I had seen that in action, only the opposite. I’d leave it at that, but since you’re here . . .

This morning I was feeling unusually sad. I won’t go into the main reason I thought I was down, but I it has to do with unmet expectations. In that sense I was comparing my hopes with my reality, the thief of joy stuff.

All of it was compounded because I was also unusually tired, having recently recommitted to regular strength and aerobic exercises. I worked late yesterday and have that ahead of me on the weekend. And Diana, perhaps the world’s most popular dog sitter, has been away doing that for a while.

So, feeling alone and tired and disappointed, the sadness was persistent.

I’m feeling much better now. None of those circumstances changed. Actually, let me take a look at that first part, the expectations. Yeah, no change. I’m still tired. Diana comes home tonight, so that will be nice.

It’s possible, probable even, coffee should get some of the credit, maybe most of it.

But I first noticed I was feeling better after having a longish conversation with someone, a conversation that unintentionally compelled me to put my disappointment in perspective.

Comparison, in this case, stole my sadness.

I won’t be filing a police report.

Steven Gardner is the founding host of Story Night in Bremerton, Washington and author of the Book, My Predominant Faith. Find out about both at fieldofsteve.com.

STORY 1

My dad used to have conversations with our dogs, but they weren’t consistent, so there was nothing to learn.

Our first Great Dane, Mariah, was booted from obedience school because the instructor said the other dogs were beginning to act like Great Danes. As majestic as Mariah could be when she posed, she carried enough bananas in her brain to keep us well entertained. Her fun side came out among the other students.

That Mariah flunked out of obedience school probably wasn’t my dad’s fault, but his inability to deliver the consistent messaging didn’t help. My brother was in charge of the obedience training. He taught us the basic commands: sit, down, stay. Mom and I stuck with those words and didn’t improvise.

Dad: “Sit. Stay. Now you stay there. Do you hear me?”

Mariah looked confused at the messaging. We looked confused wondering how Dad could have misunderstood the instructions, as if Mariah had passed some English classes.

That hasn’t stopped me from having long talks with our current dog, Ella. I don’t have any delusions about her understanding.

Me: Is it tummy o’clock?

Ella: (tilts head, walks in circles, wags tail)

Actually, I think I’ve used that one enough around dinner time that she gets what I’m saying.

STORY 2

When Mariah died at age 7 it left our hearts heavy with the weight of a thousand bags of kibble. So, within a couple of months we welcomed Alfie, who was the same breed, same color, had the same bump of intelligence atop her head, and was named after a friend of ours, Alfaratta. She was slightly less elegant than Mariah, but every bit as nutty.

One quality that didn’t come naturally to her was begging. We could sit and eat dinner, or popcorn during a movie and she wouldn’t give us that look that says, “Do you know that I also like popcorn?” We’d give her some, but she never seemed to ask for it.

When Alfie was 4 years old my mother adopted a Cairn Terrier, Sally, from a breeder who told my mom Sally’s favorite food was In-N-Out hamburgers. Sally, like most dogs I’ve ever known, was a professional when it came to begging. She probably didn’t mean to teach Alfie, because Alfie was rather large competition, but Alfie saw Sally work and her nose was never far from our table again.

It was a moment that confirmed for me something that probably isn’t difficult for most of us to believe, that dogs learn from each other and influence each other.

Early in Laurel Saville’s book How to Live with a Dog, Saville tells the story of a dog who’d had some traits scared out of her as a puppy by an early trainer who relied on punishment as a teaching tool. The dog, by interacting with Saville’s own dog, learned how to feel more comfortable with actions almost any dog owner would welcome.

“The behavioral term for what we were witnessing is ‘social learning,’ which is scientific jargon for monkey see, monkey do,’” Saville writes. “Highly social animals like canines and primates copy the behavior of others in their social group not only to learn but also to fit in so they can access group resources such as food, protection, knowledge and reproductive opportunities.”

That dogs are amazing companions (I use the term “amazing” too much but it fits here.) is the result of thousands of years of them wanting to hang out with us, and us wanting to hang out with them. It was a two-way invitation. We didn’t get here because one species brutalized another. We became friends.

And yet so much of what passes for dog training is the equivalent of bully and prey.

Saville’s book is not about training dogs per se, it’s about getting humans to better train themselves to communicate with dogs, netting behavior that makes being a companion easier. Getting a dog to learn what you want will often involve you expressing obvious excitement at the coveted behavior and an obscene amount of treats. It also means understanding that dogs may not understand things the way you do.

If you leave a dog alone after they snap at you, for example, they learn that snapping at you will get them the peace they crave. Saville says it’s the “delivery person syndrome.”

“Delivery truck stops, dog barks, truck/person goes away, dog learns that barking works to make strange or scary things go away.”

Since reading it, I’ve tried to be different. I’m quick to jump to a stern “No” when Ella’s doing something that doesn’t make me a fan. That might never go away in total. But yesterday she was up in our upstairs window yelling because another dog dared to walk down the street. Instead of yelling at her from another room to knock it off, I went into the room to defuse the tension with upbeat communication.

Did it work? Maybe a little. She stopped barking, but maybe that was because the other dog walked away. It’s going to take more than one instance, and it’s probably going to involve a lot of treats getting her to stop. I’ve got to be OK with the idea that to change her behavior, I probably should change my own.

“Dogs changed themselves over thousands of years, so they could live with humans,” Saville writes. “Sometimes, humans are brave enough or smart enough or desperate enough to change themselves so they can live better with their dogs.”

On August 26, My Predominant Faith: A moving story about moving gets its launch.

The story is of a life-changing decision I made when I was 32 years old, back when the bearable became unbearable.

Life over seven-plus years between graduation and that night on the Capitol steps wasn’t misery by any means. Eventually whatever nagging sense I had that I should be somewhere else became bearable, the same way ear hair starts as something you never considered you’d ever encounter on your own body and eventually becomes part of who you are.

If you go to fieldofsteve.com you’ll find more info, including links to where you can preorder print or Kindle versions.

For a short time, however, I’m willing to email you a PDF version for free.

Here’s why. Besides sales, what helps authors generate more sales and rise high in bookseller algorithms are reviews.

So here’s the offer, if you don’t want to buy the book yet, for a short time if you send an email to stvngrdnr@gmail.com telling me you commit to write an honest review once the book goes on sale on August 26, I’ll email you a PDF copy of the book for free. I’ll do that until 25 people make that pledge.

If you have enough faith in my work that you are willing to buy the book now and write an honest review once launch day hits, send me an email telling me you bought it and the same offer applies. I’ll email you the PDF right away. For buyers, that offer is available to an unlimited number through August 26.

That date, by the way, is my mother’s birthday. She’s been gone for almost three decades now, but I know she would have been thrilled that you had faith in her youngest son enough to get his book. She’d also enjoy getting a book for free.

It’s Sunday now, I’m still on Bainbridge but will head home in the early afternoon.

The package is a proof copy of my upcoming book, and I am hopeful it is the last proof before I can toast, “I did it!” If all goes well, I’ll formally announce on Friday.

That all this happened on Bainbridge brought back a memory of a not-completely-unrelated work I did for two years when Diana and I first moved ourselves and our kids to Poulsbo, our first home in the place where we finally established roots.

We moved up here for a newspaper job. My beat was Bainbridge Island and the rest of the northern part of this county. After a year, the company doubled down on its Bainbridge coverage by making it my sole focus and by launching a weekly newspaper mailed to every island household. The mailed paper was here when I got to this house. It’s what reminded me of this next part.

Part of that assignment was writing a weekly column to run only in that mailed piece. This was a task I welcomed, because it was what I hoped to do for the rest of my journalism career. I wanted to share newspaper space with Leonard Pitts and Maureen Dowd, syndicated columnists who earned the privilege of putting Pulitzer Prizes on their mantles, assuming they had mantles.

I’m sure there were times I wrote well. I remember nailing it when there was a tragic car accident involving teens. My best column was probably the last one, the one in which I told a perfectly appropriate story to explain why another reporter was taking my place.

There was one column that was, in pretty quick retrospect, terrible.

I was a bit peeved by how our paper was treated by the local mayor, but didn’t think I could call her out specifically. It would have seemed whiny. Instead, I asked readers to imagine a scenario where they had a dilemma. Jay Leno was offering them a chance to be on his show, but they really wanted to be on Letterman. It was a veiled message to the mayor.

The problem was that the paper should have had someone to spike that column before it ran. There was a copy editor assigned to my work, and it was the one time she questioned what I wrote. I was loud confident, enough that she let it run. Like so many people who are loud confident, I was loud wrong. The column was terrible. No one got what I was referring to, and it’s a dumb idea to send a message to one person in the newspaper equivalent of a group chat.

Writing a Substack is as close as I got to ultimate journalism goal. I don’t blame that fact on not having heavy-handed editors to guide me. But it didn’t help. Ironic, I know, that I’m extolling the virtue of editors as I publish this piece after editing it myself.

Also ironic, the book I’ll be urging you to buy is largely a self-directed project. I wrote it. I paid for a program to help lay it out, but did that myself. I designed my own cover.

Where I wouldn’t rely on myself was in having a pro read it and provide what’s called developmental editing. If the book is good at all, it’s better because of the work of Jim Thomsen.

Knowing that, you might wonder why I didn’t get a publisher. I worked in the publishing industry back when that was pretty much the only way to get something credible to market. The publisher provided an editor, a separate proofreader and a designer for the cover.

Also, by doing this myself I miss out on the confidence boost that comes from someone telling me my book is good enough for someone else to pay for design, editing and distribution. A publisher might even offer a small advance.

The downside to going after a publisher was that had I even been successful in finding one, the book that will be available within weeks wouldn’t see the light of a bookstore shelf until about two Christmases from now.

I’m 64. When I turned 60 I was gifted with an impatience that helps me make prudent decisions. It’s that impatience that drives me to finish this piece without providing a perfect ending.

Most years at his birthday, which is today, I find a picture of him as a young boy decked out in cowboy gear. When I was young I sometimes wore a cowboy hat. I had cap guns slung in holsters and, if my memory isn’t invented, I sometimes wore cowboy boots.

I was doing it for fun. My dad had a purpose.

Every January Denver hosts the National Western Stock Show, two weeks of cows and horses and all types of farm animals.

In 1931, a year after my dad was born, the Denver Post began sponsoring a contest inviting children to dress up as cowboys. The best dressed would win a saddle, a bridle and a pony to put them on.

A pony as a prize seems absurd 95 years later. Then again, the event is for people who probably have a place for a pony.

One year when my dad was old enough to dress the part and compete, the pony prize was thrilling to him. Not so much his mother. This was during the Great Depression. Work for my grandfather was sometimes steady, but not always. Horses, even ponies, can’t be easy or cheap to raise.

Dad’s mom, who we knew as Nana and regarded as a saint, had trouble with animals as it was. The Gardners took on a few dogs over the years, and darned if nearly every one of them didn’t come down with distemper. They were put to sleep the old fashioned way at the wrong end of a police officer’s pistol.

When my dad dressed up for the stock show he was hopeful he’d come home with the pony. Much to his mother’s relief, a lack of cowboy footwear made him a runner up. A judge said if he’d had boots he might have won.

Dad appreciated cowboy culture for most of his life, and when he was 62 he finally got himself a horse, fulfilling a long held dream. He purchased a temperamental Arabian named Christy from neighbors down the street who were willing to continue boarding her on their property with the other horses.

Christy was a little temperamental. More than that, any horse can be a lot of work.

It wasn’t long before the reality of horse ownership was less appealing than the dream for my dad. He sold Christy back to her former owners.

Dad is not around to talk to about this anymore, but I do wonder what those first few months of horse ownership were like for him. I can’t think of a thing I wanted in my own childhood that I would do what Dad did to get. When I dressed up like Batman as a kid I just wanted to look like Batman. I didn’t want to be Batman.

For a few months Dad got to fulfill a childhood dream. A handful of months of that was enough.

Happy Birthday, Dad. Giddyup

My guilt is rooted in growing up in a family where the Latin on the family crest translates to “We can’t afford it.” My brothers will confirm that, even though one of them not only went to Hawaii he ended up living there 50 years to the day.

I can’t talk about Hawaii without first talking about a neighbor from our childhood. As I remember it, one morning I heard Mrs. Eide yelling for joy from her front porch, because she had just been informed that she had won a trip to Tahiti. In my opinion, yelling is a reasonable response to that news, especially in the 1970s. Today I am much more suspect of any such expressions, since everything is on camera and everyone knows everything is on camera. To my knowledge, Mrs. Eide didn’t even know I was witnessing her joy, so I believe her response was authentic.

To win the vacation, and again this is subject to my memory’s accuracy, Mrs. Eide had submitted the most proof of purchase seals from a product easily purchased at any of the Alpha Beta grocery stores near us. I think she had to buy potato chips, but I hedge, because I don’t see how one family could have eaten enough to earn a trip to the South Pacific. I suppose Mr. Eide might have been generous at his business with dishes and dishes of free chips to his customers, and that might have helped.

This is a long intro to get to the main point of this story. Mrs. Eide wasn’t exactly disappointed that she won the trip to Tahiti, but admitted that she really wanted to win the second prize, which was a trip to Hawaii. I think they got to stop there on the way.

It wasn’t rare for people I knew growing up to go to Hawaii, but I don’t remember hearing about it a lot. It seemed out of reach for our family. We weren’t poor, necessarily, but travel like that was for other people.

My first trip to Hawaii was in 1990. My job took me there and I spent the whole week looking at the mountains marveling that I was there. That week was the Hawaii of the brochures. My parents did eventually get to go, as did my other brother.

Diana and I had wanted to go on our honeymoon, but we thought it didn’t quite pencil out, and wouldn’t for the next 30 years or so. We did some cool trips in the meantime, so we’ve traveled pretty well, but a few months ago we finally made reservations for Honolulu. A few days before we left we considered calling it off.

Not only was it not looking like it was going to be the “toes in the sand” kind of trip we had envisioned when we made reservations, it appeared we might even be a nuisance by going. I called the hotel and talked with a staff member there and got a better feel for what a “Kona Low” was going to deliver, that we were not going to be disaster tourists. We still were not sure what the week would look like, but we decided to risk it.

From the time we made the decision to the end of the trip I kept thinking of the movie “Hoosiers.” You know, there’s the obvious Indiana-Hawaii connection.

The first few days it rained on us pretty steadily. The streets at times could run pretty high with brown water. In our part of Oahu, Honolulu, it was inconvenient, but not a disaster. Other parts of the island were hit much worse. We opted a lot for indoor activities. As we were walking in heavy rain to the Hawaii Convention Center to attend the Honolulu Festival, we crossed a bridge over a canal that was filled with debris, including about a dozen basketballs.

There’s your Hoosiers connection.

The real Hoosiers link, as in the movie, comes in the line Coach Norman Dale says as he addresses the community when he introduces the team. The community is skeptical of the team, largely because one of the community’s athletes has as of the coach’s introduction declined to join the team, and they have made their skepticism obvious.

“I would hope you support who we are, not who we are not.” — Coach Norman Dale, Hoosiers

I kept thinking of that line about our vacation. We wanted our toes in the sand. We weren’t getting too much of that, though we did get one solid afternoon on the beach. There was that festival. And we went to the Bishop Museum and learned Hawaiian history, something we might not have bothered visiting were it not for the weather.

There was plenty we would have done sun or no sun. We saw a 51-year-old turtle named Olivia napping on the North Shore. We shopped. We ate at Zippy’s and learned how good the food is at 7-Eleven. We went to a Dodgers store.

And almost every night, we spent a couple hours sitting on the lanai enjoying the warm Honolulu nights.

It wasn’t quite the vacation we envisioned. It was the one we had. And the one we had was wonderful.

My first semester (at BYU) cost me $670 in tuition and some of my classmates yelled “What the flippin’ fetch” when it went up to $700. This was 1984, so today that would be around $2,000. You can’t even say “college” in a conversation for less than $2,000 today.

There is a footnote revealing a semester’s tuition at BYU for a member of Utah’s predominant faith is $3,444 in the 2025-26 school year, so tuition there has outpaced inflation as it has elsewhere, though maybe not by quite as much.

There is more that doesn’t show up in the book.

When and where I was growing up, “Mount Sack” was the fallback plan for many of us growing up in the suburbs about 20 miles east of Los Angeles. It was what you did if you didn’t have a fixed destination otherwise, were on hold, were content to go to the junior college first, or it was all you needed.

“Mount Sack” was more commonly known as “Mt. Sac” or “MSAC.” Rarely did you hear its full name, Mount San Antonio Junior College. It was a nice open campus set in a city called Walnut, presumably because walnuts had once grown there. Walnut was next door to my native city, West Covina, named for I’m not sure what.

My own experience at Mt. Sac came in the fall semester after I graduated high school. I knew I would be taking just a few classes before leaving on a church mission and returning to attend BYU, the four-year college that back then was the reward for serving a mission.

I signed up for four classes: Psychology, English, History and Weightlifting. I quickly dropped the History class for reasons I don’t remember and Weightlifting because I was doing exercises that worked too well (i.e. were really hard) and I didn’t like that.

The Psychology class was the entryway into what I figured would be my long-term life, sitting in an office listening to people and helping them by dispensing thoughtful wisdom like, “You’re awesome just as you are,” or “Don’t let your meat loaf.” I was already doing that kind of work for free with my friends and considered myself a natural.

What I learned most in that class was the actual science in psychological work. There are studies and research projects to determine when the best time is to tell someone they are awesome or to not let their meat loaf. I liked my vision of the job better than what it actually was. To get to that office one day I’d have to sit through four-to-eleven years learning boring material before I could be licensed to break out the therapeutic hand puppets.

I finished the class with a B and a determination that would be my last Psych class.

I learned this all for just the cost of a textbook and whatever I paid in gas to drive from West Covina to Walnut over five months.

My tuition was free.

This ability to discover what you do and don’t want is one of the under-discussed benefits of cheap college education. Many of my high school classmates also went to Mt. Sac. and figured out they didn’t want to go to college at all, spending only time and a few gallons of gas to consider other options.

My classmates in those community college classes included people who were deep into their adult lives. A decade earlier my father earned an associate’s degree from Mt. Sac, then a bachelor’s in police science from Cal State Los Angeles. My memory is he did it to get a raise working as a police officer, and I wonder if having that degree helped him some in his post-police career.

No one needs to remind me that someone is paying for anything that is subsidized, that introducing more money into a system can cause costs to go up, that administrative bloat and an amenities arms race are factors in the increase in college costs.

What I discovered in the searches sparked by my memory, though, is it is still possible to figure out what you don’t want to do with the rest of your life for relatively cheap. Mt. Sac isn’t free anymore, but that same Psych class would run me $138 in tuition. Where I live now the local community college would probably cost about three times as much. That feels like a lot more, but I guess if I were selling a book or something I could use it as a fundraising lure titled, “Help Steven figure out what he doesn’t want to do with the rest of his life.”

The biggest way turning 60 changed me was I became a little anxious to travel more. We’ve done that some but the itch hasn’t gone away. In fact, I’d say the tattoo isn’t as connected to getting older as the travel is. Something, in addition to time, motivated the ink.

To start, I don’t ever remember being against getting a tattoo. I just could never think of anything I was eager to have drawn on my body permanently. My wife and I flirted with the idea of getting matching tattoos when we married 30 years ago, but we’d heard how that can jinx a relationship. And we weren’t all that flush with cash as it was.

Lately I had been considering the tattoo idea when the notion of inking a lighthouse on my arm went from interesting to important. I worked with the artist to make sure the tattoo didn’t look like I was trying to compensate for something. I’ve seen pictures of lighthouse tattoos that surely draw giggles. I wanted to avoid that conversation. He helped me come up with something that worked.

The lighthouse is a symbol to me of something someone said more than half my life ago, a statement that has grown in importance.

In 1990 I attended a personal development training that creates that development by being at times intensely, emotionally challenging. I had made a statement that the trainer took issue with, and she let me know at length how my statement came off. I was angry at first, and looked at the doorway out of the training room more than once. But before bailing I decided to consider what she was saying. Soon, I got it, and it proved to be a powerful lesson for me.

When the training was approaching its end she took a moment to thank a group of about ten volunteers who staffed the training. In her message she included the sentence-ender, “because you all know how hard this week has been for me.”

When we were given the chance to ask questions later, someone in our group had the presence to ask why she had said the week had been so hard.

She paused. This was not a conversation she planned to have with us. She said a few words, then revealed, “My father died last week.”

She then told us it had been tough, but “sometimes what you are doing is too important to let your own stuff get in the way.”

That statement wasn’t planned as part of the training, but it’s what I remembered most, even more than the earlier scolding.

A few years later I saw that idea in action after my wife gave birth to our oldest. Our son’s shoulders were turned awkwardly, doing a lot of damage to my wife as he exited. The umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck and once they cut that they had to work the meconium out of his lungs.

While one doctor worked on getting my son to breathe, which took much longer than I’d ever seen in all the movies I’d watched, another was working frantically to sew up my wife. I had the thought in that delivery room that if this happened decades earlier I could have easily lost both of them.

The next day we spoke to the doctor who worked on my wife and he admitted he’d been worried about her condition as he stitched her up. Apparently he didn’t let that worry affect his work.

“Sometimes what you are doing is too important to let your own stuff get in the way.”

The lighthouse is my chosen symbol of that statement. A lighthouse keeps doing its job no matter what’s going on around it. The tattoo can remind me to make that same commitment. What’s more, if anyone asks about it, I get to tell this story.

It wasn’t just the message and the symbol I found that motivated me to get it memorialized. It was also the artist. It was that same son whose life was saved by people unwilling to let their own stuff get in the way

.

So, for example, when I asked a girl to marry me and she said, “I can’t say ‘yes,’” she didn’t imagine one day decades later hearing from me asking her to read over what I wrote, to give herself a pseudonym if she prefers, to correct anything she thought needed correcting and to send me a signed release form.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been reaching out to people from my past, because they appear in a memoir I’m writing about a critical decision I made in my early 30s. That decision requires context, and my past is my context.

I’ve received releases from a couple of friends who weren’t ever romantically linked to me. Those were pretty easy. And they were kind, supportive even.

There were three women who received releases from me who were once romantically linked to me, including the “I can’t say yes” woman. Two of them were quite serious relationships and we had extended chats before I sent them. It’s been radio silence since. I’m imagining a lot of reasons, most of them not great. It could be they hated what they read and they’re either too mad at me to respond yet, or they feel bad for me and are figuring out how to tell me.

It could also be that this isn’t as important to them as it is to me and they just haven’t read it yet.

Either way, I’m sending the book to an editor in a couple weeks. If we discuss the matter and they want major changes I agree to make, I’d like to get that done before the editor is on the case. This means I have to commit the uncomfortable act of reaching out to say, “ahem.”

There is a third woman I was only slightly romantic with (I was interested. She wasn’t.) who received a release form. I’m sure it was an even bigger surprise for her. She doesn’t have much of an online presence, but there’s enough information that I believe I found her home address. I mailed her the parts of the book that include her and a release form.

I have Informed Delivery from the US Postal Service, which allows me to see in the morning what will be in the mailbox later that day. When I get home from work today I’ll have waiting for me an envelope from the address I found for that woman.

No matter what the envelope contains, I’m sure I will have thoughts. Knowing me, I’ll share them here. If that bothers you in any way, look at this way: at least I’m writing to you instead of about you.

1. This is harder than I remembered.

2. That’s probably why I quit.

3. I would do it more regularly if I set a regular deadline.

4. I’m not doing that.

One of the reasons it is a challenge is because I’ve got several rising issues I think are worth exploring. Because it’s tough to choose among them, I just don’t choose.

First, though, there is some good news. I finished the first draft of the book. I was likely aided by the quarantine I was in because of a bout with Norovirus, or at least that’s what medical people tell me it was. The worst part was only about eight hours, but it was intense. And I’m still tired a week later.

During that quarantine, I realized I was close to the first finish line. That knowledge sometimes serves as a push. I’ve re-read the entire story. It needs work, but I’m generally happy with it.

The questions I will need to address before a book is in anyone’s hands are, in the words I heard at church, legion. Here are three:

1. While a memoir is mostly about a single person, other people play big roles. How much effort should I put into getting their input? Do I have them sign releases? Do I change their names? I’m conflicted by precedent and by my own attitudes.
   Current leanings: reach out to all those I can and give them options.

2. How much effort do I put into getting beta readers? These are people I pay (It doesn’t cost a lot, but it’s important to pay them.) to read the book and they offer general feedback. That question is even more interesting because of one thing that happens in the book. This is a process I see happening before I hire a real editor.
   Current leanings: Yes, I will hire a handful.

3. Self-publish or get a publisher?
   Current leanings: If I can score a publisher with an agreement I like, I’ll do that. It is not as clear cut as it might sound, though. And if I can’t find one, as Jesse Jackson once said on Saturday Night Live, the question is moot.

In re-reading the book an issue came up I wasn’t suspecting. This is why we re-read.

The story takes place over a couple of years in my life, a transitionary moment that had an impact that grows stronger the older I get.

A person becomes part of the story and my reaction to that person is colored by a facet of my life I wanted to address as little as necessary. In the current draft I’ve left out why I responded the way I did. That is a hole that can only be addressed by expounding on the subject I wanted to minimize.

Currently, I’m thinking I need to add a whole chapter. Does this mean I can’t claim the first draft is finished? Nope. First draft done.

Could I be more vague? I’ll settle for this vague for now.

In that piece I mentioned another book. That’s where this next venture really begins.

I stood by Spill Your Guts’ Guts. The book was a transcript of podcasts I had done, so there was little connection between the stories other than I wrote them.

My goal then was to see if I was smart enough to publish the book on my own using Amazon’s book publishing program. Self-publishing was my only option, because I knew no publisher would be interested. I didn’t change the content from what was spoken, except to take interviews and make them more narrative. I hired an editor to proofread the work, but didn’t invite storytelling suggestions. What you read on the page was essentially what you heard on the podcast. I made a pretty significant formatting mistake, but I liked what I had done overall.

When I reread Spill Your Guts’ Guts more recently the experience wasn’t as painful as it was rereading that first book, the novel. I recognized, though, that it would have been a better experience for the reader had I rewritten the content crafted for a podcast to make it more fun to read as a book.

That was a weird realization because I had been taught years ago that one of the editing passes I should take with written content is to read my writing out loud. If it sounds good out loud, it’s more enjoyable to read. The stuff in that book had already been read out loud, on the podcast. On the printed page it felt flat.

My first plan was to rewrite each story to be excellent in print. The second step was to add some of the Substack pieces I’d written. The final plan was to self-publish again, though this time not using the Amazon platform.

My expectations about the book’s sales were that it would sell more after the second book hit the streets and was successful. People who read and enjoyed that book would look for whatever else I wrote. When the third book came out, a new audience would join the first one to see what else I had written.

It’s not a bad theory. Then I remembered how much of this effort was also designed to satisfy my itch to talk in front of an audience. I’m no longer ashamed to say that I like being on stage. In 2014 I started Story Night because I wanted to be better at storytelling and no one else was providing an opportunity locally. Later a friend invited me to do stand-up comedy. As hard as that craft is and despite the many nights I bombed, I enjoyed being in front of people.

In my imagination, getting an audience for a book will be much easier if the book is a single story, built out of dozens of smaller stories. So the second book became the first, and the third became the second.

The ultimate model for what I want to do is what I’ve seen from Brené Brown. She has speaking events. People pay to go and they get a book as part of the admission.

That’s a lofty goal, and I am well aware it would take some kind of lightning for me to copy that success. I know, though, that I can get an audience once. And if I get one, then I’ll work on getting another one. Meanwhile, I’ll be working on that second book. And around then the idea for a third might materialize.

First, though, I need to finish the first draft. I am close, and I know how the book ends. In fact maybe I should write the ending now.

I think I’m back.

When I did this regularly before, I challenged myself to write weekly for a year, and then evaluate. It was a lot of fun and I thank you for your attention and your comments.

What I realized was that because I was not already an established columnist elsewhere or a celebrity, there was little interest in me as a generalist. I wrote about whatever occurred to me. That’s fine if you’re Reese Witherspoon, or the guy who played Reese on Malcolm in the Middle. Even if I can’t remember his real name off the top of my head, he’s had enough of an impact societally that he’d get an audience even if he was just writing about the stuff on his desk.

For me to keep this interesting, not just to any readers but also to myself, I knew it would be better if I was writing about something specific. I dabbled in that when I set up a paid subset of columns on storytelling, but abandoned that effort quickly. I was fine with the idea of not doing this ever again, figuring I’d learned some things that made it worth it.

Then, not quite like lightning because it didn’t knock me over, an idea struck.

I’m writing a book. The process, both in the imagining and the doing, has been fascinating to me. To someone else imagining writing a book I think the process would be instructive. And even if you have no plans to ever write one, I hope I can make this place interesting to you, as well.

I wrote and published a couple of books before. I wrote about that in this space. If you read that piece, it will give you flavor of what to expect from me going forward. I’ll be sharing what I’m learning and tackling questions I’ve yet to answer. For example: it’s infinitely easier now to publish a book. On the whole that’s a great thing. There are downsides, and I have an example of a downside on my nightstand.

In the future I’ll cover how I came to decide what I would write and what might be next. I’ll address self-publishing versus getting a publisher. At this point I may have little option but to self-publish, but that might not be a bad thing given how I intend to generate many of my sales. I’ll let you know what’s happening as I progress. Getting the book edited is, I believe, going to occupy a lot of space here. If I do end up self-publishing, I am committed to making the book high enough quality that you won’t easily be able to tell. The editing will play a huge role.

This will be a journal.

Not only will you have the chance to comment, you might have an opportunity to influence the book’s content.

At this point I’m in no position to ask people to pay for this material. If you want to support my work, the most obvious way will be to buy the book when it’s published. If you’re interested in doing something sooner, I created a planner and a journal that are both available on Amazon. Speaking of Amazon, that’s something else I will address.

My hope is that you will find this content useful and entertaining. I also hope it helps me make decisions in the future. If this work generates book sales, that’s not a bad thing either.

We've reached the time of year when Spotify is telling us what music we like.
Yesterday it showed me that in January the song I played the most was John Prine's "Souvenirs."

"I hate graveyards and old pawn shops, 'for they always bring me tears. I can't forgive the way they robbed me of my childhood souvenirs."

The song played prominently in January because I heard it performed beautifully at a memorial for Angela Dice, a former Kitsap Sun coworker who always made me feel like I was the most important person in the room. After the service it became a reunion of people I used to spend nearly every weekday with. It's not the first time I had one of the most beautiful experiences in the saddest of circumstances.

That reunion gave us a chance to talk about two other coworkers facing mortality. Michael Moore, who for 15 years let us all know what was happening in the local arts community, learned some weeks before that memorial that he had cancer. None of us knew the latest about him. Michael played a prominent part in many of my weekends, because he was often the only other person in the newsroom when I was there. We had lots of long conversations, not really about anything too important, but important in that they happened.

After the memorial for Angela we learned Michael had passed the day before.

We also talked about Lenna Dove, a former photographer at the paper. She was brassy, funny and loud. She was pretty open on social media about her cancer ordeal, describing it as "ass cancer." About a year ago I reached out to her privately, essentially to let her know I was grateful for her, and that I was rooting for her. We shared some laughs. She said her final "goodbye" in November.

It is evidence of my privilege that for the last 25 years I've been able to do work that has great meaning to me. In doing that work I get to be in the presence of people who in the end I will remember much more than any story I wrote or project I completed. I can tell you a little about my work as a reporter and now in elections. I can go on and on about the people I worked with.

That is the lasting souvenir.

• “The extraordinary shock(s) to our system that the coronavirus pandemic is bringing has the potential to break America out of the 50-plus year pattern of escalating political and cultural polarization we have been trapped in, and help us to change course toward greater national solidarity and functionality. It might sound idealistic, but there are two reasons to think it can happen.”

• “It was easy to sneer at experts until a pandemic arrived, and then people wanted to hear from medical professionals like Anthony Fauci.”

• “Americans are being reacquainted with scientific concepts like germ theory and exponential growth. Unlike with tobacco use or climate change, science doubters will be able to see the impacts of the coronavirus immediately. At least for the next 35 years, I think we can expect that public respect for expertise in public health and epidemics to be at least partially restored.”

Not everyone missed the mark in their optimism. There were 30 different predictions, some of them right on the money.

• “For years, telemedicine has lingered on the sidelines as a cost-controlling, high convenience system. Out of necessity, remote office visits could skyrocket in popularity as traditional-care settings are overwhelmed by the pandemic.”

• “Some trends already underway will probably accelerate—for example, using voice technology to control entryways, security and the like.”

It’s well worth your time. If enough of you click on the link above, Politico will begin wondering about “That Long Walk” bump they got in a four-year-old story

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I haven’t been here in a while, I know. I am working on a project that will lead to the next project, which will then be followed by another project. At least that’s the projected plan. But I like doing this. So, when the mood strikes I’ll come back, probably with something like this. Nice to see you again.

In the buffer year between high school graduation and the choices and options that confirmed I was an adult, I went to a New Year’s Eve dance our church held by renting an entire shopping mall. Music we liked would play at one end. Music our parents liked was at the other end and somewhere in the middle of this makeshift party arena there was something for the younger kids. 

In attendance that night was a girl I was pursuing. Her frightened look when she saw me made clear she had no interest in getting caught. We’d gone on a few dates and had some of the best times I had ever had up until then. I had a hard time understanding that good times on a date was all she was interested in. I believed she did want to be my girlfriend, but was under the thumb of her mother, who definitely did not want her daughter coupling with anyone, let alone me. And Mom was in the building.

Over the next couple of years, long after I’d stop pursuing the girl, I was given enough evidence about her mother that any jury that wouldn’t convict her would have to have been bribed. She had the means.

Over time, though, I realized I might have been wrong about the girl. I was 18. She was 16. I was out of high school and destined to leave town in a few months. She’d be around a couple more years. That she wasn’t as interested in me as I was in her is something I’ve come to accept. At that time I thought she was just afraid of her mom. Maybe she was. Either way, no New Year’s kiss for me.

The next morning I took to recording a spoof Rose Parade broadcast put on by L.A. comedian and KLOS Disc Jockey Frazer Smith. The tape was for an Idaho friend, one of my best friends when he was living a few houses down the street. His family had fled Southern California for breathable air. When the parade was over KLOS played the first two songs of Springsteen’s Born to Run album.

I didn’t recognize it right away. I’d heard Springsteen a few years before and didn’t like him. I’m not sure I immediately recognized the music as his, but life changed for me when I heard the lines, “The screen door slams. Mary’s dress waves. Like a vision she dances across the porch as the radio plays.” 

Life changed because I recognized the storytelling in these few words, and Springsteen instantly became my favorite artist, a title he continues to hold. Bruce explains on the VH1 Storyteller program about his songs, that he’d grown up hearing screen doors slam. I could relate to that description the moment I heard it in Thunder Road. I’d never thought to put it to music. And I’d never heard anyone else mentioning a screen door slamming in a love song. 

Changes, lasting ones anyway, seldom happen in a single moment. I felt like it did for me in those first few bars. Though I have to acknowledge, as a college dean suggested in the story I wrote about change nine years ago, I had been primed for it by my experience with the girl. “It’s almost like we’re set up for it,” said Mark Markuly, who was dean of the School of Theology at Seattle University when I pursued what was a passion project for me about life changes. 

Pretty soon the song becomes a literal invitation to Mary, but any good story is broader than the characters in them. I found myself in the song, longing for the girl who had avoided me the night before. 

The rest of the song is Bruce’s character acknowledging his own shortcomings, but also his ambitions. Over and over he invites Mary to take a risk, to set aside all the safety and expectations at home and ride away with him, to pursue those ambitions as a partnership, to “roll down the window and let the wind blow back your hair.” It’s close to the end where he tells her he’s got a place for her if she’s ready to take, “that long walk,” phrasing so expressive I decided to name this work after it. And in the end he offers an expression of who he is. “It’s a town full of losers and I’m pulling out of here to win.”

OK, sure, maybe that last line is judgmental about the folks there. It lacks recognition that perhaps the people he wants to flee might have taken long walks of their own to get there. In the passion of youth and longing it might be hard for someone to consider that, and Bruce was only 24 when he first conjured what became Thunder Road. 

The rest of the song is an unusually long stretch of instrumental music for a pop song. In the storyteller program Springsteen explains that the rest of the song is that ride. 

I never did convince that girl to ride with me, and I missed big on a few others. But the partnership is only part of the Thunder Road story. It’s my interpretation that the character singing was going to take that ride either way. Personally, I tried to do that, but I had trouble taking off until I found someone to ride with me. Once I did, I won for sure. I’m not done yet. The ride continues. I’m still on that long walk.

It’s also Women’s Equality Day. Mom expressed complicated opinions about this. Even something like “equality” can have nuance.

Today also would have been her 90th birthday. 

I used to joke with my mother that she couldn’t be happy unless she was worried. 

When I was 21 I drove back to Utah from Los Angeles with a woman who the day before had become my ex-girlfriend. It was the girlfriend’s decision. Before we left that Monday morning I agreed to call home when I arrived. We’d made that trip a million times as a family and to some degree I didn’t get the concern. Then again, we also knew someone a few years older than I who had been killed on that drive. 

What was top of mind all day during that Monday drive was how this relationship I had hoped would include a marriage one day would evolve past that day. You’d be right to assume that 12 hours would be plenty of time to figure that out, but it wasn’t. We spent another couple of hours sitting in a park after we arrived, and that’s where the tears and details were free to flow. We left on good terms and I went home to my apartment, where my roommate told me my parents had called.

I knew right away I was in trouble. Not like when you’re in trouble as a kid, with real personal consequences. I just knew that I had moved my mother’s worry needle into a danger zone. The worry was one thing. The pain of me not caring enough about her worry would linger at least a few days for her. I felt terrible about that, even though my own broken heart was a more pressing issue. I called, heard nothing but a couple of sighs on the other side of the phone in the breaks between my apologies. I’m pretty sure I never made that mistake again.

Mom died in 1998. She had cancer, so she had time to offer some final thoughts before passing. She never stopped worrying about us during her life, but she showed no remorse that her turn was ending. One of the things she said as she knew she was dying was she did not want to experience what she believed we would from the world in the coming years. She didn’t express worry about us in saying it. I think she believed we were capable of handling what was coming. Her three sons are all still here, giving every indication that despite some of our own hurdles we haven’t quit. So I guess her faith in us was warranted.

When Mom died, we were all there to send her off to what was next for her while we stayed to figure out what was next for us without her.

Since then I’ve often wondered what Mom would have thought about not just the events of the world, but the changes in our families, the places we’ve gone and the lives we’ve lived.

I hope she isn’t worrying and that she’s happy anyway. I hope she now realizes that she’s equal to anyone. And I hope she is surrounded by dogs.

It’s been less than a day since we learned Vin Scully died and so many tributes and, fittingly, stories have emerged that it triggers my self doubt about whether I have anything to add. Again, fittingly, I do have story.

Anyone knows that a major part of Vin’s magic ( And look, I’m calling him Vin, because he always seemed like my friend.) came from the stories he told.

It wasn’t just the stories. It was the drawn out vowels, the cadence and tone that always made me confident that Vin knew of what he spoke. My mother only really liked baseball because my dad and her three sons loved the game, I think. But she recognized how fortunate she was to listen to Vin.

Mom listened to him a lot. She had to. If you drove anywhere around Los Angeles between April and October from the late 1950s into the new millennium there was a good chance you were listening to Vin on the radio helping you imagine a Dodger game you couldn’t see, sharing a story about a player’s past and the origins of Flag Day, all on the same drive.

When I played baseball in Little League I could hear Vin Scully narrating my big-league dreams. One day, I hoped, Vin Scully would tell the wandering world that I was at bat. Even better if I was in Dodger Stadium, batting for the Dodgers.

On April 23, 1972, I went to see the Dodgers with my brother Mike and my parents. It was my dad’s 42nd birthday and my oldest brother, Jim, was in Vietnam and had managed to get a $20 money order to the Dodgers for the four tickets and a parking pass. It was a birthday present, which Jim told the Dodgers, but left it at that.

The Dodgers’ message board in left field would carry birthday greetings every game. It always read like a list. “Happy Birthday to,” followed by a long list of names that back in 1972 would fill the message board in about the same time it took to travel to the moon. It was a slow and tedious adventure to watch the names appear and we didn’t expect any greetings for Dad.

In the middle of that game someone in my family nudged me and pointed to the message board, and there was a birthday greeting to my dad from Jim. It took up the entire board. Either someone in the military read Jim’s correspondence with the Dodgers (Communications are not always secret in the military, you know.) or someone with the Dodgers was touched by Jim’s gesture.

The Dodgers lost that game 2-1 to the San Diego Padres, but the left field greeting was the story for us that day.

It impressed Vin, too. Friends tuned into the game told us Vin read the entire message, following it with, “That’s some son.” Apparently the organization hadn’t prepped Vin beforehand with the story, because he added, “But how did he know his father was here?”

As great as the message on the board was, knowing Vin Scully had spoken the names of my father and brother was ten times the honor. It was like the difference between a handshake and a hug. Vin felt like our friend in the radio.

I’ve read a few tributes to Vin since yesterday. Dodger announcers Joe Davis, who replaced Vin, and Jessica Mendoza, who grew up listening to him, were both reverent in their stories during last night’s game between the Dodgers and the team that was Vin’s favorite growing up, the Giants.

One of the stories that touched me most was from the New York Times’ Richard Goldstein’s retelling of what President Barack Obama said of Vin when Obama gave him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Obama, noting that most announcers worked with a partner, said, “Vin worked alone and talked with us. When he heard about the honor, Vin asked with characteristic humility: ‘Are you sure? I’m just an old baseball announcer.’ And we had to inform him that to Americans of all ages, you are an old friend.”

Vin Scully is the sound of my parents, of my brothers, of my childhood. It’s riding in the cozy back end of a Volkswagen Beetle as we journeyed up toward one desert to bathe in quiet or another to visit friends or family. He was the sound of Boston’s 1986 heartbreak. He told us the San Francisco 49ers, playing on their home field, were “six yards away from Pontiac,” before Joe Montana and Dwight Clark proved him correct.

Vin was there when amidst the improbable, the impossible happened.

He was not only great, he was good. I never met him, but I can assure you that he was my friend.

1. If I tell you a story that seems to be coming out of nowhere, I may be workshopping a joke.

2. I fell last night. I went to the front yard to turn off the hose, tripped over a rock and went straight to the ground. I don't know if it qualifies as "ass over tea kettle," but I went down. When I was about a third my age and half my size this happened all the time, playing football and just generally being a young, taking risks I don't take now that I'm an old. This happened a few weeks ago, on my bike. I went full Biden at the intersection of Murrelet Avenue and Old Clifton Road.

In both cases, I was fine. A little residual soreness in some places and traumatized, sure, but nothing seriously hurt.

Also in both cases my Apple Watch asked if I was OK. That thing works. I don't know if you've seen the ad where it shows a guy has fallen while mountain biking, but the watch will vibrate and the screen has an option in red to say "I'm OK." Based on the ads I thought I better press that or they'll be calling 911. So I pressed the button. There's a second button that for an old is a little harder to read. But with the proper amount of squinting I could make out, "I fell but I'm OK." Both were true, so that's what I pushed. I don't know what the second option says, because in both instances I didn't need to read that far.

Generally I'm glad that feature exists on the watch. I hope it never comes in handy and that I don't ever have to press that button again, but recent performance suggests I will.

There is a secondary benefit. When I fall and the watch starts vibrating, I have to pull myself out of the daze I'm in and focus on the watch. I don't know long I would otherwise linger in the wonder of a 60-year-old falling to the ground. I appreciate something that will make me focus on the real world again.

Not sure there's a point to any of this. Maybe I'm just workshopping a joke.

“Mini-cupcakes? As in the mini version of regular cupcakes, which is already a mini version of cake? Honestly, where does it end with you people?” he said.

“Where does it end?” is most often asked rhetorically, like Kevin did. You could also mean it literally, like “Where does the universe end?”

I have been asking that question about a story of mine. I’ve told the story on a few occasions, but I’ll refrain from doing it here. I’ve generally tried to save it, because I’ve believed for some time that this story might be the most important story I could ever tell. It depends on the audience, I suppose, but the value could be immeasurable if I could ever figure out how to land.

The reason I say I have trouble finding the ending is, I’m certain, because I’m not satisfied with the ending I have created at this point in my life. It's like I’m waiting for a different ending to happen before I give the story the attention it deserves. 

In the past few months I’ve come to wonder if maybe the story is better without the bow I want to tie to complete it. A couple things happened to cause me to ponder.

I told the story at our local event Story Night a few months back, and invited audience members to share any feedback. They seldom do, so I was thrilled when one did. She said she could tell I was hoping for some grander finale, but suggested the story might be better without it. Intuitively I considered that she might be right. What I haven’t figured out is how. 

The second factor that made me reconsider the ending I want came from reading the book How to Tell a Story, created by the staff at the storytelling event organizers at The Moth. There is a section on endings that includes brief treatment of “The Perfect Bow.”

“We don’t recommend you end your story ambiguously, but this is not to say you have to tie it up in a bow. The happily ever after thing can work, but not often. Sometimes if the story is too pat, or ‘neat’ at the end, it can seem false. The ending can dilute the deeper aspects or negate the importance of the story you shared. Many stories end in a messy and perhaps still-complicated place. Try to resist the urge to make things too perfect.”

In the past I’ve formed the story in the reality I want, not the one I have. I wanted pat and neat, and to date I’ve yet to do anything to accomplish that. Only now have I been willing to believe that maybe it’s better that I haven’t.

The question is, “How?” My guess is I’ll find out by answering, “What’s real?” and “What changed because of what happened in my story?”

Those are almost always the important questions in a good story.

Here’s where this piece ends. Actually, no. I had this ready to post on Wednesday. But on Wednesday morning, as part of a work-related conference I’m attending in Spokane, we heard from Bill Stainton, who for 15 years or so was the producer of Almost Live, a Seattle-based sketch comedy show that aired before Saturday Night Live.

Stainton told a story about Jerry Seinfeld, who made four appearances on Almost Live. His last appearance was at about the time his show was taking off. He did a set Stainton had seen before, but it was better. He asked Seinfeld if he had changed it, and he had. He’d watched a recording of his set and noticed flaws and figured out ways to make the set better.

Seinfeld was already hugely successful, but one reason that was true was because he was willing to look at something that was already working and make it better.

And that’s what I’ll do with the story I’m struggling with. I think it’s good, but I’ll approach it with the question Stainton posed, “How can this be better?”