Part 1

Our lives rarely follow the career paths we imagine as children; instead, they emerge from a mixture of circumstances, influencers, and serendipity. My youthful dream of becoming a pilot and an astronaut unraveled through an ill-advised interaction with a parking meter.

My fourteen-year-old grand-niece, Mary, recently announced that she wants to become an aerospace engineer. That’s a big shift from her previously expressed intended career: I want to be a cosmetologist. She’s coming to New York for a visit and wants to see anything related to space, so I’m going to take her to the Intrepid, a World War II-era aircraft carrier docked on the Hudson River that is now a floating museum of flight. On board is a prototype of the space shuttle Enterprise. “It’s big,” was my technical explanation.

Inevitably, when we were young, we were asked, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I think a better question to ask young people would be, “What problem do you want to solve when you get older?” Think of the potential for a young Timmy or Julie, age 9 or 10, who responds, “I want to be an activist who finally convinces gullible people that trickle-down economics is a scam.”

I had no idea how to answer that question when Mr. Imig first posed it to me in the fifth grade. I had been looking out the classroom window, which I did a lot back then.

“Jeff! What do you want to be when you grow up?” Mr. Imig tapped on my desk. I could have responded with the standard “A fireman!” or “A forest ranger!” but instead I said, “I need to go to the bathroom.”

Like I did a few times during my elementary school days when I saw no purpose in an assignment, or didn’t have the faintest idea of an answer, I took the opportunity to visit the school’s janitor in his closet storage room. I remember he had a small transistor radio playing static more than anything else. I would sit with him for a few minutes, maybe ask about a tool or cleaner. And then he would walk me back to my classroom as he let me push the big floor mop.

Mary’s pronouncement got me thinking about how and why we end up doing what we do. My wife, Jennifer, didn’t wake up one morning and say, “I want to be a highly successful textbook salesperson in New York City,” which she became. She relocated from the corn and soybean fields of rural Maryland to New York City to prove to her skeptical mother that she could sing “New York, New York” and “My Way” just like Frank Sinatra, only with books instead of a microphone.

David Sedaris didn’t wake up one morning and say, “I want to write humor that catches people so off guard that it makes them spray their coffee all over the kitchen table.”

And I’ll bet our current President didn’t tell his 5^th grade teacher, “I want to become the most corrupt, lying, self-aggrandizing public official in world history.”

“I want to be a pilot and an astronaut,” I realized after watching the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo space missions of the 1960’s. True, I’m claustrophobic and highly susceptible to motion sickness—no back seats in a car for me—but I was enamored by the white-silk-scarf-around-my-neck romance of space travel, the physics that I still can’t explain, and beating the Soviet Union to the Moon. Take that Brezhnev! I went so far as to enlist in Air Force R.O.T.C. in college.

I’m convinced we end up doing what we do through an amalgam of circumstances, influencers, and serendipity. For me, one potential life path ended, and another began with a "NO PARKING!" sign.

Late one Saturday night during my freshman year at the University of Illinois, my roommate Steve and I partied at my older brother’s off-campus apartment. I had passed out under the softly bubbling fish tank, my head next to a stereo speaker, the new Rolling Stones album, “Let It Bleed,” blaring in my ear. Talk about foreshadowing. Steve eventually kicked me awake with “Ike, home.”

Still drunk and high, we headed to our dorm and decided it would be a good idea to leapfrog over a long line of double-headed parking meters in front of the University of Illinois’ Art and Architecture building. Blurry-eyed, I couldn’t see that the last one didn’t have two meters but rather a single meter and a large metal NO PARKING sign. If I had seen the sign, I probably wouldn’t have tried the jump, and my life wouldn’t have taken the dramatic turn it did. There’s no telling what would have happened to my life plan if it had been Steve’s turn to jump the last meter, with its slightly hidden sign. But it was my turn, and so, with my imaginary white scarf waving behind me, I launched myself.

The next thing I remember is riding up in the dorm elevator when some guy said to me, “Hey, buddy, you’re really bleeding.” Steve drunkenly explained that I had leapfrogged a parking meter as if it were an Olympic event. Uncomfortable laughter. I looked down at the elevator floor, and sure enough, I was bleeding, standing in a very red, ever-widening pool of “bleeding.”

I woke the next morning on my stomach in a hospital bed. I tried to shift positions, and the plastic liner, which I later learned was there to keep any residual drainage from soaking through to the mattress, crinkled loudly. Both it and the pounding in my head said, Yes, you’re hungover. Momentarily confused about why I was there, I heard a voice say, “Oh, no, you don’t.” The face belonging to the voice appeared at the head of the bed. “You’ve got to stay on your stomach for a few days,” a woman in white ordered. ‘Your bum is in no shape for….”

A movie-like trailer began playing in my head, filled with quick snippets of me drinking, Mick Jagger, Steve and me stumbling home, a series of parking meters, the elevator, me bleeding, and me lying in a fetal position in the footwell of a car’s backseat. “Don’t worry about the blood,” someone said. “It will be easy to clean up.” Then came the tiniest suspicion that I might have done something stupid.

Catch the conclusion next week.

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This summer I’ve been releasing a series of mini-episodes where, in under 10 minutes, I examine a key concept from a previously broadcast episode. All the concepts in the series have lasting value, so I’ve named the series “Evergreen Ideas.” One of my favorite concepts is “serendipity,” which I showcase in Episode 426: Serendipity: The Art and Science of Creating Smart Luck.

Serendipity isn’t luck or coincidence; it’s about being curious and aware enough of what’s going on around you to spot and connect events and people to create—sometimes courageously—smart luck. I see evidence of a bit of serendipity in my early years.

“Why are you going to that place?” my Aunt Cele asked with incredulity. “They murdered our people there.” I started to explain that, as a history teacher, I was curious, but she swatted the rest of my answer away like an irritating bug.

Childless, I was her sheinkindt, her dear child. As a buyer for Florsheim’s shoes in Chicago’s Marshall Fields, Aunt Cele regularly fitted me out in dress shoes. She routinely had me sit next to her as we watched her beloved Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. While I hated to disappoint her, I didn’t yet fully understand her anger. All of “that” had taken place almost thirty years earlier. The best explanation I would have given her would likely have come across as clinical: I was a high school history teacher, and I was curious to see the history I’d only read about. I also wanted to bring back photos to share with my classes.

Back then, I was emotionally detached, not just as a Jew, but as a citizen of humanity.

Dachau, Nazi Germany’s first concentration camp, was on my travel itinerary, along with Hitler’s retreat in the Bavarian Alps. Located 10 miles northwest of Munich, Dachau served as a blueprint and training center for the other concentration camps. About 200,000 prisoners passed through the gate, and some 41,000 died there.

I remember almost nothing from that trip. A vague image of the crematorium? The spartan barracks? The roll call area? Those could be memories I’d mentally copied from other sources. Dachau’s gate, with its cynical, deceptive message in iron lettering registered — Arbeit macht frei – Work sets you free — but I don’t remember stopping to reflect on it or on the camp in general. In my early twenties, I was focused on seeing history. Feeling it would come later.

The shift began as I stepped into the main gate of Auschwitz-Birkenau. I stopped and looked up at the iron words again: Arbeit macht frei. And then, and I don’t know why, I did what no Jew could have done at the time: I slowly stepped back out. And then, just as slowly, I stepped back in. I was free to come and go. That experience, almost more than anything else I was to see, conveyed the finality of what the prisoners faced.

Part of the museum consists of a series of large rooms. One is filled with human hair. Another contains suitcases and pots and pans – more of the cruel ruse that their owners, who carried them into the cattle cars, were going to a place where they could use them. Another room is filled with shoes. There was no mistaking the small shoes of a child, and once I saw one, I saw many. They were, of course, the hardest to look at. I stared at them in disbelief. I can still see them.

I wanted to reach out and touch these artifacts, but glass partitions kept me from doing so.

Medical experiments were conducted in another room. Then, in another room no larger than an old phone booth, the Nazis would stuff several prisoners inside and close the door. No light. Little air. No room to sit. Even now, I feel my heart racing from the claustrophobia.

Later, after standing inside the iconic guard tower that overlooked the camp and prisoner selection area—the one that’s pictured in most essays or films on Auschwitz—my guide instructed my colleague and me to follow her.

In the fading light, we walked along the train tracks past what had been the selection area toward one of the camp’s crematoria. The same lampposts that dotted the electric fences bordering the prisoners’ barracks in the early 1940s cast a dim light across the rail bed. In the distance, a police vehicle with its emblematic siren – WHA wha WHA wha WHA wha – punctuated the night, followed by dogs barking in alarm.

Our guide wanted us to see a crematorium, which lay in ruins. The Germans had attempted to destroy it as they made their hasty retreat at war’s end. But it was too dark to make out anything except large chunks of concrete. So, we turned and walked back up the long stretch of tracks. I heard the muted ghostly shrieks, cries, and whispers of the million and more souls that had walked the same path, but only in a single direction.

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Dr. James E. Young, Distinguished University Professor of English and Judaic Studies Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, is a leading authority on memorials. He is frequently consulted on their design and has served as a juror, including for the 9/11 Memorial. The most effective memorials, he has written, are designed to allow the visitor to become part of their performance. By “performance,” he means the history and the potential stories and emotions their designs offer for consideration.

Over the past decades, I’ve visited numerous memorials, including military cemeteries. None of them dictate the designers’ intent. Instead, through their architecture, they pose the provocative question: What will you make of this? The visitor is poised to answer that question and, in the process, shift from a casual observer to a reflective participant, figuratively stepping into the past.

In that moment, a memorial becomes a portal.

For me, engaging with a memorial’s performance feeds my obsession with the tragedy and trauma underlying the memorial’s chorus of ghosts. I am reminded of the angel in the novel Angel Down, who is caught in the barbed wire of “No man’s land,” the mauled space between the warring armies of World War I. Her shrieks can be heard above the ever-present pounding of artillery, shrieks that express the horror of what men and women endure at the hands of others in war. But also, I think, shrieks of despair over the millions of lives not lived, of mattering and value not fully realized or not realized at all.

<<>>

Aunt Cele died in 1990, well before I experienced the memorial performance of Auschwitz and other places. Well before I knew how to explain.

I don’t know why she reacted as she did when I first mentioned Dachau. There was some speculation that a distant family member had been consumed in the Holocaust. Or maybe the murder of six million was still just too raw. Whatever it was, my intention to visit Dachau pressed a nerve. Like other victims who have experienced trauma either directly or indirectly, maybe she had just walled that time up in an effort to move on. We never spoke of it again.

Today, I would love to explain that while I share her anger and grief, I also share the angel’s despair when I walk through gut-aching memorials and battlefield cemeteries with their glistening white grave stones and Walls of the Missing. That I no longer see any memorial to the Holocaust or any military cemetery as a separate place. They are part of a larger collective, a larger stain on humanity.

I would try to explain that I am drawn in reverence for the millions more who died, were murdered, or were killed. That I am in disbelief that, after all this time, the deaths don’t stop because hatred for this group or that group of people doesn’t stop. That politically self-serving decisions don’t stop. That detached orders from the safety of bunkers don’t stop.

I would try to explain that when I walk in these places, it’s like I’m saying to the ghosts, I’m sorry for the life you missed, for the impact you might have had.

As I try to explain, I’d watch Aunt Cele’s eyes for what she makes of it.

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For more on Dr. Young’s explanation of a memorial’s performance, check out Episode 414: “How Do Memorials Engage Visitors Physically and Mentally?”

Episode 318: “Confronting the Remnants of Hate on the Path to Remembrance” is one of my engagements with memorials that informed my thinking.

Finally, I didn’t include this image earlier because I didn’t want to break up the narrative flow, but it’s emblematic of the military cemeteries I’ve seen on my tours of the battlefields of World Wars I and II. This is the ‎⁨Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery⁩, ⁨in Plombières⁩, ⁨Liège⁩, ⁨Belgium⁩. It holds 7,989 graves of servicemen who lost their lives during the advance of the U.S. armed forces into Germany during the fall and winter of 1944/1945. Another 89 graves hold the remains of those “Known but to God.” Another 451 servicemen are listed as missing.

This is one of 22 cemeteries in Europe holding the remains of U.S. servicemen killed during World War I and II. Most known servicemen killed during these wars were repatriated to the U.S. The battlefields hold the remains of thousands not yet found.

“I’m not saying this is definitely what the book is about,” Cindy offered. “Ask ten people, and you’ll get 10 opinions, but what I read was someone who had tremendous, unanticipated success with her first book, trying to figure out her place in the world as a writer.”

“Yes, she’s taking a road trip across the United States, and we do learn a lot about the people and the country, but the book is more about her identity than a study of American life on and off the road. This is about Lauren, I think, being extremely curious about how she navigates a nation in turmoil and the personal transformation that accompanies her emergence as a successful author.”

I thought about my half-read copy of Monster of a Land: On the Road in Search of Modern America by Lauren Hough. It does feel more like author William Least Heat-Moon’s search for himself and the real America by traveling the country’s Blue Highways, rather than CBS News reporter Charles Kuralt’s folksy and quaint weekly “On the Road” segments. Cindy House, my writing coach and the author of the successful memoir Mother Noise: A Memoir, has asked herself the same identity question as she grinds through the draft of a novel.

She shared Lauren’s book with me because she knows I’ve been wrestling with the same question. I co-authored Shifting: How School Leaders Can Create a Culture of Change, which debuted just as COVID hit. Many educators went out of their minds trying to adapt, so it wasn’t the best time for any book to land on their desks. But hey, I’m still receiving royalties. And like Lauren and Cindy, I’ve had that nagging question, the one from singer Peggy Lee’s 1969 Grammy-winning classic, playing in my head: “Is That All There Is?”

I get energized by the effort to produce an almost-weekly Substack essay, but essays aren’t a book, at least not yet. I can’t put them on my bookshelf with the covers facing the room so they collectively reflect me like a mirror.

I would love to write a second book, not just because two is better than one. My gut tells me I’ve got stories to tell and themes to explore. Maybe things to admit. But my keyboard has yet to reveal the “aboutness” that would hold all of that together.

<<>>

I usually read late at night, just before I turn out the lights. My mind tends to wander when I read, not because I’m tired, but because something an author has written triggers a memory or an idea. It’s not an ideal reading practice, because it takes me forever to finish a book. But it reinforces my need to write again.

I could read faster. I could read in the morning before ingesting the latest what the fuck has he done now news. I could read after I finish my Substack writing and podcast work for the day, but I’ve become somewhat addicted to British crime shows. I get to stand with them at the evidence board to try to piece together “who” and “why” from the available clues.

My favorite character is usually the medical examiner. They’re often portrayed as an older, sometimes irascible, seasoned scientist who reports their findings clinically. They’ve cracked too many chests, looked through too many microscopes, and smelled way too many lab chemicals to be indirect. But occasionally they present the cause of death with a hint of mystery: “The victim was definitely strangled with a rope, but” they’ll note with a pregnant pause and a raised eyebrow, “they were already dead.”

Those shows, with their focus on the cause of death, and Lauren’s possible focus on identity, got me thinking. Could we explain our cause of life in just one or two motivators?

You may be thinking we humans are too complex to do that. We are complex, but could the medical examiner in you identify the one or two dominant traits or behaviors that drive you and pull everything else along?

When I think of my dad, for example, one word immediately comes to mind: provider. The need to provide for five kids and my mom may have left him little time to develop outside interests he could pursue as his post-retirement chapter.

But it wasn’t just a question of time. His life philosophy of work above everything else was forged during his early years. One of his proudest stories was how he worked odd jobs during the Great Depression and brought the money home to his mother to support the household.

When he wasn’t at his paid job, he was rewiring our crawl space with lamp cord, paneling our rooms with mismatched plywood samples he’d received from a supplier, and insulating the attic. “Get me (name any tool)” was a common refrain.

He had little to no interest in my school sports, academics, or dating. But he was passionate about helping me with my jobs. He drove me around on my Sunday paper route, chewing on his ubiquitous cigar. When I worked at the grocery store, he dropped me off and picked me up. He was always quick with the question, asked in earnest, “How was work?”

When the nest was finally empty, he had little left to occupy his days except trips to various doctors, reading the Chicago Tribune—often starting with the obituaries—and the occasional lunch with my mom at International House of Pies.

<<>>

Maybe I’m fixated on the notion of a “cause of life” because I’m 75 and don’t want the capstone of my remaining days to be a slice of pie. And that’s not a criticism of my dad. His days were where his “cause of life” led him. We have to understand people, including ourselves, in the context of their time.

My 75 isn’t a hand-wringing 75. I’m not resorting to tired analogies like “I’ve entered my December years.” Rather, retirement feels like “75 is the new 55.” I want to experience those “somedays” that have accumulated over my life, like all the unread books on my nightstand.

So, what are my one or two words? I’ve always been compelled to know why. I was probably one of those kids who routinely plagued my parents with “why?” or at least thought about the question. Wanting to know why is why I majored in and taught history. It’s why knowing a place’s history is paramount when I travel. It’s why I get moved to tears when I look at a military headstone that reads “Known but to God.”

Growing up, there wasn’t a rock I didn’t want to turn over to see what was underneath. At work, I always wanted to know what did and didn’t motivate my staff.

Today, I absolutely want to know why people behave as they do. I don’t know how you can really know someone without considering their past.

And I named my podcast, “Cultivating Curiosity.”

Thinking about our “cause of life” can also help us look beyond ourselves. When we look at others and think, How can I understand and support their cause of life? it changes us. It can pull us out of the isolating panic rooms we’ve built to shelter us from today’s horror film with seemingly daily sequels.

Michelangelo said he could see the finished sculpture in a block of stone and that his job was merely to chip away the extraneous pieces. So, maybe there’s more than a bit of Michelangelo in second-book authors, writers, and in wannabes like me. Maybe this “cause of life” idea prompts the question: As a writer, can my words continue to sculpt something of value for the reader, and in the process, prove to me that I’m not a one-hit wonder; that as an artist, I still matter?

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One of the most interesting and necessary examinations of mattering and value is with today’s students. The podcast explored that in Episode 337: “Fostering ‘Mattering’ to Counter the Toxic Achievement Culture in Today’s Schools” with guest educator Dr. Sarah Bennison. If you are a parent or a citizen concerned with today’s students’ mental health, you’ll want to check out this episode.

I’ll have Sarah at the mic again later this fall when we discuss Mattering by Jennifer Breheny Wallace. Jennifer is the author of the opening epigraph.

I had heard the digging off in the distance at various times over the years, decades ago, really. Barely perceptible: the gentle scraping and brushing, and the clink of metal against metal from the archaeologists’ tools. We’re over here! We’re down here! I thought. But I gradually lost hope that I could be heard. I mean, I was just letters punched into a small piece of metal.

And you, of course, couldn’t speak at all with half your face blown away by the first German shell, and so much of the rest of you blown away by the second shell, including half of me. That’s the shell that buried us, the remaining half of me eventually resting inside the pulpy remnants of your face.

It always amazed me how quiet it grew when the trench collapsed over us. I felt the shells’ vibrations as they hit whatever they hit, but beneath a ton or more of dirt, compressed like we were a keepsake flower in a book, I could only hear the muffled boom of distant artillery and the occasional whistle of a shell flying overhead. And of course, there were the muted screams of the injured and the desperate cries for “Medic!”

It won’t do you any good to yell, I wanted to quip. You’ll bleed out before he arrives. But why dash hope?

And then, finally, there was just silence.

After a few years, I heard the chug, chug, chug of an engine and the deep, raspy cutting of the earth above us. Back and forth. First one way, then the other. A farmer tilling his field, perhaps? That’s what the land had been used for before the war. Not yet violated by the incessant pounding of remorseless ordnance and the rows of zigzagging trenches, one of which you fought from and died in.

And then, after almost 100 years, there it was right above us: that gentle scraping and brushing and the clink of metal against metal of the archeologists’ tools. My thoughts screamed, We’re down here! We’re down here! Then, furtive scraping and excited voices! And soon, the sunlight exploded off their metal tools as they pulled away the last of the compacted dirt.

All that remained of you, except me, was labeled and put into a storage box.

They turned me over and over in curiosity, rubbing off as much dirt as they could. They passed me around: a novelty, you see, because most dog tags in the war were made of a fibrous material and quickly disintegrated in the moist earth. But since you had been stationed in India before the Great War, you had been issued a metal dog tag — Me!— because standard-issue tags never survived that country’s heat and humidity.

I was dipped in a series of cleansing baths, and eventually a few key words and letters could be made out. We had served in the Lancashire Fusiliers. You had a name.

Your half a skull and a few bone and cloth fragments were eventually placed in a small, proper casket with me and transported on the back of a horse-drawn caisson to the cemetery, with a Union flag draped over us.

A small military band played “Nearer My God to Thee.”

Our casket was carried to the newly dug grave with its smart angles and straight walls. A solo bagpiper played “Flowers of the Forest.”

An officer from your unit read, “Today, more than a century after the guns of the Western Front fell silent, we welcome…” and your name was spoken publicly for the first time in decades. The officer didn’t describe your grisly end in a war that was a meat grinder for Europe’s youth. He didn’t say that there were thousands of remains that had yet to be discovered, still lying beneath farmers’ fields. Not the right time or place perhaps. Maybe that was for historians to say.

Finally, we were lowered into the ground once again, this time beneath a gleaming white headstone bearing your name, standing in a long line of white headstones amid rows and rows of white headstones. Alone no more.

A star was placed next to your name on the “Wall of the Missing” memorial, indicating to visitors that you had been found. That we had been found.

Every few years, I feel the gentle vibration of footsteps that stop above us. A visitor! Maybe they read the inscription:

HE DIED

AMONGST HIS COMRADES

NOT ONE SHALL BE FORGOTTEN

REST IN PEACE

Maybe their fingers trace the carved letters of your name and age, noting that you were only 32 when you were killed. Maybe they lament so much life not lived.

In one grave. In one row. In one cemetery. In one war.

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This essay is also available on 7/21/2026 as an audio file in Episode 424.

Program note: The story behind the essay

For the last few years, my podcast has offered an eclectic array of episodes on topics that triggered my curiosity. My interest in the two World Wars is an example and has led me to various sites across Europe. I’m indebted to Iain McHenry, my guide on one tour, for sharing the story of the discovery in 2006 of the remains of Richard Lancaster, a private with the Lancashire Fusiliers. This essay was based on Iain’s detailed explanation. Richard was killed on November 10, 1914, during the First Battle of Ypres, Belgium. I interviewed Iain in Episode 308. It is one thing to read history; another to walk where it happened with an informed and passionate storyteller.

The remains of countless thousands of soldiers from many nations still lie in farmers’ fields, waiting to be discovered. Some soldiers were so vaporized by explosions that their remains will never be found.

I’m also indebted to Cindy House for her reading of this essay in Episode 424. Cindy is my writing coach, and our Friday meetings are a high point of my week. She epitomizes good teaching: she is quick to challenge me to “dig deeper for my real story,” offers sound suggestions, and then praises me when I hit a strong note. I can’t imagine taking this writer’s journey with anyone else.

This essay came out of a prompt Cindy suggested a few weeks ago: “Write about a headline that never left you.” I was mesmerized in September 2019 when Iain and I walked the ground where Richard was found. I’ve not been able to forget the story in part, I think, because there are so many other Richards who’ve never been found. The Menin Gate in the town of Ypres, Belgium, bears the names of more than 54,000 Commonwealth soldiers from World War I whose graves remain unknown. France and Germany have similar walls, remembering their missing.

Rather than tell the story as a straight historical narrative, I wanted the piece to have a distinct voice. That’s where I got the idea for the piece to speak from Richard’s unique dog tags. Cindy immediately raised her hand to be the reader.

«»

In June 2025, I again toured with Iain, this time focusing solely on the Battle of Verdun, which was fought from February 1916 to December 1916. It became the longest battle of World War I, resulting in more than 700,000 casualties and 300,000 deaths on both sides.

One stop was the Fleury-devant-Douaumont National Necropolis, the largest French cemetery from the war, with more than 16,000 graves. Attached to the cemetery is the Douaumont Ossuary, which contains the skeletal remains of more than 130,000 unidentified combatants from France and Germany. Portals along the ossuary’s wall allowed me to look inside at bones simply stacked in an almost unending pile.

While these numbers are staggering, almost incomprehensible, they come from a single battle in a single war.

Those men who died during World War I and other wars and whose bodies or remains were found now lie in silence in beautifully manicured cemeteries all over the world. Green lawns and white headstones have wiped clean the horrors that once took place on the same soil. Those who grieve the soldiers’ deaths, whether relative or visitor, may be comforted by slogans such as “the cost of freedom.”

But as I look out over the graves, I am simply struck by how limited humans are in their ability and willingness to avoid the carnage in the first place.

The late fly-fishing writer John Gierach once wrote: “The purpose of fly fishing isn’t to catch fish; it’s to go where fish are caught.” I initially took “where fish are caught” to mean the obvious and concrete: anything that contributed to the fish’s physical environment. Intrinsic to that are the guides Gierach frequently wrote about when he fished unfamiliar waters: the men and women who knew the history, stories, and people of a place, and the twists and turns of the water where the local fish species were likely to be found.

As I thought about it, “where fish are caught” also has a spiritual quality: the nature of flowing water, fresh air, and sunlight’s ability to make us forget the day of the week.

And so it was that “where fish are caught” was on my mind during a recent trip to Iceland. The remote far-north environment where we fished has a stark beauty. Shaped by volcanoes and sculpted by glaciers and flowing water over millions of years, the high-walled valley is a slow-ticking geological clock. It’s a place where you can feel both very small, a fraction of a second in evolution, and gloriously young.

Sheep, lambs, and Icelandic ponies far outnumber people and roam everywhere.

The water is glacier-cold and “gin clear.” If it weren’t for the ever-present ripples caused by the water rushing over rocks and boulders, or the occasional flash of a fish, you’d swear there was no water at all.

I couldn’t help but look at that environment with awe.

« »

Like Gierach, I find guides an important part of my river experience. My most pleasurable days on the water come when my guide and I move beyond the mechanics of casting or studying where the fish are holding and get to know each other as people. That was my experience with Magnus, aka “Maggi,” on my recent trip to Iceland.

It’s not that I don’t need help with the mechanics, because even on my best days, I’m only an adequate caster. I’m not being unduly hard on myself as much as I’m being honest. I can be inconsistent and fall back on the novice habits I picked up when I first waded into a stream. I still try to muscle the rod almost to the point of grunting instead of letting it, with its built-in flexibility, do the work of propelling the line and fly.

Maggi periodically took my rod to offer a gentle correction on an aspect of casting, and then handed it back to me to practice. What I saw in his casting and tried to mirror was his minimal effort, treating the rod and reel as an extension of himself rather than a separate mechanical tool.

He was masterfully brief in his corrections: “That was pretty good. You just held it a bit too long on the back cast,” or “The line died because you didn’t give it enough ‘pop’ on the forward cast. Let’s try it again.”

If a cast worked as it should, he was quick with a smile and a “See that, eh!?” or a “You must have a great coach,” which left us both laughing.

A lot of his instruction boiled down to a single word: “tension”—the need to maintain tightness on the line throughout the cast to more effectively power it and the almost weightless fly. When I kept the tension, my line unfurled gracefully toward the water in a nearly straight line. When I lost that tension, it fell into a squiggly array that looked like the brushstrokes of a Jackson Pollock painting.

The irony is that fly fishing, done right, is a tension-releasing activity. Its movements, when executed correctly, are graceful, balletic, fluid, and calming, enhancing the spiritual aspects of a place.

Aside from instruction, Maggi and I gradually shared aspects of our personal lives, such as our work histories and how we came to do the work we do today. He appeared genuinely curious about my podcast because he always tries to find something interesting to listen to while tying flies in the evening to relax. We briefly discussed the blessings and challenges of his being a father, as well as the diminutives we use for our wives. And yes, we inevitably tiptoed into politics. I found him deeply informed about what’s happening in the U.S., more so than many people I know.

It’s tempting to explore the intersection of lives when you spend three days with someone, but it’s not guaranteed. I have fished with some guides over multiple days who were strictly focused on mechanics. After I’d made my last cast of the week and we were walking back to his car, I shared that observation with Maggi as I thanked him for our days together. He nodded and remarked, “There are two types of guides: the ones who take the easy road, and the ones who do it right.” “Doing it right” is a euphemism for approaching the client as a person and ensuring they get from the experience what they want and need. Maggi does it right.

Maggi stowed our gear, and when he climbed into his truck, he handed me a Snickers bar—it had become a tradition to end the day on a high note.

“Do you know what the best candy bar is?” I asked, taking a big bite of the Snickers. Without hesitation, he gave the answer I’d have given no matter which bar I held: “The one you’re eating.” We laughed as we had throughout our time together.

« »

I’ve thought about developing my skills to the point where I could fish on my own. That would mean becoming proficient at tying knots and learning more about insects and which flies to use in a given situation. But that’s not what I want at this stage of my life. While experiencing a place’s physical and spiritual environment is important, it’s only the baseline for why I fish. What I really want is a connection with another human and the potential for a lasting relationship that grows from our shared interests. That is something you can’t capture in a net.

I may never see Maggi again, but I hope our interactions don’t end just because our time on the water has.

Gierach had it right: the environment where fish are caught is magical, which includes, above all else, the potential to meet people who wade in the water in search of something other than a tug on the end of their fly line.

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I’m fortunate to consider two guides as friends. You can listen to our discussions here:

Spencer Siem: Episode 389 — Spencer is my guide in New Mexico and Colorado. This is a fun one because we recorded it streamside. You can hear the rushing water in the background. Our first episode, 275, is my most downloaded over 8 years because it’s about leadership as a critical guide quality. I’ve met several non-fly fishers who know of him because of the major role he played in bringing The Feather Thief to life.

Brew Moscarello: Episode 383 — Brew is my guide in southern Vermont, northern New York, and Connecticut. I can honestly say I don’t care if I catch fish with him or not because we generally laugh from the start of the day until we pack up. He’s a great, patient teacher and deeply involved in freshwater conservation, which has contributed to him being an Orvis-endorsed guide. A few days with him always culminate in a dinner out.

I was only seven or eight years old. I know this to be true because by the time I turned ten, we had moved from the house where the incident on the stairs took place to a new home, where my mother celebrated my milestone birthday with a traditional party: neighborhood boys, balloons, and cake.

Her gift was a large plastic toy cannon that fired ping-pong balls. Perhaps having watched my older brother’s habits, my mother recognized that young boys play “war” almost as a genetic rite of passage. They build forts and wield wooden swords and rifles in mock battles. She must have figured that a cannon that fired ping-pong balls would fit the bill. And it did.

But her attention to that brief passage of male youth differed from her parenting in general, which focused on my contributing to the well-oiled running of the house and learning lifelong domestic skills. Today, I am the master of our kitchen and laundry room, and I get an odd pleasure out of vacuuming.

“You can come down for dinner when you fold the sweater correctly,” my mother announced one afternoon. “Until then, you sit here.”

I have no memory of what precipitated this situation or why we were sitting on the second-floor landing of our tiny townhouse. Maybe my mother witnessed me casually tossing my sweater on the floor of the bedroom I shared with my older brother and sister. It wasn’t an unlikely occurrence.

“Watch,” she said. “I will show you one last time.” She smoothed out the sweater before us and deftly folded it in five moves.

“Fold the right sleeve diagonally until the cuff lines up with the waist.

Fold the left sleeve diagonally until the cuff lines up with the waist.

Fold the right sleeve toward the center.

Fold the left sleeve toward the center.

Fold the top half of the sweater toward the bottom half.”

“There, now you do it,” she said, her breath redolent of Sanka and Benson and Hedges.

She fluffed up the sweater and dropped the prison sentence between us.

“But you already folded it!” I whined in a fruitless argument, tears welling as my predicament became clearer. She had already folded and unfolded the sweater three or four times, so why was it so important that I do it, especially with the possibility of my missing dinner hanging in the balance? She turned and started down the stairs.

I made various half-hearted attempts, but the results always resembled leftover scraps from the loom. So, I would cry at my frustration. And I would laugh—not a humorous laugh but one of resignation—that I would be captive to the landing forever and never again savor my mother’s macaroni and cheese with its cut-up segments of Hormel’s cocktail sausages.

My mother periodically poked her head around the corner of the living room and looked up at me.

“Tears?” she would ask. Or “This is funny?” she would add if she caught my laugh of resignation.

I must have eventually mastered the task because otherwise, you would be reading a newspaper article:

Seventy-five-year-old man finally succumbs
on the second-floor landing of his family home.

Unable to fold his sweater correctly, his mother condemned the boy to a life of solitary confinement. He never graduated from college, married, or traveled to Italy.

“I suspect she had her reasons,” the man once offered, “but she never explained why I was banished other than to say, ‘You need to know how to do this in life.’”

I say, “I must have mastered the task” because it’s unlikely my mother finally gave in by taking the sweater and motioning me downstairs with a nod of her head. That was not her way.

Maybe the sweater was just a handy prop in her classroom of life’s lessons. Maybe it was that there’s an exacting way to do everything:

Add the thickening agent, such as flour or cornstarch, to a cool liquid, not a hot liquid, or it will form an unusable gelatinous lump.

Put your shirt on first and then your pants.

Pour the bleach into the wash after the tub fills, not when you first put the whites in.

Maybe it was because she wanted me to be different than my older siblings. Maybe she thought of their rebellious selves and said, “Not with this one.”

I would have liked to have held out at the top of the stairs as the young Paul Maclean character did in Robert Redford’s movie version of A River Runs Through It, where, unwilling to eat his oatmeal, he sat stubbornly at the dining room table for the better part of a day until his father, a Presbyterian minister, finally relented in a moment of Godly-like grace.

But I was no Paul. For much of my life, I believed I must have been near the head of the line when they handed out the compliance gene, as it became a behavioral tendency that often defined me in both business and life. Maybe my mother saw that tendency in me and knew it wouldn’t serve me in the long run. Instead, maybe she wanted me to stand up for myself and fight back as Paul did. Maybe she wanted to hear me say “No!”

Today, I can’t fold clothes without envisioning her sitting on the edge of my bed, a Mona Lisa smile on her face, one leg gently bouncing, crossed over the other, a lit cigarette in one hand and a cup of coffee in the other.

But then, decades later, with her ashes long since scattered to the winds, I wondered if the whole incident with the sweater had nothing to do with me. Maybe it was the coda to the story she told me in the small Vermont café about what her father and then her priest had taken from her as a teenage girl. Maybe the correctly folded sweater was just symbolic of the exacting order and perfection she felt compelled to demonstrate as wife, mother, housekeeper, piano teacher, gardener, and Catholic converted to Judaism as if to say to herself, “This, I can control.”

We never spoke of the sweater incident again. And I don’t remember discussing other aspects of my youth, such as playing sports, dating, or possibly attending college. Those were foreign concepts to a woman who had come of age during the Great Depression and World War II. But my schoolwork always elicited the same response: “You can do better.”

I know my mother loved me, but it was safer for her to live behind a self-imposed emotional boundary. She showed love by caring for the house and for us. We weren’t poor, but there was no discretionary income in my father’s paycheck. As a result, no one did more with less than my mother. But expressing emotion in words was not her way. We would end phone calls with me saying, “I love you, Mom,” and she would reply, “Me too.”

So maybe my tendencies to follow the rules and be exacting in whatever I did was a seed planted at the top of the stairs and nurtured in my Wonder Bread years. I did what was expected of me because it pleased my mother, and while I wanted more than “Me too,” I took what she could give. Not surprisingly, wanting to please others, to be something so elementary as to be liked by others, to be perfect became ever-present drives when I went out our kitchen door for the last time.

Years later, my mom sent me a birthday card that I still have. The photograph on the cover shows a young boy leaning on an open car window, looking at something beyond the frame. Inside was the card’s printed message.

The years flew by.

And before I knew it,

He was all grown-up.

What a wonderful man you’ve become. Happy Birthday.

And then, in her best Catholic-school script.

Dear Jeff.

Lately, I have looked at cards for Jeff, and nothing really grabbed me until this one. It’s the absolute truth.

Love & hugs from Mom

The written words would have to do.

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I briefly mentioned the scene with Paul Maclean from Robert Redford’s adaptation of Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It. In Episode 380: “Digging Deeper to Find the Heart of the Story,” I use the film as a catalyst to try to get beneath a story’s surface to its “aboutness.” Like Norman, I struggle in my early drafts to move beyond surface storytelling and uncover what I am truly trying to say. I’m grateful that I have a writing coach in Cindy House who magically sees between the early lines and pushes me to “dig deeper.”

There are official memorials to D-Day, June 6, 1944 that artists have created out of metal, granite, and marble, but I was curiously drawn to the composition of the beach itself, so I pocketed the stone not because it had a particular shape or color but because it was indistinguishable from the thousands of other stones on the beach, just like the men—often boys, really—who were indistinguishable from one another as they attempted to wade ashore under the near-crushing weight of their packs and the relentless enemy machine-gun fire that cut them down before they could even point their weapons, leaving many of them crying out for their mothers and bleeding all over the stones, which decades later have been washed clean by the pounding surf,

like the one I slipped into my pocket as I fake-tied my shoe, ignoring the sign that asks, “Please Don’t Pick Up Souvenir Stones,” because I’ll probably only walk this sacred stretch of sand and stone once in my life and then trudge up the zigzag path to the top of the bluff, like many of the soldiers did as they eventually battled their way off the beach, fighting every step of the way, before breaking through to the flat ground above to what is now a cemetery for the fallen and missing, a white sea of names and “Unknown,” “Unknown,” “Unknown” on marble crosses and Stars of David, where, on top of any of them, I might be expected to leave the stone, as any Jew would leave a pebble or a small rock on a family gravestone to tell other mourners, “Someone was here to remember,” but,

no, I had another resting place in mind where I can see the stone everyday, so the ghosts of those who died on Omaha’s nothin’-about-it was-‘Easy’ landing zone in Normandy, France, or for that matter during the brutal winters of Korea, in the jungles and rice paddies of Vietnam, the desert and cities of Iraq, or the mountains, valleys, and caves of Afghanistan can remind me that “Life can turn fast,”

be it somewhere with bullets turning you into pulp, or—now that I think about it—in my car that could be t-boned by a drunk, or by a doctor pointing out the white area on my abdominal CT scan, or by forgetting not where I left my keys, but what keys are for, or by that blood vessel that decides now is the time to burst, or by the death of my soulmate,

all of which makes me realize that I slipped that stone into my pocket as I fake-tied my shoe, so I could clutch a tiny piece of the past and eventually see this small memorial first thing when I turn on my desk lamp and last thing before my room goes dark and, in doing so, somehow get closer to the men who, through their muffled cries for their mothers, frantic orders, and near paralyzing fear established a tenuous foothold on Hitler’s “Fortress Europe” on that very wet, acrid, and loud June morning and began to number the days of evil.

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In Episode #313, I was fortunate to sit down with two historians, Bill Whiteside and Paul McNicholls, to discuss David Stafford’s unique study Ten Days to D-Day: The Countdown to the liberation of Europe. Some important takeaways from our conversation:

1. Success was not guaranteed, but the extensive planning, deception, and preparation increased the potential.

2. Victory in Europe would have been significantly delayed if it weren’t for the success of the D-Day landings.

3. D-Day is often discussed in terms of strategy and military movements, but at its core it was a profoundly human story.

An understanding of D-Day matters because it offers timeless lessons about leadership, planning, and execution. It reminds us that history is shaped by both grand decisions made by leaders and the individual actions of ordinary people.

The fact is, I wasn’t very good at developing my staff’s leadership abilities when I was a young manager. I was focused on the products we were creating, not the people doing the work, and that penchant was reinforced by the high marks I received on performance appraisals for creativity and innovation.

I also wanted to be liked, so I willingly answered any question a staff member asked. It was a buzz for me—the supreme source for knowledge—and staff got their questions answered quickly and moved on.

But that approach wasn’t a recipe for their long-term growth.

A better idea

The topic of capacity building came up as I looked for an evergreen concept to share in a special summer series on my podcast, Getting Unstuck–Cultivating Curiosity. Dr. Melissa “Missie” Patschke spoke about it during our interview in July 2021. Missie, who has since retired, was at the time of our recording the principal of Upper Providence Elementary School in the Spring-Ford Area School District in Southeastern Pennsylvania. Her message, born of 20+ years of experience and reinforced by the COVID pandemic, was that organizations move forward with strength if they’re led by leaders, not a leader.

As a school leader, your role is not to be the person pulling everyone up that hill or being number one at all times. Your role is to build that capacity and be number two, so that other people can be number one. And the more number ones you build, the better you’re all going to be.

Taking the idea deeper

The necessity of building others’ capacity to lead is not a new idea. It’s not universally practiced, though, because leaders typically get stuck trying to build capacity in one of three ways:

1. They get “it” conceptually, but… They get the need and wisdom behind growing others. But their inner critic pulls them aside, puts an arm around them, and whispers, “Yeah, but if they lead, what’s your role? How’s it going to make you look?”

2. They forget that “building” ends in “i–n–g,” implying that capacity building is an ongoing process, or at least a process of gradual release. It’s not a one-and-done effort, meaning one day your staff is being led and the next day they’re leading. Leading through a give-and-take coaching process can be time-intensive, and that practice can run headlong into the need to stay on schedules. Many managers will simply opt to do the thinking themselves.

3. They just don’t know how. Let’s take a small step toward number 3. One of the best examples of building capacity came from what may at first seem like the most unlikely of places: the military. We usually think of life in the military as giving and receiving orders: An officer says “Jump!” and you jump. But one savvy ship captain saw things differently.

When Captain inherited what was at one time the worst-performing submarine in the U.S. Navy, the USS Santa Fe, he immediately understood why: the 135-member crew consisted largely of doers, not thinkers. Crew members were conditioned to take orders. But Marquet knew that to effectively run something as complex and as deadly as a nuclear submarine, you had to have people who were thinking about what they were doing and how what they were doing impacted the rest of the ship’s performance.

So Captain Marquet instituted “intent-based” leadership, where crew members were helped to think about how to perform their roles. Instead of waiting to be told what to do, they were taught to express a needed action with the simple phrase “I intend to… because.” The word “because” gave the Captain or one of the Chief Petty Officers essential context for understanding a crew member’s intended action. Initially, permission might need to be granted, but once the thinking culture was fully embedded and trust was established, crew members simply explained, “I intend to…because,” and then acted.

Captain Marquet reserved one action for himself. After all, the ship was a weapon of war.

The result? What had been the worst-performing submarine soon became one of the highest-performing in the U.S. Navy.

Putting the idea to work

OK, you’re not the captain of a nuclear submarine, but if you’re leading an organization, a department, or a team, the implications of your collective work are significant. You need to be surrounded by thinkers, not just doers.

If you buy into that wisdom, but you’re not used to leading in an intent-based way, the next time someone comes into your office with a question, instead of providing the answer, start by asking the simple question: “What do you think we should do?” And probe with a follow-up question or two to get at their all-important rationale.

Asking the question “What do you think we should do?” with genuine curiosity may be the hardest shift for some managers who are comfortable with simply giving direction. One of the pitfalls of asking, “What do you think we should do,” is the potential to play “bingo” with your staff by having them work toward the answer you already have in mind. The tone you use to open a discussion and invite their thinking is critical. In fact, try not to have the answer unless it’s a desperate, time-sensitive situation. Be curious about the ideas your staff can generate. Probe for clarity and the ability to implement.

Gradually shift staff to the intent-based model by asking, “What do you intend to do?

Trust me on this. I made the mistake of not leading this way early in my career because I wanted everyone to rise to my “brilliance.” I wanted them to come to the answer that was in my head. That approach simply bred frustration and distrust among my staff.

Through coaching and study, I gradually traded in the buzz of seemingly having all the answers for the glow of helping staff come up with “I intend to…because…” It was the realization that future product excellence could best be achieved by cultivating talent rather than by stroking my ego.

What do you think? If this essay resonated, please consider clicking the heart symbol 🤍 above or below. And all comments are welcome.

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A version of this essay will be available here as a podcast on Tuesday, June 2.

I had the pleasure of interviewing David Marquet in February 2020 about his second book, Leadership is Language: The Hidden Power of What You Say—and What You Don’t. You can access the conversation here.

For more on his days at the helm of SSN Santa Fe, check out his book, Turn the Ship Around! Click below for an illustrated video on David Marquet’s leadership approach.

A colleague of mine and I were recently discussing the shifting tectonic plates of foreign and domestic life, and at one point, she asked a provocative question: “Where do you find safety and comfort these days, perhaps in an unexpected way?”

My first thought was carrot cake. I’ve often joked with friends that if I knew government secrets and a nefarious group wanted me to tell all, carrot cake would be a sure-fire sodium pentathol substitute. “What do you want to know?” I’d ask between large bites of the moist cake and icing.

I cower under my desk was another thought. I’ve considered it, but I haven’t done it. All those electronic cords and dust.

The Beach Boys’ hit song “In My Room” came to mind because retreating to my room was a steady practice back in my middle school days.

But she was serious, so I reconsidered.

I do one thing, but I’m not sure how unexpected or unusual it would be, given the enormous popularity of YouTube, Instagram Reels, and TikTok, but here it is: I replay clips from three of my favorite movies: Flight of the Phoenix (the original version only, please), Sneakers, and Seabiscuit. Repeatedly.

Each of these clips features a major turning point in the overall story, a key object, music building to a crescendo at the precise moment of the turning point, one or more elements of impactful character, a memorable line, and a complete story arc: from desperate to hopeful; from not knowing to a frightening realization; and from failure to redemption.[1]

Together, the elements offer a masterclass in storytelling, something every writer, whether aspiring, as I am, or a veteran, is compelled to study. At some level, studying those story elements with the intent of someday mastering them represents “safety and comfort,” because why else would I watch them repeatedly? That said, they don’t quite fit the context in which my colleague posed her question. We were discussing the events and people that are rocking our domestic tranquility, not personal growth.

And then the Universe pointed.

I came across a New York Times book review of Angel Down, a Pulitzer Prize-nominated novel set during World War I. While I’ve been a student of the two World Wars for as long as I can remember, I typically don’t read much fiction (it’s a long story). But here, my curiosity was piqued when I read that this “thunderous gallop of a war novel” is written in a single sentence that ends with a comma rather than a period.

So, I bought it, and that’s when the answer presented itself, like a slap on the forehead.

I buy books all the time that I intend to read, but often don’t. I have titles I’ve mentally labeled “Will read next” and “Will really read next” books. Sometimes I actually read them, but most titles are pushed further down the queue when another title is added.

The unread titles don’t silently chastise me. There are no tsk-tsk admonitions from the shelves. My books are content to wait their turn or simply to fulfill the role I ask of them: guardians of potential for discovery, knowledge, and wisdom. They are my safety and comfort, unexpectedly so, because while some may be read, others may never be.

The “Nameless Library” is a Holocaust memorial on the Judenplatz in Vienna. It is a single-story concrete structure composed of concrete shelves of books, with their concrete spines facing inward, making it impossible to read the titles. Like all effective memorials, it beckons the visitor to become part of its performance. It’s impossible to enter this “library” because the concrete doors are sealed, so I enter it mentally and lean into the questions it asks.

What does it say about a society that restricts the exploration of ideas?

What does it say about a society that attempts to eliminate human stories, as the Nazis did to more than 65,000 Austrian Jews?

What does it say about a society that locks the doors to knowledge to prevent learning about the true past?

Acquiring books that I may or may not read is my middle finger – my safety and comfort – toward the book banners and to those who would go one step further and set ablaze the titles they consider objectionable, as a group of Nazis did to some 20,000 books on Berlin’s Babelplatz on May 10, 1933.

When Angel Down arrives this week, I may read it or hold off and order another title that catches my eye. But if it goes on the shelf, it will be in good company. A few of the guardians await.

Here are the stories of men returning from war, physically and mentally injured, and often unwelcome. Of music as culture’s memory. Of the victims of the Holocaust who would never return, and the enduring anti-Semitism their deaths could not blunt. Of what it was like to be a German citizen at the end of the war. Of our unique wilderness heritage and the continuing struggle to preserve it. Of leadership beyond titles.

If Angel Down goes on the shelf, its spine will face the room, like the hundreds of other titles on the bookshelves behind me. With that, it’s not hard to imagine being inside the Nameless Library, scanning titles that were only moments ago concrete and inaccessible to millions. I’m still free to select any title, and that freedom can’t be minimized. I can curl up with that title on the couch, and when I do, watch the library’s once-sealed doors open to discovery, knowledge, and wisdom. For a few moments, today’s onslaught of lies, disinformation, accusations, misrepresentations, bloviating, denials, spins, walk-backs, redactions, and dumpster fires recede into the background.

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We’re all looking for safety and comfort in some way. My friend, JoAnne Duncan, is working to find what’s next after resigning from her position as a school principal, a classic example of educator burnout. In this episode, which will air on May 19, we get to the root of things and explore a potential strategy to help untangle that hairball of change and answer the question “What’s next?” Look for it here.

[1] If you’re curious, here are the movie clips. Note how each develops the elements I described above.

One

It took a lot of courage

to leave the line of

hands-in-their pockets,

feet-shuffling,

heads-down

boys

to walk across the gym floor

to the line of giggling

girls

to ask her to dance.

She did, reluctantly, now that I

think about it—glancing at her girl friends

with a shrug of her shoulders.

When the dance finished,

we stood there sweaty,

lit by shards

of multi-colored light from

the spinning disco ball.

As she made to leave, back

to the safety of the girls’ line,

I mumbled

“Would you like to go steady?”

And I held out my brand new

Kennedy half dollar because

I didn’t have a pin or a ring, and

since many of my classmates were

going steady, I thought,

Why not?

She looked at it and me, and with a

pained, quizzical look said

“What? Um, gross.

Who are you?”

Two

On the darkened booster bus

to the state baseball championships,

Sophomore year, I sat next to Kathy S.

kissing—

—that awkward first time, at least for me,

electro-shock think-your-heart-will-explode kiss.

Not her first, I thought as I brought

the plane in for a landing. Her, um,

credentials were widely known.

But I didn’t care.

We lost the tournament, but Kathy and I dated

for months after that, if I can call “dating”

being driven to and from the movies by my father.

One time, he must have caught us

in his rearview mirror

kissing in the back seat—

UGH, I know, right?—

because when we got back to our house, he

stopped me on the driveway and said,

“Be careful you don’t father something.”

Huh, from kissing?

My friend, Chuck Jackson, had given me

“the talk”

on the curb in front of his house,

so I knew better. But

then I worried

what my dad thought about me

that made him jump

from first base to home plate before

we were even in the house.

Three

My year-long high school graduation present

was dating Carol H.

She was smart, but never held it over me,

funny in her own quiet way,

and possessed of a unique and honest beauty

that I leave to a more polished poet to describe.

With my then-clinically low self-confidence,

I couldn’t believe she said “Yes.” But

I eventually felt

she more than just liked me because she would lean into me

as we walked—a dead giveaway—and

she gave me a nickname:

“Pokey-Stover,”

which is how she signed my yearbook.

I was in love with her, and I knew it was love

because I ached when I wasn’t with her,

and my grades suddenly improved.

I knew awe for the first time. Before I saw

the Grand Canyon,

the Northern Lights, or

the first moon landing

that summer I left for college.

When we went off to separate universities,

I affixed the stamps upside down on my love letters

because one of my dorm mates said

“That’s a way to say, ‘I love you.’”

Carol either accepted that

or thought I had latent dyslexia.

Through those letters, we arranged for me

to visit her campus over a weekend.

It was a long bus ride there, fueled by

anticipation,

and an even longer one heading home

because I was still reeling from the

“Dear Jeff”

talk, a soliloquy, actually,

I received sitting in front of her dorm.

“But we could still be friends.”

You have to get that first break-up

out of the way, I eventually realized.

It’s a rite of passage, like

a first rejection or

a first kiss.

I no longer have my yearbook,

so thankfully, I don’t have to

periodically reminisce over

“Dear Pokey…love Carol.”

(My thanks to Cindy House for the out-of-my-comfort-zone writing prompt.)

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This week’s podcast episode #414 focuses on memorials and how best to experience them. The most effective memorials, my guest, Dr. James E. Young, explains, create a “performance” that brings you physically and mentally into the memorial’s space to experience its underlying historical story and energy.

The root word of memorials, memoir, and memory is the Latin memor, meaning "mindful" or "remembering,” as I did above.

One night, a few of my dorm floor mates and I did what we often did when we couldn’t study anymore, when we stopped playing hockey in one of the hallways, or when we returned from one or more of the bars on campus. We sat around and talked about girls we wanted to date or about what was happening in the news. It was 1970 or ‘71, so Vietnam was always in the news.

One of the guys mentioned a friend who had recently been killed in Vietnam. “I think he was a gunner on a helicopter, and they didn’t last very long,” he said. His name was Barry Fivelson.

I filed that name away until one day, decades later, I was in D.C., standing in front of the Vietnam Memorial. Reading the names etched on panel after panel of the black granite walls was a numbing experience. It was hard to make sense of the loss associated with the more than 57,000 names, made even harder as the official justifications for the war unraveled over time. We eventually knew, as many of the presidents and their advisors apparently knew at the time, just how unwinnable and senseless the war had been from the beginning.

A body count on that scale was unfathomable. Even with my college deferment, I had been mistakenly drafted. The issue was eventually resolved, but at the time, it was impossible not to catastrophize and assume I would have been added to that growing body count if I had served.

And then I remembered Barry Fivelson, the one person whose name I knew who had died in the war.

There was a large kiosk near the wall that housed a directory, a massive book with the names of all those killed arranged alphabetically, along with the panel and line on which their names could be found.

Maybe if you were directing a Hollywood film, you might have the actor playing me open the directory, not just to any “F” page, but, for the sake of drama, to the “F” page. Shock would slowly register on his face as he realized he had potentially opened the directory to the exact page. The camera would follow his finger as it moved down a column to “Fivelson, Barry F.” It wasn’t Hollywood, but that was my experience. The Universe, serendipity, or Barry’s spirit must have been looking over my shoulder.

There he was:

Fivelson, Barry F — Panel 05W, Line 106

Barry Fivelson was born on March 19, 1950, and grew up in Evanston, Illinois. He started his tour in Vietnam on December 15, 1970, as a helicopter pilot. He was not flying the massive twin-rotor CH-47C Chinook, which was on a resupply mission in Laos when it was hit by ground fire and exploded. He was simply a passenger riding in the jump seat. It was February 15, 1971. Barry had been in Vietnam for only two months.

Initially classified as Missing in Action (MIA), Barry’s remains were recovered on February 11, 2000, and officially identified on October 18, 2001. He is buried in Arlington National Cemetery.

As I stood looking at Barry’s name, I saw my reflection on the black wall. I became part of the wall, not as a veteran but as a citizen drawn to reflect on the history it represented.

And that’s what effective memorials do, my recent podcast guest, Dr. James E. Young, explained. Dr. Young is an authority on memorials who is frequently asked to serve on jury panels evaluating proposed memorials. He and other jurists look at how a designer encourages the visitor to become part of what he calls the “memorial’s performance”— how a memorial uses space and design to tell a story and create an experience in which it is almost impossible for the visitor to avoid making meaning from what they see and feel.

And meaning will vary widely. I’ve seen visitors at 9/11 take selfies, while others gently touch the names of those killed, which are etched into the bronze parapets around the two reflective pools. Still others simply gaze down into the infinity pools. Who knows what any of them is thinking?

This desire on the designer’s part for visitors to create meaning must be behind the lack of detailed signage at so many memorials. If there is too much explanation, the visitor risks becoming a casual bystander. With limited or no signage, like what I experienced when I entered the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin, I was free to consider my own story and experience within the memorial.

Are the more than 2700 concrete blocks meant to represent coffins?

Does the fact that some of the blocks start flush to the ground at the memorial’s edges and then grow in height as one enters the memorial represent how the repression of the Jews was initially limited in scope and then increased over time?

Is the undulation, created by the unevenness of the ground and variations in the height of the blocks, intended to make me feel the same sense of uncertainty that the Jews must have felt as the terror around them grew?

Is the claustrophobia I experienced in the dark center of the memorial, there, dwarfed by the tallest blocks, symbolize what Jews experienced when their world began to collapse around them in the 1930s and 40s?

When I was a history teacher, I spent a lot of time helping my students understand the causes of historical events and then the events themselves. When I discussed outcomes or consequences of those events, it was usually at a geopolitical level, meaning how territories and power had shifted. If I talked about the impact on people, the human consequence, it was probably in the context of those shifts. If I were teaching today, I would place greater emphasis on the human impact of events.

All of the memorials I’ve visited over the years radiate a powerful energy and share a characteristic: they speak to the immense loss of life and a void that can’t be filled. Barry Fivelson was born nine months before me. He grew up in a town just a few miles from mine. We likely graduated the same year or a year apart, and for one reason or another, we took different paths. His path ended in a ball of fire over a field in Laos, with his name eventually etched into the Vietnam Memorial.

Given that one goal of a memorial is to immerse the visitor in its performance, maybe, if you were directing a Hollywood film and wanted to make a dramatic point, you might have those government officials who are considering sending young men and women into battle stand in silence before that same wall, so they see their reflections as they listen to Barry and the other names there have their say.

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My interview with Dr. Young, Episode #414, will be available on Tuesday, May 12. You can find it here.

I should first explain that I hated being a wrestler. I hated the smell of the gym – that mixture of rubber mats and sweat-soaked bodies that hung in the air like an ever-present cloud of victory or loss.

I hated the endless after-school training. Coach Walters’ whistle, followed by “Again!” like a record skipping because of an unseen scratch.

I hated the sleepless nights of worry, rehearsing moves in my head against imagined combatants. I hated that all that worrying gave me colitis.

I hated the peer pressure that nagged at me to play a sport. I didn’t necessarily want to be one of those jocks who swaggered down the hallways on Fridays wearing their letter jackets or sweaters, but I didn’t want to be on the outside looking in either. For much of high school, I was in that liminal space between being seen and mattering – as you think you can only matter in high school – and being no one in a graduating class of almost a thousand students.

I hated being out on the wrestling mat, me against one guy. It wasn’t that I was more at home in team sports. What I preferred was sitting alone at home reading about sports.

And I hated losing because, until the last match, it was never a fair fight. At the time, I weighed about 155 pounds. Our team had stellar contributors at 157 and 165, but lacked someone at 175, so I was assigned to fill that slot rather than have the team forfeit.

I didn’t lose by points, which would have lent some dignity to the six minutes of embarrassment. I lost by being pinned, usually in the first two-minute period, but certainly in the second. The ref would have been on his knees, his head flush with the mat, eyeing the distance between my shoulder blades and the mat as my opponent maneuvered his heaving breath, sweat, and extra twenty pounds onto my chest. I struggled to keep at least one shoulder off the mat. As the ref’s right arm and open hand were poised in anticipation of the inevitable, the attack and counter-attack moves I had rehearsed over and over in my mind during my sleepless nights were suddenly immaterial. Finally, when both of my shoulders were pinned to the mat for three seconds, the ref slapped the mat with a resounding WHOMP!

Then came the final match of the season. Once again, I was assigned to wrestle at 175, but this time my opponent was a kid who weighed about the same as I did and, like me, was forced to wrestle two classes above his weight.

A fairer fight.

Maybe it was the videos of continuous defeat raging through my mind. Maybe it was my dislike for the whole sport and my part in it that boiled to the surface. I may have won on points, or I may have pinned him in one glorious end-of-season exclamation point. I don’t remember anything except the ref raising my right arm and then being mobbed by my teammates when I came off the mat.

Coach Walters stood in our living room vestibule, rain dripping from his trench coat onto the small welcome mat. Sick with the flu and unable to attend the sports awards banquet, I stood at the top of the living room stairs, Kleenexes cascading from the pockets of my robe.

“Thank you, son,” he said, looking up at me, lofting the trophy into the air in front of him. My parents looked from him to me.

The trophy was perhaps six inches tall: a bronze grappler, knees and waist slightly bent, arms outstretched in front, poised to engage an unseen opponent. A small plaque read “Maine Township High School Wrestling, 1967.”

Despite going one and eleven, I never considered it a participation trophy. Someone else might have been embarrassed and stuffed it in the bottom of a drawer, or worse. To me, it meant everything, even if I couldn’t articulate why.

Although I would never wrestle again, the trophy stayed on my bookshelf throughout the rest of high school. I would eventually recognize it as a symbol of never giving up, despite the odds and the sport’s toll on my health. Most of all, it meant something because Coach Walters had hand-delivered it. The athletic department assistant could have just as easily sent a note at school telling me to pick it up from the wrestling office.

When I packed for college, I put keepsakes, including the trophy and my senior year high school yearbook, into a large box. I didn’t know what kind of space I’d have in the dorm room, so it was best not to overpack. I slid the large box into the attic with the intent of retrieving it one day.

That day never came. When I crawled into the attic after graduating from college, the box was gone. My father, the only family member who would have bothered with the attic’s contents, shrugged his shoulders.

One of the missing items was the stanzas from A.E. Housman’s collection of poems, “A Shropshire Lad.” I had hastily scribbled them while mesmerized by the voiceover that punctuates the melancholy ending of the movie Walkabout.

Into my heart an air that kills
From yon far country blows:
What are those blue remembered hills,
What spires, what farms are those?

That is the land of lost content,
I see it shining plain,
The happy highways where I went
And cannot come again

How ironic that a poem about loss and longing would come to symbolize my missing box of treasures.

I don’t know why my dad disposed of the box. Was it because I had moved out to attend college and left the contents behind, so maybe, in his mind, the items weren’t important?

Was it more personal? Was he angry that I was leaving him? During my high school years, we developed a strong bond through the only way he could relate to a teenager. Not through sports or academics like a lot of dads. He never attended any of my wrestling matches, nor did he take any interest in my studies. But he became animated when I worked as a newspaper delivery boy and grocery clerk. He couldn’t ask enough questions to satisfy his curiosity. Having lived through the Great Depression and World War II, he understood work. Work made sense. Wrestling statues and other youthful memorabilia? Not so much.

It was a gap my dad and I would never close, but eventually it didn’t matter.

The older I got, the more I came to appreciate my dad for what he could give. He was the consummate family provider, a dependable product of an earlier time. He loved the only way he could. The incident with the missing box faded by comparison.

And the memory of that night, when Mr. Walters stood, rain-soaked, in our vestibule, stayed with me, even if the statue didn’t. I came to appreciate that an object can be powerful either as a fleeting moment or as a lasting relic on a shelf. Almost 60 years after my high school graduation, Mr. Walters is one of only two teachers I remember by name. Long after the shrill of his whistle and “Again!” faded, I remember that what matters in life is more than a win/loss record.

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The clarity that has come to me over the years is something many of us strive for yet often struggle to find. My guest this week in Episode #412, “From Insight to Action: How Real Change Actually Happens,” is Ashley Jablow. Ashley is a workshop facilitator, speaker, coach, and design strategist who blends design thinking and innovation, emotional intelligence, and creative tools to spark clarity and action for teams and individuals navigating change.

When I emerged from the subway, I soon caught up to our neighbor Alex, shuffling toward our co-op. His feet almost never left the pavement. One foot was rarely half a step ahead of the other. Alex has Parkinson’s.

He had a cane in one hand and a plastic bag of groceries in the other.

“Alex, can I help you with the groceries?” I offered.

“Thanks,” he said, shakily passing the bag to me.

It took us twenty minutes to make our way down the rest of the street, arm-in-arm, stopping periodically so he could steady himself. Another ten minutes later, I had him at his front door.

“I’m going to give you my cell phone number,” I promised, “if you need me to pick up a few items.”

He struggled to insert his key in the lock. I waited until he stopped in frustration or embarrassment and held out my hand.

It’s uncanny how many times over the fifteen years I’ve lived in New York City I’ve run into situations where a few minutes of my time have helped someone—a neighbor who left her cane at the grocery store, a new mother struggling with a stroller as she tried to navigate the subway stairs, an elderly man dragging his suitcase up those same stairs, tolerating the “Wump! Wump! Wump!” of each incremental step. Or a stranger staring at a piece of paper, then searching storefronts for a building’s address.

“Can I help?” I ask.

All of these interactions are coincidental. For a moment, I just happened to occupy the same space as someone else. It’s not like I’m wearing a sandwich board with the message “Free help!”

It’s uncanny, though, I think, how most others don’t seem to see these situations—how they can walk right by people.

“It’s head-down, mind-your-own-business, New York,” my wife said when I brought up the idea of see-or-don’t-see behavior at dinner. I remember her telling my father-in-law not to make eye contact with anyone on the subway. “And please, Dad, don’t try to strike up a conversation.”

I ponder the head-down idea. I don’t think most people intentionally disregard someone who needs help, although I have seen that. Like the person who won’t let you merge in traffic because they just have to get that one car length ahead of you.

Maybe, as Thoreau offered, it’s not what we look at, it’s what we see. Or what we allow ourselves to see. Maybe being head-down is simply a form of adaptability, insulating oneself from New York’s omnipresent congestion and noise.

Or maybe people have simply become inured to the city’s loud and constant churn. My wife has lived in New York a lot longer than I have and swears she doesn’t hear the incessant honking of cars or the driver playing their favorite song through car stereo speakers the size of a teenager, as they wait for the light to change.

Maybe it’s worse now, given the “What-the-fuck?” craziness of the day’s headlines.

My wife just returned from a week-long solo trip in Japan. As much as I hate not being with her, I declined to go, opting instead to spend a few days with friends in the unspoiled, silent wilderness of northwestern Colorado. More steers and trout than people.

“People are so helpful in Tokyo,” she said of those who offered directions.

“And there’s no garbage on the streets. No gum on the sidewalks. And the subways are like surgical operating rooms.”

Many New Yorkers shrug their shoulders when I mention the city’s challenges. “OK, but what about our restaurants, art museums, and theatre?” they retort, as if Cassoulet, Vermeers, and Broadway balance everything else out.

And then there’s the real native New Yorker response, “Well, if you don’t like it here, move.”

Maybe it is a question of geography. I grew up in a Chicago suburb. It was quieter. Slower. Maybe that’s it, I think, as I stare up and down the subway car at everyone, fixated on their smartphones.

But maybe it’s something else.

When I moved to New York, the physical connections I had established with friends and colleagues over decades were suddenly broken. Well-meaning expressions of “Let’s stay in touch!” eventually gave way to the intensity of adjusting to a new space and human laziness. Aside from my wife, I was alone in a city of millions.

On most Sundays, I immediately turn to a feature in the Times to distract myself from whatever lunacy greets me on the front page. (I once started counting the number of headlines that had the word “Trump” in them and realized my mental health would be much improved by eating an entire box of Cinnabons than reading the articles.) The feature is called “Metropolitan Diary,” and it offers five experiences from New Yorkers who lived them. The stories are short, only a few hundred words. They’re slices of life that a few fellow New Yorkers have experienced, sometimes in the vein of “I overheard two people talking in line…”

One narrator tells the story of a post-haircut interaction.

The next day it’s freezing and super windy, so I end up layering a baseball cap, hoodie, and jacket hood—basically covering my head like crazy just to stay warm. On the subway, I notice a guy who looks familiar…and then realize it’s my barber from the day before. The barber looks at my over-covered head and offers, “It was that bad, huh?”

For me, these stories are redemptive for what some of us go through to live here. They humanize the sidewalks, the elevators, the subway, the shops, our street corners, and our hallways. They momentarily break the spell of what might be my feelings of isolation.

And curiously, over time, something else has too. I’ve connected with our florist, our dry cleaner, our pharmacist, our liquor store owner, and the barkeep at our local pub while waiting for our takeout order. They’ve become “James,” “Sunny,” “Ashley,” “Mr. Singh,” and “Tony,” and to them, I’ve become “Jeff.” What could have been standard, hurried transactions became conversations. To make up for my lost connections, maybe I was unconsciously channeling Fred Rogers, mentally humming “Won’t you be my neighbor?”

Maybe my virtual “Free Help!” sandwich board was just a way to connect with someone.

As I opened the door to Alex’s apartment, he asked if I would help him in and put his groceries away. We made our way to his studio apartment couch, and he flopped down, exhausted.

I carried the one grocery bag to his galley kitchen. I placed the gallon of milk into the fridge and left the bottle of chocolate syrup and a couple of cans of peanuts on the countertop.

“Thanks, Jeff,” he said to me, as I made my way to leave, finally using my name after seeing each other in the hallways, elevators, and on the street for more than a decade.

Smiling, the next day, I slid my cell phone number under his door.

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This week’s episode, #411, is on bullying, a practice that’s been exacerbated by cell phones. One-on-one interactions and not-so-flattering comments left on a bathroom wall now go viral. My guest and I discuss what schools, parents, and communities are doing about the practice.

In the weeks ahead, how one coach approaches her clients, what one not-for-profit is doing to protect our Public Lands, and what one scholar looks for in the designs of new memorials.

Clink, clink, clink. My aluminum camp cup tapped metronome-like against my backpack buckle as I hiked the trail between the two lakes. Once my friends and I had completed the portage, loaded our gear, and begun paddling to our next destination, I untied the cup, lowered it into the lake, and gulped down a cupful to quench my thirst. Poland Spring and the like had nothing on this water.

It was an activity I repeated hundreds of times during my trips to Quetico Provincial Park in southwestern Ontario. This pristine wilderness canoe park was my destination right after the school year ended. My teaching pals and I drove from suburban Chicago and spent a week or more canoe camping, fishing, and gazing in awe at the Milky Way and the northern lights.

To the south of Quetico lies its twin, the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA). Nestled along the Minnesota and U.S. northern border, it encompasses almost a million acres of pristine forests, glacial lakes, and streams. Like Quetico, it offers a largely untouched wilderness; the land and water are as they have been for thousands of years. It brings the potential for deep reflection. You exist comfortably, or not, in the park largely on what you carry in on your back.

It’s no surprise, then, that the BWCA is the nation’s most visited wilderness area. But if Congress ultimately gets its way, it will no longer be advisable for anyone to dip their camp cup in the BWCA waters.

On April 17, despite strong public opposition, the Senate approved House Joint Resolution 140, which reversed a 20-year rule banning mining upstream of the BWCA. The measure paves the way for a subsidiary of the Chilean mining company Antofagasta to pursue copper-sulfide mining—a process that produces sulfuric acid. That waste would eventually flow into the BWCA. Hundreds of thousands of wilderness enthusiasts, along with more than $1 billion in annual revenue and 17,000 jobs tied to their recreational activities, would be put at serious risk. The raw copper ore would be shipped to China for processing and sold on the global market.

Wait... A Chilean company does the mining? China processes the raw ore and sells the final product? The U.S. loses jobs and revenue? Why are Republicans trying to push this mining operation that, on the surface, doesn’t benefit the U.S.? I’ve yet to read or hear any definitive explanation. It’s not clear, and that should raise everyone’s suspicions.[1]

Because the ban on dangerous mining is now one step closer to being rescinded through a rarely used legislative technicality, this new legislation, if it withstands judicial review, could be reversed only by a future act of Congress. None of the government land management agencies—the Bureau of Land Management, the U.S. Forest Service, or the U.S. Department of Fish and Wildlife—could overturn it through their traditional rulemaking authority.

The same technicality could be used to overturn federal land-management rules that protect other public lands and wilderness areas, noted Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar, during debate. “This is focused on northern Minnesota today, but where will it be next time? What part of your state will it be focused on? What will happen to your public lands?”

And that’s where this situation gets even more interesting. Those other public lands that Senator Klobuchar spoke of fall within the states and districts of Senators and Representatives who voted to reverse the ban. On the surface, it looks like they’re voting against their state or district’s self-interest and against their constituents’ opposition. But they were likely motivated by more powerful considerations.

First, the legislation to reverse the mining ban near the BWCA is not an isolated incident. It’s part of a broader, deliberate Republican effort to weaken federal land management agencies, eliminate government regulations that stand in the way of opening our public lands to resource extraction and grazing, and further commercialize our National Parks.[2] Driven by this mindset, a Congressional vote to rescind the ban was about satisfying long-term political and commercial influence.

And second, many Senators and Representatives remain reluctant to oppose Trump and his administration for fear of retaliation, even if it hurts their state or district. Despite his current low approval ratings and head-scratching tweets of late, Trump still controls the Republican Party. Driven by this mindset, a Congressional vote to rescind the ban was about job preservation.

I watched the vote on HR 140 via the Senate floor proceedings webcast. The roll call took place in a nearly empty chamber. Senators entered the chamber, some with a confident stride, others with a casual pace, stopping to chat here and there. Each then walked up to the recording secretary with a hurried thumbs-up or a thumbs-down. Their vote was then announced. Some Senators immediately left the chamber; others remained briefly to speak with colleagues. As with so much of congressional voting these days, the results were likely a foregone conclusion, a formality.[3]

It’s easy to feel disempowered with so much of what’s coming out of Washington these days, to feel cynical that power and greed rule everything, and to assume that those in favor of lifting the ban will remain physically and mentally distant from the consequences of their actions.

When I saw the final tally, I was angry, still am, and for a moment felt empty and powerless. Depending on the course of any litigation and whether Canada gets involved—the BWCA and Quetico waters are linked, and Canada has an environmental treaty with the U.S.—the clink, clink, clink of camp cups like mine may eventually be drowned out by a cacophony of chainsaws, backhoes, and drilling equipment.

But there are actions we can take.

• Think back on your experiences using public lands. There are 640 million acres of public lands in the U.S., consisting of various sites. You have likely visited one or more National Parks or Preserves, National Monuments, National Wildlife Refuges, National Recreation Areas, National Conservation Areas, Wilderness Areas, National Historic Sites, National Memorials, Battlefields, Wild and Scenic Rivers, National Sea and Lakeshores, and National Trails.

What was your experience like?

How much did you and your family value it?

What plans do you have to visit any of these sites in the future?

• Stay informed about the administration’s attacks on public lands. Jim and Will Pattiz’s “More Than Just Parks” Substack and website are go-to sources for what’s happening to our public lands, as are Our Public Lands Podcast hosted by Adam Bronstein and the Backcountry Hunters and Anglers organization.

• Call your federal and state offices to express your views. Yes, state offices. These public land grabs can have state implications, like Minnesota and mining in the BWCA.

And perhaps most important:

• Remember all of this at the midterms and in 2028. Did your Senator and Representative vote to rescind or maintain the mining ban? What’s been their stance on public lands? Will their actions impede or maintain the enjoyment of public lands for your children and their children?

Environmentalist and public lands advocate Will Pattiz said it best in a recent Substack.

Someone wants to take something that belongs to everyone and give it to someone who already has too much. The answer, now as then, is no.

There’s something clarifying about accepting this. You don’t have to wait for a better moment or a more qualified advocate or a more sympathetic administration. The moment is always now. The advocate is always you. The country you were handed is the country you have to defend.

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I’ll have more to say about the current debacle in a future episode.

Wolf / Cody Roberts Update

In Episode 408: “What Do We Still Get Wrong About Wolves?” My guest, Amaroq Weiss, and I discussed the felony animal cruelty case of Cody Roberts. Roberts had run over a young wolf with a snowmobile and then paraded the severely injured animal around his neighborhood bar before taking it out back and shooting it. He was charged with animal cruelty, not because he ran over the wolf with his snowmobile—it’s legal to do that in Wyoming—but because of his antics at the bar. Prior to going to trial, Roberts pleaded guilty and accepted a plea deal. It was up to the trial judge to weigh in on the conditions of the plea that would keep Roberts out of jail.

Sweetwater County District Judge Richard Lavery eventually imposed an 18-month probation term, a $1,450 fine, and a suspended prison sentence of up to 2 years. “I have to be honest with you, Mr. Roberts,” Lavery told the defendant, “the charge in this case is disturbing.”

“Disturbing”? And all it warrants is probation and a fine?

Footnotes

[1] I’m speculating here, OK? I know that the owner of the Chilean mining concern, Andrónico Luksic, purchased a mansion in Washington, D.C., which Ivanka and Jared Kushner temporarily rented as their D.C. home. Luksic, one of, if not the, wealthiest Chilean business owner, was also embroiled in a federal legal dispute because the Obama administration had previously canceled mining leases near the BWCA. Given that Trump would love to undo anything Obama did, HR 140 would seem to give Luksic what he wants: access to copper mining near the BWCA. Just speculating…

Adding to the suspicion, Minnesota Representative Pete Stauber (R) introduced the measure, which passed the House in January.

[2] A map developed by Jim and Will Pattiz on their More Than Just Parks website shows the 130 million acres of public lands currently under threat.

[3] Susan Collins (ME) crossed over with the Democrats, and Josh Hawley (MO) was absent.

As a podcast host, I’m usually the one asking my guests questions. A while back, though, I decided to turn the microphone around so the guest could ask me the last question in the interview.

One of the most interesting questions arose recently when a guest asked me, “How, in the current political climate, can you serve as an 'upstander' to anti-Semitism?” We had been discussing her powerful collection of essays on the role of theater, dance, music, visual art, and film in fighting anti-Semitic hate and encouraging introspection and social responsibility. (See. below.)

I explained how I have used the podcast multiple times as a platform to share information about the Holocaust, including historic sites I visited that my listeners might not know about:

The luxury villa outside Berlin, where, in only two and a half hours, 16 high-ranking Nazis, including Adolf Eichmann, established the organizational structure that would oversee the murder of 11 million European Jews.

The Berlin plaza where, in May 1933, the Nazis burned over 20,000 books they considered objectionable.

The transit camp in northern Holland, where most of the 102,000 Dutch Jews murdered during World War II, including Anne Frank and her family, were taken before being shipped to a death camp.

Using the podcast to discuss the Holocaust’s roots in post-World War I European history, its perpetrators, victims, and memorials, made sense given how I approached the topic as a high school history teacher decades earlier. My guest seemed to appreciate my explanation.

Our conversation eventually shifted to a brief discussion about whether traditional Holocaust studies or the arts are more effective at fostering public empathy and social change. The traditional historical approach provides an understanding of the broader context in which the Holocaust occurred. The arts, on the other hand, have been crucial for raising awareness of the victims and their suffering and resilience. In the spirit of the moment, I suggested that a combination of both approaches might be best.

As I thought about our conversation later, my response to my guest’s initial question began to feel inadequate, not because what I’m doing lacks value. I appreciate the belief that if you reach even one person, light one light, or make even a small dent in an issue, your work is meaningful. But my response felt lacking because I haven’t yet used the platform to explore one of the root causes of anti-Semitism, one of the underlying forces that has traditionally kept it alive.

Anti-Jewish hatred is partly a psychological phenomenon. It’s a manipulative tactic that makes one group believe, “You don’t have this or that because someone else does,” or “you’re suffering because of someone else’s actions. But if you follow me…”

This psychological tactic deliberately diminishes the listener’s sense of personal responsibility, making them more vulnerable to political manipulation. For example, the same group of young, mostly single white males who chanted “Jews won’t replace us” at the ‘Unite the Right’ white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, in August 2017, was later called “very fine people” by the then-president. Statistics show that white males without a college degree overwhelmingly voted for him in subsequent elections.

Adolf Hitler and his propaganda minister, Joseph Goebbels, used this tactic masterfully in the 1930s. They convinced the public that Germany had fallen into a severe depression after World War I because “Jews had stabbed it in the back” at the end of the war. Jews were depicted as the “haves,” with wealthy Jewish business owners and bankers controlling everything. It’s no accident that the Nazis targeted Jewish businesses during their organized rampage on November 9/10, 1938, now known as Kristallnacht, the night of the broken glass. Hundreds of Jewish storefront windows across Europe were shattered on the sidewalks and streets, their businesses looted.

Anti-Jewish hatred can incubate in a real or manufactured petri dish of disparity and political ambition.

If I were to teach a unit on World War II and the Holocaust today, I would introduce students to the Shoes on the Danube Promenade memorial in Budapest. There, along the Danube River, sixty pairs of rusted bronze shoes memorialize the place where, during the winter of 1944-1945, a violent anti-Semitic group forced Jews to remove their shoes and then tied the individuals together in small groups. They then shot one or two members of each group who fell into the river, dragging the rest of the group to drown in the icy water. The shoes were picked up and sold on the black market.

Horrible. Grotesque. Unfathomable.

The memorial as a historical statement urges us to recognize the brutality that took place along the river. The memorial as art encourages us to feel that brutality. Together, the memorial asks us to bear witness to the void left by the now-missing men, women, and children who wore the shoes.

Yet, despite how terrible that practice was, the memorial might do little to reduce anti-Semitism because, on its own, it doesn’t explain the “why” behind the practice. It doesn’t help us understand the perpetrators’ perspective behind their actions.

Today, I would also ask my students who the perpetrators were and what Jews represented to them that was so abhorrent that they had to be eradicated. This additional exploration would make students more aware of the underlying causes that led to anti-Jewish hatred and the Holocaust.

But what of that lesson’s long-term impact? I know that, despite decades of instruction from teachers and various institutions, surveys show that a significant portion of Americans have a broad awareness but only a shallow knowledge of the Holocaust. Misconceptions and uncertainty are common .1 Deep down, I know that if we want to genuinely reduce anti-Jewish hate, society must weaken the conditions that allow manipulators’ messages to attract followers. Education can’t do it alone.

As a former teacher, the realization that history has its limitations left me cold and feeling inadequate. When I mentioned this feeling to a colleague, she offered a lesson from the Talmud, the Jewish book of wisdom.

Do not be daunted by the enormity of the world’s grief. Do justly NOW. Love mercy NOW. Walk humbly NOW. You are not obligated to complete the work but neither are you free to abandon it.

So, as an “uplifter,” I will find and invite a guest to join me at the microphone to discuss the underlying causes of anti-Jewish hatred—and how those causes might also relate to our nation’s long-standing hatred of immigrants.

Only society can address the root causes that give rise to and sustain hatred, but in the meantime, maybe my conversations will continue to reach a listener, light one light, and make a small dent in the issue.

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This week, episode #407: “Why Might the Arts Teach the Holocaust More Powerfully Than History Alone?” features Dr. Karen Berman, who co-edited a two-volume series of 33 essays on the role of theater, dance, music, visual art, and film in fighting anti-Semitic hate and encouraging introspection and social responsibility. Joining me as a co-host is my friend and past guest of episode #370: “Walking Where History Happened: A Daughter’s Holocaust Journey,” Irene Stern Frielich.

I recently attended a reading at the New York Historical with Dr. Doris Kearns Goodwin, who was speaking about her latest book, An Unfinished Love Story: A Personal History of the 1960s. It’s part biography of her husband, Dick Goodwin, a speechwriter and advisor to President John F. Kennedy, part memoir of her work as a presidential historian focusing on Abraham Lincoln, Teddy Roosevelt, Franklin Roosevelt, and Lyndon Johnson, and part history of the turbulent 1960s.

I wanted to see her speak because the 1960s were my decade: the Space Race between the U.S. and the Soviet Union culminating in Apollo 11’s landing on the moon in July 1969, the Vietnam War and anti-war protests, the violent clashes of the Civil Rights movement, the birth of Medicare and Medicaid, The Voting Rights Act, and the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. The dynamic nature of that period was one of the reasons I became a U.S. history teacher.

But I also wanted to see Dr. Goodwin speak because I had briefly met her years before. In 1995, I was the head of textbook publishing for Prentice Hall Social Studies. When her then-new book, No Ordinary Time: Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt: The Home Front in World War II, was published, I wrote to her asking if she would sign some copies that I could give to our sales representatives as gifts for long-standing customers.

After she said “Certainly!” I brought two large boxes into her living room in Concord, Massachusetts. Fifty, seventy-five, a hundred books? I can’t remember.

I recounted that story as she signed my new copy of An Unfinished Love Story. “I remember that! I’ve never signed so many books,” she exclaimed with a big smile, grabbing my hand.

I couldn’t wait to start reading her book when I got home, but that would once again mean setting aside my current read to make room for a new one. I say “once again” because dropping one book in favor of another has become a bit of a habit.

I’ve become a serial book jumper. It’s like going on a lot of first dates, promising to call at the end of the night, but then rarely picking up that book again from the nightstand. The pages are seemingly always greener in another book.

And it’s become an expensive habit. Someone will recommend a book, and I’ll buy it. I’ll read about a book, and I’ll buy it. I can’t wait for the book to arrive. When it does, I rip open the package, and there it is: fresh, crisp, a new book.

I have the best intentions. I have a collection on my bookshelf that I’ve mentally labeled “To Read.” Above that shelf, there’s another smaller collection of “Definitely to Read.” I’ve convinced myself that I’ll find time to read them all.

Why this behavior? One thought is that books have been a steady companion throughout my life.

Besides frequent trips to the public library, books were always available in our house courtesy of my parents’ membership in “The Book of the Month Club.”

While in high school, I often got up early to read in my parents’ basement. Three Years Before the Mast, Mutiny on the Bounty, Hawaii. There was always some new adventure to take through the pages of a book.

In college, I began building a collection of history books in my off-campus apartment to demonstrate my dedication to the discipline.

As a classroom teacher, I relied on a variety of history books to develop my lessons.

When I left teaching, I worked for a year in our local independent bookstore. I shouldn’t even call it ‘work’.” I loved opening the store early, turning on a few display lights, tuning in to the classical music station, refilling books that had been pulled from their proper location, and dusting the original wood-planked floor. When the store opened, I enjoyed helping customers find just the right title. It was honestly the best job I ever had.

After being turned down for the store manager position, I soothed my wounded pride by replying to an ad in our local paper for an editor of social studies textbooks. Promotions came steadily over an almost 40-year career, and I eventually became the head of all textbook publishing for the then-largest school publisher in the world.

As I transitioned into retirement, I co-authored a book that would help educators lead more purposeful and effective change initiatives.

Another potential reason for my behavior starts to take shape when I study my “To Read ” and “Definitely to Read” titles. They are a mixture of my interests that have blossomed in retirement: fly fishing, protecting our remaining wilderness and public lands, and personal growth. Midway through my 70s, maybe I’m trying to nourish the interests I largely ignored while on the corporate treadmill, if only by acquiring titles associated with them.

Interestingly, most titles focus on some aspect of World War II, which, from 1939 to 1945, I believe was the defining event of the 20^th century. That war changed the physical map of the world and its centers of power, and we are still feeling the repercussions today. Some sixty to seventy million people died worldwide in a conflict best described as a struggle between freedom and authoritarian rule.

And with that, my mind shifts to where we stand today: on the brink of authoritarian rule. We’ve ignored the lessons those years have to teach and have instead embraced bravado and posturing over thoughtful, reasoned leadership. Lies are disguised as truth to the point where the masses repeat propaganda as prayer.

Back in my teaching days, many of my U.S. History students would start the year by complaining, “Why do we need to take this stupid class?” I offered that knowing our history is like carrying a flashlight into a dark room. That beam of light can shed understanding on where we’ve successfully stepped before as citizens and where and why we’ve stumbled in the past.

Those currently in power, however, want to sanitize our history with patriotic platitudes and whitewashed interpretations, or even worse, remove the darker chapters from our school curriculum. Books on various topics are being attacked today because they often explore thoughts or behaviors that some in society prefer to hide. As a result, these books are removed from library shelves and banned.

History shows us that this has happened before. I’ve stood in the Bebelplatz in Berlin, where on May 10, 1933, the Nazis burned more than twenty thousand books they didn’t like. A memorial, perhaps designed in shame, sits below ground level in the center of the enormous plaza, its empty white shelves visible through a glass plate. You wouldn’t know it’s there unless you knew it was there.1

On the corner of my desk are five books I’ve committed to reading as background for upcoming podcast interviews. It’s an eclectic mix, like the books on my “To read” and “Definitely to read” shelves.

One title, though, stands out: How to Fall in Love with Questions—A New Way to Thrive in Times of Uncertainty. Given the level of uncertainty we face today, due to the current administration's seemingly deliberate efforts to cause chaos both domestically and abroad, I’m eager to read the author’s suggestions.

And so, too, the uncertainty I feel extends back to my books and my compulsion to acquire more and more of them. Maybe it’s my response to the news reports about high school students being assigned articles rather than books, and about college students who struggle to finish books required on traditional course syllabi.

Our digital-age practice of parsing information into smaller and smaller pieces is conditioning our youth to read less. Their education—their thinking—is suffering, not just at the hands of the book banners but because of contemporary practices. Are today’s youth inadvertently creating their own libraries of empty shelves?

Meanwhile, I’ll keep watering my “To read” and “Definitely to read” shelves with new books. If only because I still can.

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For the past few months, I’ve caught myself counting.

I’ve counted the steps from our co-op apartment to the small room on our floor where residents temporarily store items for recycling: 35 steps.

I’ve counted the steps to the elevator on our floor: 42 steps.

I’ve counted the steps in the stairway from our floor to the first floor: 72.

I’ve counted the steps from when I leave the subway to when I exit outside: 45 steps. That’s three flights of 15.

And I’ve found myself counting steps from our front door as I walk up the street or into our co-op’s courtyard. I stop counting when I realize I’m counting and chastise myself with Why are you counting!? It’s like I’m on autopilot. I leave my apartment and start counting steps.

I don’t count people ahead of me in line at the grocery store, or how many seconds it takes for the first driver to lay on their horn when the light at our corner turns green. I don’t count how many times Trump’s name appears on the first page of the electronic edition of the New York Times.

I just count my steps.

I initially thought it was just a mindless activity to do while walking, since I tend to think about odd things now and then, rolling them over in my mind like a sculptor working a ball of clay to make it pliable. The other night, I had to stop reading a book on fly fishing to look up whether trout sleep.

I’ve also wondered how nature figured out that fires should be a key part of its forest life cycle. The heat from forest fires actually helps certain pinecone species release their seeds. I remember that from my high school Biology class. Left alone, a forest knows how to regrow itself without the well-meaning actions of the National Forest Service. But how did it figure that out?

And one item that’s really got me wondering is a piece of advice I came across from the Austrian poet Rainer Maria Rilke on how to think differently in a time of uncertainty. Instead of rushing to clarify a situation, he suggests we try to “love the question” of the moment. Let things sit. “Live the questions now,” he advised.1 Hold the easy answer at bay to see what else emerges. That advice runs so counter to the ways our brains are programmed to work. They crave certainty.

It was initially discomforting just to sit with uncertainty. It was like the itchy feeling I had as a kid when I had to wear a wool suit to a Sabbath evening service. My mom would pat my leg as if to say, “I know, dear, just a little bit longer.” But, leaning on Rilke’s advice, I tried to love the question: Why do I count my steps? I was curious. Like rewinding a videotape, I played back moments when walking had impacted me to see what might emerge.

I love walking in our nearby forest preserve. I do some of my best thinking there. Maybe it’s like one of my podcast guests remarked about his own experiences in a forest, where he listens to what the trees are whispering in response to his quiet musings. But it’s been too cold or snowy, too gray and dreary really, to do much walking in the woods this winter.

I enjoy walking to our nearby grocery stores to pick up a few items I need for our evening meal. It makes me think about what life would be like if we lived in Rome or Paris — taking a daily stroll to the local market for fresh foods, so I wouldn’t have to worry about storing them in our apartment’s tiny fridge. Again, our winter has worked against my plans to play out my European fantasy.

And then I thought of my neighbor, Elliot, who struggles to walk. He has Parkinson’s, and his condition is clearly worsening. I’ve passed him several times on the sidewalk and asked if I could pick up or carry anything for him. His pride always forces him to gratefully refuse. He trudges on, his feet barely leaving the surface of the sidewalk as he shuffles along. It’s painful to watch.

I recently found him slumped in our hallway, unable to walk the mere 14 steps from the elevator to his apartment. His legs simply gave out. I called 911 and sat with him until the medics arrived. He’s never been much of a talker, and he must have been embarrassed and probably scared of what was happening. I promised to keep the few items he had picked up at the grocery store until he returned. He was hospitalized for a few days, and now he gets around with a walker, taking one careful step at a time.

I just had my annual physical, which included a treadmill stress test and an echocardiogram to check how my heart is functioning. The rhythmic opening and closing of valves with their characteristic “swish, swish, swish” was reassuring. “Everything seems fine for now,” my doctor concluded, but then she couldn’t resist adding, “You know, you are getting older.”

Mentally replaying these scenes made me wonder whether counting my steps is a subconscious way of reminding myself to be grateful: I can still walk.

Trout don’t sleep, by the way. Instead, they enter a state of reduced activity and metabolism while staying alert to life’s uncertainties posed by predators and potential changes in their environment, including the dangers posed by fly fishers like me.

While they have never read Rilke, trout seem to be masters of living with uncertainty rather than catastrophizing about possible negative consequences. They appear to live in the moment, embracing the question of how to find sufficient food and safety while expending the least energy, rather than constantly swimming about in a frenzied state.

Psychologists tell us that we humans usually behave in the opposite way. Our projections of possible negative outcomes to an unsettling event are significantly worse than knowing the outcome. That explains why, during the rollercoaster times we’re living in, many of us remain in an unending state of anxiety and worry.

Maybe counting steps through empty hallways and stairwells, alone and shielded from distracting family conversations, momentarily distanced from the shocking behavior and complicity of those in power, was merely a nervous tic—an obsession with something so trivial that it kept my uncertainty and my anger at its perpetrators at bay.

As I write this, it’s going to be 70° here in NYC this afternoon. A mating pair of doves has returned to our balcony after spending the winter in a warm place. All manner of bulbs will soon be peeking through our co-op’s gardens. Soon, our courtyard fountain will be a balm to those who sit near it. For me, it’s time for a walk in the woods, and as Rilke suggests, to just be with the questions of the day and not immediately grind away at seeking answers.

Who knows what advice the trees might offer?

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For a deeper dive into living with uncertainty, listen to Episode #391, “What Can Chronic Uncertainty Teach Us About Control, Acceptance, and Resilience?” My guest, Jon Gluck, recounts the chronic uncertainty of living for more than two decades with multiple myeloma, an incurable but treatable bone-marrow cancer.

I met Tom Reed through my friend and fellow podcaster Diane Wyzga. During an initial get-to-know-you chat, Tom remarked, “I’m one of those people who never cared about money. It wasn’t a motivator for me. I wanted adventure and experience.” I immediately felt that we would have a fruitful conversation.

Tom worked as needed to support his true passion: exploring and learning about the world and himself, and documenting his journeys through photography and writing.

His black-and-white photographs are jaw-droppingly stunning. “Awe-inspiring” is almost too limited a phrase to capture what he sees through the lens and then shares with us. When I first saw his photographs, I thought, Ansel Adams. That observation turns out to be a frequent assessment and a well-deserved compliment. I’ve included several photographs in the show notes on my website.

His writing, and you’ll hear an excerpt from one of his books, is equally penetrating.

If I could only use one word to describe Tom, it would be “honest”— to his heart, soul, and those around him. He knew what kind of life he wanted from an early age, and he’s living it. It’s not the vision others had for him, nor is it one for all of us. But I’ll admit I sometimes have pangs of wonder as to what I might have missed in life if I had driven over fewer paved roads.

More of Tom’s photographs can be viewed on my website

https://www.queticocoaching.com/blog/405-what-can-standing-in-awe-of-the-natural-world-teach-us

and on Tom’s

https://tomreed.com/

For the past couple of weeks, I’ve been reading John Gierach’s All the Time in the World. Gierach, who passed away in 2024, was arguably the best fly-fishing writer of his day. A line from another of his twenty-plus books, “The purpose of fly fishing isn’t to catch fish, it’s to go where fish are caught,” underscores that his focus was often less about the technical aspects of the sport than its soothing, transformational power. Flowing, sun-dappled water, a breeze, and a songbird serenading the scene have immense power to heal the life-weary soul. Landing a trout is the bonus.

I usually read Gierach at night after I put away the other books I’m reading for my podcast interviews with their authors. His writing is like melatonin for the psych—poetic, calming, and reflective.

It’s that reflective quality that often triggers a train of thought, taking me beyond the page. In the title essay of All the Time in the World, Gierach explores how the passage of time continues to shape the sport and how the loss of an old friend stayed with him long after his ashes were scattered. Nothing escapes the passing of time, and that theme took me back to when I was a teen and would stumble into the kitchen for breakfast. I often found my then-retired dad reading the obituaries in the Chicago Tribune. I didn’t understand back then why he read that section of the paper, but I have a couple of theories now. For him, obituaries might have served as a crude measuring stick, a way to compare his life to someone else’s. Or maybe he saw them as a marker of time. When he read about the lives of people from the generation before his, it may have reminded him of his own mortality.

I will admit that reading about the untimely passing of certain individuals grabbed me by the collar. When Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong and Eagles musician Glenn Frey died, heroes of mine, I remember muttering, “Holy…shit.”

The ticking of the clock on the wall seems to grow louder and louder.

So how do we quiet the clock? A recent article in the New York Times briefly outlined “24 Secrets to a Healthier Life.” Strong relationships were cited as a key factor to healthy aging, and the author didn’t just mean spouses. Like strength training for muscles, strong relationships are strength training for the psyche and soul.

Our Relationships Are Our Biosphere

It is in our interest to keep the biosphere healthy and happy, because we live inside of it. You have to operate like a team with the other members of your ecosystem. That means connecting with your own feelings and needs, and those of the people around you.
— Terry Real Therapist and founder of Relational Life Institute

I marvel when someone mentions that their relationship with so-and-so began in grade school. Grade school? I recently looked at a class photo from elementary school, and while I could recognize the faces, I only knew one student by name: mine!

I have one friend from high school, but we rarely stay in touch. I would be sad to hear of his passing because he was a major reason why I walked upright through high school. Doug was a borderline member of the in-crowd, and I was a charter member of the unseen majority in a class that numbered almost a thousand kids. But somehow we connected. We hung out in his basement listening to Jose Feliciano’s “Light My Fire” repeatedly, and we often double-dated. Sometimes we dated the same girl, though not at the same time.

In college, I lived on a dorm floor that was more like a fraternity, and I loved some of those guys like brothers. But I lost contact with everyone the day my diploma arrived in the mail.

Deep relationships from my careers in teaching and publishing have gradually faded over time for various reasons.

Why this loss of relationships? Maybe it’s you, the old self-critical, finger-pointing me suggests. Or maybe it’s just personal orbital mechanics. The planets in our solar system follow their own orbits that, over time, bring them closer to and then farther from the other planets. Maybe it’s the same with people. A law of the universe.

Now that I’m retired, most of my relationships are virtual. A lot of people decry tools such as Zoom and Google Meet, but I’d be a true loner without them.

I’ve interviewed over 400 people on my podcast. Most guests look at the experience as a single point in time. We talk about their work or their latest book, but when I stop the recording, the association generally ends. “Thanks, it was nice talking with you.”

A few interviewees, though, have become friends with whom I regularly communicate. Several have later served as co-hosts on topics of mutual interest and even recommended new guests. I’ve fished with two of them.

One of my recent podcast guests, a writer, discussed the importance of building a supportive community because writing can be a very lonely activity. As proof, she mentioned her website “Lonely Victories.” I smiled because I am starting to build a writer community. The cornerstone is my exceptionally supportive and patient coach, who regularly reminds me that I have more to offer about myself than what’s in my first draft. I’ve connected with a few dedicated aspiring writers through our relationship, including one I’m lucky enough to live near. So, we sometimes meet in downtown Manhattan—an actual in-person writer friend.

Fly fishing has become another way for me to build relationships. I tend to rely on the same guides when I fish, and I feel confident that my connection with a few of them is evolving from client to friend. We’ve scaled the red “NO TRESPASSING” barbed wire fence that was there in the early days of our encounters, and now talk freely about past lives, politics, and our significant others. We laugh a lot, too, and not just at my casting.

All this to say, life at my desk—the portal to a largely virtual world—has become rich, which is a good thing at any age but especially as I sit here at 75. I now know, too, what Gierach meant when he spoke of the recent passing of his friend, “Paul always acted like he had all the time in the world, and now he does.” Those of us who are still on the green side of the lawn don’t. The bathroom mirror reminds us of that every day.

All the hand-wringing worry in the world won’t help me or anyone else avoid the inevitable end of days. We can slow down our attitude toward it, though. Albert Einstein suggested that time is not absolute but relative, as expressed in the concept of “time dilation,” which states that time moves more slowly for moving objects. So…I need to continue crossing aging’s creaking mental bridge—from worrying about dying to delighting in still living. And nurture the forces that help me.

I’ve thought about ending the podcast many times. It’s a lot of work, and it costs me a significant amount of money to produce. But I’m still meeting interesting people and, judging by the volume of daily downloads, sparking my listeners’ curiosity. For now, I’ll continue to hit the “Record” button.

There’s always another article to write, or that elusive memoir to finally coax out of the battered filing cabinet of my past. Of no small benefit, there’s always more to learn about the craft of writing by continuing to work with my coach.

And finally, there’s always new water to wade into with a guide or friend, gratitude to feel for the warmth of the sun on my back, and the anticipation of a trout rising to my fly.

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This week’s guest picks up on the theme of time and mortality that I spoke about above. Matthew Collins interviews the sons of World War II veterans to capture their remembrances about their dads’ service and enrich the historical record.

If you’re the son (or daughter) of a WWII veteran, or if you know someone who is, please check out this episode preview. I provide Matthew’s contact info at the end.