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I saw a small boy on a beach.

I watched him drag a bucket from the ocean with both hands, knees gritty with wet sand, and then dump it beside a wall. He was reinforcing a castle under siege. The ocean took the left side twice, so he rebuilt it twice. This time, the third, though he built it higher. Thicker too. And he dug a moat outside the wall and added a second one behind it. He understood defense takes layers.

“Not there,” he said, directing the wave away from his unfinished work.

As if the water might listen. And of course it didn’t. The small wave barely touched the first moat, but it was followed by a large one that pushed all the way through. The wall caved, the second moat filled, but the castle was safe. At least for now. The boy stared at the ruined wall, mouth open and breathing hard, and as the water returned to the ocean he jerked his head toward his parents and laughed. The castle stood.

“Help me,” he shouted to nobody and everybody, scooping more sand into his bucket. By the time the next wave came he was back at work, palms flat, packing the wall into shape, certain he learned something important about how to hold back the sea.

It was unbearably hopeful.

The ocean was the ocean, and the wall was made of wet sand. The boy, he knew it couldn’t hold. Afterall, he watched the waves come in all morning. He stood there and saw the moat fill and the towers melt, but the breach didn’t make the project hopeless to him. It made it necessary.

As adults, we watch children build sandcastles on beaches and we smile. Real life looks different than play on a beach, but our walls have been washed over more than once, and not always playfully. A job disappears, cracks form in a marriage, you get hit with an unexpected diagnosis. Hopes melt like wet sand walls and futures are built on ground less solid than we thought. And like the boy, the impulse remains. We build, we brace, and we try to hold back what’s coming with whatever we have on hand.

I know something about that. I’ve built a few walls of my own.

For a few years, I thought my son, Max, wasn’t listening to me. And maybe that’s not fair, because he listened to some things. Do you want pizza? Want to play Xbox with me? The game’s on. Let’s play catch. If there was a promise of something physical at the end of the sentence, he was there. And it’s also not fair because it’s clear my son loves me and always did. People mistake listening for love. But love is about presence and listening is about absorption.

It’s hard to measure how much someone is taking in. The life lessons. How to treat people. Me trying to talk about the difference between funny and mean. My spiel on why it matters to be on time. Efforts to show how a person can be both strong and kind. Why fair play matters. The difference between cruelty and strength. I’d start in on versions of that, and I’d feel the focus slip. There was only so much he could absorb, or had an interest in absorbing. He’s a polite kid, so he wasn’t rude, but the emotional door would shut and pretty soon we were doing something else and I had no idea if the talk mattered.

We’d switch to keep-the-balloon-afloat in the hallway, smashing into walls, the doors, and occasionally each other. We threw footballs to, and at, each other. There was laughing and crashing and the kind of full-body comedy where bumps and bruises are the same as hugs and kisses. We played video games together. We opened packs of sports cards. We went fishing. I stepped into his world as often as I could.

But, inside that playful aggression, the embodied love and attention, I always tried to teach. Even if I thought the ideas weren’t landing. Because it scared me. Because boys are not left alone anymore. The world gets to them fast. The internet gets there faster. There is always some asshole waiting to weaponize the very things Max and I connected through. The physicality of boys, the way they explore the world through competition, hierarchy, trash talk, and aggression. To me, these aspects—which many men and boys hold—can be cleansing and good in the right time and place and in the right doses. But they can also be toxic, as we have seen so much of lately.

So, I did my best to work inside it. To direct it. To keep the contact sports about connection instead of conquest, so that confidence was built from the inside and not based on what other people saw from the outside. And as you can imagine, I talk a lot. About ideas, about hopes, about feelings and philosophies. And as you can imagine, those are not always the most engaging topics for a little boy who mostly wanted to talk about why his favorite Pokemon was Groudon and how it would beat mine, which was Chansey, in a fight. But even that choice—Chansey—who is a healer in the game, was a conscious choice made in hope that Max would see that strength and violence are not always the same.

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And while I know he heard me, I rarely heard him echo it back. He knew who I was, but he still wanted to punch, and fight, and shoot and kick. Which are not the opposite of what I was trying to teach him, though at times I treated them that way. I kept trying to reach him through words because words are how I understand the world. Or try to. I explain, argue, revise. I take a feeling apart and dissect the pieces until everyone in the room wishes I would put on some music or just shut up for five minutes.

But he was a boy. My boy. And like most boys, life moved through his body first, not his mind. There was play and impact. It moved through jokes and competition and the delirious thrill of trying to knock your father over in a hallway. He wasn’t refusing the lesson, necessarily. He was living in a language I had forgotten.

So I started a wall. Around the fear that my speeches about kindness and fairness and strength hit him on the surface and rolled back out to sea. And then, as he got older, there was the fear that the world was getting through to him faster than I was.

And like the boy on the beach, I built and rebuilt without even knowing. Higher. Thicker. A moat outside the wall and another one behind it. Another talk in the car turned into football chatter. The desire to explain why being strong did not mean being cruel turned into a wrestling match in the hallway. The common language of men became the defense against other men. Against the world.

“Not there,” I was saying, more or less, redirecting the water away from the parts of the relationship I feared losing. If I couldn’t get through to Max, I at least needed to protect that.

As if the water might listen this time.

But kids are not castles, and parenting is not built from wet sand. And you can’t keep rebuilding around them until every opening is sealed. Or you can, I suppose, but then you don’t have a child anymore. You have a person buried in the sand with your own fear packed around him, mistaken for protection.

And that’s what I did not understand. The wall was mine.

We were in the car, my son and I. I don’t remember where we were going. Best Buy or Chipotle. We get in the car a lot and just go places. But on the drive back, he brought up politics, which was not part of our usual rotation of football and video games. He asked about a comment from the President and a cruel name used for a reporter. Then he asked what I thought about the war with Iran. Was it fair?

I almost missed it. I was so used to being the one steering toward fairness that when he brought it to me on his own, it took a second to land. A small wave, touching the edge of the moat.

I said what I thought. He said what he thought. And then we talked about something else.

Then, in the kitchen, weeks later, my daughter Piper told me about a conversation she’d had with her brother. Somehow, in whatever winding discussion they had, Max told her he wanted to be the kind of person who puts good into the world instead of just taking from it. I could hear her pride in it, and some surprise. I felt it too, but then, as so often happens with my daughter the discussion moved fluidly from emotions, to movies, to lunch, to whatever. There is no wall there.

But when she left for her room, I stood and thought about that moment. Max had taken it in. His questions in the car, his discussion with his sister, a dozen smaller moments in between then and after. I could feel the water rising. The tide coming in. And that was when I realized I had the metaphor wrong.

In watching the boy on the beach, I saw water as loss. The world eroding what I built and washing it out to sea. My fear was Max becoming someone I couldn’t reach because the water would carry him too far away. But now I see the water for what it is. It’s more complex. It’s both more and less than a threat. The water is time. Or maybe it’s growth, really. It’s the invisible work moving through a child even when it looks like they aren’t listening. The water was life moving through him, for good and bad, but mostly unshaped and unknown.

And the problem wasn’t that my son didn’t listen, but that I wasn’t patient enough for his response. I took what I’d learned over decades of becoming a person, the slow, messy, unfinished work of growth, and expected to see it in a boy who was still at the start. And when I didn’t see change on my schedule, I panicked and packed the sand higher. As if my effort could replace time. As if I could build the wall fast enough to outrun the tide.

I think about the boy on the beach sometimes, building and rebuilding his sand castle. How the wall always fell. How he laughed when the water pulled back. He just went back to work, palms flat, packing the sand into shape, certain he learned something important this time. And maybe he did. He didn’t see the breach as failure. It wasn’t about holding back the sea. The lesson was how to keep building after the sea comes through. Even when you know it’s going to come through again.

The wall falls and we rebuild. And then the wall falls again. It’s not a story of something broken. It’s the story of fatherhood, motherhood, parenthood. It’s friendship, it’s a person alone looking in a mirror wondering how they will get through another day. It’s most of us waking up each day shoring up our walls as we head out for the door.

You pack the world into shape with whatever you have on hand, knowing it won’t hold, knowing the tide has its own unrelenting schedule. But you do it anyway.

And now I know the wall is not the point. Because the building is.

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Friday starts with the phone. Really, every day starts with the phone.

Alarm. Thumb. Slide. Screen. Email. Texts. Little white numbers waiting in their little red circles. Someone did something somewhere and the phone needs me to know. I know better. I should let the phone sleep, but I look anyway.

Then the voice is awake too.

Look at you. First thing in the morning and already checking whether anyone noticed you.

I put the phone down. Stare at the ceiling. Then I pick it back up.

Open the email if you want. Marketers love you. And why not, you’re such a sucker.

The dogs are still under the covers. I can feel one of them pressed against my leg, warm. The other one is snoring somewhere near my hip. I lie there for another minute, trying to focus on how safe they must feel.

But I’m not. And I’m stalling. And the voice knows it.

I sit up. The dogs surface in stages. One ear. One paw. A full-body stretch and a tiny yawn. They shake out their dreams, and I can see them remember the existence of breakfast as they start to lick my face.

Bathroom. Toothbrush. Sink. Mirror. And I look into a face that’s been around for a while. The wear shows. Gray in the beard and around the temples. Crinkles along the eyes. Is that a new freckle? I take the medicine. I run the shower. I wait for hot water.

Why do you bother?

He says it like he’s bored. Cruelty with a shrug.

You know what you’re looking at. Older. Softer. You can shower, but why bother? You’re not going anywhere and it won’t wash away the age. Invisible is invisible, even if you clean it.

I rinse the toothpaste out of my mouth. One dog licks the shower door. The other stares at the bedroom door wishing it was open, his mind full of food and morning birds to chase.

That helps. Not enough, but some.

The dogs spin as I head into the hallway. They bark. They wag so hard their back feet slide back and forth and the little one falls over. They crash into each other. Excitement has no steering wheel. I scoop the food, add some kibble, and look down to see both suddenly frozen, knowing this is the moment they get their morning meal.

They need you more than they want you. You understand the difference, right? You could be anyone right now. They’d follow a stranger if he had a can of Alpo and a handful of Iams. This doesn’t make you special.

Maybe. I feed them anyway. There are worse things than being needed by animals who lose their minds because you opened a bag. The day gives me that much.

Then, work helps. Work is my world. It’s easy. Concrete. There are emails, deadlines, documents, and clients. Opposing counsel drawing attention to a clause in an agreement while hiding another deeper in the same contract. Here there are dates, facts, rules. I know what to do with that.

I sit at my desk. Coffee. Keyboard. Calendar. Inbox. And I feel useful. The voice knows this, and doesn’t leave. But the strategy adapts.

Oh, here you go. This is the version of you people need.

I answer an email.

Good boy.

I draft a demand letter.

But what do you do, really? Rearrange wreckage? Transfer one person’s disaster onto someone else. Useful little lawyer. You’re not solving problems, you’re just moving them around.

I keep typing. Work is armor with a set of noise-canceling headphones.

That’s the trick with work. The voice never leaves, but the work is louder. Deadlines scream, hearings demand, clients cry. The world can explode into fire, but somebody has to show up to court. Somebody has to help.

That somebody is me. And for a few hours, it’s enough. Then the phone rings. Potential client. And then another. Some emails come in from people who I can’t or don’t have time to help. Then I get a few calls from clients sent to me by AI for work I don’t do. The algorithm has had me wrong for months.

Even the algorithm doesn’t know who you are.

The voice likes that one. It’s new.

You’re so invisible the machine is inventing a better you.

I set the phone down and click open Word. Maybe it’s time to pivot. Take a break. Work on the essay, or the idea of the essay. I open it. A few scattered fragments that made more sense yesterday. I have almost-words. I have almost-ideas.

The voice settles in.

I type a sentence. Delete half of it.

You and me and the blank page again, huh?

I type another one. Worse.

Stalled as usual. How many times are we going to pretend the problem is the phrasing and not your lack of something interesting to say.

I rub my forehead until it stings and stare at the clutter of post-its on my desk, wondering whether I should just focus on work again.

Give it up and go back to writing demand letters. At least you know someone has to read those.

I close the document. Then I reopen it. I don’t write anything, but I leave it open. Maybe I’ll have ideas later.

At lunch, I read someone else’s essay on Substack.

It’s wonderful. I read it and the walls of my office don’t exist and I’m standing next to the author while she tells me who she is, why she is. It’s alive and she made it alive. I am enrapt. Then the world goes flat. The walls close in. The sandwich on the plate seems cold. The phone rings loud. I feel the desk press hard under my elbow as my head weighs into my hands.

See that?

I do.

That thing they have?

I know.

See the difference?

I know.

They have something you don’t.

Please stop.

Ability. Talent. Something to say.

I need you to stop.

Good luck competing with that.

Please shut up.

You mean shut it down. Because that’s what you should do.

Just shut the fuck up.

Don’t even bother reading anymore. You think you can absorb their talent? You can’t. And you can only pretend so long before people see who you are. You put down the pen 30 years ago for a reason, remember? You talentless hack. You word butcher. Pretender and child. Just. Shut. It. Down. No one will notice and no one will care. You are and always will be invisible.

Water. I need water. Maybe air. A quick walk, to the kitchen and my phone comes with me. Always does.

I stand at the kitchen and open the essay. The beautiful one. The one not written by me. I leave a comment.

A long one. Of course. It’s a real one, but I begin to feel self-conscious while typing, and still I can’t stop. I want the writer to feel how they made me think. I want to be in the room with them. Or near it, or close enough that they can know how they reached me. For them to see what their talent did. They deserve that. I think they must have their own voice and maybe I can be louder than that for one moment. For them.

Nobody asked.

I keep typing.

You always do this. Like they care. It’s so transparent anyway. Your small novel in someone else’s comments? You’re a leech. You need this springboard. You jump off other people’s ideas because you don’t have your own.

I hit send. They’ll read it and think: earnest and feel seen.

I reread it.

Right. They’ll read it and think: a lot.

I edit one sentence.

They won’t think: writer. They probably won’t even read it.

I put the sentence back.

Later, I check a post I published last week. Three new hearts.

Your mom, a friend, and someone who thought she hearted the post above yours.

Refresh it.

I refresh it.

Maybe the number changes.

It doesn’t.

It never will. The number is the same. It’s been a week, Charlie. If people wanted to read it, they would have by now. They aren’t busy, they just aren’t interested in you.

I mouse through to the Substack dashboard and look at metrics for the posts.

This is the exact size of your audience. Look at it.

I click around a few of the articles. Read a few comments.

But keep looking, you desperate attention seeking whore.

Someone I follow posts a note. It’s funny and easy and real. I can see them in three dimensions. They are growing. Faster than me. They started after me. I try not to see it, but I do. It’s hard not to.

Keep telling yourself this is about the work. That you’re not here for the attention.

I’m just happy to be writing again. Good or bad. No goals.

You liar. Why do you look? You know the numbers. Why does it matter?

I look at the numbers. I know it matters.

Because you are a shallow bowl of miserable mayonnaise. You are plain and offensive at the same time.

I close Substack. Even my inner voice is overwrought.

You should delete the app. You have a problem, and it’s not just lack of talent, its lack of depth. You do not belong here.

Open it again. Close it. Walk to the computer. Close the essay draft. For a few minutes, I think about paid subscriptions. Wonder if there is a world where someone would pay to see me write. It’s a fun fantasy. Something I wanted when I was a kid, but doesn’t seem real.

Good idea. Charge people money to ignore you more formally.

That makes me laugh. The bastard has timing. I go back to work and the voice disappears into the background as expertise takes over. The easiest voice. And the day gets thin, which is when Friday gets dangerous. Afternoon is drift.

The voice likes drift. Drift drives out the expert.

You could write now.

I open the document.

But you won’t.

I read the last sentence.

See? Still no ideas. You’re world class at staring at open documents, or misspelled fragments spilled on a page. Maybe you can repackage your bullshit as poetry.

I close it.

There we go.

I send my son a text and ask if he wants to fish this weekend. He says maybe Sunday. Maybe Sunday is good. It’s a door cracked open. A boy with a fishing rod and a few hours to spend.

He said maybe. He’s being polite because he loves you, but he’d rather be somewhere else. You’re already becoming an obligation. Go ahead and take him fishing, but you’ll spend the whole afternoon wondering if this is the last time he says yes.

I hate that one.

That yes is real, but it has a clock on it. You know it does. They all do.

Every yes from a child has a clock on it. Every movie, every errand, every drive, every grocery store run. The fishing trips, the couch surfs, each bowl of popcorn, and every “yeah, sure” is a countdown to “I’m a little busy,” and “I’m hanging with friends,” and then simply “no.”

The clock is real, but the voice weighs the answer and puts its thumb on the scale. Tenderness turns to worry, and the moment turns into inventory. It feels mechanical.

By early evening I’m tired behind my eyes and I wish I could just sleep. I walk back into my office and put on a record. I pull out the sleeve, take the record by the edges. Set it down. Drop the needle. A little crackle comes through the speakers before the song begins.

The voice returns.

Look at you. Staging a personality. A man alone in a room with his taste and nobody to share it.

The record plays. That’s all. It keeps playing. A bass line. A guitar riff. And from the vinyl a voice explodes with anger and momentum. For a few minutes I’m not a lawyer, writer, father, husband, patient, survivor, fraud, hopeful idiot, or middle-aged man looking over the back side of life. I’m a person in a room with music.

There’s a reclining chair with a footrest in the corner of my office. It’s for moments like this, and the dogs have already claimed it. Lying on top of each other, their wagging tails asking me to join them. So I do. And I close my eyes and focus on one thread in the song, find one layer I didn’t notice the last time I listened. Maybe it’s a tambourine or the bass line, or a background singer coming in every other chorus. For almost three minutes it’s just me, music, and two little warm bodies stuffed into a chair I picked just for this.

And the voice doesn’t have anything for that. But my mind is restless. So I head to the kitchen and mix a cocktail. Which is a trapdoor.

Kitchen. Counter. Bottles. Glass. A Bijou. A wonderful drink. Gin, green chartreuse, sweet vermouth, and orange bitters. I should probably write about it. It’s old and forgotten, but it’s one of my favorites. And as I measure and mix, I’m not thinking about getting drunk. I’m thinking about making a drink. It’s something I love. Ice. Measure. Bottles. Bitters.

But the voice likes this part too.

There you go.

He’s almost kind.

Balance and craft. Taste and tension. Something you understand.

I stir the drink. I strain it through the Hawthorne. The glass is cold in my hand. It looks good and it tastes good. For a while, I’m standing in the kitchen after a long week with one good drink and no crisis attached to it. The music from my office calls.

Then the glass is empty. The voice waits until I notice.

So fast?

It did go down easy.

Make another.

I rinse the mixing glass. Wipe up the rings on the counter from the wet jigger. I pretend the decision is forming. I look toward the living room. TV on. Dog asleep. My wife on her phone.

The first was craft, but the second. That’s your relief.

I make the second. And I’m on the slope.

It doesn’t feel like slipping at first. A slide has drama. You feel the ground loose beneath your feet. You sense freedom from friction and your mind casts around for balance. But this, it’s procedural. There is no sudden shift. It’s ice in a glass, bottles open, pour, stir, sip. The easy mechanics of leaving yourself by inches. The paint-by-numbers of giving up.

The second drink is still good. And second drink signals that the first one was not a mistake. The second drink says the day was long and you are allowed to take the edge off. The voice loves the second drink.

You worked. You listened. You wrote almost nothing, but you thought about writing, which is basically the same. At least for you. You had dinner. You were pleasant. Have the drink.

I have the drink. The room softens. Maybe not the room. Maybe me. Maybe my armor.

Less signal.

And he’s right. Less signal. Less noise too, but the signal is getting quieter. And that’s what I want, and the voice knows it. It’s where the voice and I are friends. Oblivion. I want less signal. Less phones. Less comparison. Less hope. Less old body. Less clock. Less.

The glass is empty again, but the third drink already exists. How could it not. It’s where the signal goes.

Now we’re being honest.

I don’t move. I want less signal. Less noise. Less voice. Drink three is tricky. It’s me fighting the signal. Fighting the voice. But it’s also me inviting the voice to take over.

Three. That’s what you need. Maybe four. Give it a try, but you’ll never drown me. You know that. You’re just drowning yourself, and I’m the one still here.

I hate him for saying it. I see the truth in it. I’ve been here before. The drink doesn’t kill the voice. It feeds it. It kills mine. But knowing and stopping are not the same.

You want to erase the last twelve hours. Tomorrow morning you’ll wake up with a headache, your essay will still be a word jumble, and you’ll be one day closer to quitting. Pour it.

I stand in the kitchen, bottles out. The mixing glass cold with ice. The dogs asleep. My wife nodding off in the living room.

It’s just me. The noise. A volume knob that only turns up.

C’mon. How much more can you take?

The house is quiet and I stare out the window while the record in my office slips into a locked groove.

Pop.

Static.

Pop.

Static.

Pop.

Static.

Again.

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Spider-Man was coming to the 7-Eleven.

My mother knew about it, somehow. This was pre-internet, so she must have read an article in the town paper or seen a flyer at the library. Maybe Tom Ryan dropped the news between a traffic report and the new Bob Seger hit on WOMC as we drove to T-ball practice. I don’t know. It didn’t matter. Because Spider-Man was coming, and my mom knew about it.

And my mom cared. She cared when I cared, and boy did I care about Spider-Man. So we cared together that he was coming to the 7-Eleven. I don’t remember the details, but I probably talked about it all day. She must have been exhausted by my excitement, though I’d never know it. Exhaustion was not an emotion my mom shared with me if she felt it. But I assume it was there. How could it not have been? She was young, with two kids, a house to run, groceries to stretch, dinners to make, and a checklist full of chores that waited for her as she made one small boy feel like the center of the world and listened one more time about radioactive spider bites and web shooters. But if her day was tiring, she didn’t make that part of mine.

By the time we got into the car, I probably met Spidey a million times in my head. We were going to be pals. I knew it. My mom knew it too, or at least she knew I hoped it.

And then, when we got to the 7-Eleven, he wasn’t there.

I’m sure I didn’t notice the empty parking lot as we pulled in. Or that there were no kids in a line wrapped around the store. But my mom probably did, and I’m certain she felt it before I did too. Maybe even more than I did. I don’t know if we had the wrong time or the wrong store, but the short of it was that a guy in a Spider-Man suit had moved on to the next stop in his glamorous convenience-store tour. What I do remember, though, is disappointment. I built the whole thing up in my mind, and then we walked in and it collapsed. We found Slurpee machines, half-filled candy racks, and a couple bored clerks. No Spider-Man.

My mom. She must have been disappointed too. Or at the very least she knew the shape of how my disappointment felt. She was a young mother and likely acquainted with the feeling you get low in your stomach when hope and reality collide. It’s not the same things, missing Spider-Man and missing your youth, I know. Clearly different scales. But among the many tricks my mom carried in her oversized purse was the ability to match her feeling with mine. Empathy, I suppose, but bigger than that really, and a bit more like mind reading. She always knew. And she always knew what to do next. Still does.

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So we went home. I probably cried and didn’t notice her pick up the phone. A real phone, attached to the wall, with a cord and a number pad. No internet, so no shortcuts. She called someone, probably followed by several someones. There must have been a phone book involved, if anyone remembers what those are these days. There was no app, no store locator, no events page, no chatbot pretending to be sorry. Just my mom watching her little boy wipe away some tears as he pulled out his Matchbox cars and tried to forget how Spider-Man was supposed to be his pal. And she worked the phone. Exhaustion and disappointment she kept to herself, for herself. Not for me.

And somehow, she found him. Who knows how many calls or numbers or confused convenience-store clerks she had to cut through. But she did. All of them. For me. She packed up my toys, put on my jacket, and loaded me into the car. And she drove. I don’t know how far we went. Too far is my guess, but that word didn’t really exist for my mom. Still doesn’t. She must have had other things to do. Errands, dinner, laundry, bills, a pile of obligations waiting at home. Still, we drove across town, or across several towns, and really across whatever distance existed between a disappointed kid and a man in a Spider-Man costume.

I’ve been trying to name what that felt like, and I’ve been struggling and getting it wrong. It’s almost unseeable, unknowable. It’s a shimmer at the edges of my life. A protective barrier my mom may not realize exists even though she built it.

It would be easy to reduce that feeling and say she made me the center of her world, but that’s not right, and it makes her world too small. My mom had a whole life. She had my sister and my dad, yes, but she also had sisters and brothers of her own, friends, bowling leagues, golf leagues, neighbors, welcome wagon meetings, phone calls, plans, jokes, errands, recipes, housework, dreams and desires, and whatever else filled the days of a young woman trying to be herself while also being a mother.

Her life was going to be full with or without me. But when she turned her attention toward me, the world narrowed because she turned all the way. It didn’t erase the rest of her life or any of it. She just moved everything else to the edges for a while. It was like she crawled into bed and pulled the blanket over our heads and built a world out of attention and love. For that moment, for all of those moments, there was only us and whatever we chose to allow in.

And it wasn’t just that Spider-Man moment. It was trips to the grocery store, where I rode the end of the cart while she laughed at my silly impression of Steve Martin from The Jerk. It was her pretending not to notice as I tossed a package of Chips Ahoy! into the cart while she effortlessly calculated what to cross off her list of needs to make room for my wants. It was staying up late after my father went to bed, and watching Casablanca or The Out-Of-Towners with a ten-year-old, somehow translating the adult world of romance and chaos into an adventure I could understand and love with her. It was getting up before anyone else to make sure breakfast was on the table and lunches were in bags. It was hugs every day as we stepped out the door, knowing it would be bookended by another as we crossed back in.

It was crisscrossing all of the 7-Elevens of the Detroit suburbs hunting a man in an ill-fitting Spider-Man costume because she made a promise, and breaking a promise had a cost that was greater to her than gas or time.

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We found him, eventually, and I saw Spider-Man. We got the picture. Maybe there was an autograph too, though I don’t remember that part very well. Spider-Man, as it turns out, was not very memorable. A man in a suit who didn’t sound like Peter Parker at all. He didn’t even have webs. We didn’t become pals. I don’t think he even asked for my name. He may have had a small gut pushing out his suit, but I can’t really recall.

But while I don’t remember much about Spidey, I do remember the chase. My mom, refusing to let the day end at the wrong 7-Eleven. I remember that something I loved mattered enough for her to will it into existence over copper wires and rubber tires and an endless chase across the metro Detroit area. I remember her shuffling her schedule, her day, her life really, to fit small works of magic into my own. And while Spider-Man is little more than a faded picture in an aging mind full of memories, it sits next to a lifetime of moments laser-etched of the woman who made them happen. She was the only superhero I met that day.

I doubt she remembers it the way I do. For her, it was probably one more chase in a life full of things that needed pursuing, or fixing, or soothing. But for me, at fifty-four, it’s a core childhood memory. One that birthed an intensity and love I carried to my own parenthood.

When I run to the grocery store because we’re out of milk or need lunches for the week, my son and daughter come with me. I’ll ask them and they’ll say yes. Because we understand it’s more than an errand. It’s a chance to connect, to laugh, and to sneak in a few unplanned snacks. It’s a chance for joy. My daughter and I built entire rituals around movies and movie marathons. Once we watched the entirety of the Harry Potter series back-to-back-to-back, twenty-some hours. We made themed breakfast, lunch and dinner to eat while we watched. We made butterbeer and printed 3D mugs to hold our cups. We opened Harry Potter figurine blind boxes and built Harry Potter Lego sets while we watched. My son and I, we built worlds around trading cards and video games and fishing. In each of these, for each of them, I pulled the covers over our heads and built a world out of attention and love, just as my mom had for me. And I know they feel it. I can see it. I felt it too.

I wrote recently about a fairy door my wife and I made for our daughter, and about all the magic that became real around it. Notes. Glitter. Tiny secrets. At the time, I thought we were building something for her, and we were. But I was also using tools my mother handed me years before. She taught me that if a child loves something, you don’t have to watch it from the outside. You can step inside it with them. You can let the magic be real for everyone.

That’s what my mom did with Spider-Man. That’s what she did in the grocery store. That’s what she did on the couch with the old movies. She made the world smaller without making it less. She made a place small enough for two people, and still somehow large enough to hold our entire lives.

So thank you, Mom. Thank you for finding Spider-Man. Thank you for Monday grocery trips. Thank you for the cookies in the cart, the chalkboards and Lego streets, the old movies, the homemade sauces, the cart rides, the practices, the lessons, the birthdays, the Christmas mornings, the hugs in the kitchen, and the hand on my back while the movie played. Everything that was too much and too wonderful to ever fit into the confines of what my words can say.

Thank you for noticing what I loved. And thank you for teaching me how to notice what others love too.

I’m fifty-four now, and we live a country apart. But I still can’t pass a 7-Eleven without thinking about you. I still can’t walk into a grocery store without feeling some part of those Mondays come back. Ask my wife. She has never fully understood why I love the grocery store so much. And she’s probably heard the Spider-Man story too many times.

I understand it now though. Some part of me is still walking the aisles with you, watching the cart fill up, wondering what we might make when we get home. And some part of me is still in that car seat next to you, wondering how many 7-Elevens there are in the world, knowing there would never be too many for you, and looking forward to Spider-Man.

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This week, I woke up realizing I was somehow making breakfast for 150 people.

This was a problem for a few reasons. First, I was still in bed. Second, I hadn’t agreed to host anything. And third, while my kitchen is a decent size, I don’t think I can cram 150 in it, and I certainly don’t own 150 coffee mugs.

But, before I could worry about any of that, I had the normal morning obstacles to manage.

Every morning, I roll over and turn off my alarm, which is also my phone, because apparently I have learned nothing.

That means the first thing I see most days is whatever came in while I was asleep. Usually it’s work email. Sometimes a text from a late night friend with a musing about drink recipes. Then there are the apps pretending they have urgent business. Credit Karma’s certain I need to apply for a new loan. Uber’s in a panic that I haven’t taken five trips to trigger their new 30% discount. But we all know there is no urgent app business. Especially at 6:00 a.m.

Lately, though, there has been something closer to urgent business. Or at least like business I want to be bothered by. I’ve been seeing the little orange Substack bookmark more often. And I wish I could say I am above caring about that.

I am not.

There’s a little hit when I see it. A new post. A reply. A new subscriber. Somebody read something, said something back, or posted an article I want to read. Maybe somebody I don’t know wrote something, and now it’s about to feel like part of my morning.

Most days, I don’t open it right away. Partly because I’m still half-asleep and I don’t trust my brain to work yet. If somebody left a thoughtful comment or sent me something interesting, I don’t want to read it with one eye open only to have the thought disappear between brushing my teeth and feeding the dogs.

So I get up. Or I start the process of getting up, which is not really the same thing.

First I pull myself out of bed, groggy and irritated by the existence of morning light and my inexplicable lack of blinds. Then the pugs begin to emerge from somewhere under the covers. They spend the night buried in the blankets, radiating heat like two small, snoring furnaces, and then, once I move, they start tunneling toward daylight.

Eventually they make it out, shake back into dog shape, and launch themselves off the bed. At their size, and from the height of our bed, this is not nothing. These are not elegant animals. They hit the floor with authority. Or maybe it’s more of a plop. Either way, gravity has clearly woken up as well.

Then they follow me into the bathroom and gather on the tiny bath mat in front of the sink. The mat barely fits me, but somehow, every morning, it becomes me and two twenty-something-pound pugs standing in a space designed for one set of feet.

So I brush my teeth without moving too much. I take my medicine without stepping backward. I drink some water. I splash my face. I try to wake up while also trying not to trip over Parker or Tito and crack my head on the tile before 6:15 a.m., which feels like an undignified way to go.

Then I go into the closet and turn on the light. They follow me there too, and by then they are fully awake, propellers for tails, looking up at me as if the next thing I do will be fascinating or at the very least involve food. And apparently, pulling on a pair of pants satisfies the first hope. They immediately decide the legs are theirs and we begin a tug-of-war. Every morning. I pull them back. They pull harder.

It’s not convenient. It’s certainly not great for my pants. But it’s also pretty great.

Eventually I wrestle the pants free and get my feet into them without losing a toe. Then I sit down to put on socks and shoes, which takes longer than it should, because by then both dogs are jumping into my lap, licking my face, pawing at me, and acting like the whole point of me being on the floor is to make sure I understand I have been missed during the eight seconds since I last touched them.

It’s a hell of a way to start the day. I mean that sincerely. If you have something like that in your life, you know. If you don’t, I hope you find it. And if you can’t imagine wanting it, maybe that’s worth thinking about too. Because there are a few good ways to begin a morning. Two overexcited pugs trying to steal your pants, it’s one of them.

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Eventually, I make my way to the kitchen, where I remember the problem: Breakfast for 150. But I’m distracted by the pugs, because by then the morning has reached its only truly non-negotiable and sacred stage: breakfast for the dogs.

I pull out their food. I make their meal. They supervise each step with the intensity of growling little auditors who are certain the cats have mishandled their funds. And frankly, one of the cats is usually eating part of their food on the counter at that point, so I get it.

I brush the cat away, put the dogs outside to eat, make coffee, plod down the hall to my office, close the door and sit down at my computer. I reach for my mouse, wake the screen, pop open a browser, and the welcome little orange bookmark is waiting for me here too.

For the past month or so, this has become one of the best parts of my morning.

That feels a little ridiculous to say. It’s a website. It’s a feed. It’s another thing on the internet, and God knows I don’t need more reasons to be on the internet. But it has made me a reader again. And a writer again.

I don’t mean that in some grand artistic way. I mean it in the most basic possible way. I wake up and there are things to read. There are people thinking out loud. There are essays and notes and comments and arguments and jokes and little pieces of someone else’s life that I would not have found otherwise. And it makes me want to write something back.

But this week, somewhere in the middle of that morning routine, I saw that 150 people had subscribed to this thing. That was the breakfast. Or at least, that was the moment I realized there were more people at the table than I understood or thought would ever show.

I’ve been trying to not care about that number. I really have. I know myself. I can get weird about numbers. Views. Opens. Reads. Restacks. Subscribers. All the little measurements and bits of information that turn a fun hobby into a side-hustle.

I don’t want this to become that. But 150 got me.

It’s such a round number. Such a good number. Not big in any internet sense, obviously. It’s not going to put me on any leaderboards, and it’s not going prompt agents to line up at my door asking to sift through my pile of unsubmitted manuscripts.

But 150 people is still a lot of people.

It’s too many people to fit comfortably in my house. It’s enough people that I can’t pretend I’m only talking to myself. And that feels good.

I don’t know exactly why each of you came here. Maybe you came for the hockey essay. Maybe you came for the piece about misogyny and immediately regretted wandering into that comments section with me. Maybe you came for a discussion about AI and selfhood and the way modern systems keep shaving us down until we start mistaking efficiency for a personality. Maybe you came for cocktails. Maybe you came for Record Store Day. Maybe you came because somebody else restacked something and you clicked without knowing what you were getting into.

That would be fair. I don’t exactly have a lane here, so maybe its hard to tell. Maybe you don’t even know. I sure as hell don’t. So far, this place has included grief, hockey, feminism, AI, productivity, cocktails, old records, fairy doors, poems, and the possibility that I might start putting fiction here because apparently I cannot leave well enough alone.

That’s probably bad branding. It’s also accurate.

I’m not writing from a plan. I’m writing from whatever feels hot enough in my head long enough that I need to put it someplace else. Some of it is serious. A little is angry. There’s an abundance of sentimental feeling, and the nagging need to work through how to pay attention to it all, and to myself. And some if it is far less interior. Like me making a drink on a Friday, posting my recipe, and imagining one of you pouring yourself the same.

But the best part has not been watching the number go up. It’s been finding that some people write back. One person leaves a comment or links to an article. Another says, “This made me think of something.” Someone disagrees, and another tells me about a film their wife made that circled the same issues in my essay. And a good number of you have written sentences that follow me around for the rest of the day.

That’s what I wanted more than I knew.

I don’t really want an audience in the performative sense. Who am I to say what people should read or think about? I want a conversation. I want the thing I wrote to bump into the thing somebody else is thinking. I want to know what other people are reading, what they’re chewing on, what they’re upset or passionate about, what they remember while walking the dog or making coffee or sitting alone with their own phone in the morning.

One of the best parts of Substack has been discovering people through other people. The essay restacks and referral comments. Where someone mentions a writer I’ve never read, or says something smart under somebody else’s post. And suddenly I’m following that thread too. It starts to feel less like a feed and more like walking into a room full of conversations, where every discussion leads to another room.

There are people here whose work I look for now. I wake up and read them right away. Some of them I knew about before I got here. Some I found in Notes or as a mention in another post. And there are people here who have not written much yet, or have not commented much yet, or are maybe just reading for now.

I get that too.

But I hope they do write and I hope they comment. I want them to post the idea sitting in their drafts, or the rejected line banished to a purge file, or maybe even just an idea rattling free inside their head, because one of the strangest pleasures of this place is realizing that everybody is working on or through something. It’s all of us trying to make sense of a memory or work out an argument. Land a few jokes, or maybe offer a recipe—I already made one I found on here. Grief. It’s all over the place and people are figuring it out, or at least on their way. And then there are the notes, often full of half-formed and fledgling ideas, with the writer testing how much pressure they’ll take once stacked inside the feed.

I want to read those too.

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That may be the thing I’m most grateful for. Not just that people are reading me, although I am grateful for that. More than I expected. But that I have been reading you. Or finding my way toward you. Or waiting for you to finally put your fingers on the keyboard and say whatever it is you’ve been carrying around.

And I mean it when I say I want the conversation.

If I’ve ever shown up in the comments on your own Substack page, you probably already know this. I am rarely a one-sentence guy. I tend to arrive with a paragraph, a tangent, a question, a second tangent, and half an idea I probably should have let cool for another ten minutes before pressing send.

learned this the hard way. She made the mistake of DMing me one day, and now, apparently, I’ve decided she needs a steady supply of stray thoughts, essay ideas, and whatever else has fallen out of my head that morning.

Tina, if you need me to stop, you can tell me. I will understand. I’m trying!

Probably.

But that is the kind of place I want this to be. I don’t want comments to feel like applause at the end of a performance. I want them to feel like someone pulling up a chair. And I get the self-consciousness of it.

I have gone back and edited comments because I thought maybe I said too much, or said it badly, or walked into somebody else’s house with muddy shoes. I’ve done the same thing with Notes. I’ll post something, then look at it later and think, that was too much, or too sharp, or too loose, or maybe just not quite what I meant.

That’s part of this too, I think. You’re not only writing. You’re learning the edges of your own voice in public. So when I say I want the comments, I don’t mean I expect everyone to show up perfectly formed.

I don’t.

I want the paragraph you almost deleted. I want the “this made me think of…” post. I want the rough ideas, the links, the poems, the pictures, the thing you’re still trying to say but exists just beyond the end or your words.

I should also say that I don’t have paid subscriptions turned on. I don’t know if I ever will. I’ve thought about it, but mostly because I don’t understand how any of this works and part of me wonders whether Substack rewards you for flipping the paid switch. Maybe it does. Maybe it doesn’t. Maybe the algorithm is just a manic squirrel in a server room knocking over levers at random.

In any event, I do not expect anyone to pay for this. And yet two people have pledged.

This is astonishing, and also funny, because I know both of them. One was my best man. The other is someone I used to sit with in a basement playing Dungeons & Dragons when I was in middle school.

So I messaged both of them privately and said, more or less: hey, you may want to take that back, because if I ever turn paid subscriptions on, I think your credit card gets charged. Neither responded. I’m choosing to interpret that as support from people who know how hard it is to put your mind in public.

Maybe that’s another version of what I mean. Some of you are strangers. Some of you are old friends. Most of you are people I will probably never meet. But somehow you’re all here now, at least for the moment, inside this odd little room where I keep putting things and hoping someone answers.

So here is the part where I want to pull out a few more chairs.

If you read this, and you feel like it, bring something to the table. Put the piece you’re most proud of here or anywhere on my page. Put a poem or a photograph. Drop a note. Comment an idea you keep nearly writing but are never sure where it goes. Put the thing you wish more people would read. Put the thing you’re not sure anybody wants to hear.

I know people sometimes frown on self-promotion. I get why. Nobody likes walking into a party and finding someone standing on a table telling everyone about the bar down the street. But that’s not what this is.

There is no thread to hijack here, because there is no agenda here beyond gratitude. This post is not trying to prove anything. It’s not trying to sell anything. It’s not even trying to be especially useful. I just want it to be a space for us. That’s the whole meal, as far as I’m concerned. That’s the breakfast.

I’m just happy this place exists. I’m happy you’re here. I’m happy some of you occasionally want to read something I wrote. And I would love to read something back.

It may take me some time. Like many of us, I have a day job. I have emails and clients and errands and dogs whose desire for food is far greater than their concern for my writing or reading aspirations. But I am making my way through so many interesting things. And the more interesting things I find, the more ideas I have. The more ideas I have, the more I want to write. The more I write, the more I want to know what everyone else is carrying around too.

So thank you.

Thank you for reading and subscribing. Thank you for the comments and the articles and the arguments and the jokes and the recommendations and the weird little moments of recognition. Thank you for giving me something to read in the morning. Thank you for making me want to write back.

And if we’re all here anyway, pull up a chair. I’d love to see what you brought.

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Piper sat on her knees in a chair, focused on two little scraps of parchment on the table in front of her, a rainbow of colored pencils scattered about. One was a note left by fairies in our backyard. The other was blank and waiting for her reply. Every time Piper bent over the paper, her hair fell into her eyes. She brushed it back and kept printing in careful block letters. She was writing back.

My wife and I stood there watching while she worked.

She kept stopping to think, then adding another line. Her tongue pushed out a little when she concentrated. She pressed hard enough with the pencil that the letters had to be visible on the back. She was writing to somebody real. That was plain.

That night, after Piper was asleep, Nancy and I stood at the kitchen counter with glitter on our hands and a pile of tiny junk from Michael’s spread out between us trying to decide what Misty, our backyard fairy, should say back, and what gift she should leave for Piper.

A bead. A button. A fake jewel. A little earring. Tiny scraps of paper. Tulle. Lace. Little bags. Scissors. Glitter on the laminate, glitter on the faucet, glitter somehow on our shirts. Nancy held up a tiny spoon and asked whether it was the sort of thing Misty would gift. I had no idea, but I nodded anyway, lost in the note Nancy had written in miniature, amazed at how easily her handwriting passed for something from another world.

Outside the kitchen door, the old oak stood in the dark, the little wooden fairy door we’d bought at a craft store glued low against the trunk. My wife tied the spoon to the note with a ribbon, propped it against the door, and slipped our daughter’s letter into her pocket.

Those nights still sit near the top of the list when I think about being a parent.

The first door went into that old oak maybe three feet from the side-yard door off our kitchen, close enough that the kids could discover it when playing the yard, but hidden enough so the discovery felt like theirs.

The tree was enormous and older than the house by decades. Maybe a century. Its branches sprawled across most of the yard and down the hill, and its trunk was so thick that a child could easily imagine a world inside.

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The second door was in the stone wall, half hidden behind tall dry grass just to the left of a rose bush, tucked low in the mulch with a tiny mailbox outside that we found at the craft store. A fairy with a pen pal needs somewhere to receive letters, after all.

One fairy door was a surprise. Two was a neighborhood. But Nancy and I were smart enough to stop at two. And we learned that while the fairy in the oak was a homebody, the ones in the wall were frequently on vacation—there are only so many notes a parent can write after all. Piper left letters at both, and the fairy that was home wrote back. We never gave either door an official street number, but they might as well have been 419 and a half and 419 and three-quarters.

During that summer, Piper left drawings, coins, marbles, little plastic animals. Anything she cared about enough to give to a small friend she came to love. She asked the fairies about their lives and told them about hers. Misty mattered.

Her brother was in the story too, though not the same way. Piper went all the way in. She named them, wrote to them, worried about them. Max was younger, but somehow more suspicious, which put him in prime position to push on the magic door and see whether it moved. He was, as far as any five-year-old can be, a happy skeptic.

At the time, I didn’t think about what any of this meant. Nancy and I didn’t stand at the kitchen counter with glitter on our hands discussing child development projects. We did the types of things parents do all the time. We wanted to make the world bigger for our children, but also small enough that they could matter inside it. It’s part of the job. We make rituals and games. We tell stories and make up fairy tales. We hide eggs. We fill stockings. We don’t always know what lasts and don’t know what will feel magical or foolish. Most of the time we’re just hoping.

That, I think, is one of the harder parts of being a parent. You’re always putting things into your kids’ lives without any guarantee of where it lives in them ten years later. Stories and traditions. Rules and responsibilities. Sometimes a tiny brown fairy door glued near the root ball of an oak. At the time, you’re not standing there thinking about the future. You’re thinking about the children in front of you. The one kneeling at oak tree and the other trying to see behind the door. You’re thinking about notes to Misty in careful block letters written at the table where you would later craft the perfect response, sprinkled with pixie dust. Whether you’re trying to make their world larger or warmer, or simply more fun, I’m not sure. But it’s from love.

Years later, I was in my office reading an essay by a Substack author named (I used to believe in magic) about growing up with fairies and finding out her mother had been behind them all along. At this time, Piper was two and a half hours away in her first year of college, probably taking notes in her stats class, tongue still poking out in concentration. She was a long way from the girl at our kitchen table with parchment and colored pencils spread out in front of her, but not as far as time would suggest. Then I hit the line in Sophia’s essay where she wrote she had been angry, that she had felt fooled by her mother, and the whole thing came back in a rush.

The door in the oak tree. The other one in the stone wall behind the tall grass next to the rose bush. The little mailbox. The glitter near the sink. Piper kneeling by the roots, her note waiting to be answered. And with it came a question I had managed not to ask when the kids were little.

What had we actually given her?

And I immediately thought about the day the door came off the tree.

Max pried it loose. We told him it was sealed by magic, so I don’t know if he expected it to come off or open up. But when Piper ran into the house crying that Max was trying to break the fairy door, I ran outside to find him using a spoon to lever it loose. It came off as I came out, and he held to door up toward me with a mix of shock and pride. The back of the door showed plain wood and glue with no sign of magic or another world. I took the door from Max and told him to go inside. I glued it back on. I made up something about the power of fairy magic, and hoped for the best.

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After that, Piper wrote another note.

Dear fairies,
I’m sorry Max broke your door.
Love, Piper.

This one was all words, no drawings. No hearts. You could see her hope fighting with reality in the note.

A child who thought her brother damaged a fairy house sat down and tried to make it right. She wanted the fairies to know she was sorry. She wanted them to read it. She wanted them to know she meant it. She wanted them to be real. But could that magic hold?

In hindsight, the door was always going to come off sooner or later. What my wife and I never gave much thought to was what would happen to the magic once the fairies were gone. We never pictured Piper looking back on the notes or the gifts or the apology and feeling stupid for caring that much. We saw the notes as evidence of sincerity, not something she might one day have to laugh off as an embarrassment.

Eventually Piper stopped writing the notes and the fairies gave way to other things. Tea parties. Card games. Hide-and-seek. School. Friends. The small, crowded life of a child getting older. For Nancy and me, the transition felt easy enough. We didn’t spend much time wondering what happened to all that feeling when the notes stopped. We certainly didn’t ask whether what we’d given her was more wound than wonder.

Then Sophia’s essay raised that same question, years later. She wrote that she felt like a fool when she found out her fairies weren’t real. She had been upset at her mother for a long time, but later came to understand that maybe magic was real all along because of what her mother created and how she made it real. That last part is what I hadn’t thought about. I had no trouble remembering the enchantment, and I still felt the injury, but I never knew whether the injury was the end of it.

And that’s the reality of parenting. You’re almost never working with certainty. You’re working with hope and your best judgment, making choices that feel loving in the moment, and trusting time will prove you right. And sometimes you are, but sometimes you’re not. Sometimes something you meant to be magic turns out to be a craft store door glued onto a tree. You don’t always know the impact of your choices.

Sophia’s essay put Piper back in front of me. My wife and I had built a world in the yard and watched our daughter step into it. All the way into it. She wrote to the fairies and left them gifts. She wrote to Misty the way you write to somebody you expect to answer. So what had we done? Had we given her a beautiful childhood memory, or had we built an early heartbreak with glitter and ribbon and a glue gun?

When I picture Piper at that table, bent over the parchment with her hair falling into her eyes, I don’t think about a child being tricked. I think about a child learning to imagine life on the other side of the door. She wrote to Misty. She left gifts by the roots. When Max broke the door, she sat down and wrote the fairies an apology in careful block letters. I can’t find much wrong in that.

But the answer here belongs to Piper. I can tell you what I remember building, what I worried about later, and how I feel about it now. But what it felt like on the other side of that fairy door is hers to say, just as it was Sophia’s.

So, I went to my bedroom and opened the little wooden box in my dresser. I pushed aside the bent paper-clip people Max made for me, a couple of Nerf darts long separated from their gun, a beat-up Pokémon card, some frayed ribbons, a few Play-Doh figurines, and, for reasons I still can’t explain, a Ziploc bag full of baby teeth. Near the bottom was a small piece of parchment, the letters in pencil pressed hard enough to be visible on the back.

I knew what it was before I unfolded it. I took a picture and sent it to Piper and asked, in the careful, over-serious way a parent asks when they are not quite sure whether they did the right thing. Whether making that world for her had felt like magic, or like being fooled.

After a few minutes, her answer bubbled up on my screen, and it was simpler than my worry. She remembered it sweetly. She obviously knew plenty of childhood magic was made by adults. Santa. The Easter Bunny. All the little worlds parents build and children enter until they are old enough to see the seams. The fairy doors, to her, were not an injury doused in glitter. They were fun. They were ours. She was glad we put them there.

So I sat there alone with the note in my hand and thought about the girl at the table, and the daughter I have now. I thought about the old oak, the stone wall, the little wooden door, the tiny mailbox, the spoon tied on with ribbon, the glitter on the counter, my wife writing in miniature because our daughter believed somebody small and hidden might be glad to find it. And I sat there with the message she just sent, and felt glad she had that world for a while.

For a long time, I thought the magic ended when the notes stopped. Now, I know better. The magic never had to end, because it was never the world behind the fairy door, it was that she knew to look for one in the first place.

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I was reading posts by Emily Frey (“Social Media for the Introvert”) and Tina Lance (“Watching Them Watching Her”) on Substack the other day, and they knocked loose a phrase I’ve been carrying around since: slightly off-centroverted.

I thought I made that term up on the spot. Turns out centrovert is already floating around out there, even if not many people use it. From what I see, it’s used to describe someone who falls somewhere between an extrovert and an introvert, which is fair enough, so I’m not claiming I discovered a new continent here. I’m just bending the word toward something more specific: a slightly off-centrovert. A person who wants to help shape the center without living in it. And that variation got at something I’ve been trying to understand about myself for a while, and none of the usual words seem to quite do it.

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I know there are also other terms for people who do not fit neatly into introvert and extrovert. Ambivert and so on. Those are probably useful. But those words still feel a little broad for what I mean. What I mean is less about whether I like people and where I get social energy from and more about where I do best in relation to the center of things.

Because I do like people. I like conversation. I like the live current of a room once it stops idling and the social motor is humming. I like helping that happen. Maybe too much.

That “too much” part is part of why I’m writing this.

A while back I was out to dinner with my wife and some friends, and I asked one of them a question I thought I probably already knew the answer to. She’s someone I think of as intense in a way I understand, maybe even admire. Socially forceful. Strong presence. The kind of person who does not drift into the background by accident. So I asked her, “Do you think I can be too intense?”

To my honest surprise, she said yes. You can be a lot sometimes.

It hurt more than I thought it would, and it stayed with me. And when she said it, I knew it wasn’t meant to be cruel. It was actually generous. It was an honest response to an honest question, and she trusted me to be OK with it. I can be a lot.

And it was not the first time I had heard some version of it. A friend responded in a text thread once, during one of my cocktail and mixology deep dives, that the way I can get into certain topics can be a little overwhelming. My wife has told me, more than once, that when we’re out with other people, she can sometimes feel slightly shunted aside in conversation. That one lands especially hard because I know she’s right.

Part of what happens there, I think, is that I unconsciously experience the two of us as a pair, an “us,” and then make the lazy mistake of assuming we are already on the same page. So I extend curiosity and attention outward to the room and stop extending enough of it toward her. Which is unfair, and not at all the same as being connected. It’s actually a failure of connection disguised as confidence in it.

And then there is the larger problem, which is that if you give me enough room, I can absolutely fill it.

Especially one-on-one.

Someone asks a question. Then another. They’re engaged. Curious. Warm. They’re being the kind of conversational partner you should appreciate. And somewhere in there my motor starts to run. Once it starts, it can really go. There is always another word behind the last word, another angle behind that, another thought, another association, another qualification. I have a restless brain and if I am not careful it will simply pour itself into the available space.

When that happens, I don’t walk away feeling lit up. I usually walk away feeling vaguely awful.

Exhausted, for one thing. But also embarrassed. Like I turned a conversation into a monologue I didn’t even fully mean to give. And I can’t even imagine how it feels on the other side. They probably feel pinned down as I let my own momentum trap me inside my own center.

That phrase matters to me: trapped inside my own center.

Because I don’t think my problem is that I want all attention all the time. I think my problem is that once attention settles on me, I can sometimes fail to interrupt it. I keep feeding it. I keep generating. I keep going. It becomes a kind of social inertia. A loop. Or maybe a runaway lithium battery fire is the better comparison: it gets hot, and then the heat itself becomes fuel, and then pretty soon the whole thing is running on its own bad momentum.

My daughter said something to me once that made me recognize this in a different way. She was talking about being with friends and feeling herself become somebody different than her “true self” while she was talking. Like she could hear it happening and didn’t quite like it, almost from just outside herself. And that sometimes it made her anxious in the moment, or disappointed afterward.

When she described that feeling, I recognized it immediately—or at least part of it. We talked about it, and emotional space closed between us. Then we went silent and listened to the radio for a bit. Which is when I noticed something else: she and I can sit in silence with each other without needing to move the moment forward. Maybe because we both know the feeling of getting pulled too hard toward the center. Seeing it that close, in someone I love, made it feel less like a private flaw, and more like a broader pattern.

Which probably means this is not some private little defect of mine. I suspect a lot of people know the feeling of hearing themselves keep going, feeling their engine take over, but wanting the conversation to become shared again. And not quite knowing how to take a healf step out of the center once they are in it.

That strange feeling of being a passenger as your own momentum carries you away from where you started, and further from where you meant to be. The dissociation of it. The sense that your brain has shifted into output mode and your mouth is now a little ahead of your better judgment. What you really want, actually, is for somebody else to come in and help carry the conversation, take the spotlight, but somehow you are still the one talking. Or doing. And it’s your own damn fault.

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I think a lot of people know that feeling. People who can be very “on” socially and still feel trapped when the conversation settles on them for too long. Who do not want to vanish, but do not want to be pinned to the center either. People who feel most alive when the social circle opens up and becomes shared.

I know that feeling very well.

Which is why I think what I’m trying to name here is not exactly a personality type. It’s more like a preferred social shape, and maybe even a discipline I’m trying to learn.

And that’s where I decided: Slightly Off-Centroverted.

Close enough to the center to spark something. Far enough from it that other people can enter. Or maybe more honestly: trying to get better at stepping half a pace to the side so the conversation can become something other than the contents of my own head.

Because that is what I actually want. I don’t need infinite room to keep talking. I have that already. What I want is the moment someone else says something I could not have produced on my own. Their thought. Their joke. Their feeling. Their memory. Their weird angle. The thing that shifts the whole conversation into new territory. And maybe I helped get it there, but now it’s operating under its own power.

That is the real energy for me. That is the real relief too.

The best version of being with people, at least for me, is not occupying the center and holding it there through force of personality or momentum. It is helping something come alive and then feeling it become shared. It is when the room starts humming and I no longer have to carry it. It is when somebody else grabs the thread and runs with it somewhere better than where I would have taken it alone.

That’s true at dinner. It’s true with friends. It’s true in my marriage, or at least it should be more often than it is. It’s true at work too. I don’t always need to be the person out front. A lot of the satisfaction is in shaping the thing, sharpening the thing, helping build something more alive in the room than the version that first showed up in my own head.

So maybe that’s all I mean.

Slightly off-centroverted. Close enough to be a spark. Wise enough, I hope, to step away once ignition happens. Someone who does best when the conversation is moving, the room is open, and the center is loose enough for other people to step into.

That’s what I hope to be. That’s what I’m trying to become. Maybe you are too.

Grief is strange.

A friend of mine died last night. A hockey friend, which maybe sounds like unnecessary detail unless you have never had one of those. But if you know, you know. Sunday mornings. Over-50 league. 6 a.m. games. Getting up in the dark to go play a sport we do not play well anymore, but still crave in some deep and embarrassing and necessary way.

That locker room. The ice. That stupid ritual of taping sticks and pulling on gear and chirping each other and pretending our knees still work like they used to. There is something there I do not really know how to describe without sounding overly sentimental about old men playing a game badly, except that it is real. A kind of camaraderie that is harder to find as you get older. Maybe impossible to replace once you do find it. A place where men who are carrying all kinds of private feelings and troubles come together and, for an hour or two, become part of something shared where those things don’t matter. It’s a ritual and release adult life doesn’t allow for most days.

A lot of us have tried to quit over the years. And a lot of us have come back, injuries and breaking bodies be damned. Because it turns out that whatever that thing is in the locker room, whatever that thing is on the ice, it is not easy to live without.

A week and a half ago, one of the guys on our team lost his balance on the ice and went headfirst into the boards. No big hit or dramatic cheap shot. Just one terrible, irreversible accident. One second of physics. One moment where a body goes the wrong way and life splits cleanly into before and after.

Catastrophic spinal injury. Paralyzed from the neck down.

I went to see him that Saturday morning, the first chance I had.

And there he was.

Wayne.

Alive, but trapped inside a moment that happened too fast for any of us to understand. Talking was hard for him. Strained. Effortful. A few words at a time. Yes. Okay. All right. That kind of thing. And even that looked like work. He was exhausted in a primal sense.

This was a guy who used to sit next to me in the locker room and just tear into people. Laughing, talking shit, telling stories, nonstop. The kind of guy who was fully alive in every direction. A trash talker. A wheeler and dealer. The kind of teammate who, if somebody took a run at you, would absolutely be in the mess a second later. Probably started it. Certainly ended it. That was just him. He was in it. He was one of us in the oldest sense of that phrase.

And now I was sitting next to his hospital bed, trying to have a conversation made out of single words.

I do not know what to do with the brutality of that contrast.

While I was at the hospital, there was a small heartbreaking moment. He had been on pureed food. Pureed pork, pureed chicken and veggies, whatever else the kitchen could blend. It was the best he could have, but it was still indignity on a hospital tray. He hated it. Of course he hated it. Wayne was picky anyway. He liked burgers, pizza, fries, and more broadly regular food instead of soupified versions of it. Same as most of us. And at some point the nutrition specialist said maybe he could handle small soft bites. So I asked if they could get him a broken up hamburger patty with ketchup. Familiar food. Normal food. Food he might actually want.

It felt, at the time, like maybe that meant direction. A good one. Maybe recovery. Maybe a little piece of himself was coming back through all of this. Maybe it meant that we were still in a world where effort and time equaled results.

I left before lunch. I do not even know if he got the burger.

The next day another teammate visited him and sent out word that Wayne had gotten worse. He was on a ventilator. He could not breathe on his own anymore.

And then, not long after that, we learned that he had made his decision.

If this was permanent, he did not want to live on a vent.

So we went back.

A few of us this time, over several days. Teammates. His family was there too. His mother had flown in from Tennessee. A cousin. People gathering around the edge of the unimaginable. Wayne could not talk anymore. Tubes down his throat. Eyes open. Awake. A page with letters and basic responses on it. A nod. A look. Tiny movements standing in for a whole human being still fully present, still fully aware, still having to make the most final decision a person can make.

And he made it.

He knew what his life would be. He knew what it would mean. He knew what he could no longer do, and what would never come back. And he decided.

I do not know how to write about the courage of that without diminishing it. I can’t. I can barely put this thing together at all, but I have to. It’s the only way I know how to process.

We sat with him. We told him things would be okay, and said things like “see you later,” which I am not even sure was for him as much as it was for us. Maybe both. Probably both. We said goodbye in the soft, dishonest language people use when the truth is sitting right there in the room with them. We loved him. He knew it. I think that matters. I told him, which stupidly I never would have done sitting next to him in the locker room.

Then we left and waited.

And even then Wayne was still being Wayne. Holding on long enough to get his affairs in order. Handling power of attorney. Taking care of the legal and practical things that needed to be done. Imagine that. Imagine being that close to death, having already decided to meet it, and still making sure the paperwork is right, still making sure other people are protected, still carrying responsibility with whatever strength you have left.

That is a strong man.

That is a man.

And last night, Sunday, March 29, at 10:45 p.m., Wayne came off the vent and died.

This morning I woke up to the team text thread.

Usually that thread is jokes. Ball-breaking. Random hockey bullshit. Shit talking about who overslept and who brought what beer and whether any of us are actually stretching enough not to break into a million pieces on the ice. That kind of thing. Dumb, familiar, living things. The patter of aging with friends.

This morning it was memorials. Rest in peace. Broken hearts in the language men use when they are trying to say something enormous through a device built for almost nothing. All of sitting in our own homes, without the protective shield of the locker room.

And then the pictures started showing up.

Hockey sticks, standing outside front doors. Leaning against houses. Alone.

Just a stick outside a home. And I lost it.

I put mine out too.

I took the picture. I sent it in.

And I do not fully know why that mattered so much, except that it did. Maybe because grief is always looking for a shape. Maybe because love is. Maybe because when a terrible thing happens, you want at least one small act that says: I was here. He was here. We were here together. This mattered. He mattered. Because we were and he did.

Maybe that is all a memorial is. Love trying to make itself visible.

What gets me, maybe more than anything, is how beautiful it was. How beautiful these men were in that moment. Men who would mostly rather make a joke than a declaration. Men who know each other through skates and sweat and trash talk and years of dumb rituals. Men who probably do not say half of what they feel even to themselves.

And yet there it was. All over the Bay Area, I imagine. Sticks outside houses. Little signals in the dark that no one else will understand. A language no one planned, but seemed natural once it happened. A tenderness emerging from exactly the place people least expect tenderness to live.

Sometimes grief burns away all the stupid intermediate bullshit and leaves only the truth.

Which is that we loved him.

And that we love each other.

And that whatever this thing is we find in those early Sunday mornings, in that freezing rink, in those locker rooms, in all those years of half-assed hockey and full-assed companionship, it was real.

It is real.

I keep thinking about how easy it is to forget that.

How easy it is, in ordinary life, to mistake the daily conversation for the real one. To think the world is made out of the arguments we are having, the positions we defend, the identities we polish, the teams we pretend matter most. Wayne and I probably were not on the same page on all the “important” issues. Not even close, really. In another context, that may have been an obstacle. Another modern barrier. Another way to reduce a person, and each of our worlds, before actually figuring each other out.

But none of that mattered in the locker room.

None of it mattered on the ice.

And none of it matters now.

What matters is that he was our friend, and that he showed up. What matters is that he made life bigger and louder and funnier by being in it. That he had our backs. What matters is that when it was time for us to show up for him, we did. And I think we would again. Every single one of us.

We are here for such a short time.

And the only thing that keeps proving itself to me, over and over, is that the only thing that really matters is how we treat each other while we are here. Forget the abstractions and the posturing. Put away the scorecards we carry around in our heads. Unlearn the stupid, reflexive reasons we give ourselves for withholding kindness or friendship.

Just this.

Love people.

Be kind to them.

Show up for them.

Treat them like real people before they die.

God damn it, do it before they die.

Because one day you are sitting next to a guy in a locker room while he laughs and talks shit and gives you grief for some dumb play you made in the neutral zone. And then one day you are standing in a hospital room saying goodbye while he nods at you with the only movement he has left. And then one day you are putting your hockey stick outside your front door because words have failed again and this is all your hands know how to do.

Grief is so strange.

It breaks you open, yes. But sometimes, if you are lucky, it also lets you see what was there all along.

And what was there was more important than agreement, or sameness, or ideology. Or even daily connection.

What was there was deeper. Something that survives all the surface differences. A thing that exists underneath the noise, but only shows up when you can’t hide from it or disguise it anymore. And I hate that this is the moment that revealed it. I hate that Wayne is gone.

But I love what I saw from these men today. I love what Wayne called out of us just by being loved. I love that somewhere, all over, there are hockey sticks standing alone outside houses like a kind of prayer.

And I think maybe that is what grief is, too.

Love, with nowhere to go.

Thank you Wayne.

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