Gloria Steinem died on Wednesday at her home in New York City. She was 92. The announcement said she went peacefully, surrounded by people who loved her, and that she kept working for equality right up to the end. Anyone who followed her life for the last sixty years would expect nothing less. She never seemed to understand the concept of retirement, which is a little embarrassing to admit for someone writing a column with “Second Act” in the title.

The obituaries will do the résumé justice, and it is a staggering one. Born in Toledo in 1934 to a family with a suffragist grandmother. Smith College, magna cum laude, 1956. Two years in India on a fellowship that taught her how change actually spreads: person to person, village to village, in circles rather than from podiums. A young freelancer in New York who was told by an editor that he needed a reporter, not a pretty girl, and who answered by going undercover as a Playboy Bunny in 1963 and writing an exposé that is still assigned in journalism classes. A co-founder of New York magazine in 1968. A co-founder of the National Women’s Political Caucus in 1971. A co-founder of Ms. magazine in 1972, the first mass-market publication in America run by women, for women, about women, at a time when the smart money said it would fold in six months. The Ms. Foundation for Women. A shelf of books, from “Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions” to “My Life on the Road.” The Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2013. The phrase “reproductive freedom,” which she coined, and which entered the language so thoroughly that most people who use it have no idea it had an author.

That is the public ledger. What I want to write about is a much smaller entry, one that fits on a single index card, because it taught me something about her that no list of accomplishments can.

Miami Beach, July 1972

I was a medical student that summer, and through a combination of luck and a faculty member who liked me, I was assigned to the medical team covering urgent care at the Democratic National Convention in Miami Beach. For a twenty-something, third year medical student, it was an astonishing place to be. I had a floor pass that let me wander the convention hall, and between shifts I also wandered the protesters’ encampment outside, where the anti-war movement had set up in Flamingo Park. Inside and outside, the air had the same electric quality. Something was being fought over, and everyone knew it.

I carried a Minolta camera everywhere. Between speakers, when the floor loosened into a shuffling, gossiping crowd, I would roam the aisles taking pictures of the luminaries. It was the kind of convention where you could turn a corner and bump into a senator, a movie star, a Nobel laureate, or a delegate from Iowa who had never left the state before. I was scanning faces in the crowd when I looked straight ahead and saw Gloria Steinem walking up the aisle directly toward me.

I should explain what she was doing there, because it matters. That convention was where the women’s political movement she had helped build made its first real stand inside a major party. The Caucus had flooded the delegations with women. Shirley Chisholm’s name was placed in nomination. There was a floor fight over a reproductive rights plank that lost, bitterly, in the small hours of the morning. Steinem was not there as a celebrity. She was there as an organizer, working the floor, counting votes, getting outmaneuvered and coming back the next day anyway. She had every reason to walk past a starstruck kid with a camera.

She didn’t. I stopped her, and in a voice that I’m sure came out higher than I intended, told her that I admired and appreciated her work. I asked if I could take her picture. She agreed, graciously, and since this was decades before anyone could hold a phone at arm’s length, I simply raised the Minolta and took the shot where we stood.

Then she did the thing I have never forgotten. She asked me questions. Who was I? Where was I from? What was I doing at the convention? She listened to the answers, which is not the same thing as waiting for them to end. There was nothing performitive about it. She was not being polite to a fan; she was being curious about a person. The whole encounter probably lasted two minutes. It has felt, for fifty-four years, like a half-hour interview in which I was somehow the subject.

What the two minutes taught me

I have thought about that aisle many times since, usually when I am tired and tempted to treat the person in front of me as an interruption rather than a human being. Medicine gives you a thousand opportunities a week to make that mistake. Steinem, in the middle of the most consequential political week of her movement’s young life, with a floor fight to run and a magazine to launch, did not make it with me.

Years later I read something she told a journalist that explained the whole encounter. “I’m an entrepreneur of social change,” she said. “I raise money. I talk. I write. I tell stories. I want to do justice to the women I meet.” I have come to believe that the last sentence was the engine of everything else. The organizing, the speeches, the magazine, the decades of airports and church basements and college gyms were all in service of doing justice to particular people, one at a time. She wanted to know who you were. She believed you mattered. And she extended that belief past the women she was fighting for, to a nervous medical student who happened to be standing in her way.

That is the part of her I would ask people to remember alongside the milestones. It is easy to celebrate a public figure for what she changed. It is rarer to be able to say that she changed how you treat the next person you meet. She insisted, in the way she lived, that justice and kindness were not competing values. The movement she led was about dignity, and dignity is not an abstraction. It is a woman in an aisle asking a stranger where he is from, and meaning it.

She spent her final years, according to her family, in community with others and writing. That sounds exactly right. She kept the same brownstone for more than half a century and filled its living room with what she called talking circles, hundreds of people at a time, sitting together to figure out what to do next. India taught her that in 1957. She never unlearned it.

I still have the photograph. It is not a great picture; the light on the convention floor was harsh and I was shaking a little. But it is a picture of a woman who stopped. That is what I will hold onto now that she is gone. Gloria Steinem was one of a kind, and the kind she was is the kind we need more of: someone who did justice, in the largest possible sense and in the smallest possible aisle, to the people she met.

Light a candle for her, as her family has asked. Then go ask someone where they’re from.

Wine is one of the oldest human pleasures. Long before it became a symbol of refinement, before it was discussed in notes of oak, tannin, and vintage, it was simply a way of turning fruit, patience, and place into something lasting. Across centuries, wine has remained with us because it is more than a drink. It is a record of human care, a vessel for memory, and a quiet expression of where we live and what we value.

The history of wine reaches deep into the past. Ancient communities in the Middle East, the Mediterranean, and beyond learned that grapes could be transformed through fermentation into something that both nourished and delighted. Over time, wine traveled with trade routes, empires, monasteries, and migrations. It became part of religious ceremony, daily meals, harvest festivals, and political gatherings. In each era, wine picked up new meanings, but it never lost its basic character: something made by people, from the land, for sharing.

Part of wine’s lasting power is cultural. In many traditions, wine marks important moments — births, weddings, harvests, holidays, and reunions. It can feel formal or familiar, sacred or simple. A bottle opened at the table often carries more than flavor; it carries mood, memory, and company. Wine invites conversation. It slows us down. It asks us to pay attention.

There is also something deeply appealing about the way wine connects us to place. This is where terroir comes in — the idea that wine is shaped by the climate, soil, geography, and human hands that make it. Terroir is what makes wine feel like a snapshot of time and place. A bottle can reflect a hillside, a season, a harvest, even a year’s weather. It is agriculture translated into emotion. You are not only tasting grapes; you are tasting a landscape, a climate, and a moment that will never happen in quite the same way again.

That may be one reason wine continues to fascinate us. It is both ancient and immediate. It comes from the earth, but it also comes through time. It asks for patience in its making and attention in its drinking. Unlike many other pleasures, wine carries a sense of arrival: the fruit ripens, the harvest comes, the juice ferments, the bottle rests, and eventually the glass is poured. Each step adds another layer of human intention.

And then there is the simple joy of tasting it. People enjoy wine for the same reason they enjoy music, stories, or good cooking: it gives pleasure in layers. There is aroma, texture, flavor, memory, and surprise. A wine can be bright or brooding, light or weighty, familiar or strange. It can taste of berries, stone, flowers, earth, smoke, or rain. But beyond description, wine offers a kind of emotional richness. It can make an ordinary evening feel a little more ceremonial.

Perhaps that is why wine endures. It is not only about alcohol or prestige or even taste. It is about continuity. It reminds us that the best things are often shaped slowly. That land matters. That seasons matter. That craft matters. And that, sometimes, the most meaningful pleasures are the ones that hold within them the memory of sun, soil, and time.

Wine is a drink, yes. But it is also a story — one written by vines, weather, people, and patience. And when we raise a glass, we are not just tasting wine. We are tasting a place, a season, and a human desire to turn life into something shareable and lasting.

There’s a story I love about beginnings. On July 6, 1957, at the Woolton Village Fair in Liverpool, a teenage John Lennon met a slightly younger Paul McCartney for the first time. Lennon was almost 17; McCartney had just turned 15. One was leading a skiffle group called The Quarrymen, playing church grounds and local halls. The other showed up with a guitar, a sharp ear, and enough musical confidence to impress the older boy. Out of that modest meeting at a village fair grew a partnership that would eventually change popular music and a lot of ordinary lives in its wake.

It’s easy, now, to see the Woolton anecdote as destiny: two future legends, one pivotal afternoon. But what interests me is how un-legendary it was at the time. Just two teenagers, some borrowed gear, a small stage, and the noise of a local event. That’s a very second-act kind of origin: something big growing out of modest circumstances, not because the conditions were perfect, but because the people involved kept showing up and kept making things. Lennon and McCartney didn’t know they were launching an era. They were just kids who wrote, rehearsed, played, and revised, doing what they could with the skills and friendships they had.

When we talk about why the Beatles still matter, we usually reach for innovation: the way they turned studio tricks into art, moved from catchy early singles to daring albums, played with tape loops and orchestras and unexpected chord changes. All of that is true and important. But underneath the experiments, there’s a simpler reason their songs remain companions in our lives: they keep touching feelings that haven’t gone out of date. Love that’s thrilling, love that’s uncertain, days where you feel like “Nowhere Man,” moments when you can’t shake the sense that “It’s been a hard day’s night,” and quiet reflections that feel like “In My Life” or “Let It Be” are still with us.

Part of their second-act power is how the catalog ages with you. As a young listener, you might latch onto the energy of “She Loves You” or “I Want to Hold Your Hand,” all bright chorus and forward motion. Later, different songs begin to glow more strongly: “Eleanor Rigby” when you’re noticing loneliness in older faces, “Blackbird” when you’re trying to rise from something difficult, “Hey Jude” when you want someone to take a sad song and make it better, even if that someone is you. The tracks haven’t changed; you have. Yet they keep meeting you where you are, like friends who don’t mind that your life looks very different now than it did when you first pressed play.

From a second-act vantage point, their constant reinvention feels especially relevant. The band that charmed the world with matching suits and cheerful harmonies, refused to stay put. They changed their hair, their clothes, their lyrical focus, their sound, sometimes alienating parts of their audience along the way. They moved from songs about holding hands to songs about inner turmoil, social commentary, spiritual searching, and domestic tenderness. That willingness to shed a skin and grow a new one, over and over, models something we wrestle with throughout life: how to keep evolving and remain relevant without losing ourselves.

We also return to certain Beatles songs because they were built so well. Put together, this is why a Beatles song can still stop someone in their tracks today: it’s a strong melody, built with care, recorded inventively, carrying feelings that haven’t gone out of date, and wrapped in a story that changed what popular music could be. Even if you’ve never read a liner note or studied chord charts, your ear recognizes that something precise and generous is happening, enough structure to feel satisfying, enough openness to let your own story in.

Listening in a later chapter of life, I find myself hearing not just the songs but the effort behind them. I think of Lennon and McCartney at Woolton, of Harrison insisting on getting his guitar parts just right, of Ringo steadying the whole thing from the back. I think of the countless takes in cramped studios, the arguments, the reconciliations, the shared jokes, the disappointments, the desire to try something new one more time. Their second acts as individuals weren’t always neat or easy, but the body of work they made together still offers a kind of company to those of us sorting through our own changes, career shifts, losses, new loves, quieter moments.

There’s comfort, too, in how ordinary it feels to carry these songs forward. We hum them while washing dishes, hear them in grocery stores, find them in our children’s playlists, stumble across them in films and documentaries. They show up, often unannounced, in the background of whatever we happen to be living. And when they do, they can catch us: one line aligning with an ache we’ve been ignoring, one chord progression opening a window we didn’t realize was closed. A Beatles song doesn’t fix anything. But it can make a feeling feel named, which is its own quiet relief. “In My Life” and Lennons’ later solo work “Imagine” still touch me deeply.

Second acts are usually less about grand reinventions than about small, sustained choices: to try again, to learn something new, to let go of an older version of yourself, to keep making things even when fewer people are watching. The Beatles’ history beginning with two teenagers at a village fair, holds a useful reminder. You don’t know, in advance, which of your collaborations or experiments will last. You do know whether you’re willing to show up with your guitar, your ideas, your aging voice, whoever you’ve become, and say, “Let’s see what happens if we play.”

We talk a lot about firsts: first car, first job, first apartment, but the first kiss lives in a different category. It’s rarely practical. It doesn’t pay the rent or get you to work. And yet, years later, most people can still tell you where they were, who they were with, and what the air felt like in that small radius of space around two nervous faces. The memory is vivid and oddly private, tucked away in the mind the way we tuck loose photos into the back of a drawer.

Psychologists will tell you that emotionally charged moments get highlighted in the brain; stress hormones and “love chemicals” help write them into long-term storage. That may explain why so many of us remember our first kiss more clearly than our first day of school or first paycheck. But the science, while interesting, doesn’t quite capture the texture, the awkward pause, the thud of your own heartbeat, the way the world seems to shrink down to the question, “Now?” and the answer, “I have no idea.” A first kiss is part chemistry, part choreography, part sheer improvisation.

Some of the most poignant stories are about kisses that never happened. Missed chances stay surprisingly fresh in memory. You can still feel the porch light, the weight of the keys in your pocket, the way your hand fit in theirs. You can replay the exact moment you could have leaned-in but didn’t. The episode dissolves into a polite “I had a nice time tonight” or a wave, and you walk away feeling both relieved and oddly hollow, like you just stepped out of a scene before it finished. Later, that gap of what might have been, takes on its own kind of power, a small private ache attached to an otherwise lovely night.

My own first almost-kiss lives in that category. I was on a date with a young woman who was kind, engaging, and comfortable in her own skin. We had held hands, laughed at the same moments at a friend’s house party, and shared the casual personal details people offer when they feel safe: siblings, school stories, what we liked about our neighborhood. At the end of the evening, we stood on her doorstep, talking in that looping way people do when they’re trying to stretch out a good moment without seeming clingy. And then came the pause: long, obvious, almost comically perfect. If it were a film, a soundtrack would have swelled. In real life, I froze. Anxiety, self-consciousness, the fear of misreading the situation, all of it stacked up in the space between us. I said goodnight, thanked her, and walked down the steps with my heart pounding and my lips resolutely unused.

That missed opportunity lingered far longer than I expected. It wasn’t about conquest or checking a box; it was about feeling like I’d failed a kind of human test. A chance to offer something tender and mutual had come and gone, and I had ducked. Later, I could see a dozen reasons: my own nervous history, the scripts I’d absorbed about who should initiate, the difficulty of imagining myself as someone another person might actually want to kiss. But in the moment, it boiled down to one simple reality: I didn’t trust myself enough to ask for that closeness, even in the gentlest way.

When I finally did get that first kiss, it arrived with its own twist: my date was a smoker. She was funny, bright, and open, and we got along well enough that I felt brave enough, this time, to lean in. The moment was every bit as charged as people describe: the rush of being chosen, the warmth, the nervous joy of finally crossing a threshold other people seemed to have crossed years earlier. And then, very quickly, there was the taste. If you’ve never kissed someone who smokes, imagine leaning into a warm ashtray. Tobacco, ash, stale heat; that was the flavor profile. It was as if my brain had been preparing for fireworks and got a mouthful of the aftermath instead. The disappointment was immediate and confusing; the event I’d built up, delayed, and worried over, had finally arrived, and it tasted like burnt filter.

I don’t tell that story to shame smokers; it’s simply the honest sensory imprint my memory chose to keep. At the time, though, it became an obstacle. I had finally crossed the bridge from “never kissed anyone” to “officially kissed,” but the experience left me hesitant about trying again. If this was what kissing tasted like, did I really want more of it? My brain, in its usual literal way, began weaving a confusing association between intimacy and ash. It took time, and other, better kisses, to rewrite that script, to teach my senses that a first attempt wasn’t the whole story.

What fascinates me now is how those early moments, both the missed porch kiss and the ashtray kiss, grew into something larger than themselves. They were clumsy, imperfect, comical, cute, but tinged with embarrassment and disappointment. But they also opened space for reflection: about how I handled fear, how I read other people, how I understood my own worthiness as someone who could offer and receive affection. First kisses, real or imagined, are tiny tests of our capacity to be seen. They ask whether we can let another person close enough to smell our breath, feel our nervousness, and still stay.

When you listen to other people’s stories, you discover a wide, sometimes hilarious range. There are roller-coaster kisses and locker-room kisses, kisses in darkened movie theaters and under bleachers, kisses that tasted like cotton candy, cheap beer or mint gum shared between two mouths. There are kisses interrupted by parents, by pets, by an ill-timed sneeze. There are first kisses that felt like a promise and first kisses that felt like an exit. Many of them are remembered with a mix of fondness and gentle cringe. It seems most of us carry around a small internal anthology of these moments; our own and those told to us, like a dog-eared book we seldom show anyone.

Underneath the humor and awkwardness, there’s a quieter truth. A first kiss, whatever form it takes, is usually less about technique and more about courage. It’s about stepping into vulnerability, risking rejection, and trusting that you can survive either outcome. Whether your first kiss was soft and cinematic or smoky and disappointing, whether it happened at fifteen or forty-five, it marks a point at which you allowed yourself to hope for connection in a more embodied way. The memory’s sharpness down to the porch light, the taste, the soundtrack, reminds us how much it mattered at the time.

Looking back from a later chapter of life, I find a kind of tenderness in all of it. The younger versions of ourselves, hovering on doorsteps and leaning into the precious moment, were trying to learn how to love with the tools they had: fear, curiosity, borrowed scripts from movies and friends, and nervous bodies doing their best. It’s easy to wince at their mistakes; it’s harder, and more generous, to be grateful for their attempts. There’s a quiet beauty in the fact that most of us remember those moments in such detail yet carry them mostly in silence. Our first kisses: missed, messy, or magical, are private little altars to the idea that being close to another human might be worth the risk.

In that sense, the first kiss is never just about lips. It’s about the beginning of a lifelong negotiation with intimacy: how much we can stand to be known, how willing we are to try again after a bad taste or an awkward pause, how we learn to offer affection without a script. The joy, the humor, the disappointment, the anticipation, they all belong to the same fragile, hopeful human impulse. And if we can smile, now, at the memory of an ashtray-flavored milestone or a missed porchlight moment, it’s a sign that the story didn’t end there. We kept learning, kept reaching, kept trusting that somewhere beyond the anxiety and the smoke, there was a kiss that tasted like what we’d hoped for all along.

When you live in Washington, it’s easy to talk about big names first: the airplane company, the tech giants, the brand labels everyone elsewhere recognizes before you finish the sentence. But a recent piece in The Seattle Times reminded me that our state’s character is built just as much by the people whose names never leave the industrial park sign. It turns out we have 8,282 manufacturing companies in Washington and over half of them employ four people or fewer. They actually make things, often in spaces you’d drive past without looking twice.

Those numbers say a lot about the place we call home. About 4,000 of our manufacturers are tiny outfits: four people or less, sometimes two partners and a dog. They bend metal, machine parts, assemble components, blend ingredients, and send their work quietly into a larger stream of trucks, planes, trains, satellites, and household products. They don’t get their logos on skyscrapers, but their bolts and beams and brackets hold a lot of those more visible structures together. It’s the sort of ecosystem you only notice when someone stops and counts, and then you realize how much of our economy is built by people who are still close enough to the work to smell the dust.

Wine joins that story too. Washington has 985 licensed wineries, almost all of them small, and they are classified as manufacturers because they take raw grapes and turn them into something new. They live in that liminal space between agriculture and industry, crushed skins and stainless-steel tanks, harvest crews and bottling lines. Ninety percent of our wineries make fewer than 5,000 cases a year, which means most Washington wine is still being coaxed into existence by teams that can fit around a single picking bin. In a world that loves to talk about scale, it’s worth pausing on this: our second-largest wine-producing state is powered mostly by humans counting cases in the hundreds, not the millions.

One detail in the article stayed with me: a small composite company that got a call from NASA. Composites, as the piece explained, are made by combining two or more distinct materials to create a new one that’s stronger, lighter, and more durable. That definition feels like a metaphor for the small-business mindset in the Pacific Northwest. We have people here who start with limited inputs: time, cash, garage space, a borrowed lathe, a vineyard planted on marginal land, and combine them into something that holds up under stress. Stronger than its parts. Lighter than the burden it came from. Built to last in places where the weather, and the market, are both unpredictable.

It’s tempting to romanticize this, but anyone who has tried to run a small shop or farm knows it isn’t romance; it’s stubbornness and ingenuity in equal measure. Our history in this corner of the map has always leaned that way. We outfitters of the Klondike Gold Rush sent stampeders north with gear cobbled together from what was available, and logging outfits in the Cascades and the Olympics learned to improvise in terrain that didn’t care how neat their plans looked on paper. The modern MacGyver jokes in the Pacific Northwest aren’t just about duct tape and baling wire; they’re about the expectation that you will do the best you can with what you’ve got, where you are, with a kind of quiet pride.

That line, widely attributed to Theodore Roosevelt, “Do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are”—turns out to be a piece of “homely philosophy” he himself credited to Squire Bill Widener of Widener’s Valley, Virginia. Roosevelt thought it summed up one’s duty in life: start here, use what’s on hand, and stop waiting for perfect conditions. It’s hard to imagine a better motto for the small manufacturers and service businesses in our state. The composite company that takes the call from NASA, the four-person shop making precision parts for rail cars or medical devices, the family winery coaxing grapes through unpredictable vintages, all of them are living that sentence on repeat.

What strikes me is how this manufacturing story overlaps with everyday lives. I see the same spirit in friends who have turned side skills into small businesses: the baker who scaled up from a home oven to a shared commercial kitchen, the mechanic who finally opened his own shop, the seamstress who made custom quilts into textile art, the gardener who started a landscaping business with a used truck and hand tools. None of them waited for a pristine runway to appear. They took the skills and relationships they already had, combined them with a willingness to endure some risk, and made something that wouldn’t exist without them. In each case, the “composite” was part grit, part local knowledge, part community support.

There’s something distinctly Pacific Northwest about this attitude. We live in a region where weather can turn on a dime, where volcanoes and ocean, mountains and industrial ports all share the same horizon. It encourages a certain adaptive stance: you don’t expect permanence, but you do expect to be able to improvise. Maybe that’s why a small manufacturer making carbon-fiber rods for aerospace and fishing, or a micro-winery turning out a few hundred cases a year, feels so at home here. They are working messily at the edge of uncertainty, combining what they’ve got into materials and experiences that can travel well beyond our fog and fir trees.

In a second act of life, these stories read a bit differently. It’s one thing to admire a scrappy start-up when you’re twenty-five; it’s another to recognize the same resilience in people your own age who are still experimenting, still manufacturing, still quietly keeping something essential going with small teams and limited resources. I’m starting to see Washington’s 8,282 manufacturers, the four-person shops and sole proprietors, the nearly thousand wineries, the composite company fielding a call from NASA, as a kind of collective parable. We don’t control the global market any more than they control the weather. But we do get to choose whether we stand still or combine the pieces we have into something that might hold up.

The older I get, the more that “homely philosophy” feels less like a motivational poster and more like an honest description of how people I know actually live: do what you can, with what you’ve got, where you are. Some of them are literally making things: parts, tools, rods, functional art, wine. Others are manufacturing care, stories, small acts of neighborliness, or services that help those physical businesses run. All of them, in their own way, are composites: human lives made stronger and more durable by combining grit, creativity, and local loyalty.

In a state where so many of us build second acts out of recycled skills and modest resources, the quiet manufacturers deserve more attention. They are proof that you don’t need a giant payroll or a famous logo to matter. You just need a willingness to start where you are, a tolerance for imperfect conditions, and a belief that, like a good composite, something better can be made from the parts already in your hands.

The garden is the only place in my life where failure is guaranteed, and still I feel most myself there. Plants will die in my care. Weather will ignore my best-laid plans. Slugs will find the seedlings I tuck in with such optimism. Every season contains at least one quiet collapse, no matter how well I prepare. And yet, when I picture where I want to be the most during a long week, it’s that small plot of soil out back, knees damp, hands dirty, head unexpectedly clear.

When people who don’t garden talk about it, they tend to picture glossy catalog images: perfect borders, baskets overflowing with beautiful flowers or vegetables freshly harvested, a smiling figure in a straw hat who looks like they’ve just stepped out of an ad for contentment. The reality, at least in my yard, is more honest and less photogenic. It includes plants that sulk and never quite take, perennials that vanish after one brave season, and beds that always seem to have a corner I haven’t weeded properly. It includes mildew on some foliage, hail on the tender starts, and the slow realization that there are more variables than you can ever manage. Gardening is not for the timid, not because it is grand, but because it asks you to keep showing up in full view of your limits.

What keeps me there is not the fantasy of control but the relationship. Over time, you begin to know your plants the way a good clinician knows their patients or a seasoned baker knows their dough by feel, by history, by a kind of accumulated intuition. You remember which bed stays soggy too long, which rose never liked that corner, which tomato will sulk unless it gets a little extra room. You learn who in this green cast will bolt, who will linger, and who will surprise you by pushing a volunteer shoot up through gravel and neglect. It is less a project than a conversation that can be both a struggle and joyful.

The losses in the garden are rarely dramatic. A shrub simply doesn’t leaf out in spring. A plant you loved last year quietly declines and is gone. A promising experiment ends as a bare patch you eventually rake smooth, pretending this was the plan all along. But if you stay long enough, you discover that these small endings give the successes their meaning. A bed that flourishes filling with foliage and blooms, a plant that survives a hard frost, a seedling that pushes through compacted soil. All of it feels amplified because you’ve seen how easily it could have gone the other way. Every bloom is a negotiated truce between your intentions and the world’s indifferent challenges.

The garden is also, for me, the closest thing I have to a chapel. It is where I go to practice patience in a culture that loves speed, to accept endings when preferring to fix things, and to celebrate modest miracles in a world that tends to overvalue spectacle. Out there, I don’t own the outcome. I only own the hours of honest attention I’m willing to spend in the dirt. The reward is not just the harvest but the way those hours loosen the grip of my own ego and fears. I am reminded, daily, that much of what matters most is beyond my control.

There is a particular kind of contemplation that only seems to happen with your hands in soil. You can sit on a meditation cushion, or in a pew, and think about impermanence in the abstract. But it lands differently when you’re kneeling beside a plant you’ve nursed for months and realizing it is not going to make it, or when you catch sight of a volunteer flower blooming where nothing “should” be growing. The garden keeps staging these small demonstrations of both limits and grace. You stand there with your trowel, looking at something you did not orchestrate, and feel a brief, clear humility: you helped, you tried, and something beyond you took it the rest of the way...or not at all.

For all its losses, the garden remains one of the most hopeful places I know. No gardener I’ve met plans next season by cataloging what went wrong. We plan by remembering what grew, what surprised us, and what we might dare to attempt again despite the odds. We order seeds in January because we are willing, once more, to believe in tiny beginnings. We start plants on the earliest cusp of viability balancing vulnerability. We haul compost and drag hoses because we’ve seen how a tired bed can be coaxed back toward life with attention and time. In that way, gardening is a kind of second‑act practice: you keep revising the story, even when previous chapters ended abruptly, because you’ve learned that a small patch of land can change if you stay in relationship with it.

The hook, for me, is this. The garden is one of the few places where an ending is guaranteed and joy still arrives anyway. Every plant is temporary; every season closes; every bed will eventually be turned over. Yet in the middle of all that you get evenings when the light falls just right across a messy border and you feel a sudden, disproportionate satisfaction at one healthy leaf, one open bloom, one line of seedlings you nudged into maturity. The journey itself, the hours of tending, watching, and accepting what you cannot steer is part of the reward. Learning to trust the process of the garden, to celebrate modest successes in the presence of inevitable endings, may be the most honest training ground we have for living a human life, especially in a second act when we’re more aware of how finite it all is. It’s a priceless journey well worth the endeavor.

I have a garden that is, by design, just the right amount of trouble. Small enough that I’m not mowing until my knees file a formal complaint, big enough that there is always, and I mean always, something that needs doing. Prune this, stake that, chase the aphids off the roses before they throw a party. I reduced the actual grassy lawn to two small patches that I can mow in nine and half minutes with an electric mower. Cutting grass is absolutely my least favorite task. The darned stuff keeps growing back! The to-do list changes with the calendar but it never actually ends, which I’ve come to understand is the whole point.

Busy Hands, Quiet Mind

There’s a particular kind of relief that comes from a task that needs your full attention but not your full anxiety. Weeding does this. Deadheading does this. You can’t think about your gutters or your gallbladder while you’re carefully working a trowel around a root ball, the garden simply won’t allow it. It wants your hands and your eyes and, without asking permission, it takes your worries too and quietly sets them somewhere out of reach for a while.

I spent a career solving other people’s problems with my brain running at full tilt. Retirement, it turns out, is not the art of doing nothing, it’s the art of finding things worth doing that don’t require your brain to run at full tilt. The garden qualifies. It’s physical, it’s seasonal, it’s endlessly specific, and at the end of a couple of it I feel worked, rather than wound up. That’s a different kind of tired, and it’s the good kind.

I Am Never Actually Alone Out There

Here’s the part nobody warns you about: you think you’re gardening solo, and then you notice you have company. Bees working the lavender like they’re on commission. A rabbit who has clearly decided the clover is communal property. Every so often a squirrel pauses mid-theft to give me a look that says I was here first, technically. It’s a small patch of dirt, but it’s apparently a popular one. There are a variety of birds that frequent the suet filled feeders. Even an occasional eagle may glide by at altitude.

The hummingbirds, though, the hummingbirds are the main act of the whole show.

I planted for them without fully admitting that’s what I was doing, and now the garden is stocked with the tubular, nectar-heavy flowers they can’t resist, plus a small water feature that I originally justified as “atmospheric” and now understand exists mostly for them. They love it for the same two reasons I do: it’s cool, and it makes a sound worth listening to. Watching a hummingbird dip into the spray, or simply hover at the edge of it catching the mist, is its own small argument for keeping the thing running all summer.

The Hover

And then there’s the moment, any gardener with hummingbirds already knows. You’re bent over some task, and you feel it before you see it: a hum at ear level, and there it is, hanging in the air a few feet in front of your face. Not feeding. Not fleeing. Just facing you straight on, wings a blur, body perfectly still, like it’s about to say something and is waiting for you to stop talking first.

They say hummingbirds remember faces, the way crows do. I believe it, because this doesn’t feel random. It feels like recognition. Sometimes one will come in for a drink at the hose while I’m watering, hovering so close I could reach out and touch it, and I never do, because that feels like exactly the kind of thing that ends a friendship. Mostly it just seems to want to check in. To confirm I’m still the same guy who keeps the flowers coming and the water running. Then, maybe I get a brief side-eye tilt of the head, business apparently concluded, and it’s gone.

I’ve spent thirty seconds like that and felt more thoroughly seen than I did in some entire hospital hallways.

Not Alone, Even When I Can’t See Them

What gets me is that the feeling doesn’t require them to be visible. I can be elbow-deep in the dirt and mulch with no hummingbird in sight and still feel like I’ve got company, like the garden itself is a shared arrangement, not a solo project. I do the watering and the planting and the endless small maintenance; something out there does the appreciating right alongside me. It’s a strange kind of partnership with a species that weighs less than a nickel and has never once said thank you, and yet the gratitude feels entirely mutual.

That, I think, is the real sensory pleasure of the garden, not just the smell of tomato leaves on your hands or the sound of water in a small basin, though those are real and good. It’s the sense that your work is being noticed by something other than yourself. That the beauty and the usefulness you’re building out there isn’t just for you.

So, the aphids can have the roses and bamboo this week.

The hummingbird already told me I’m doing fine.

There are certain sounds a doctor comes to know by heart.

The muffled cough from behind a magazine. The scrape of a chair leg on linoleum. The receptionist’s voice saying a name twice because the first time no one quite believed it was theirs. The soft rustle of a winter coat being unbuttoned. A child asking, too loudly, whether this was going to hurt.

For more than forty years, those sounds were part of the weather of my working life. A waiting room, for all its plain furniture and tired magazines, is one of the most human places on earth. Nothing dramatic may be happening on the surface. People are just sitting there, after all. But underneath, all kinds of things are going on.

Hope is there. Fear is there too.

So is boredom, which has a bad reputation, is simply worry with its coat buttoned up. There is irritation over the delay, embarrassment over what brought you in, and that familiar little flare of defiance people exude when they are trying not to feel helpless. A waiting room is where we go when something in life has become uncertain enough that we need another person to look us in the eye and tell us what they think is happening.

One morning years ago, I walked through the door from the back hallway expecting the usual low buzz of voices and paper shuffling. Instead, the whole room had gone quiet.

Not empty. Quiet.

There was perhaps a dozen people there. A man in work boots sat with both hands folded over a baseball cap. An older woman in a red coat stared at a painting of sailboats on the wall as if she might be tested on it later. A young mother held a toddler on her lap, the child unusually still, cheek pressed against her shoulder. A teenage boy in a hooded sweatshirt kept tapping his heel against the floor, a quick nervous rhythm that seemed louder than it should have.

No one was speaking.

It wasn’t a dramatic silence. No ambulance had pulled up. No one was crying. It was just that kind of silence that sometimes settles over a room when everybody has retreated a little way into themselves.

I remember standing there for half a second, hand still on the doorframe, noticing how exposed people looked when they were waiting. In ordinary life, most of us go to some trouble to appear self-contained. We have errands to run, jobs to get to, groceries to buy, stories to tell about ourselves that make us sound competent and more or less in charge. But the waiting room undoes some of that.

People come in wearing their regular clothes and carrying their regular bags, but something else comes in with them too. A question. A pain that has not gone away. A lab result they are trying not to think about. A private fear that sounds foolish when said aloud, though it doesn’t feel foolish at three in the morning. They sit there among strangers holding these invisible burdens, and somehow the whole room knows it.

That morning the silence felt almost reverent, though I doubt anyone would have called it that.

Receptionists understand this better than most people. They are often the first face a patient sees and the first barrier between private worry and the machinery of medicine. Research on clinic waiting rooms has pointed out something doctors should probably admit more often: the waiting room is not incidental to care. It is part of care. Reception staff do a kind of emotional labor there, managing fear, irritation, confusion, and hope before a patient ever reaches the exam room.

In other words, medicine starts before the stethoscope.

Back then, I was mostly thinking about the day ahead. There were charts stacked up, blood pressures to recheck, follow-ups to review, one patient who was almost certainly going to ignore my advice and another I was worried might have a diagnosis neither of us wanted to hear. A doctor learns to keep moving. If you stopped to feel the full weight of every waiting room, you might never make it to the first exam room at all.

Still, that quiet stayed with me.

I went about the morning as usual. The first patient smiled too brightly and told me she was “fine,” by which she meant almost anything except fine. The second wanted to discuss his knees but what really came out was loneliness. The third had a cough that turned out to be ordinary and a level of dread that was anything but. This was not unusual. People often came in for one thing and carried three others under their coat.

That, too, is the waiting room’s lesson. It teaches you how much of life is lived just below the level of visible evidence.

I used to think of the waiting room as dead time, the stretch before the actual encounter. Years later, I understand it differently. Waiting is not empty. Waiting is its own experience, and often its own ordeal. Psychologists and clinicians have long noted that uncertainty makes time feel longer and more painful, especially when people do not know what news is coming or how long the wait will last. A ten-minute wait for coffee and a ten-minute wait for biopsy results do not happen on the same clock.

What the room held that morning was not simply silence. It was suspended narrative.

Every person sitting there was between chapters. The story had started with a symptom, a phone call, referral, worry, but the next page had not yet been turned. Human beings do not much like unfinished stories. We rush to fill in blanks, usually with the darkest possibilities available. We imagine not just outcomes but whole futures. By the time a patient reaches the exam room, they may already have lived through three possible tragedies and one miracle, all before nine-thirty in the morning.

And yet, for all that fear, there is something quietly moving about a waiting room.

People show up.

That sounds simple, but it isn’t. They show up after bad nights, after denial, after internet searches that frightened them half to death, after spouses told them it was “probably nothing” in that tone spouses use when they are trying not to alarm themselves. They come in with canes, with children, with folding paperwork, with brave little jokes. They come in angry, embarrassed, stoic, suspicious, hopeful. But they come.

I have always found that admirable.

We tend to reserve the word courage for large public acts, the kind with medals or headlines attached. But there is another kind of courage that never gets a parade. It is the courage of sitting in a molded plastic chair under fluorescent lights because something is wrong and you have decided, despite your fear, to face it. It is the courage of waiting your turn while your mind tries to run ahead of you. It is the courage of hearing your name called and standing up.

The older I get, the more I think that much of life is a waiting room of one kind or another. We wait for news, for healing, for grief to loosen its grip, for children to call back, for medications to work, for the weather to break, for our own hearts to settle down after some hard season. We try to look normal while we wait. We read the magazines of distraction. We avoid eye contact. We make little bargains with God or cholesterol or time.

And every so often, the room goes quiet enough for us to notice that everyone around us is doing the same thing.

That may be the most hopeful part of it. Not that suffering is universal, though it is, but that vulnerability is shared. The waiting room strips people down to something common. Rich, poor, tidy, disorganized, educated, confused, cheerful, difficult, beloved, lonely: in the face of uncertainty, we all look a little alike. We all want reassurance. We all want to be called in kindly. We all hope for good news. Even the most irritable among us would prefer a gentle voice.

I sometimes think the world would improve if more of us remembered how we look in waiting rooms.

A little less certain. A little less polished. A little more in need of mercy.

I never learned exactly why that room was so quiet that morning. Maybe they were all tired. Maybe the weather had something to do with it. Maybe the receptionist, usually chatty, had sensed the mood and wisely let it be. Or maybe that is simply what happens when enough people gather in one place carrying invisible worries. The air changes. The room knows before the chart does.

What stays with me now is not the silence itself but the tenderness of it.

Nobody in that room knew much about the others. They did not know who had diabetes, who feared cancer, who had come for chest pain, who had only brought in a child with an earache. But for a little while they were companions in uncertainty, citizens of that temporary country between suspicion and knowledge.

By noon the spell had broken. Phones rang. A baby cried. Someone laughed at something the receptionist said. The ordinary sounds of the office returned, and the day moved on the way days always do.

But I have thought of that morning often since retiring. It reminds me that before there are diagnoses, treatments, and plans, there are people sitting quietly with their private fears, trying to act as if this is just another errand on a Tuesday. It reminds me that medicine is not only about fixing what can be fixed. It is also about recognizing what it costs a person to wait.

And outside medicine, the lesson still holds. We meet one another in grocery stores, parking lots, church foyers, airports, and online comment sections with no idea what waiting room the other person has just come from. Some are waiting for test results. Some are waiting for a marriage to improve. Some are waiting for money, for answers, for sleep, for relief. Most of us are braver than we look and more frightened than we will admit.

That seems worth remembering.

If there is any wisdom in a long life, it may be this: speak gently to every person you encounter. We are all in some waiting room, including the invisible ones. Most are doing the best they can while they wait for their name to be called.

On this day in 1848, something began that no one in the room could have fully understood its significance. In Seneca Falls, New York, a small group of women and men gathered for what would become the first women’s rights convention in American history. It didn’t start as a movement. It started as friendship.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Lucretia Mott had known each other for years, ever since they met at an anti-slavery convention in London where the women delegates, Stanton and Mott included, weren’t even allowed to sit on the convention floor. They were seated behind a curtain, out of sight, while men debated the abolition of human bondage without them. The irony wasn’t lost on either woman. It planted something.

Back home, Stanton and Mott kept meeting, kept talking, the way friends do, over tea, in parlors, in the ordinary rhythm of visiting one another. They talked about the small and large abuses that shaped their days: the property they couldn’t own once married, the wages they couldn’t collect, the custody they could lose over their own children, the education denied them, the pulpits and podiums closed to them. What began as venting between friends eventually hardened into resolve. If no one else would say these things publicly, they would.

So, they called a meeting. They placed a small notice in the Seneca County Courier and expected, at best, a modest local gathering. Instead, nearly three hundred people showed up, women and men both, filling the Wesleyan Chapel for two days of discussion about the condition and rights of women in American life.

Stanton had spent the weeks before the convention drafting a document modeled deliberately on the Declaration of Independence, calling it the Declaration of Sentiments. She wrote that “all men and women are created equal,” and then laid out a list of grievances against the ways women had been systematically excluded from full citizenship. Most of the document’s resolutions passed without much controversy. The one that didn’t was the ninth: a demand for the right to vote.

At the time, this wasn’t a modest ask. It wasn’t a modest ask anywhere on Earth. No woman, in any nation, held the right to vote in 1848. Even among the reform-minded women and men in that chapel, many believed Stanton had gone too far. Suffrage seemed to some of her own allies not just difficult, but faintly ridiculous, a demand so far outside the realm of the possible that pushing for it risked making the whole convention look foolish. Lucretia Mott herself reportedly worried it would embarrass the cause. It was only after Frederick Douglass, the abolitionist and publisher who attended the convention, rose to argue in support of the suffrage resolution that it narrowly passed. Sixty-eight women and thirty-two men ultimately signed the Declaration of Sentiments, and many of them faced ridicule and social punishment for it in the years that followed. Some later asked to have their names removed.

It would be seventy-two years before American women, as a class, could vote at all. The road there wasn’t straight, and it wasn’t even the road most people assume. In 1868, the Fourteenth Amendment was ratified, guaranteeing citizenship and equal protection under the law to all persons born in the United States. It’s remembered, rightly, as one of the great constitutional achievements of Reconstruction. But for the women who’d gathered at Seneca Falls two decades earlier, it landed as a strange kind of betrayal. For the first time, the word “male” was written directly into the Constitution, specifying that the right to vote applied to male citizens. Some of the very reformers who had fought alongside abolitionists for decades now found the door to full citizenship narrowed further, not widened, even as the nation expanded its promises elsewhere. It would take another fifty-two years, until the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, before women’s suffrage became the law of the land nationally, and even then, in practice, that promise didn’t reach every woman equally for decades more.

The work Stanton started at Seneca Falls has never fully finished. In 1972, Congress passed the Equal Rights Amendment, a simple constitutional guarantee that equality of rights could not be denied or abridged on account of sex. It went out to the states needing ratification by thirty-eight of them. It has never gotten there under the terms Congress originally set, caught in disputes over deadlines and procedure that continue to this day. More than a century and a half after that first convention, the country still hasn’t settled the question Stanton dared to raise in that chapel.

I think about all of this not as abstract history but as something that runs directly into my own life. I think about the women who raised me, taught me, argued with me, forgave me, and made me better than I would have been left to my own devices. I think about the women who have been my partners, in work and in life, the ones who saw more in me than I saw in myself and the ones who told me the truth when I needed it more than I wanted it. I think about friendships with women that have shaped how I understand loyalty, and about the quieter, unglamorous acts of support that don’t get written into any declaration but hold a life together all the same.

I genuinely cannot imagine my life without them. Not as an ornament to it, but as its structure. The women I’ve known have been co-authors of who I’ve become, not supporting characters in a story that was mine alone. When I read about Stanton and Mott sitting together, talking through their frustrations until talk turned into action, I recognize something true about how change actually happens. It rarely starts with a grand movement. It starts with two people who trust each other enough to say the quiet part out loud, and it grows because others, sometimes generations later, keep insisting the conversation isn’t finished.

It still isn’t. But it started, in part, on this day, in a small chapel, because two friends refused to stay quiet.

The gardening books have a confident way of talking about tomatoes.

They tell you how many hours of sun the plants need, how deep to plant them, what kind of soil they prefer, which stakes to use, and when you can expect your first ripe fruit. If you follow the steps, they say, you’ll be rewarded with strong vines and dependable tomatoes.

Last spring I had a tomato plant that apparently hadn’t read those books.

I tucked it into what should have been a respectable spot: raised bed, decent compost, a little cage to lean on when it got taller. The neighbors had already begun their annual tomato bragging season, “Early Girls are in,” “San Marzanos look great”, and I was content to play along.

For a while, the plant behaved. A few new leaves unfurled. The stem thickened. I started imagining pasta sauces and sandwiches and that particular August pleasure of eating a tomato still warm from the sun.

Then, one morning, I walked out with my tea and found the tomato slumped over like it had pulled an all‑nighter.

The leaves had drooped, not the gentle kind of droop that says, “a drink of water would be nice,” but the kind that makes you think you missed something important. I checked the soil, still damp. I looked for pests, none. I did the usual gardener’s dance of doubt. Too much water? Too little? Wrong fertilizer? Too much talk about it?

The plant did not answer.

Here’s the part that felt familiar in a way I wish it didn’t: I recognized the look. In the clinic, I’d seen that same sudden sag in people who, by all accounts, were “doing everything right.” Blood pressure controlled, blood sugar improved, diet cleaned up, exercise routine in place and then overnight, or at least it felt that way, something new appeared on the scan or the lab report.

Medicine has its own version of gardening books. We have guidelines and pathways, targets and timelines. We draw neat little flowcharts that make disease look like a series of tidy, predictable steps. To follow them is to be “a good patient.” To deviate, sometimes, is treated as misbehavior.

But bodies, like tomato plants, refuse to listen as closely as we’d like.

Back at the raised bed, I did what gardeners do. I made a modest adjustment. Trimmed a couple of leaves. Loosened the soil. Shifted the cage a bit so the stem had more room to lean. I resisted the urge to dig the plant up and start over, which is not as different from ordering a new battery of tests as you might think.

The next day, the plant looked no better.

The day after that, a little worse.

By the end of the week, I had resigned myself: this particular tomato, in this particular spot, was not going to star in anyone’s harvest photo. It was going to teach me something instead.

The lesson was not complicated or new; I just needed the reminder. When I practiced medicine, I spent a lot of time trying to reconcile what the books promised with what patients’ bodies actually delivered. People would come in, discouraged, saying, “I did everything you said, and it still got worse.” Sometimes the numbers backed them up. Sometimes they didn’t. Almost always, the feeling was very real.

The danger in both gardening and medicine is the same: we start believing the map more than the territory. Listening to the client is usually the path to understanding what’s wrong.

It’s tempting to think we can control every leaf and lab value, that if we’re careful and obedient enough, nothing will wilt without warning. And when something does, we look for someone to blame—ourselves, the doctor, the book, the soil, the seed.

Standing there with my sagging tomato, I realized how quickly I’d gone from confidence to quiet accusation. I’d done the steps. Why wasn’t the plant cooperating? What did I miss? What did it miss?

Eventually I stopped interrogating it and just kept tending. A little water when the soil felt dry. A loose hand on the cage so it wouldn’t snap the stem. No dramatic interventions, no heroic rescues, no midnight internet searches about exotic tomato diseases.

A curious thing happened. The plant never became the showpiece I’d imagined, but it didn’t die either. It stuttered along. A few leaves crisped and fell. A couple of new ones appeared. The stem thickened just enough. By late summer, tucked in between its more robust cousins, it produced a handful of small, stubborn tomatoes.

They weren’t pretty. Some had scars where the sun hit too hard. One had a split down the side that healed over like a seam. But on the plate, they tasted like August. Perhaps effort had lowered expectation, but the outcome was nonetheless rewarding.

If there’s a point to this, and I suppose personal essays should have one, it’s probably this: the human condition is full of plants and bodies that refuse to listen to our plans. We can follow all the good advice, make careful adjustments, and still wake up to drooping leaves or unwelcome test results. The maps help. The guidelines matter. But they are not guarantees.

Sometimes resilience is loud and dramatic: a recovery that surprises everyone, a scan that suddenly looks clear. Other times it’s quieter: a life that doesn’t get better so much as it finds a way to go on, producing small, scarred tomatoes we’d have missed if we were only looking for perfection.

As I head into this second act of my own life and another spring in the garden, I’m trying to treat myself more like that tomato plant. Less blame when something sags without warning. More patient tending. Less faith that the books can see every future. More appreciation for small, unexpected fruit.

If you have your own “tomato plant that refused to listen” in your garden, your body, your family, your work, I’d be interested to hear about it. Those are the stories that remind the rest of us we’re not alone, even when the leaves look a little tired.

Today is July 14 and if you’re the kind of person who notices how calendars behave, you know that some dates feel charged, as if history has left a little static in the air. In France, July 14 is Bastille Day, commemorating the storming of the Bastille in 1789, a moment popularly told that helped set the French Revolution into motion. In a reposted note, Garrison Keillor highlighted that story in his inimitable way, including the familiar punchline often quoted with it: that it wasn’t merely a “revolt,” it was a “revolution.” And then Keillor did what he always does: he kept walking. He moved the reader from Paris to Oklahoma, from the symbol of a fortress to the sound of a harmonica.

Keillor also noted that July 14 is the birthday of Woody Guthrie (born 1912), and he included an excerpt about Guthrie’s beginnings: his father left town for Texas, leaving 14-year-old Guthrie to play harmonica for sandwiches and coins on the streets.

If you keep reading his account, Guthrie’s life becomes a kind of long, restless translation of catastrophe into music, “hitchhiking and freight-training across states”, soaking up stories of displacement, and turning what he saw into lyrics that insist America belong to more than the already-comfortable. Keillor describes Guthrie landing in Texas in 1931, forming the Corn Cob Trio, enjoying early public success, then colliding with the full weight of the Great Depression. Keillor adds that Guthrie wrote “This Land Is Your Land” in New York City while living at Hanover House, and that he was tired of hearing a patriotic radio song that treated the nation like it had already been solved. He wrote the song in 1940, recorded it later, and the publication arrived in 1945 in a mimeographed booklet that cost 25 cents.

What struck me, enough that I couldn’t let the thought go, is the similarity in the shape of these lives and these moments. Not the details. Not the geography. Not the outcomes.

The shape: tumultuous, unthinkable circumstances; people pushed into corners; and then the sudden birth of evocative, actionable ideas aimed at something larger than survival, something like a shared moral direction.

The brittle feeling of “this can’t be the way it is”

In the popular Bastille story, we’re shown a kind of pressure cooker: food shortages, high taxation, and the sense that the powerful live lightly while ordinary people carry the cost. There’s also the element that makes the event last in memory: the crowd isn’t only trying to acquire gunpowder or leverage. It’s trying to change the meaning of power.

Keillor’s excerpt compresses it, as calendar stories do, stretching years into one day. But the underlying logic matches something human: when legitimacy starts to look like a costume, people pull at the seams. They storm the symbol because the symbol has become unbearable.

History is messy, and any single “it happened because” explanation is always oversimplified. But the symbolic clarity of that July 14 moment is exactly why it endures. The public told a story to itself: the state is not untouchable; the future is not predetermined; the rules can be renegotiated.

And even if the exact “revolt vs revolution” exchange is best treated as story craft, the contrast it communicates is real: a revolution is what happens when people stop asking for adjustments and start demanding transformation.

Now compare that with Keillor’s Guthrie: a boy with a harmonica, not a fortress with a drawbridge. Keillor’s account begins with the kind of abandonment that doesn’t just injure a family, it rearranges a kid’s relationship to the world. His father leaves; the child survives by playing music on the streets for sandwiches and coins. Then the story keeps moving: rural Texas, then the Depression, then trains and hitchhiking, then learning how people sound when life has stripped away the comfortable lies. And out of that, out of the humiliations, the long distances, the stories of people fleeing the dust, Guthrie creates something aimed at the public good. Not just “art,” not just “expression,” but a piece of civic language.

Keillor’s excerpt about “This Land Is Your Land” is especially telling: Guthrie is tired of hearing Kate Smith sing a version of “God Bless America” that treats the nation like it’s blessed by default. He has seen what that blessing doesn’t cover. So, he writes a song that insists America include the evidence that America has always carried: the exclusions, the hardships, the rough edges, the parts that official optimism skips.

He writes it in New York, from a transient building called Hanover House, near Times Square. He doesn’t write from a studio that assumes comfort. He writes from a place where people are passing through because staying put has become impossible.

That’s the key: Guthrie’s hardship becomes not only material for songwriting, but a method, a way of seeing and insisting.

The shared lesson: crisis can compress ethics

Here’s the parallel I want to build on, the premise that brought me to Keillor in the first place.

When tumult enters a society, whether that society is a country in 1789 or a nation in the Great Depression, it can do something dangerous: it can narrow the moral imagination until people can only think about rage, revenge, or survival.

But crisis can also compress ethics. It can force a reckoning. It can strip away the pretense that everything is fine, leaving only questions that matter:

· Who gets fed?

· Who gets heard?

· Who gets to define “the nation”?

· What does it mean for democracy to be more than a slogan?

Guthrie’s songs are, in their own way, answers to those questions. Bastille Day, as a revolutionary turning point, is one of humanity’s oldest examples of what happens when those questions can no longer be ignored.

And both stories, in their own way, suggest the same unsettling truth: extenuating circumstances don’t guarantee goodness. They don’t make people wise by magic. But they can act as a catalyst for renewed thinking and evaluation, a re-checking of fundamental goals; a re-measuring of what democracy is for. A demand to work toward something closer to “a more perfect union,” even if we never reach perfect.

What this asks of us right now

I don’t have to tell you what our present feels like. Many people experience today’s social and political environment as brittle. Institutions feel slow. Civility sometimes feels performative. Trust seems harder to build than to lose. The language of “freedom” sometimes sounds like a marketing strategy rather than a shared promise. And when conditions feel frightening or unfair for long enough, people begin to ask what people in every era have asked:

If the system won’t change, do we have the right to make it change?

That question can lead to better outcomes, community building, political courage, moral creativity, or to worse ones: escalation, scapegoating, violence, the collapse of shared reality.

Keillor’s pairing of Bastille and Guthrie nudges me toward a third option: not denial, not despair, but purposeful reevaluation.

Not “things are terrible, therefore everything is justified.”

But: things are terrible, therefore our values must be clarified and enacted.

So here is the takeaway I want to offer, almost like a thesis statement carved into the margin of a calendar:

Even when extenuating circumstances are as difficult and concerning as they be, they can be a catalyst for renewed thinking and evaluation of our fundamental goals of democracy, and for working toward a more perfect union.

Not perfection. Progress. Motion. A willingness to argue again about what we owe one another.

Bastille and Guthrie are not the same story, but they share a deeper mechanism: when life narrows, people discover what they actually believe. And belief, when it’s tested, tends to become action, sometimes through peaceful demonstrations, sometimes through songs, always through a reimagining of who counts.

On July 14, I’m left with a kind of reluctant hope. The hope isn’t that hardship is good. It isn’t.

The hope is that when the old arrangements stop working, when the fortress looks too much like a cage, or the anthem sounds too much like a lie, people can still find a rational, peaceful way to build a truer common life.

That’s the work democracy asks for: again and again, under pressure. Not because the pressure is holy. Because pressure reveals whether our ideals are merely decorative, or whether they can hold.

One of my favorite things about traveling in the U.S. is that you can tell where you are by what’s melting in your hand. We like to pretend ice cream is a universal language: vanilla, chocolate, strawberry, maybe a scoop of mint chip when we’re feeling bold, but once you start paying attention, you realize different regions have quietly invented their own dialects in frozen form.

In New England, childhood summers are measured in Hoodsies, 3 oz. wax-paper cups with half chocolate, half vanilla, eaten with a flat wooden spoon that feels medically designed to prevent joy and yet somehow delivers it. There’s also vanilla ice cream with Grape-Nuts and warm maple syrup, a flavor that tastes like someone turned breakfast into dessert and declared that morally acceptable. More recently, Vermont and its neighbors have leaned proudly into the Maple Creamie: maple-flavored soft serve made with real syrup, served in a cone or cup and often finished with a sprinkle of crystallized maple sugar for crunch. It’s the kind of thing that makes you briefly consider moving east just to stand in a roadside line and watch people debate whether “small” is ever really enough.

Head into the Upper Midwest and you meet Blue Moon, a bright blue scoop whose flavor people describe as everything from “fruity” to “Froot Loop dust,” and whose exact formula is closely guarded. Outsiders tend to stand there squinting at their cone, trying to figure out what on earth they’re tasting, while locals shrug and say, “It’s Blue Moon,” as if that were sufficient explanation. This is also frozen custard country: eggier, denser, and richer than standard ice cream, churned fresh and served immediately at stands that treat custard as both dessert and civic duty. In parts of Wisconsin, it’s easier to get strong opinions about custard than about politics, and probably healthier.

On the West Coast, particularly around San Francisco, It’s-It ice cream sandwiches are a quiet obsession: ice cream between two chewy oatmeal cookies, dipped in chocolate, born at the old Playland at the Beach in 1928 and still loyally eaten decades after the amusement park disappeared. In Southern California’s Newport Beach, the Balboa Bar, a slab of ice cream on a stick, dunked in chocolate and rolled in toppings, is the sort of treat you can’t eat gracefully, which is precisely the point. No one is grading your technique; they’re just watching to see how long you can make it last before gravity and physics take over.

Some regions seem determined to confuse visitors on purpose. Pennsylvania has teaberry ice cream, which looks like pink medicine and tastes like wintergreen; it’s beloved locally and makes non-Pennsylvanians wonder whether they’ve accidentally licked a tube of muscle rub. In Atlantic Canada, moon mist, a swirl of grape, banana, and blue raspberry or bubblegum, looks like a tie-dye experiment and tastes like childhood crammed into a cone. Blue Moon and teaberry both belong to that category of regional flavors you can’t really explain; you just have to hand someone a scoop and enjoy watching their face. Then again I could never explain gravy on French fries either.

In Hawaii, shave ice is its own ritual: paper cones mounded with finely shaved ice, drenched in syrup, sometimes hiding a scoop of ice cream at the bottom. Red bean ice cream, made with azuki beans, shows up there and in communities with strong Asian culinary roots, adding a lightly sweet, earthy note that sits far away from the usual chocolate-vanilla axis. The South and Mid-Atlantic lean into pie and cobbler in frozen form, butter pecan everywhere, plus blackberry cobbler, coconut cake, and blueberry cream pie folded into cream and sold right alongside more straightforward scoops

Then there’s the Pacific Northwest, where my own second act is unfolding. Here, ice cream customs are stitched into the same fabric as coffee, beer, wine, and weather. We have the usual suspects, vanilla, chocolate, berry swirls, but also flavors that feel like local postcards: marionberry, wild blackberry, salted honey, and scoops that taste like someone scraped the forest floor and added cream (in a good way). Regional creameries tuck Washington cherries, hazelnuts, and apples into their churns. Of course, coffee ice cream is ubiquitous. Sometimes you get ice cream with a splash of local Pinot Noir or a ribbon of reduction made from grapes grown not that far away. It’s not quite wine tasting, but it nods in that direction.

From a Washington wine perspective, I can’t help noticing that both ice cream and wine are ways of capturing place and time. Wine is literally a drink made of time, sunlight stored in grapes, years folded into barrels, patience poured into a glass. Ice cream is a more immediate snapshot: milk from nearby farms, fruit from a short growing season, maple syrup from a stand of trees, churned and frozen into something you eat in minutes. Wine asks you to respect the years that went into it. Ice cream asks you to respect the fact that it’s melting right now. Both make you pay attention.

When you put all these regional customs side by side, a pattern emerges: people use ice cream to freeze their local stories. Dairy states emphasize custard and farm products. Coastal towns invent signature bars and rolls tied to boardwalks and beaches. Old flavors, black licorice in Wisconsin, teaberry in Pennsylvania, hang on as edible nostalgia. Maple Creamies carry the taste of sugaring season into July. Blue Moon keeps the mystery of Midwestern childhood alive. Each scoop is a little line of autobiography: “This is where I grew up. This is what summer tasted like. This is what we thought was normal.”

In a second act, I find myself less interested in chasing “the best ice cream” and more interested in noticing what each place chooses to put in a cone. The question shifts from “Is this superior?” to “What does this say about here?” The Maple Creamie says: our trees matter. The custard stand says: we’re loyal to our dairy. The shave ice shack says: we live under sun that demands serious cooling strategies. The tiny neighborhood shop that offers one berry flavor for three weeks and then never again says: this is seasonal, local, and you’re lucky you walked in on the right day.

Ice cream customs might look trivial compared to bigger questions: health, work, relationships, but they’re part of the same human impulse: to turn our environment into something we can taste and share. We sample each other’s flavors and, in the process, get small, sweet glimpses of how other people live. In a world where so much feels heavy, there’s something hopeful in the fact that we still line up at roadside stands and walk-up windows, debating cones versus cups, arguing about Blue Moon versus teaberry, and handing each other bites with the simple question, “Have you tried this?”

Every few years the world stops to watch a ball roll across a field.

We rearrange schedules, lose sleep, shout at televisions that can’t hear us, and suffer the kind of emotional swings most of us would never tolerate in our ordinary lives. For something that lasts ninety minutes, a World Cup match can feel strangely large: personal, heavy, and unforgettable.

On paper, it’s just a game. On the screen, it looks like something closer to a mirror.

What makes the World Cup so popular and engaging isn’t only the skill or the spectacle. It’s the way the tournament manages to turn the basic facts of being human: the thrill of victory, the agony of defeat, into a story we can watch unfold in real time. It’s drama, but it’s also recognition. There are fleeting moments of perfection and the impossible dream turned to sharp reality. We see ourselves out there, even if we’ve never made a proper pass in our lives.

You don’t need to understand tactics or formations to feel this. All you really need is a team to care about, or an underdog to root for.

Part of the pull is identity. For a few weeks, the jersey stands in for something much bigger: country, culture, family, childhood memories. People who don’t watch football all year suddenly find themselves talking about “we” and “us” as if they’d been in on every practice. A win feels strangely close to a personal triumph; a loss can sting like a small piece of pride has been chipped away.

That “we” is powerful. In the clinic, I watched patients carry fear and hope quietly, inside their own bodies, inside small rooms. With the World Cup, fear and hope come pouring out into open squares and living rooms. Strangers become teammates for ninety minutes. You can look at the person next to you when your team misses the penalty and know they feel it too, which is a kind of medicine of its own.

Then there is the emotional rollercoaster itself. We know, in our bones, the shape of a day that starts in cautious optimism, swings into joy, and ends in disappointment, or the reverse. Football compresses that shape into a single match. It’s the same pattern patients described when they talked about getting test results, or waiting on news, or hoping something would finally change. The World Cup just gives it a scoreboard and a clock.

The thrill of victory is easy to understand. A late goal, a surprising upset, a keeper’s fingertip save, these moments send a wave through a crowd that feels authentic and physical. People jump, scream, hug whoever happens to be within reach. For a brief moment, the world tilts. Things feel lighter. You walk home taller, talking faster. The win doesn’t change your mortgage or your diagnosis or your family situation, but it changes how the day feels, and sometimes that’s enough.

The agony of defeat is more interesting.

Most of life’s losses arrive quietly. A job that doesn’t pan out. A relationship that fades rather than explodes. An illness that undercuts plans in small, exhausting ways. The World Cup puts defeat on a giant stage and lets it land in one sharp, undeniable instant: the final whistle, the missed kick, the scoreboard that refuses to change.

We watch players collapse to the ground, pull their jerseys over their faces, stare into the middle distance as if they can’t quite believe what just happened. We see fans crying in the stands, sitting down hard on plastic seats, looking like they’ve aged ten years in a few seconds. There’s something oddly honest about it. Nobody pretends it doesn’t hurt. Nobody makes small talk to cover the silence. The loss is acknowledged, fully and publicly.

For all its drama, that’s one of the inspiring things about the World Cup: it gives us permission to feel, together, the very things we’re often told to manage privately. Joy, fear, humiliation, pride, they all show up, sometimes in the same match. The tournament becomes a safe place to practice being swept away and brought back, knowing that this particular storm will end when the whistle blows.

What should inspire us about the sport isn’t only the great goals or the clever coaching. It’s the resilience built into its structure.

Teams know, before they board the plane, that most of them will not win the trophy. The math is simple. Some will go home quickly. Some will go deeper and drop out in heartbreaking fashion, penalties missed, extra-time goals conceded, dreams stretched just far enough to hurt when they snap.

And yet they come.

They train for years for a tournament that might end for them in three games. They run themselves into the ground for a ball they may never touch. They accept that the world will watch them succeed or fail and then move on to the next match. There’s a kind of courage in that: the willingness to risk public disappointment for the chance at shared joy.

Spectators do a smaller version of the same thing. We invest ourselves in a team knowing that, statistically, we are signing up for a loss. We paint faces, wear jerseys, clear calendars, fully aware that we might be walking home in stunned silence at the end of the night. We do it anyway. The possibility of a win and perhaps more importantly, the guarantee of a story, is enough to justify the gamble.

When I think about the World Cup now, it feels less like a sports event and more like a temporary, global storytelling festival. Each match is a short story with familiar ingredients: protagonists and antagonists, rising tension, sudden reversals, unresolved questions. The underdog victories remind us that effort and heart still matter. The expected wins remind us that excellence has its own quiet satisfaction. The losses remind us that even the best plans can come to nothing, and that surviving that is part of the deal.

For those of us in our second act, the World Cup offers a different kind of inspiration. We know what it feels like to have more life behind us than ahead, to have wins and losses already tallied in private notebooks. Watching younger players run and older ones dig deep for one more tournament, we see bodies and hearts willing to risk one more time. It’s a reminder that courage isn’t reserved for youth; it just takes a different shape as we age.

Most of our days will never have a stadium full of people watching. Our victories will be quieter; our defeats will come without commentary. But the same patterns apply. We line up, we try, we fail, we succeed, we hope, we hurt, we heal, we go again.

That’s what inspires me about the World Cup: not the perfection of the game, but its shabby, glorious humanity. It shows us a world in which people still care enough to be heartbroken, still hope enough to be delighted, still gather enough to feel less alone when the final whistle blows.

If you’ve found yourself holding your breath during a match you didn’t think you cared about, maybe that’s why. Somewhere under all the jerseys and flags, the story is familiar. It’s ours.

Welcome to Second Act Field Notes.

If you’re reading this, you’ve somehow wandered into the corner of the internet where a retired physician in his second act has decided to keep telling stories. I’m glad you’re here.

For over forty years, my work revolved around exam rooms, hospital corridors, and kitchen tables where families laid out their worries like medication bottles on a tray. People came to talk about chest pain, lab results, stubborn coughs, but what they really brought in were questions about how to live with whatever life had just handed them. Sometimes it was bad news, sometimes good, often something in between.

I was supposed to treat the body, and I did my best at that. But it didn’t take long to learn that the body is only part of the story. The rest of it shows up in the way people tell their own tales—who they blame, who they thank, what they hang on to, and where they find hope when the numbers on the chart don’t look so good.

Now, in my second act, I still care deeply about health, wellness, and illness, but I’m no longer bounded by clinic walls. My days stretch out into gardens and grocery stores, movie theaters and walking paths, box scores and news headlines. I see the same human patterns playing out in tomato plants as in cardiology, and in old movies as in waiting rooms.

That’s what this newsletter is about.

Here’s what you can expect:

• Health, wellness, and illness. Not medical advice, but stories and reflections from someone who has watched a lot of people try to make peace with their bodies and their fears.

• Gardening and the natural world. Tales from the yard and the orchard—fruit trees, tomatoes, weeds that never take a day off—and what all that digging and pruning teaches us about patience, loss, and small satisfactions.

• Current events and everyday life. Not hot takes, but how ordinary people absorb big headlines and still have to make breakfast the next morning.

• Cinema, music, and books. Thoughts on the films, songs, and stories that stick with us, and how they echo what I used to see in the clinic and now see in daily life.

• Human behavior and storytelling. The way people talk to each other at the pharmacy counter, on the sidelines of a game, or in line at the coffee shop. Everyone has a story; sometimes they just need a listener to help them hear it.

The tone here will be simple and conversational—more kitchen table than lecture hall. I’m interested in the messy, honest reality of being human, but I also believe strongly in the hopeful part of the tagline. People surprise me, often for the better. That’s worth writing about.

I don’t have a grand plan other than to show up regularly with stories and reflections that might make you nod, smile, wince, or see something familiar in a new way. Some posts will lean more toward medicine, others toward gardens or movies or music, but they’ll all have the same thread running through them: what it feels like to be alive, especially in the later chapters.

Because this is meant to be a conversation, not a monologue, I’d genuinely like to hear from you. If there are topics or themes you’d be interested in—questions about aging, health, caregiving, gardening, memory, cinema, sports, or just “why people do what they do”—please don’t hesitate to suggest them. You can reply to posts, leave comments, or send along ideas you’d like to see explored. Some of the best stories I’ve heard in my life started with a simple, “You know, I’ve been thinking about…”

For now, this newsletter will be free, and my main aim is to build a small, thoughtful community of readers who find comfort and curiosity in these notes from a second act. Down the road, I may add deeper, longer pieces for paid subscribers, but the heart of this place will remain the same: messy, honest, hopeful stories about the human condition.

Thank you for being here at the beginning. I look forward to seeing where our conversations go.

These days, I’m retired from the clinic but not from paying attention. I’ve carried those conversations with me—about fear, hope, grief, love, boredom, humor—and they continue to shape how I see the world. Along the way, I also wandered into other territories: writing fiction and nonfiction, gardening, following sports seasons, watching films, listening to music, and generally studying how people behave when life doesn’t go according to plan.

Second Act Field Notes is where all of that comes together. This is a place for stories and reflections on the human condition—messy and honest, but ultimately hopeful. You’ll see posts about health, wellness, and illness, about gardens and sidewalks, about current events and small-town moments, about cinema and songs, about the way people talk, fight, forgive, and carry on.

I believe everyone has a story, and there is great strength in telling and hearing those stories. My own explorations across medicine and many genres of writing have reinforced that belief again and again. I hope you find as much comfort and quiet joy in these journeys as I have found in creating them, and that they nudge you to see the world with a bit more empathy and understanding.

You’re welcome here whether you’re a patient, a caregiver, a reader, a fellow writer, a gardener, a movie lover, or simply someone who enjoys a good story told in plain language. Pull up a chair, and let’s see where this second act takes us.