Bella just got her first post-college, big-girl job. It is at the same university I worked for until 2016. It is an idyllic starting professional experience for both her and her employer. For her because she is going to learn a lot about the future industry she intends to occupy, and for them, because they just landed a young woman obsessed with what their group does—event production.

...

In 2016, I left my job to start a company. I still vividly remember an exchange with an older guy shortly thereafter.

OLD GUY
Oh. So you started your own company?

TROY
Yeah. I’m a little nervous but more excited.

OLD GUY
Sure. Fun stuff. Being your own boss is great. Want to know the best thing about having your own company?

TROY
Sure. What ...

End of an Era, Part II

End of an Era Part I here.

Logic dictates that when one thing ends, another thing begins, and this new era has plenty of interesting fodder in the folds. For one, it, the new era, is marked by Marty and I being the parents of three grown children. There are many curious things about watching your children ste...

End of an Era, Part I

Bella and I were sitting on the couch. I hadn't seen her in several days. Before now, travel-aside, I could count on one hand the number of times I did not see my oldest child for consecutive days. But those times have passed. Now, seeing her two days in a row is the unusual experience. As we sat catching up, she said she recently had a few tough emo...

Now that the kids are older and either moved out or are often out, Marty and I are edging our way into those scary waters where a couple has just one another to talk to. When I was younger, I thought this period would resemble life before having kids. Light. Carefree. Easy. In some ways, it is, but when you have sent children you love more than you thought possible into the world, I think my mind ...

Anthony walks into the kitchen to find me running the last serving from a box of Raisin Bran through a kitchen strainer.

ANTHONY (15)
Are you washing your cereal?

TROY
No, just sifting all the tiny broke pieces out. I don't like those.

ANTHONY
That's quite a process.

TROY
Not really. I've learned you just gotta be smarter than your problems. ...

Best friend Mike, known around these parts as Bookpimp, recently turned 50. To mark the milestone, he had planned a gathering of his three best buds, which techinically is two best friends and a brother. The original celebration got axed by the pandemic but was salvaged in late 2022 when things started normalizing. Months before the gathering, I reached out to the other two invitees, unbeknowst to...

It was a Friday. Marty was home because it was parent-teacher conference week. On these weeks, Marty works three, twelve-hour days and, in return, gets a Friday off. The boys were home too because if there are no teachers, there is no school.

I woke at my usual time and started working. After a few hours, I heard Marty's feet pad to the bathroom. I snuck to our bed, so I was there for ou...

One of the first things I do each day is make note of what happened the day before.

Each year, there are always a few stand-out days. This year that day was May 4th, 2021. Here is my daily re-cap from that day.

• this was anthony's first day back to school in over a year. he has to go in for end-of-term testing and they won't/can't let kids do that from home. i could tell anthony...
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I had a dream. In it, I was playing hide and seek with a little girl. I have the sense she was a grandchild. She had a frilly dress and thick pigtails both of which flowed behind her when she ran. Her melodic giggle bounced off the walls and brought life to the whole house. I was hiding behind a french door in the nest (where Marty and I sleep). I heard the small voice running from room to room, c...

my uncle tim died in october. this was my mom's older brother and he died nine years to the month after my mom, his sister. i always described uncle tim as my favorite uncle. at his funeral lots of people described him as their favorite fill-in-the-blank. a contributing factor to this was my uncle tim was a prankster. never malicious. never hurtful. but also never off-duty. he seemed to always hav...

at the end of every week, i write two journal entries--one for my business and one for my personal affairs. i do this with several things in mind. i like to reflect on the happenings of the prior seven days. this is both to celebrate any progress and achievements as well as help set the tone and priorities for the week ahead. last week's personal entry, shared below, felt a little more potent than most.

there's more than a little truth in that closing sentiment.

there is a handful of humans who think i have it too easy. they believe that the world just opens up before me and provides me undue rewards and riches. these boons come in all sorts of sizes and looks. my assumption has always been that everyone gets these sorts of things. they can be as big as scoring the mother i did and as small as getting the good table by the window. those that don't know me...

bella came to me while i was working at my desk, and asked me if i'd read something for her. she handed me a piece of paper that said, "Please accept this as my two-week notice and December 15th, 2017 will be my last day. Thanks! Bella."

i asked what i was looking at. bella said it was her resignation notice. i asked how she intended to deliver it. by hand? over the phone? bella said she was going to text it to her boss.

this is one of those moments as a parent where you have to catch yourself. you do this by first taking a deep breath and then, following the resultant exhalation, by saying nothing. those first things that roll across your mind's conveyer belt aren't the winners you think they are. no matter how smart or appropriate or necessary they may sound in your head. what you're looking and waiting for during this quiet breath is the realization that the only reason your child doesn't know any better or different is because you, her parent, have not yet taught them the difference. i have found in the past that i have often fumbled these moments because they come (1) frequently and (2) at inopportune times, though if you asked me when an opportune time was, it would probably take me longer to find a time to i'd call convenient than it would to just show you what i need to show you.

so here i told bella there are better ways to do this. to this she said, "but mom said it was ok". to which i said, "you showed this to mom? and she said it was good?" yep and yep. breath and silence. when dealing with spousal disconnects, there's a whole other decision tree which i will simply describe as a higher level of math and leave it at that (for now). after my breath and silence (and spousal calculus) i said "mom and i are going to have to different approaches here. while yes, you could technically send this brief message AND you could technically send it as a text and no one may bat an eye in today's white-knuckled, fast-finger society there is a better way to leave a job and this is an opportune time to practice that better way."

i talked way longer than i needed to (but this is my way and my children may worry for me if i were ever brief, so i in part do it for them). but i talked at length about the value of not burning bridges and making an impression on people, even as you are parting ways, but in short it is always about conducting yourself with class and being respectful (even when there might be angst, which was not the case here). way back when i left the bank and posted my resignation, a few people commented on it to me. so i found it (here) and shared it with bella. using that as a template she produced the following: my girl, as she so often does, did me proud. and she has already been offered on open-invitation in the summer when she will have more time and they will have more need.

one thing my mom definitely worked hard to teach me was just because lots of people in a society may deem something ok and acceptable does not mean it is ok and acceptable. texting a one-line resignation to your boss to quit your first long-term job squarely lands in that bucket for me. bella and i both thank you mom.

a story-portrait of a moment in time.
Thursday November 16th @ 6:50am

alex is in the dining room eating breakfast.
bella is in the foyer putting on her socks.
marty is in the living room packing her bag for the day.
anthony is upstairs just waking up.
troy is in the kitchen making anthony's lunch.

there's a knock at the door. in that i am the least busy of...

you be doing too much. that is what a middle-school peer once told bella. it has become a house-staple that jokingly gets thrown out anytime anyone seems to be going above and beyond. you be doing too much. they be doing too much. a confusing part of its use is one can say it in a complimentary or derogatory fashion. when you hear it, you must listen for both the tone and context in each situation...

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."

i had my wallet stolen out of my car a few years back while playing tennis. even with the money and inconvenience of it all, the only thing i truly hated losing was the first picture i ever had of marty. and even more than losing the picture (which i was able to get a replacement of) was losing the note that was written in her architect-grade penmanship on its back.

meanwhile in marty's ...

i called my friend matthew. we needed to talk. as i began he started eating something, something that sounded like a mixture of apples, cheetos and ice. i kept pausing at the height of his chewing. picking up on this, matthew stopped his masticating long enough to say:

MATTHEW
sorry. i was just on an hour long call with these morons from work and was starving.

TROY
well ...

i love lists.

lists govern many facets of my life, admittedly sometimes to my detriment. once, when i had to travel i relied on multiple lists to prepare for my trip. i used my TRIP list to pack my bag. i used my BATHROOM list to pack my toiletries. i used my SKI list to pack my ski gear. as always is the case, the trip prep went fast and easy. then, thankfully before getting out of my n...

the short story is this:

• in mid-june i resigned my position of ten years at my most-recent employer, washington university in st. louis.
• i spent the next three weeks feverishly working to make my exit a clean and competent one. fwiw i spent the five weeks prior as well, starting my work after making the decision to leave. this effort was largely in the name of my staff who i didn't w ...
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a few things i learned in 2014:

• there is a conversation-starting question almost as good as "what are your interest?". the new question is "what is something you've done recently that you're proud of?". i've already travelled a good number of miles on it and would assert that if you can't get a good conversation out of one or both of those questions, you should cut bait and move on to th...
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last week marty's summer officially ended.

:-(

our last family act of the summer was to have a celebratory "sam-survived-cancer" (rel) dinner complete with porterhouse steaks, giant potatoes, fresh corn from sam's family farm in iowa all chased by cookies, ice cream and cup cakes. there's few things sweeter than appropriate decadence. at 9:30 (or at the end of the third hour of the dinner) and in the middle of a rich conversation about tips, tricks and lessons of growing up (mostly for bella's studious edification) but after her moving thankful about sam and diana, marty pushed her chair back, stood up and said, her final words 'best summer ever' came with oprah like fervor on free stuff day. i and the children repeated her calls of best summer ever and the kids came forward with big smiles, hugging her. en masse the group looked like a sporting team that just played their last game of the season and were ending their run together, never again to field the court in that exact complement. in many respects, this metaphor aptly describes us as we will never again enjoy a summer with a 13, 11, and 7 year old. given this magical age-set, we enjoyed a rare time together full of many things, such as:

• marty not working (a facet of life we will never again take for granted since her return in 2012).
• sleeping in (and it's counter-part, staying up late)
• roller-blading (at rollercade and on our neighborhood's newly paved streets)
• beach vacations with marty's mom and siblings (to celebrate mama nat's 80th)
• minecraft-marathons (other marathons include xmen, star trek and x-files)
• trampolining (a gift from our newly departed neighbors)
• sleeping on the trampoline (a stellar marty idea and which saw a 5-night run)
• watching blairwitch on the trampoline + sleeping the night on the trampoline (bella and i only)
• group reading (both from books, kindle and audio)
• monopoly (the real-one, no more of that monopoly junior bullshit - thanks to marty's brother mike)
• eating on the porch (we've evolved to setting a table out there)
• movie nights (one even at a drive-in, front playground included--which anthony came back soaking wet from)
• bike rides (my biking regimen is nearly back to pre-kid form)
• introducing my family to the great world of true, professional comedy (starting with bill cosby)
• walking to a vp fair concert in forest park (please move it to forest park every year)
• closeness
• calmness
• laughter
• smiles
• family
• health

marty commented that a big difference maker this year was the kids, all of the kids, are now old enough where they can mostly run their own games and we have fully entered that next phase of parenthood where we have more mutually interactive relationships. for me, it is the last six items on the list that make for the core ingredients of great times. marty's summers-off job is what allows for great quantities of this and her working the other nine months of the year, accentuates their importance. at the start of the summer anthony asked me why i didn't get summers off like mom. i told him that mom had a special sort of job that allowed for that but that also, when mom has summer break, so do i, given that she essentially takes all of my chores on (e.g. dishes!!!) during these months and making my time equally relaxing and special. but placing an active emphasis on those bottom six is key:

• by making attentive time for our kids.
• by trying to run a non-frenetic home.
• by ensuring everyone has laughed every day (tickling a human does wonders for that).
• by breaking a funk by forcing an agitated human to smile (fart jokes and actual farts can distract young boys from a foul mood).
• by that so often taken-for-granted human need, to know you are loved. it's one of those few, rare things you can never get enough of. so make sure you kiss and touch and wink and smile at someone you love today.
• and possibly most importantly, by acknowledging daily that there are only two kinds of health—there is the health you have before you are told you have a life-threatening illness and there is the health you have after you are told you have a life-threatening illness—and appreciating every day you and yours spend on light-minded side of the fence (because when you are placed on the other side of the fence, it is all consuming to you and those who care about you).

so while i'm sad to be writing about the end of the best summer ever, i'm thankful to be able to healthily say we just had the "best summer ever" and look forward to trying to top it is subsequent years.

i recently wrote about the picture i thought was the most joyful ever. in that discussion i shared that my image of choice was part of a daily ritual i have but i didn't discuss it further. i have a ten minute walking commute to and from work. while it is great to have your home be that close and convenient to travel to, ...