in the backroom slush pile closet. Remember, Douglas discovered them, and he thought the writing was pretty good.”

“Good Lord, you’re right, I remember now. Brianna won’t believe the coincidence. It’s all pretty remarkable. This guy touched a lot of lives with his letters.”

“Hey, I have a crazy idea,” Jill said. “What if we were able to collect all the letters he wrote? You know, put out press releases and invite people to send us copies of his letters. It would make an amazing book.”

“You know what, Jill, you might be on to something. Let’s float the idea with Douglas at tomorrow’s staff meeting.”

Douglas was the new head editor at Little House Publishing, a mid-level publishing house with several best-selling titles already under their belt.

Douglas had a discerning eye for great literature, but he also understood the publishing world and how unique and uplifting titles can sometimes catapult to best-seller status.

When Draymond and Jill floated their idea about Dr. Theodore Hope Flannery’s collected letters, something stirred in him. Call it an intuition, a spiritual vibration.

“I like it. I like it a lot. Okay, let’s explore how we can collect copies of all those letters,” Douglas said in the staff meeting, adding, “We’ll have to get legal involved to obtain permissions and sign-offs. And once we comb through all the letters, we’ll need a book title for the collection. Something concise that captures the impact and essence of his letters.”

“How about ‘Letters of Hope?’” Draymond volunteered.

Everyone in the room grew quiet.

It was the kind of moment when something profound was happening. And something profound was happening. The kindness, love, and legacy of an old literature professor swirled around in that publishing house conference room. Dr. Theodore Hope Flannery’s spirit was with them. Everyone could feel it and loved Draymond’s suggestion for the book’s title.

It took a little over a year.

Nearly all the letters were collected, except one lost to a house fire and another buried with its owner. Douglas told the publishing staff he’d give a raise to anyone who could convince the family to sign off on an exhumation order, but he was only joking.

The book was titled “Letters of Hope” with the subtitle, “A Literature Professor’s Gift to Those in Need.”

News of the book and its story spread far and wide, catapulting it to The New York Times Best Seller status. Suddenly, Little House Publishing grew in stature, and many fine authors and writers began working with Douglas and his expanding staff.

Dr. Theodore Hope Flannery had left behind a modest living trust. Any proceeds from the sale of his assets were to go to the local orphanage and animal rescue where his beloved wife had worked for so many years.

Dr. Flannery posthumously achieved what he always dreamed of when he was alive. He had become a successful, published author, and through the proceeds from his book sales, the local orphanage and animal shelter received a windfall of much-needed, recurring income.

Dr. Flannery’s late wife Helen would have been so proud, just as everyone in the community was proud of Dr. Flannery. Through his elegant, cream-colored stationery and fountain pens, he inspired everyday people through his letters to live better lives.

Lives filled with hope.

Sometimes, at dusk in town, locals swore they saw an old couple walking hand in hand down the street beside the duck pond. Other times, volunteers at the animal shelter reported seeing an old couple walking the dogs around the facility, but they’d always disappear.

Mayor Carlson had a similar experience.

He’d been invited to visit the local orphanage and read to the children for their “literature week” program. Mayor Carlson brought his copy of Dr. Flannery’s book to read a few of the moving letters.

The children were all assembled in the orphanage’s library, and Mayor Carlson opened the book and read the letter he’d personally received, along with a few others. And he told the kids to never give up in life. That anything is possible.

After the reading, on the way to his car, Mayor Carlson thought he heard a twig break in the distance. When he looked up, he saw what appeared to be an old couple standing by a tree, and the man waved to Mayor Carlson.

Mayor Carlson waved back and said, “Thank you, Dr. Flannery. Thank you for saving my life. God bless you and Helen.”

Mayor Carlson stepped forward to get a better look, but lost his footing on a mound of grass, dropping his copy of Dr. Flannery’s book.

He reached down, picked up the book, and looked back at the tree.

But the old couple were gone.

(Originally published in "The Morning Fox," 2024)

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It started as a dull ache in an upper right tooth. Painful battles can sprout this way, from unremarkable annoyances. Because I know this, I took preemptive action and phoned my dentist.

“Which tooth is it?” the receptionist said.

Before the call I had examined the tooth in the mirror.

“It’s the crown on the upper right side,” I said.

She pulled up my records and scans on her computer. “Oh yes, I see it. That one had a root canal, but we didn’t do the work. How long ago was it?” she asked.

“I don’t know. Probably several years. My old dentist in California. Why would it be aching if it had a root canal?” I said.

“Any number of things. Grinding. A crack. Infection. Let’s get you in,” she said.

The appointment scheduled, I joined my wife in our home library and continued reading Kent Haruf’s poignant novel Plainsong. Nanuk, our 16-year-old Alaskan Klee Kai, settled his arthritic frame beside me. The afternoon sun warmed the room and Nanuk began mildly panting.

“His breath is getting worse,” my wife said.

“Yeah, I need to get him into the vet,” I said.

I’d been hesitant to do so. I already knew the problem. Nanuk had most of his teeth removed a few years ago. The remaining teeth had gone bad. But now, due to his age, there was concern he’d not survive anesthesia.

“At the least, maybe they can give him antibiotics to knock back the infection,” my wife said.

I phoned the vet.

The next day I took Nanuk to his appointment. The vet examined him and said, “Those remaining teeth have to come out. His lymph nodes in the neck are swollen. I’d like to do some preliminary blood work,” she said.

“If I recall, he has a heart murmur. The vet we saw a while back had concerns about him going under,” I said.

“Always risks. I’d like to do an ECG. If we leave those teeth in, the infection will spread,” she said.

“Alright,” I said.

An assistant came in and joined the vet. They took Nanuk out of the exam room to get his blood.

I sat there on the cold bench, in that sterile exam room, thinking of our little dog Chug. He was a chihuahua/pug mix whose old age summoned blindness and heart issues. On his last day, he experienced a seizure at home, and I raced him to this same veterinary office. A kind, young vet examined Chug and confirmed what I already knew, that it was time. It was so very hard because Chug had come out of the seizure and was leaning his warm body calmly in my arms on the exam table, his little ears alert. His blindness was a kind of saving grace, as he couldn’t see the syringe and drugs the vet was about to administer. The vet assured me that Chug would peacefully drift off, which is exactly what he did as his body melted into my arms. And then the vet gave him a second drug, and Chug’s heart, which had always been a lion’s heart of love and loyalty, thumped down to that silent oblivion where memories and eternity coalesce.

I wiped my eyes and rubbed the right side of my jaw.

The vet returned with Nanuk and said she’d call with the lab results. If they were promising, she’d recommend dental surgery next week. “We’ll do the ECG then, right before the surgery, to rule out cardiac concerns,” she said.

The lab work, tests, surgery, and medications would cost nearly 2K.

I got in to see my dentist.

It didn’t take long. A few scans and he brought up the results on the overhead screen.

“You’ve got an abscess. See this area here? It’s a mess. Let’s get you on some Amoxicillin. Once it kicks in the pain will go away. Then off to the endodontist, to redo that root canal. Afterward, I’ll follow up and fit a new crown,” he said.

My law enforcement retirement pension includes an excellent medical plan, but not dental. I pay out of pocket, just like I do for veterinary visits.

I handed the dental receptionist my credit card and later picked up the prescription at the pharmacy. Ibuprofen for the pain had been somewhat effective, but less and less so.

The day came for Nanuk’s surgery and I dropped him off. Gave him a hug while the veterinary assistant waited. Then the vet joined us.

“We’ll take good care of him,” the vet said. It was a different vet from the woman I saw previously. This was the same vet who’d taken care of Chug on his last day.

I put that out of my mind and drove home.

Later the vet called to tell me that the ECG was clear and that they would go ahead. He called back thirty minutes later while Nanuk was still under to report that indeed all the teeth had to come out. One upper canine was so infected that a fistula had burrowed from it all the way to his inner nostril. The tissue had deteriorated, and stitching it together would be tricky.

Poor Nanuk, I thought. Nothing is ever easy.

Time passed and the vet phoned to say Nanuk had awakened. In recovery and doing well. They’d even taken him on a short, outside walk to relieve himself.

At the end of the day I was able to take him home, along with his liquid antibiotics and pain medications. We both settled onto the couch, where Nanuk napped and I read Plainsong and swallowed my Advils and Amoxicillin.

“You two are a sad pair,” my wife said.

On Friday the pain from my abscess had grown significantly worse despite the antibiotics and painkiller. I phoned my dentist.

“When is your endodontist appointment?” the receptionist asked.

“Not for another ten days. It was the earliest they could get me in,” I said.

“Let me give them a call,” she said.

She phoned back in ten minutes. “They had a cancellation and I got you in this Tuesday.”

“Bless you,” I said.

“The antibiotics should kick in and you’ll feel a lot better,” she said.

I thanked her again, optimistic that things were on the upswing.

But then Nanuk started bleeding profusely from the mouth.

C. S. Lewis, in The Problem of Pain, wrote, “Thomas Aquinas said of suffering, as Aristotle had said of shame, that it was a thing not good in itself; but a thing which might have a certain goodness in particular circumstances.”

As my tooth ached and I drove my bleeding dog to the vet, I failed to see what “certain goodness” could be found in our “particular circumstances.”

It just felt like suffering.

In Christian theology, suffering can be offered up to unite the sufferer with the passion of Christ, serving as a means of purification and spiritual refinement. Buddhist philosophy distinguishes between pain, the unavoidable “first arrow” of life, and suffering, the “second arrow” created by our stories and resistance.

Pain may be inevitable, but the suffering can be used as a meditation on the nature of attachment. The poet Rumi once wrote, “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”

My infernal aching tooth, my physical suffering, was compounded by my concern for Nanuk. My fear that something bad might happen to him.

But it was more than that.

Recently, I published an essay about a dear childhood friend who is fading away into the shrouds of early-onset dementia. Visiting him called up memories of an old law enforcement colleague struck and killed by a drunk driver. And memories of my parents, gone now for many years.

Sometimes physical pain and stress erode our emotional constitution.

There’s a cumulative effect that digs past our well-being and armor, burrowing to those subterranean levels where the soil of our souls is most fragile. Maybe this is why, whenever in my life I’ve been sick in bed and physically weak, my emotions are so easily unearthed. All it takes is a sad film or moving song or poignant novel and then, much to my surprise, a flood of emotions pours out.

But if I’m honest, those emotional outpourings have always been cleansing and therapeutic. Almost a necessary purging, like when reptiles shed old skins or birds molt their feathers.

So that renewal can happen.

It was quite the scene at the vet.

I led Nanuk in on his leash as he left a trail of blood all over the tile floor. I overheard a woman say, “Oh no, that poor baby!”

“He had dental surgery here yesterday. I think he busted some stitches,” I told the receptionist.

She picked up the phone, and almost immediately someone from the back came out. Then a vet I haven’t met introduced herself and said, “We’ll take him back and figure out what’s going on. Why don’t you have a seat here in exam room number three.”

I closed my eyes in exam room number three and waited, trying to ignore the pain in my tooth.

Sometime later the vet came in and said, “Okay, we were able to stop the bleeding. He’s doing fine.”

“I don’t know what happened,” I told her. “He was licking his paws and suddenly started bleeding everywhere.”

“That fistula we repaired had a lot of weak tissue around it, and it’s going to be fragile and prone to bleeding. We’d like to keep him tonight and monitor the situation. If all goes well, you can pick him up tomorrow morning. Just be sure to keep him on soft foods for the next two weeks,” she said.

“Thank you, Doctor,” I said.

I went home and gave my wife an update. Then I swallowed a few more Advils and lay down. My tooth pain was getting worse.

The next morning I picked up Nanuk. He still had some faint blood stains on his white paws where the veterinary staff did their best to clean him up. But otherwise, Nanuk was anxious to come home.

We both spent the day resting. I took him for a short walk, careful not to overdo it. The hardest part was administering his liquid antibiotics with a syringe, being careful not to clip his stitches.

Nanuk spent a great deal of time sleeping. Dogs know when they need to heal. But when he was awake, I had to watch him constantly to make sure he didn’t lick his paws and start bleeding again. At night, I lay on the couch beside him.

My dental pain grew worse, and I barely slept.

I’d count the hours between Tylenol and Advil doses. I’d swish warm salt water in my mouth. I’d hold an ice pack outside my tooth. I’d massage part of my gums with my finger. Anything to lessen the throbbing and unrelenting pain. Sometimes, the pain in my tooth would radiate to other teeth. I began to doubt that the Amoxicillin capsules I was taking three times a day would ever kick in and tamp down the infection.

On the second night, desperate to ignore my pain and suffering, I put on headphones and listened to all thirty chapters of Voltaire’s Candide. Somehow it managed to distract me.

In the novel, Candide suffers endlessly chasing meaning, love, and explanation. And after all that chaos, the conclusion the book offers is that “We must cultivate our garden.”

We must maintain the things that matter.

This reminded me of the McPheron brothers in Kent Haruf’s novel Plainsong. The brothers are old farmers. They lost their parents when they were young. Never married. All they’ve ever known is the cattle farm they live on and maintain. They’re gruff and set in their ways.

They’re the last men you might think of to help a teenage girl in trouble.

And yet, when a teenage girl named Victoria becomes pregnant and abandoned by her boyfriend and her mother, she turns to a high school teacher for help. The teacher puts her up for a while but eventually asks the old McPheron brothers if they’ll help.

Of course the brothers know nothing about women, much less pregnant teenage girls. All they’ve ever known is farming. “Who’s the sire?” they ask about the baby’s father.

But the McPheron brothers know about pain and suffering.

They’ve not only witnessed it on the farm, caring for their animals. They’ve also had first hand experience, losing their parents as young boys. Loss like that never leaves a person, but sometimes suffering and pain have a “certain goodness in particular circumstances.”

The McPheron brothers agree to take in young Victoria.

They set aside their parents’ old bedroom for her. They cradle her in love and protect her tenderly like a fragile bird in their hands. They take her shopping, buy her the most expensive baby crib.

They know what it means to cultivate their garden.

Nanuk had a few more bouts of bleeding, but eventually it stopped. And blessed relief came to my tooth on the third day of steady antibiotics. It was still tender to chew with, but at least the incessant throbbing had receded to a dull ache.

The day of my endodontist appointment came around.

One normally doesn’t look to an endodontist appointment and root canal with alacrity, but I was anxious to put all this pain and suffering behind me. The endodontist was friendly and employed the latest technology, including some fancy laser therapy that kills bacteria.

After it was all done the young receptionist smiled and said, “That’ll be $2,020.” I handed her my credit card.

“If you use a credit card instead of your bank card, it’s an extra two percent fee,” she said.

“Of course it is,” I said.

Back home, Nanuk was ready for a walk.

It was good to see him on the mend, but I was still dragging. Those painful nights of no sleep had caught up with me. And even though my abscessed tooth had been treated and repaired, the endodontist said to finish the antibiotics and expect it to be sore for several days. Also, I still faced another thousand dollars or so follow-up with my regular dentist, who’d called to schedule a time for me to get a new crown fitted.

I swallowed a few more Advil and took Nanuk for a walk.

Later I sank onto the couch and read the remaining, beautiful chapters of Plainsong. How I loved the McPheron brothers. Their kind hearts and deep humanity.

They made me think of my dear friend, the one who is disappearing into himself. The one who used to visit my parents on their wedding anniversary, every year, and drop off flowers.

Such a sweet, kind soul.

And thus, in my weakened state, a melancholy washed over me. It’s a melancholy that often finds its way into my writing. And while pathos has its utility in creative work, one has to be cautious. One mustn’t get lost in it. One must continue to cultivate the garden.

Keep an eye out for the sunshine that entices flowers to grow.

Early that evening, in the midst of my fatigue, my phone buzzed. A text from an old childhood friend. Unexpected and perfectly timed.

We don’t talk often anymore. Different states. Different lives. But I’ve known him longer than anyone. Since we were boys.

He sent a photo of us at his family’s swim club, sunburned and grinning. He’s making a goofy hand signal as I stare at him, bemused.

Below the photo he wrote:

“Still my favorite pic of all time. I hope u and ur family are doing well. Come up north and let’s get a tattoo related to friends. I need one more and I think u need one. Thanks for being my lifelong friend.”

I stared at the message for a long moment before responding.

There are people in this world who, without knowing it, arrive exactly when they’re needed. The McPheron brothers were like that. As is my friend grappling with dementia.

And my oldest buddy who sent the text.

I texted back and thanked him. Told him I loved the photo. That we’re overdue for another visit.

And I added the words, “Thanks for this.”

Nanuk stirred beside me and looked up with those soft, trusting eyes. I rested my hand on his head and felt the quiet rhythm of his breathing. It had been a long week of pain, worry, and expense. None of it had offered any clear lesson, just the blessings of care, memory, and the simple act of someone reaching out.

Perhaps that is what matters.

We don’t need to understand suffering or try to give it meaning. We just need to cultivate our garden. Tend to what has been placed in front of us. Answer it with attention and love.

Somewhere between the fading ache in my jaw and the soft weight of Nanuk’s warm body beside me, I closed my eyes.

And we both fell fast asleep.

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Irma Hincenbergs had the softest hands and gentlest touch I’ve ever known. Even her voice, with its Latvian accent and smooth register, was soothing and warm.

During piano lessons she’d sit beside me, turning music pages and repositioning my fingers and admonishing me to press the porcelain keys with soft, expressive connections.

“Never pound, Johnny,” she’d say. “Softly, as if petting a humming bird.”

Sometimes she’d reposition on the bench to face me, hold my fingers in her silklike hands, and get lost reminiscing about the old country. All of which lulled me into a trance.

Her hair was white as snow, eyes a penetrating blueish gray, and aging Baltic features reminiscent of the soft folds on an apple doll’s face.

Mrs. Hincenbergs (that’s how I always addressed her) knew I liked to draw cartoons, and that my parents didn’t have a newspaper subscription. So she’d cut editorial cartoons from the papers and collect them each week in a little tin box. Fridays, after my hour long piano lessons where I’d butcher Claire de Lune and other classical selections, she’d admonish me to practice more. Then, despite my erratic performances every week, she’d reward me with a pile of cartoons.

Mrs. Hincenbergs wore drab, nondescript, matronly dresses. Her fine white hair always pulled together in a tight bun. No jewelry or makeup. She must have been in her early eighties.

And she was beautiful.

My mother was beautiful, too. In her twenties she worked as a Barbizon model in New York City, where her petite frame and long blonde hair caught the attention of many admirers. One admirer, a young Wall Street businessman riding the train, struck up a conversation with her. They fell in love, married, and eventually settled in Northern California.

My sister and I came along a few years later, and thus our lives intertwined and seasons changed. I had a front row seat in the many stages of my mother’s aging. She dressed elegantly and remained attractive through the decades.

But then the first days of invisibility arrived, and with them the unwelcome recognition that time spares no one. Mom complained about her weight, the gray in her hair, and the inevitable lines and sags in her face. The mirror no longer held that Barbizon model of her youth.

The author Akiko Busch, in her book How to Disappear: Notes on Invisibility in a Time of Transparency, wrote:

“The invisible woman might be an actress no longer offered roles after her fortieth birthday, the fifty-year-old woman who can’t land a job interview, or the widow who finds her dinner invitations declining with the absence of her husband. It might be an older woman in a restaurant who is ignored by the waiter, unable to get a glass of water when she sits down at the table, or later, the check when she is ready to leave. When she pays for a purchase in a store, a cashier might call her ‘honey.’ She is the woman who finds that she is no longer the subject of the male gaze, youth faded, childbearing years behind her, social value diminished.”

My mother surely experienced these wounds that accumulate over time, yet she never showed it.

Virginia Woolf’s Clarissa Dalloway came to recognize when the blossom of youth fades and beauty evolves into something else:

“She had the oddest sense of being herself invisible; unseen; unknown; there being no more marrying, no more having of children now, but only this astonishing and rather solemn progress with the rest of them, up Bond Street, this being Mrs. Dalloway; not even Clarissa anymore; this being Mrs. Richard Dalloway.”

I don’t know if my mother read Mrs. Dalloway, but she’d likely recognize parts of herself in the novel.

Sometime in her sixties, a minor twitch in my mother’s left finger would bring greater indignities. She was stoic when the doctors said Parkinson’s, and thankfully the disease unfurled slowly over the years.

But eventually it stole her ability to walk. To bathe unassisted. To hold a book. Or even feed herself.

Many would have turned bitter and angry.

But Mom accepted her disability with grace and elegance. She remained a fashion plate, dressing elegantly and wearing her best jewelry. She engaged everyone in spirited conversations about politics, golf, books, and life’s ups and downs. Always with a positive attitude and frequent laughter.

The day Mom died in my arms as I gently whispered, “I’ve got you,” I noticed she was wearing a delicate, white, bowtie barrette in her silver white hair. Elegant to the very end. And not long after her last breath, as the hospice nurse and assisted living staff consoled me, someone said:

“She was beautiful.”

Of course there have been many other beautiful older women in my life.

We’ve all been blessed with grandmothers and in-laws and mentors and friends of a certain advanced age, beyond the superficial charms of youth and good looks. Burnished by time and life’s slings and arrows into a kind of sophisticated elegance.

In a recent New York Times essay about aging women titled One Can Get This Beautiful Only With Time, the author Roger Rosenblatt wrote:

“What is the secret here? What do old ladies have that sets them apart? I think it’s fierce hope. They look at problems, all problems, and they say: I can handle this. They look at their families or at the country and ask: What can be made better? I have seen men grow sullen and depressed in old age. I have never known a woman who was sorry for herself.”

That last line could have been written about my mother. And Mrs. Hincenbergs, who lost nearly everything (including her home) when she and her husband fled Latvia during the Soviet invasion. She had plenty to be bitter about, but all she ever expressed was gratitude for her life in America.

Rosenblatt ended his essay with:

“Behold them, will you, as they glow in the dark. The hair gone white. The careful step. The archipelago of age spots. The blue veins in the hands. The folds in the neck. The crack in the voice. Takes your breath away.”

Mother’s Day is approaching. Another chance to say I love you, and buy flowers, cards, and gifts for all the wonderful mothers in our lives.

But most of all, let’s not forget the old ladies with white hair and hard-earned wisdom. Make extra time for them. Ask to hear their stories. Marvel at all they’ve achieved.

Look for the eternal light in their eyes.

Because one day, the light will go out. You will feel deep loss. But even then, you will find yourself saying the truest of words. Words that will resonate years after she’s gone.

She was beautiful.

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The early morning fog hung low over the Santa Cruz mountains and quiet streets of Scotts Valley, California. It was chilly and dark, but I knew the sun would burn off the sulking marine layer. By noon, things would be warm and bright.

The same could not be said for the task ahead.

I was in town for the annual police retiree firearms qualifications and BBQ. I left my mother-in-law’s house where I was staying and drove northbound Highway 17, climbing toward the summit and Lexington Reservoir. I knew the route well, having chased many speeders and drunk drivers during my law enforcement years.

Highway 17 was poorly designed. Its sharp curves lean outward as if in league with the fatal effects of speed, alcohol, distraction, and centrifugal force. Before engineers installed K-rails to separate opposing lanes, the highway was known as “blood alley.” I used to park in turnouts along Highway 17, my cruiser windows down as the breeze lifted my hair and crickets sang their somnolent lullabies. I’d hear strange sounds, like whispers of lost souls lingering long after their fatal collisions, unable to accept fate’s insouciant indifference.

Every few miles brought memories of fatality accidents, including one that took the life of a CHP Lieutenant I’d known many years ago. I’ve never forgotten the way his small children looked at the memorial. The overwhelm and vacant confusion in their eyes.

I pushed these memories away and thought about the childhood buddy I hoped to reunite with that morning. He had no idea I was coming, and I had no idea if he’d be where I expected him to be. I considered surprising him at home, but he lived with his brother who was somewhat estranged from me. There was a chance the brother would be uncooperative or claim my buddy wasn’t home.

For this reason, I decided on the church.

My buddy attended the same little Protestant church since he was a teenager. He sang in the choir. He used to invite my family every year for the church’s annual Christmas Eve performance.

We’d dress up. Red poinsettias always lined the walkway of the church entrance, where we’d find my friend smiling and waiting to welcome us.

The performance was popular and the church was packed. Afterward, they’d serve coffee, juice, and donuts. Everyone would mingle and talk about their Christmas plans and goals for the coming new year.

I miss those times.

I met my friend in the second grade. He was a bit shy and struggled with school, likely due to a mild learning disability. But boy could he draw. We shared a love for drawing and sketching, often getting together on weekends with our drawing pads in hand.

He became a fixture in the landscape of my life.

He was there at all the summer BBQs my father hosted at our home, and he can be found in all of our family’s holiday photos. He was there at my university graduation, police academy graduation, wedding, and nearly every other important life event. He even stopped by on my parent’s wedding anniversaries to drop off flowers. In short, he was the sweetest, kindest soul you’d ever meet.

Then one day I stopped hearing from him.

He still sent me his hand drawn birthday and Christmas cards, but he no longer returned my phone calls, emails, and social media inquiries. Had I done something to offend him? Was he ill?

So many concerns raced through my mind.

I reached out to one of his sisters via social media. She was coy, claiming not to know what was going on. But on a subsequent exchange, she left a devastating comment. Her brother has been having some memory issues. “But it’s not that bad,” she said.

Not that bad.

The words hung in my consciousness. What did they mean? What did the future hold for our long friendship?

Was I losing my dear friend?

I took the exit into downtown Los Gatos, the town I was born and raised in. I gazed at all the shops lining North Santa Cruz Avenue. There was the little coffee shop my mother loved, where my buddy sometimes joined us on weekends. He used to delight my mom with his napkin doodles and silly jokes about monkeys.

Soon I was leaving town along Highway 9, headed for Saratoga where my friend’s church was located.

I arrived in the rear parking lot, shut off the engine, and sat quietly gripping the steering wheel. A wave of mild anxiety coursed through me.

I made my way to the rear church entrance. It was a Sunday but the parking lot was less than half full. A man in khaki pants and button down shirt with a name tag welcomed me. “I’m from out of town, here looking for my friend. He volunteers with the church,” I said.

“What’s his name?” the gentleman asked.

I told him and the man said, “Oh, sure, I think he’s in the children’s classroom. Just walk into the courtyard, make a left, and it’s the last door at the end,” he said.

I thanked the man and continued on.

When I got to the children’s classroom a woman, also wearing a name tag, asked if she could help me. I told her I was from out of town, and that I was looking for my friend. I must have been nervous, because I added that we’d known one another since the second grade and that I remembered coming to the church for their wonderful Christmas Eve performances.

“Oh, sure, I’ve heard about those old performances. That was the old church. It’s changed hands over the years. We don’t have a choir anymore. Wish we did,” she said.

We stood there for an awkward moment.

“When was the last time you’ve seen your friend?” she asked.

“Well, it’s been a few years. Thought I’d surprise him,” I said.

“Okay, well I need to tell you something. It’s his memory. He forgets. So far, he’s able to drive himself here on Sundays. I mean, he’s been a fixture here since the early days of the church, before any of us were involved,” she said.

“Yeah, his sister mentioned he had some memory issues,” I said.

“Okay, well, he’s in the main church. I think he’s seated in the back, on the right side.” She pointed the way and I thanked her.

Anxiety pulsed through me as I made my way into the church. What would I find?

Would he remember me?

There, alone in the back, I spotted his gray hair. He’d always been thin, slight of build. But somehow now he looked smaller. Like a lonely old man, a wraith still floating around the buildings and corridors of this old church.

I slipped into the empty chair directly next to him.

At first he kept looking ahead at the altar of the church. And then he turned and looked directly at me, no doubt wondering who this man was who saddled up right next to him.

His eyes met mine.

Despite the gray hair, a few more wrinkles and thinner face, his expression held the same gentle countenance I’d long known. And his eyes, albeit strangely duller than I recall, still radiated an inner kindness.

He gazed at me briefly. I held my breath.

And then he said, “John! What are you doing here? You’re supposed to be in Nevada.”

I felt like I was about to cry.

I gave him a hug and said I was in town for the annual firearms qualifications at the police department. “Thought I’d surprise you,” I said.

“Wow, it’s great to see you!” he said.

I had a million questions but the service was about to get started. “Step outside, or do you want to enjoy the service first?” he asked.

I figured it best not to interrupt the flow of things and said, “Sure, we’ll talk after the service.” This pleased him.

He smiled broadly and patted my knee affectionately.

The service was nothing like the old days.

The choir was gone and replaced by a small band. A pastor in blue jeans and polo shirt greeted everyone and invited us to sing along to their opening song. There were a few prayers, and then the pastor said they were going to turn it over to the church’s head pastor.

The lights went dark, the music stopped, and suddenly a man appeared in the middle of the altar. He was an older gentleman wearing a suit, illuminated by some kind of overhead spotlight. He sat on a three-legged wooden stool.

“Good morning everyone,” he said. “On this blessed Sunday morning we’re going to continue our three part series with lecture number two on acceptance and love. And today’s topic begins with an apology to those LGBTQ members who may have been disenfranchised in the past. We want to welcome our LGBTQ brothers and sisters with open arms, and take responsibility for any past failures of the church,” the head pastor said.

Then he literally blinked on stage, like a lagging video. It reminded me of a scene from Star Trek, when people were beamed one place or another via their transporter.

That’s when I realized that the head pastor was nothing more than a 3D, life-like image beamed in via holographic projection technology. A “holy hologram.”

As a Catholic, this new age style of worship was completely foreign to me. Also, it was nothing like the traditional services the church used to perform in the past. I wondered what my buddy thought about all these changes.

When the service was over, we strolled out into the courtyard.

“It’s so great to see you, John. So what brings you into town?” my old friend said.

“Oh, like I said, the police department’s annual firearms qualifications,” I said. Then I added, “The church service is a lot different now. I miss the choir.”

“Yeah, a lot has changed,” he said. He gazed past me at the fifty foot high tree in the courtyard. He pointed at the tree.

“I remember when we planted that tree,” he said.

“Yeah, I remember coming here during the holidays when it was still a little tree. You’ve been here a long time,” I said.

He nodded in agreement, and it struck me that he was older than most of the new church’s staff members. He was like a permanent fixture of the church. A keeper of the history. The old memories.

And then we spoke of old memories.

I brought up our childhood, and how we used to swim in the pool behind his parent’s house. The same house that he and his brother still live in, like an old couple. Neither had married and so they rely on one another.

“Yeah, we finally had the pool filled in and covered over with lawn. And sometimes there’s this raccoon that climbs over the fence from the creek and runs across our backyard,” he said.

I laughed about the raccoon.

I thought about inviting him to join me for coffee in downtown Saratoga where we sometimes met. We used to get coffee and scones and then drive around the corner to Madronia Cemetery, where my parents are buried, to pay our respects.

But instinct told me to stay put.

I felt that he was more comfortable there at the church, in familiar surroundings. And it seemed that the church staff looked after him, aware that something within my dear friend was slowly unraveling.

We strolled over to the coffee and donut table, made our selections, and then sat at an empty picnic table. I asked how his brother was doing. Told him a bit about my life, my writing and photography and what my son is up to these days. I asked if he was still drawing. “A bit,” he said.

“I remember when we’d sit by the pool in your backyard with our sketchbooks and draw the birds,” I said.

“Oh yeah, I remember that. You know we filled in the pool and covered it with grass. And sometimes this raccoon climbs over the fence by the creek and runs across the lawn,” he said.

“Oh yeah?” I said. “That’s pretty funny.”

The church pastor strolled over and introduced himself. My buddy told him how we’ve known each other since the second grade.

“There is nothing on this earth more to be prized than true friendship,” the pastor said. I recognized the quote. Thomas Aquinas.

We chatted for a bit.

Then the pastor left us to visit with others and I started to run out of things to say. Somehow my friend’s house came up again, and for a third time he mentioned the raccoon in the backyard.

I hugged him tightly.

“I’m so glad you were here,” I said. “It’s so good to see you.”

“Likewise,” he said with a smile.

We made our way to the rear parking lot, and I pulled my rangefinder camera out of the car and asked if I could take a few portraits. He said sure and smiled that familiar smile. And yet, there in his eyes, something distant. Unfamiliar. Sad.

“Well, I guess I should be heading back,” I said, and we hugged one last time.

I got in my car, and as I drove slowly toward the parking lot exit, he walked alongside the car, as if escorting me out. As I turned right onto the street, I rolled down my window and waved.

He waved back, and then turned and faded away into the corridors of the church.

On the drive back through Los Gatos a young couple in the convertible in front of me was playing Bob Marley. I thought of a Bob Marley line I’d written down in one of my journals.

“The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.”

If we didn’t care, there’d be no sting to loss. No suffering when loved ones die or slowly evaporate into the darkening marine layer of dementia. And for this reason, I wept on my drive back over Highway 17.

I wept for my childhood friend.

I wept for my parents. And for the CHP Lieutenant who lost his life on that dangerous highway corridor.

As I crested the mountain and gazed out on Lexington Reservoir’s smooth waters, I saw the silhouette of a small animal ambling through the shoreline shadows and brush. I squinted to look closely.

And I laughed most of the way home.

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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.