Random Thoughts from a Restless Mind

“…for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.” –George Elliot (HT to my friend Bruce K.)

We in the U.S. have been bombarded of late with missives that declare that we are living in “historic times”, that we have a “historic opportunity” to participate in an election that will “determine our fate as a country in historic ways.” But is that really so? Are we truly at an altogether unique inflection point, one so different from all that have come before that our fate, our daily experiences to come will be affected in ways that we cannot miss or ignore? Or is this particular upcoming election simply the next in an unbroken series of political or governing evolutionary steps that has been unbroken since the end of the Civil War? Is the excitement and the drama simply an extension of the “Techquake” and its always on firehose of information?

Seriously now, if you are one who is on your soapbox (facing in either direction), are you really telling us that Election Day is going to change our nation to a greater degree than the one that brought us 4 years of LBJ and the Great Society?

As a people the citizens of the developed world have been swept along in the great rivers of effluent poured forth from that firehose of information that was spawned by the internet. Have we forgotten the accuracy and truthfulness of Elliot’s words? If so is it because we simply cannot get even a single pupil above the torrent of information to see what he saw? Or is it more that we have lost the ability to paddle even the tiny amount necessary to do so? No matter, the result is the same.

Literary fiction is taught as the study of quiet acts of desperation and the fall-out that follows. Life, on the other hand, is made up of quiet acts made out of sight of nearly everyone. Anonymous acts carried out with neither malice nor benevolence. These are what constitute the reality of life. It seems to me that at least a (very loud) portion of our people have lost the appreciation of this reality. For them each act is either an affront or a tiny step toward canonization. I do not believe they are correct. Elliot is only wrong in that he underestimates his object; that things are not so ill with you and me, is not half but mostly owing to those who lived that faithful life.

To what, then, is this anonymous majority faithful? This is quite simple, and because this is so it is all the more painful that it must be pointed out: they are faithful to one another. They live lives that are faithful to the belief that it is another person with whom they are living, not an opinion or a belief. This anonymous mass lives lives that are intertwined with other people, not other opinions. When they look to their left or to their right what they see is not a position or a platform, but a person. It is this, the acknowledgement that we are surrounded first by other people, that leads to salvation in this life.

You are surrounded by people who are faithfully living quiet lives, anonymous to all but a handful of others, whose lives will be remembered by even fewer, if at all. Unbeknownst to one another they likely crossed paths with someone with whom they would find little common ground in belief, someone who is close to you, about whom you care very much. Despite this lack of commonality the crossing was uneventful. It was peaceful. On balance it was marked by quiet goodwill, if it was marked at all. It was a moment that will have passed directly into an unvisited “tomb” in the memory of each of these individuals.

And yet it was that quiet faithfulness that behind whatever disagreement might exist between the two there lived much more than another opinion or belief. There lived another person. Another person living a life largely unnoticed, hopefully a quiet one with less desperation than more, on their way to an end noticed by few and mourned by fewer still. Lives that were lived in the faith that there exists much, much more good in others than not.

A faith that we, the living, must endeavor to keep.

1) Candy. Pro tip for Halloween: always buy candy that you don’t eat.

2) Gratitude. “Gratitude is like wine for the soul. Go on. Get drunk.” Rumi

What this 13th Century poet and mystic was suggesting was to give oneself fully and gleefully to the joys of gratitude. I quite like this.

3) EHR. Could this really be true? Today’s Sunday paper in Cleveland, the Plain Dealer, had an article stating that the VA medical system has increased the efficiency with which it cares for our nations military veterans with a proprietary Electronic Health Record (EHR or EMR). Is it really possible that the health system that has defined inefficiency in health care has cracked this code?

Please let this be true. Please let this not be simply an improvement over the abysmal but a true slap in the face to every commercially available system (EPIC, Cerner, et al).

This could turn out to be the only good thing that could come to medicine from Washington if it is true and it we could all have it.

4) Club. Last weekend the WSJ had an article on the so-called “new” country club. Traditional clubs are supposedly struggling to fill their rolls because they lack activities and spaces that include the wives and children of the male members. Gone are the members’ lounges and the members-only spaces, replaced with multiple lounges/bars/restaurants geared toward family members whether or not they play golf.

For that matter, gone are the blank checks for the golf courses and all that comes with them. Money that would traditionally be spent on a larger chipping green or a Par-3 course now goes to larger resort-style pools and multi-sport racquet facilities.

The cigar bar is now a nursery.

Honestly, this is progress. Everything about this trend, with the exception of the still astronomical entry fees and monthly dues, is superior to the rather myopic design of the traditional country club. I’ve noted many times that my parents social life revolved around their club; it was an early example of this new trend all the way back in the ’70’s. If there must be country clubs I sincerely hope this is the model that becomes the norm.

In other news, the average initiation fee to join the remaining traditional golf clubs in major metropolitan regions is now said to be >$200,000. La plus ca change…

5) Generation. A couple weeks ago there was an op-ed in the WSJ by Todd Kashdan, a psychology prof at George Mason, which basically tells old guys like me who say that younger workers have a totally warped sense of what it means to go to work, and that this sense is different from what we Boomers thought and did at the same age, are wrong. While he doesn’t come out and say it, he is also showing that Millennials and Gen Z’s who say that their experiences are uniquely different from those of their Gen X and and Boomer bosses are equally inaccurate.

The data are fascinating.

It turns out that Baby Boomers were just as insubordinate at work as both Gen Z and Millennials. We changed jobs just as frequently, and we protested by walking off those jobs with the same frequency as well. Our Greatest Generation bosses described us as narcissists with a poor work ethic. Sounds kinda familiar if you are either a Baby Boomer boss or a Mellennial/GenZ’er employed or managed by one, eh? This one’s on us my fellow Boomers; we did pretty much and had pretty much the same attitudes when we were in our first 2 or 3 jobs as our young employees do now. We stayed with our jobs for the same amount of time and had the same number of jobs at the same stage. We were no more or less drawn to altruistic work than today’s young workers, but the young of today are markedly more interested in leisure time and activities than we were at the same age.

Ah, there it is. There’s the rub.

The young of today are expressly intolerant of what Greatest Generation, Baby Boomers, and Gen X considered nothing more or less than stage of life problems/issues/inconveniences during launch phase. Cramming 4 or 5 bodies into a 3 bedroom apartment? What’s the big deal…everyone did that. 60 hours in the office every week and only 2 weeks of vacation? Standard issue first couple of jobs. Are you on X/Twitter? Take a look at some of Mark Cuban’s recent responses to younger members of the workforce and their complaints about how much harder it is today than back “in the day”. Like Boomer and Gen X bosses who think their charges are somehow different from them when they were young in their careers, today’s young workers seem to have no meaningful understanding of how similar their experiences are with those of their bosses.

Honestly I can’t tell if Cuban is being sarcastic or sympathetic in his response. 5 bodies in a 3 bedroom apartment at the inflation adjusted same-rate rent. Eating crappy take-out, canned and frozen food from the discount stores. I remember all of that. Beth and I only ate meat twice a week. Not because we were ahead of the health curve on the whole plant-based protein thing, but because we couldn’t afford to eat meat. My non-medical buddies all lived the same life. We hit up every Happy Hour buffet we could find, existing on over-cooked wings and Swedish meatballs for the $1.00 Coors Light entry fee. Remember Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson in The Wedding Crashers? Yah, my buddies and I may or may not have attended 40+ wedding receptions in our quest to be fed on the weekend in med school.

And how about the whole “things are so much harder now” than they were “back in the day” thing? Yah…about that. I accept that there are some pretty standard issue things that exist today that weren’t on our list of monthly bills in the 80’s and ’90’s. Stuff like cell phones and the basic app universe young’uns “need” now. I’ll grant that this is different. But if you do the math and adjust for inflation in all things including salaries that stuff is, what, $25/month? Sorry, I’m not buying it. In 2026 inflation is at the excruciating level of 3.4%, unemployment is <6%, and the 30 yr. fixed mortgage is around 7%. When Cuban (and I) was a young member of the working force in the 1980’s inflation was > 10%, unemployment was almost 10%, and my first mortgage in 1990 was %11.5%.

But sure, tell me how much worse it is now.

Listen, being young and out on your own is hard. It’s always been hard. It was hard for my parents’ generation and it was hard for mine. There’s a certain “pay your dues” aspect to being on the bottom of the ladder that really doesn’t look a whole lot different to the folks in my generation when we look at the young people who work for us. Kinda like it didn’t seem all that different when our Greatest Generation parents looked at our Boomer experiences. It was hard for them. It was hard for us.

The generations may or may not be different. As Kashdan would certainly say, it is not for the older generations to say. But the experiences of the lived lives of each generation are objectively the same, or awfully darn close. What is different is the interpretation of that experience.

Will today’s young employee rise to their today’s reality as their bosses and their bosses’ bosses did? History is likely to be on the side of those who follow the lead of people like Mark Cuban. You aren’t likely to become a billionaire–I sure haven’t–but the odds certainly favor the young person in the work force who works through the lean years early in a career.

Those years have been hard for generations.

I’ll see you next week…

“I quit when medicine was placed under State control, some years ago. Do you know what it takes to perform a brain operation? Do you know the kind of skill it demands, and the years of passionate, merciless, excruciating devotion that go to acquire that skill? That was what I would not place at the disposal of men whose sole qualification to rule me was their capacity to spout the fraudulent generalities that got them elected to the privilege of enforcing their wishes at the point of a gun. I would not let them dictate the purpose for which my years of study had been spent, or the conditions of my work, or my choice of patients, or the amount of my reward. I observed that in all the discussions that preceded the enslavement of medicine, men discussed everything—except the desires of the doctors. Men considered only the ‘welfare’ of the patients, with no thought for those who were to provide it.” |

Doctor Thomas Hendricks, P3C1 Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)

1) Fall. Next week we” fall back” and undo the 2026 version of daylight savings time. Does it matter? For that matter, should the fact that almost no other country brooks such a fancy, that we can have a meaningful effect on all aspects of daily life as we know it by changing the time on the clock when we feed the livestock? I’m doubtful the pigs notice when the slop appears.

They so rarely check their emails, let alone the time on their watch.

2) Jack O’Lantern. Beth and I had the most joyful day you can imagine yesterday. On a brilliant, blue sky October day we went to a pumpkin patch with our grandchildren and picked out the canvases for this years Jack O’Lanterns. Throw in a hayride into and out of the patch and a lovely little trick or treat set up at the grocery store, the front end of the afternoon just couldn’t have been nicer.

When’s the last time you dug your hands into the innards of a fresh pumpkin? You know, up to your elbows inside. While Beth helped with the artistry involved I was all about the “heavy labor” on the front side. It helped that the temp got into the mid-60’s and the sun stuck around for the whole shebang; cleanup on a porch is a much less arduous process than it would be in the kitchen. Three kids, three very different ideas about what a pumpkin should look like after it’s been carved. And three kids aglow at their creations. Add in the simplest of dinners and top it off with S’mores on the deck and it adds up to a day for the ages.

And the perfect gift to give their Grammy and Papi.

3) Space. As in “Third Space”. I’ve been thinking about this a ton lately. We all have 3 spaces: home, work, and our 3rd space, that place we spend a substantial amount of the rest of our time. Howard Schultz, CEO of Starbucks, is quite famous for declaring that his coffee shops thrive because they become the 3rd space for so many of their customers. Having just spent a couple of hours killing time in a Starbucks waiting for a meeting I can certainly attest to this, at least in that rather large one. Each time Beth and I stop in for a cuppa on the way to the barn I get it.

For my folks and many in their generation the 3rd space was a club of some sort. My Mom and Dad had belonged to the same country club for 40 years and the majority of their social life has revolved around friendships made there. This kind of 3rd space need not be as fancy as a country club, though. Beth and I were once invited to a birthday party for one of our associates at a VFW outpost. When our friend walked in it was like a scene out or “Cheers”: everyone knew them there. Like my folks, that VFW has been a gathering place for this couple, a place for them to make and commune with friends.

Indeed, one of the essential characteristics of a CrossFit Affiliate gym is that it very often becomes the 3rd space for its members and trainers. While we certainly miss the friendships we made across the country during our time within the larger CrossFit community, what we really miss is what our family created in the CrossFit gyms we once had.

My closest friend out side of family and I chatted this morning for quite awhile. Rob shared news of how his various interests have been evolving since he retired 4 or so years ago. We spent a lot of time talking about our expanded families. Rob and Rosemary are very engaged with their grandchildren, too, and had a big family Sunday last week. What will stick with me about this conversation is our instant agreement that finding our third space and populating it with a group of like-minded folks remains one of our top priorities as we enter the last 3 or so innings of our long game.

We agreed that the space itself is much less important than the people who fill it.

4) Dreams. All I ever dreamed of was to be Dr. Roy.

The most difficult question I ever had in my medical school interviews was the “why do you want to be a doctor” question. Honestly, I can’t ever remember being anything other than a doctor. More exactly, what I really wanted to be was Dr. Roy. How could I possibly give that answer during an interview taking place in 1985? But that was, and continues to be the most accurrate answer to this day. I not only wanted to be a doctor, I wanted to be the kind of doctor I knew when I was a kid.

Dr. Roy was the only pediatrician in my hometown of Southbridge, MA. There weren’t a whole lot of doctors at all, but for a youngish town filled with families he was the only game in town. Heck, there were more general surgeons on staff and living in Southbridge. Dr. Roy wasn’t just the most respected doctor in town, he was one of the most respected humans in town. Everyone looked up to him. Looked to him for answers when a particularly thorny issue came up, whether or not that issue involved anything related to healthcare. And not just patients, everyone.

Why was the town pediatrician held in such high regard? Well, I have to think that at least a part of it was Charles Roy the man, but a major part of it was the fact that, like almost every doctor in America at the time, he was in private practice. He owned his practice, set his fees, paid his staff and kept the lights on in what was in effect his own tiny family business. And as the only pediatrician in town he was pretty much always available. I’m sure the guy took a vacation some time, but no one could ever tell you when that was. He was always on call. My brother had rheumatic fever and couldn’t be around other kids; Dr. Roy came to the house. I had some kind of weird GI thing and ended up in the hospital for a week; I saw him in my room twice a day for a week.

Anybody over the age of 40 or so has memories of a doctor like Dr. Roy. Maybe every doctor of the era wasn’t quite as devoted to quite as significant a population, but pretty much every doctor reported to the same boss everywhere they worked: the patient. No one ever wondered which side the doctor was on or whether they needed to check with an administrator or supervisor to make sure they were covering an institutional imperative or preserving a profit margin. Your doctor was just that: YOUR doctor. He or she went to work for you. They took you home with them after work and your problems kept them up at night. Sometimes there was a price to pay for this kind of dedication. Usually it was a price paid not just by the doctor but by their family as well.

But you knew that when you needed them your private practice doctor was going to be there.

Why bring this up now? I mean, I’ve been in private practice for my entire career. Who could ever say about themselves that they had become a modern version of Dr. Roy, but I sure know that I have strived to be that every day of my career. As I write this I am having a little text side bar with a close friend and colleague in another city about the complexities of our modern medical world, the barriers that have been erected between us and our patients and kept more doctors from having any chance to become Dr. Roy. the why of that is the answer to the questions “why now”: private practice has been systematically targeted for destruction.

When I was a newly minted, wet behind the ears doctor right out of residency at least 75% of the doctors in the United States were in private practice. Might have been more, actually. Almost all doctors who didn’t work at large academic medical centers like the Cleveland Clinic or the Mayo Clinic or Sloan-Kettering either worked for themselves, or worked along with other physicians who together owned the practice that collectively took care of their patients. No outside money guys. No investors who managed stuff so that profit could be maximized. No hospital-employed middle managers monitoring whether or not the doctor had added the adequate amount of data, real or otherwise, so that the hospital could bill at a higher rate.

Nope, more than 3 quarters of doctors worked in an office where the person answering the phone and making your appointment set less that 20 feet from the exam room where you saw your doctor. Not some phone center out of state or even overseas, you saw the person who answered the phone when you checked in for your appointment. The nurse was in the same PTA group from your kids’ school and the lady who took your check as you left the office sang in the choir. Heck, you knew where your doctor lived, but no one ever dreamed of dropping by because you didn’t have to. You had a problem your doctor saw you in the office.

So what happened? In the late 1990’s and early 2000’s the knock on doctors and hospitals was that they needed to become MORE like Dr. Roy. To make the experience more like your last best experience at a boutique or restaurant. This movement lasted until 2008, a very short interlude between Dr. Roy and today. What happened? The Affordable Care Act, more commonly known as Obamacare happened. Perhaps the biggest lie ever laid on the table in any discussion of national healthcare has got to be “if you like your doctor you can keep them.” Whether intended or not literally every actionable item in the ACA has resulted in an economic environment that rewards large, consolidated organizations like…wait for it…the Cleveland Clinic, the Mayo Clinic, and Sloan Kettering, as well as every academic institution in the country. Not only do they get to not have to pay taxes, they get to charge more for everything they do because they don’t have to pay taxes!

And what has become of the Dr. Roy’s of today? In my little world of ophthalmology only 18% or so are still in a traditional practice setting where the business is owned and operated by the doctors who work there. If he exists Dr. Roy’s great grandson is 72% likely to be employed by either a large hospital system or a money-management firm than by s/he and his/her partners. Those of us who are still holding out and on are doing our best, but it’s a rough world out there if you still want to be like Dr. Roy. Unlike the large medial institutions, a private practice doctor’s office receives a lower payment for every visit and treatment, and each year those payments go down.

So why keep doing it? That’s the thing. It’s still better in every doctor stuff way when you get to work for your patient and not your non-MD manager. It’s still better when your first 4 of 5 priorities is making your patient better, and making it as easy as you can while doing so. It’s still better when everyone else in the office has the same exact goal because they all work for the doctor/s who own the group. When you see your neighbor or your neighbor’s child or your spouse’s best friend’s neighbor and you know it, that’s better. When they call the office and the person who answers the phone when they have an urgent problem, and the person who answers the phone walks back to the clinic to ask for advice from the nurse who is 20 feet away, that’s better still.

And in the end, why tell you? Well, that’s both the best and the worst part about it. It’s still all about you. Dr. Roy was right. He, and all of the doctors like him were always right. That’s the best part. The worst part is that those of us who remain are essentially defenseless. At some point even Dr. Roy wouldn’t be able to keep the lights on without your help. Did you like your doctor in 2007? Still got them now? Is it the same as it was then? No?

Private practice, what medicine once was can still be the way it may once again be. It was always about you. The only way it’s gonna be that way again is if patients ask for a return to the days when doctors went to work for you. If you want your care to come from someone who comes to work for you and you alone you have to ask for just that. No one knows if that will be enough, but we sure know that the folks who make the rules aren’t listening when those of us left in private practice ask.

It’s not for me to say if you did, indeed, like your doctor and want to keep them. But if you do I do know that it doesn’t have any chance of happening if you, the patient, don’t ask for a Dr. Roy.

I’ll see you next week…

Beth and I had a rather spirited discussion about how we in the U.S. might be able to pay for the healthcare of our citizens. Being ever practical, and also owning the job of writing the checks that pay for the “health insurance” our company offers its associates (including us), Beth in effect is arguing for a national consensus on something we might describe as a baseline ‘value’ for healthcare. Others would label her concept a ‘floor’, but you get the idea.

What Beth intuitively understands is the tension between cost, quality, and convenience. You pick a baseline or a floor and offer that to everyone. With training as a nurse and 15 years in healthcare administration, her idea of what constitutes the sum of cost, quality, and convenience naturally overweights the integers for cost and quality: outcomes should be essentially equal across the board at the baseline or floor level, and the costs of achieving that should be in some way equitably shouldered by something we could describe as “society”. Very practical. A strategy that lends itself to being observable and measurable.

What’s the rub? Well, only two of the three elements that make up value are covered. To obtain an agreed upon level of medical outcomes (mortality, morbidity, longevity, etc.) the cost is covered. Ah, but HOW you obtain those outcomes is still a variable. It is the FLOOR of value that is guaranteed. Our family is experiencing a bit of this right now with Beth’s Mom. She is living in a setting that is providing excellent care at a reasonable cost, but it is a setting that does not provide any extras; it’s old, not very pretty, and she will soon have a roommate. Her (and her daughters’) experience, what we might call “convenience” in our formula, has been found to be lacking.

Therein lies the problem with any discussion about literally anything that we might discuss as a “right”.

If we examine food, something we are very conscious of in the public health part or our medical world we find something quite similar. No one among us would say that X Million people should go without food. Indeed, we don’t even really talk about true hunger in the U.S. anymore, we talk about “food insecurity”, the concern that we may become hungry. By the same token, though, no one asserts that everyone is entitled to the same quality of food. Not even a little bit. No, quite the contrary, all that is discussed is cost and convenience (access).

Now, of course, we in the medical world argue that quality is an ineluctable part of nutrition, that one must extend the equation outside of food alone so that an explicit choice is made that prioritizes quality calories over other purchases. While this is accurate and proper we can reasonably quarantine nutrition and keep it separate from other needs I believe, at least for the purpose of our discussion. The universal concept of the interplay between cost, quality, and convenience holds true in nutrition/food on a global, grand policy making level:

You can pick any two, but only two, when you are declaring what is the minimally acceptable level.

My formulaic approach to the coverage of needs has a little wrinkle that should be mentioned: quality cannot be increased ad infinitum. In all examples we might evaluate there is a practical limit to the ability to improve quality. The law of diminishing returns arrives in the form of asymptote as quality rises. On the other hand, cost and convenience are unbound and can rise almost infinitely. It is the alcohol in a drink that confers the health benefit or an effect detrimental to health; the same outcome occurs no matter what you drink. One person’s jug wine from Costco is another person’s Chateau Lafite served in the Gulfstream V. You get the picture.

One needs to consume protein in order to survive. Whether you are eating Beef Wellington or a burger you are still acquiring a complete protein derived from a cow and you get the same protein per gram from both.

What will become of our conversations about issues such as healthcare? Will we arrive at a similar juncture to the one we have now in food, clothing, and shelter? Where quality (outcomes) and cost issues are addressed and everyone is left to make their own call on convenience/experience? Beth can’t see how it can be any other way. Me? I’m much less optimistic. That old “want vs. need” thing just keeps popping up. Confusion arises when a truly generous people confuse what people want with what they need. Need is measurable and therefore finite, whereas want is neither. We can, and should, all work to pick up the check for the needs of each. “Want”, on the other hand, is the proverbial “free lunch”.

TANSTAAFL.

Randy texted me about the exciting finish to the ND/Stanford NCAA football game. It made me smile. Not the result, not even the topic, but the excitement. A parent is only as happy as his least happy kid, and at that moment one of my kids was very happy. Randy’s football playing days are long behind him, but the game still brings him joy.

Me? Not so much.

Oh sure, there was a time when football never seemed to be any lower on my list of wonderful things than 2 or 3. I was a medium-sized fish in a puddle as a high school football player, but I didn’t have the game out of my system when I graduated. Accepted at one Ivy League school and waitlisted at another, I turned down both because I was too small to have any chance of playing football at that level. Instead I went to a very old, very small school and played a bit all 4 years. Now done as a player I was nonetheless still enthralled by all other things football.

Many of my closest friends were met on the freshly cut football fields of my youth. Wins and losses followed on those fields, most of which I’ve long forgotten. Indeed, I’ve written before that it is only the losses I remember, especially those that resulted from some personal failure in a game. A fumble, perhaps, or a blown coverage. And yet there is no escaping the fact that those countless hours at practice, in the locker room, and on the field are in large part responsible for who I am, the adult I’ve become.

It’s a powerful thing, football. The game itself is exhilarating to both play and watch. At least, it was. I find myself finding all kinds of reasons not to watch football games now. Not consciously finding “big picture” reasons so much as tiny reasons, like Mrs. bingo wants me to tag along to the barn, or Abbie the world’s smartest (and most easily bored) dog would like an adventure kind of reasons. Football of all sorts played at any and all levels has sunken to a kind of triviality, easily trumped by a trip to the grocery store.

No one thing is responsible for this falling out of love, as it were. This fall is different from the last, and the one before only in that it is now glaringly obvious that football holds for me no essential attraction by itself. Looking back my only surprise is that it took me so long. Why didn’t I begin to turn away as my friend the ER doc buzzed through Dan’s shoulder pads with a saw in order to get him into the MRI? Or when I walked onto the field after Randy knocked himself out cold with a helmet-to helmet tackle to force a fourth down, his first concussion? I was still young, still sure that the game would bring my sons what I thought it had brought me.

I see them now, both of my boys, face down and immobile, and I shudder. I started to see them each time I saw a player go down in high school, or college, or the pros. I began to see that I valued those young men nearly as much as my own boys, and I started to notice that the game of football had become The Game. Those entrusted with The Game did not–do not–appear to share my feelings about the players.

The junior high coach carries the star running back to the bench, there to wrap the sprained ankle in the hope of returning him to the game. In a high school freshman game, a rout, the first string defense is still on the field in the fourth quarter, the opportunity to play in a game slipping away for kids who may never get another chance, when the starting safety goes down with a severed spine on a play he should have been watching from the sideline. What was the first string learning at that point in that game? Alumni and athletic directors and coaches at colleges noted for academic excellence openly opine that they cannot win without lowering the admission standards for football players, and just as openly run those kids off the team and out of their scholarships when they are no longer needed to win. The game in the NFL becomes ever more violent, with ever more gratuitous violence magnifying the carnage wreaked upon the bodies of the players. Ex-pros roam the earth as a kind of walking dead.

When did football become The Game? When did the keepers of the game become keepers of The Game? When did football players as young as high school become little more than a modern stand-in for gladiators thrown into the arena for little more than the amusement of the many and the benefit of a tiny protected few? I’d like to think that there was such a time, an inflection point, when it did change, but I fear it has been ever thus. If that is so then I, too, bear some responsibility for what The Game has become. I did not turn away, or turn my own sons away, at the time of my own dawning awareness that The Game and its keepers cared naught for our sons at all, but only for themselves and their respective place and privilege.

There was a time when my playing days were long over when I still found myself on edge as the weather chilled and the smell of cut grass filled the autumn air. It was time to get ready to play football. Those days are long past, and I find that I no longer even think about watching, indeed can no longer see myself watching, except as a vehicle with which I can channel the joy of a child. And that is perhaps why: I can no longer watch a game whose keepers have lost sight of the fact that someone’s child plays in The Game.

One wonders about the parents of gladiators past.

I woke up on October 9th feeling kinda unsettled. Couldn’t really place the feeling. And then, as I eventually do each day, I checked the “Memories” on my Facebook feed, and there it was: another year without my Dad. It’s unlikely I can do any better than I did last year as we all marked a decade since his passing. Here’s what I wrote, edited to account for the passing of time.

After a 2 1/2 year struggle, at 8:07 PM EDT 11 years ago, I lost my Dad.

Four of us did, actually. Four middle-aged adults lost a father-in-law. 10 young adults are down one grandfather. Young Landon, the Lil’Prince, lost a great-grandfather whom he never met.

I am gutted.

My Dad’s been sick, really sick, for quite a long time. First hospitalized in January of 2013 he never recovered from an illness that we were told should have killed him every week since then. We’ve had two and a half years to prepare, a kind of “pre-mourning” if you will. Don’t believe it. There’s no such thing. Staring at the specter of a slow, tortuous decline with all of the indignities associated with it, I was still wholly unprepared for what turned out to be an unexpected and surprisingly quick demise. Nothing of these 2+ years of knowing left me the least bit prepared.

Some time ago I attended a talk on end of life care, the first in a lecture series honoring the friend I lost to cancer a few years ago. The talk was surprisingly moving, not only because it brought back memories of Ken but also because I knew I would likely lose my Dad in the not too far future, and I thought of my folks throughout the talk. What the speaker discussed as end of life care and end of life preparations also offered a very important take-away that I have tried try to apply every day since, especially with my parents.

The speakers thesis is that one should say 4 things often and with ease, not only in the course of completing a life’s work or concluding a life’s relationships, but in the course of living a life:

Please forgive me.

I forgive you.

Thank you.

I love you.

Sounds simple, huh? Maybe even a little trite. But each one of those little phrases is a bit of a minefield, each one laden with a hidden meaning and a back story, each one the mid-point in a little journey with a “before” you know, and an “after” you can’t possibly predict. There’s a little risk in that “after”, too, and that’s why those 4 little phrases aren’t really all that simple, and why considering this is not at all trivial. All 4 of those little phrases make you look outward, look at another, and in the stating they force you to put yourself at the mercy of that other. Each one of those phrases is a little opening in our guard, an invitation to accept or reject not only the sentiment but the sender.

I’ve now spent several years thinking about those 4 essential things and about how they fit in a life that is not necessarily concluding (at least I hope not!). We are, each of us, part of a tiny little ecosystem; thinking about using these phrases encourages us to look outward and see the others in our own worlds whether we are approaching the conclusion of a life or smack dab in the middle. How will my parents react if I approach this when I visit? Do they/did they know it’s now the 5th act, that we are tying up all of the loose ends in the story?

How about my friends, my kids, my darling bride? Actually, without really knowing it I’ve been on this path for some years now, probably guided by Beth and her inherent goodness. Friends come and go; either way I’ll likely feel a sense of completeness in any relationship if I remember these 4 things. Patients and staff do, too. I think I’m a pretty good boss and pretty user-friendly for patients as far as specialists go. Bet I’ll be better at both if I’m thinking about these, even just a little bit, even now.

Please forgive me.

I forgive you.

Thank you.

I love you.

I hope, sweet God do I hope that I remembered enough, said these enough. I pray that I remembered to say them to my Dad before he lost the ability to remember that I said them. Don’t wait as the end of someone’s life approaches to say these four things. Don’t wait for the conclusion of your life before you think about these.

I can’t believe it’s been 10 years. Richard E. “Dick” White 6/21/31-10/9/15. I really loved my Dad.

I’ll see you next week…

There is such a thing as right and wrong. Good and bad are different. My reminder came while reading about Dale Murphy, the retired baseball player most famously remembered for his days as an Atlanta Brave. Mr. Murphy was noted for his career-long insistence on doing the right thing. If you are a baseball fan you may remember that he retired 2 HR short of the magic 400 that likely would have guaranteed his election into the Hall of Fame; he could no longer stand to be the shell of his former self and so he went home rather then extend his career with PEDs.

Dale Murphy is a good man who did the right thing.

We have been living in an age of moral equivalence for a very long time. Certainly no less than 30 years. A time in which the ends justify the means. Something is not really wrong if it was done by or directed at the right people. Generations ago one could enunciate a coda of what was nearly universally recognized as good, as right. Be honest. Don’t steal or cheat. Work hard. Don’t cause harm to another on purpose. As a society Americans had an ethic of working together toward a common goal, a common idea of what was good. None other than de Tocqueville observed this and included it in his historic musings about America and Americans. As a people we had a sense of what was right and what was wrong, a clear understanding about the difference between good and bad for a couple hundred years. Sometimes we got it wrong, but in general we strove as a people to be better.

This is the place where naysayers jump in with comments about various types of discrimination, about groups for whom this ideal was simply not a reality. I fully acknowledge these facts. Racial discrimination was terrifically worse in previous generations, as was the unconscionable treatment of women (entire categories of people could not vote for 150 years). All true. But as de Tocqueville anticipated, there has been an inexorable (albeit painful and often excruciatingly slow) movement toward more of better. It has hardly been a straight line from bad to better, but that is the journey we have taken, and things are, indeed, better.

Dale Murphy is looked upon with a kind of wonder, as if he and his life are somehow not of this time. Marry someone you love. If you have a family prioritize raising your children to be good citizens who know the traditional difference between good and bad. Be honest. Don’t hurt people. Be kind and generous to those outside of your family whenever you can. Do these things in a quiet manner, not out loud in self-aggrandizement as you build “your brand”. There are certainly other famous people who fit this mold; Denzel Washington and Neil Patrick Harris come to mind. Lots of no-name folks, men and women you will never meet who will never be famous are doing the same thing.

You could say that what I bemoan about our present society has always been thus; that I, we, simply know more about it now because of newer, freer information streams. I cannot argue against this possibility. Still, it seems as if even knowing this, that a return to an acknowledgement that there is a clear difference between good and bad, between right and wrong, can only strengthen the fabric of our society. Different, on its face, is neither good nor bad, it is simply that: different. Something that is unattractive or distasteful may be just that and nothing more. We can disagree in the great middle. Good and bad is bigger than taste or style or personal preference.

In the dark we are all the same. We live together unseen. We have the same dreams and the same fears. Though we cannot see we still feel. Right and wrong are different. There is such a thing as good and bad. These things do not change when the lights are turned on. Seek the good. Do the right.

An attic is in many ways similar to the vast storage facilities that lie hidden beneath and above every museum you’ve ever visited. The exhibits you walk through are like the life you see being lived right in front of you. If you are an experienced museum goer the existence of that treasure trove of unseen artwork is something you know is there somewhere. For the archivist, all of that art is there for the asking.

A life remembered lives in the attic or the basement or the back of a closet in the remotest room in the house. Beth spent 3 long days and nights pulling together the totems of her parents lives from the nooks, crannies and crevasses of what is literally the Hurst family ancestral home. No fewer than 4 generations lived significant parts of their lives in what was once a tiny one-room schoolhouse surrounded by Amish and Mennonite farms. What an incredibly daunting task, that.

Hearing her tell of her task (we were “together” on speakerphone) was what it must have been like if you could have been an open ear at the excavation of St. Paul’s Cathedral in Rome. The attic had an attic; each closet had a closet. Every step further into each space unearthed another layer of the family’s history. Here a deed to the original schoolhouse, there the wedding certificate for her great great grandparents. Was her Dad a good student? Well, he had a pretty solid 3rd grade judging by his report card.

And the pictures! Oh my, yes, there were pictures. Beth and her sisters fell straight down the Schaeffer family tree. Who knew how much they looked like their Mom when they were all younger women? I got to see pictures of the stunning beauty I fell in love with some 35 years ago, a literal restoration of the portrait in my mind’s eye of our days of courtship. Treasures unearthed in the attic.

Stories, journals, histories, legends…they all came out of the attic’s attic and emerged from the closet’s closets. Beth’s “legs” fairly buckled under the responsibility of curation. What to keep? What should go? They are the last of their line, these Hurst sisters. Whatever was consigned to go would be forever gone. There are no more attics; there will be nothing to curate. She felt the presence of not only her parents but of their parents, and theirs, and theirs as well.

Is this nothing more than a melancholy musing on memory and loss? Maybe. There was a lesson in there, though, one that Beth and I stumbled upon as we “walked” through those archives together. It didn’t have to happen like that. As it turns out each attic corner, each tiny closet contained notes and stories that lead, like so many tiny treasure maps, to the next discovery. Why had my in-laws not taken us all in hand and walked us together along those pathways? For sure there were stories that should have been buried elsewhere, art not meant to be seen by generations hence (note to self: remember this lesson when it is time), but still, we thought of the joy we could have shared had we just known these treasures were there to share. That’s the lesson my friends, one that Beth would agree afterward was worth the lonely emotional lifting she did as she curated a life remembered, archived like so many art treasures in the attics and closets filled over generations and hidden from view.

Someone may be alive today who’s been filling those attics. Find them. There is joy in the attic. Like so much that is joyful, to share your discoveries with those who created them is just too wonderful to let it pass now that you know that you don’t have to.

In my travels, and those of my oldest friends and acquaintances, I have come across scores of people who are truly happy. Capable of feeling and giving in to joy. It’s such a special thing to see, and even better to in some way feel a part of that joy, wherever it may be from and whatever may have brought it to life. It’s out there, you know. Sometimes it’s subtle, as gentle and quiet as the proverbial footstep of a butterfly landing on a leaf. Other times it is raucous and riotous and simply blasts through your space like a runaway train.

That’s kinda cool.

Sadly, there are others out there who resent the joy in others. Whether they are themselves happy or not so much, the happiness of another feels to them like losing. It’s more than envy in the unhappy. For these folks it’s as if there is a finite about of happiness and joy in the world; no matter how much of either they may have at any one time they cannot see another’s joy without feeling as if it is somehow draining the reservoir from which they may drink some time in the future. Weird, huh? They sometimes seem more fixated on the blessings of others than on their own, so much so that their own joy slowly seeps away.

Happiness and joy are not limited resources. Quite the contrary. My happiness, my joy is not predicated on your unhappiness or your sorrow, and vice versa. Heavens, if one person’s happiness could come only from another’s despair we’d have long ago slipped into a rather dismal anarchy. No, joy is the ultimate non-zero sum measure. More than that, joy is an exponential multiplier. When you find or see joy in someone else and that vision makes you happy, the mount of happy you get is a full order of magnitude greater than it should be. If that joy and happiness should come to someone who has lately had little of either, well, that’s just that much better.

Life is pretty good around Casa blanco right now, and as much as I’d like to think that means it will always be thus that’s not how life works. Regardless, if I should stumble upon you in the midst of something joyous you can be sure that no matter what happens to be going on in my little world I’m surely not going to resent you or your joy. Quite the opposite. I am going to rejoice with you!

Whether the skies be cloudy or eggshell blue, a glimpse of the sun always makes it warmer for everyone.