It’s Wednesday afternoon. The Matanzas River marsh opens in my windshield, as I cross from the tree lined forest on the oyster shell road into the Atlantic seascape.

Rising on the drawbridge, I see the collision of two blues, a seam of ocean and sky in a straight line on the boundless horizon.

With the window down, I taste the salt air, as McCready hits that understated riff from No Code, the opening of Present Tense. The track is meditative at the opening before turning into an explosion of introspection live. The song is an invitation, as familiar ruminative notes draw us into the present moment. The song then strengthens, releasing us to soar above as the music takes us away.

Do you see the way that tree bends?
Does it inspire?
Leaning out to catch the sun’s rays
A lesson to be applied
Are you getting something out of this all-encompassing trip?

I made this trip Monday in reverse. Parting the blackness, nearly alone on the road as my family slept further and further away. Duty inevitably called. But with those responsibilities honored, I returned today.

When travelling to Florida, there’s an imperceptible shift in landscape in this drive.

My mind drifts as I drive.

South Georgia’s towering longleaf pines stand regal, as sentries flanking the vast fields of farmland. Row upon row, center pivots spraying a mist in the suffocating heat. A tractor at the edge of the field kicks up dust, blurred by the pivot’s rising vapor.

In the lowlands, in glimpses caught on bridges, cypress trees dot the wetlands. Brackish water standing still as nature rests in the in between.

Crossing into Florida, beyond the planted palms at the welcome sign, the towering pines remain, but they’re interspersed with sprawling oaks. Oak arms aloft, Spanish moss hanging densely, pulled to the ground, as the tree forms a canopy above. Out my window, palms are now scattered below the trees, a Florida tell. Palmetto brush sits above the grey sand, replacing the red clay of Georgia.

Even from 75 mph, these north Florida woods offer a subtle welcome. A transparency, such that when you gaze into these woods you’re drawn to what’s beyond. An aperture to what awaits on the other side. Going from what’s within, to a certitude that something redemptive awaits on the other side.

Along this drive, the imperceptible shifts also awaken impressions of pressure, temperate, emotional changes within.

Have you belief that the road ahead ascends off into the light?

The Matanzas River marsh extends both north and south, far beyond what I can see. Center consoles, a couple ski boats cast a wake, yet I imagine galleons dancing across the Atlantic seeing this place as I do today.

I check my hands and study the lines.

I read this week that one day we’ll be nostalgic for right now. We live in moments we’ll long for, as we live in other moments we’ll long for. And the beach allows a confluence for this nostalgia. Longing for memories while living in ones you’ll long for.

Beyond the relaxation, time at the beach is laced with mile markers in your soul. It was at the beach you sat with your family as a kid, showered, clean, sunburned, the cool evening wind blowing in our still damp hair, realizing, perhaps for the first time, the power of love in these suspended scenes. The day was as it should be. And you knew you had another one tomorrow.

The screen within my mind replays the conversation Christian and I had on the white sands about our future together. Nervous, understanding the stakes, having the courage to voice our truth. Deciding for all eternity to love each other.

I see my kids’ first steps onto the beach. Hays and JR tearing into the waves. I see the scene shift to their tiny steps holding my mother’s hand as the receding tide reflected their shapes walking away. I see Cooper in his floaty, wanting to go swim with Hays and JR and Banks. Not wanting to just watch while they played, I attached him to a literal dog leash so I could keep him nearby as he floated in the big waves.

Sight of the ocean releases the collective memories, allowing us to reckon with so many versions of ourselves. The salt cures. It purifies. Preserves. And heals.

With my elbow in the open truck window, I breathe it in.

As I descend down the bridge, back from responsibility, the present tense awaits. Closing the door to my truck, walking into the house, one day, I know, I’ll be nostalgic for what I’ll experience today.

Makes much more sense, to live in the present tense.

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

                                                The Peace of Wild Things                                                         
                                                                  -Wendell Berry

With the rising sun at my back, I ride east on my bike. As the oyster shell road ends it turns to charcoal gray sand lined with palmetto. Approaching the marsh, an invisible waft of sulfur burns the senses. I lean my bike against an oak tree, under outstretched arms draped with moss.

In the morning’s stillness I ride away from the beach. It’s the marsh that’s cleansing. There’s a bench overlooking the marsh, the Amelia River somewhere in the middle. A barge makes its way through the slender channel, seeming to slide on top of the cordgrass.

Sitting down, I see the tide is out. Black, fecund mud reveals oyster racks. Water striders, pond skaters skimming the still water’s surface.

This marsh, nature alive, the keel of the Atlantic ecosystem, nursing the water, feeding the rot below and plenty above. Twice a day the tide floods the marsh, infusing the grass with what the sea and land discarded. The roots soak what the land spilled, the ebb decants away clear.

Solitude is found in this place. A warm salt wind blows over the dunes. There are a few grains of sand in my flip-flops from yesterday’s walk on the beach. A palm tree sways gently, looking like it’s bowing as I sit.

I open my journal, this mental marsh that cleanses grievance, insecurity, doubt. Pages decanting virtue. I open it to yesterday’s page.

“It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.”

Looking up, reciting this Emerson passage in my head, I see a shrimp boat in the distance, arms outstretched, underway heading to the coast. The wires are set to pull in the catch.

I know the iron string within.

With the journal in my lap, my gaze at the horizon, I return unexpectedly to age 24, to my office at the church.

-

My office was adjacent to the youth center. White noise filled the space, courtesy of the thunderous air conditioning units just across the basement stairs. A few years before I occupied it, this office was converted from a nursery, one I used to inhabit as a toddler.

This particular morning I’m remembering, I attempted to read from my worn Bible as ministry dissolved as a calling. I didn’t sense the dual deliverance as I do now.

Delivered to this nursery as a child. Delivered from the ministry as an adult.

Deliverance.

Reading, with my resignation already turned in, I reckoned with this suspension between states. The decision was made. I was just working out a notice. No longer a minister, yet still in ministry. Hired in business, not yet a businessman.

I was caught between two worlds, not knowing if I could succeed in either.

I closed the Bible. Put it on top of my yellow legal pad, slid the chair back, and exited out the backdoor that opened to the playground area. I’d avoid the office section of the church. It was there one crossed into a confluence of churchmanship and sanctimony. Gone were the youthful ideations on the purity of Methodism’s mechanics.

Unlocking the tall wooden door, I entered the darkened sanctuary. Quiet on a weekday morning. There’s a special serenity in a place used to crowds, to music, preaching of the word. The silence is jarring. You’re entering a place that’s alive, pulsing with a stirring of presence.

I sit, take a deep breath. Breathing in the warm air, the air conditioning not running. Sensory awareness would awaken as I could hear my breaths, sense my heart beat behind my ears. My knees touched the wood of the pew ahead, gently bending the wood holding the hymn books in place.

I’m not sure what I was looking for that morning. Perhaps a continued contemplation of my choices, a confirmation from the quiet assurance within. I look up to the stained glass above to see Jesus doing the same. In the Garden, Jerusalem waited in the distance behind him.

I stared further into Jesus’ eyes. Seeing the agony of awareness, seeking peace. When would that gleam of truth flash across his mind, that to be rejected is to accept what’s within. And to know your truth, the inner sanctity of one’s truth. To disregard the organizational structure of the institution, as I was doing.

What’s in our hearts? What speaks in that moment of realization, when everything changes. But you realize nothing changed at all, you just reset to the paradigm within.

“A man should learn to detect and watch that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within, more than the lustre of the firmament of bards and sages.”

At the marsh, I go back to that pew. Seeing myself from above, beyond the stained glass, above the stone columns, and at the same time rapt within. When I return, there’s relief. I knew leaving was right. I didn’t know how right it would be. And underneath the relief there’s now a tinge of fear for who I’d be if I’d stayed.

Now, on the bench, journal in hand, I think about Emerson.

“I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching. How far off, how cool, how chaste the persons look, begirt each one with a precinct or sanctuary!”

For in due time the inmost becomes the outmost.

Nearing a meditative state, I’m drawn into a dream.

My eyes are open, but only black exists.

Nothing’s touching me, but the pervasive blackness pushes me in all directions, vertigo.

My balance sways.

The void is a space filled with my presence. I know I’m present.

I hear my heartbeat in my ear. That muffled register, a cadence of blood pumping through my body, sounding rhythmic. Reassuring even as gravity in this blackness begins to betray me.

I can see nothing.

I breathe in. Slow and steady.

My heart races, as the blackness unbalances me.

True darkness is disorienting, knocking me off my equilibrium, heightening the other senses, such that each smell or noise ratchets up my awareness.

And in this void of blackness where I can’t see, fear rises. My mind begins to sense changes in the air pressure, seemingly subtle shift in winds. A gentle wind on the back of my neck as the hairs rise.

I blink my eyes, just to ensure I’m awake. To perhaps wipe the blackness away, stepping into the light.

My soul rises, on alert.

Then it happens.

A lightning strike. A camera flash in this darkened space.

A heightening of my senses, my mind taking a mental image of this place in that split second. This instant, this flash, the nanosecond allowing a full survey of this space I occupy. I’m left gasping, absolutely certain I’ve seen what wasn’t previously seen.

When it flashed, I saw the faces in that room looking back at me. Standing stoically, watching me. Experiencing none of the emotions I was. Like they were comfortable where they were. This was their safe ground. Yet all eyes were on me. I could feel their stares. Their judgment.

And in the subsequent darkness I was plunged back into the blackness, yet I was aware of their presence.

I could still see where they stood. Where the furniture was laid out, the room, the spaces. The gaps in spaces. I remember the distance between places.

I remember everything.

Seeing change everything within. Even in the blackness after the flash, I’m at peace. Now alight while in the dark. My heart rate reruns to normal. My eyes close within the dark, seeing clearly behind my eyes. Breaths in and out.

Seeing, even for that second, assured me what needs to be seen is what’s within. The light’s not outward. It never had been. It was within.

It was found in self-reliance.

-

A decade after I’d been in banking, as I’d worn pages in my journal, I discovered the writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Learning how he shifted from the ministry, I was drawn to his story. I’d come to imagine him sitting in a pew like mine at his father’s church, Boston’s First Church.

I’d imagine him before the writings. Before Divinity Hall, before Nature, before the Address that would keep him from Harvard for nearly thirty years. Before he realized that life is within.

I’d see him sitting in Boston, wrestling as I did with the established path. Ministry’s pull as well. Seeing the pulpit high overhead, occupied by his father before him. The rich, bourbon wood of the altar area, nicks from the craftsmen, and oils from the palms of the faithful darkening the area of prayer. White walls accentuated the gold light, slanting through the paned windows. Salt was in the air, gulls could be heard, alongside the busyness of Boston’s wharves. Chimney smoke signaling life.

A watchman can be heard outside. The bells echo throughout the city.

Emerson closes his eyes.

-

Years later, he’s at his desk. The wood indented from thousands of words in his journal. With the window open, the air of Concord gently pushing the linen curtains, he compiles his thoughts. Seams between thoughts. Seams between years, versions of himself.

Emerson could sit with the aftermath of a resignation, balancing the ledger. Reconciling the accounts.

I imagine the quill dipped in ink, the permanence of that blackness on the page, traveling through the years and versions into my consciousness. The nib grinds on the coarse paper as his words form on the page. Such that one could hear the writing outside that window. His pressure on the page expressive of the motion of the words.

“He who knows that power is inborn, that he is weak because he has looked for good out of him and elsewhere, and, so perceiving, throws himself unhesitatingly on his thought, instantly rights himself, stands in the erect position, commands his limbs, works miracles; just as a man who stands on his feet is stronger than a man who stands on his head.”

-

The tide begins to rise, as does the wind. The sun rises higher from the eastern sky, a golden illumination on my pages. I imagine his ink drying, tattooing everything within me.

“Nothing can bring you peace but yourself. Nothing can bring you peace but the triumph of principles.”

Three hours ago, we were married, surrounded by hundreds of folks. Now we’re alone, piercing the August night on I-185 northbound.

Starving, we searched the food basket in vain. No utensils. We ripped the steak by hand, scooped shrimp and grits from a container, laughing as we hurtled away from home in the late hours of August 10, 2002.

Driving in my gold Ford Taurus on the winding roads, how insignificant we must look from above. Within those four doors, though small on this darkened earth, we were everything to each other in that moment, yet nothing at the same time. We were at ease with one another, familiar, while also strangers.

Marriage, love, we’d learn, is a revelation.

In those years, I struggled with the concept of love, wondering even how to define it. How would I know if I felt it? If I were in it? We’re surrounded by this societal image of love, a ubiquitous definition of a range of ebullient emotions. Love as a feeling, an emotion, a projection of passions, affections. Love’s something one’s swept up in uncontrollably, like casting off on a rafting trip, riding the ravishing whitewater in an adrenaline rush. You’re paddling, but the river is in control.

Love, I perceived, was beyond anything you can control. Love happened to you. You fell into it by way of a transformation that’s a metaphysical shift in control.

Approaching Atlanta in the darkness, planes dotting the dark black sky on final approach, I replayed the day in my head. Hours earlier, I’d said, I do. I said before God and everyone assembled that I’d love her forever. I meant it. I gave her that ring I could barely afford, with all that I was. That ring, now on her finger, is resting in my hand. All that I have. Looking over, I could see her face backlit by the interstate’s lights and the lights of passing cars. I vowed to honor you.

I summoned, as I so often did, the familiar expectation of believing a feeling marked the significance of the moment. In a rush, all the emotions came at once, seeking clearance to land simultaneously. Gratitude, fear, anxiety, excitement, peace, insecurity, combined with moments of fleeting clarity.

From those planes passing above, we’re atoms in motion below. Electrons bouncing from one place to another, ostensibly insignificant. One of seemingly millions of others on the road. A single, minuscule car on a planet in a universe too massive to measure.

The same blackness greeted us the following morning as we loaded practically all our clothes onto the hotel shuttle. Less than 12 hours since we were married, in the quiet of the Atlanta airport, our honeymoon ahead of us, I sat with her beside me, wondering what the fuck had happened.

Lost in expectations of an emotional high, I was instead confronted with the gravity of my responsibility. Will one’s feet touch the floor on a honeymoon was replaced by the reckoning that I was now a husband. I’d vowed to be her husband.

It crept in. Doubt and insecurity arrived, joined by that familiar imposter syndrome, wondering if I had what it took to be her husband. In the quiet afterglow, I knew such strength was within her, but I was terrified, unsure whether I could be her husband. Yet she seemed so sure I was the one for her. If she believed in me, maybe I was worthy.

Her love would prove a revelation.

-

One can get sideways pursuing the societal projection of love. The one laced with romanticism and emotion and feelings. The love I anticipated feeling had been bent through the prism of society, and it would be years before I could distinguish love’s true dispersion.

Love, I’d come to learn, is the disciplined work of willing that love into being. Love is in the choice.

Awaiting our plane, bound for Jamaica, romantic, that’s what I was supposed to be. Gushing over the emotional high, soaring on the jet’s wings in the stratus clouds of love. A man of certainty, wild at heart, fighting for and protecting his wife for life. It’s what a new husband feels on a honeymoon.

Inside, I was none of those things. Grateful, humbled that she chose me. I loved her, I was certain. I wanted to spend the rest of my life with her.

But I was unmoored, adrift.

-

Even in Jamaica, I didn’t feel romantic. I felt inadequate. A poser. Unworthy of her. Worse, I believed I was unable to provide for her. Unworthy to rise to her level. That I’d made a mistake on her behalf. The mistake had nothing to do with her, though. She was perfect in body and soul. The mistake was me marrying her, because I wasn’t worthy of her.

Deep within I inventoried my anxieties, shortcomings, and insecurities. I knew them well, keenly aware of what a weak man was within. I was terrified she’d figure that out.

What I didn’t know then was that, despite my self-doubt, somewhere within me was a strength she saw. Hidden, yet visible to her, was evidence of that flicker of virtue I’ve written about. An ember she sought to turn into a virtuous fire by looking inward.

Her love would orient and guide me to my truth within. She’d usher me along, such that I’d discover that one’s fortitude is within.

Simultaneously, she was striving for her vision of love. We both loved each other. We’d committed to each other, but she was acting in love. At the same time, I was seeking to feel love.

Some truths are only proven in time.

-

I could’ve read all the societal signs wrong. But I equated success in pursuing God, relationships, friendships, whatever, as a feeling that confirmed the action.

What I was learning as I navigated life’s paths was that the feelings were fleeting.

As I look back on that I realize, through her, I was learning precisely what love is.

While I couldn’t articulate it then, I was arrested by the depth of my responsibility. I took the vows seriously. I knew the grammatical meanings of the word, but I didn’t understand the gravitas of how these words, when lived, changed the life first of the person you love, then you second. I’d missed the meaning and ramifications in chasing the feeling. Vows are lived. Love is earned. One says their vows in their wedding, then you spend the rest of your life honoring your word.

Walking those early years, hand in hand with her, I couldn’t appreciate the complexities of actual love beyond the feeling. It would take years to learn that love is gritty, blunt, profane, serene, sometimes on the same day. Sometimes in the same hour.

I think of us on our honeymoon, alone in Jamaica, bright eyed, loving one another, but having no idea what that meant beyond the wedding and the immediate life together. Feelings as fleeting as the sunset we watched over the turquoise waters of the Caribbean.

Gorgeous, stunning as it was, that sun would go down and blackness would reign. That night’s blackness was only interrupted by the generosity of the moon, or the ferocity of the dancing stars’ reflection. Mirroring the reflections of better and worse.

Love, I’d see through her, counters physics. It builds, it climbs, it asks everything, before returning an enlightenment outside one’s current understanding.

-

In my years with her, I’d learn the romantic worldview is a lie.

Within this romantic construct life befalls you. Salvation, wealth, health, fortune. Eventually, I’d go to war with this worldview.

Agency is having the will to pursue this love beyond feelings, and the efficacy in the relationship to walk it, even if each side isn’t aware how they’re serving the other.

The results of this work are gradual. There is no epiphany. But I did feel a warmth in my soul from this vantage point. In seeing myself anew through the refracted prism of her love.

When one believes in you and loves you first, that ember begins to burn. As the fire began to burn, I thought, perhaps I do have what it takes.

In her, I saw the courageous power of love’s work. Of her consciously choosing what life should be, then working like hell to bring it to reality.

In the quiet after giving birth, I’d see her sitting up in bed. Gently holding the child she’d just delivered, softly singing them into life, even though she’d been awake for days and endured the delivery without pain medicine. She’d endured unimaginable pain, yet exuded calm, peace, and love.

And as we added more kids to the mix, I’d marvel at how she sought to follow her intuition for motherhood, executing her vision rather than what was modelled. Chasing her vision rather than the adolescent lived reality.

Deep within her soul she envisioned the life of her husband and family, seeking to create what wasn’t modelled for her.

Watching her allowed me to be a better version of myself. She gave me the grace to grow up, seeing me for always more than I currently am. A work in progress then. Now light years from where I was, now possessing the tools to excavate my mind, manifest virtue, and be a man worthy of her devotion.

I am proof of her love. Of her devotion. And, now looking back on my progress, I’m proud of where I am, while deeply grateful for her. And more in love with her.

The feelings I once pursued are on the other side of the work.

-

Grace emanates from her in a purified glow of what I imagine surrounds God.

Equanimity steadies her soul, radiating peace.

Her steadiness provides rest for others, despite the restlessness placed upon her upbringing.

With her, disorder shifts to order, even as she comes from a place of seismic tension. There’s serenity in her presence.

Her fortitude, the sheer force of her will, is an awakening. Striving beyond feelings to implement her vision. Blending subconscious action with her aspiration for love became our familial construct. She wills love and peace and the fruits of home into existence, without having been given a seed to plant herself.

She envisioned the fabric, threads, tapestry of our family’s love. Long after I realized it, I’d seen the embodiment of love’s definition alive in her. Within her I witnessed love.

From the ferocity of bearing children without self-regard. To the brutality of a night of repeated hours, to figuring it out alone with such grace. To the selfless belief in her husband. To her awe-inspiring capacity for forgiveness. She is love personified.

Love in the moment is often work outwardly focused. It’s pain. Toil. Sleepless nights. Difficult conversations. Resetting of relationships. Yet love is also courage. It’s virtue. It’s doing what’s right, sometimes directly against how it feels. It’s truth.

For me and the kids, she’s our sun, the centripetal force in our lives. She’s my force of attraction, my gravitational pull. She’s our universal center.

Our power is drawn from being loved by her.

She willed our family, our home, and somewhere in the building of it, she willed me into a man.

-

Her love also shifted my definition of home.

Safe with her my soul is at rest. She’s a harbor. That place where she sees the anxieties, insecurities, and flaws, and chooses to love anyway, allowing me to transcend the stifling bonds that restricted me.

I am who I am because of her love. Through her, I’ve learned what love is.

Love, through devotion and work, has the power to manifest more from within than we first believe is there. The love that suffused from her heart filled my veins, pulsed within my heart.

Her love, seeing within what I couldn’t see myself, granted me safe passage on a journey of self-discovery.

With my eyes closed, I imagine us walking along that same beach in Jamaica in 2002. I can see the purity of her young face, sun kissed skin from a day laying out. Curly hair swaying in the Caribbean wind as the cool evening settles in. She’s walking with her feet in the water, gently kicking the waves, our hands within each other’s, arms gently swaying as we walk.

As that version of myself wrestles with questions of feelings and fear, I want to whisper to him through the breeze that the answer to his life is beside him. That she’s home for his soul, which will answer the questions in due time. Tell him to work. It’ll make sense once you realize the feelings come after the moment.

I am mine, but only because I was first hers.

The full moon is looking for friends at high tide -

It’s a violet morning. The sky inked in horizontal indigo, cobalt, steel blue hues across the marine layer clouds. The wind blows east to west off the Atlantic. Salt wind pushes aside the ghostly moss hanging from ancient Oak branches I walk past. One of the oak tree’s arms drifts under the jasmine below, before remerging, reaching for the sky.

Across the horizon, the sun barely breaks the ocean’s surface, as the distant water seems to boil in its presence. A shimmering welcome, as the sun slowly, visibly, moves into position for the day.

Stepping onto the sand, it’s cool. Not yet burned by the midday fury, still chilled from the night. The sand hardens as I walk toward the water.

A morning on the Atlantic coast is a revelation.

Dunes line the beach, tracing my path north, carefully crafted by the wind. This sand, grain on grain, compiled from eons of continental rock. What was once substantial bedrock, mountains now cast into smaller and smaller fragments by the force of our nature until it’s a grain of sand.

Towering mountains abraded into the sea, now forming a child’s castle in the sand.

This sand is like our lives. Changing, transforming, our fragments becoming parts of one another. I think about how my faith recrystallized into fragmentary grains of what’s now my sedimentary truth.

Walking along the beach, the rising Atlantic tide waves gently wash this sand from my toes. As the water recedes, sand accumulates again. And is washed again. Washed. Covered. The rhythmic cadence of a walk on the beach. Our metronomic connection to this world.

The wind blows a morning cool, before the humid afternoon coastal air heats the landscape.

Near the dunes, a felled tree lies. Turned now to driftwood. With the sun still gentle, I walk over, take a seat, immersed in the coastal seascape, my senses firing in the peace and power of the morning.

A crab shuffles sideways, line dancing back into the ocean.

Winds from across the Atlantic push water to the surface, energy crashing onto the beach, white foam splashing upward into the mist.

Overhead, seagulls long call into the expanse, pelicans skate the undulating surface of the ocean. Far above, the contrail of an airliner parsing physics.

The grains under my feet were ground by forces predating my earthly existence. Forces that acted without my involvement.

Do we allow outside or ephemeral forces to shape us, fashioning us into a prescribed shape by a relentless abrasion?

Or do we sculpt what’s within, according to our own virtuous artistic vision, opposing imposed transformation?

Without conscious thought, caught in this ocean synesthesia, I whisper...

Me, I figure as each breath goes by, I only own my mind.

I know I was born and I know that I’ll die. The in-between is mine.

-

To own one’s mind, excavate its sedimentary layers, extract its minerals, and formulate its outflows takes hard work and courage. This excavation to understand what’s within first requires a survey of one’s mind. Core samples. Test bores to register the topography of one’s thoughts. Then, reconnaissance to map the fault lines of one’s insecurity. Rock bolts, steel pillars placed within to shore up one’s virtue. Engineering, excavating within, backfilling weak spots, buttressing the walls. It’s an ongoing process.

Owning one’s mind is an internal confrontation of what’s uncomfortable, what’s strong, what’s virtuous, what ideals one holds and why. This introspection is looking within, regardless of the ore, sludge, and sediment found, and confronting oneself honestly.

This is work that can’t be outsourced.

I only own my mind.

Abdication of the arduous work within weakens the mind’s character. And that concept created a tension in my ministry pursuit.

In this pursuit, I saw faith without this individual responsibility allowing the faithful to offload their minds to God, with an expectation that God then does the work.

Owning one’s mind, I came to believe, was a responsibility of grace. Understanding our internal significance, its responsibility is partnering with God, rather than a renunciation of one’s obligation. The work begins within.

Within, an awakening. Within, significance.

And the feeling, it gets left behind. All the innocence lost at one time. Significant, behind the eyes.

-

The Church’s second graders, of which I was one, walked in a single file line into the Sanctuary, each taking our place in front of the altar. One by one, Dr. John Horton walked the line, handing us a brown leather-bound Bible as our names were called.

I looked down and saw my name embossed in gold, set against the cover’s toffee-hued leather. Once we’d each received our Bibles, we turned to face the congregation, our own word of God in hand, as those assembled prayed over us.

Sitting down in the pew with my family, I thumbed through the pages as the service continued. The thin pages seemed so delicate in my fingers, the responsibility for the word of God now in my care.

As I thumbed further, trying to be quiet as the sermon began, I saw long blocks of text and some short sentences in red. Distinct from the black I’d seen in the first three-quarters of the book, I realized these were the words of Jesus.

I started reading the words of Jesus only during church services. Over and over, I’d skip the black text and read only the red to get a feel for who Jesus was and what he actually said.

What emerges is a picture of a man enraptured with radical love. Jesus was devoted to earthly justice, in drawing the Kingdom of God to earth. In the Kingdom of God coming, directionally, to earth. He disrupted the status quo and institutional comfort, bashed hierarchy, and instead chose inclusion. To break down what impeded, to make room for what restored.

Through those red words, I saw how Jesus sought to bring heaven to earth, rather than directing us to secure our place in it. I read of an apocalyptic prophet, speaking with intensity, conviction, empathy, courage, unafraid of how his words would land. I read of a social revolutionary in action, filled with the spirit, unbowed by trouble.

During Sunday School, though, I’d stare curiously at the picture of Jesus on the wall as if he sat for an Olan Mills-style portrait. His long, wavy hair captured divine light. His face was smooth, meek. His countenance is docile, beatific. His eyes, gazing up, captured more light, signifying kindness. He’s peaceful, an ideal tenant within our souls.

This image contrasted with what was in the red writing.

In 2025, still struck by this contrast in our society and religious dogma today, I repeated the project, seeking to separate Jesus’ words from the noise. This time in a Field Notes notebook. I opened Matthew and handwrote everything Jesus had to say.

Through such excavation, conceptions and creeds bash against our epiphanies. Our mountains weathered into intricate grains.

Faithing and hoping to buy themselves time.

Fissures formed in my foundation.

-

In a hotel in Virginia Beach, overlooking the same Atlantic Ocean, the fragmentary grains of mountains on the beach below, Eddie Vedder penned I Am Mine on the eve of the band’s first concert after Roskilde.

After this dark stretch the band returned, with I Am Mine serving as a reassurance. A call beyond those eternal sands below. What you own is within.

I Am Mine was track six of fifteen on Riot Act, right after Ghost and before Thumbing My Way. Riot Act was Pearl Jam’s seventh album, released on November 12, 2002, with lyrics shaped by September 11, maturation, existentialism, the album is Pearl Jam. Introspective. Visceral. Abiding.

Riot Act asked questions as I did. What do you own when faith is replaced? When the organization of that faith fails to resemble the words in red?

In red letters, the Church looks different than Jesus.

There’s no need to hide, we’re safe tonight.

-

In seminary, the fissures deepened.

With I Am Mine as a backdrop, I went to the Church Library early one morning in 2003 to work on a sermon. Near the original front entrance, First Methodist had a library with books on all four walls. Commentaries, Bibles of different versions and interpretations, and close to a thousand volumes. In the middle of the room was a wooden table. Big enough to spread out books to cross-reference across a multitude of sources.

Opening the Library door, I was first met with the smell of aging paper. Taking a seat, I shifted the chair slightly as the morning light shone through the translucent curtains through the vintage single-pane windows, buffeted by the artistic concrete columns.

With a yellow legal pad, I opened the liturgy for the week, Matthew 5:44-45. Two specific verses from Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

“Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.”

I could picture these words in red. Precise, concise, radical, so consistent with how Jesus speaks and ministers. Love your enemies, follower, because that’s what God does, not because of any anticipated reward. Purity of motive. God loves all, Jesus contends, so it’s simple. Love as God loves. With all your heart. With all your soul. And with all your mind.

Me, I figure as each breath goes by I only own my mind. I only know my mind.

Thinking through how to present such a common passage in a novel way, I sought to cross-reference the commentaries. One commentary crossed to Paul’s letter to the Romans, chapter 12, verses 14, 19, and 20 as a comparable passage.

Reading it stopped me cold.

This text wasn’t in red. It was in black against the onionskin pages. A red and black contrast seeping through the meanings of the words. I looked up from the table, as if to say to no one, do you see this?

“Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse them... Beloved, never avenge yourselves, but leave room for the wrath of God; for it is written, ‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.’ No, ‘if your enemies are hungry, feed them; if they are thirsty, give them something to drink; for by doing this you will heap burning coals on their heads.”

The differences are striking. Stand aside, so a vengeful God can handle absolution. Feed, not to satisfy the need, or to bring the Kingdom of heaven closer to earth, but instead to heap burning coals on their heads. Serve food and water to our longing fellow man, watch them eat and drink, with the reassuring knowledge that we’re sharpening the blade for God’s vengeance. Yo.

I sat back, surveying the book spines staring back at me. I only know my mind, echoed in my spirit as I contemplated what I’d read.

Jesus challenged institutions, yet I was preparing to preach to one. Seeking ordination from one.

Jesus grounds in love unconditionally.

The red words. The black ones.

Another seam of conviction gave way, in this gradual erosion of my established faith. Newly detached grains and pebbles landing on the foundation that becomes my sedimentary faith reformation.

The red words. The black ones.

That morning, just as I clearly saw my handwriting on the yellow legal page, the sun’s rays stage lighting dancing dust particles, the only question that mattered was what I did in response to that love.

I am mine.

Hymns -

Guns ‘N Roses’ Welcome to the Jungle

Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Simple Man

Pearl Jam’s Black

Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA

Pearl Jam’s Release

It was a grey morning. A low-slung fog draped over Philadelphia, obscuring the skyline as our train pulled from the station. Boarding in Philly’s historic Union Station, Cooper and I were bound for Manhattan.

Emerging from the northern part of the City, the train picked up speed, seemingly floating along the tracks as the cityscape blew by. The Acela seemed to glide across the tracks, as the suburbs blew by with increasing speed.

I opened Life360. 110 MPH. I nudged Cooper in the window seat. He was looking at his phone with his chin in his palm as the trees blew past us. I showed him the app. He saw the speed, looked out the window, smiled, as if riding the Acela to New York at 110 MPH was like riding in JR’s Optima on Stuart Avenue.

About an hour later, the Acela slowed at Newark, just beside where the Devils play. As the train moved again, our next stop was Penn Station. Before crossing the Hudson, the train slowed again at the tunnel, allowing us to see the faint, gray outlines of the Manhattan skyline in the opaline clouds.

From the platform, we exited through the renovated Moynihan Train Hall, the skylight dimmed by the day’s gray. Rain was falling lightly as we emerged into the City. Before us, though, Madison Square Garden pierced the pewter haze, standing stately on the other side of Eighth Avenue. Lit Orange and Blue for today’s Knicks contest with the Phoenix Suns.

It was Sunday, April 6, 2025. Cooper and I were in Midtown to see the New York Knicks at MSG for the second time in two years.

-

The Knicks are the nucleus of New York City’s atomic energy. Woven into the culture, circulating through the bloodstream, present in the rumble of the City’s bass line.

Knicks fandom spans religions, dogma, nationality, class, like the colors and art within the stained glass of St. Patrick’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue. New York has two of everything, but the Nets have never really been New York.

Loyalties divide in baseball. Yankees, Mets, of course. New Yorkers also still pull for the Dodgers and the Giants, even though they’ve been gone for decades. Families still recall histories and fabled moments at Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds.

Football is the Football Giants or the Jets, sharing a home field.

Yet one thing all New Yorkers seem to agree on is the Knicks. From the glass offices of the financial district to Biggie’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood and Jay-Z’s Marcy Houses in Brooklyn, to the Upper East and West Sides, to the Bronx, Queens, underneath the leaves of Central Park, to the towering hills of the Hudson, the Knicks are New York’s Team.

At the Garden, those orange and blue lights rise into the sky as a celestial signal to visitors that this is the center of our universe. Even though I’m not a New Yorker, I succumb to the beat. Slowly bob your head to the rhythm of this eternal City’s contagious cadence.

When you arrive in New York, you sense the City is the current. We plug into it. You disembark the plane, hop into a cab, see the skyline in the distance, and you’re plugged into a pulse of electricity that energizes and connects as if we’re all on the same frequency. From the lights on Broadway, to seats in Yankee Stadium, along Fifth Avenue, in the sacred halls of Grand Central, and even the gritty, blunt, profane aspects of the City allow me entry for the time I’m present.

While they won’t outwardly welcome you, the shared connection to the City’s energy source indicates New Yorkers accept you. While immersed in it, you’re a part of it, in ole New York. These lights will inspire you. They do make me feel brand new.

-

Over lobster rolls at PJ Clarke’s, Cooper talked about SGA as a foul merchant. KD being too sensitive. Curry’s brilliance. We compared players across eras. Yet, interestingly, he also wanted to know what it was like to watch Michael Jordan. As I took a sip of Coke from the bottle, I tried to find the words. How does one describe a transcendent experience adequately? You know you’re watching something eternal. A transcendent presence. That the game entertains and inspires you, but you also know that folks will be watching this game, these highlights, for as long as human beings watch sports. You’re in the moment, yet somehow also in an eternal moment.

For a kid who’d never seen Jordan beyond YouTube, he seemed to agree. I was comforted that this generation at least appreciated something from mine. And didn’t discount everything based on recency era bias.

This trip confirmed that Cooper is thoughtful and startlingly insightful. Able to read into situations and people. He prefers the shadows, likely because he can see into the highlights with perfect clarity. Perhaps that’s why he used to sit contentedly and watch all the activity around him.

We took the Subway back to Midtown, emerging onto 8th Avenue again. Arriving at the Garden, you’re in a sea of orange and blue, floating above the avenues and streets, and a steady drum beat of enthusiasm.

After passing through the history in the concourses, we take our seats in the Garden. The place is steeped in the ghosts of sports and entertainment history. I look up at the banners, seeing the Rangers Cup banner, remembering Messier hoisting the Cup during the 1994 Choir Tour. Then my eyes are drawn to the gap in the Knicks banners on the other side of the arena. How is it that the New York Knicks last won a championship in 1970? Doesn’t seem plausible.

Beside me, a man reads my thoughts.

Yes. 1970. He says, looking at the same banners.

I turned to look at him as he continued to eye the spot where the next banner should go. He’s in his late 60s, early 70s, wearing a Knicks jacket and a blue, well-worn Knicks cap. He holds out his hand, and I turn to shake it. “Tommy,” he says as we introduce ourselves.

“Been coming to the Garden for 5o years,” Tommy says. He says he’s a long-suffering Knicks fan who recounts watching Bradley, DeBusschere, Frazier, and Reed with his father. His father was an international law attorney in Midtown, using his season tickets to entertain clients. But Tommy and his dad would come to 10 or so games a year. He was present for Starks’s dunk, for Ewing’s miss, and the afterglow of the early 70s Knicks, when it felt like a dynasty was developing. He was New York through and through. As the conversation progressed, I asked what he did for a living.

“I was a Deputy Chief with NYFD, but I’m retired now.”

As he continued, he recounted how he and his father struggled to communicate, as many fathers and sons do. Through the 70s and 80s, they seemed to speak a language the other couldn’t understand. Yet the Knicks became their idiom. They spoke through the ages, through life’s decisions and milestones in Knicks code. The Knicks were a common denominator that brought them together and ultimately allowed them to grow closer. I asked him what his father thought of these resurgent Knicks.

With a mist in his eyes, he replied in that unmistakable NY brogue, “I bring him with me, but he’s watching from heaven.” I mumbled some “I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Don’t be. He’s with me.”

Then, he looked beyond me, seeing Cooper. “One day,” nodding at Cooper, “he won’t remember a damn word you say. But he’ll remember that you sat with him at the Garden, and he’ll remember your presence. I can sense my pops as sure as I can see you.”

“Just be present for,” he said. “Just be present. It’s enough.”

-

As Tommy and I talked, Cooper took in the warmups. He’s dialed in at a basketball game. His innate awareness allows for a focus on the warm-ups, the coaches, and the strategy. He and I have been to seven NBA games together, and his phone stays in his pocket for all of them. The night before this Knicks game, we’d see Anthony Edwards lace a dagger into the Sixers to win the game. And earlier this year, we saw Luka do the same at Crypto. Moments, man.

Tonight, he’d watch Brunson.

The basketball purist in me respects the Knicks’ team game. And that this was a group of winners. A team. The core played for Jay Wright at Villanova, winning two championships. The ‘Nova wins indicated these guys could get it done. They already knew how to win together. Brunson’s steady leadership alongside his Wildcat teammates, Josh Hart and Mikal Bridges. Joined with KAT, OG, Deuce, Landry, and Mitchell. This team was fun to watch. And I think New Yorkers sensed it too.

I know Tommy, seated next to me, did. I wanted it for him.

So after our second game in the Garden, the Knicks became the team for Cooper and me. We’d talk about the games, how they performed, keep an eye on the standings, and wonder if they could dethrone Boston in the East.

Earlier this year, in April, we saw these Knicks at MSG again. This time on the Revell Family Boys Trip. Our third time, so they now felt more like our team. And that same sense we had in 2025, that this team was different, was more pronounced.

New Yorkers were coming together in an age of extraordinary division to celebrate the Blue and Orange. Yet you could also almost sense a wariness. Optimism laden with caution was pervasive. Reticence is as ingrained as the reflex to look both ways before stepping off the sidewalk. An unwillingness to get too excited. But that emotion broke through in spots as Brunson would nail a three, or the organist would cue the Defense chant, or Robinson flushed a put-back or a lob. You could sense the hope. The unity, the longing for there to be a winner.

At this game in April 2026, I thought about Tommy, how he must be watching the games each night with his father on his mind. Just as I watch the games with my son on my mind. I thought about going back to his seats to see if he was there. I didn’t.

When the Knicks won the championship this week, I thought about Tommy. Wondered what he said to his father in those moments afterward, in the power of those emotions that crossed generations.

In the videos shared on social media, there were millions of familial experiences like Tommy’s. A release of emotion, a cleansing. Hearing Alicia Keys and Jay-Z as videos are posted from fire escapes, you can sense what it would be like to be part of it all in the streets below. Seeing the videos of the Empire State Building, a peaceful regular night, with the spires Blue and Orange, then interrupted by cheers echoing from the dark buildings as OG throws the ball to the roof, and Wemby walks off the court.

The joy is palpable, a real thing. The Knicks are a collective entity. The joy, folks stream into the streets, through the steam rising from the manholes. The subway clambers in the distance.

Let’s hear it for New York, New York, New York.

New York held two truths close to itself. The drought and the release. Exuberance replaced despair as the clock hit zero.

What a catharsis for a city. Strangers hugging, a rapture in the collective spirit. And for those fleeting moments, they’re running through the streets of New York in their mind, alone, yet bound to millions of others.

Love waits on a result, and when it’s pure, love finally receives one, even if it’s generations past due. You love, never knowing what you’ll receive in return. Never knowing if it’s requited. Yet, you give, because that’s what feels right in your soul. And when words fail, you reach for all that you can to show that love. Presence. Unbroken presence. With love, you serve as each other’s beacons of light, which in this paternal sense just so happens to be orange and blue.

Fatherhood. And fandom.

Fatherhood is a collection of moments, most absent of words. Memories are formed in the afterglow of that moment that made it worthwhile. A collection of moments understood only in the post-game. Fatherhood stretches across the years, echoing in the generations, but it is a collection of moments that craft the story of fathers and sons.

What lives on?

What would Tommy’s father say to that question? That I’ll die, erased from this earth, only living on this earth through their eyes and hearts and the words I leave behind.

Who then will answer?

Maybe Cooper sees some of himself in Brunson when he looks at that jersey on his wall. From 11, perhaps he draws inspiration as an achiever. One who overcomes, who doesn’t allow the stature of narratives about small guards to confine his capability.

Believe beyond your constraints, son. I have great faith in you.

There’s a gulf that appears between fathers and teenage sons. Even so, there’s a longing within me to swim that gulf, arriving on the shores in knowledge of his soul. To ask profound, open-ended questions for deep, meaningful conversations.

But there’s the reality of the flight reflex from teenage sons when such questions abound.

So, I’ve learned not to force it. I speak up when I need to. Yet, mostly I remain quiet. Seeking presence instead. Seeking to set an example. To provide reassurance that life will damn sure throw some punches, but it’ll also allow them to prove themselves. To know that they have what it takes within them. That I didn’t do it for them.

But whenever they’re punched, or walking forward into a darkened, uncertain future, all they have to do is turn around.

I’ll be there.

This is our New York state of mind.

All five boroughs, the love is thorough

New York forever, against whoever

Constrain, detain, confine, capture. Words that conjure darkness. Suppression of spirit in my mind’s eye. As if I stand alone on a desolate patch of ground on a dark day. The sky a violet gray. Thunder rumbles in the distance. A vast expanse unfolds before me, yet I stand alone against the elements. The world is roiling, angry as the storm rolls in. Wind and rain pummel, I’m unable to move. Unable to take cover. I am not mine.

In vain, I look around for deliverance, for a hand of salvation. As the rain pours down my face, I’m forsaken. Consecrated to a call that’s a cage disguised as divinity.

I see the man standing in that storm. I embraced the man I believed I was supposed to be, held him in good faith.

I was the captive and the captor. Detained within.

Release me.

Yet the word release evokes an awakening. Freedom. It’s standing on the same patch, but with a release, the skies clear and the winds calm, you’re reclaiming yourself in those fleeting moments. Peace arises. An inner assurance moves.

Once one is released from confinement, freedom begins.

Release me.

You celebrate and mourn, for your new self, apart from confinement, is now self-defined, which is both exhilarating and daunting.

I envision confinement as a tangible act. A submission of one to another regardless of will. A change of possession, so to speak. In my case, a submission to a ministry calling, turning over my life to the containment of a religious infrastructure.

Consequently, I also picture release as a physical act. A loosening of what binds, restricts, allowing freedom of physical movement and mental ascension. When freed from confinement, one swims out of the current. Gone is the instruction, the pull of groupthink. The inherent compliance. When released, your direction now is calibrated by your internal compass.

Released. It’s a kinetic psychological act that requires consent from both the captor and the captive. Release is intentional.

And with release from what aligns me to something outside myself, I am now mine.

You’re then on your own. Such is the beauty and the fear. You’re leaving the affirmation of one path behind, for the unadorned, lonely path. One removed, desolate, lonely, with backs turned along the way.

After the release, moving forward requires burgeoning virtue.

-

Resonance in prose or lyrics comes from emergent realizations with each reading. The power of Pearl Jam’s lyrics lies in the revelations within the songs, connecting you to past versions of yourself while also foreshadowing who you may become. Sitting in a concert with your younger self, you’re the same person, at different stages of life, perhaps grappling with who you’ll become. Such that the lyrics and consonance of the familiar chords hit differently depending on your bearing when you hear them.

Pearl Jam’s Release was the last track on Ten, but it’s often the opener at concerts. When I unwrapped that album in my bedroom, listening from the first track to the last, Release would’ve been the last song I heard. In a way, hearing it last is a release from the album.

Yet in life, the song has come to symbolize a release from all that hinders, all that’s superfluous and constrictive holding of one’s virtue.

The first time I heard Release live was at my fourth show, which I flew across the country to see. On the flight, we chased the sun. Taking off at 7:30, our flight bent time, willing the day to stay awake. Such that when we crossed into the northwest hours later, it was golden hour. The sky was a brilliant, untouched blue, curtained first by a cotton-candy pink. Out of the window, Mount Hood appeared, jagged, majestic, a divine work of art, draped in pure white snow. The peak was above us as we descended into Portland. Rainier was in the distance. The chasm of space could not diminish the majesty of the mountain.

On Hood’s western face, the setting sun painted the receding day in a stately sublimity. True is the photographer’s sentiment that looking away from the sun lends a cinematic vibrancy to what the sun’s brush paints. Into the sun has the glare of white, the stark reality tinging the image.

I see the world.

West, the rich violet of a certain evening took hold. The glittering lights of Portland on the horizon. A darkening night pulls me in, with a gravitational pull of certainty.

I see the world

Feel the chill

Which way to go

Windowsill

I see the words

On a rocking horse of time.

I see the birds in the rain.

-

There’s a vortex in the accepted path within a concentric group, such as Christianity. A gravitational pull to the center of the group’s mores. Choosing what the group rewards sends waves of approval to the one constrained within the group’s vortex.

While in the church, I wrestled with my ministry decision, privately grappling with a perceived calling.

Publicly proclaiming and answering a call to ministry while in the church is an intoxicating fulfillment of what you aspired to, as the vortex reinforces certainty and expunges what you feared. Following such a celebrated path draws a crowd of assurance. It’s a road of affirmation. Palm branches waving as you traverse the path of complicity.

And for someone like me, one who sought acceptance at that age above all else, believing that was the objective, such affirmation was the only proof I could attain that I was doing right. If everyone was affirming this direction, certainly I was doing what was right?

If I didn’t know myself, certainly all these wise adults did, and they could tell me.

Release me.

I’ll ride the wave, where it takes me.

When you’re oblivious to look inside, you look outside for affirmation. For assurance.

Was the call authentic, or was it the proximity to the warmth?

The accusation remains the confession.

-

In Portland’s Japanese Garden, I sat on a bench facing east. Above, a bigleaf maple shaded me from the sun, as the air barely topped 70 degrees.

From this vantage point in the garden, I could see Mt. Hood in the distance. Bathed in the midday majesty rather than the golden hour vibrancy of the night before.

I see the world.

Feel the chill.

Which way to go.

Windowsill.

I see the words

I’ve often wondered when one realizes the path they’re on vanishes underfoot. When that realization arises, that the path isn’t the right one. It’s certainly later in the psychological realization than in the emotional one.

I see the world.

Clear eyes in one’s path, with an acknowledgment that such clarity changes how one walks.

I see the chill.

What are the costs of changing course? Shifting from an environment of acceptance to one of questions. One of disappointment, disapproval.

Which way to go.

Discerning direction from within. From listening to one’s virtue. While not understanding the full route, at least understanding the first steps.

Then, what of the courage it takes to alter one’s trajectory? Fearful of what people will think. The knowledge I need to make a change, but convincing myself the timing just isn’t right. The current will shift.

But if the conviction is strong enough, you eventually recalibrate the compass and follow its direction, aware of the consequences. To accept the consequences of such a change yet make it anyway.

Later that afternoon, I took a Lime scooter to the Moda Center, crossing the Willamette River on the Steel Bridge.

PJ took the stage in their typical understated style. The crowd pulsed with anticipation. As the lights rotated outward, lighting up the crowd, the familiar chords coursed through the center, placing us in a meditative state. Eyes seemed to close as Ed started his low hum. The cleansing was underway.

Release, opening the concert, signifies the cleansing before the energy. It hits each of us different, yet we acknowledge this moment, as we collectively internalize our detainment and then our release. Somehow this release makes the night more meaningful. It’s a cathartic release first. Then an emotional exposition.

Surrender and connection in the same breath.

The pulse of the song is what’s resisting release. The prisoner kneels. So does the penitent.

What’s within causes the scales of tolerance to right itself, as you listen to what’s inside and courageously manage the consequences.

Walk your own path, you confirm yourself. Refusing to listen to what’s within denies yourself.

It brings spiritual questions.

Can you see me now

I am myself

Like you somehow

-

When I was certain ministry was no longer my calling, and probably never had been, I questioned whether I was seen by the God I prayed to. I knew I wasn’t forsaking the divine but instead walking away from the superfluous trappings. I wondered, “Can you see me now?”

Now that I was pursuing my path of truth, I understood, as the lyrics echoed in my soul. That even though I didn’t pursue ministry, I’m closer to the truth than I would’ve been preaching the word.

I am myself. Like you somehow.

-

For years, I chased what I believed the faith required of me. I couldn’t understand the tears in worship. I longed for the mountaintop, for the heart strangely warmed, for the transcendent trance where the world falls away and you stand in the presence of the Lord. Hundreds around me seemed to find it. I never could. Feelings eluded me, yet religious expectation bound me in her constrictive grasp.

It’s like being in the sanctuary, and hundreds in the pews hear something I don’t. An inside joke I’m not in on. A wave of emotion crests around me. Or am I in on it, but the laughter is fake?

As congregants bask in the glow of emotion, I’m no longer looking at the room, longing for what they have. No longer do I beat myself up for emotional absence. No, now I sit in the pew, head bowed, a rushing wave of gratitude at my release from capture into freedom of virtue. Finally, emotions well, as virtuous certitude rides my incoming tide.

Willingly, I gave myself to the calling, falling into the detainment of religious dogma. As I think back on those pursuits, on seeking that calling, I’m left feeling the same nothing that I felt in worship. The art of release allows me to see that nothing with profound gratitude.

For such a release from nothing allowed me to find my something.

Can you see me now

I am myself

Like you somehow

Released.

Hymns -

Guns ‘N Roses’ Welcome to the Jungle

Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Simple Man

Pearl Jam’s Black

Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA

Bankers, I’m one you. And for this talk, we’ll push the absolutes to the side, for our answers are in the nuance. For bankers, it’s not relationships or technology. Relationship banking sits on our mountaintop, remaining the pinnacle of our attainment. Always will be. So, as I dive into the technology gap that’s centered on how we deliver relationship banking.

There’s a growing technology gap our Cores can’t close. Inherently, we know this. Their development, roadmaps and implementations limit our horizon for what’s possible. And because of that, over years, our thinking of what was possible with technology confined itself to that box, the limitations in the banking technology space.

The big three Cores (Fiserv, FIS, Jack Henry) account for over 80% of banks with assets under $1 billion. Those banks, us, rated their core’s effectiveness 2.78/5, while the cores rated themselves 4.31/5. A significant effectiveness gap, or perhaps a delusion gap. And a vast majority of banking executives, you, say their existing architecture actively hinders meeting client needs.

And you also don’t need me to tell you it’s costly. Data-processing costs at banks grew significantly, outpacing other noninterest expense categories.

Thousands of banks, three cores, few technology providers. That imbalance exacerbates our technology gap.

For bankers, our frame of reference with technology is limited by what we see, what we can purchase, or what we can code ourselves. Technology has long been a separator.

In this talk, I’m going beyond client facing digital banking, what we typically think of as technology, deeper. To data analytics, BSA/AML, credit underwriting, ALM, and vendor management. I’m talking about using our data to create processes and deliver solutions to our clients, understand our portfolios, and align technology with the world-class relationship banking in this room. To rethink our approach to this gap. To think differently, while assuring relationship banking remains at the peak of our execution.

In 2026, we’re as technologically advanced as society has ever been. Yet for all the prognostications otherwise, personal relationships matter as much today as they ever have. But success demands nuance in our execution, which requires blending relationships and technology. For most of us in this room, that blend leans more toward relationships than technology. Strategic thinking, though, requires swinging that pendulum further to the middle, to inject technology into our relationship management, going beyond what’s just client-facing.

Today, as we talk, let’s grant this. Our cores can’t carry our technology strategy alone. Inherently, we know this. We’ve sat through the core renewal presentations, the deep dives. We’ve seen the implementation roadmaps. That horizon that recedes as we step toward it. You’ve heard it’s in the pipeline, perpetual beta. It’s vaporware, into the mist.

By relying on our Cores as our technology strategy, we’ve allowed the Cores to set the ceiling.

With that constriction, our implementation offered no alternative other than accepting a core’s limitations and the solutions available. What other choice did we have? We’re bound by a belief that what they offer is all we’ll be. Our frame of reference is theirs.

That belief is the first ledge of our gap.

We need a core processor, but for core processing. For core banking functions. Core. Our question goes beyond whether our core can lead us forward, to what gets us to the other side of the gap?

Thankfully, our operating environment is changing.

-

Closing this gap, envisioning a technology platform and infrastructure that enhances relationship banking, is elusive. For community banks, it sits behind two impenetrable steel walls - Cost, more than a community bank could justify. Capability - It takes a bullpen of computer scientists we’re not going to hire.

These walls stood before us and our horizon.

But an equalizer has arrived, which demands we rethink how we deploy technology and how we relate to our vendors. How this repositions us in the industry.

AI equalizes because it puts capabilities in our hands that were cost-prohibitive or simply unavailable a year ago, a month ago. For the first time, a community bank stands on the same playing field as the tech companies and the megabanks.

It’s too cliche, though, to just say that AI is the answer. But our first thought on it must be as an accelerator. It allows the community banking industry to shift the paradigm. To invert the script, so that what was once on the other side of those steel walls is now attainable to us all. The industry is on the cusp of a revolution that equalizes the playing field, allowing us to restructure and reimagine our technology suite from our perspective. The beauty is we’re all at the starting line together, no matter size or industry.

Third parties can’t lead us, because the environment is evolving too fast. They seek to keep up, just like we are. But, within these constrictive ecosystems, their whole model depends on the dependence. Our vendors won’t win this revolution.

A vendor whose advantage is the lock does not hand you the key.

We are the keepers of our clients’ financial lives. A psychological reassurance. Relationship bankers, trusted within our communities. Within that framework, we’re also data companies. Every account, every transaction, every relationship going back decades, behaviors. There’s sacred meaning in the book of business, and it has been sitting in our own library the entire time. With our raw data now analyzed combined with our relationship banking knowledge, we can understand the trends that support our relationship banking.

Let’s go beyond conventional wisdom. The operating environment today moves at a speed that the core relationship has never allowed.

So, how do we close the gap?

This starts with a vision. A vision of what we want to become. Not a new mission statement or vision principles. It’s answering, who are you to your clients, and how does data help accentuate that? What do your standards demand in the promise you make to your community and clients? What do your stakeholders expect in terms of operational efficiency? This vision removes the conditioning that has been an impediment, allowing a fresh imagination of what’s possible. Deposit franchise and behavior analytics, predictive modeling to understand the tendencies in our portfolios, household/relationship level economics, and concentration and liquidity surveillance. What do you want to know, and how does that impact what you deliver to clients?

This is also collaborative internally. This goes beyond the traditional siloes and responsibilities to a strategic team that breaks down the conditioned possibilities, to think through what’s possible. It’s your leadership, marketing, operations, and relationship managers. This has the potential to be the first truly collaborative suite of solutions crafted within community banks, because the canvas is essentially blank.

To close the gap, own this from the top. It’s more than an IT project. It’s damn sure not a vendor demo. This requires you to learn the basics of the publicly available AI models. To embrace AI. To understand the scope yourself and reframe your thinking about the possibilities. To confront whatever fear, whatever uncertainty may exist. And to know within this ecosystem, the enterprise license is an initial boundary.

Because we’re on the front-end of this horizon, we’re not catching up. The beauty in this is also the fear. We’re essentially on our own. The vendors are absorbing these changes as we are. So, as we demote the core from the center of gravity to an ancillary system of record, we’re able to shift from a strategy crafted on a roadmap in a core’s boardroom to one crafted in ours.

Thinking of AI as an accelerator and an equalizer empowers your people to envision solutions as well. Start small. No need to boil the Atlantic first. Get small team wins. Respect the governance. Embrace the uncertainty. Create explicit permission to reimagine.

We’re all frustrated with our technology partners. So frustrated, we’ve moved on from their constraints, because we’ve never had an alternative. We have technology gaps that our core can’t close. Now, with an equalizer and an accelerator, let’s push the envelope of what’s possible.

For the community banking industry, our understanding must first rest on the perspective that our technology partners won’t lead us home. Acknowledging this opens a generational opportunity to push back, to craft our own solutions, rather than having them designed for us.

To craft the bank in your image, rather than in the image of a prescribed solution.

The gap is ours to close, and it’s us who will lead us home.

My first exposure to Charleston was Will McLean driving over the Ashley River, returning to campus for his senior year at the Carolina Military Institute. In the novel’s opening pages, he balances his ledger with one sentence, I wear the ring. I wear the ring, and I return often to the city of Charleston, South Carolina to study the history of my becoming a man.

As Pat Conroy noted, Charleston is a feast for the human eye, with the economy and stringency of its lines, and the serenity of its mansions South of Broad. For those within the Holy City, hailing from her lines, there’s a reverence of place. A trinitarian worship of this aristocratic, gorgeous, self-righteous ground. Airs abound. There’s no quarter for humility or regard from those beyond the peninsula. A genteel swagger passes in the summer breeze, a benediction of subtle sanctimony.

Lords of Discipline was assigned reading the summer between my sophomore and junior year. I was 15, at the peak of my insecurity, listless. I took acceptance wherever it was given, from whomever would give it, on whatever terms they set. I was adrift, with no mooring lines, no anchor, nothing but the futile adolescent chase of perception. I was seeking mirages because I had not yet found the citadel within. I’d yet to excavate inside to understand that virtue and weakness, courage and fear, strength and doubt are all within.

All of it was found when I looked inward.

-

In June 1995 we were in Daytona Beach visiting family. One afternoon I put the book on a picnic table and shot some baskets on the hotel’s parking lot basketball court. After shooting for a while, I sat down at the picnic table. The breeze from the Atlantic coaxed the book’s cover open. The palms above swayed in the ocean wind. Palms never stop swaying. The Atlantic tide rolled in from somewhere beyond the horizon, waves building in the deep water and cresting just before the beach. Cars drove up and down the beach.

I opened the book expecting to grind through a few pages at a time.

I was wrong. From the first sentence, I wear the ring, the wave that knocked me prone came from Conroy’s preternatural ability to read my soul. I read his words as if this book was written solely for me.

From the first page, my entrance to this marsh haunted city is always filled with troubled meditations on both my education and my solitude during a four-year residence at the Institute, my education and solitude resonated within, yet Conroy also blended it with place. Place is our witness that remains. Each return summons the prior self, joining the council of the men I’ve been.

Conroy speaks of Charleston as a magical place, to step into the bloodstream of a history extravagantly lived by a people both to a fierce and unshakable advocacy of their past. A triune mythology with equal parts sublime, mysterious, and grotesque.

-

I first crossed the Legare Bridge above the Ashley River in 2022. Christian and I were visiting for our 20th wedding anniversary, and I bored her with Conroy’s prose as we crossed into the peninsula. I’d printed his words in a Field Notes notebook, so I could narrate our walks through the city. Good thing this was not a first date.

Arriving at the Restoration Hotel, I thought of how place and prose can restore our souls to an unimpaired or improved condition. How, as I reflect on my education and solitude, my connection to this place transcends presence. I’ve never visited Charleston until this moment, outside of the pages of Lords, yet it’s partially responsible for the fortification within what I’ve become.

In Lords, McLean is an outsider forging his code inside a system designed to break him. He is afraid. He is uncertain of his place. How deeply I fought all of those emotions.

He’s athletic enough to earn his position, but not gifted enough to coast. Me, again. Everything he becomes he earns; unmoved, unyielding against the encroaching machinery of the cadre. Against doubt. Against men who would prefer he simply disappeared. The system assails him, body first, then his core. But he holds.

Lords felt autobiographical.

That fear, insecurity, and the slow and arduous construction of a virtuous soul was a journey walked by others is as reassuring today as it was when I was 15.

I return to the Lords of Discipline to study my history of becoming a man.

-

Pat Conroy wrote the Lords of Discipline in Atlanta in 1977, two years before my birth. He was in his early 30s. He’d broken through with the Great Santini. But he still battled the inner-imposter syndrome plaguing those suspended on the precipice of success. Great Santini blew up his family, though. And now he was divorced. He wrote, alone in Santini’s debris field.

While Santini was a warning shot, Lords would be a bomb with a far larger blast radius. Conroy had The Citadel in Charleston, SC in his crosshairs.

He wrote in the morning. Several hours, every day. Then he walked to Cliff Graubart’s Old New York Book Shop on Juniper Street to unwind and browse.

The book had been a decade in the making. In 1970 Conroy published The Boo, a tribute to Lt. Colonel Thomas Nugent Courvoisie, the Citadel’s assistant commandant who had been pushed out of his post. Conroy later called The Boo “The Lords of Discipline in embryo.” But the embryo wasn’t yet a novel. It was an angry young man’s protest, dashed off. He had treated prose as flashes of fury. It took him years to learn otherwise. By the time he sat down in Atlanta to write Lords, he understood the power or prose.

Conroy knew before he turned in Lords that it would cost him. He called the book “a nuclear explosion” and was warned it would be dangerous for him to return to Charleston. After the publication, his alma mater banned him for years. The book was banned on campus. He missed his cousin Ed’s 1989 graduation from the Citadel. He missed the graduation of his best friend’s son a few years later. He did not return to the campus in any formal way until 2000, when the school awarded him an honorary doctorate. The same ceremony also honored Courvoisie. The Boo himself.

He wore the ring.

There’s a moral force beneath every sentence of Lords of Discipline, allowing it to resonate with profound echoes. Conroy had given himself permission to tell the truth. And he granted the reader permission to explore truth, too. To look within yourself. To question the institutions that shape you and see them with clear eyes. To love them, but to settle the accounts, confirming what they cost.

To be in, but not of.

-

After a dozen raw oysters and shrimp and grits, Christian and I set off south of Broad. Wandering through its streets can be dreamlike and otherworldly, its alleyways and shortcuts both fragrant and mysterious, yet as haunted as time turned in on itself. We walked in the spire-proud shade of Church Street. We wandered through the alleyways and shortcuts both fragrant and mysterious, communing with lingering ghosts, as haunted as time turned in on itself.

Fully present among the forged iron gates, creeping jasmine, garden fountains, yet I’m fifteen again, reading along the beach in Daytona.

When I cracked this book the first time, I didn’t know myself. And I didn’t know that I didn’t know myself. Without introspection, there’s an inherent oblivion that comes from an unexamined life, as you follow societal mandates and prescribed perceptions.

Somewhere along the way, cracks form in the societal facade, allowing us to see the foundation underneath. The light from beyond the cracks is the initial glimmer of individual enlightenment, seeing within for the first time. An emerging recognition I’m not like everyone else. That perhaps what is conventional wisdom isn’t.

At that stage of life, you can’t possibly believe convention is so misleading. So, when you’re young, you punish yourself for your differences. To accommodate, you walk the line. Try to traverse the path that society points your to. I’ve got to get in line, to do the right thing. To be compliant and complicit. You see the church in all its glory, then once you’re in it, you see that it’s dysfunctional and forsaken. And you wonder why everyone else can’t see it. Evil would always come to me disguised in systems and dignified by law.

There’s reward in walking the path. It’s safe. There’s affirmation, you’re doing right. You’re going with the current, rolling with the flow. Herded into the trailer like all the other cattle.

Lords taught me otherwise.

-

Will says, whenever I look at photographs of myself in the cadet days, I stare into the immobile face of a stranger. His name is mine and his face seems distantly related, but I cannot reconcile the look of him. When I study the face of my adolescence, I recognize the face, I empathize with him, yet I also long to pull him aside to say, you have what it takes. To let him know that while I’ll always be afraid, I can’t be bought or rented out for any price.

Through Will, I want to travel across the Atlantic Ocean above the dunes and to the basketball goal where I shot. To catch his rebound, pass it back to him, and tell him, I have great faith in you. And soon, you’ll have great faith in yourself.

Throughout Lords you see examples of Will standing above or outside, often at great personal expense. Will gave me permission to be afraid, but also the inspiration to unleash courage. To stand alone and be proud of that fact. To know that standing alone wasn’t a symptom of weakness but was instead a manifestation of virtue. Standing alone was a good thing. It’s the simplest epiphanies that reverberate loudest.

Will acknowledged his own insecurity yet acts anyway. Will accepts the Bear’s charge. He stands by his friends. He exposes corruption. His virtue and his fear walk hand in hand.

Will granted me permission to be afraid and act anyway.

-

I’ve written about an adolescent dream of running through a mirrored fun house. Each reflection returns another’s face. You move from one to the next, quickened pace to try to find yourself, but it’s not you. You run, you now sprint, your heartbeat elevates. Your fear does as well. You’re not able to find yourself. You run and run and run and you’re nowhere to be found. And that’s the nightmare, that you can’t find yourself.

The continuation of that dream is when you’re certain you’re yourself. Yet you’re in a crowded room, and you go to faces you know well. Familiar faces. Friends. Relatives. Yet you’re seen, but no one knows who you are. No one recognizes you. Even as you drop familiar words, tell the inside joke, and try to remember, you look into these faces, but instead of finding familiarity, you find that gaze of unrecognition. There’s nothing behind the eyes that connects the relationship.

In both dreams you’re alone, but in the first you’re unable to find yourself. Second, you know who you are. The first dream is the scary one, the second one is the realization of recognition within yourself first. Some may see you, others may not.

But you see yourself.

-

Over lunch at Magnolias I tried to explain to Christian the tears in my eyes. She didn’t know the coward within. The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it. How do I explain to the woman I love, my wife, who I’ve been married to for 20 years that within her husband was a boy whose fear laced every second of his growth, and still lurks in his shadows. Anxiety was a blanket worn in all seasons, and insecurities a badge sewn into my breast.

But that’s the point of life’s progression, I thought. There’s a standard deviation within us all, allowing us to expand our virtue beyond where it currently resides. It’s the lengths from where we start. This deviation expands, shifting further and further away from the reversion the more we commune with what’s within.

Such an exposure is a face with no mask; it’s performing with no pretense. It’s removal of all pretexts, so the authenticity of the human is all that’s seen.

-

I never wore the ring. But I wanted to see those who would.

After lunch we took an Uber to the Citadel.

We crossed through what I presumed to be the inspiration for the gates of Legrand, as the fortress arose from the oaks in cream stucco. Walls rising above the Ashley River and the distant marsh as battlements against the blue sky.

From Moultrie we turned right onto Jones Avenue. The barracks of my imagination were replaced by the barracks in front of me. Formed in quadrangles, with the battalions stationed within. Through the gates we dared not enter, we could see the cadets in full dress preparing for the parade. We moved unseen, as if we were part of the low country wind. Summerall Field was on our right, and we walked to Jenkins Avenue, past the F-4, finding a bench in the shade. Walking the streets of Charleston in the late afternoons of August was like walking through gauze or inhaling damaged silk.

The corps of cadets moved into position. Full dress, gray coats and white cross belts, regimental flags lifting in the harbor breeze. The Pipes and Drums begin. Bagpipes drone out across the parade ground, Braveheart present through these chords. The rhythmic snare line set the march’s pace. Hundreds of cadets step from the barracks as one. Boots strike pavement in a single rhythm, as the gray wave then flows over the green grass of Summerall Field. Brass buttons catch the afternoon sun. Rifles ride the right shoulder in unison.

At the reviewing stand the command rings out, eyes right, and a thousand heads turn at once like a single body. The chapel bells score the hour, as Charleston’s heat bears down.

I pick out a face in the cadets. I imagine it’s Will’s. From Lords, I know what he thinks as he marches, as he returns to the barracks at night, as he crosses the Ashley River. I imagine myself standing beside him, among the cadre, both of us returning to our education and our solitude. I allow the darkest recesses of my citadel to be lit by the flame of virtue from my flint’s spark.

And though I had learned in the barracks that I would always be afraid, I had also learned that I was not for sale and could not be rented out for any price. I had found one thing — at last, at last — to like about myself.

-

I had come to Charleston as a young boy, a lonely visitor slouching through its well-tended streets, a young boy, lean and grassy, who grew fluent in his devotion and appreciation of that city’s inestimable charm. I was a boy there and saw things through the eyes of a boy for the last time. The boy was dying and I wanted to leave him in the silent lanes South of Broad. I would leave him with no regrets except that I had not stopped to honor his passing. I had not thanked the boy for his capacity for astonishment, for curiosity, and for survival. I was indebted to that boy. I owed him my respect and my thanks. I owed him my remembrance of the lessons he learned so keenly and so ominously.

Hymns | Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Simple Man

Hymns | Pearl Jam’s Black

Hymns | Bruce Springsteen’s Born in the USA

Along the white sands of the Gulf’s forgotten coast, Mexico Beach, Florida is forgotten twice over. Swept first by the encroaching development and second by nature’s fury in 2018.

In 1980s Mexico Beach, the scenery was the show. Souls at ease along on the white sands, above the dunes, immersed in the sparkling blue water, before coddled weakness demanded plush comforts and before fractured concentration required scrolling distractions.

We allowed ourselves to subsume into the scenery, rather than the bulldozed dominion so prevalent elsewhere.

White sand, swaying reeds above the dunes, the rhythmic waves were the stars in the show. Mexico Beach was Miller Genuine Draft in styrofoam coolers, Tommy T’s arcade, George Strait on the radio, fresh shrimp from a weathered shack on the docks, and bait sold next to the groceries in a grocery store that doubled as a hardware store. No one thought twice about this kid walking the aisles of that store barefoot.

Our beach chairs were those aluminum patterned, vinyl strapped and woven crosswise, that we tied to the top of the station wagon. Set ‘em up in the white sand, man. Towel off, grab a Coke from the cooler, sit damp in the chair. You’ve swam all day, thrown the football, so you’re exhausted, but charged. You’re attuned to the gentle end of the day when the sun’s rays relent from midday ferocity, before setting southwest, burning the water as it sets.

As I took a sip of that ice cold Coke, Dad reached over, adjusted the boombox volume up, allowing Bruce Springsteen to call to America as we listened to the waves.

As Emerson said, we are idolaters of the old. Damn right I am. My mind lingers on the sands where edenic winds swept our souls.

Time was different here. Seasons passed with natural synchronicity, and our reverent compliance.

Mexico Beach abides in us, and we abide in her, content to confine to this past.

I am indeed an idolator of this vignette.

-

Unlike most beach towns, there’s no parallel road running along the coast. The streets in Mexico Beach run perpendicular to the Gulf. On one trip, the house we rented sat at the end of the street. A left turn into the parking pad, the house facing west, with the Mexico Beach pier and the untouched coastal land in the background.

One morning we walked the cool white sand to the Mexico Beach pier as the sun rose behind us. Activity at the pier was well underway. Fishermen unloaded, carrying rods and reels, pulling wagons with the day’s provisions. Sand was in our flip flops. We ascended on the brown weathered planks. The planks had such texture, deep ruts in the wood from years of storms and rays of sun. Some cracked, some rotted ones replaced by new planks.

Gulls circled above seeking a scrap. Dried shrimp dotted the rails. Marlboro smoke, discarded fish, a morning Budweiser, coffee, and salt added to the aura.

On this day, we were crabbing. My pal Colby Mosseller led the way. He was a much more experienced fisherman than Mike D and I were. Toting the brand new crabs pots along the pier, we found a gap in the rail. On either side of us were sun-burnished, salt-cured fisherman casting a wary eye at the young kids with the crab pots. Undaunted, Colby set us up. We baited the traps, throwing them over the pier’s railing into the teal seafoam below.

Colby suppressed our excited urge to pull the pot up too quickly, instead allowing it time to soak. Sure enough, patience worked. Over the course of a few hours, we pulled over 50 blue crabs from the gulf, their blue claws raised for the fight.

As the sun yielded, dropping into the golden hour, we packed up our haul and headed back to the house. Walking down the pier, two F-15s from Tyndall thundered overhead. I felt the power of the engines in my chest. And as I walk with the full buckets of crab, I imagine myself in that seat, pinned from the thrust, flying off over the gulf. A life untethered by the restrictive bonds of earth.

Back on the beach, the buckets and pots were heavier and heavier with every step. We trudged down the beach, then arced toward the house. Denny and Dad watched our arrival while sitting on the deck listening to music. Dad wore a mesh FSU hat, a white bathing suit, no shirt, and aviator sunglasses. Denny rocked a trucker style UNC hat, a Southwest Airlines t-shirt, and like dad, aviator sunglasses. Likely the ones issued during their USAF days.

They stood as we walked up, marveled at our haul. Mom and KK came from inside the house to see, as we displayed the day’s catch. The music continued to rock on the deck.

With over 50 crabs on the deck our dinner was obvious.

Mom and KK put the crabs in a pot to boil, as the men sat outside on the patio. We sat down, tired from the day, yet satisfied as the cooling wind passed through the dunes. We sat in silence. Content in ourselves, this place, and the evening on the coast.

On the stereo was Bruce’s Born in the USA.

The synth riff enters first. Drums follow suit, as the chords hit with the Boss’s force. His voice so unmistakable, calling into the sunset. In that instant, our future seemed as infinite as the outstretched horizon. The promise of our lives and the ascent of our national virtue rising as the eastern sun.

Born down in a dead man’s town.

-

Bruce Springsteen released The River in October 1980. A double LP, the album owned the Billboard 200 for four weeks, selling 1.6 million copies.

The River Tour ran for almost a year, starting October as the album was released, concluding in September of 1981. The shows ran three hours and longer, over thirty songs. Bruce sold out six nights at London’s Wembley Stadium.

During The River tour, Bruce picked up Ron Kovic’s Born on the Fourth of July. Kovic, a Marine, came home from Vietnam paralyzed from the waist down. The memoir is Kovic’s furious account of his country’s betrayal. A reckoning with the consequences and the illusion of American performative idealism.

Soon after, by chance, Kovic rolled his wheelchair up to Bruce poolside at the Sunset Marquis in Los Angeles. They talked. They kept talking.

The River Tour ended in 1981. Bruce was on top of the world. The Boss. An artist in demand. As Warren Zanes notes, “the role that he’d been given as a public figure was at odds with what he was experiencing behind the image he’d created. He went into a solitude that was more powerful than he was himself.”

From the mountaintop Bruce looked around questioning, seeking truth and meaning. He retreated to a rented ranch house in Colt’s Neck, New Jersey. As he grappled with his fame and the commercial proliferation of his art, he withdrew. He plumbed the depths of his soul, as he poured himself out on the page.

The house had a bedroom with dead acoustics from the shag carpet, where his guitar tech set up a home recording rig. In the power of solitude, Bruce filled notebooks in the writing table. Hosing the deck of his mind, asking questions, reckoning with his place.

In that bedroom, he recorded 15 songs, the majority of which make up the album Nebraska. Introspective, performing for an audience with. As his manager noted, “if you listen to the vocal style on Nebraska, it’s different from any other record. It’s like he’s singing to himself.”

Within that framework, I sense a concurrence with me. An acknowledgement that this Substack is the same. I write for a readership of one.

Yet, in the quiet of Colts Neck, he hadn’t forgotten his conversations with Kovic. As the sun’s rays pierced the dusty curtain, forming an outline of the windowpanes on the shag carpet, Bruce also wrote an anthem in Kovic’s spirit.

Born in the USA.

-

I spent last week in Washington DC as part of the Georgia Bankers Association DC Fly-In, advocating on behalf of the community banking industry.

Starting along Reagan National’s banks of the Potomac into the cityscape, the district is spellbinding. From the soaring glass and curved steel of Reagan’s terminal with its towering American flag, to the low architectural artistry of the Arlington Memorial Bridge, to Jefferson standing tall maintaining unbroken eye contact with the White House, to Washington’s monument piercing the sky, to the verdant green grass, the immaculate landscapes. It’s a visual exposition of America’s grandeur. A landscape architect and sculptor’s interpretation of America’s ideals.

In the District, you walk on sidewalks that are buttressed by towering marble on buildings that encompass city blocks. Even with recurring visits, there’s still a charge of American pride at seeing our nation’s capital. Of reading the words of Lincoln, Reagan, Adams, Bush, Washington, Jefferson, Obama, to grasp our noble aspirations. There’s history on each corner, even as you ride by on a Lime scooter.

In DC, one also grapples with our present and our history in the same sightline. The marches on these steps, the decisions made in these halls, the consequences reverberating from this place into all corners of our world, and even into our universe. You sense the quantum nature of our country, the past, present, and future, together in communion, each affecting the other.

And while our founding narrative is one of noble aspirations and the pursuit of liberty, each time I visit I grow more and more concerned for the state of our republic. Especially for the strength of our institutions and for the pretext of our political discourse. Concerned for the social contract that binds our ideals. The inalienable rights that are written in the blood of those who came before.

Born in the USA echoes in my AirPods.

In 2026, society’s virtue seems as feeble as weak limbs, bending with the slightest weight, breaking at paltry inconveniences.

What of America’s fortitude? Our self-evident truths. Life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness. Our more perfect union. We the People.

What of American honor?

I’m fearful we’ve given up on the pretext of American discourse. Giving in to a brazen removal of the mask, even as it eats the face. We’ve forgone idealistic unity, instead shifting to outright factionalism. And at what expense, are we ten years burning down the road?

Have we no where to run, no where to go?

-

Growing up, there’s a certitude in the moral arc of our country. In our nation’s innate goodness. The city on a hill Reagan espoused. As Bruce wrote on that oaken desk in Colts Neck, he questioned the American ideal. He reckoned with the stories we tell ourselves. With what hides behind the mask.

His questions remain.

In the cab, crossing the Potomac as the district glows golden in the afternoon sun, I wondered about the bedrock of our foundational union. Even as our nation makes mistakes, historically there’s an undercurrent pulling to what’s right.

When I’m in DC, though, I’m struck by the flippant relationship with what’s right. There’s such a commonplace abdication of principle, it’s ubiquitous. It’s as if I sit alone at a magic show, the only one not in on the illusion. Everyone just knows this is how the game is played. The right thing to do isn’t a mystery, but it’s rarely the deciding factor either. It’s railing on the other side, Americans be damned.

What kind of mental atrophy must take place with that mindset shift, where truth is surrendered?

What are we left with when the glass of our dreams shatter as it slips through our fingers, and we’re left with the broken pieces on the floor. Shards we can’t even walk on. Where do we step?

The dog that has been beat too much. And now there’s nothing left to cover up.

Is my view of the horizon the same as it was when I viewed the sunset in Mexico Beach, as the crabs boiled in the pot, and Bruce sang on the stereo?

I’m ten years burning down the road, nowhere to run, nowhere to go.

As we look out on the vast expanses toward the fruited plain and the purple mountain’s majesties, does the smoke from the gas fires of the refinery, from the burning of our ideals, block us from seeing from sea to shining sea?

Redemption comes from within. From the power of an individual contributing to the collective. In pursuing virtue, in making choices that live America’s ideals. It’s forgoing the abdication of our obligation to instead honor it, to rise to it. Together.

I look into the eyes of my boys. I see their world ahead reflected in those eyes. Their America. I imagine the three of them looking at me with steeled, accountable eyes. I respond, son, if it were up to me.

I say to them, borrowing the words of Phil Knight, “The cowards never started, and the weak died along the way — that leaves us.”

-

Last week after our legislative meetings, I needed to work but didn’t want to do it in the hotel room, so I took a Lime scooter to the Lincoln Memorial. I found a bench in the shade. Watched as the tour groups climbed the steps, name tagged lanyards around their necks. Matching shirts. I saw uniformed park rangers tend the ground.

Before I opened my laptop, I looked over my left shoulder, seeing the Vietnam Memorial in the trees. I thought of Bruce and Kovic.

Born in the USA.

An American Airlines A321 flew overhead, banking left along the Potomac flight path. I imagined Lincoln in America today. Surveying our individual response to our collective’s full measure of devotion. I imagine his decree of malice toward none. I see the stone steps, his immense memorial. From our birth of freedom, his prayer that this government of the people, by the people for the people shall not perish from the earth.

This people, us, whose collective virtue must support the weight of our country’s obligation.

After working for a couple of hours, I put my laptop in my bag. I walked to the middle of the mall so that I’m centered on a straight line between Lincoln, Washington and the Capitol. The spire of the Capitol hides behind Washington, the WWII memorial in front of Washington. The sun sets to the west, the sky a brilliant orange and blue. I think of sitting on that Mexico Beach deck, as the sun sets in a similar palette, Bruce singing through the stereo. I turned, seeing Lincoln sitting stoically. His eyes up. Dead ahead.

I opened Apple Music. I play Born in the USA. The synth riff hits as I slowly turn in all directions, a 360 degree of our nation’s aspirational center. The soaring music against the poignant lyrics. My eye finds the top of Washington’s monument. I return to our sacred obligation, honoring our creeds, the explicit and authentic act of the people.

Today's wind is on my face. Looking into the sun, I imagine that wind blowing off the Gulf, my family beside me on the deck at Mexico Beach in the 80s.

As I stood on the mall, I surveyed my life today, and my belief in this country. An optimism rose. That familiar pride in being an American.

Adhere to our virtue, and our future stretches as it did on the white sand at Mexico Beach.

I was born in the USA.

I’ve driven over 100 MPH three times. That I’ll disclose. And all three were to Phoebe Putney. All involved my sons.

Keep your foot hard on the pedal. Son, nevermind them brakes.

The first was for Hays’ birth, the second for JR’s, and the third for Coop’s snake bite. Each trip was in the dead of night, parting the darkness as we raced to the hospital. It was going down at the end of this ride. Or during it, if I didn’t drive fast enough.

A trauma unit and labor & delivery unit is a choreographed dance of skilled practitioners, facing high stakes with calculated confidence. Yet, as skilled as those folks were, on the other end of those drives it was Christian who was my revelation. In her, as the cold machine of a hospital spooled up around her sons, I’d see love personified in action and spirit. As if the universe rolled out this cinema just for me, to show the depths of true maternal love. How she endured, through pain, sleep deprivation, the extremes of human endurance, to love her children with a fierce, powerful love is an anchor for my paternal experience.

When we arrived for JR’s birth, we warned the nurses that he would arrive in a hurry. Sure enough, it happened so fast that an epidural wasn’t possible. And I watched the fiercest love I’ve ever seen, again, as Christian delivered him without pain medicine. Her love was willing to endure any pain to bring her child into the world.

That morning, August 6, 2007, Jackson Henry Revell joined the family.

As the fog of war wore off, I dabbed my eyes, seeking to regain my composure. Instinctively, I tracked him with my eyes as he endured the battery of tests, purple and dazed. Once swaddled, they placed him in one of those clear bins on top of a cart. I walked over slowly, eyes focused on him. Taking in these first few seconds of someone I’d watch grow, love, and attempt to lead toward manhood. I took in his face, unfamiliar now, seeing a stoic expression that would become so familiar. I put a finger in his palm. His tiny fingers wrapped around mine.

The first time I held him was shortly after 6 AM. This was a new person in my arms. My son. The realization descended as the emotions rose, hitting me as stark life realizations do. Those same familiar questions arose again as I reckoned with the responsibility and life now in my arms.

-

Parenthood is a series of questions in the moment. It’s a revelation over time. It’s high-stakes decisions with profound ramifications. You do what you think is right, often in a reactionary moment, oblivious to the repercussions in that instant, fighting negative emotions, battling tiredness.

In the succeeding years, as you read the epic of your child’s life, discovering their soul becomes the manifestation of the questions asked along the way.

With clarity of my insecurities, am I passing along the worst of what’s within me? Seeing him small and dependent, I ask, ‘Do I have what it takes to provide?’

I’ve seen Christian’s maternal greatness. Could I meet her on that peak?

The questions mount, pushing to enter your brain as an overcrowded subway car.

You do the best you can, but parenthood carries joy and guilt. You peg the full spectrum of human emotions. You feel what you’ve never felt. Your equilibrium changes, as the depth of feelings plummets through the sea floor you thought was bedrock, while the emotions of love pierce through the atmosphere you thought contained your world.

What will he become because of me? What will he become despite me?

I don’t know yet. I only get to read. Yet, in Jackson, the answer is already revealing itself.

-

In those first days, you’re reading a new epic, an 8lb life in your arms. An epic that unfolds over years, connected to generations, revealed a page at a time. Holding him close, I’d feel his heartbeat, learn his rhythms, catch the first glimpses of how he responds. I’d see JR’s eyes searching above him.

A year later, I’d put Crocs on his feet as he watched Little Einsteins. Refill the sippy cup. Cut up his waffle at Waffle House. Listen as he watched Full House over and over.

On the first day of kindergarten, I watched as he stepped down from the truck, grabbed his new backpack teeming with new supplies, and followed Hays into Lake Park. My sons are walking to elementary school, I said out loud to myself. Another chapter to read.

I close my eyes, and I see him pick up Easter eggs. Thank us for the Christmas presents. I can see him annihilate a doughnut or a Cheeto. I remember him going into Krispy Kreme alone, dressed in a pirate costume, emerging proudly with his free dozen glazed.

When it was time for baseball, we’d tie his cleats tight, then I’d worry with every pitch, pray at every at-bat. Seeing your heart outside your body, trying his best, I so wanted the pages to reveal that he’d done well. Got the hit, the strikeout. But I couldn’t do anything but read the manuscript, understanding he was alone on that pitcher’s mound and in the batter’s box. I wanted to pass along strength and love. Perhaps he already had my belief, love, and support within him. I’d read the stoic expression, learning of his character, fears, and integrity.

With a deep breath, I can still see his wet hair and how he stands in front of me, arms raised. I pull the tight, wet swim shirt off him after a day at the beach. That reminds me of the swimmys he wore, tooling around the pool. The pacifier he sometimes still had. The way he tensed up with the fireworks at Disney World or the thunder at the ball field. The spiked hair. The baseball rope necklaces.

Every day I read more and more, understanding this main character in his epic.

I’d tense as he calmly shot free throws, playing for Lake Park, the gym ringing in all our ears.

I remember the slow-motion cinematic arc of his home runs. His expression unchanged as he ran the bases, until slight smile emerged as he rounded third, his teammates ready to mob him at home plate. On the ride home I’d see him quietly looking out the window as his cleats hung over the edge of the seat, his legs not yet reaching the floor.

I see the Mathlete at the Storm Dome, leg tapping in concentration. Then, years later, the same focus as he plays region basketball, his gaze steeled, muscles and posture tightening just enough for the task.

The Root Man.

In photos, he’d break the tension, make a face, refuse the staged solemnity. But behind the gaze, he took life seriously. The trivial got a smirk. The significant got all he had.

He always finds his mother and grandmother in a crowd and gives them all a hug.

Behind the eyes, the same gaze, across his years. His character was visible in the carrying.

There’s a whole world in him. One we see glimpses of. Places we want to visit, worlds we see traces of.

I wanted to read all of it in one sitting. Yet his narrative is one that’s revealed in time, pages turned through his actions. This book is revealed at the subject’s pace.

Fragments of his humanity form a stained-glass mosaic of his character.

As he graduates, in cap and gown, I can see the words sharpening on the page. I see a man who is his own. A man with a calibrated moral compass, balanced scales of justice, perhaps with an inkling that his virtue is within. And a developing assurance that he has what it takes, even as the future is daunting and uncertain.

I can see him becoming a revelation to himself as he discovers that certitude is within.

-

In high school, he broke his arm twice. Both times throwing a baseball. Each time, the break was at the elbow from the strain of his throwing motion. For the first few days of each injury, you could see him shaking his fist slightly, wiggling his fingers in discomfort. But he never complained. He just went about his day. The first time, we asked how his elbow was. In his understated form, the reply: “I think it’s broken.”

It damn sure was.

He rehabbed, wore a huge cast, and did what was prescribed.

Then, the following season, the same thing happened again. He threw a pitch, then he couldn’t. The coaches pulled him from the game. It was broken again. During that time, I took him to the doctor while Christian was at school. He took every stick, every prod, every cast, every painful rehab moment without complaint. He was obviously disappointed not to be out there competing with his friends, but it didn’t show on the outside. He dealt with it.

The pages I was reading showed a resilient young man who took life’s punches with a sanguine confidence. This adversity was revealing more chapters of his soul.

As college approached, and he’d gravitated away from high school weekend festivities, I took him to Houston to see his favorite teams, the Texans and the Rockets on back-to-back nights. It was just us, so we had some time. I chose my spots carefully, knowing the words would be limited. On this trip I wanted him to be seen, to know that I could see him being his own man. To let him know I support him and to let him pursue his life with us behind him, wherever that may go. He listened politely, certain, again, in what he wanted to do.

Houston revealed a man with a plan and the courage to execute it. And as I listened, I realized that while he’s introspective, he would go to Florida State and start over. Or he may take the UNG to Georgia route, but he wasn’t going because others were. He was going because that’s what he wanted to do.

Over the past several years, we have gone to multiple FSU football games. When we had season tickets, and he was newly 16, I rode with him as a test run. As the Seminoles took the field and the war chant started, he’d take to his feet and chop along with thousands. When the Noles scored, he’d shed his stoic exterior and let the emotions loose. For almost every game afterward, he went often by himself. In those pages, I knew the emotions were within, that the Noles and this time alone were what he loved. That he could picture himself as a student at Florida State, and that loyalty sprang within. Loyalty to the Noles. To his friends. To his brothers. To his family.

In his freshman basketball season, he nailed three 3-pointers against Terrell, while Hays did too. His trajectory was up, but the elbow injuries inhibited his ability to lift and practice in the summer. In the years that followed circumstances were adverse, but he stuck with it, continuing to work hard. He could recognize character in others, allowing qualities he didn’t want to emulate to register as antithetical to his character.

In January this season, against Schley County, he was given a consistent opportunity and drained 5 three-pointers in the second half. His teammates responded to him, showing more excitement than he was. So did the student section. Christian and I were elated, of course, but we were caught off guard by how happy everyone else was for him. You could tell he appreciated the moment, as a slight smile crossed his face. But in these moments of triumph, you can tell a lot about someone’s character by how others respond to them. When you see others celebrate him, even as stoic as he is, it’s another chapter revealed.

He’s an answer to my questions. Yet the answers have little to do with me and more with JR’s character within.

When I ask the questions of whether I’ve provided well, whether we raised him in the right place, when I see him stand with his bros in his cap and gown, see him walk the halls of Lake Park while Pomp and Circumstance plays, when I see him drive away as we leave him in his apartment in Athens, time has answered the question.

Conventional wisdom focuses on what our kids learn from us, but fewer words are written about what we learn from our kids. Because I’m Jackson Revell’s father, I’ve learned that character development is painful to watch in others, but seeing virtue in your son is one of life’s richest rewards.

But I also saw him triumph. I saw him tap that virtue and realize for himself that it’s there.

-

“You can love completely without complete understanding.” Norman Maclean wrote in A River Runs Through It. The post-Enlightenment tradition treats understanding as the precondition for valuation. You know first, then you judge, then you respond, but Maclean cuts the cord. Love does not have to wait for understanding. Love runs alongside, ahead, or independent of what is comprehended.

Understanding is revealed in time.

A father loves across a gap that a mother has already crossed. There is no pregnancy, no nursing, no biological intimacy with the interior. From the first moment, the father is on the outside watching. Jackson’s character was being forged from within, and I’ve read every page since.

When I’m alone in the subtle light of a Fernandina morning, as the water laps against the beach just above my feet, the morning cool, all existence condenses into the being of my soul and the memories within.

I see the sun, layer by orange layer, burning the distant blue water, as the clouds transform colors second by second. With my eyes closed and my face into the wind, I breathe in the salt, reading the chronicle of this life behind my eyes.

It is those we love most who elude us. Yet to love deeply is to be inscribed by a surrender to the reading. I have read him for eighteen years, and somewhere along the way, the pages began to transform the reader. His text edified and sanctified this reader.

Eventually, our lives merge into one. And our love runs through it.

Part I

Part II

Part III

September 2004

4AM. Outside the Crown Plaza in Hartford, 50 of us gathered up, all in suits, our breath visible in the streetlights. Smith Barney sequestered us in Connecticut for three weeks, to run through the boiler room training plan to become Financial Advisors under Citigroup’s red umbrella.

After the ministry I was drawn to the markets, to American enterprise, to a respected career in business. I’d already left a career that felt like a calling, which felt like a failure. So doubt creeped in with this one; did I have what it takes? Adding to the stakes, Christian was seven months pregnant. My son was set to be born in two months. I had more questions than answers.

I was on the verge of being a father.

This particular morning, when we gathered to board the bus, we were headed to New York City for a day of training. We had two weeks under our belts, heading home was in sight, yet we’d barely touched on investment training, instead focusing on cold calls, overcoming objections, pushing through to make the sale.

After a few days it was clear, they weren’t teaching us investments. They were teaching us sales.

The sun began to rise on our approach. The bus rolled down the West Side Highway as the sun rose over New York City.

I’m on the right side of the bus, looking out the window seeing the Hudson dance in pink, while New Jersey rises in the pastel light.

We continue to trace the Hudson into Lower Manhattan as the Statue of Liberty comes into view. She’s looking in the other direction, out to sea, her gaze unchanging.

We turn into TriBeCa, the bus stops on Greenwich St. The red umbrella out front. We’d been up for hours, but the day was just beginning.

-

The class started as all the others did. They handed us the sales scripts. It was time to overcome objections. In rapid fire we were called out, asked to respond in high pressure situations, thinking only of the firm, no thought given to the client. Sell, sell, sell, put people in commission-based products.

At the first break I felt my anxiety rising as the walls seemed to close in. The room compressed, I needed an escape.

Heading down the elevator, I exited under the red umbrella. I broke away. I knew where I needed to go.

I walked south on Greenwich. The cobblestones gave way to standard sidewalk, the cast iron cornices to corporate granite, the sky narrowing to a slot above the buildings.

The fence appeared at Vesey, eight feet of green scrim wrapped around a city block, three years of offerings pinned to the wire, photographs of the dead in plastic sleeves, handwritten notes layered under newer notes, FDNY patches, a wedding portrait of a young man in a tuxedo and a girl in green. The faces had stopped aging the same week.

Ground Zero.

Through the scrim, the pit, eight stories down, the slurry wall holding back the Hudson, construction equipment moved slowly across the floor of absence. Sounds of trucks backing up, then climbing the ramp back to ground level, metal on metal as demolition continued.

I could see the giant craters, the remnants of the World Trade Center. It was an excavation site. I looked at these places I’d seen on that crisp morning, when I went back to my apartment alone at University Garden grappling, as we all did, with what just happened. Inherently knowing that life would be measured from before and after this day, a seismic shift in our arc of time.

There was a giant steel cross, the force of the buildings falling twisting it into this eternal shape. I looked at it thinking about the ministry I’d left behind, and the assurance I still felt for the symbol I’d preached for.

I looked up to the brilliant blue sky, which looked the same as it did that morning. And I thought of people having no choice but to jump. Of knowing their life was over, and that while I was struggling to find success, I’d walk back to my job today, I’d fly home to my wife, and that I wasn’t trapped above a burning building into the skies of NYC.

And I thought of those faces I’d see covered in soot, the heroic firefighters who ran up the stairs, and the cowards who crashed the planes just a few hundred feet above me.

I reckoned with myself. With whether I had what it takes. How small I was in this giant world. How insignificant I was, yet unaware at that moment that significance was already behind the eyes.

I didn’t know where to go from here, but I didn’t have a choice. I was a father, soon to be, and I had a wife to support. I’d better figure it out. And I’d have to work to determine if I’d succeed in this opportunity, or if there would be another career.

I walked back from Ground Zero looking inward, yet unable to tap the nascent strength within. I didn’t know how. Didn’t even know it was possible. At 24, you’re following the prescribed path, believing that adhering to societal norms will lead to self-actualization. Yet within, as with the ministry, there was a sense that conventional wisdom may not be all that wise.

However faint, deep within a still, persistent voice, one with fortitude in its tone, told me that what I needed was within.

But how do you tap it when you need to provide for your wife and feed your kid, I thought as I retook my seat in Citigroup’s boiler room training.

I had to become a Financial Advisor. One of the instructors looked my way. “Revell, your turn. Come to the front.”

-

April 2026

Saturday morning, the boys dutifully abided by the commandment and had a big breakfast at Carnegie Diner again.

After breakfast, we circled up in the lobby, then walked to the 34th Street / Herald Square station for the subway down to Cortlandt. We took the R downtown. Aromatic subway scents, the sublime fermentation of ambrosial aromas, greeted us as we descended to the platform.

The doors shut after the mechanical voice warned us, the car lurched and rocked forward as the steel wheels screamed against the rails at every turn. Granddaddy was reading the map. We were heading to the 9/11 Museum at Ground Zero.

We emerged from the subway into the Oculus, then walked to the memorial.

The pools are squares cut into the plaza, each one the footprint of a fallen tower. This is where I stood twenty-two years before. Water now falls thirty feet down the black walls, then drops again into a smaller void at the center. The water continues on into the eternity of our senses.

We gathered again as a family to enter the museum.

The first time I visited the museum was 2016 with Hays and JR and Christian. The museum’s power rests in its presentation. It’s focused on the human experience, and our shared emotion of that day. We remember where we were, what we were doing, what we first thought when we heard, what we felt, and experience that through the eyes and ears of others. This emotional connection draws us together. Such that we feel each phone call that replays in the museum, because you can picture yourself in those moments of life. You can sense our tacit connection to each letter from a child to a parent gone forever. Such that we all feel connected to the white rose that’s within someone’s name.

And you remember the hope of America from those days afterward. That we were virtuous, the good guys, and that those who attacked us were bad. And that the trajectory of our country and our spirit was on a moral arc to goodness, that we’d come together as one, a supposition that has been tested in our history.

Moments bind you together.

We descended underground, into the museum. The voice of Robert De Niro guiding us. I helped Mom and Dad get their headphones set, and we each descended into the museum at our own pace.

As I walk through the museum, I’m struck by the magnitude of life’s power in rhythm in moments. Of how important the mundane details of the day are. How the hugs and kisses and calls are the anchors, the beacons of all that continues after. That which we think is routine becomes the most important. What we often do without thinking is what resonates deepest, because it’s connected to our relationships. That which we chase, promotions, security, all of it, you realize is fleeting.

As you’re in the hall of heroes you realize they thought the same thing as well. But what they want is to brush their daughter’s hair, shoot baskets with their son, hug their spouse, and breathe in the warmth of a spring day. To feel the sun. To be alive.

In those moments while you walk with your own kids, listening to the voices of the 9/11 families. You feel their pain, you connect with their emotions, because they’re so universal. I instinctively look for my kids, to make sure they’re there. They are. I search for my parents in the crowd of people with their headphones on. I know they’re there, also, yet the voices I’m listening to on my headphones live only in the words replaying in our ears and in the hearts of those that love them.

We gathered in the lobby after a couple of hours, walked out into the sun, among the trees and the falling water. Four hundred swamp white oaks fill the plaza, planted in rows that will grow into a single canopy. The names of the dead are cut through the bronze parapets at the edge of the pools, the letters voids, the water visible above the names. A white rose stood in a name we passed.

Welles Crowther. John Ogonowski. Jonathan Brile.

I stood against the names, looked down into the pools, and thought about looking at this site in 2004, as a construction site. Dump trucks taking loads away. Buildings still bearing the scars of the towers falling. I thought again of those people jumping, and hitting this ground where I now stood. I remembered those doubts of provision, knowing Christian was pregnant.

I look at that child, now 21, a few paces from me, taking in his version of American history. He doesn’t know his spirit was here before he was born. Nor does he know he’s the answer to the questions I wrestled with. Or how this family is the answer to the questions I reckoned with. Or that the answers to his questions are within.

The sky was a brilliant blue, which it hadn’t been when we entered the museum. It looked like that September day.

-

Crossing the West Side Highway, we approached the Hudson for lunch. PJ Clarke’s On The Hudson sits on the marina at Brookfield Place, with dark wood and exposed brick inside, red-checkered tablecloths. It carries the original 1884 saloon character imported from the Midtown location. Outside, there’s a yacht harbor and the Statue of Liberty stands across the water.

My first trip to a PJ Clarke’s was on this trip in 2016, where we sat outside, next to the harbor with the Statue of Liberty in the distance. It was one of those perfect, light-air, vibrant-color days in New York City. We ate lobster rolls.

Our family’s connection to lobster can be traced back to one of the best family trips we took. With the Mossellers in the mid-90s, we went to Maine.

Starting in Bar Harbor, we worked our way through Acadia National Park, meandering along the Maine coast. Coastal Maine is rugged, yet magisterial, with granite and pine, cold water slapping against rock, lobster boats working the harbors in the fog. The remoteness blends a New England sensibility of taste, with the raw bearing of the Atlantic’s force. Each road stand looks so similar to those in the south, but the accoutrements are different. Each hole in the wall has clams, oysters, and lobster. And it’s July, yet you have a sweatshirt on.

It’s a different kind of coastal elegance from the Florida Atlantic coast, but a regal dance nonetheless.

There are some meals that become pins on the map. For our family, it was a meal at Beal’s Lobster Pier.

Beal’s Lobster Pier has been there since 1932. Three generations of the same family. The pier came first. The restaurant came in 1969, at the end of the pier, where the boats unload. You walk up to the counter. The lobsters are in the tank, alive, banded. You point at the one you want. They weigh it, cook it, hand it back to you on a paper plate with corn on the cob and butter.

We sat on picnic tables on the dock, above the water. As lobster boats unloaded and the lobsters boiled. The sun set over Cadillac Mountain, the air cooled further. This is a communal dining experience, as you rock your bibs and crack into the lobster. It’s a moment frozen in time, a still frame on our collective memory. Yet even in that moment, you can somehow appreciate how you’ll call back to this memory for the rest of your life, as if you watch the meal from above. That anytime someone from the family eats lobster we’ll compare it to the evening at Beal’s. Fastened from that meal forward.

Rather than go out to a restaurant for my birthday, for several years we had fresh lobsters overnighted to the house.

Lobster brought us together.

So, in 2026, as we sat at PJ Clarke’s, Mike and I at a table next door, it’s no surprise the family ordered lobster rolls. Almost all the way down the table. Even for the boys, who know nothing but verbal legends of Maine. I’d hoped the views would be the same as 2016, but a river refresh project was underway, blocking our view. But we ate the lobster, the Revells connected back to Maine, the Revells forever connected to Revells. -

We walked the Hudson, took the subway back to the hotel, then ventured up to the Bronx. The D train pulled out of Times Square Station packed in pinstripes, fans pressed shoulder to shoulder, beer breath at 4 in the afternoon, kids in their twenties shouting at each other across the car. We were heading to the cathedral. Ruth and Gehrig and DiMaggio. Mantle. Reggie’s three swings in ‘77. Maris’s sixty-one. Jeter’s flip. The ghosts stalking the Bronx.

We climbed the stairs out of 161st Street into the Bronx afternoon, the elevated tracks rumbling overhead, vendors hawking caps and shirts and hot dogs along the sidewalk, the new Stadium’s limestone facade rising across the street. I looked to the site of the old stadium, thinking about being here in 1994 with Hosanna when I was a freshman.

It was opening weekend. Cold and windy. Wind cut down off the Harlem River and across the upper deck, jackets pulled over jerseys, hands stuffed into pockets between innings. Beer was everywhere. Vendors moving up and down the aisles, fans on their fourth round by the third inning, the volume in our section rising with each Yankee at-bat. Three guys in the bar area beside us were screaming into the air, then at his own friend, then at the umpire, then at no one in particular. Aggressive, ridiculous drinking, and overly obnoxious behavior took away from the moment. Is the social contract broken? Without regards for anyone else?

But I look at our boys. They think it’s just as absurd as we do. Maybe the social contract lives in them.

We left in the 6th inning, fighting our way through the Bronx crowd, buttoning our jackets against the wind. We emerged onto the street, then descended underground away from the garish cathedral of baseball to the sullen, cracked tiles of the subway. The contrast was St. Patrick’s to Fifth Avenue, a few steps changing the vantage point, altering the perspective. We boarded the D train, heading into the black tunnel under the Harlem River, back to Manhattan.

A man was singing reggae tunes above the platform, the rhythmic steelpan marking our rhythm. No Woman, No Cry, he sang, and I thought of mine watching the fireworks on Main Street. Tomorrow, I’d have to leave earlier than the group. I looked up again, the oscillating light on the Empire State Building dancing in the clouds, an expanding light show on the soft backdrop of the gray clouds.

I paused for a moment, watching the boys turn the corner to head into the hotel. I sat on a bench, taking in the last few moments of the day. Knowing that my time in NYC was over. That this trip, as meaningful as it was, was over for me. I had to head home early.

All things progress. All things end. It’s our only certainty.

-

The next morning I took a cab to LaGuardia. Cleared security in minutes, and entered the Sky Club to eat breakfast. Within my journal, I sought to document the trip as best I could, thinking about the physical gap I was now caught in. My family still in NYC, my girls in Orlando. Me in between, flying from one to the other.

A dense fog settled over LaGuardia as I waited to board the flight.

I opened Life360, seeing Christian and Cate in Animal Kingdom, and the boys moving from the hotel to Brooklyn. Slowly, I could see their pins moving from Manhattan to Brooklyn. Mom texted that the boys led the way, guiding the family on the subway. While I’d been the guide for the trip, I was no longer there. I wasn’t needed. I smiled. They were now the guides, charting the direction themselves.

Once I was in my seat on the plane, I could see the girls heading home as well. They’d just started on the Florida Turnpike heading home. The boys were in the Barclays Center, ready for the Nets vs. Wizards after lunch at Dave & Busters.

The fog that covered LaGuardia lifted, as the sun’s rays cut through the clouds. I was seated on the left side in a window. No one was in the middle. We taxied to Runway 31, the engines spooled, the brakes released, and we were pinned to our seats as the A321 thundered down the runway. The jet ascended westbound over Manhattan, building moving fast as we ascended. The East River and Triborough Bridge below. Central Park spread to my left, as I looked down the island to Times Square, to the Empire State Building, to the Garden, and further to One World Trade. As we banked left over New Jersey, I looked further toward Brooklyn, catching a slight glimpse of Barclays through the buildings, knowing the boys were present in that small building in this giant city.

As Brooklyn passed to the left, the Jersey shore opened up below. I looked back, seeing Brooklyn and Long Island fading.

Sitting back in my seat, I looked down at the phone in my lap, opened Life360, and watched the trip resolve into pins on a map.

Mom, Dad, Mike, Hays, JR, Banks, Cooper held together at Barclays, seven pins clustered for tipoff. Christian and Cate on I-75 north of Gainesville, two pins moving toward home. My own pin somewhere over the Atlantic seaboard, the icon I never saw move because I was the one moving.

I closed my eyes and pressed my head back against the seat. This familial impression formed behind my eyelids, as an image forms in long exposure when the shutter stays open long enough to hold what the eye can’t catch in motion. The family was in focus, all of them, sharp, their faces and their presence held in the frame as the world streaked around them.

I was the blur in a Delta jet.

Home is disparate places. Our spirit is in multiple places at once.

I closed my eyes as we reached cruising altitude.

Above us, only sky.

Part I

Part II

June 2003

With my left arm on the steering wheel, Christian and I looked through the windshield as people crossed 44th Street in the shade of Fifth Avenue’s towers. My whip was the FUMC blue church van, Ol’ Blue, of course, pulling the trailer with Hosanna’s equipment behind. We were trailing a 53-foot CoachUSA bus, driven by Frank from the Bronx, carrying the kids from our youth ministry. As a Transit Top Gun, you’re taught to leave minimal space between the bus ahead, to protect pedestrians and minimize the potential for accidents. Ain’t possible in Midtown.

After five days following behind Frank in the van, I knew the man could pilot a bus. Elite can spot elite. Top Gun to Top Gun, I could sense the markings of the best of the best when I saw them.

Easing right from 44th onto Fifth Avenue, I followed Frank as close as I could, but folks walked between us, their faces forward in the Manhattan trance, eyes trained on an absent point beyond the city’s horizon.

Frank maneuvered the bus to the Fifth Avenue right lane, against the curb, as yellow cabs and bikes raced by. I followed, pulling over as well, leaving little daylight between me and Frank. The bus filled our windshield, blocking most of what we could see ahead.

No sooner had I put the van in park than a running NYPD officer approached the driver’s window, yelling that we had to move. I tried to tell him we were with the bus, but in this post-9/11 security environment, it didn’t matter. He glanced at the First United Methodist Church wordmark on the van, and in that distinctive NY accent, I don’t give a fuck if you’re waiting on God himself. You gotta get the fuck outta here.

Heart pounding, no time to think, I put the van in reverse, summoned my trailer skills, and backed up the right lane of Fifth Avenue in Midtown Manhattan. When enough space emerged, the dour cop graciously held traffic as I pulled the van back into the flow.

Cast off, we set off in the current, while the bus remained anchored on the banks. The bus receded in the mirrors as we drifted southbound on Fifth Avenue.

Christian and I looked at each other, unmoored in Manhattan.

We knew two things, though. We were heading south on Fifth Avenue and Long Island was east. And we were due for a Hosanna concert on Long Island by 7.

Christian opened the atlas to the New York section, finding the close-up page of the boroughs. At traffic lights we’d consult the atlas, working together, figuring out where to go. Long Island was east, we knew that. And the East River was in the way, so east meant a bridge or a tunnel, we reasoned.

Untethered from the group but fastened together.

We worked the city together. Horns, cabs, pedestrians, the rolling decision-making of every block, while trying to find our way. Christian stayed in profile beside me, calm, beautiful as ever, the atlas in her lap.

We hadn’t even been married a year.

After gliding east, we saw the signs for the Queens Midtown Tunnel, turned left, and followed the signs east. 36th Street pulled us toward the river, the road sloping down toward the bank. We could see the East River over the street’s horizon.

Crossing into the tunnel entrance, we were greeted by another cop, who directed us to pull over. This one was flanked by several others, all wearing tactical gear, all with both hands on their assault rifles. And dogs.

One of the officers approached, with his rifle secured on his chest, as I rolled down the window.

You lost? What’s in the trailer?

We’re a long way from Albany, Georgia, I replied.

You’re damn right. What’s in the trailer? The other officers gathered around to see this church van from Georgia going through the Queens Midtown Tunnel.

With us standing back, they opened the trailer. A cop reached into a black case and lifted out a snare drum, holding it up. They opened a few other cases, a few bags, and turned the dogs on the trailer.

You don’t look like you’re causing problems. Except to the choir, if you can’t find your way. They laughed, carrying no confidence that Christian and I could find our way.

We sealed the van and the trailer, getting back in the van. We shared a laugh at the absurdity of our situation; us, together, in a church van separated from the group in Midtown. We put the van in drive, still unaware if we were heading in the right direction.

The tunnel opened ahead. Our headlights swept the curving tiled wall as we descended. The 1940 engineers had to go under what they couldn’t drill through.

Then, after a few minutes, we could tell we were ascending, the subtlety of gravity indicating as such. Gradually, we could see daylight on the Queens side, the tube spitting us out into Long Island City.

With the windows down, music up, and Manhattan falling away in the side mirror as we accelerated on the Long Island Expressway, the skyline behind shrinking into the frame.

We beat Frank to the church.

-

April 2026

One of the commandments of Grandmama is thou shalt eat a big breakfast. It wouldn’t be carved in stone, it would be on a needlepoint in her kitchen. Right beside the sad Italian chef from Fernandina and the hand-print plates. And anyone who has been around my mother knows there’s no quarter for a violation of her commandments.

Dutifully, on Friday morning, the boys went downstairs in the Martinique to eat a big breakfast before the day’s events. Today would be a full one. Walking in Manhattan, Grand Central Oyster Bar, a tour with I Know A Guy Tours to Brooklyn, closing out the night at Madison Square Garden.

I’d been up for a few hours, having coffee and an Acai bowl for breakfast, so I just nursed a fresh cup of coffee with the family at breakfast. It sticks to your ribs, Granddaddy said as he always did when breakfast beckoned. Mom ordered her eggs over medium with crispy bacon, as the boys filed into the Carnegie Diner connected to the Martinique.

When I see my folks interact with my boys I realize the depth of generational unconditional love. How it’s a generational inheritance. And that no matter how old or how cool the boys get, they fall in line when their Grandmama is around. They give her a hug, slide into the booth, and order their big breakfast for the full day ahead. Like dinner the night before, the conversation is over easy, and the barbs lobbed across the table land while the coffee steams.

After breakfast, we set off north through Greeley Square, passing Minerva in Herald Square, then veered east toward Fifth Avenue.

Once on Fifth, we passed the New York Public Library, the marble facade catching the early eastern light. Last May, Mom and I tried to make it into the Rose Reading Room to see the long oak tables under the painted sky ceiling, scholars and students working as if a wonder of the world weren’t sitting above their heads. But it was closed to visitors. The year before, Cooper and Cate and Christian and I had climbed to the top, surprised it was free, surprised it was a working library, awed by its grandeur. We stood with the other tourists while New Yorkers read.

I opened Life360. The girls were on Splash Mountain.

Hays and JR walked beside me. Cooper was just ahead, his eyes taking it in. The rest of the crew tailed behind, my brother and Banks talking, my father keeping pace. Mom rocking her flip-flops.

Without announcement, we approached 44th and Fifth from the south. I looked at the curb, memories coming back. I then looked across the street, at the Zara where the girls had shopped in December, tracing our lives from this spot.

The MTA buses ambled south, Citibikes whizzed by, I stood again as a long exposure photograph in the kinetic movement of Fifth Avenue.

In that fleeting moment you’re able to connect the past with the present as you slowly blink your eyes. Then as you open them, seeing your sons, your parents, your brother, and nephew you connect the answer with the question. Connecting with how time answers today’s queries.

I pulled out my phone. Life360. Peter Pan’s Flight.

I looked back at the curb.

Twenty-three years ago, I’d backed a church van and a trailer up that lane while a cop held traffic.

We didn’t know where we were going. We figured it out together.

The family kept walking. None of them knew the family history of this curb.

The road from this block had carried Christian and me twenty-three years to here, the family riding it now without knowing they were on it.

We continued walking.

Bound for the NBA Store, after hitting the MLB store and Nike’s Flagship, Cooper turned and waited for me at the corner. I caught up. We crossed the street, now passing St. Patrick’s Cathedral.

The boys continued to the NBA Store. Mom, Dad, and I snuck inside St. Patrick’s Cathedral. We walked in. I couldn’t help but think of my transition from the ministry. And how the architecture of a church can both inspire and comfort. And how the ostentatiousness contrasts with the ministry of Jesus, and how his words are lost to church polity. And I thought of my own reckoning of faith. Grappling with who I believed I was, the call I thought was within, to the certitude of the man I’ve become.

I took a deep breath of gratitude.

We came out of St. Patrick’s into the late morning and walked south on Fifth toward the NBA Store. The boys were already outside on the sidewalk, bags from the day in their hands. Mike sported a new Knicks hoodie. Cooper bought a Knicks shirt. Hays had a Raptors sticker, his allegiance remaining in the north.

We walked east to Grand Central Terminal for lunch. The Oyster Bar sits below the terminal in a vaulted hall of Guastavino tile, the curved ceiling humming with a hundred years of conversations and the clatter of shucking knives, and the long counters where stools fill at noon and oyster shells pile high.

The eight of us took a long table in the main room. We’d beat the crowd, and took in the menu, each ordering a different entree. Mom’s southern dialect causes a language barrier within various accents of English, as it did with Ricardo this meal. We need Google Translate for New Yorkers to understand her version of southern English.

But, as we talked, and as the food arrived, I saw her across from me, smiling at the table.

Life360. Buzz Lightyear’s Spin.

-

Later that afternoon, we gathered up under MSG at the Penn Station food court to eat before heading up to the Garden. We joined the orange and blue tide ascending from the tracks below or the streets outside, which included Mike D in his Knicks hoodie, and waited to enter the world’s most famous arena. The floor level is stories up, so you rise and rise, until you emerge at your section. We sat in section 221, and after a few minutes getting situated, I signaled for Mom and Dad to come with me as the boys watched the teams warm up.

We walked into the concourse to take in the history. Above us, the Rolling Stones. Mick Jagger mid-stride across the stage in some night I wasn’t alive for, the photograph capturing the moment for eternity. Dad and I stopped in front of it. I remember being on the floor of our den on Pearl Avenue, eight years old, listening to his Stones records. Dad was Rolling Stones. Mom was the Beatles, and we found those pictures, too.

We had all those records.

As we walked, Mom and Dad talked about where they were when some of these things happened. Ali and Frazier in ‘71. The Pope in ‘79, my birth year. So much of America had moved through these walls.

Of course, I found Pearl Jam on the wall. An interwoven stitch in time.

We returned to our seats. The boys were watching Brunson and KAT warm up. Knicks vs Bulls.

The Bulls uniform remains the same, but it belongs to the 90s. To the legend who rose to the highest of heights in this building, once dropping fifty-five points one March night in 1995 just back from baseball.

The game ends in the first quarter. Thirty-eight to sixteen after twelve minutes. The Knicks put this one away before the crowd has finished its second beer. Brunson is conducting the orange and blue with ten assists, seventeen points, no panic. Mitchell Robinson goes seven-for-seven from the floor and pulls eleven rebounds, a hoss, dominating whoever he wants.

But the night belongs to OG Anunoby, who hits seven of ten from the three-point line for thirty-one points.

The crowd and the organ do not sound the way they do in Atlanta or Houston. There’s a timelessness to the sounds, a permanence. Sonic history added to the wall, to the photographs, to the retrospective that wraps the sixth-floor concourse and is called Garden 366, one moment for every day of the year.

-

The walk back from the Garden took us past Friedman’s on 31st. The window glowed.

I slowed. Through the glass, a family I didn’t know was sitting where we had sat the night before. Father at the head, kids on either side, the warmth inside matching the light.

Last night, that had been us.

Dad had been laughing at himself about the Edge, retelling the moment he mistook the projected film for windows on the elevator and grabbed Cooper’s shoulder. I’d needled him about flying T-38s at 500 miles an hour above Valdosta, and how he was terrified now of a fake elevator at 1,100 feet. The whole table laughed, Dad included.

We relived walking on the Edge, within the shroud the city was under. We saw what the city wanted us to see, as I fought the urge to say how majestic it looks on a clear day. Mike joked about the boys in Hudson Yards, and how the girls would have spent hours in every store while the boys cut through in fifteen minutes. The Risacher sighting came up, the Hawks draft pick, who was just a few years older than the boys.

Eight of us dining together. Mom, Dad, Mike, me, Hays, JR, Banks, Cooper. A table of boys at every age, cousins who are brothers, brothers who are friends, their banter sharp and easy and constant. Theirs is the kind of conversation that pulls you in because they actually like each other. And the woman at our center, that familiar blonde hair, laughing, the standard-bearer for us. No phones.

If you’re on the outside, looking in at us, you couldn’t have heard what we were saying but you could have seen the contentment and ease in how we spent the meal together. You could have seen the grandparents watching their grandsons. You could have seen the two brothers across from each other, different yet forged by this family, bonded in the same station wagon. One walking by could’ve seen the light from the family shining with a warmth matching the ambiance.

That person walking by would’ve kept walking, contemplating what they saw, continuing into the city. Yet would they see that scene in your mind as you continued to walk?

As the family continued in the night, I walked to catch up. The family was ahead of me on the sidewalk now, moving toward the hotel.

To the east of Broadway, the Empire State Building rose against a clean black sky, the dancing gold lights moving across the spire, the antenna firing light out into the night, the crown alive with motion, oscillating gold dancing on the mooring mast.

Above us, only sky.

PART I

If the winds are favorable, Manhattan sweeps across a vast IMAX screen outside the Airbus’ windows as you fly into LaGuardia. Trust me, pick the window seat on the left side of the plane, facing west on the northbound flight. With a northern wind, you’ll fly over Staten Island, the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge below, as the waters of the Upper Bay catch the light, white streaks on the water running from the sun.

Moving right to left in the window, the Statue of Liberty turns to meet you as the East River and Hudson split at Battery Park.

One World Trade rises in the distance, a 1,776-foot monument to the American spirit.

All of Manhattan stars in this panoramic spectacle unfolding from Lower Manhattan to the Upper East Side, on the descent into LaGuardia. Sinatra’s refrain scores this film, as it plays through my low-fidelity mental sound system.

Even if you know it’s coming, the city’s cinematic reveal will take you by surprise.

In June 2016, Christian and I took our oldest two to NYC. With career stability, I’d shifted past career survival and uncertainty that racked earlier trips, when provision was a question I hadn’t yet answered.

On the flight in, Hays and JR, 11 and 8, were looking out the window as we caught our first view of Manhattan. Their heads are silhouettes in the window. From behind the bills of their Braves cap, the city was so close my hand twitched slightly, as I almost instinctively reached for it. The proximity of the city was a jolt, causing emotions to well as I took in this great American city now serving as a backdrop for my son’s new experience. I caught myself unable to speak, only able to point it out. And absorb the moment, and hope no one could see my tears.

Our lives were intertwined in this place.

Those are rare, precious moments in life. When the totality of your experience condenses into one blink of an eye. Where you’re in the same place, but you’re connecting with multiple versions of yourself, as if 2004 Perry sits with 2016 Perry. When that ephemeral lighting strikes and you’re aware life’s blended together, you understand that path you’re on, and importantly, the person walking it. You’re in that sacred temporal space, aware of your humanity yet awed by it. And in that instant, there’s a simultaneous assurance of your future. Such that it’s humility, pride, fear, hope, and assurance, all in the same fleeting breath.

New York, New York.

-

Two successive Christmases, my mother gave the grandkids a trip to NYC. Christmas 2024, she gave one to the girls. I went along last May as security, guide, bag carrier, while they shopped through NYC, saw Lion King, and ambled through every H&M, Free People, and Starbucks. Christmas 2025, she gave a trip to the boys. This one avoided shopping, instead planning with a sports focus. Knicks, Yankees, Nets, and 9/11, Brooklyn Bridge. Eight of us, Mom, Dad, Mike D, me, Hays, JR, Banks, and Cooper. Four nights in the city.

Thursday afternoon, the family would arrive at LaGuardia. I flew up Wednesday.

I often need to pound out words on the page to think. To overcome a rut, to work through a complex issue, or to just order my thoughts. I do so on paper. Writing allows me to think beyond the loop, in a linear progression, so that what emerges is cohesive, in a line longer than a fleeting thought is capable of constructing. So, I took 24 hours in New York to tap into the emotional energy this place had given me before, to order my mind, to think, to hear the voice trying to speak above the bustle of my inner depths.

I went from coffee shop to bookstore to record store, stopping to write, to think in between. I stood in the middle of Grand Central, the still figure in a long exposure photo, the blurs of activity around me, seeking to ground what roiled within. I sat along the benches in Madison Square Park with a shake from the OG Shake Shack and looked up into the blue sky to see the Flatiron Building undressing after years of scaffolding, and then I returned to the page.

I moved north to the concrete blocks under the gaze of Minerva in Herald Square, hoping for a spear of wisdom as the sky turned a Carolina shade of blue before blending into pinks and oranges. The air cooled, and the city pulsed with brilliance, with energy, with the centrality to the human experience. And I absorbed the introvert’s power of being unknown in a city of 8 million yet feeling alive and connected and energized by that anonymity. Empowered. As if the significance behind my eyes amplified when my significance was anything but to everyone around me.

Part of my home was traveling to me, though. My sons, my mother and father, my brother and my nephew, arriving tomorrow. While my home, Christian and Cate, were at Walt Disney World.

I closed my eyes, heard the sirens a block over. I close my eyes, took a deep breath, looking up through the arching architectural marvels. An A380 on approach to JFK flew over, and a crazy fucker yelled as crazy fuckers do, and took another deep breath. I’d written thousands of words since landing, in an arduous task that’s both freeing and brutal at once. I was alone yet plugged into the charge of humanity that exists in this universe, and rich knowing that family was on the way.

-

Thursday morning, from a bagel shop, I watched their jet take off on Flighty. DL 378 from ATL to LGA. Set to arrive in just over two hours. And then I pulled up Life360 to see Christian and Cate waiting at rope drop in the Magic Kingdom. Over 1500 miles apart, and the boys in the air.

I finished the bagel, drank a green juice that tasted of spinach and ginger burn, wrote a few words about the morning in my journal, as the city moved around me, and the proprietors of the bagel shop argued with a DoorDash driver across a language barrier.

With Stephen Wilson, Jr. singing of American Gothic in my AirPods, I walked past Madison Square Garden and thought of the two games Cooper and I had seen here. I stood on the corner of 8th and 33rd, seemingly the only person looking at the world’s most famous arena. The city moved with millions of individual purposes, and the world’s most famous arena was just part of the wallpaper.

I thought of Pearl Jam in this place. What Release must feel like in the shadows of American history. What the longing of Black means in a city of 8 million strangers.

-

I entered Moynihan Train Hall, looking up to the skylight as the busyness of the city whisked past. The commuters arriving in the city, knowing they’d have to do it again eight or nine hours later. And I thought of my 3.4-mile trip home, and what it must be like to live a commuter’s life. Could I do it? Who would I be if this was the path I chose? Where would my home be, and would it still be her?

A chill washed over as I looked to the pink Tennessee marble floor, the same pattern as the original post office.

Confined to the present, we exist where we are. And our belief in what that is rests within, and in the minds of those we love. Who we are. What we think. What we become. Circumstances can influence, but ultimately, if you’re scanning for it, you find the FM signal of your soul. And sometimes you need that change of scenery to tune the perspective, to return you to the virtue that lives within. What’s within stays with you. Compass is within. The key is within. Virtue is within. You are within.

I opened Flighty. It was time to head to LGA to pick up the family. As I descended to take the E train to Queens, I opened Life360 again, seeing the girls on their way to the Seven Dwarfs Mine Train. Both on trains moving in different directions, miles and miles apart.

-

I emerged from the subway at the Jamaica station, taking the Q Link to LGA, seeing this ground I’d traveled before. The first time I’d returned to the airport to not fly, I was picking someone up. Like a local. Flighty open as I stood in the bus. We were on the Grand Central Expressway when I saw the jet make an approach. Holding on to the bar by the door, I looked to the right in the fog, and saw the A321 emerge from the clouds. I heard the jet roar overhead, descending just a few feet above the freeway, and saw it out of the left side of the window, knowing a good portion of my world just landed in Queens. I felt that knot in my throat, as I did when I saw the silhouettes of Hays and JR’s heads backlit by the light of Manhattan.

My sons, in this place.

Life360. They were in Cinderella’s Castle.

The Q Link pulled into the bowels of Terminal C, the elegant Delta-driven renovation of what I consider the nicest Delta terminal in the network. I saw the cab stand lined up in a long yellow line, and thought of the first time I rode a cab with each of my kids. Entering the baggage claim, I could see us putting on our jackets for a winter trip with Christian and Cate, and the pride at being able to provide, finally.

Life360 now had Christian and Cate in Small World, while I saw my sons walking closer to my location in LGA. Small world, indeed.

The long escalator from the arrivals section carried a steady stream of people. Faces all anonymous for the past 24 hours, a steady stream of unknown faces, nothing recognizable. Then, with the same instantaneous realization of a powerful memory, I saw their faces one by one.

My brother is leading the way. The blonde-haired boy who sat across from me in the rear-facing seat of the Caprice, watching the same road in reverse, a grown man now. A husband and father, a successful businessman with the courage to chart his own path. The unity from the bunk beds, from the bench seat of Truckmobile, and to the collective journey of raising our kids in proximity, still holds. While we’re different, we’re aligned in what’s important, starting with our family.

Banks stood beside his father. 6’4”. The tallest cousin now, but the small boy with the Cars books who once named every Lightning McQueen car is still visible in his face. He’s the perfect blend of his mother and father, and with his academic prowess, he’s bound for Georgia.

Then Dad. I thought of the young Lieutenant in a T-38 burning at 500 miles an hour above Valdosta, a wife at home and a son on the way, asking the same question of provision I’d carry decades later. The young man who chose family, landing the jet for the last time to build a different life on the ground. After law school, he made a place that wasn’t home into home. He took the bench and connected across every kind of person who came before it. The thick black hair has gone gray now, a slight limp earned somewhere along the way. As I saw him recognize me, I thought of the ethical foundation he’d built for Mike and me through every year that followed, granite under everything we’d ever stand on.

Then Mom. The blonde hair I’d known my whole life. The same smile she used to find me after basketball games and when I’d come home from college, the recognition that hadn’t changed in forty-six years. The hurricane of deep abiding love and the relentless drive toward what’s right, who didn’t deviate from what she believed and pursued it with the kind of courage that taught Mike and me what standards looked like. I could see her at Fernandina, holding small hands down the beach, teaching the grandsons to swim, holding them when they cried, the maternal gesture that traced from her through us and into her grandchildren. The architect of this trip, the woman who’d gathered eight of us across geography to be in one place for four days. I thought of how she loved us and protected us, as I her smile finds me from the escalator, the same one from every crowded space.

Behind her came my boys.

Hays first. Look at any family picture, and you’ll see his arm is around a sibling in every picture since he could stand. The connective tissue that connects with humanity, making it better. In the best sense, he changes the family dynamic when he’s home. And over the past several years, he’s grown into manhood. With discipline, he chose to become a better man, spiritually, physically, and emotionally, summoning the courage to try, and the result was actually becoming the son who inspires his father, with his easy smile.

JR is behind him. As he and Hays talk, I see him at the Braves game with his senior pals, unaware I’m watching, animated and loyal and fully himself in a way the stoic surface rarely shows. I see him in every picture, eyes alive, penetrating deep into the soul. His inner depth is maintained below the surface and beyond the reach of words. A month from graduation, 18, he was about to leave, to become his own man.

Then Cooper. The peace he carried as a child still draws my gaze. His Ownself is what I called him as a kid. He’s profound, asking insightful questions, as his depth radiates from his emotional intelligence. On the escalator, I see his eyes looking around as he descends, knowing he’s absorbing it all, knowing that he senses everything and penetrates to the truth of it. Two weeks earlier we’d watched the Lakers together in California, as we talked about our places in the world, while wrestling with the world.

After 24 hours with no one familiar around, this was my family descending from the heavens onto the runway at LaGuardia to the escalator to this place.

-

Packed into the Link, we emerged at the Roosevelt station to take the F train back into the city. All of us spread around the car, holding rails and gripping poles, my mother seated next to a man who hadn’t bathed, in what smelled like ever. On brand for the Subway.

At 34th Street Station, the doors opened. Herald Square. The same concrete blocks where I’d sat alone the day before, where the sky had turned from blue into pinks and oranges. This place where the introvert’s anonymity in 8 million is power. Now eight of us climbed the stairs into the same square, the family I’d been waiting for, stepping into the city I’d been alone in.

Above us, Manhattan.

Above us, only sky.

Hymns | Pearl Jam’s Black

Hymns | Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Simple Man

Hymns | Welcome to the Jungle

What would become Henry Gym was under construction my senior year. With the 1997 region tournament scheduled for this new gym, we knew we’d play there one night, but not tonight. Tonight we’d play in our jungle.

The tight confines of Grace Gym were familiar to those wearing the white jerseys from our hours in the summer. But it damn sure wasn’t comfortable for anyone watching a game. It was small. It was loud, and it was spartan. With the bleachers on one side, the volume echoed off the far concrete walls, such that even in the huddle the sound seemed to come from the cinder block wall behind you.

The first time I took the court for a school was for Albany Middle School, a few years earlier. I’d seen Westover and Albany High and Dougherty and Monroe take the court to the Alan Parsons Project, but that was in the Civic Center. So when the AMS locker room door opened, we burst through, and I was surprised to see a line of cheerleaders and students drawing us into this sudden light. The contrast between the locker room and what awaited on the other side of the door was stark. How quickly the light and emotion and energy changes. How you go from anticipation and preparation to kinetic execution and emotion.

One door opens, everything changes.

While the new DWS gym was under construction, we dressed in the cafeteria. The small room that’s now an art room. It was pushed up against the Grace Gym wall, such that we could hear the buzzer, the fans, and we’d know when the girls’ game would end. We sat at tables, our bags on lunch tables. There were no lockers against the blocks, which had been painted over for decades. Nothing about the room suggested what it prepared you for. This was a cafeteria by day, a holding chamber by night, a transition between who you were when you walked in and who you’d be when you ran out as a team, dressed for a game.

Tonight we were 10-2, and Sherwood was 11-1. Both of us ranked in the top five in the state. They’d made the final four the year before, while we struggled through a 7-20 season. But this season brought Coach Gruhl back to the boys, and we were resurgent, so the game produced an electric charge. As Gordy went over the last parts of the game plan, we could hear the buzz outside the makeshift locker room, voices gathering, folks waiting to get into the gym. The final horn sounded as the girls’ game ended. It was time.

We opened the door. Behind us, quiet. In front of us, folks amassed in the hall. There was a palpable energy, especially as we realized it was so full that folks would be turned away.

Standing between both sets of bleachers, we lined up in our usual order, and awaited Slash’s guitar. The slow, climbing, menacing crawl that cut through the cinder block and the wood floor and the Knight painted on the wall and the gravity pressing your body’s nerves. The same riff that would call out thirty-five years of Knights, as the opening notes of Welcome to the Jungle echoed off the walls and the steel trusses above.

We take the court. Cheerleaders and students line both sides, forming a corridor of bodies, dark behind you, light ahead, two lines forming a chute, and the riff pulling you through. You burst through into the gym, into the noise, into the light, while Axl Rose screams what you already know.

We see folks lined around the gym, up on the stage, packed into the bleachers. Game time.

You know where you are.

-

The song is comforting while you live it. As you warm up, though, you don’t yet realize you’ll live it every time you hear it from those nights on.

You know it’s not a jungle per se. We’re at Deerfield-Windsor, for God’s sake. But it was our jungle. Our home. This confined gym, where we’d build a decades-long run of private school basketball success. Where we practiced in the summer.

There’s something spiritual about working alone in a gym, preparing for your school’s season, and then standing in the same place while it’s packed, while you’re leading the team. The solitude of preparation against the collective of execution. Yet in the heat of execution, there’s also a solitude, a peace that comes from the reassurance of preparation.

You can be in the moment, in the zone, yet completely at peace. And at other times the moment may overwhelm, the nerves may get to you. And in those moments, when you feel the emotion rising, the anxiety lurking, you lean on what you know. What’s confirmed.

And Welcome to the Jungle, man, that song would simultaneously energize and calm, bringing us all together for the moment. We’d meet the moment together.

Years later the song finds you. You’re in a truck, alone, windows down, and the riff comes through the speakers. The leg taps. The hands tighten on the wheel. You can smell the paint and the sweat and feel the wood floor give and hear the whistle and the cheers when the dunk goes down. Or you come back home to watch the Knights play, and you’re in the bleachers, and the riff hits, and for a few seconds you’re not in the stands. You’re behind that door again, lined up, waiting to run.

You know where you are.

-

William Bruce Rose Jr. was born in Lafayette, Indiana. His biological father left before Rose could form a memory of him. His mother remarried a Pentecostal preacher who beat the boy between church services. Rose believed the man was his father until he was seventeen. When he found out the truth, he shed the name of the man who beat him, choosing his own. W. Axl Rose.

Rose was arrested more than twenty times before leaving Indiana. When authorities threatened to charge him as a habitual criminal, he got on a bus. Seventeen years old, heading to Los Angeles with only a future ahead, because there’s nothing in his past to return to. He arrived with nothing and lived like it. Sidewalks. Couches. A string of bands that formed and fell apart before they played a show. Three years of that before the pieces locked.

By 1985, the classic Guns N’ Roses lineup had formed. Rose, Slash, Izzy Stradlin, Duff McKagan, Steven Adler. They lived together in a communal rehearsal space in West Hollywood they called the Hell House with no air conditioning. No kitchen. Junkies and runaways and dealers wandered through the unlocked front door. They had nothing to their names but each other and the songs.

Slash had a riff, though. He played it for Rose on acoustic guitar. They took it to the band. Each added to it, working it through the GnR lab. Spontaneous. Unanalyzed. The whole arrangement came together in about three hours in one session. It was the first true collaborative effort of the lineup that would make Appetite for Destruction.

Rose wrote the lyrics to Welcome to the Jungle while visiting a friend near Seattle. The distance from LA allowed him to see the city clearly, what it demanded, what it took, what it offered in return. He wrote about survival on the Hollywood streets. You learn to live like an animal in the jungle where we play. The title came from an encounter with a homeless man who shouted at Rose as he stepped off a bus: You know where you are? You’re in the jungle, baby. You’re gonna die.

This was the late-80s, and Geffen Records couldn’t sell the video to MTV. Reluctantly, the network finally agreed to air it once, at four in the morning on a Sunday. The phones lit up. Viewer demand surged. Within a year, Appetite for Destruction was the number one album in America, the best-selling debut in U.S. history. VH1 would later name “Welcome to the Jungle” the greatest hard rock song of all time. Rolling Stone readers named it the greatest sports anthem.

The song was written as a survival story. A kid telling you what the city would do to you, yet empowering you to stand unmovable within. A warning about what waits on the other side of the threshold. But it didn’t stay a survival story. It became an anthem. A battle cry. The warning became the war drum.

The song crossed from vulnerability to power, and it carried every Knight across that same line every time they burst through that door.

Axl’s screams and Slash’s riff would simultaneously inspire, pump the adrenaline, and calm with those familiar notes of home.

You know where you are.

-

Gordy Gruhl coached basketball at DWS for thirty-five years, serving stints as the girls coach, the boys coach, and in some seasons both. By the time his career wrapped, he was the eleventh-winningest coach in the nation. In the nation.

A Gordy Gruhl team would shift tactics based on its strengths, but the fundamentals and standards were anchored. Some years he had transcendent players like Andre Young or Joey Carroll, but for the majority of his tenure he won with team-based basketball, fundamentals, and excellence in execution.

During his tenure coaching boys basketball, he won five state championships across multiple eras. None were back to back. Nor were any even in the same era. His first was 1991. Second in 1997, third in 2003, fourth in 2010 and his last in 2015. Averages about one every five years, meaning that he did it with different players each time.

He was a constant in the basketball success, built on standards of performance. Excellence in execution. Adherence to fundamentals. The belief that details matter. All constants, enacted daily, in practice, in preparation, in the way players carried themselves. The program had a standard, and those of us who wore the uniform are proud of that standard’s legacy. Connected by the jersey. Connected by the standard.

And connected by a song. Welcome to the Jungle was a constant, too. The soundtrack of the program. A ritual. The song was the rubicon between preparation and performance, between the private work and the public arena, even though both took place in the same space.

You know where you are.

-

I wrote a series about Deerfield-Windsor School (WT Henry, Knight Line). The final three segments of that series was an exposition on the school’s seal: Veritas, Officium, Honestas.

Deerfield-Windsor, at the height of its aspirations, pursues its own path. Acts with class. Holds itself accountable to the three words anchoring the school’s seal: Veritas, Officium, Honestas. Truth, duty, honor. The standard should govern everything.

When we adhere to it, it instills a pride that transcends winning and seeps into everything to do with being a strong component of the Knight Line.

This year, after three decades, the team removed Welcome to the Jungle as the song playing when the Knights took the court. Shifted to a contemporary song instead. The decision was made without thought, ceremony, and certainly without understanding what was being severed. It was treated as a playlist update. A generational refresh. It was none of those things.

The removal is a symptom of a subliminal erosion of standards, of slowly fading from what pulls us to the Knight Line. The song change was likely flippant, not given any thought, which is worse than a deliberate decision. Deliberate would mean they knew what they were cutting. A passive cut is a confession, indicating the standard was abdicated before the song was.

The rupture between the standard and the present, is indifference toward Veritas, Officium, and Honestas. And indifference is how standards wither. One concession at a time. The fundamentals. The details. The excellence in execution. The belief that what you inherit carries an obligation. All slowly fades away in the haze of apathy.

The seal on the wall draws no eyes. That drift whispers the confession of a thousand small concessions.

The teams that now take the floor may believe themselves to be unbound by the past. But this is a program that measures longevity and standards by banners hanging in Henry Gym. And there’s a pronounced pause in boys basketball banners. No region championships. No state championships. The banners ceased when the standards were surrendered.

The song played for a few years after the standards began to recede, before being replaced this season. Perhaps that's fitting. May well be the song belongs to the standard.

Maybe the song returns when the standards do.

The banners that do hang in the gym are fading. Brighter white text for the recent championships, off-white for those decades old.

Man, the stories that fabric whispers.

You know where you are.

The squadron lot at NAS Pensacola, adjacent to Sherman Field, is empty when his truck pulls in. It’s five-thirty in the morning. The base is stirring with the hum of action from the ground crews. A tug is pulling a training jet from the hangar, the distant clatter of a tool cart and a drill, a fuel truck ambles into position. The amber tarmac lights still burn against a black sky that’ll soon give way to a Florida sunrise painting.

The pilot steps out of his truck in his blue flight suit, custom-sewn in downtown Pensacola, by the same tailor who’s crafted the iconic blue flight suits for all Blue Angels past.

The Florida humidity hits, releasing the hold of the truck’s cab chill.

A Kodiak leather briefcase is in his left hand, a Yeti cup in his right, with coffee steam escaping the lid. He crosses the lot toward the squadron building, his boots rhythmic on the pavement, the Blue Angels squadron patch catching the night’s artificial light.

Inside, the ready room is bustling but quiet. The aviators are preparing, gathering weather reports and mission briefings. A few nods. The industrial coffee maker is going, the drip audible in the hustle.

The Blue Angels emblem hangs above the briefing board. He sets the briefcase on a table.

The pre-flight brief begins on the minute. The show sequence. The diamond pass. The opposing solos, the crossings, the timing tolerances measured in feet and seconds. The minimum altitudes. The ground references. The awareness of where every airplane is in the formation at every second of the show.

The flight line walk is practiced and consistent, the blue jets shining in the early morning sun, lined up and ready.

The preflight begins at the nose and works clockwise, dialing in on the details. Each check allowed the next one, nothing skipped, nothing assumed, because the Super Hornet is forty-seven thousand pounds of rocket ship and avionics and fuel. Every system has to be aligned before the wheels leave the ground, and the six-ship joins up in the delta over the Gulf.

The pilot walks the jet the way the old cavalry officers walked their mounts before battle, every strap and buckle and line, because a man who goes into the sky in formation with five other airplanes can leave nothing to chance. Control the controllables.

Up the ladder. Straps in. Helmet on. Oxygen mask clicked in and tested. The canopy lowers, and the world narrows, the instruments, the kneeboard, the HUD coming alive.

The Boss gives the signal, and the engines spool. First the right, then the left, the low hum rising to a thunderous, even rumble that seeps into the cockpit and settles into the bones. The airframe is alive. Pilot and jet as one.

The Super Hornet moves deliberately on the ground. At the hold short, he waits with the other five for the tower. The runway stretches out in front of him, and beyond it the coast, and beyond the coast the Gulf of Mexico, and beyond the Gulf the sky holding the last of the night and the first suggestion of the promise of a day above Florida’s most beautiful white sand beaches.

Cleared for takeoff.

He positions the jet, rolls the throttles forward, and the afterburners light, and the jet defies earthbound physics. The acceleration pins him into the seat, the airframe shuddering against the force of its own thrust, the runway lights streaking past faster than the eye can separate, the nose rotates up, the gear thumping into the wells, the coast falling away beneath him, and the Gulf opening up below in the first pink and gold of the sunrise.

The Hornet climbs into the waning dark, the horizon tilting as he banks to rejoin the formation.

A Blue Angel goes to work.

-

Meanwhile, in Athens, Georgia, the lot at UGA’s campus transit, tucked off River Road, is empty when my Ford Taurus pulls in. It’s also five-thirty, maybe a few minutes past. The sky is still black over Athens, the first suggestion of dawn’s rising not yet whispered. The air’s cool on a September morning, the indecisive daily temperature vacillating between hot and cool.

A few buses idle in the yard, their running lights red and amber against the concrete, the diesels humming low. Somewhere beyond the fence, the first sounds of a city awakening are audible, the hum of a town that’ll be up and at ‘em in an hour. Right now, though, it’s a college town asleep.

I step out of the Taurus, Florida State hat on my head, LL Bean boots on my feet, backpack slung over my shoulder. I cross the lot toward dispatch, my boots rhythmic on the pavement, the transit sign over the door reflecting the parking lot’s amber lights.

Inside, dispatch is bustling but quiet. The drivers are preparing, checking their bus numbers, scanning their routes. A few nods. The coffee pot on the counter is going, the drip audible in the hustle.

The UGA transit logo hangs above the dispatch desk. I check the board, confirm my bus, pick up my route sheet, and the timetable. The morning’s notes are already posted: the construction detour on South Lumpkin, a lane closure on East Campus Rd, 15% chance of rain, and the class day’s enrollment numbers for the shift. Positioning is critical, because one bus out of position cascades, like flight disruptions at Hartsfield-Jackson.

Knowing where every bus is on the route at every second of the shift is paramount to Top Gun Transit operations.

The walk across the lot is familiar, the steel thoroughbreds lined up, diesels humming in the dark. My walk is slow motion, set to an inspirational Hans Zimmer soundtrack. The elite walk this yard, the best of the best.

The pre-trip begins at the front bumper and works clockwise. Headlights. Turn signals. Marker lights. Tires. Each check earns the next one, nothing assumed, because this horse is eighteen tons of steel and glass and diesel and seats, and every system has to be right before the wheels leave the yard and students climb aboard. I walk the bus the way the old cavalry officers walked their mounts before battle, every light and line and latch, because a man who pulls onto Sanford Drive with something he did not verify is not a man who should be driving college kids. Like a Top Gun, the way a fighter pilot preps an F-18.

Up the steps. Into the driver’s seat. Seat’s adjusted. I press the ignition button, the Detroit diesel coughs once, then catches, then climbs into the low, even rumble of eight cylinders, finding their rhythm, the vibration coming up through the floor and into the wheel and into my chest, the bus alive under my boots.

This steel horse is ready to gallop.

I set the mirrors. Left, the blind spot and the rear axle. Right, the curb line. The interior, the empty rows behind me, seats waiting on Them Dawgs to take their spot. Athens, Georgia, man.

I release the parking brake. The air hisses. The bus shudders once, as this steel horse moves slowly on the ground, heavy, deliberate.

Leaving the yard, I position the bus in the lane, roll through the gears, and get a feel for how this bus responds, confirming the feel necessary to captain this ship. The streets of Athens open up through the windshield in the last of the dark, the first pink of the Georgia sunrise just beginning to edge the sky over the east side of town, the bus finally at home in the medium it was built for.

From the windshield of this steed, mine eyes see this Athens glory.

I go to work.

-

My route starts gradually, as the day does on campus. Peace pulses through a college campus in the morning, and there’s a particular serenity to morning at the University of Georgia. It’s calm, resplendent, accentuating the gods’ purview of this garden.

The first red and black wave hits around eight. Traffic swells as classes change, friends drop students off, and the population in these few square miles grows. By eight-thirty, the campus is full, and every stop has a line.

The intersection at the top of Sanford Drive is the heartbeat of campus on a class day. From that hub, students pump from one point to all points of the campus.

Approaching that intersection, from Memorial Hall, I take a right, arriving at the intersection fully loaded, knowing a right turn is coming.

Listen up, bus driving disciplines. The turn, though, is not mastered in the turn. The turn is conquered in the positioning.

I position the bus as far left in the right lane as I can. The left placement buys me every inch of room I will need when the light turns, and I turn the wheel right. I look to the right down Baldwin Dr. to see where the oncoming cars are parked. I look at the sidewalks to see how many folks will be crossing. When I make this right turn, I’ll cross into oncoming traffic, swinging the bus far into the other lanes. There is no second attempt.

Without that setup, the bus swings too tight to the sidewalk, the rear wheels track inside the turn, and I end up pinched against the oncoming lane with a stoplight on a hill behind me, students pulsing everywhere.

You have to position the bus ahead of the maneuver.

The light turns.

Game time.

We sit on an incline, so I gently apply the gas while keeping a foot on the brake so the bus doesn’t roll back downhill. My steed moves forward, swings wide right, the front clearing the oncoming lane, the rear tracking clean through where I planned it to track off the sidewalk. The turn flows because the setup was right. The passengers feel a smooth right turn, and they see Maverick in the chair, oblivious to the three hundred yards of positioning.

Positioning.

That’s thinking through the move and where you need to be before you make the decision.

I’ve sought to adhere to that principle ever since. You rarely win in the moment; you win in the moments of preparation.

-

Later in the morning, around 10 AM on another circuit, I’ll bring a capacity bus from South Campus to North Campus. On Sanford Drive, heading north by the Sciences as the stadium looms, we’ll hit that left turn dip, down the road toward the Stadium, and across the bridge, the famous descent toward the nadir of campus.

The bus is full. Every seat is taken. Folks standing in the aisles, in the doors.

Loaded, she’s a different beast. Empty, she corners flat.

Full, the lean comes first, the bus’s body swaying as the weight shifts within, force pushing me as the bus rolls right into the Sanford Bridge descent. The chassis groans. I am already off the pedal before the empty-bus brake point because I know what this weight does to stopping distance. If I wait until the empty-bus moment, I’m late.

Feel. It’s all about feel, about being “ahead of the bus.”

Feel comes from reps, not from the manual. Not even from training. The distance between the driver and the bus has to disappear. That only comes from feel, a product of the work.

-

Back when I started at Campus Transit, just two weeks on the job, I was running the Milledge Avenue route on a Friday afternoon in the Fall. It’s early afternoon, so folks are mainly leaving. It’s peak complexity. Pedestrians on both sides of the street. Cyclists weaving. A delivery truck on Lumpkin. The schedule is in my head, and I’m trying to stay ahead of the bus. I check the mirrors every few seconds, left, right, interior, and back to the road. Inside the bus, several people are standing because the seats are full. Outside the bus, Athens at class change on a Friday afternoon, the sidewalks moving, an ocean alive.

Sensory awareness. You take all the data points, compute them, read them, and prepare for situations.

A kid is walking on the sidewalk to my right, a copy of the Red and Black open in both hands. He is not looking where he is going; he’s reading. I watch him drift, a step at a time, his trajectory angling toward the curb. I have already slowed when he trips. The curb catches his foot, and he falls forward into the street, the newspaper fanning out around him as he hits the pavement.

I have already stopped.

He gets up, embarrassed, picks up the paper, and gets back on the sidewalk. The bus rolls on.

Situational awareness.

Awareness is not in the reaction, it’s in the anticipation, sayeth, Top Guns.

-

On my last day on the job, two days before graduation, Christian joined me. Graduation was the impediment to my moving home, to us beginning our lives together. I’d move out of my apartment in Athens in a few days. She was here to help me. We would ride off into the sunset together, literally.

On my last circuit of the Orbit route, my college friends met me at a stop. Celebratory, it was late in the day, crowds were thin, so they jumped on, and we reminisced as I ran the last circuit. We laughed, told jokes, and they made fun of me for even being a bus driver. The late sun angled through the windshield and lit the aisle orange, catching on the faces I’d known for four years, the ones that would scatter in seventy-two hours.

As we rode the bus, we knew the end was coming. That what we had in college was ending, and our lives from this place were beginning. And like much of life, you don’t appreciate the ramifications of either at the time. The mood was exuberant, even as we knew it was ending. But we didn’t know what was beginning or what was ending. Clarity comes with distance.

At the last stop before the yard, I drop them off. We hug, shake hands, celebrate again, then the bus goes quiet as I close the doors. It’s just Christian and me. The sun has long since set. I look at her, knowing she’s my life, destiny, but having no concept of what either was. Clarity comes with distance.

I’m driving from one version of myself to one I haven’t met yet, with home sitting in the seat beside me.

I pull the bus into the yard, then into the parking place. I kill the engine. The vibration settles out of the floor and out of the wheel and out of my chest.

The post-trip begins at the front and works around. Same order as the pre-trip, in reverse. Walk the interior first, row by row, check for anything left behind, a backpack, a Red and Black folded into a seat pocket. Nothing today. Out and around the exterior. Lights. Tires. Log the mileage. Log the fuel. Fill out the post-trip report.

Nothing to report. The bus ran clean.

I honor the craft by respecting it.

-

Christian and I walk across the bus line, back through the double doors, into dispatch. I hand the report across the counter to the second shift, Unit 2. A nod. Nothing said.

We walk back down the hall, out the other side, into the lot. The Taurus is where I always parked it. We get in, and I pull onto River Road, as the yard hides behind the hills in my rearview mirror. I’m no longer a student. No longer a bus driver. No classes ahead.

Yet the rest of my life is waiting.

Home is beside me.

The bus is behind me.

The principles aren’t.

In high school, the FUMC youth group would tent camp in the Deep Creek Campground on the edge of the Smoky Mountains National Park, in the cool of a North Carolina late July, after enduring a suffocating South Georgia summer. At home the air sat on your chest, compressing you in a constrictive wool embrace. Along the creek the air moved. You could smell the pine resin, dip your toe in the cold creek water, and see the sun shining through the leaves, lighting the exposed rock. We’d stepped into a different realm, one of natural mountain beauty.

Deep Creek, which wasn’t really deep, ran from the mountains through granite and rocks, pure and clear and cold enough to numb your foot. The flowing water sound was constant, a sonic therapy in this meditative landscape.

After dinner in the campground, we’d head off to hike the ridge. We’d find a rocky clearing and turn our eyes upward. The sky turned from a regal shade of purple to deep navy to black, and the stars burst forth in the darkness of this place. We’d lay on our backs in the grass alongside the rock, the ground still holding the day’s warmth while the air above cooled. A breeze pulled a shiver through your chest.

But from the ridge, even from that distance, you could see the campfire back in camp. A faint flicker. Red embers, orange flames dancing against the black.

When it was time to head back, the trail was darker than when we’d climbed it. The temperature was lower. Branches brushed our shoulders. Our own breathing was louder than it should be, amplified by the roar of silence and the distant rumble of the creek.

Approaching camp, the fire grew larger with each step. You walked toward it without deciding to.

When we arrived back from the ridge into the circle no one called out. Faces turned, then turned back. Each in a meditative trance when introspection meets relaxation and beauty marks the peace of the moment. An ember climbed the dark and faded. Woodsmoke permeated everything, your jacket, your hair, the blanket draped over a stump. A log split and crackled. Voices low, unhurried. Nobody came to the fire to connect. They came because they were cold, or tired, or because the dark had been enough for one evening. And yet the fire drew people close and let the warmth and proximity conduct the vigil.

The conversation came later, or it didn’t. Either way, you were warm.

On a dark morning the Quickie was the same way.

The first door opened to a foyer. A stone wall was on the right, with a cigarette vending machine with Waylon Jennings’ face on it pushed up against it. Within the foyer, you’d move to the second door. And when you pushed through, man, all senses aligned, you’d arrived at the Quickie. The smell signified this place. I can still breathe in an arrival into the Quickie, even now, years later. Bacon frying, sausage on the flat top, eggs cracking on the griddle, grits boiling in a pot to the left of the grill. Coffee so strong you could taste it in the air. And above it all, Marlboro smoke rising from the counter into the amber stained glass light fixtures, where it pooled and hung, as a floating veil over the morning’s proceedings.

Men sat in formation along the counter. With a synchronized look to the right when that interior door opened, they’d size up who was entering. Their forearms were up on the counter, blue jeans and overalls, Skoal rings worn into back pockets, gray beards stained brown from years of nicotine. Leaning forward, their faces over their coffee, the steam billowed into their beards while the cigarettes burned beside them.

The Andros brothers came from Voutiro, Greece, in 1952. They opened the Quickie as a counter on Pine Avenue in downtown Albany, and when the city moved west they followed it to 1906 North Slappey Boulevard. The address it would hold for the rest of its existence.

Behind the grill the Andros brothers worked with their sleeves rolled up tight against their arms, with wary eyes for anyone new. This was a place measured in decades. They were happy to serve you, damn good food with no bullshit, and they damn sure didn’t want anything but order in their place of business.

Their cohesion is understandable. Leaving your homeland, travelling to a new country, relying on each other, establishing a restaurant, as a family, on the other side of the world. Then once it provides a life, there’s a reverence in such an undertaking. A communion with family present and past, and a realization how important this is. You don’t want some bullshit artist taking it down.

Jackie moved through it all, careening from booth to booth and chair to chair. Fire red hair, red lipstick, yet never a smile. She never stopped. She just worked. Pouring tea, writing orders, slinging coffee, weaving between the counter and the booths. Jackie was a machine, and you’d damn well be ready to order when she came your way.

Inside, faux leather booths lined the wall next to the windows, opposite the counter. You’d stick to them in summer. You’d slide in during winter and settle close to whoever was next to you. The booths were tight. Togetherness is part of the experience, your comfort comes second.

The sweet tea came in glasses with a cut diamond pattern pressed into the bottom. Real glasses, cold to the touch, filled with soft pebble ice and tea that was pure and light and damn so good. Nectar of the gods before I was old enough for coffee. Ashtrays decorated each table, along with giant sugar bottles and salt and hot sauce and the menus we didn’t need.

The Quickie was an accepting place, even while reserved. Acceptance is entirely different from friendly. If your face had been seen before, you belonged, and belonging was silence. Subtle nods, turning eyes to you, then returning to the task, knowing you were part of the fabric. Too many eyes on you was a bad thing. You could sit at the counter and be known without being acknowledged. The Quickie allowed and celebrated tranquility and calm.

Early in the mornings, the day stretched out before us, the sun rose behind the restaurant. What toil awaited, heartache, joys, stresses, what we each dealt with from that place was as unique as each of us, but the Quickie offered a grounded start. A respite before the storm of whatever the day would throw at us. All of us knew, at least while we were at the Quickie the world couldn’t land any knockout punches. Those might’ve come later.

Each arrival would elicit the same feeling of home, a brief pause for the soul. On a dark morning, when you’d be waiting for clearing traffic on Slappey so you could turn left, you could look into the Quickie, seeing the morning’s activity, and the warm glow of a place that was home, and know you were about to enter that sanctuary, after passing by Waylon.

Pat would cut a quieter path. One of service, yes, but also of disdain for the machinations of a morning. Pat was initially reserved. She’d hide in the back, let you think she was apathetic, let you believe she wasn’t listening. Then she’d hit you with a quip that landed before you saw it coming, and by the time you caught on she was already laughing as she walked away.

Behind her smile was a wariness and a seriousness that was at first difficult to discern. Pat worked hard and loved her family. She bottled up whatever she had to give back to this world and ended up giving it to us. She loved through it all. We didn’t know much of her life outside the Quickie, she didn’t say much, instead keeping the focus on us. There were times you could see her frustration with the ownership, the weight of whatever she carried through those doors each morning.

Over the years she took a liking to us, especially to my brother Michael. She was a counselor, a listening ear, a wise ass, and a friend, all in the same conversation. Sometimes in the same sentence. And you never knew what was coming, profound wisdom or a kick in the pants. All were possible. Over time all were needed.

She had a way of paying for our meals when we got older. We’d ask for the check and the server would say someone up front already took care of it.

One homecoming, back from college, I asked Becky where she and Michael were going for dinner. Deadpan: “Probably Pat’s house.”

Both Michael and I brought our future wives to meet her. A test, whether we called it that or not. Pat wanted the best for her boys. Both passed. Both are still around.

My senior year, on gameday mornings, my dad and I would hit the Quickie early for breakfast. It became a tradition, reinforced as we continued to line up wins. Superstitious. Same booth each time. Pat would walk by and didn’t even have to take the order.

We’d buy an Albany Herald out of the box, two quarters in, and start with the sports page. We’d read about Dougherty, who was also on a state championship run, and Westover, who you know all about, and Sherwood, who was having a stellar season. We’d see what Daniel Shirley and Mark Lastinger had to say about the Knights in that night’s game. It was how we connected, talking the matchups, the game plan, seeking to calm ourselves on gameday. Knowing that the time we were in this booth we didn’t face cases, grades, or the pressure of what was coming. We just sat.

Two over medium, grits, patty sausage, white toast, and sweet tea.

The food arrived steaming on a white plate with a brown trim. I’d situate the eggs on the left side when I adjusted the plate. The eggs had that crispy edge from being fried just right, but the yolk was perfectly runny, and when I cut into it the yellow pooled across the plate toward the grits.

The grits were to the right. Stone-ground, stirred with a wooden spoon, bubbling long before I woke up. I’d put a dab of butter on top and watch it melt as I cut the eggs.

The sausage was uptown. A crown to the morning meal. Patty sausage. Mashed, not manufactured in perfect links or round circles. This was pan sausage formed when pressed on the grill. True sausage with the perfect amount of spice, pressed flat until the edges crisped.

We’d eat. The servers whizzed past. The men at the counter stared ahead into their mornings. The bacon sizzled, the coffee poured, the world beyond Slappey went on, just as our days soon would.

We sat in communion at the Quickie, summoning fortitude for life ahead, though all I knew I was preparing for was a basketball game that night.

I appreciate that pause more now, having tried to build the same rhythm with my own.

On gameday afternoons I’d slide in after school during the lull, find a booth at the end, trying to avoid the cigarette smoke. Hamburger steak and fries. Multiple glasses of sweet tea. Nobody in the Quickie knew who I was or cared that I was about to play a high school basketball game. Pat knew, but that was different. The anonymity was the point. Step out of the hype, quiet your mind, and just eat.

In the summer we’d hit the Quickie before taking the boat out for the day. Two over medium, grits, patty sausage, white toast, and sweet tea.

We’d gather there before youth trips with FUMC. We’d gather before we went off to college. We’d gather for a prayer breakfast with Woody Boyd. We’d gather when we came home. The Quickie was our meeting place, a beacon from home.

Some evenings I’d go alone. After I could drive, feeling out my introverted independence, I’d order the hamburger steak and fries and sit amazed that the food was this good at the same place I’d eaten breakfast that morning. Sometimes I ate there three times in the same day.

Once I began my first job at FUMC, Dad and I shifted the gameday tradition to a Wednesday tradition. I in the ministry, learning how to work in a professional world and a religious one, taking seminary classes while serving as the youth minister.

Same booth. Two over medium, grits, patty sausage, white toast, and sweet tea. My dad across from me. Our order was on the table. As was the Herald.

But the subject was different.

My ministry was ending, though, and we were coming to terms with how to proceed. The path I’d followed since high school, the one everyone affirmed, the one that felt chosen for me, was buckling under the burden of what I’d endured. I’d come to know leaving the ministry was right subconsciously before my conscious mind agrees. Knowing didn’t stop the hurt or alleviate the fear of the new unknown. Grieving what the path was supposed to be while already summoning courage for a different one.

My dad sat across from me. The sausage was the same. The servers moved. The coffee was fresh. The men at the counter stared ahead. The world on Slappey continued while my life cracked open in this booth. The unchanging place holding me while everything inside me changed.

We made a decision in that booth. And I’m damn sure proud of the road we chose.

People drove past on Slappey, in their own cars, their own mornings. They didn’t know what was being decided in this place. And I wonder what I’ve driven past, what decisions sat behind windows I never looked through.

I didn’t appreciate what the Quickie was while I was in it. How could you? It was there. It would always be there. A certainty in a world of uncertainties.

But it wasn’t to be.

The Andros family sold it in 2007, and it changed hands a few times before closing around 2020. The building at 1906 North Slappey still stands. Other restaurants have tried the space, but the Quickie is gone.

With Pat, we’ve lost touch. But there’s a part of Pat’s soul in the Revell family today.

As I write this, I return to that ridge, older, further from that fire, but so much closer to the one within. I can see where it was, breathe the cool air, see the stars above, but I can’t walk back to it. Just as I can see the diamond-cut glasses and the pebble ice and the patty sausage pressed flat on the grill. The amber light through the stained-glass fixture. Jackie’s red hair. I can hear Pat’s quips. I can see Dad listening, seeking to offer counsel. The Andros brothers, sleeves rolled, wary eyes. Pat, laughing as she walked away. The men along the counter, forearms up, smoke rising, the morning still ahead of them. My dad across the table with the Herald open between us.

The warmth exists only in the looking back.

It was just breakfast. It’s just a booth. But over that breakfast, in those booths, I prepared to face Sherwood. Left for a state championship game. Left to go to Oglethorpe. Left again to go to Athens. Decided to pursue the ministry. Preached my first sermon. Gave up the ministry. Decided on banking. Brought in the woman I’d marry.

Two over medium, grits, patty sausage, white toast, and sweet tea.

Only from the ridge, in the cold, looking back at where the fire was, seeing inside the warmth of those windows on a dark cool morning, do you understand the Quickie held every version of you. Still does.

Long live the Quickie.

I had a twenty-dollar bill, given to me by my aunt for my birthday. So, when my mom was running errands at the mall, I walked past the fountain and took my twenty to Turtles on the far corner by Sears.

One of my friends had Pearl Jam’s Ten on cassette tape, and we listened to it at his house, but I didn’t own the album, yet the songs remained circling in my head. Now that we live in an era where the entire canon of music is available with a search, it’s difficult to remember the days when you had to own the music, catch it on the radio, or hope your friends had a copy you could borrow.

From the opening of Once to the initial guitar riff of Alive I could sense Pearl Jam was different.

The visceral intensity I could appreciate then. The lyrical introspection would come later, as life progressed, as I moved through the world.

Long before the iPhone, Turtles was an excursion into popular culture, a place where you could position yourself legit, even though you had a G.I. Joe aircraft carrier and Matchbox cars and Legos in your room. You could envision yourself as a cool kid. If only for a brief moment, until you returned to your mom’s station wagon for the ride home.

Alone, with my $20, I entered the music store, rock runes of the early 90s thumped in the speakers. Walking the aisles I saw names I’d glimpsed when I was able to sneak a forbidden look at MTV. Or artists I’d heard about from kids at school. A row over was Dr. Dre, Snoop, and Tupac Shakur. The cassette cases were hinged open so you could read the liner notes without buying, seeing the art, the thank-yous and the shout-outs and the production credits.

Metallica, Stone Temple Pilots, Nirvana, Red Hot Chili Peppers. I found the section I was looking for, and found the album. The band member’s bodies suspended between stillness and explosion. Fists raised like a team breaking a huddle or boys swearing a blood oath. Pearl Jam spelled out at the top in a font that looks hand-stamped, imperfect. Washed magenta, the color of neon lights in rain-slicked streets. No faces. No names splashed across the front. The figures dark against that color, silhouettes more than portraits, as a concert photograph taken a half-second too late, when the stage lights start to shift.

I picked it up, held it in my hands. Turned it over and saw the songs listed, unaware the listing of names would become the soundtrack of my life. I walked with it to the counter, she rang it up, and I handed her my twenty.

I walked back into the mall with the cassette in the bag, seeking to rejoin my mom. I couldn’t wait to get home.

-

In 1990, a Seattle band called Mother Love Bone was on the cusp of breaking through. They had the songs, they had the label, they had a frontman named Andrew Wood with the “it” factor.

Right when the trajectory was upward, weeks before their debut album dropped, Wood overdosed, passing away at twenty-four. Mother Love Bone ended on this fault line.

Stone Gossard and Jeff Ament, the guitarist and bassist who’d poured years into Mother Love Bone, struggled through grief, alternating between its paralysis and propulsion. For months they grieved, imagined, seeking to heal.

Then Gossard started writing again. Darker stuff, harder stuff, music from within himself.

He recruited a guitarist named Mike McCready, a magician, a master of the Stratocaster, to join. Initially, McCready, Gossard, and Ament recorded some instrumental demos, five songs with no words, just the initial brushstrokes, awaiting additional mediums of art.

They needed a poet.

One of those demos was a ballad in the key of E. Gossard called it “E Ballad” because, well it’s an arrangement in E, and the lyricist hadn’t yet arrived.

The tape made its way down the Pacific coast. It landed in San Diego, where Eddie Vedder was working security on the night shift at a gas plant, surfing every day, living in mundanity, until the tape arrived. A friend gave him the tape.

Then he wasn’t in mundanity. Life change in an instance.

Vedder listened. He stayed up all night writing and recording vocals over three of the tracks, a fever dream of words and melody, and mailed the tape back to Seattle.

The band listened and knew immediately. They flew him up.

On the plane north, Vedder wrote lyrics for that ballad in E. He called it “Black.” The words a plunging depth of heartache and despair, yet with a tinge of hope. A relationship ended, a girl who had walked away, the brutal ache of watching someone you love become someone else’s future.

Vedder was twenty-six years old, flying toward a city he didn’t know, joining a band formed from the wreckage of another man’s death, writing a song about loss while suspended thirty thousand feet above the earth.

Arriving in Seattle, they went to work.

The guys recorded Ten in a month. The studio was called London Bridge, tucked away in Seattle, the same room where they’d tracked the Temple of the Dog tribute to Andrew Wood with Soundgarden. The budget was seventy thousand dollars, which was nothing, but was everything when you’re young and hungry and believe the songs will save you. The producer, Rick Parashar, played piano on “Black,” those subdued keys that hold the song together.

Ten came out in August of 1991. It crept up the charts through word of mouth, late-night radio, kids telling other kids. By the time I walked into Turtles with my birthday twenty in 1992, Ten had become something of a phenomenon. I just knew that when my friend played it in his bedroom, something closed within me opened, and I needed to find out what was inside.

-

I sat down in my room. My Sony stereo was perched above shelves that held children’s books. The same books my mother read to me for bedtime stories. There were Legos in crates. Some of the Legos, like the fire boat, still rested on display on my shelves. Matchbox cars filled the room, vestiges of Top Gun toys scattered around. I sat in between two worlds. A boy. But opening a teenager’s album.

I pulled the plastic open, revealing the cassette. Walked over and put it in the player and pushed play.

The familiar static of a cassette before the music arrives.

“Once” hits first, percussion and rustling before the guitars cut in aggressively, a song chasing you, relentless. In my room, sitting on the edge of my bed, I felt my pulse match the tempo. This was not the music my parents played in the car. “Even Flow” rolls in on that riff, the one you’ve heard a thousand times since, McCready’s guitar jangling and insistent, Vedder’s words tumbling out in a slur you can’t quite parse but somehow understand anyway. The song is about a homeless man, though I didn’t know that then. I just knew it felt like urgency, a man shouting directions in a language you’re learning as he speaks.

“Alive” slows the pace but not the intensity. That opening guitar line, clean and climbing, and then Vedder telling a story about a mother and a secret and a son who survives a heartache known to everyone but him. The pain. The shame. The chorus hits like a fist, Vedder howling that he’s still alive, and the song becomes an anthem despite itself, despite the darkness underneath. Maybe because of it.

In my room I nodded along, not knowing I was listening to a man work out his own tangled history, or knowing someday I’d untangle my soul through the catharsis of writing.

“Why Go” brings the aggression back, quick and slashing. The shortest path between two points.

And then.

The tape keeps rolling and “Black” begins.

The shift is immediate. The temperature drops. Gossard’s guitar enters alone, fingerpicked and fragile, and you sense the emotional pull. The drums come in soft, patient. And then Vedder’s voice, lower now, careful, seeking solitude and introspection and purgation of his hurt.

Black opens slow and spare. The song builds. Each verse adds tension, emotion growing with each note. McCready and Gossard’s guitars speaking alongside Vedder’s words.

Sheets of empty canvas, untouched sheets of clay Were laid spread out before me, as her body once did All five horizons revolved around her soul as the Earth to the Sun Now, the air I tasted and breathe has taken a turn

And when Vedder reaches the end, when he wishes her well, when he calls her a star in someone else’s sky and asks that question, that why stretched out over the fade, there’s no answer. There never is.

And now my bitter hands chafe beneath the clouds Of what was everything All the pictures had all been washed in black Tattooed everything

I take a walk outside. I’m surrounded by some kids at play. I can feel their laughter so, why do I sear?

Mm-hm, and twisted thoughts that spin ‘round my head I’m spinning, oh-oh, I’m spinning How quick the Sun can drop away?

And now my bitter hands cradle broken glass Of what was everything All the pictures have all been washed in black Tattooed everything

The lyrics work in three movements. The first establishes absence. Empty canvas. Untouched clay. She was there. Now she’s not.

The second lives in memory. She was the center. The sun. And then the turn: those memories darkened, tattooed permanent but stained. His hands chafe. Not ache. Chafe. The irritation of reaching for something that isn’t there anymore.

The third is the blessing. He doesn’t curse her. Doesn’t beg. He wishes her well. Tells her she’ll shine. And then asks why it can’t be his sky. The question hangs.

All the love gone bad turned my world to black Tattooed all I see, all that I am All I’ll be, yeah-yeah Oh-oh, oh-oh, ooh

I know someday, you’ll have a beautiful life I know you’ll be a star in somebody else’s sky But why, why, why can’t it be Oh, can’t it be mine?

The guitar fades. The room goes quiet.

The song ended and I sat there, twelve years old, Legos on my shelves, Matchbox cars on the floor.

This song would become instrumental in my life.

-

Two months before my thirteenth birthday, Eddie Vedder sat on a barstool in Queens.

March 16, 1992. Kaufman Astoria Studios. MTV Unplugged. The band hadn’t played a show in months. Ten was climbing the charts, but slowly.

Vedder wore a corduroy jacket, a White Sox cap pulled low. When they got to Black, he closed his eyes. The acoustic guitars stripped the song down to its skeleton. Just the words and the want behind them. You realized the talent wasn’t volume or electricity. These were artists. The lyrics were poetry. And watching it, even years later on a screen, you understood that Unplugged went beyond performance, it was a confession.

And then, at the end, something unscripted. The band vamped on the outro and Vedder leaned into the microphone and sang a line that wasn’t in the song. A tag. An addition. Five words borrowed from a Rickie Lee Jones record he loved.

We belong together.

He sang it like a man trying to convince himself. Or maybe like a man who knew it wasn’t true but needed to say it out loud one more time.

That moment changed the song. From that night forward, Black became a living thing. Vedder started adding tags. Different words for different nights, different years, different versions of himself.

We belong together became We didn’t belong together.

And later, in some performances, I’ve been healed.

The song kept pace with him. It aged as he aged. Grieved as he grieved. Let go as he let go.

I know something about that.

-

It’s March 1997. We’d just won the state basketball championship. The bus rolled south from Milledgeville in the dark, a light rain on the window, Pearl Jam’s Ten in my Discman. I stared out the window at the pine trees sliding past and pondered the journey, from sitting alone on the bleachers as a freshman to winning a state championship, sheets of my written canvas.

A year later, I sat in Truckmobile outside Dorough Fieldhouse at Oglethorpe University, contemplating whether to stay. Whether to quit basketball. Whether to walk away from the thing that had defined me recently but wouldn’t define me for life. I’d lost the love for the grind of the game. Black played through the speakers, and I let it thump. I was communing with what I was leaving. On my sheets of written canvas.

I drove home for my aunt’s funeral with the song in the Taurus’ speakers. Drove the same roads a few years later for my grandfather’s. The lyrics didn’t change, but depending on your state of mind, you hear them differently. The chafing hands. The pictures washed in black. The crucible of life has a way of teaching you what the words meant all along.

When I wrestled with the ministry, with the call I thought I’d heard and the silence that followed, the song was on the speakers. When I finally decided to pursue a career instead of a pulpit, Black played in the symphony of that reckoning. I didn’t curse the years I’d spent discerning. And I asked why. And I didn’t wait for an answer.

The song was there when my kids were born. It played when I started in banking. When I closed my first deal, I felt, for the first time, like this was my career. It played when I left SunTrust and came to AB&T. It played the night I was named CEO, driving home in the dark, the title still strange in my thoughts, the question of capability still floating somewhere ahead of me.

Love exceeds possession, flourishing in proximity. You get to stand near someone, something for a while. You get to orbit their sun. And then, if you’re lucky, you learn to wish them well when the orbit ends. But because wanting isn’t the same as deserving. And deserving isn’t the same as having.

Vedder doesn’t beg or bargain or rage in that song. He blesses. He soars. He says: you’ll shine somewhere. Just not here. Not with me. And then he asks the only honest question left. Why?

There’s no answer. That’s the point. Some shifts in life don’t come with explanations. They just come. And I can spend life demanding a reason, or I can let the question float out into the silence and sit with what remains and continue to soar with emotion as the song does.

The blessing and the wound can live in the same room.

-

I’m forty-six now. Three sons, a daughter. A wife who’s home. A job that asks everything, yet returns virtue gracefully.

But every day, or close to it, I turn on SiriusXM. Pearl Jam Radio. And when Black comes on, I let it play. With every listen, I sit with it the way I’ve sat with it for thirty-four years. In bedrooms and buses and trucks and hospital rooms and offices and in the serene moments of preparation. The song hasn’t changed. Yet I have. That’s the poetry in great art. The words stay still as I walk circles around them, sensing something different every time I pass.

And sometimes, still, the question floats out into the night.

Why can’t it be mine?

You realize, over time, it can.

I remember a vivid adolescent dream. I was in a carnival fun house, one of those with a hall of mirrors, running from mirror to mirror, but every face staring back is someone else’s. You run from mirror to mirror looking for yourself, for familiarity, but the only gazes returned are the indifferent gazes of strangers. Why does that mirror not return my gaze? The dream won’t break because you’re looking outward for familiarity.

Why can I not find myself?

You wake in a cold sweat, heart pounding, and the question follows you into the morning. Who am I?

The waking version of this search is quieter but no less disorienting. You scan faces, images, perceptions, trying to find the one that matches your own. You look in other people to find yourself. In movies. In books. In what others believe about you. You look everywhere before you look within, because looking within requires you to stop running, but running is all you know. The fountains run dry one by one, the people and the places and the perceptions, until the only source left is the one you’ve been avoiding. And when you’re exhausted, face marred with toil, despair pulling at your muscles, you turn inward only to realize you’ve been trying on masks. How many wrong ones did you wear? How many did you mistake for the face underneath? Some chase the ideal of who they believe they should be rather than acknowledging who they are.

The mask eats the face.

-

Lynyrd Skynyrd came to Albany, Georgia, September 23, 1995. Newly 16, my pals loaded into my old Truckmobile, bound for the Albany Civic Center like we were heading to a travelling revival. The air in the Civic Center was thick with cigarette smoke, spilled Busch Lights, and the hum of a thousand conversations folding into one voice when the lights went down.

At that point I knew Skynyrd like the masses did. Free Bird. Sweet Home Alabama. Deep tracks were Curtis Lowe, Tuesday’s Gone, and Working for MCA. All on the greatest hits.

Skynyrd came out of Jacksonville in 1964, five boys with long hair and bad attitudes in a time that didn’t appreciate either. The high school gym teacher, Leonard Skinner, enforced the hair code with a zealot’s conviction, and the boys repaid him by misspelling his name across the marquees of a thousand American arenas.

On October 20, 1977, a Convair 240 carrying the band from Greenville, South Carolina, to Baton Rouge ran out of fuel at six thousand feet. It crashed in a Mississippi swamp. Ronnie Van Zant was killed. Steve Gaines was killed. His sister Cassie, a backup singer, was killed. The survivors were broken in body and would remain so, in certain respects, for the rest of their lives.

A decade of silence followed.

Then surviving members reconvened. Ronnie’s younger brother Johnny took the microphone. Gary Rossington, the last original founding member still able to perform, stood where he had always stood, stage left, guitar slung low. The tribute became a resurrection.

From then on, they never stopped.

And on that Saturday night in September, the tour pulled into Albany, and the band that took the stage was not the band that had crashed in a Mississippi swamp eighteen years earlier. But it carried the same colors. It played the same songs.

We stood in that Civic Center with our fists raised, and something in the music reached past the noise and the smoke and the crowd.

But it wasn’t the radio hits that connected, it was a song on the debut record, one I’d return to long after that night, that gave me the first language for what I’d been looking for in all those mirrors. A mantra. A chord progression simple enough to harmonize everything I didn’t yet know about myself.

That song nearly didn’t exist, and the story of its making is worth telling.

-

In the spring of 1973, with the debut album sessions underway, two members of Lynyrd Skynyrd found themselves contending with a grief that had nothing to do with music. Ronnie Van Zant’s grandmother had died. Gary Rossington’s mother had died around the same time. The two men convened in Van Zant’s apartment to remember. They sat and traded stories about the women who had raised them, the things those women had said, the counsel they had dispensed with the certitude of maternal authority.

Rossington picked up a guitar and found a chord progression, C major, G major, A minor, unhurried, circular, the kind of ephemeral sound that always existed and was merely waiting to be discovered.

Van Zant began writing lyrics. About instruction. A mother speaking to her son, telling him what she knew: be satisfied with simple things, find something you love, don’t let ambition or money or lust undo the person you were made to be. The whole composition took roughly an hour. Rossington would later describe the process with candor: the women in their lives had really written the song, he said. He and Ronnie just played it.

The band recorded “Simple Man” without their producer in the room.

Silence that fell over arenas when those opening chords rang out, the almost devotional quality of the crowd’s attention, that he conceded he had been wrong.

“Simple Man” appeared as the fourth track on the debut record, released August 13, 1973. It was never released as a single. It never charted. It didn’t need to.

-

On evenings by myself, I’d blast this song into the wind. Driving in the blackness alone, not yet aware of the virtue within me, not yet able to name what I was looking for. I’d fire up the truck knowing it was the only place a fledgling introvert could find peace. Windows down, on the bench seat, the thin Chevrolet steering wheel in my hands, the air flowed through the cab the way the words of Rossington and Van Zant did, refreshing, true, and certain.

The song’s reminder was so subtle, so simple, that its power spoke beyond the repeated chord progression. The simplicity of manhood is just that when you boil it down to what matters and cut away what doesn’t. Stop chasing ghosts and idols and falsities. Chase virtue and you find it along the long white line.

I’d ride past places of my childhood. I’d ride by the parties I didn’t attend, the places that held joy and pain and heartache and triumph in equal measure. You know the virtue as certain as they hit that familiar chord refrain. In the quiet of those miles I could see who I wanted to become. And it started simple, with being a simple kind of man. One I’d love and understand.

Even now, when the song comes on, I’ll crank it. I might be on an airplane, in my office, in a place far from those Georgia roads, or in my truck as I used to be. It doesn’t matter. The same rings true.

-

But there comes a moment when you catch your own reflection and hold it. In the dark glass of an airplane window at thirty thousand feet with the cabin quiet and the earth curving below, or in the truck window on a Georgia road with the wind pulling through the cab and the pine trees running past in the black. The song is playing. The chord progression turns its familiar cycle. And the face in the glass is yours. You can see the lines around the eyes, earned on life’s roads, with the music carrying you and all the versions of yourself.

You’ve looked in a thousand mirrors and seen a thousand wrong faces.

You’ve worn masks until they wore you.

But, when looking within, the face returned now, lit by the glow of a dash or the pale blue of a reading light above an empty row, is the one you were looking for all along.

All that you need is in your soul, and it was in your soul before you started running, before the carnival house, before the lineup.

The virtue was simple all along. A mother’s counsel set to three chords, sung to us all, waiting for us to stop looking outward long enough to hear it.

You look within and you see yourself.

For the first time.

And then, every time you look again and again and again.

When she’s around the sky finds a deeper shade of blue. The green of the grass calls from somewhere below its roots. The mountains surrounding the Pacific span as a panoramic postcard and the breeze makes the heat bearable and you stand there thinking, how can a man be in the same place two weekends running, identical weather, and experience it so differently.

The difference is if home travels with you.

As our marriage has grown, Christian has become my home. She’s where my soul rests. Last weekend my soul relaxed because she was with me. Her presence provided a subconscious assurance that whatever came we’d face it together, even as my mind ran its familiar loop through the worst-case travel scenarios that live in my anxious mind.

The gentle hum of her essence. Her heartbeat synced with mine.

I’ve been in LA two weekends in a row. What an arrogant sentence. Last weekend my home was with me. This weekend I’m here with Cooper, planting a seed, while home is at home.

These father-son trips are about building a spirit of home within them, so that wherever they go they’ll know that family, that their father, is a frequency they can find in life’s static. That when the times get hard, they’ll reach back and locate a stream of strength that steadies the soul.

Until they find their long-term home, we, their parents, are always the home they can return to.

You don’t recognize where your home is until you’re apart from it. I don’t miss my house, though I love my house. I can be comfortable in a hotel. I miss my wife. And while this experience during the second weekend in LA is incredible, while we’re doing generational things, my heart longs for her.

Home is a person.

-

When Cooper was little, he was chill, present. His eyes didn’t miss a thing. He’d take in everything around him and with a spirit of contentment. He was comfortable just being with those nearby.

Something in his soul draws in the world, while he’s content to keep the world at bay. Even now, whenever I’m with him and we see people who know him, they light up. His boys, the girls, people love Cooper, and they’re always excited to see him. Yet he prefers to the solitude of his home.

Coop also possesses a deep emotional awareness, an empathy that resonates. As aware as most adults, sensing feelings, his inner soul is calibrated to everything going on around him. I’d stare at him when he was little just to see his mind at work, to find peace in my own soul by being near his. I called him His Ownself, because he had such a uniqueness about him that I envied. I respected it and longed for it in myself.

His Ownself.

He’s 14 now, turning 15 next month, and he loves NBA basketball.

With a resonance of feeling that deep within him, he’ll need to construct his home from within. These trips are part of that foundation.

-

We landed in LA shortly after lunch and headed to In-N-Out for the animal style tradition, watching the planes on their final approach as we ate. When in LA…

We settled at a table, ate the burgers, drank the shakes, and talked about the trip ahead. We compared generational players, tried to slot LeBron into history, and Cooper asked me what it was like to watch MJ. How do you explain the fiercest competitor there ever was, one who defied the physics of what was possible both in athleticism and will, who seemed to bend reality to his purpose? You don’t, really. You just say it such that perhaps the awe that remains influences, even though you know MJ has to be experienced in context.

LeBron is great. Luka is generational. They ain’t like Mike.

Cooper has solid basketball knowledge for 14, though. He knows the players, the stats, the generational history. We’ve traveled to see games in Boston, Philly, the MSG twice, Barclays twice. Last time at Barclays, LeBron hit nine of ten threes and electrified that crowd. Every time he touched the ball the electricity in the room shifted, the pressure changed. It reminded me of MJ in the Georgia Dome in 1997. There’s a kinetic energy that’s unseen but absolutely felt when the great ones do their thing.

-

We had two NBA games on the docket for this trip. Friday night we went to see LA’s little brother. The Clippers.

The Intuit Dome in Inglewood is futuristic in design and execution, your face gets you in and serves as your wallet, and you can tell it was built recently in the space and the sightlines. Ballmer built an arena worth experiencing, but the Clippers are the Clippers despite his best efforts. Kawhi is a Hall of Famer, but watching him you can’t help but wonder what could have been. What if Kawhi rose to his potential, where would we slot him?

This was a lesser-tier game against the Bulls. We both knew it. When in Rome, though.

The Clippers got the win, but we were here for the main event.

The Lake Show.

-

Saturday, Cooper slept past noon Pacific time. We ate at Fixins in LA Live, a soul food restaurant that reminded me of Carter’s Grill in Albany. Fixins rocked the thickest sweet tea I’ve had outside South Georgia, grits and collards that tasted like Mr. Carter made them. I imagined him sitting at the end of this bar, like he used to sit at the end of his counter.

After lunch, we walked Chick Hearn Court outside the arena as the SoCal sky reflected on the concrete, and the bronze statues stood as the pantheon of LA greatness. Kareem and Magic. Gretzky, Robitaille, Pat Riley suited. Shaq, Elgin Baylor. And the voices of the franchise. You’re walking among accumulated fame, among a franchise woven into the fabric of a city that doesn’t even have a lake.

The lead statue is Kobe. As it should be. On the side of the base, the box score from his 81-point game is etched in the stone, which is fitting since just this week Bam passed him on the all-time scoring list in questionable fashion. The record may have moved. The reverence hasn’t. He’s influenced this generation the way MJ influenced the one before. An indomitable will. A standard that doesn’t negotiate. Cooper stood in front of it and took it in. The Black Mamba.

We stood there a moment before moving on.

-

Inside, the arena banners hang as a golden curtain above it all. Seventeen of them. Each one a season of immortality, where excellence and dominance and fortified will met. The history is structural.

The Lakers’ home is a temporal space. You sense Kareem’s skyhook while Jokic warms up on the floor below. When LeBron takes the court you can feel Kobe somewhere behind him, pushing. Chick Hearn is still calling it somewhere in the rafters, his voice an echo off the building’s steel. The retired jerseys hang, witnesses and stewards of the Lakers standard. West. Chamberlain. Abdul-Jabbar. Johnson. Bryant. Each number is a world.

MSG has its ghosts. Boston has its banners and its parquet and its particular arrogance about both.

But this feels like the center. For basketball, this feels like home.

Because of the accumulation in this home. The championships across eras. Because seventeen championships don’t lie. Because the standard here was set by people who refused to let it drop, and you can feel that refusal in the air when you walk through the doors on a Saturday afternoon in March with your fourteen-year-old son who loves this game.

This is where we were. In the NBA’s home, far away from our own.

-

As we waited in line, Cooper went through the matchup. Future Hall of Famers on the court tonight — Jokic, LeBron, Luka. Could Reaves and Jamal Murray be on their way? It was the prime time ABC game, for positioning in the West. The Lakers had won seven of their last eight. The Nuggets had the MVP. For now. Cooper went through the stats and we talked basketball the way we always do, easily, naturally, without effort. We bond over basketball. That’s the entry point. We’ll get to the deeper things with time, once he knows in his bones that his mother and I are his home.

Then Luka took the court.

He’s a generational talent. We all know that. We know the trade from Dallas was spiteful, small thinking manifested. But even the casual fan sees glimmers of why it was made. Untapped potential. Can someone be the best player in the world and still not live up to what they’re capable of? What if he was in top physical condition? What if he played defense? Would we be looking at the greatest of all time?

If there was fire, drive, and a will like Kobe, what would Luka’s ceiling be?

From our TVs, phones, and seats, we look at athletes as machines. The industry that springs around them. They’re brands. Businesses. As Jay-Z said, I’m not a businessman. I’m a business, man. Yet underneath the fashion and the athleticism and the raw skill there’s a human being. One who’s reached the pinnacle of sport, yet also changes diapers, longs to hold his babies in the night, and looks forward to one day walking his girls down the aisle.

The first thing on Luka Doncic’s Instagram is Gabriela with a heart, then Olivia with a heart. Nothing about his accolades, his awards, who he plays for, what he’s achieved. On his IG profile, all that’s listed is his daughters. At the free throw line does he think of his girls? When he dropped 51 against the Bulls last week, did he want to hold them first? When he drives home from the arena, the ringing of 20,000 fans in his ears, does he long for the quiet voice of his daughters? Did he look for them on the court, only to remember they weren’t there. That his home is two people and a place, and he’s apart from all three.

As I long for my home, watching Luka, you can’t help but think how he longs for his.

His daughters, and his country.

Slovenia is the quiet dude Europe keeps talking over.

Smaller than New Jersey. Bordered by four countries and possessed, somehow, by all of them. The Alps press in from the north. The Adriatic pulls from the southwest. To the east, the Pannonian plain stretches until Europe runs out of argument. Luka’s birthplace, Ljubljana, sits at the center.

LA performs. Ljubljana presides.

LA exports its image to the world and calls it culture. Ljubljana kept its culture and let the world come to it.

His girls are in Ljubljana. He’s in LA. His former fiancée took them home, and home is six thousand miles and a court order from where he works.

Imagine sitting in that locker room. Exhausted. Spent. At the absolute top of your profession.

Longing for home.

-

The fourth quarter of the game was a battle.

Gordon hit a three to push Denver up seven with three minutes left. Luka answered with a three. Got fouled on the next possession, knocked down all three free throws. Tied. Smart stole it and laid it in. LA back in front. Then Hardaway hit a three and Denver had the lead again with seconds left.

Then Reaves.

Down one, fouled intentionally to prevent a tying three, Austin Reaves stood at the line and missed the second free throw on purpose, rebounded it himself, and converted the floater with 1.9 seconds left. The kind of play you see tried thousands of times, never working, actually works on a big stage.

Overtime.

With under 10 seconds, Luka caught it on the wing, seventeen feet out, Spencer Jones draped on him, the clock bleeding. He created just enough space. The fall-away left his hand with 0.5 seconds remaining.

Cooper and I stood with the Laker faithful and held our breath as the ball floated through the net. A sonic wave pulsed through the building. The silence in one beat, the exuberance in the next.

Lakers win.

Lakers 127, Nuggets 125.

Jokic had 24, 16, 14 and five steals and was arguably the best player on the floor. Murray went one for fourteen and may have cost Denver the game. Gordon came back from injury and gave them everything he had. The Nuggets had the better assist-to-turnover ratio, the faster pace, the comeback.

Didn’t matter.

Luka had 30, 13, 11 and the last shot. Shot 38 percent, but was there when it counted. That’s what generational looks like. Rising. Presence. The ability to bend the moment to your will when the moment is largest.

-

It happens in a single second, yet you fly across the country for moments like that. Uber through traffic, disrupt your sleep, wake up early, worry about TSA. All of it in service of a single instant when the ball leaves his hand and the building holds its breath and your son is standing next to you. We high fived. This beat, these few fleeting moments, we’d remember forever.

You build home sometimes away from home because home will be there when you return. You dig into the distance, into the longing, knowing what waits on the other side. These trips are deposits. Into him. Into us. Into the home our family builds together. Our spiritual presence with one another, even if our physical presence is not always possible.

One day he’ll construct his own home. His own frequency. His own place where his soul rests. These moments are the foundation going in before the walls go up.

The ball fell through the net in LA on a Saturday night in March.

Cooper was there.

So was I.

The San Gabriel Mountains passed on our right. Her ridgelines sharp against the ‘grammable California blue sky, scrubbed clean by Santa Ana winds. Cate was beside me, headphones in, watching Clueless on the seatback screen, unbothered by the geography assembling itself below us. Christian was reading.

This is Cate’s trip. Twelve years old, Los Angeles rising from the horizon to receive her, as we continue our family’s 12-year-old trip tradition with the baby.

With Los Angeles approaching, I switched from my flying playlist to Dr. Dre’s The Chronic.

The bass arrived through my AirPods as a change in cabin pressure. Below us the valley’s basin spread in every direction, the grid of it endless, ten thousand blocks of stucco and concrete and palm trees in the March sun. The 110 threading south toward Compton. The 405 pushing west toward the ocean. Beverly Hills and Crenshaw, Brentwood and Watts, pressed against each other.

Dre’s voice, unhurried, certain.

I was thirteen years old again.

-

March 1993.

Bus 243 ran from Highland to my neighborhood, Pearl Avenue. Ms. Mary at the wheel, her eyes finding you in the mirror. Omniscient, she knew what would happen in the back before it happened, while navigating the bus through traffic. With grades K through 8, everybody’s business was hers, whether you wanted it that way or not.

A dude in the seat next to me passed the cassette hand to hand without a word. We’d been coordinating this, like passing contraband on the prison yard. That was the protocol.

He got off a few stops before me. As he walked down the street, I looked at the tape, Dr. Dre’s face returning my gaze. The Chronic written in blue. His family didn’t have the same restrictions that Cathy Revell placed on her boys. Parent advisory, explicit lyrics. But I had a tape player, and what she didn’t know wouldn’t hurt her.

Ms. Mary opened the door before she stopped, her eyes already on me. “Lil Perry, it’s time. You too slow.” She loved that; loved watching a kid like me go red trying not to disappoint an adult or be called out for attention.

After stepping off, I crossed in front of the bus, crossed Greenwood, and walked down Pearl Avenue with an awakening in my pocket.

Mom was in the den reading. I said my hellos. Gave the customary teenage boy non-answer. Said I had homework.

Right when I got home?

Slick, for sure. But I was studious.

Just not about academics today.

I closed the door. Ceiling fan turning, cut grass through the window screen, the stillness of our house, the vestiges of boyhood mixing with a budding adolescence.

I put the cassette in and pressed play.

The bass arrived, as did Dre’s authority and Snoop’s vibe. The tracks surged forth through the cheap speakers and into the sternum, lodging deep within.

Dre’s voice, man. Unhurried, certain, laying out his world in a rhythmic cadence with the conviction of each earned syllable.

Then Snoop. A drawl so singular it resonated as if it was always with us. As if Snoop Dogg was always part of our lexicon and our soundtrack.

I sat very still, listening to each track. I knew this music wasn’t for me, that I couldn’t relate, but I was drawn to it, as I looked out my window. In Albany, Georgia, which is decidedly not LA.

Outside my window were pines, red clay, humidity that pressed against you, suffocating you in July. I visually constructed Los Angeles from the music, block by block. I didn’t know Crenshaw from Compton, the 110 from the 405. But I’d heard the soundtrack of the place. Lowriders moving through streets, hydraulics lifting and dropping to a rhythm. A joint celebration and declaration. Joy and danger in the same car, windows down, no one apologizing. It was Tupac’s California Love.

I had never been west of Vegas. After listening to Dre, Los Angeles was a sonic frequency before it was a place.

-

Los Angeles, the City of Angels, is anointed by Gretzky, decorated by Beverly Hills, hardened by Compton. It’s patrolled by Ponch and John.

Los Angeles is the towering palms of Dodger Stadium. The same San Gabriel mountains of our descent, provide the same scenic vista that saw Benny the Jet steal home.

Los Angeles is a collection of images, narrated by other people’s voices.

Vin Scully painted the nights, poetically describing another Dodger Stadium scene, his cadence so unhurried and spare and precise it made Dodger baseball feel meditative, even spiritual.

Chick Hearn describes Magic Johnson’s exuberance in leading the Showtime Lakers in the Forum, on the fast break, the smiling leader of the Lake Show’s gorgeous improvisational ballet. Magic, a one-named immortal man.

Then Kobe. The darker frequency, the Black Mamba. Obsessive, solitary, ferocious, a competitor whose singular focus returned memories of MJ. Kobe, his low, deep voice exuding a primal search for supremacy.

And from those eras, two sets of Lakers banners hang for each.

You felt Los Angeles before you ever saw it. Los Angeles was a vision before it was a place. The Chronic, man.

-

Thursday, March 5, 2026, we hopped off the plane at LAX, with a dream but no cardigan, into the land of excess and fame. Our first stop was In-N-Out Burger. The iconic one. The one in the flight path for LAX. We sat under that blue sky we’d just flown through and watched the planes land, while rocking animal style burgers, fries and milkshakes.

When Christian was pregnant with Cate, we didn’t find out what we were having. With three boys already in the stable, we believed raising boys was our foregone conclusion. While Christian is a world-class boy mom, there was a noble longing within her for a daughter. I was indifferent, just wanted our new life to be healthy, but I was intrigued at the thought of being a girl dad.

By the time March 7, 2014, rolled around I felt like I could deliver babies. I’d seen it done three times before. I was a doctor in a movie. So, I gave the nurses my customary warning that once she started having contractions the baby would come lightning quick. It had happened with all three boys. One a midwife delivered because the MD didn’t make it in time, the labor progressed that fast. As I told the nurses it would go quickly, I got the cursory nod, an acknowledgement that they had no intention of listening to a damn thing I had to say.

Is there any place where a man is more useless than a Labor and Delivery ward?

Sure enough, she went from the childbirth equivalent of 0-60, and the head began to crown. The pushing intensified. I stood helpless, looking ridiculous, so out of place. My work was done months ago. The nurses began to move with a quickened pace, many entering the door, doing a battlefield check and working to get the machinations in place so our fourth could arrive safely.

Like the fucking warrior she is, Christian fiercely pushed with all her might. She’s in the fight; I’m just in the fog of war. Maternal childbirth is an expression of immense, heavenly love.

The medical crew gets into position. The pace quickens, it’s frenetic, you hear the nurses begin to show genuine excitement, for something many of them have seen hundreds of times. Such is the miracle of life.

One more push, the Doc says. With all her might, Christian pushes, the nurses grab the baby. One second ago the baby was inside her, now, in this exact moment, she’s out. Christian leaned back in relief. One of the nurses held her up and said those life-changing words, “It’s a girl.”

Christian leaned forward, exuberant, not even thinking about the pain, pure joy in the coldness of a L&D room, after the brutality of delivery, and said, “IT’S A GIRL! ARE YOU SURE?!”

Our emotions welled like a geyser, fierce and uncontrollable. Power, from the depths of my core into the air.

I was a girl dad. Catherine Annsleigh Revell joined us that day.

-

With sons, you’re transferring a blueprint. You know the territory. Responsibility, virtue, ownership a man carries and must bear honorably. You’ve lived it. They’re going to need it. You pass it down the way it was passed to you, imperfectly, honestly, with the hope that they take what’s useful and improve on the rest.

A daughter is different. Not in the intensity of the love, that’s equal and absolute. Yet it’s different in the architecture of it. With Cate I’m not transferring a blueprint. I’m trying to be one.

What she accepts from the world, what she demands from the people in it, how she understands her own worth, that runs through me first. Because I’m the first man who loved her without condition or agenda. What she measures everything against starts with me, imperfect, striving, fully committed to being her daddy.

I want her fierce. I want her joyful. I want her to walk into every room knowing she belongs there. I want her to know that her place in the world is wherever she plants herself, not wherever she’s told to stand. I want her to look at her reflection the way I look at her; without the cruelty the world trying to force her complicity. For all my imperfections, what is perfect is my love for her.

I want her to know my love for her is our family Chronic.

-

From the ground, Los Angeles is a city of contradictions that feel irreconcilable. Wealth pressed against poverty, glamour against hardship, Brentwood against Watts. At street level those tensions abide yet rumble as a cold war, almost like a SoCal detente.

But from thirty thousand feet the borders disappear and it’s just one continuous place. The city stops being its own argument and reveals itself as a single being.

The Chronic came from one corner of that valley and found its way into every other corner. The kids in Beverly Hills memorized it the same way I did in Albany, Georgia. The music transcended space and time.

Which is the chronic condition of the American experiment itself. The pursuit of happiness. The hunger for meaning. The desire to build something that outlasts you. These aren’t feelings that arrive and resolve. They persist. They are the thread running through every neighborhood, every creed, every story that begins somewhere hard and reaches toward something worth having.

What’s acute is what’s tearing us apart. Tribalism. Selfishness. The decision to turn away from one another as if the valley doesn’t connect us all. The scroll that feeds you outrage and laughs, while also thieving joy. The societal grievances without a face, the argument made to no one in particular and everyone at once. We wouldn’t turn on our own children. Wouldn’t place our smallness against their futures. Wouldn’t choose ourselves over the people we made a promise to. And yet collectively we keep making that choice. The acute over the chronic, the wound over the inheritance, the self over the obligation.

Tupac threw the windows open. California Love isn’t the erasure of difference. It’s the refusal to let difference be the last word.

So what’s chronic must be what’s virtuous. The love that doesn’t negotiate. The presence that doesn’t expire. For Cate, for my sons; not perfection, but permanence. The chronic condition of showing up, of being the thing they can locate from anywhere, in any weather, that tells them what home feels like.

Virtue as the chronic condition. The only inheritance worth leaving.

-

We arrived at the Westin in Anaheim, checked in, opening the door to a room that overlooks the park. Disneyland spread out in front of us, right across the street, the same San Gabriel Mountains in the distance, a sunset backdrop to begin the trip.

The happiest I ever see Christian is at Disney. Perhaps it’s a return to her childhood; the fear, the insecurity she felt in her situation, manifest by a dream of what could be. That for those moments at Disney as a child, she wasn’t going back and forth from one parent to the other, that she could imagine her future elsewhere, that walking through the park allowed her to imagine a future with her wellbeing at the center. Where love was unconditional and someone would take care of her.

So now as a mother of a daughter, one who’s being raised differently than she was, the happiness of what is is connecting to her hopes of what was as she walked Main Street as a child herself. Could be there’s a comfort in knowing she made it, that she’s the mother of her dreams, and with her guidance and limitless love, her kids are feeling the security she so longed for?

I just stand back and watch. I’m along for the ride, trying to keep up even though my stride is twice as long. I’m swept up in the Santa Ana winds of Christian and Cate Revell at Disneyland.

Friday morning started early with a rope drop and continued through the day with a relentless pace. I rode a few, but when you’re 6’5” you don’t fit well on these rides, so I opted for the benches in the shade.

As the crowds kept coming and they kept going, I bailed, heading back to the hotel to catch my breath before heading back for dinner at one of those uniquely cheesy Disney restaurants masquerading as fine dining.

-

Saturday, we crossed into California Adventure, which is its own kind of Los Angeles. Distinct worlds blend together as LA’s neighborhoods do, each one unique, each one complete. Cars Land sits at the edge of it, a full sensory rendering of Radiator Springs with red rock formations glowing in the afternoon sun, the ride racing through the canyon. Speed, I am speed.

Lightning McQueen literally rolled through town. So did ‘Mater.

I thought of Hays, JR, and Cooper as little boys. The capitalist fury of Disney made it impossible to own every vehicle, but we tried. I remember the way they marveled at each one.

Now close to grown men, but I can see them standing in these stores looking at Lightning in a plastic box.

Yet, now, I am with my daughter, turning twelve, standing in the same temporal space I’ve occupied before with different children, a different version of myself. The same and not the same.

You can be fully present in Cate’s twelfth year while also inhabiting every Disney trip that came before it, the past and present occupying the same geography simultaneously. One body, many moments, all of them true at once.

After Disney we drove west until the continent ran out.

Santa Monica sits at the edge of the Pacific. The pier is a gritty, gorgeous tourist trap, the vibe somewhere between South Beach and PCB’s Miracle Strip. The sky was that particular California blue. The peninsulas stretched out on either side, the sun began its descent toward the Pacific, the whole scene so unreasonably beautiful it demands a pause. Selah.

Cate and I took the hotel bikes south toward Venice on the path that runs along the water. The Pacific stretched out to our left as far as the eye could reach, planes on the LAX flight path crossing overhead in steady procession. The path was its own Los Angeles. Skateboards and rollerblades, the persistent whiff of weed, yoga classes in the grass, an outdoor church service with folding chairs and a portable speaker, the Venice Skatepark below where skaters launched themselves into the air with the casual authority of people who have decided gravity is negotiable. Muscle Beach. Volleyball courts. Dogs and thongs and speedos. Skin everywhere. The grit of Venice bleeding into the gleam of Santa Monica and back again, two worlds sharing the same bike path.

Cate rode ahead. Well ahead. An Albany girl suddenly free on the pathways of Santa Monica and Venice Beach, seeking that sliver of independence the way twelve-year-olds do, running forward, testing the distance between herself and the people who love her, which is its own kind of growing up. I watched her from behind, her silhouette against the Pacific sun, glowing, moving through the world at her own pace and on her own terms. Surrounded by thousands of people. The center of all of it; at least to me.

We walked the bikes down to the water. The cold Pacific shocked our feet. She flung shells into the surf. I stood beside her and looked around, seeking to mark the moment in my mind. I was in California, with my daughter, at the edge of the continent, her future stretching out as limitless as the horizon in front of us.

Our love for each other a chronic condition. Our chronic.

We watched the sun go down knowing we were heading home tomorrow. Back to Albany. Back to the ordinary. But the same sun sets over Santa Monica, over Disneyland and Hollywood, over every corner of that valley and beyond. Over Albany. Over every one of her days, because the light doesn’t recognize the borders we draw underneath it. The light recognizes love.

Night comes. It always does.

But my life is forever lit by hers.