four years ago i received word that they were going to replace the college football stadium that was near my childhood home. while i wasn't a season ticket holder, i did have a respectable number of memories in the place, most notably sneaking in on weekend nights with my friends to play hide in seek in the sprawling facility under a moonlit sky, well, play hide and seek until we were chased out by security which was admittedly part of the sport and appeal. upon hearing the news, i made immediate plans to see one last game there in the last year the CSU Rams would play in the storied Hughes Stadium which butted right up against my Fort Collins foothills.

so i made a proper trip of it, and bookguy joined me, and we met up with boyhood pal snake and had some great laughs and panhandler's pizza and bookguy, and i biked a century up through estes park and into rocky mountain national park. in short, it was a lovely and memorable weekend.

then the next year i returned to fort collins to take in a game at the new stadium. no bookguy this time as he was out of the country but snake and i shared time, and i made the estes ride up the big thompson canyon solo. it was again a lovely and memorable weekend.

then this year snake reached out and asked if i would be coming out for another CSU game. i countered saying i thought those couldn't be very exciting for him since they were in his backyard and suggested he pick a game somewhere in the country he would like to see and we could meet there. he said he would get back to me. a few weeks later he sent a note outlining the following weekend. a few days of golf followed by a historic SEC matchup, Tennesee @ Auburn. then on sunday we would travel an hour north and take in some nascar at Talledegha. right away i could tell i should have put snake in charge of planning our weekends years ago.

part of the itinerary was influenced by snake's brother tommy and their long-time friend paul (who was the nascar guy). they have been golf buddies for lots of years. since i'm not a golfer, i said i would meet up with them on friday for the saturday game and sunday race. so i had a lovely drive down to alabama on friday. i imagine it has been said before, but i love driving. part of it is i love my car, a 91 bmw 318i (or an E30 for those in the know). i became its second owner in 1998, and it has brought me an unreasonable amount of joy since then. a slight problem i have is i have not driven to work for more than twelve years AND i live in a community where i can walk to nearly everything i need which means i can go long stretches without ever rolling it out of the garage. but another thing i love about driving, distance driving particularly, is the simple act of unplugging from the daily firehose (simple to do, hard to make happen). these cross-country treks are highly therapeutic and meditative for me. on these day-long drives, i cover lots of desolate mentalscape that rarely sees travelers pass through.

a quick aside to address the number one question people ask when they see my nearly 30-year-old car, how many miles does it have? i can't really tell you because the odometer broke about six years ago. when it stopped merrily rolling along, the dial read 130k miles. i reckon since i don't drive a whole lot locally, i could count up the trips i've taken and get you a respectable ball-park number, but those sorts of things don't really tickle me like some. it's like the price of gas. whatever it is isn't going to keep me from buying some, so i don't bother giving it any of my precious neurons.

back to our story. i put myself fully in their hands and was told just to show up as they would take care of all of the arrangements, right down to our lodging. marty will attest to my excellence on being able to follow that sort of plan and my travel day went off without a hitch, and i pulled into the hotel parking lot five minutes before the fellas returned from their double round of golf and the weekend was off and running.

tommy got us the football tickets and had us in the second row of the end zone facing their mega screen and just to the right of the visiting band. it there was a better seat in the house, i'm not sure where it might have been. tommy and i struck an immediate over/under bet on how many times the tennessee band would play Rocky-Top (not as many as he wagered by far more than i would have ever imagined). it was an excellent day with lots of blue skies and belly laughs. and i didn't learn/recall until after the day began that it was snake's 50th birthday. by my math, it would have been challenging to dial up a better celebration than what we were in the midst of.

paul was in charge of the nascar tickets as he had family in the south who were regular patrons. shortly after meeting paul i said i heard he was a nascar guy. he said nothing but held up a finger instructing me to hold that thought, went to his bag, rummaged a second and then turned, holding to his chest his very own ricky bobby wonder bread race suit. with my mouth still agape, he turned to his bag again, this time announcing that if you didn't want to be ricky bobby you could always wear his race team partner cal naughton's old spice suit which he held before him with equal flourish. yeah, i guess he'd fall into the nascar guy column.

but, it turns out snake had some nascar connections of his own and was able to get us passes into pit row. this is the racing equivalent of scoring backstage passes to your favorite band. while the race was going on and paul was texting with friends telling them where he was right now, his phone almost caught fire from all the envy and hate being sent in reply.

the only downside to this mega-weekend is what in the heck could we ever do to follow it up. and/because it will be followed up as i'm hoping to make this trek to some college rivalry/experience a new annual tradition. too many interesting places and cultures in this country to not stick your head in the room at least once and soak it up.


hughes staudium (2016)



new stadium (2017)



auburn game (2018)



talledegha 500 (2018)

i have a friend who is a work addict. how addicted? he lives in colorado. i live in the mid-west. he lives a few hours from some of the best skiing in the world. i live a twelve hours from that same skiing. yet, i ski more every year than he does. that's how addicted he is to work. (and yes, he does like skiiing).

now i am not faulting him for being addicted to something. we all have our proclivities. i only faulted him for what he was addicted to—a corporate job. and every time we would get together, this would inevitably become part of the conversation, as uncomfortable and futile as we all knew it was.

but after better than twenty years, my friend recently broke his bonds of addiction and left the company that transfixed him all of these years. he was a different man overnight. and not only did he go skiing with bookguy and i last winter, he also took us to a college football game last fall.

while on my spring break vacation this year, he left me a voice mail. he said he need to talk with me. his voice was serious and he didn't give any additional details. i feared that something happened to one of his parents. i excused myself from our company, went outside and returned his call. the family was fine but his addiction was being tested. a new company had approached him with a very appealing executive job offer. the downside would be he would surely fall into his old ways of seventy hour work weeks and no off days. he confessed to seeing the peril at hand but explained that it was a very good job offer, one that lots of people would want and even more people would question his turning down.

we talked it through and found a position that showed how passing on it would in the end prove to be better career capital than taking it AND that it would allow him to continue enjoying his current life that offered more balance and leisure. we ended the call but just as you might worry about a more conventional addiction problem, i worried for my friend.

he was to deliver his decision the next day. i wrote him the following night and asked him how it went.

DISCLAIMER:
admittedly, this following exchange will only mean something for people who are RABID fans of the cohen brothers' film Raising Arizona. if you are not a huge fan of that movie, this may not mean much to you but if you revered it like me and many of mine did, you will find the close of this email exchange to be a great homage to the film and mighty clever response to the situation.
and marty mocked me and my friends who could and would perform whole swaths of that movie back and forth during long drives in the car ("nobody sleeps naked in this house!") or even over dinner ("what now little brother?"). she said that memorizing the lines from that movie would never come in handy. with such a bad eye for future value, it is lucky for marty that "she's a flower ... just a little desert flower."

snake, my oldest friend in life, passed through town yesterday and stopped to have dinner with us. i remember when i was younger, before kids, and knew company was coming, i'd clean my place up, putting things away, cleaning the toilets and dusting. now the extent of my civility is when they arrive saying, "if you have anything you care about, you might want to leave it in your car."

another thing i noticed is that when i walked him through the house, instead of saying this is alex's bedroom or this is where mary and i sleep, i was saying things like, "uhhm yeah, some people sleep in here, and uh, this over here is another sleeping room that people sleep in most nights."

and as if all that wasn't enough, the night before we announced my friend's visit at the dinner table, we also said that we were having an unexpected steak night. bella asked if she could put the bacon shield (a metal, three-sided structure put around a pan cooking bacon to contain the splattering) around her plate so our guest didn't have to watch her eat steak. marty said that she'd prefer bella used it as a learning opportunity and try to eat like a proper young lady, even using silverware. conversely, i supported bella's bacon-shield idea and suggested she use it wether we had a guest at our table or not.

i began my first day of forty sick. i'm not in tune enough with my body to know if it was rebelling against leaving my thirties or being pissy about entering my forties. either way, the coughing and hacking kept me home. i wasn't about to go in public on my first day in a new decade sounding like a feeble old man.

marty spent much of her day out and about giving me an unusually quite house to recuperate in. i puttered about trying to catch up on my chores which piled up given my on-the-couch state the day before. intermittently i sat down at the piano. i'm learning to play jingle bells so i can support alex while he sings 'jingle bells, batman smells' on christmas day.

my folks were coming down for dinner. when they arrived marty and the children were still out. we sat and caught up for a bit. when marty and kids did arrive my dad told bella that it was thirty-nine years a some months ago that they went to the pound to get me. i added it was good they were ok with taking home a mutt. bella gave the two of us a practiced eye roll.

we went to my favorite eatery at the moment. it's a persian place on south grand called kabob international and their food is ridiculous. the maternal owner seems smitten with our children and dotes on us like we were kin. anthony was drawn to a ramp connecting two rooms that had beads hanging in the doorway. he kept animatedly running through them with his arms waving until he lost his balance and face-planted into the bar. also eating there was a neighbor with his two sons (a week earlier i saw his wife eating there as well). we exchanged pleasantries and our adoration for the food. when i said i was here for my birthday he said he was here a month earlier (nov 7th) when he turned forty. crazy little world.

for dessert we went to ted drewes. drewes sells custard year round and custard and christmas trees during the holidays. the place is a scene straight out of christmas story with old-school traditionalist on the hunt for that perfect christmas tree. they have everything but the barrel-fire to keep the workers warm. no matter how cold or late it is our kids always fight to eat their various concrete mixtures in the parking lot, lazing about on the car. this night we went home.

when we walked in the door the house was richly decorated with helium balloons. there were scores of them throughout each room. they weren't there when we left. marty and the kids had spent much of their day down the street at a friend's house. they were drawing my cards and readying these balloons which the mom agreed to decorate our house with while we were at dinner. these are the touches in life that let you know you are part of something.

after eating dessert and sending grandparents home and getting children to bed, i called my friend snake in colorado. he had sent me an email earlier in the day and i was months overdue in returning a call to him. we caught up and compared our thoughts on the boons and bites of aging. i ended the call by saying "see ya dave" which is probably the first time i haven't called him by his snake moniker since our friendship began some thirty years ago. this could be one of the bites of forty.

marty and i then sat in front of the fire, each looking minutes from bed. instead we held our comfy spots and talked for over two hours about when we were young and re-visiting how we met and the nuances and fortunate twists that surrounded our coming together. this more than any other component of my life makes being forty not only ok but actually better than being thirty-something or twenty-something. i think i'm going to be ok with this leg of the marathon.

an email excerpt:

As you turned me on to the original I thought you should know, if you had not already heard, Ken Follett just came out with the sequel to Pillars of the Earth. It is called World Without End, I have a copy and will be commencing reading in the next few days.

five minutes after reading this message i jetted to my local bookstore and made one of their copies mine. i've been waiting over fifteen years for follet to produce something along the lines of his original pillars, which for me has been one of the very finest tales i've been lucky enough to enjoy (via a college class marty took dealing in european architecture).

thanks for thinking of me snake. and for those of you who don't know pillars, fix that. for those that do, you know what to do.

it was twenty years ago today that i left colorado. i had just graduated high school and was headed to saint louis to attend college. it was not my choice. i had forfeited my option to stay in the state by not taking control of a situation earlier. this was one of my first severe lessons in life. as i pulled off I-25 and onto I-70 east i recall repeatedly looking into the rear-view mirror, watching the mountains dissipate in the distance. i couldn't cry outright because my home-town pal snake was cheerily riding shotgun next to me. his jovial spirit was certainly a by-product of his golden two-way ticket.

time has shown, leaving fort collins and colorado was one of the best doses of medicine i ever ingested. staying there would have stunted my emotional growth more than a pack a day habit would have stymied my physical maturity. leaving the serene shelter of fort collins granted me not one but two re-inventions of myself (the first of which lacked some of the potential i thought possible). it allowed me to shake off my adolescent conditioning and live a life governed by natural instincts rather than societal expectations. i'm unable to quantify how this change in approach improved my life and ultimate fulfillment other than to say it was immense.

another unanticipated boon of the change was oddly enough my theatre-going. before moving away, i had never gone to movies alone. after the move, i went solo quite frequently (having no one to go with) and found it to be wonderfully liberating. i've actually tested this theory against real-life folks and find it to be mostly predictable. that is, people who live in their hometown seldom or never go to movies alone and those who have had some major change in geography will sit alone without compunction if not by preference. i know it's sad to to insert this sophomoric discovery in with such a heartfelt reveal but i'm disproportionately proud of this observation.

i do have great adoration and warmth towards colorado and love saying i am from the state. a pre-boom, pre-california colorado where kids rode bikes into the mountains without helmets, routinely ice-skated on wild lakes and always knew on which horizon the sun would set. i may return one day but will do so as a different person and with different expectations. and thanks to in-town family i love and a job i greatly enjoy in saint louis, i will patiently do so many, many years from now.

my buddy snake was telling me about this wager that recently took place between some friends of ours. the bet was that this guy, nate, could not remain awake for 8 hours of really bad tv and then answer a series of questions about the episodes. the guy coordinating the effort, nick, setup the following lineup for nate to watch (note: shows had to be readily available for taping which explains their somewhat pedestrian nature).

1/2 hour friends
1/2 hour frazier
1 hour sabrina the teenage witch
2 hours family matters
1 hour boy meets world
3 hours full house

if i may commentate for a moment. i like the early technique of starting with the respectable shows as to make the ones down the line seem more abhorrent. that was strong. the hour of sabrina is a neutral selection though. i've only seen snippets of the show and know there's some talking animal that's pretty surreal but if i recall there's some youngish, cutish girls in there. rookie move given the male contestant. the two hours of family matters serves as a sound recovery though but any ground gained here was lost in the boy meets world selection in that the topenga character has a haunting, yet compelling, physical presence and would stir mental endurance if even only to ponder her peculiarity. but, again, nick returns as strong as one could with the epic atrocity that is full house. no one can question this move and certainly many would have been tempted to lead, assault and even end with this show alone but i like the staggered and diversified approach. that's the definite sign of an artisan who treats his craft seriously.

as it turns out nate fell asleep during the boy meets world leg of the challenge. this obviously surprised me. and with three hours of full house ahead of him, that poor bastard didn't stand a chance. but, given he didn't have to watch the full house block and nick did to tape it, it's hard to say who really walked away the victor here. i'd be lackluster on it.

Welcome to outback camping in Rocky Mountain National Park. Our campsite is just to the left of snake there, in blue, at the base of the rocks. Spending the night where the closest human to you is at least 10 miles away is a bewildering experience, given all the humans on the planet to think you solely occupy such an uninterupted piece of real estate is a touch, well, freaky. Any amount of effort ...