A few days ago, I was sitting in my backyard under the umbrella with five dogs scattered around me.

The waterfall was running. The sun was out. My cooling pool was a few steps away. I was naked, because it’s my backyard and that is one of the reasons I created such a private little oasis in the first place.

Looking around, I thought, This is pretty damn nice.

And it is.

I have built myself a little paradise.

The problem is, paradise can get awfully quiet when nobody comes over.

I had texted a couple of new people I’d recently met one afternoon to see if they wanted to hang out. Nothing elaborate. Come over. Sit outside. Have a drink. Get in the pool. Talk.

Nobody came.

So there I sat.

Me and five dogs.

Which got me wondering: how does somebody get to this point?

You know, where you can have a pretty good life, genuinely enjoy your own company, and still find yourself wondering who the hell you’re supposed to call when you don’t want to be alone anymore.

Before I go much further, I should probably say this: you’re seeing all of this through my windshield.

Someone else involved may see things differently. They probably do. I’m not claiming my version is the only version.

It’s just what things look like from where I’m sitting.

And lately, the view has been pretty lonely.

🪑 Alone Isn’t the Problem

I actually like being alone much of the time.

When I’m by myself, I organize my thoughts, work on projects, plan trips, putter in the yard, take walks and occasionally decide something needs fixing badly enough to consume the next six hours.

And I write.

I publish an article every week, but “weekly article” makes it sound as though I sit down for forty-five minutes, bang something out and hit Publish.

Hardly.

I spend hours on these things. I dig through memories, move things around, cut things out, put them back in and try to find the story inside the story.

I enjoy it.

Solitude gives me room to hear myself think.

So I don’t want less time alone.

I want more choice about when I’m alone.

That’s the difference.

The problem isn’t that I have nowhere to go.

The problem is that sometimes I don’t have anyone to call.

🛣️ How I Got Here

For about ten years, most of my social life naturally revolved around being part of a couple.

That’s not unusual.

When you’re in a long relationship, your lives overlap. Your evenings overlap. Your friends overlap. Your weekends overlap. You stop thinking much about building a separate social life because you already have somebody to have dinner with, watch a movie with, run errands with or just sit around and do absolutely nothing with.

Then a couple of years ago, my partner and I moved into separate homes.

Strangely enough, I thought it improved our relationship.

We seemed better as friends than we had been as partners.

I spent a lot of time at his new place. We had dinner. Watched movies. Shared our dogs. Hung out.

I helped with all kinds of projects around the new house. Painting, decorating, hauling things, fixing things. There was always something.

I honestly thought we had figured out how to remain family without having to remain a couple.

And I thought that friendship would survive even if one of us eventually met somebody else.

Then somebody else came along.

And from my side of the windshield, my place in that life seemed to disappear with surprising speed.

The dinners stopped.

The movies stopped.

The casual hanging out mostly stopped.

And somewhere along the way came the familiar:

“We should get lunch sometime.”

That phrase can sound sincere.

Sometimes it probably is.

But sometime has a funny way of never appearing on the calendar.

Gotye’s Somebody That I Used to Know has been rattling around in my head lately. Not because every lyric fits, but because the central idea does: someone who was once woven into your everyday life can somehow become almost a stranger.

Someone who once knew nearly everything about my life now seems barely interested in any of it.

I understand that song differently now.

At roughly the same time, a friendship of 31 years fell apart too.

That one didn’t happen overnight.

For a long time, I had felt as though I was carrying more of the relationship than I should. Helping. Listening. Showing up. Trying to keep things moving.

Then one more conflict came along.

It didn’t create the problem.

It just made a pattern I had been ignoring much harder to ignore.

I finally got tired of carrying the weight of it.

So within a relatively short period of time, two of the biggest relationships in my adult life changed dramatically.

And here’s the part I hadn’t really thought about until recently.

During those ten years as a couple, and another couple of years as friends, I wasn’t building much of a social life for myself as a single guy.

I didn’t think I needed to.

I already had people.

Until suddenly I didn’t.

So when those relationships changed, I wasn’t just grieving the relationships themselves.

I was looking around and realizing there wasn’t much of a social structure underneath them.

Which leaves me at 68 asking a question I never expected to be asking:

How the hell do you start over socially at this age?

🧭 So Now What?

I do have social events available to me, and right now they’re probably my best source of interaction.

Sometimes you meet somebody and keep talking afterward.

Sometimes everybody has a good evening, says goodnight and goes back to their own lives.

That’s just how it works.

Bars used to be an obvious place to meet people, but spending an evening having several drinks and then driving home is not a lifestyle I have any desire to resurrect.

Apparently nobody hands you a new social calendar along with your Medicare card.

Maybe part of the answer is becoming a regular somewhere.

Friendship probably comes less from one magical introduction and more from showing up enough that people start expecting to see you.

And that means I have to admit something else.

I’m very comfortable at home.

Maybe too comfortable.

Social Security and a few other income sources cover the basics, and I’ve found ways to travel and live in a house that suits me.

Am I living as high on the hog as I once imagined retirement?

No.

The hog has been downsized.

But I’m not broke either.

I have a backyard I love, a hot tub, a cooling pool, dogs around constantly, trips planned and enough privacy that clothing remains entirely optional.

And somehow half a dozen houseplants have turned into what appears to be the early stages of a botanical takeover.

They’re kicking ass, by the way.

So I’m not sitting around with nothing to do.

But my side hustle watching dogs keeps me home a lot.

And when your home is comfortable enough, it can become pretty easy to stay there.

Maybe even a little too easy.

🚪 When People Stop Showing Up

Losing those two relationships forced me to take inventory of some others.

Was I usually the one helping?

The one calling?

The one making plans?

The one keeping things going?

I don’t regret being generous.

But I have started wondering whether I sometimes confused being useful with being valued.

I don’t want to spend the rest of my life auditioning for friendship by being helpful.

I don’t want to be useful to people.

I want to be important to them.

I don’t need to be anybody’s center of attention.

I just don’t want to be the entire maintenance department for the relationship.

And I don’t want “too busy” to become a permanent reason there’s never time for me.

I understand that people have jobs, responsibilities and full calendars.

But making time for someone is also a way of showing that they matter.

Busy is an explanation.

It shouldn’t become a permanent exemption from effort.

Nobody has to slam a door.

Sometimes there is just distance with good manners.

And that can feel like a closed door too.

The hardest part of loneliness isn’t always being alone.

Sometimes it’s realizing that people you thought would remain interested in your life don’t seem particularly curious about it anymore.

That hurts in a way solitude never does.

🧩 Meeting People Isn’t the Same as Finding Your People

A lot of the people I meet are already in relationships, many of them open.

That can leave room for friendship, companionship, dinner or an occasional overnight.

But often they already have their person.

Their home base.

Their life.

So I’m not necessarily having trouble meeting people.

I’m having trouble meeting people who have room for me.

There are pockets of companionship.

A good-morning text.

A friend I hang out with occasionally.

A social event.

A pleasant evening out.

Those things matter.

But sometimes loneliness isn’t about having nobody.

It’s about having somebody for a small pocket of the week and then a whole lot of silence around it.

And when I meet somebody new, initial interest is often physical.

I’m certainly not complaining about being found attractive.

I’ll take the win.

But there’s a difference between somebody wanting to get naked with you and somebody wanting to know you.

Can this person listen?

Not simply wait for his turn to speak.

Actually listen.

Ask something.

Remember something I said.

At this point, I’m not looking for somebody to complete me.

I’d settle for somebody who remembers what I said five minutes ago.

Being desired and being known are not the same thing.

I want to be known.

Of course, here’s the contradiction.

Loneliness can lower the bar.

There are evenings when being selective feels like a luxury.

And I have to be careful not to let my fear of being alone make room for people who leave me feeling lonely anyway.

🕯️ When Loss Goes Unacknowledged

We understand grief when someone dies.

There are rituals, support groups, sympathy cards, people checking in.

As there should be.

But what about the losses where nobody died?

There’s no funeral when a friendship fades.

Nobody sends sympathy cards when somebody stops calling.

There’s no support group for people whose friends quietly stopped showing up.

We’re not nearly as good at recognizing the empty space left by people who are still very much alive.

And maybe that leads to the part that scares me most.

🌫️ What If This Is Permanent?

Not a lonely Sunday.

Not a quiet week.

What if this isn’t a phase?

What if this is simply how life looks from here?

What if I never rebuild the kind of social circle I thought I would always have?

That thought scares me.

And when it gets loud enough, I start wondering whether I should change more than my social life.

Maybe I rent the house and spend part of the year somewhere warmer and more social.

Maybe I build a community somewhere else.

Maybe staying here is the right answer.

I don’t know.

Sometimes I can’t tell whether the urge to leave is reinvention or escape.

Maybe it’s a little of both.

I love my house.

I love my yard.

But sometimes I wonder what really keeps a person in one place when the people no longer do.

And then there is another thought I’ve had that I suspect more people have than admit.

Sometimes I wonder how people would react if I simply weren’t here anymore.

I am not planning to end my life.

I’m not.

But I’m 68.

Life happens.

What if I got sick?

What if I were in an accident?

Who comes?

Who calls?

Would somebody who doesn’t have time to call today suddenly wish they had?

I don’t think that thought is really about wanting to be gone.

I think it’s about wanting to know that my presence matters before my absence proves it.

Sometimes I wonder whether people would notice the empty chair more than they notice the person sitting in it.

📱 Maybe Call Somebody

And that is where this stops being entirely about me.

Because although I’m not contemplating suicide, somebody else feeling this degree of loneliness might be.

Maybe there’s somebody in your life you haven’t heard from in a while.

Maybe you assume they’re fine because they haven’t told you otherwise.

Maybe they are.

But maybe it’s worth asking:

How are you doing?

Got any plans this weekend?

Want to grab lunch?

You don’t have to fix their life.

One friend of mine sends me a good-morning text every day.

Usually it’s nothing elaborate.

But there is something powerful about knowing one person thought of you before the day got away from them.

Sometimes that’s enough to remind somebody they aren’t invisible.

✨ What Joy Is Left to Find?

People ask me, “What brings you joy?”

It’s a reasonable question.

It also irritates the hell out of me sometimes.

Because I know what brought me joy.

People.

Friendships.

Dinner.

A spontaneous invitation.

Family.

Conversation.

Being included.

Feeling wanted.

It isn’t as though I misplaced my joy somewhere and just need to remember where I put it.

Some of the things that brought joy into my life have changed or disappeared.

So maybe the question I’m more interested in now is:

What joy is left to find?

There are still things growing around here.

Last month I had people coming over, and suddenly I had all the motivation in the world to clean up the yard and get everything looking right.

There were people coming.

There was a reason.

Now the party is over.

The lawn still gets mowed.

The plants still get watered.

But it’s harder to prepare a beautiful place when you don’t know whether anyone is coming.

Still, I walk dogs.

I travel.

I make plans.

I write.

But a philodendron isn’t going to ask how my day went.

A Labrador, lovable as he may be, remains notoriously weak at conversational follow-up questions.

And writing has started to mean more to me than I expected.

For years I’ve worried about what people will remember about me.

One identity.

One failure.

Well, maybe more than one.

One chapter mistaken for the whole book.

Except that isn’t my life.

I’ve been a father, a grandfather, an Air Force veteran, a traveler, a dog watcher and a storyteller.

I’ve loved people.

Lost people.

Made spectacularly stupid decisions.

Started over more than once.

That’s a life.

Not a label.

And maybe these stories are part of what I leave behind.

The I Could Write a Book! pieces, especially, are becoming a record of my life in my own words.

Maybe someday one of my grandchildren will want to know who Grandpa really was.

Maybe somebody I’ve never met will read this particular story years from now and think:

Damn. I thought I was the only one.

Maybe that counts for something.

🚘 Still Looking

I still don’t have a tidy conclusion.

I don’t know whether I stay here forever, move somewhere else, find a new circle of friends or eventually find somebody who actually has room for me.

I do know I don’t want less solitude.

I like my solitude.

I just want someone to call when I’m ready for it to end.

I don’t know exactly where this goes next.

But I’m still looking.

Still asking:

What joy is left to find?

I don’t know.

But I’m still looking.

✍️ A quick note about I Could Write a Book!
I’ve been thinking about giving my I Could Write a Book! memoir series a home of its own, possibly as a separate Substack channel, while keeping Second Wind focused more on essays like this one about life, aging, relationships, reinvention and whatever comes next. I haven’t made that decision yet, but I’d be interested in hearing what you think.

💬 Does any of this sound familiar?
Have you ever found yourself rebuilding a social life, grieving a friendship that didn’t technically “end,” or wondering where your people went? I’d love to hear your perspective in the comments.

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📤 Know someone who might recognize themselves in this story?
Please share it with them. Sometimes simply realizing “Damn. I thought I was the only one” can make the world feel a little less lonely.

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I’ve been thinking about what you can remember after 38 years of being somebody’s dad, and how differently some of those memories can look depending on which side of the childhood you were on.

But there is one thing I’m absolutely certain about.

August 18, 1988 was the best day of my life.

Adam was supposed to be born on 8-8-88.

Apparently he thought that was a little too cute.

So he waited ten days.

On August 18, 1988, I stood next to Debbie in the delivery room, my forehead pressed against hers, doing the Lamaze-like breathing we’d practiced.

Then Adam arrived.

And he wasn’t breathing.

The umbilical cord was wrapped around his neck, and the doctors and nurses quickly whisked him out of the room.

Debbie started to panic.

“What’s wrong with my baby?”

I was scared too, but I could see the medical team out of the corner of my eye. Nobody seemed panicked. They seemed to know what they were doing.

So I kept my forehead against hers.

Breathe.

Just breathe.

Then, from somewhere down the hall, we heard a baby cry.

My mom, Jackie, was there with us, behind a curtain in the birthing room.

She said something I will never forget.

“That’s your baby.”

She was right.

And 38 years later, August 18, 1988 remains the best day of my life.

Of course, becoming a dad and figuring out how to be one turned out to be two different things.

🎵 Cat’s in the Cradle

I’ve been singing Harry Chapin’s Cat’s in the Cradle for years.

Most people my age know the story.

A father is busy building his life and never quite has enough time for his little boy. The boy grows up, and eventually Dad is the one who wants time together while the son is too busy.

When Adam was eight, though, that song meant something very different to me.

I had come out as gay, and what followed was an ugly custody battle. This wasn’t just a disagreement over parenting time. My being gay was being treated as though it somehow made me dangerous around my own son.

At one point, after the court finally allowed me to see Adam again, his grandfather called and told me I could come get my son, but if I brought any of my “faggot friends” onto his property, he would call the police.

Yeah. It was that ugly.

For about two months, I wasn’t allowed to see my son.

I was living on Whidbey Island at the time, and karaoke had become part of my life.

I sang Cat’s in the Cradle because it made me feel closer to the little boy I was fighting so hard not to lose.

It hurt.

And when I finally could see him again, being there required a whole lot of driving

🚙 My Little Co-Pilot

For years, Adam was my little co-pilot.

When I lived on Whidbey Island, seeing him could mean driving 200 miles to Vancouver, picking him up, driving 200 miles back, spending the weekend together, driving 200 miles back to Vancouver to return him Sunday, and then driving another 200 miles home.

Eight hundred miles in a weekend.

That gave us a lot of time to talk.

And Adam asked lots of questions.

One day he came up with the question every parent eventually gets.

“Dad, I know babies come out of the mom’s tummy, but how do they get in there?”

Excellent question.

That particular discussion had arrived a little ahead of schedule.

Fortunately, Adam lived on a horse farm.

So I asked him how horses made baby horses.

He quickly responded:

“Oh yeah, the boy gets on top.”

Okay then.

“There you go.”

Apparently that was all he needed to know.

No follow-up questions.

Parenting crisis averted.

🏠 Making Room

The custody challenges didn’t end when I was finally allowed to see Adam again. With me living 200 miles away, even my Wednesday-night parenting time became something to fight over.

Eventually I decided the only practical answer was to move back to the Portland-Vancouver area and deal with it from here.

That meant leaving Whidbey Island and starting over again.

For a few years I played in Portland’s gay softball league, and Adam became our unofficial bat boy. He loved it. Whenever somebody got a hit, he’d run out, grab the bat and bring it back to the dugout.

What he really wanted was to play.

He was still a kid, so that wasn’t happening, no matter how many arguments he or my teammates could come up with.

My living arrangements changed a few times during those years, and so did Adam’s room.

When I lived with friends after leaving Whidbey Island, I used blankets to carve out a space in the basement that was Adam’s.

At McCormick Pier, he had a bedroom piled with stuffed animals. Somewhere I have pictures of him buried in them with little more than his face showing, and I think Amber may be in some of them too.

Later, when money got tighter and we moved into a one-bedroom apartment, we built couch forts downstairs when he stayed with me.

I remember him loving that place.

We were right on the river, and he would go rollerblading while I walked along Portland’s waterfront.

Years earlier, when I lived on five acres in Battle Ground, I built Adam and Amber a treehouse. Tree branches came through the floor and windows. I got it about 95 percent finished before we moved.

The roof never quite got finished.

But the kids didn’t seem to care.

They had a treehouse.

Through all those different homes, though, Adam was still coming to stay with Dad.

He wasn’t living with Dad.

❤️ “Dad, I’m Ready”

For years, Adam told me he wanted to live with me.

To be honest, we both wanted that.

Somewhere along the way, I told him that when he turned 12, he could decide where he wanted to live. I’m not sure that was ever legally accurate, but Adam remembered it.

I also told him that if he wanted to live with me, he would have to be brave enough to tell his mother himself.

I promised I would be beside him when he did.

Then, when he was around 12 and a few months, the phone rang.

“Dad, I’m ready.”

So I went to his mother’s house and sat beside him while he told her.

It did not go well.

He left crying.

And from that day forward, Adam lived with me.

For years, I had a fortune-cookie slip taped to the console of our household computer:

“Your dearest wish will come true.”

I put it there for me.

Adam always knew what it meant.

That day, it came true.

Until then, I had been what divorced parents sometimes call a “Disneyland dad.”

Every other weekend. Wednesday nights. Special trips. When your time with your kid is limited, you tend to make most of it about the kid.

Then suddenly I was the full-time parent.

School conferences, groceries, laundry, rules, homework, friends sleeping over, first cell phones, budgets, and saying no once in a while.

Disneyland Dad and Full-Time Dad are very different jobs.

We both had some adjusting to do.

At one point during his teenage years, Adam told me he didn’t really want to live with either of his parents.

I told him:

“Well, you’re not exactly easy to live with either. But I love you anyway.”

I could see that it landed.

By then, Disneyland Dad was long gone.

I had a teenager.

🎸 The Kid With the Guitar

At 15, traditional high school simply wasn’t working for Adam.

Intellect wasn’t the problem.

It was the structure.

We tried different schools.

Nothing clicked.

Then during a temporary move to Sacramento, we found an independent-learning program.

And suddenly he started doing well.

Around the same time, he got a guitar for Christmas.

He taught himself to play.

And got pretty damn good at it.

By the time we moved to Tucson, we found Compass, a publicly funded magnet high school that emphasized music and the arts.

That worked.

The kid who arrived in Sacramento at 15 with almost no high-school credits graduated on time in 2006.

I was ridiculously proud.
I threw a graduation party. Family came from all over, and I made three different videos using photographs and music from different stages of his life.

Did I overdo it?

Probably.

I’m his dad.

By then, the guitar he’d taught himself to play wasn’t just something sitting in his bedroom anymore.

Music had become a huge part of his life.

🤘 Have a Backup Plan

He joined or formed bands.

Eventually there was Call Us Forgotten, which developed a following and even received some media attention. Their fans became known as the Forgotten Army.

I also committed what may be one of the great sins of Baby Boomer parenting.

I told him to have a backup plan.

What I meant was:

Go for it. Just figure out how you’re going to pay the bills if being a rock star doesn’t work out.

But I can also see how “have a backup plan” might sound a lot like:

Dad doesn’t believe in me.

That would have been news to me. I thought I was backing the dream while still making sure he had something to fall back on.

I gave him the van I had been driving so the band had something to travel in.

Once, while I was at a business conference in Washington, D.C., I learned that seven young musicians were stranded in Indio, California, where the temp was over 100 degrees, in the middle of the night with that van broken down.

Adam wasn’t even 18.

So there I was in Washington, D.C., trying to rescue seven musicians in the California desert.

This was before you could solve everything with a phone app, so I was hunting down a fax machine to send my driver’s license and credit card information to a hotel in Indio.

And somewhere in all of that, there was still a broken van that needed to be repaired.

As I recall, Dad’s credit card got involved in that part too.

Officially, I believe four young musicians stayed in that room.

The other three apparently became invisible.

Years later, after Adam had moved back to Vancouver, Call Us Forgotten scored a gig at the Hawthorne Theatre in Portland. I was still living in Tucson, so I flew up and surprised Adam before the show.

The backup plan was never supposed to replace the dream.

It was just supposed to be there in case the dream didn’t pay rent.

As it turned out, finding that backup plan took a while.

🎓 The Long Way Through College

Adam’s path through college was not exactly a straight line.

There were several starts and stops and several different schools along the way.

One of those stops was the Musicians Institute in Hollywood, where he spent about a semester studying music.

Later there was Clark College in Vancouver, and ultimately Washington State University’s Vancouver campus.

In 2018, he graduated with a degree in mechanical engineering.

I was proud of him

The engineering company he’d been interning with offered him a full-time job, but he’d have to move to San Antonio.

So we decided to turn the move into another father-son road trip.

We intentionally timed our departure around having all four of Adam’s wisdom teeth removed. He had a manual-transmission Scion, so while his mouth recovered, Dad did ALL of the driving.

And, with four freshly removed wisdom teeth, Adam wasn’t doing much talking either.

I had a captive audience.

We stopped in Sacramento in time for Aunt Louise’s 80th birthday celebration, a big family banquet that turned into a pretty remarkable reunion.

Mom and Jerry were there.

Dad and Sandy were there too.

Mom was already in the early stages of dementia by then, enough that at one point she mistook my dad, her ex-husband, for her own father.

That was both funny and a little unsettling.

Then Adam and I got back on the road.

In Los Angeles, we visited with Adam’s friend Chris Neff, whose apartment could generously be described as “cozy.” It was basically part of a basement and maybe half the size of a tiny home.

We stopped at Carlsbad Caverns, and then Tucson, where I caught up with old friends and Adam reconnected with his old friend Phil.

When I had left Tucson years earlier, Phil’s son was just a baby.

Now suddenly he was a 10-year-old boy.

Apparently time had continued moving even though nobody had asked my permission.

Eventually we pulled into San Antonio.

We got Adam settled into his apartment, found furniture, barstools and all those other things you suddenly realize you need when you’re staring at an empty apartment.

Then it was time for me to leave.

After all those years with Adam as my little co-pilot, I got back on the road without him.

That felt strange.

He spent about three years in San Antonio before eventually coming back home to the Pacific Northwest.

📸 The Man He Became

Music is still part of Adam, but these days a lot of his creative energy goes into photography and videography.

He photographs dancers, aerialists, acrobats and performers.

His work is sometimes beautiful, sometimes strange, sometimes dramatic and often unexpected.

And it’s good.

Really good.

He’s also an engineer, because apparently that backup plan worked out after all.

These days he sometimes has more photography and video work than he has time for.

But the last couple of years haven’t exactly been easy ones for him.

His marriage ended.

Then, only weeks later, one of his closest friends died unexpectedly.

That friend was Elliot, one of the young musicians who used to play drums in my basement years ago.

When Adam needed a dad hug, I gave him one.

Sometimes that’s about all Dad has to offer.

And somewhere along the way, the relationship between father and son changed again.

🍺 Funny Thing About That Song

Adam turns 38 today.

Something has changed between us during the past few years.

I don’t entirely understand what.

Adam lives about three miles away.

Sometimes I go weeks without seeing him.

I invite him to lunch or dinner, offer to fire up the grill, suggest we put something on the calendar.

Sometimes it happens. Often it doesn’t.

Most of the rest of our family has since moved to Coeur d’Alene, so these days Adam and I are the two still here.

Adam has work, friends, photography, projects and a life of his own.

I know he’s busy.

He tells me he’s busy.

I believe him.

I miss the ordinary stuff.

Grabbing a beer.

Watching a movie.

Taking a hike.

Going sailing.

Hosting family gatherings.

You know, Dad stuff.

And suddenly Harry Chapin’s old song sounds different.

Funny how that works.

Maybe that’s why, with his 38th birthday here, I keep finding myself looking backward.

🪞 Looking Back

At seven or eight, Adam went through his Macaulay Culkin phase.

He looked so much like the kid from Home Alone that we joked about it. There are pictures. Adam would even do the pose, hands pressed against his cheeks, mouth wide open.

I remember that kid.

I remember my little co-pilot.

I remember the teenager with the guitar.

But those are my memories.

Adam may remember some of those things exactly the way I do.

Others, probably not.

He may remember the long drives as a kid spending an awful lot of time in a car.

He may remember “have a backup plan” less as practical Dad advice and more as Dad doubting his dream.

I remember making sure there was a place for him wherever I lived.

He may remember how often those places changed.

Children don’t experience their childhood from their parents’ side of the windshield.

Adam has his memories.

I have mine.

I’m sure some match perfectly and others don’t.

That’s okay.

But there is one memory I don’t have to second-guess.

Thirty-eight years ago today, I stood next to Debbie in that delivery room, my forehead pressed against hers.

Our baby wasn’t breathing.

Then, from somewhere down the hall, we heard a cry.

My mom said:

“That’s your baby.”

She was right.

That baby became my little co-pilot.

My responsibility.

My pride.

My occasional pain in the ass.

And eventually, a man with a life of his own.

Which brings me back to that damn Harry Chapin song.

When Adam was eight, I sang it because I was afraid of losing my son.

At 68, I understand the other end of it.

Kids grow up.

They get busy.

Sometimes Dad wishes the phone would ring a little more often.

Sometimes Dad would really like to hear:

Want to grab a beer?

I guess I’ve got a case of Adam withdrawals.

But none of that changes what happened on August 18, 1988.

It was the best day of my life.

🎂 Happy Birthday, Kiddo

Happy 38th birthday, Adam.

And Grandma Jackie, my mom, said it first:

“That’s your baby.”

She was right.

Thirty-eight years later, you are still my (not so little) bud, my kid, my kiddo.

And you always will be. ❤️

If this story brought someone to mind, a son, a daughter, a father, or just somebody you wish you saw a little more often, maybe give them a call.

Time has a funny way of moving faster once we start paying attention to it.

❤️

If you enjoyed this story, please tap the ❤️, leave a comment

Leave a comment

…or share it with someone who might recognize a little of their own family in it.

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If this is your first time here, take a look around my profile. There are plenty more stories where this one came from, and if you’d like the next one to find you, hit Subscribe.

And if you enjoyed this enough to buy the guy who wrote it a cup of coffee, I certainly won’t argue with you.

☕ BuyMeACoffee

I actually told him that.

I lived about 600 miles away, which made producing a weekly show about whatever Jerry was building, rebuilding, modifying, improving, repairing, overengineering or otherwise screwing around with a little impractical.

But the name of the channel was obvious:

Jerry-Rigged

And I’m telling you, we could have monetized the hell out of it.

There would have been episodes like:

Why Your Self-Propelled Wheelbarrow Isn’t Self-Propelled Enough

How to Recycle Used Sand Because Apparently Buying More Sand Is Surrender

Three Pulleys, Two Clamps and One Log I Refuse to Lift

Can You Improve a Knitting Machine With a Power Drill? Why Wouldn’t You?

And every once in a while:

Don’t Tell Cathy

That one usually meant Jerry had hurt himself.

More on that later.

The truth is, Jerry didn’t need YouTube.

He already had subscribers.

Anybody who came to the house was a potential viewer because sooner or later he’d say the words every family member knew:

“Let me show you what I’ve been working on...”

Those of us who knew him well learned how to navigate these demonstrations.

New visitors were toast.

Because “let me show you” did not mean take a quick look at this.

It meant Jerry was about to explain the original problem, why the people who manufactured the thing had clearly not thought it through, what he changed, why he changed it, how much better it worked now and what he was probably going to change next.

And God help you if you asked a follow-up question.

You had just renewed your subscription.

🔧 Never Accept the Factory Setting

Jerry loved buying the latest and greatest equipment.

The equipment probably would have preferred a different customer.

Because bringing something home was rarely the end of the transaction.

It was more like Jerry had just acquired a prototype.

Take the self-propelled wheelbarrow.

Most people buy a self-propelled wheelbarrow, verify that it does indeed propel itself, and conclude that the engineering department has done its job.

Not Jerry.

You still had to lift the handles.

This bothered him.

Apparently the manufacturer had misunderstood the phrase self-propelled.

So Jerry removed the rear support structure and installed a swiveling third wheel underneath it.

Now the machine supported itself.

Forward.

Reverse.

Left.

Right.

No lifting.

There.

Now it was self-propelled.

I inherited that wheelbarrow, which I suppose makes me the current curator of an authentic Doyle prototype

_{The Doyle prototype in action. Forward, backward, steerable and, most importantly, no lifting the handles.}

Had we actually made the YouTube channel, I think Jerry’s episode title would have been simpler:

THEY CALLED THIS SELF-PROPELLED?

💥 Loch Lomond Knew When Jerry Was Sandblasting

Then there was the sandblaster.

Calling this thing a sandblaster is a little like calling a locomotive “transportation.”

It was huge.

It lived under its own canopy.

And when Jerry fired it up, neighbors could hear it blocks away.

Nobody on Loch Lomond needed to wonder:

I wonder what Jerry’s doing today?

They knew.

Jerry’s sandblasting.

But naturally the sandblaster itself wasn’t enough.

Jerry arranged the fuel supply so he wouldn’t have to lift and tip a heavy gas can whenever the machine needed fuel.

He also put the long blasting hose on a hand truck so he didn’t have to drag or carry the damn thing around.

That’s something I’ve come to appreciate about Jerry.

He didn’t just improve the machine.

He improved all the crap you had to do around the machine.

Then there was the sand itself.

After sandblasting, much of the blasting media was still usable, except now it was mixed with debris.

Most people might have thrown it out.

Jerry had another saying, one he’d gotten from his father:

“Necessity is the mother of invention.”

So he built a filtering system.

Three screens.

Different mesh sizes.

Coarse to fine.

Shovel the used sand onto the top and work it through. Bigger junk stays behind. Reusable sand comes out.

Pretty clever.

Problem solved.

Except Jerry noticed that after a couple of shovelfuls, he had to stop shoveling and use his hand to move the sand around on the screens.

Unacceptable.

So he attached a vibrating mechanism to the whole contraption.

Now the screens shook themselves while Jerry kept shoveling.

That was Jerry in a nutshell.

He didn’t just solve problems. He found problems with his solutions and solved those too.

And thanks to my brother John, we actually have Jerry demonstrating this one himself.

He talks through it pretty fast, so listen for the part where he explains the three different screens.

Then again, Jerry had places to be.

There were still things out there operating at factory settings.

_{A genuine Jerry demo: his three-stage vibrating sand-reclamation system, explained by the inventor himself.}

Welcome to the family.

You just got the tour.

🌳 The Man in the Trees

Tree work was a huge part of Jerry’s life.

Some of it he did for money.

A whole lot of it he did for nothing.

Neighbor needs help?

Friend has a dangerous limb?

Family member has a tree where a tree shouldn’t be?

Call Jerry.

Even when he charged for tree work, I’m pretty sure the value of what he did usually exceeded what he collected.

He wasn’t exactly running a venture-capital-backed arborist operation.

He was helping people.

With chainsaws.

Jerry climbed trees for decades.

And decades.

And decades.

He finally stopped at around 80.

I should clarify something:

Jerry did not decide 80 was old enough to stop climbing trees.

We decided that for him.

At an age when people are advised not to stand on kitchen chairs, Jerry was still willing to tie himself into a tree with a chainsaw and begin removing the parts around him.

He considered this perfectly reasonable.

The family had questions.

Years ago, Mom and Jerry came up to my five-acre place in Battle Ground, Washington, to help me clear spruce trees.

At one point Jerry cut his hand badly enough that there was blood everywhere.

Most people would have stopped.

Jerry wrapped it up and went back to work.

Tough as shit.

Mom worked right alongside him, gathering brush and helping with the endl ess cleanup. Jerry called her his brush bunny.

That was pretty much their marriage in miniature.

Jerry created debris.

Mom helped organize it.

🔥 “Don’t Tell Cathy”

Jerry had a recurring phrase after certain projects went sideways:

“Don’t tell Cathy.”

Cathy Forcier is Jerry’s oldest daughter.

She is also a nurse.

You can see why Jerry occasionally considered her lack of information to be medically beneficial.

His neighbor Dan remembers one particularly good example.

Jerry was welding when a piece of hot weld dropped onto his shoe.

It burned through the shoe.

Then it burned his toe.

Jerry’s first concern apparently wasn’t the toe.

It was information containment.

“Don’t tell Cathy.”

Dan did what any loyal friend would do.

He told Cathy.

This wasn’t necessarily an isolated incident.

Jerry tended to regard injury as an inconvenience.

Getting caught being injured was the bigger problem.

🪵 Too Heavy? Don’t Lift It

Tree work created another category of Jerry problem.

Big chunks of tree.

Heavy ones.

Normal solution:

Lift them.

Jerry’s solution:

Why?

He came up with ways to drag the rounds from a trailer into the backyard.

Then he rigged pulleys and clamps that could grab a round and pull it up onto a worktable.

From there, he could slide it onto the log splitter.

Split it.

Slide it.

Move it along.

And where did the finished wood go?

Into the modified self-propelled wheelbarrow.

Of course it did.

At some point Jerry had stopped owning individual tools and had built himself a small wood-processing facility.

The man didn’t eliminate hard work.

He eliminated stupid work.

There’s a difference.

🐴 This Didn’t Start With Trees

Jerry’s willingness to climb things, improvise solutions and disregard certain widely accepted notions about safety did not begin late in life.

His daughter Cathy describes her childhood as “interesting.”

That’s her word.

Jerry had horses.

He had a monkey.

One Christmas morning his kids woke up and found a horse in the garage.

As one does.

The monkey eventually got loose and tore up the kitchen.

According to Cathy, her mother eventually kicked out both the monkey and Jerry.

Jerry also left a perfectly good job as a jet-engine mechanic because he wanted to work at Roaring Camp and do hayrides.

Think about that.

Jet engines?

Nah.

Hayrides.

That sounds like Jerry

Cathy also tells a story about Jerry trying to sell a pony.

Young Cathy was maybe seven or eight, so Jerry put her on the pony to demonstrate what a fine, safe animal it was.

The pony bolted.

Jerry realized it was heading toward a barn doorway where Cathy could get badly hurt.

So Jerry solved the immediate problem.

He pushed her off the pony.

Onto gravel.

At speed.

Cathy ended up in the ER with gravel in her face.

Jerry’s defense became family lore:

“I’m sorry. I was trying to save you. I know I almost killed you, but I was trying to save you.”

Technically, he did save her.

That distinction probably mattered to Jerry.

🎨 Why Use a Ladder When You Have a Horse?

Then there was Jerry’s innovative approach to painting a covered bridge.

Most people would use a ladder.

Or scaffolding.

Jerry had a horse.

Apparently he looked at several hundred pounds of draft horse and thought:

Close enough.

Yes.

He stood on the horse and painted.

The San Francisco Examiner even ran a photo of it in 1969 under the headline:

The Heedless Horseman

Looking back, perhaps the family should have seen the tree-climbing years coming.

A man who uses a draft horse instead of scaffolding probably isn’t going to spend retirement worrying about ladder safety.

🎟️ Jerry Could Rig Situations, Too

Jerry’s creativity wasn’t limited to machinery.

Sometimes he worked on systems involving humans.

Years ago, several of us went to Cal Expo.

There were a number of us.

There were also a number of admission tickets we had not purchased.

Jerry walked up to one of the gate guards and started talking to him like they were old friends.

They were not old friends.

I don’t remember exactly what Jerry said.

I remember the result.

The gate opened.

Jerry, Mom and several of us walked in.

No tickets.

Jerry had apparently concluded that if you act like you belong someplace with enough confidence, eventually someone may agree with you.

Factory setting?

Negotiable.

Admission procedure?

Negotiable.

Gate?

There’s probably another way through.

And this general operating philosophy occasionally traveled internationally.

At one point Jerry went to Suriname, South America, and according to family lore returned with two baby exotic birds tucked into his pockets.

There were customs regulations involved.

Jerry had his own interpretation of those.

I’m going to leave the details right there.

Some Jerry stories are best told with the statute of limitations firmly in the rearview mirror.

🧶 Apparently Knitting Was Too Slow

Jerry’s neighbor Rachel discovered another danger of knowing him.

You couldn’t casually show Jerry something.

Because he might improve it.

Rachel had a walking stick.

Nothing wrong with it.

Jerry decided it needed a better rubber tip.

Done.

Then she showed him her knitting machine.

Again, it worked perfectly well.

But Jerry noticed that it was...

slow.

Apparently Big Knitting had grown complacent.

So he made an attachment allowing her to operate the machine with a drill.

Because why wouldn’t you?

This is where the projects stop being just funny inventions and tell you something else about Jerry.

He liked doing things for people.

My brother John described it perfectly:

“His love language was activity.”

Jerry wasn’t usually the man you wanted for a long, deep emotional conversation.

If things got too serious, there was almost certainly a pun inbound.

But tell him you needed something fixed?

Moved?

Trimmed?

Built?

Hauled?

You were speaking Jerry.

😂 Jerryisms

Jerry always had something to say.

It was almost always a joke.

Whether it was a good joke was a completely separate matter.

If rain was really coming down:

“It’s raining harder than a cow peeing on a flat rock.”

If someone came up with a particularly smart idea:

“You’re a pretty fart smeller.”

Smart feller.

Fart smeller.

I know.

If you asked Jerry how old he was:

“How old is dirt?”

He apparently also had an Annette Funicello joke involving a “funny cello.”

You’re welcome.

When he first met my mom, who at about 5-foot-8 was a fairly tall woman, Jerry reportedly opened with:

“Take me to your ladder, lady. I’ll meet your leader later.”

Against all available evidence...

this worked.

They were together for nearly four decades.

After 37 years, Jerry would still tell people:

“We’ve been together 37 years, but we’ll have to see how things work out.”

Mom laughed.

She usually did.

She called him her:

“Funny honey.”

🛠️ The Man With the Most Tools Wins

Jerry had another philosophy:

“The man with the most tools when he dies wins.”

Jerry won.

Period.

His neighbor Dan probably supplied the official audit when he said:

“Home Depot’s got nothing on Jerry.”

Jerry had tools for cutting, welding, splitting, lifting, blasting, pulling, hauling and fixing.

There were tools designed to assist other tools.

There were probably tools whose original purpose had been forgotten but which Jerry had repurposed into something more interesting.

My brother Michael shared some of the gadget gene.

Jerry showed him solar equipment.

Michael later installed solar.

Jerry showed him his 30-ton log splitter.

Michael bought a 27-ton version.

Jerry showed him a really bright battery-powered shop light.

Michael reached into his backpack and produced an even brighter flashlight.

Soon Jerry wanted one.

So the technology transfer worked both directions.

What Jerry really liked was sharing his enthusiasm.

If he discovered something cool, you needed to see it.

Which brings us back to:

“Let me show you what I’ve been working on...”

📝 A Kid Figured Him Out Years Ago

In 2010, Jerry’s grandson Chase had to write a character sketch for school.

He was young.

Nobody was gathering memories.

Nobody was trying to sum up Jerry’s life.

Chase was just writing about Grandpa.

And the kid nailed him.

He called Jerry:

“straight up hilarious.”

He described him helping an elderly neighbor mow her lawn, helping a friend move, trimming dangerous tree limbs for family and fixing whatever happened to break.

He wrote that Jerry was:

“constantly inventing clever ways to use an item.”

He also called him:

“stubborn as an ox.”

And my favorite:

“When you argue with Jerry, you will probably lose.”

Not necessarily because Jerry was right.

He just had more stamina.

Chase noticed something else, too.

He wrote about the way Jerry’s eyes sparkled when he saw his wife.

That wife was my mom.

❤️ Jacque

My mom, Jacque, had an effect on Jerry that his own kids noticed immediately.

Cathy knew all the earlier versions.

Horse Jerry.

Monkey Jerry.

Hayride Jerry.

Let’s-see-if-this-works Jerry.

Then he met Mom.

Cathy said:

“She centered him like nobody I’d never seen him centered before.”

Then she added the necessary qualification:

“As calm as you can get for Jerry.”

Jerry told her:

“When you find the right person, it’s just easy. You’ll just know.”

My brothers saw the same thing.

Greg said watching the two of them taught him something about relationships. The right one didn’t have to be a constant struggle.

John described Mom and Jerry as gradually becoming:

“one energy.”

I don’t want to turn this whole story into a love story.

But you can’t really explain Jerry without explaining Mom.

A lot of us came to appreciate him partly through the way he treated her.

Greg said:

“I came to love him through my mom’s love for him.”

That’s hard to improve upon.

So I won’t.

🪃 Then Karma Started Working on Jerry

Not everything about Jerry was charming.

When I first knew him, he carried some attitudes from another place and another time that neither Mom nor I were willing to let slide.

I remember riding in the car with him early in their relationship. We passed an interracial couple walking down the street holding hands.

Jerry pointed them out and said something along the lines of:

“See, I just think that’s wrong.”

I told him I thought what he had just said was wrong.

Mom did the same whenever Jerry ventured into a racial joke. She didn’t laugh politely. She told him it wasn’t acceptable.

Jerry also made jokes about gay people.

Then life, which apparently has a viciously efficient sense of humor, began delivering karma in bulk.

In 1994, I came out.

That set Jerry back on his heels for a while.

Now “gay people” weren’t some abstract category he could joke about.

One of them was me.

And by then, Jerry and I already loved each other.

Years later, my brother John came out too.

Then the next generation joined the lesson plan. My older brother Mike’s daughter Ginny came out. My baby brother Greg’s daughter Courtney came out. Our cousin Ron’s son Kevin came out.

Mike and Greg are the oldest and youngest of Mom’s four sons, so we’ve always called them the bookend brothers.

By that point, the universe wasn’t dropping hints anymore.

It was using a megaphone.

Among Mom’s four sons, two of us were gay and the other two each had a gay daughter. Add Kevin in the extended family, and suddenly Jerry’s old jokes weren’t about some distant group of people.

They were about his family.

Then one of Jerry’s own daughters became involved with Ron, who is Black, and they’ve been together for years.

At some point, Jerry had apparently been enrolled in the full diversity immersion program.

No electives.

No opt-out clause.

To his credit, he had to reconcile people he loved with some of the things he’d once believed.

I’m not going to rewrite history and pretend Jerry suddenly became chairman of the diversity committee.

But he changed.

Some of those old attitudes simply couldn’t survive repeated contact with people he cared about.

And yes, he also learned when to keep his mouth shut.

Sometimes personal growth comes through enlightenment.

Sometimes it comes through karma with a two-by-four.

Jerry spent his life modifying things that didn’t work properly.

Every once in a while, life modified Jerry.

🤝 “What Can I Do for You?”

And this, I think, gets closest to who Jerry really was.

Even near the end of his life, when his body had stopped cooperating, somebody would come over and Jerry would ask:

“What can I do for you?”

Think about that.

The guy might barely be able to get himself across the room.

Didn’t matter.

Somebody had arrived.

Maybe they needed something.

Cathy, being both his daughter and a nurse, would basically look at him like:

Dad. What exactly are you planning to do? You can barely walk.

Jerry apparently considered his own physical condition a minor technical detail.

Greg remembered the same thing.

Even when Jerry was using a wheelchair and could barely do anything for himself:

“Anything I can do for you?”

That’s so Jerry it almost hurts.

His neighbor Rachel understood it too.

Toward the end, she sometimes found things for Jerry to help with simply because she knew he needed to be needed.

There’s something wonderfully backward about that.

Jerry had spent decades inventing ways to make hard jobs easier for everybody else.

Eventually, the people who cared about him started inventing jobs so Jerry could still feel like Jerry.

🧰 “Bring Me Some Tools”

One of my favorite stories from Jerry’s final hospital visits came from Cathy.

Jerry was pretty out of it.

Confused.

Not entirely sure what was going on.

Cathy sat down beside him.

Jerry looked at her and said:

“Bring me some tools.”

She asked what he was talking about.

Jerry said:

“I need something to do.”

Of course he did.

Even delirious, Jerry Doyle was apparently bored because nobody had assigned him a project.

Had we created the YouTube channel, I know the episode title:

Jerry-Rigged: Bring Me Some Tools

📺 The YouTube Channel That Never Happened

I knew Jerry for more than 40 years.

There were enough inventions, alterations, repairs, questionable decisions, improvements, demonstrations, contraptions, close calls and one-liners to fill a channel for years.

I wish I’d lived close enough to do it.

Jerry would have loved people watching his projects.

I know he would have loved explaining them.

And I would have loved figuring out how to monetize the whole damn operation.

But I lived 600 miles away.

So Jerry-Rigged never became a YouTube channel.

This story will have to suffice.

And the more I think about Jerry, the less I think the real story was the wheelbarrow or the sandblaster or the pulleys or the trees or the horse he used instead of a ladder.

Those were symptoms.

The real Jerry-rig was simpler:

See something that could work better.

Fix it.

See something too heavy.

Figure out how not to lift it.

See a rule that might have a little wiggle room.

Well...

That depended on who was watching.

See somebody who needs help.

Ask:

“What can I do for you?”

Even when you’re the one who needs help.

That’s the part I hope his grandkids hang onto.

That’s the part I hope his friends and neighbors on Loch Lomond recognize instantly.

That’s the Jerry I knew.

A man who could look at a perfectly functional wheelbarrow and see a design failure.

A man who could look at a draft horse and see scaffolding.

A man who could look at used sand and see perfectly good sand that just needed three screens and a vibrator.

A man who could barely walk and still look at the person coming through his door and wonder what he could do for them.

By his own scoring system, Jerry did pretty damn well.

But the tools were never really the point.

It was what he did with them.

And somewhere, if the equipment isn’t working quite right, I have a pretty good idea what’s about to happen.

Some poor unsuspecting soul is going to hear:

“Let me show you what I’ve been working on...”

Toast.

❤️ Before you go…

If you knew Jerry, I’d love to hear your favorite Jerry story, invention, one-liner, or “let me show you what I’ve been working on” moment in the comments.

Leave a comment

And if you’re one of his kids, grandkids, great-grandkids, friends, or Loch Lomond neighbors, feel free to add something I missed. With Jerry, I’m pretty sure there’s always another story.

🔁 Share this one

If this sounds like the Jerry you knew, share it with somebody else who knew him.

Especially anyone who ever got trapped in one of his demonstrations.

They’ll understand.

Share

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☕ Buy Me a Coffee

If this made you laugh, nod, remember somebody you miss, or wonder whether your wheelbarrow is sufficiently self-propelled, you can always buy me a coffee.

I won’t argue.

👉 https://buymeacoffee.com/Secondwindsteve

P.S. If Jerry somehow figures out how to comment from wherever he is, I fully expect him to correct at least three technical details and then ask if I want to see what he’s been working on.

For years, whenever someone heard one of my stories, I’d smile and say, “I could write a book... and I’m going to call it I Could Write a Book!“

Well... this is that book.

I’m simply writing it one chapter at a time, sharing the stories, adventures, misadventures, and life lessons I’ve gathered along the way.

📚 I Could Write a Book!

Chapter 5: The Air Force

Part 4: Arkansas, Blues & Crossroads 🌾🎸✈️

Sometimes the road home takes the longest possible route.

🌄 The Mountains Were Gone

The mountains were gone.

After two years of snow-covered peaks, glaciers, salmon streams, horses, moose, and bears, the Air Force was sending me to northeastern Arkansas.

My next assignment was Blytheville Air Force Base, in the very top corner of the state, not far from the Mississippi River and about seventy miles north of Memphis.

Compared with Elmendorf, Blytheville was small.

Compared with Alaska, Arkansas was flat.

Very flat.

No mountains. No dramatic scenery. Just farmland, humidity, and a horizon that seemed to keep going until it ran out of Arkansas.

At first glance, Blytheville did not look like a place where much was going to happen.

I was wrong about that.

But first, I had to get there.

🚚 Seattle, Sacramento and Stratus

My Dodge D-50 pickup, along with the camper shell Uncle Howard and I had built in Alaska, was shipped south to Seattle.

I flew down to pick it up and spent some time with my second cousin, Mark Nelson.

Mark was exceptionally good-looking, and I secretly had a crush on him. Then again, I was probably not alone. Mark had the kind of personality that made just about everyone fall in love with him.

At the time, I had no idea he was gay.

I would not learn that until several years later.

From Seattle, I pointed the Dodge south toward Sacramento.

My brother John and some friends had formed a band called Stratus, and I got to see them perform at the Sutter Street Saloon in Folsom.

John and Kelli had been living together for about a year by then, and John had already become a father figure to her two children, Jodi and Mikie. They would marry a few months later, on November 9, 1982.

I remember being impressed with the band.

They were good.

They played at least one song by The Cars, and I remember thinking John and his friends sounded every bit as good as many of the local bands getting attention at the time.

Stratus had even opened for another Sacramento band called Steel Breeze, which had recently scored a national hit with “You Don’t Want Me Anymore.”

That name would come back around later.

🚬 A Smoke, a Toke and a Sudden Drop

During one of the band’s breaks, I stepped outside for a cigarette.

As it turned out, it became a cigarette and a toke.

Back inside, the seating was arranged in long, picnic-table-style rows along the wall, maybe three deep.

I do not remember feeling dizzy.

I do not remember thinking anything was wrong.

I simply passed out.

When I opened my eyes, I was lying in the space between the first and second benches, with Kelli and someone else looking down at me and asking if I was okay.

It could only have been a few seconds.

I was fine, although probably more embarrassed than anything else.

🔧 The Torque Wrench

Before leaving Sacramento, I stopped to visit Grandma and Grandpa.

At one point, Grandpa stood up from his chair, wearing his wraparound towel with the snaps and a pair of flip-flops.

I remember noticing that his knees wobbled a little.

He asked me to follow him outside to the patio.

That patio, which I may have described before in the story about Grandpa’s towel, was full of stuff. Some of it useful. Some of it probably only useful to Grandpa. Some of it junk.

He poked around for a moment, opened a toolbox, and pulled out a torque wrench.

I knew what a torque wrench was, but only barely. Unless you are a mechanic, it is one of those tools you might need once in your entire life.

Then Grandpa handed it to me.

“Here,” he said. “I won’t be needing this anymore.”

I am not sure I completely understood what he was telling me.

Maybe I did not want to.

I also do not remember whatever became of the wrench.

But I remember him handing it to me.

That was the last time I saw him.

💔 Three Days Later

After leaving Grandma and Grandpa, I got back into the Dodge D-50 and started the long drive east.

I was traveling by myself.

Three days later, I reached upstate Michigan, where Mike and Carrie were living.

When I pulled in, they were packing their car.

Grandpa had died that day.

September 5, 1982.

I had seen him only three days earlier, standing there in his wraparound towel and flip-flops, handing me a torque wrench because he “wouldn’t be needing it anymore.”

Now he was gone.

Mike, Carrie, and I turned around and drove roughly four hundred miles back toward Minneapolis–St. Paul so we could catch a flight west.

We flew into San Francisco and then drove another hundred miles or so to Sacramento.

I stayed there for at least a week, possibly two. I do not remember exactly how long.

There were arrangements to help with, things to go through, and Grandma to help as she adjusted to being on her own.

Eventually, I flew back to Michigan with Mike and Carrie, retrieved the Dodge, and resumed the trip south to Arkansas.

By the time I finally reached Blytheville, I had driven across the country, doubled back several hundred miles, flown west, flown east again, and then driven south.

It was a lot to absorb in a very short period of time.

🌾 Finally, Blytheville

By the time I reached Blytheville Air Force Base, I was ready to stop moving.

The base sat in the extreme northeast corner of Arkansas, not far from the Mississippi River and only about seventy miles north of Memphis.

After Elmendorf, it felt tiny.

And after Alaska, the landscape could not have been more different.

Everything was flat.

No mountains.

No glaciers.

No dramatic scenery of any kind.

Just farmland, humidity, and a horizon that seemed to keep going forever.

The people sounded different too.

They were not going to do something.

They were fixin’ to.

If something was not merely possible.

They might could do it.

And if somebody had an opinion, there was a good chance it would begin with:

“Well, I reckon…”

I liked the accent.

I still do.

Some of the customs took a little more adjustment.

Catfishing was popular in that part of Arkansas.

I saw other people go, and Alan may have been one of them.

I had no interest.

After fishing for salmon in Alaska, sitting beside muddy water waiting for a catfish did not exactly feel like an upgrade.

Then there were the drive-through liquor stores.

One evening, some friends pulled up to a window, ordered liquor, and were handed not only the bottle but also a cup filled with ice.

That struck me as one of the most bass-ackward things I had ever seen.

Apparently, even drinking at home required too much patience.

Still, there was something freeing about Arkansas.

Once I got to Blytheville, I was rarely alone.

🏠 The Brick Duplex

Not long after arriving, I rented a two-bedroom brick duplex just outside the base.

I cannot remember the landlord’s name, but I remember what he looked like.

Big white cowboy hat.

Cadillac.

Farmer, rancher, property-owner type.

To me, he looked like he had wandered out of an episode of Dallas.

Not Bobby Ewing.

More J.R.

He owned a number of rentals in the area and seemed to know exactly how much influence he carried.

He was perfectly fine with me. I paid my rent, he left me alone, and there were no problems.

Still, he had the kind of presence that made me think crossing him would be a very bad idea.

The duplex itself worked out well. It gave me two bedrooms, a place of my own, and somewhere to begin settling into life in Arkansas.

🍺 An Oktoberfest Introduction

I had arrived in late September, and I believe the base held some sort of Oktoberfest-style event in early October.

That may have been when Terry Shannon introduced me to his family.

The timing would make sense. I had barely arrived, and suddenly I had people to sit with and a social circle beginning to form around me.

Liz was at the event independently, seated at the opposite end of the same long table and bench.

I was on one end.

She was on the other.

The Shannon family was sitting between us.

Someone decided we should be introduced, so everybody leaned back at the same time to give us a clear view of each other.

The bench nearly tipped over.

That was how I met Liz.

A few weeks later, Terry’s younger brother Alan began spending quite a bit of time at my duplex.

We got along easily.

He was fun company, and before long he became part of my everyday life in Blytheville. We talked, drank, listened to music, and found plenty of ways to pass the time.

Between the Shannon family, Alan, Liz, and the other people I met, I was rarely alone.

❤️ Liz & Co.

Liz and I got together fairly quickly after that Oktoberfest-type event.

She was about ten years older than I was and much more sure of herself.

Liz knew what she wanted.

Usually, she wanted it now.

She was confident, direct, funny, and not remotely the type to fade into the background.

She was, and probably still is, a force to be reckoned with.

When I met her, she was working with a woman named Anne. I believe Anne owned the building and Liz operated out of part of it. As I remember it, the salon may have been called Trend Setters.

At some point, the business relationship between Anne and Liz came apart.

I do not remember all the details, but Liz decided to venture out on her own.

So she found space in a strip mall and opened Liz & Co.

That was very Liz.

She did not simply leave one arrangement.

She put her own name over the door and started over.

At some point, John and Kelli made her a beautiful stained-glass sign that said Liz & Co.

She hung it above the salon entrance and treasured it.

For all I know, she may still have it today.

Liz played a large part in my life during the seven months I was in Arkansas.

By the end of my assignment, I was spending most of my time at her place. I suspect I let the lease on the duplex expire and stayed with her during my final month or two.

She was also very interested in marriage.

That was one area where we were not standing on the same square.

I had just come out of a marriage that ended painfully, and I was not in a hurry to walk into another one.

Still, Liz and I remained close long after the romance ended.

We stayed friends until 2005.

More than twenty years.

The way that friendship eventually ended belongs to a much later story.

For now, Liz was one of the central people in my Arkansas life, and one of the few who remained part of it for decades afterward.

🐾 Along Came Nutmeg

Somewhere toward the end of my time in Arkansas, I saw a classified ad in the newspaper for AKC-registered purebred Collie puppies.

That was how you found things in those days.

No Craigslist.

No Facebook Marketplace.

You opened the paper and looked through the ads.

The puppies were north of Blytheville, somewhere out in the country near Steele, Missouri.

Steele is only just across the state line, although I remember the drive being longer, maybe seventy-five miles or so.

After all these years, I may be combining parts of the memory.

What I do remember is going out into the country and finding a Collie puppy that looked almost exactly like Lassie.

That was Nutmeg.

I am not completely sure whether I was still living in the brick duplex when I brought her home or whether I had already started staying with Liz.

I suspect it was fairly late in my assignment, possibly after my lease had ended, because I do not really remember taking care of a puppy at the duplex.

But by the time I left Arkansas, Nutmeg was definitely with me.

She was still a puppy when we headed north to meet Dale Fisher in Ohio, and then Dale, Nutmeg, and I drove across the country to Sacramento.

That was the beginning of roughly fourteen years with her.

At the time, of course, I had no idea she would be with me through so many moves, jobs, relationships, and changes.

I had simply answered a newspaper ad and come home with Lassie.

🎶 Seventy Miles from Memphis

One of the best things about being stationed at Blytheville was that Memphis was only about seventy miles away.

That meant concerts.

I was in Arkansas for only seven months, but I still managed to see at least three major shows.

The first was probably Kenny Rogers.

I took Grandpa’s camera with me, along with one of his large telephoto lenses.

Grandpa had been a photographer.

I had the equipment.

That did not mean I knew what I was doing.

Still, I wandered around near the aisles carrying that camera as though I belonged there. I managed to get fairly close and took quite a few pictures.

Some of them actually turned out pretty well.

They were not professional quality, but I still have many of them today.

I also saw Rush and Nazareth.

Nazareth was the heavy-metal concert that left my ears ringing for about three days.

At twenty-four, I probably considered that proof that the concert had been good.

At sixty-eight, and wearing hearing aids, I look at it a little differently.

🎷 Beale Street Blues

The concerts were great, but my favorite Memphis memory was Beale Street.

I remember walking into one of the blues clubs and being completely taken in by it.

The musicians were right there.

No giant arena.

No video screens.

No real separation between the performers and the audience.

You could watch their hands move, see the expressions on their faces, and feel the music from only a few feet away.

It was genuine.

I had never experienced live blues that close and personal before.

Even after all the traveling I have done since, those nights on Beale Street still stand out.

Memphis had grit.

It had history.

It had music coming out of little clubs and doorways.

For someone stationed in a small, flat corner of Arkansas, it was a pretty good place to escape to for an evening.

🎖️ Things Were Going Well

Professionally, Blytheville was another good assignment for me.

Once again, I worked in the orderly room.

My commander was Lieutenant Larry Sewell, a young Black officer who was very nice and easy to work for.

I do not remember many specific stories about him.

I remember liking him.

By then, I knew the orderly room job well.

Personnel paperwork.

Awards.

Promotions.

Transfers.

Discharges.

All the paperwork behind what happened to the people assigned to the unit.

It was not glamorous work, but it mattered.

If the paperwork did not move, people did not get promoted, transferred, decorated, or discharged on time.

I had become pretty good at it.

By then, my record already included being named Airman of the Year in 1979 and NCO of the Year in 1981.

When I left Blytheville, Lieutenant Sewell submitted me for another Air Force Commendation Medal.

That meant I received one from each of my three major assignments.

Three Air Force Commendation Medals in five years.

At the time, I do not think I fully appreciated how unusual that might have been.

I probably thought I had done the work, so naturally they gave me the medal.

Looking back, the Air Force clearly thought pretty highly of me.

My first sergeant certainly did.

As my separation date got closer, he tried to persuade me to stay.

He wanted to submit me for Stripes for Exceptional Performers, or STEP.

That could have resulted in an early promotion to Technical Sergeant, E-6.

There was also talk about putting me on the wing’s Inspector General team.

Those were not small opportunities.

I had been in the Air Force for only five years, and people were already talking about promoting me ahead of schedule and moving me into a position with more responsibility.

On paper, staying made plenty of sense.

I was doing well.

My supervisors liked me.

My record was strong.

A twenty-year Air Force career was sitting right there in front of me.

And I still decided to leave.

✈️ Why I Left

There was another reason I decided not to stay in the Air Force.

It was not something I talked about at the time.

Working in the orderly room, I processed discharge paperwork. I knew what happened when someone was caught engaging in sexual activity with another person of the same sex.

They were discharged.

As I remember it, those discharges were often under conditions that were less than honorable.

I knew one accusation, one mistake, or one person saying the wrong thing could end a military career.

The problem was that I knew I was sometimes attracted to men.

I had occasionally acted on it.

Still, I did not think of myself as gay.

That possibility did not make sense to me.

I dated women.

I had been married.

I was involved with Liz.

In my mind, gay men were gay all the time, and that clearly was not me.

So I reached a different conclusion.

I thought I was some kind of pervert who occasionally wanted to fool around with guys.

That was how little I understood about myself in 1983.

I did not have the vocabulary.

I did not understand bisexuality.

I did not understand that attraction could be complicated.

I certainly did not realize how many other people were struggling with the same questions.

I only knew it was something I was supposed to hide.

And because I processed the paperwork, I knew exactly what I could lose if I got caught.

I cannot say that fear was the only reason I left the Air Force.

I was young.

I was restless.

I wanted to see what else life might offer.

But the fear was a major reason.

The Air Force was offering me the possibility of an early promotion, a position on the Inspector General team, and what could have been a very good career.

I was afraid that sooner or later I would do something, somebody would find out, and everything I had worked for would disappear.

So I got out.

It would be another eleven years before I came out and began understanding that part of myself.

In 1983, I was nowhere near ready.

Civilian life felt safer.

🎂 Twenty-Five and Heading Out

I celebrated my twenty-fifth birthday at Liz’s house on March 1, 1983.

Not long after that, I left Blytheville.

My official separation date from the Air Force was April 19, 1983, but I took what was called terminal leave.

That meant I used up the leave time I had accumulated and was allowed to leave about a month before my official Date of Separation.

Technically, I was still in the Air Force.

I just did not have to report for duty anymore.

I vaguely remember talking with Mom several times about when I expected to arrive in Sacramento.

She and Jerry were planning their wedding, and she wanted to choose a date when she knew I would already be home.

The problem was that I could not give her an exact arrival date.

I was leaving Arkansas while it was still technically winter, I had Nutmeg with me, and I was not taking the most direct route to California.

First, I headed north to Columbus, Ohio, to meet up with Dale Fisher.

Dale was the same friend I had met during my first Air Force assignment at Fairchild.

He and Lori had divorced by then, and he agreed to make the drive west with me.

🎤 Steel Breeze, Again

Before we left Columbus, Dale took me to see Daryl Hall and John Oates.

As we were walking into the concert, I happened to be telling him about John’s band, Stratus, and the Sacramento group they had opened for, Steel Breeze.

Then the lights went down.

The announcer introduced the opening act.

And out walked Steel Breeze.

The very band I had been talking about only minutes earlier.

John’s band had opened for them in Sacramento.

Now, only a few months later and more than two thousand miles away, there they were opening for Hall & Oates in Columbus, Ohio.

What were the odds?

It was not some grand sign from the universe.

It was just one of those strange coincidences that makes you stop for a moment and wonder how small the world really is.

🏔️ A Stop Near Denver

After the concert, Dale, Nutmeg, and I continued west.

Because it was still winter, we stopped somewhere outside Denver near one of the ski areas. I no longer remember which one, although I think it may have been one of the more popular resorts.

Dale met up with a very beautiful woman there.

I believe they already knew each other.

They had a good time together.

According to Dale, though, not quite good enough.

After we eventually reached Sacramento and got settled, Dale flew all the way back to Denver to finish what he had started.

Apparently, the second trip went better.

Nothing lasting came from the brief romance, as far as I know.

But Dale came back happy.

🌅 Leaving the Air Force Behind

From Denver, we continued west toward Sacramento.

Dale was riding beside me.

Nutmeg was still a puppy, somewhere in the Dodge.

My five years in the Air Force were essentially over, even though my official separation date had not yet arrived.

I had entered the service at nineteen.

Now I was twenty-five.

In those five years, I had lived in Washington, Alaska, and Arkansas.

I had married and divorced.

I had traveled farther than I ever expected.

I had been named Airman of the Year in 1979 and NCO of the Year in 1981.

I had received three Air Force Commendation Medals, one from each of my major assignments.

I had been offered the possibility of an early promotion to Technical Sergeant and a position on the Inspector General team.

And I had walked away from all of it.

Not because I had failed.

Quite the opposite.

The Air Force had been very good to me, and I had been good at being in the Air Force.

But I wanted something different.

And I was afraid of what could happen if the military discovered a part of me I still did not understand myself.

So I headed back to California.

Mom and Jerry were trying to choose a wedding date when they knew I would be home.

Nutmeg had no idea what any of this meant.

She was just along for the ride.

As for me, I did not have much of a plan beyond reaching Sacramento.

At twenty-five, that seemed like enough.

Five years earlier, I had left California as a kid who had barely been anywhere.

Now I was coming back with medals, memories, a failed marriage, a Collie puppy, and a much larger world behind me.

Whatever came next, I knew one thing.

I was no longer the same person who had left.

💬 Before You Go

Have you ever walked away from something you were good at because another part of your life was pulling you in a different direction?

Or have you ever looked back and realized fear played a larger role in one of your decisions than you understood at the time?

I’d love to hear your story in the comments.

Leave a comment

🐾 For the Dog People

Nutmeg entered my life through a newspaper classified ad near the end of my time in Arkansas.

She left with me as a puppy and stayed by my side for roughly fourteen years.

Some dogs do not simply become part of the family.

They become part of the timeline.

📚 Catch Up on the Story

This is Chapter 5, Part 4 of my I Could Write a Book! series.

Visit the Second Wind profile page to find the earlier chapters and the rest of my stories:

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🔄 Share This Story

Know someone who served during a very different era of the military?

Someone who has started over after heartbreak?

Or someone whose dog became a four-legged witness to an entire chapter of life?

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🎧 Prefer to Listen?

The audio version is available at the top of the post.

Because sometimes a memoir is better heard in the voice of the person who lived it.

✍️ Next Week

Next week, I’m giving I Could Write a Book! a brief rest.

Instead, I’ll be sharing “Jerry-Rigged,” a story about Jerry, the things he built, the problems he solved, and the wonderfully inventive ways he approached life.

After that, we’ll see where memory takes us next.

For years, whenever someone heard one of my stories, I’d smile and say, “I could write a book... and I’m going to call it I Could Write a Book!“

Well... this is that book.

I’m simply writing it one chapter at a time, sharing the stories, adventures, misadventures, and life lessons I’ve gathered along the way.

📚 I Could Write a Book!

Chapter 5: The Air Force

Part 3: Living the Alaska Dream ❄️🫎🐴

When people hear I once lived in Alaska, the questions usually begin almost immediately.

“Did you ever see the Northern Lights?”

“Did you catch salmon?”

“Did you see bears?”

“How cold was it?”

The answer to all of those is yes.

But Alaska wasn’t simply a place I lived.

It became one of the defining chapters of my life.

Most Air Force members didn’t get to choose where they were stationed.

You received orders, packed your belongings, and went wherever Uncle Sam decided you were needed.

When my orders came assigning me to Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, I knew almost nothing about Alaska.

I certainly didn’t know I was about to experience one of the greatest adventures of my life.

🚢 Three Days to the Last Frontier

Flying would have been the easy way.

Instead, Debby and I loaded everything we owned into our little 1979 Plymouth Champ, boarded the Alaska Marine Highway ferry in Seattle, and spent the next three days sailing north.

It wasn’t flashy. It wasn’t powerful. But it was dependable, economical, and carried everything we needed to begin our new life in Alaska.

There was something magical about watching the coastline slowly transform into towering mountains, dense forests, waterfalls, and tiny fishing villages that seemed completely untouched by time.

Every morning we stepped out onto the deck bundled in jackets, coffee in hand, wondering what incredible scenery would appear around the next bend.

I don’t think either of us fully realized it then, but the adventure had already begun.

The ferry eventually arrived in Haines, where the road system finally picked up.

From there, we pointed the little Plymouth Champ north toward Anchorage.

The Alaska Highway wasn’t quite the paved highway people imagine today.

Long stretches were still gravel.

Construction crews seemed to be rebuilding it one section at a time.

Ironically, many of those gravel stretches were smoother than the pavement.

The scenery, though...

There are moments in life when you realize you’re seeing something you’ll never forget.

This was one of them.

Snow-capped mountains.

Glacial rivers.

Moose grazing beside the road.

Endless spruce forests.

And mile after mile where it felt like we were the only people on Earth.

🌲 Everyday Life Became an Adventure

People spend years saving for the trip of a lifetime to Alaska.

I got to call it home.

That still amazes me.

Almost every weekend brought a new adventure.

If we weren’t horseback riding, we were fishing.

If we weren’t fishing, we were camping.

If we weren’t camping, we were exploring another part of a state that seemed almost too beautiful to be real.

Some places are destinations.

Alaska became our backyard.

Caption: Two horses. Two wonderful dogs. Two young Air Force kids who thought they had the world figured out.

One of the more unexpected parts of our Alaska life centered around horses.

The horses weren’t ours. They belonged to Debby’s family back in Washington.

Rather than leave them behind, Debby’s dad loaded Czar and Rena into a horse trailer, hooked it to his van, and drove them all the way up the Alaska Highway so they could spend our Alaska years with us.

That’s a pretty remarkable thing when you stop and think about it.

Once they arrived, I didn’t exactly volunteer to manage the horse stables.

I was more or less volunteered by Debby.

And because I was the Air Force member in the family, I was quickly appointed president of the base stables club. Looking back, I suspect no one else wanted the job, and I was simply too new and too naïve to know what I was getting myself into.

Debby and I fed the horses every morning and every evening. That would have been enough responsibility by itself, except I was also deathly allergic to hay and just about everything else associated with a horse stable.

Still, I went along with it.

Debby was a natural horsewoman and even gave riding lessons.

Teaching me to ride, however, wasn’t nearly as enjoyable.

She lacked patience with me.

I lacked coordination.

Let’s just say we weren’t exactly a dream student-and-instructor combination.

Still, Czar and Rena became part of our daily lives.

So did our two dogs.

Napper, our lovable Border Collie, was overweight, kind of goofy, and never seemed to be in much of a hurry. But what everyone remembered most was his smile. I’m not talking about panting. I mean honest-to-goodness, human-looking smiles whenever you’d talk to him. It was impossible not to smile back. He was one of the sweetest dogs I’ve ever known, and if there was an adventure to be had, Napper wanted to be part of it.

Greta, our Chow-Shepherd mix, was every bit as sweet, although every now and then the Chow in her reminded us she had a mind of her own.

Horseback riding never became one of my favorite activities.

I certainly wasn’t the accomplished rider Debby was.

But every now and then she’d convince me to saddle up and head out on the trails.

I’m grateful she did.

Because one of those relatively few trail rides produced one of the most unforgettable memories of my Alaska years.

🫎 A Twenty-Foot Standoff

On one of those relatively few trail rides, Czar and Rena suddenly stopped.

Not because we told them to.

Because something ahead had caught their attention.

Standing squarely in the middle of the narrow, snow-covered trail...

...about twenty feet away...

...was one of the largest bull moose I’d ever seen.

His enormous antlers were coated with fresh snow.

He wasn’t threatening.

He wasn’t frightened.

He simply stood there looking directly at us.

Oddly enough, I wasn’t nearly as concerned about the moose as I was about the horses.

If either one panicked, things could have gone sideways in a hurry.

Instead...

Neither horse moved.

The bull moose didn’t move either.

For what felt like an eternity, but was probably only a few seconds, we simply stood there looking at one another while snow quietly accumulated on his massive antlers.

Then, just as calmly as the encounter had begun, we eased Czar and Rena off the trail to give him room to pass.

He never acted aggressively.

He simply continued on his way as though reminding us whose forest this really was.

Looking back, I think I learned two things that day.

First, Alaska had a wonderful way of reminding you that you were never completely in charge.

Second...

Sometimes it’s best to trust your horses.

Czar and Rena had recognized the situation long before I did, and they handled it with a calm confidence I wish I possessed more often.

It wasn’t dramatic.

Nobody screamed.

Nobody ran.

Nothing happened that would have made the evening news.

But more than forty years later, I can still picture that magnificent bull moose standing silently in the falling snow, looking directly at us.

Some memories never leave you.

That one never will.

That wasn’t our only encounter with moose.

One morning we looked out the front window of our base housing and found an entire moose family wandering through the neighborhood.

By then we had already learned one of Alaska’s unwritten rules.

You’re living in their home.

Not the other way around.

🎣 Hooked on Alaska

Fishing quickly became another obsession.

Elmendorf Air Force Base had dozens of lakes scattered throughout the property.

Many evenings after work we’d grab our fishing gear and spend a few peaceful hours trout fishing before heading home.

We even tried ice fishing one winter.

I honestly don’t remember whether we caught anything.

I do remember drilling through several inches of ice and thinking...

“Apparently this is perfectly normal around here.”

❄️🎣😂

When salmon season arrived...

Everything changed.

People didn’t ask,

“Want to go fishing?”

They asked,

“Which salmon are running?”

Kings.

Silvers.

Coho.

Sockeye.

Everyone seemed to know exactly when each species would begin making its incredible journey upstream.

One of the first things I learned surprised me.

Spawning salmon generally aren’t feeding.

They’re focused on reaching their spawning grounds.

The trick wasn’t convincing them your lure looked like dinner.

It was irritating them enough that instinct took over and they’d strike.

Whether it was science, tradition, or simply decades of Alaskan fishing wisdom...

It worked.

One day I was fishing the Kenai River with my friend Terry Shannon.

At the time Terry and I were coworkers in the 616th Aerial Port Squadron. He managed the squadron’s supplies and equipment, and while we knew each other well, our friendship would deepen later under very different circumstances.

That day, though, we were just two guys hoping for a good story.

I hooked something big.

Really big.

Fortunately, it happened just before the river made a sweeping bend to the right.

Terry was already standing around that corner with the net.

Instead of fighting us across the current, the fish practically swam right into it.

Moments later we were staring at a 45-pound King Salmon lying at our feet.

I’ve caught fish before.

I’ve caught fish since.

Nothing has ever matched that one.

Living in Alaska changed little things, too.

Fresh salmon in the freezer became normal.

Horseback riding became normal.

Seeing moose became normal.

Even hearing sayings like this became normal:

“When you come to Alaska, you either get fat, pregnant, or divorced.”

Someone almost always added with a grin,

“Sometimes all three.”

At the time, I laughed.

Like every newcomer, I assumed it was just another piece of Alaska humor.

I had no idea how prophetic those words would eventually become.

🚚 Trading Up

It didn’t take long before Alaska convinced me I needed something a little more practical than the little Champ.

Within about a year of arriving at Elmendorf, I traded it in for a Dodge D-50 pickup.

I remember Debby wasn’t especially thrilled with my decision.

Looking back, though, it turned out to be exactly the right vehicle for Alaska.

Before long, Howard was helping me build a custom camper shell for it, and that little pickup became our ticket to countless weekends of camping, exploring, fishing, and simply seeing as much of Alaska as we could.

🏕️ Howard & Ruth: Our Alaska Family

One of the unexpected blessings of our assignment to Alaska was discovering we already had family there.

Debby’s Uncle Howard and Aunt Ruth had homesteaded in Alaska years earlier. They weren’t simply relatives who happened to live nearby.

They became our Alaska family.

Whenever we had questions about living in Alaska, Howard usually had the answer.

Need advice?

Ask Howard.

Need a tool?

Howard probably had two.

Need help building something?

He’d likely already built one himself.

When I decided I wanted a camper shell for the back of my little Dodge D-50 pickup, Howard didn’t suggest buying one.

He suggested building one.

So that’s exactly what we did.

Using plywood, we constructed a sturdy camper shell that fit the truck perfectly. Then we covered the exterior with fiberglass before painting it a dark brown.

One detail always surprises people.

It didn’t have windows.

That wasn’t because we forgot them.

It was intentional.

During an Alaska summer, darkness is surprisingly hard to find.

The midnight sun doesn’t completely disappear, and a camper full of windows becomes an oven long before breakfast.

Without windows, the inside stayed cool, dark, and surprisingly comfortable.

That little camper became our cabin on wheels.

Looking back now, I honestly have no idea how many nights we spent sleeping in the back of that truck.

I only know that many of my favorite memories began there.

🫎 Our First Camping Lesson

Howard also loaned me a handgun before our very first camping trip.

He figured it might come in handy.

I accepted it...

Mostly because saying “No thanks, I think we’ll be fine” didn’t seem like the smartest response to someone who’d spent years living in the Alaskan wilderness.

Ironically, guns have always made me a little nervous.

That’s probably surprising considering I’d earned the Expert Marksmanship Ribbon in the Air Force.

Shooting at paper targets on a firing range is one thing.

Carrying a loaded handgun into the wilderness is something entirely different.

Fortunately...

I never needed it.

At least not the way Howard imagined.

It was still early in the season.

The state parks technically weren’t open yet, but we found a campground and decided to hike in anyway.

We’d made several trips back and forth from the truck carrying sleeping bags, cooking gear, and supplies.

Everything seemed peaceful.

Until it wasn’t.

Out of nowhere, a female moose came charging directly toward us.

She closed the distance unbelievably fast.

Just before reaching us, she abruptly veered away and disappeared into the trees.

Debby and I stood there frozen.

Heart pounding.

Completely speechless.

Later we learned exactly what had happened.

She wasn’t trying to attack us.

She was warning us away.

She almost certainly had calves hidden nearby and wanted us to leave.

Message received.

She didn’t have to ask twice.

😊

That was another Alaska lesson.

Not every charge ends in an attack.

Sometimes it’s simply wildlife reminding you who’s really in charge.

🐻 The Bear Who Wanted the Garbage More Than Us

Another favorite fishing lake on Elmendorf had a dock with a garbage can nearby.

Apparently we weren’t the only ones who appreciated the location.

A female black bear visited fairly regularly.

The first time we saw her, she wandered straight to the garbage can and completely ignored us.

We watched from a respectful distance.

She enjoyed lunch.

Everyone went home happy.

Another day, we returned to the same lake with Napper and Greta.

When the bear appeared again, Debby grabbed the dogs and walked out toward the very end of the dock.

I think she assumed I’d follow.

I didn’t.

Instead, I yelled something that probably sounded a lot less polite than this.

“Get off the dock!”

The bear might have ignored us again.

Or...

The dogs might have barked.

If that happened, the dock suddenly becomes the worst possible place to be.

You can’t run.

You can’t step aside.

Your only escape is into the lake.

And that introduced another Alaska problem.

Leeches.

Lots of them.

Napper loved wading into those lakes until the water reached his belly.

Sometimes he’d simply lie down and cool off.

When he came back out, we’d roll him onto his side and remove leeches one by one.

Thankfully, Debby listened.

She gathered Napper and Greta and headed around the opposite side of the lake.

The bear finished her garbage buffet.

We finished fishing.

Everybody won.

By then I was beginning to understand something about Alaska.

It wasn’t dangerous because everything wanted to hurt you.

It demanded respect because everything belonged there long before you arrived.

And if you remembered that...

Alaska usually rewards you with stories you’ll spend the rest of your life telling.

💔 The Alaska Saying

There was an old saying I heard more than once while living in Alaska.

“When you come to Alaska, you either get fat, pregnant, or divorced.”

Someone would almost always grin and add,

“...sometimes all three.”

Like every newcomer, I laughed.

It was just another piece of Alaska humor.

At least, that’s what I thought.

I never imagined those words would someday describe my own life.

Without going into all the painful details, Debby eventually became involved with another man, Bob Pressley, whom we’d both considered a friend.

One day I had a wife.

The next...

...I didn’t.

Looking back now, I can still remember how completely lost I felt.

We had built a life together.

Bought horses.

Adopted dogs.

Made plans.

Dreamed about the future.

Then, almost overnight, that future disappeared.

For someone who had always been optimistic, confident, and independent...

I suddenly didn’t know what tomorrow was supposed to look like.

🤝 When Friends Become Family

Heartbreak has a way of revealing who your real friends are.

When my marriage ended, I wasn’t watching someone else drive away.

I was the one loading up my truck and leaving.

At the time, Debby and I were living in Bob Pressley’s house, so after everything happened, it simply made sense for me to move out. One day I had a wife, a home, and a plan for the future. The next, I was trying to figure out where I belonged.

That’s when Pete and Jackie Maycumber stepped in.

They wouldn’t hear of me living alone. They insisted I move into their condominium, and for a while that’s exactly where I stayed. Looking back, I realize they weren’t just offering me a place to sleep. They were quietly making sure I wasn’t trying to survive one of the hardest chapters of my life by myself.

Around that same time, another friendship began to grow.

I had already known Terry Shannon through the 616th Airlift Port Squadron, where he worked as our Materials Handler, keeping track of the squadron’s equipment, supplies, and parts. We were friendly before everything happened.

After the separation, Terry became something much more than a coworker.

One evening he decided what I needed wasn’t another night sitting around replaying everything in my head. He took me out, got me thoroughly drunk, made sure I made it home safely, and then kept checking in on me afterward. That night didn’t solve my problems, but it reminded me I wasn’t facing them alone.

That simple act of friendship became the foundation for a relationship that would last for many years. Terry will show up again later in this story when my Air Force journey takes me to Blytheville, Arkansas, where his family was stationed.

And then there was my mom.

❤️ Mom

One of the first people I called after everything fell apart was my mom.

She had always been my rock, and this was no exception.

She knew how devastated I was.

She knew I wasn’t just dealing with the end of a marriage. I was trying to figure out what my life looked like now.

She didn’t hesitate.

She got on an airplane and flew to Alaska.

Not for a vacation.

Not to see glaciers or wildlife.

She came because her son needed his mom.

At the time, she’d recently met a man named Jerry Doyle.

Every now and then his name would come up in conversation.

Whenever it did, I couldn’t help but notice the smile on her face.

She had that unmistakable glow of someone who had unexpectedly fallen in love.

I was grateful to see it.

Life had dealt both of us some difficult chapters over the years, and it was nice knowing she’d found someone who made her happy.

At the time, neither of us could have imagined that Jerry would eventually become my stepdad and an important part of our family for decades to come.

Rather than spending all our time in Anchorage, we climbed into the camper Howard had helped me build and simply started driving.

I honestly don’t remember every destination.

I remember the feeling.

We camped.

We explored.

We talked.

Some days we’d stop beside a lake just to admire the view.

Other days we’d pull over simply because something caught our attention.

There was no agenda.

No schedule.

Just a mother and her son spending time together while Alaska quietly worked its magic.

Those conversations didn’t erase the hurt.

Nothing could.

But they reminded me that even after one chapter ends...

Life has a remarkable way of beginning another.

When I look back on my Alaska years today, it’s easy to remember the horses...

...the salmon...

...the bears...

...the moose...

...and the incredible scenery.

But those aren’t the first memories that come to mind anymore.

The people are.

Howard and Ruth.

Pete and Jackie.

Terry.

My mom.

They each appeared at exactly the right moment in my life.

And without realizing it, they helped me become the man I would eventually grow into.

🌄 Looking Back

People often ask me if I would go back to Alaska.

My answer is always the same.

In a heartbeat.

Not because I think I could relive those years.

We never can.

But because Alaska gave me something far more valuable than photographs or souvenirs.

It gave me perspective.

It taught me that adventure often begins just beyond your comfort zone.

It taught me to respect nature.

It taught me the importance of friendship.

And perhaps most importantly...

It taught me that even after your heart is broken, healing has a way of finding you.

Sometimes it arrives on horseback.

Sometimes it comes from an old friend buying you a beer.

Sometimes it’s your mother showing up with a sleeping bag and a colorful cowboy hat.

And sometimes...

It arrives disguised as the most unforgettable place you’ve ever called home.

Next week...

Chapter 5, Part 4: Blytheville Air Force Base

Sometimes the next assignment isn’t just another duty station... it’s the place where you begin putting your life back together.

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Second Wind

Life after 60—real, raw, rebuilt Essays, Rants, and Reality from the Road

By Steve Williams

Every chapter builds on the last... and the adventure is just getting started.

💬 I’d Love to Hear From You

Have you ever lived somewhere that completely changed your life?

A military assignment...

A new job...

College...

A move across the country...

Or maybe just one unforgettable vacation that stayed with you forever.

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📸 Next Week...

I Could Write a Book!
Chapter 5: The Air Force
Part Four

✈️ Blytheville Air Force Base

A new assignment.

New friendships.

A fresh start.

And discovering that sometimes the best way to heal is simply to keep moving forward.

❤️ Final Thought

Looking back now...

I realize Alaska gave me much more than incredible scenery.

It gave me friendships that lasted a lifetime...

Adventures I’ll never forget...

And the quiet confidence that even after life takes an unexpected turn...

There is always another trail waiting just around the bend.

🌲 Until Next Tuesday...

Keep exploring.

Keep laughing.

Keep collecting stories.

Because one day...

You just might discover...

You could write a book, too. 📚

— Steve

For years, whenever someone heard one of my stories, I’d smile and say, “I could write a book… and I’m going to call it I Could Write a Book! ” Well… this is that book. I’m simply writing it one chapter at a time, sharing the stories, adventures, misadventures, and life lessons I’ve gathered along the way.

🚪 Opening

🚗 On March 1, 1980, my twenty-second birthday, I drove out the front gate of Fairchild Air Force Base for the last time.

For the previous two years, Fairchild had become home.

It was where I found confidence I never knew I had.

It was where Debby and I built our first home together.

It was where we made friends we were convinced we’d know for the rest of our lives.

Now it was time to leave all of that behind.

✈️ Our next assignment was Elmendorf Air Force Base in Anchorage, Alaska.

Just saying the word Alaska sounded exciting.

Neither of us had ever been there.

Neither of us had much of an idea what to expect.

After spending a few days with Debby’s family in Randall, celebrating my birthday, making pizza, loading hay bales against my better judgment, and helping butcher my very first cow, we pointed our little 1979 Plymouth Champ toward Seattle.

⛴️ The first leg of our trip would be aboard the Alaska Marine Highway ferry to Wrangell.

I’d been on ferries before.

Nothing like this one.

It was big enough to carry hundreds of passengers, dozens of vehicles, and enough cabins that we’d actually spend several nights aboard before reaching Alaska.

💭 As I sit here nearly fifty years later, I wish I remembered more about those days on the ferry.

I don’t.

I remember that we had a small cabin, but mostly because it gave us a place to sleep.

Most of what I remember happened out on deck.

Debby and I wandered around the ship, ate our meals, and spent a lot of time simply looking at the scenery.

The Inside Passage was absolutely beautiful.

Snow-covered mountains.

Dense forests stretching right down to the water.

Little communities tucked along the shoreline.

I remember thinking it was some of the prettiest country I’d ever seen.

🌿 One evening, Debby and I were visiting with a few other passengers out on one of the open decks.

Someone passed around some marijuana.

I’d smoked before, but whatever they were sharing that night was in an entirely different league.

Let’s just say the scenery became even more impressive after that.

🧠 Beyond those memories, I honestly don’t remember much about the ferry itself.

Sometimes that’s just how memories work.

The details fade.

The feeling stays with you.

❤️ What I remember most is the anticipation.

We were leaving everything familiar behind and heading toward a place we’d only read about on a map.

🗺️ When the ferry finally eased into Wrangell, we drove the Plymouth Champ down the loading ramp and onto Alaska soil for the very first time.

I remember feeling excited.

I remember feeling just a little nervous.

Mostly, I remember unfolding the map and realizing something.

Getting to Alaska had been the easy part.

Now we had to drive across it.

🛣️ Neither of us had any idea what waited for us on the Alaska Highway.

Looking back…

I’m kind of glad we didn’t know.

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💬 I’d Love to Hear From You

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Second Wind

Life after 60—real, raw, rebuilt Essays, Rants, and Reality from the Road

By Steve Williams

🚗 Coming Next...

Chapter 5, Part 4

Driving the Alaska Highway

Snow.

Ice.

A whiteout.

Wildlife.

And one unforgettable road trip through some of the most beautiful country I’ve ever seen.

A continuing collection of stories, memories, misadventures, and life lessons from my first 68 years.

Act I – Where I Found My Confidence

When I arrived at Fairchild Air Force Base, just outside Spokane, Washington, I was twenty years old.

I had completed Tech School, married Debby, whom I’d known since we were four and five years old, and was reporting to my first permanent duty assignment in the United States Air Force

Like most young Airmen arriving at their first base, I carried two suitcases, far more enthusiasm than experience, and absolutely no idea how much the next two years would mean to me.

Fairchild was home to the 92nd Bombardment Wing, part of the Strategic Air Command, better known simply as SAC.

During the Cold War, SAC wasn’t just another Air Force command. It was America’s primary nuclear deterrent. B-52 bombers stood alert around the clock while Security Police protected both the aircraft and the nuclear weapons they were designed to deliver.

I wasn’t flying those bombers, but before long I found myself entrusted with a responsibility that directly supported the people who did.

☢️ Learning the Importance of Details

After spending some time in-processing, I was assigned to the squadron orderly room, where I eventually inherited responsibility for administering the Personal Reliability Program, or PRP.

Most people have never heard of the PRP, but it was one of the most important administrative programs in the squadron. Every name added to or removed from the roster determined which Security Police personnel were authorized to carry weapons, access the armory, and stand guard over both the B-52 bombers and the nuclear weapons entrusted to Strategic Air Command.

It wasn’t glamorous work.

No exciting arrests.

No flashing lights.

No Hollywood soundtrack.

It was paperwork.

Accuracy wasn’t simply encouraged.

It was mandatory.

Every morning, before most people had finished their first cup of coffee, I walked into the commander’s office carrying the latest PRP updates.

At first, that commander was Major Lars Vedvik.

Each morning I briefed him on every addition to, or removal from, the PRP roster.

Looking back, it amazes me that a twenty-year-old Airman was trusted with information that directly affected the readiness of the people responsible for protecting some of America’s most important military assets.

At the time, though, I didn’t think much about it.

It was simply my job.

Major Vedvik was eventually promoted to lieutenant colonel and reassigned. His replacement was Major Leslie Smith... or at least I believe Smith was his surname. Nearly fifty years later, a few names have become a little fuzzy, but I remember exactly the kind of leader he was.

Professional.

Approachable.

The kind of commander who could put a young Airman at ease without ever giving up the authority that came with his rank.

Looking back now, I realize how fortunate I was. Without really knowing it, I had been surrounded by leaders who believed in developing young Airmen.

👞 Big Shoes to Fill

Long before Dale Fisher became a friend, I knew who he was.

The PRP program I inherited had previously been his responsibility, and everywhere I turned I heard the same comment.

“You’ve got some pretty big shoes to fill.”

Everyone respected the job Dale had done.

Rather than feeling intimidated, I took it as a challenge.

I wanted to prove everyone right.

So I immersed myself in the work.

I reorganized files.

Improved procedures.

Checked every detail.

Then checked them again.

The more I learned, the more comfortable I became.

Something interesting happened along the way.

Without realizing it, I was beginning to believe in myself.

Somewhere along the way, Dale and I became friends. Before long, he and his wife, Lori, welcomed Debby and me into their lives.

Looking back, I don’t think Dale and Lori ever set out to mentor us.

They simply opened their home, included us in their circle of friends, and made two young newlyweds feel like we belonged.

⭐ Confidence Earned, Not Given

One of the leaders who had the greatest influence on my early Air Force career was Senior Master Sergeant George B. Robbins, our First Sergeant.

If you’ve never served in the military, the First Sergeant is often described as the heart of a squadron. Part mentor, part disciplinarian, part counselor, and sometimes a father figure to a lot of very young Airmen living away from home for the first time.

Sergeant Robbins seemed to know exactly when a young Airman needed encouragement and when he needed accountability.

During my assignment at Fairchild, Sergeant Robbins was promoted to Chief Master Sergeant, one of the highest enlisted ranks in the Air Force.

Watching Sergeant Robbins become Chief Robbins left an impression on me.

Looking back, I’ve never been able to prove it, but I’ve always believed he was the one who nominated me for Airman of the Month. I’m also fairly certain he was the one who told me I’d been selected.

I still have the framed certificate from the 92nd Security Police Squadron.

I don’t remember a formal ceremony.

I don’t remember applause.

What I remember is realizing that leaders I respected believed I was doing a good job.

That meant more than any certificate ever could.

Later that year, I was honored again when I was selected as 1979 Airman of the Year for the 92nd Security Police Squadron.

Looking back, I don’t think anyone sets out to become Airman of the Year.

I certainly didn’t.

Somehow, simply showing up every day and doing my best added up to something extraordinary.

Just before leaving Fairchild, I received another unexpected honor.

I was promoted Below the Zone to Senior Airman (E-4), an early promotion reserved for Airmen whose performance placed them ahead of their peers.

At the time, a Senior Airman wore three stripes with a subtle blue-on-blue star in the center. After serving the required time in grade, Senior Airmen automatically became Sergeants, still in pay grade E-4, with the insignia changing to a white star on a blue background.

To anyone outside the military, it probably sounds like a minor change.

To me, it meant everything.

It meant my supervisors believed I was ready for greater responsibility before the normal promotion timeline.

That vote of confidence meant far more than the new stripes themselves.

Somewhere during those two years, a few people around the squadron started calling me “Super Troop.”

I never quite knew how to respond to that.

It was flattering.

It was also a little embarrassing.

Anyone who knows me knows I’ve never had much of an ego to inflate.

Every promotion.

Every compliment.

Every new responsibility.

Added another brick to a foundation that had been missing most of my life.

Late in 1979, the Air Force offered me my next assignment.

Elmendorf Air Force Base.

Anchorage, Alaska.

There was one condition.

If I wanted Alaska, I had to extend my enlistment by another fifteen months.

Debby and I didn’t spend very long making that decision.

We were twenty-one years old.

Adventure had a way of sounding much more exciting than staying put.

I signed the extension.

Our orders wouldn’t take effect for several more months.

Little did we know that some of our favorite Fairchild memories were still ahead of us.

Act II – The People Who Made Fairchild Feel Like Home

Every weekday morning I put on an Air Force uniform.

Every evening I got to be twenty-one years old.

Debby and I were assigned a little duplex in base housing on Colorado Street. For two young newlyweds just beginning our married life together, it was the perfect place to call home.

Before long, evenings and weekends settled into a comfortable rhythm.

Many of those evenings found us gathered around Dale and Lori Fisher’s dining room table playing Spades.

Most of the time, Debby and I teamed up against Dale and Lori.

The games were usually pretty evenly matched that way.

If Dale and I made the mistake of becoming partners...

Well...

The ladies generally had our number.

Apparently, military training offered no particular advantage when it came to playing cards.

About that same time, a brand-new television comedy called Mork & Mindy premiered.

I still remember watching it with Dale and Lori for the very first time.

We’d finish another hand of Spades just in time for the show to begin.

None of us had ever seen anyone whose mind seemed to work as fast as Robin Williams’.

Within minutes we were laughing so hard our sides hurt.

Then we’d miss the next joke because we were still laughing at the previous one.

We were absolutely busting a gut.

Before long, “Nanu Nanu” had become part of our vocabulary.

Even today, I can’t think about Robin Williams without being transported back to those evenings around Dale and Lori’s television.

Another regular in our little group was Don Wheeler.

Don was tall, slender, good-looking, and simply enjoyable to be around.

He was married when we first met him, although that marriage eventually ended.

What I remember most about Don, though, wasn’t anything he said.

It was his dog.

An Airedale Terrier named Champ.

Don absolutely loved showing off everything he had taught Champ to do.

“Watch this,” he’d say with a grin.

Champ would sit.

Shake hands.

Speak.

Fetch just about anything.

Sometimes Don would balance a dog treat on Champ’s nose and make him wait.

Champ wouldn’t move a muscle until he heard the command.

Then, with one quick flip of his head, he’d toss the treat into the air and catch it before it ever touched the ground.

Don couldn’t have looked any prouder if Champ had just graduated from college.

After Don’s marriage ended, I believe Champ stayed with him.

Many of the smaller details from those years have faded with time, but Don and Champ remain inseparable in my memories of Fairchild.

Life in Spokane wasn’t centered around bars or nightlife.

Most of us were still pretty young, and some of us weren’t even old enough to drink.

Besides, eastern Washington offered something much better.

Beautiful lakes.

Towering evergreens.

Rolling hills.

Fresh mountain air.

I remember hearing there were something like seventy-six lakes within fifty miles of Spokane. Whether that number was exactly right or simply local pride talking, it certainly felt believable.

Debby and I also had relatives living in the Spokane area, so every now and then we’d spend time visiting family away from the base. Those visits gave us another connection to eastern Washington and made Spokane feel even more like home.

Then came my twenty-first birthday.

Dale and Don decided it was finally time to introduce me to my first legal drink.

They picked me up and took me to a bar somewhere in Spokane.

I honestly don’t remember the bar.

I remember the friends.

Afterward, they drove me home.

The moment we pulled into the driveway, both of them suddenly announced they needed to come inside because they had to use the bathroom.

Nice try, guys.

I wasn’t nearly as gullible as they apparently thought.

I had a pretty good feeling Debby was inside putting the finishing touches on a surprise birthday party.

Sure enough...

She was.

Whether it was that same celebration or another party sometime later, I also learned a lesson that many of us eventually learn the hard way.

Everyone seems to have one particular kind of alcohol they overdo exactly once.

Mine was whiskey.

Add a generous helping of peanuts to the evening, and things deteriorated rather quickly.

Our duplex had a full basement.

That’s where the whiskey and peanuts staged their rebellion.

The peanuts made a second appearance.

I’m fairly certain Debby remembers the cleanup much better than I do.

More than forty-five years later, I still don’t care much for whiskey.

Looking back, it’s easy to remember the promotions and awards.

It’s even easier to remember the people.

Dale.

Lori.

Don.

Champ.

At the time, we were certain those friendships would last forever.

Military life had other plans.

Not long after Mount St. Helens erupted, we gradually lost touch, and I haven’t spoken with any of them in decades.

That doesn’t make those friendships any less meaningful.

For those two years, they were exactly the friends we needed.

They made Fairchild feel less like a duty assignment...

...and more like home.

Act III – Closing One Chapter

Late in the winter of 1980, my final day at Fairchild finally arrived.

Debby had already left Spokane to spend a few days with her family in Randall while I stayed behind to complete my out-processing.

On March 1, 1980, my twenty-second birthday, I climbed into my little 1979 Plymouth Champ, drove out the front gate of Fairchild Air Force Base for the last time, and headed west.

A few minutes later, I stopped for gas in Airway Heights.

Before I even picked up the nozzle, my eyes went straight to the price posted on the pump.

$1.22 a gallon.

I remember standing there thinking,

“You’ve got to be kidding me. How can gasoline possibly cost this much?”

If only I’d known.

The drive to Randall gave me plenty of time to think.

Fairchild had been my first permanent duty assignment.

It was where I learned responsibility.

Where I discovered abilities I didn’t know I possessed.

Where Debby and I built our first home together.

Where friendships formed that, at the time, felt as though they would last forever.

By the time I arrived in Randall, everyone was ready to celebrate my birthday.

Since I had spent several years working at Mama Mia’s Pizza before joining the Air Force, there was never much question about what my contribution to the celebration would be.

Make pizza.

Thankfully, that assignment was right in my wheelhouse.

The next assignment...

Not so much.

I’d like the record to show that I did not volunteer.

Debby volunteered me.

Apparently, helping load what seemed like an endless supply of hay bales was simply expected of the newest son-in-law.

There was only one problem.

I’m extremely allergic to hay.

That little detail didn’t appear to influence anyone’s plans.

So there I was, spending part of my birthday loading bale after bale while my allergies quietly plotted their revenge.

As if that weren’t enough, I experienced something else I’d never done before...

and have absolutely no desire to do again.

I helped butcher a cow.

Growing up in Sacramento and spending my teenage years making pizza had done absolutely nothing to prepare me for that experience.

I gained a whole new appreciation for where hamburgers come from.

Those few days passed quickly.

Before long, it was time to continue our journey north.

As we left Randall, Mount St. Helens stood quietly in the distance.

It looked exactly as it always had.

Majestic.

Peaceful.

Unchanging.

There wasn’t a single reason to believe we were looking at it for the last time in the form we had always known.

A few weeks later, the mountain began venting steam.

People started paying attention.

Then, on May 18, 1980, Mount St. Helens erupted.

Friends back in Spokane found themselves sweeping volcanic ash from driveways, sidewalks, rooftops, and cars.

Debby’s family, living much closer to the mountain, had an even bigger cleanup ahead of them.

I never did learn exactly how much ash fell around Randall and Morton, but I’ve often imagined it must have been measured in feet rather than inches.

Even today, I sometimes wonder what that cleanup must have been like.

How do you clean up after a mountain explodes?

I’m still not sure I know.

Looking back now, what strikes me most is how ordinary those final days in Washington felt while we were living them.

It was just another birthday.

Just another visit with family.

Just another chance to make pizza.

Just another afternoon loading hay.

Just another unforgettable experience involving a cow.

None of us knew we were saying goodbye to Mount St. Helens as we had always known it.

None of us knew we were quietly closing one of the happiest chapters of our young married lives.

A few days later, Debby and I climbed back into the Plymouth Champ and continued north.

Seattle would become our gateway to Alaska.

Neither of us had any idea what waited beyond the end of that ferry ride.

Looking back now, I realize Fairchild gave me far more than my first permanent duty assignment.

It gave me opportunities to discover confidence I didn’t know I possessed.

It taught me responsibility.

It introduced Debby and me to friendships that made Spokane feel like home.

And it quietly helped shape the man I would become.

Sometimes you don’t realize you’re living through the good old days...

until they’re forty-five years behind you.

As we drove toward Seattle and the ferry that would carry us to Alaska, neither of us had any idea what the next chapter would hold.

Looking back...

I’m kind of glad we didn’t know.

✍️ Closing Thought

If this chapter brought back memories of your own first job, first apartment, military service, or the friends who helped shape your early adult life, I’d love to hear about them in the comments.

Some friendships last a lifetime.

Others last only a season.

Both can change us forever.

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Life after 60—real, raw, rebuilt Essays, Rants, and Reality from the Road

By Steve Williams

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📖 I Could Write a Book! Chapter 5, Part 1

A continuing collection of stories, memories, misadventures, and life lessons from my first 68 years.

When people ask where my adult life began, they’re usually expecting me to name a city.

Sacramento.

Spokane.

Anchorage.

Maybe Arkansas.

They’re all wrong.

It began with a conversation between my dad and me.

I had graduated from high school in 1976. Like a lot of young adults, I wasn’t exactly sure what I wanted to do next. I took a college class or two, but I wasn’t charging toward a degree. The only profession that really interested me was teaching. I liked the idea of helping people learn.

Unfortunately, teachers weren’t exactly getting rich in the mid-1970s.

Eventually, my dad decided it was time for me to make a decision.

His offer was straightforward.

Either enroll in college immediately, and he’d pay my expenses...

...or join the military.

Looking back, I don’t see that conversation as an ultimatum anymore.

I see it as a father recognizing that his second son needed a push toward adulthood.

So I chose the United States Air Force.

At nineteen years old, I didn’t receive much guidance about choosing a career field. I simply picked Administration because it sounded safe, familiar, and probably easier than many of the alternatives.

Years later, I would realize that one seemingly simple decision quietly shaped much of the rest of my professional life.

Funny how that works.

The decisions that change everything rarely announce themselves at the time.

🌊 It Started With an Earthquake

Long before the Air Force entered the picture, another event had already begun shaping my future.

In March of 1964, the Great Alaska Earthquake triggered tsunami warnings along the Northern California coast.

Our family lived on Humboldt Hill above Eureka.

The Mandt family, Debby’s family, lived in the Eureka lowlands.

When the tsunami warning was issued, my parents invited the Mandts up to our house until the danger had passed.

Fortunately, Eureka escaped the worst of the damage. The greatest destruction occurred farther north in Crescent City.

But because of that earthquake...

...two families became friends.

Debby and I were just kids.

Neither of us could have imagined that fourteen years later we’d be planning a wedding.

❤️ Meeting Again

Fast forward to the fall of 1977.

About a week after I committed to joining the Air Force, Debby and I crossed paths again.

This time, we weren’t children.

We were young adults.

Whatever spark had existed years earlier suddenly had room to grow.

From that point on, we were practically inseparable.

Somewhere during those whirlwind months, I proposed.

So when I boarded a plane for Texas on January 20, 1978, I wasn’t simply a nervous nineteen-year-old leaving home.

I was leaving behind my fiancée.

Neither of us had any idea how much life we were about to squeeze into the next five years.

🪖 Turning Civilians into Airmen

My destination was Lackland Air Force Base in San Antonio.

Six weeks of Basic Military Training.

People often say the military’s goal is to build discipline.

I’m sure that’s true.

But if you’d asked nineteen-year-old Steve, I’d have answered a little differently.

It felt like their first objective was to break your individual spirit just enough that they could rebuild you as part of a team.

The first three days were emotionally intense.

Not just for me.

For nearly everyone.

Within hours of arriving, the barber had introduced himself without saying a word.

Hair disappeared.

Civilian clothes disappeared.

Privacy disappeared.

Individuality disappeared.

We all looked exactly alike in our green fatigues.

Airmen who had arrived a couple of weeks before us immediately had a nickname for the newest trainees.

Pickles.

Considering the bright green fatigues, I suppose the nickname made perfect sense.

Most of us entered as Airman Basic, with no stripes whatsoever on our sleeves.

Military slang had another name for us.

Slick sleeves.

A handful of recruits had enlisted under special programs or had prior experience, so they already wore a stripe.

The rest of us simply hoped not to attract attention.

I was assigned to Squadron 3708

By the second week, we graduated from one nickname to another.

Once the buzz cuts began growing out, the earlier training flights started calling us pingers.

This was long before computers made the word “ping” part of everyday vocabulary.

The explanation we heard was that those tiny little hairs sticking back out of our heads would go...

“Ping... ping... ping...”

...if someone rubbed a hand across our scalp.

So in the span of about a week, I had become a pickle...

...a slick sleeve...

...and now a pinger.

The Air Force had an impressive talent for creating new ways to remind us that we hadn’t arrived yet.

📄 Form 341

One of the first things we learned about was something called a Form 341.

It was a small form that each of us carried folded neatly in the front pocket of our fatigue shirt.

The pocket flap wasn’t just convenient.

It was intentional.

If a drill instructor thought your attitude needed adjusting, he simply reached into your pocket and removed your 341.

That little piece of paper carried an enormous amount of psychological weight.

Multiple pulled 341s usually meant additional discipline, unwanted attention, or potentially much worse.

Oddly enough, one of the accomplishments I’m still quietly proud of nearly fifty years later is this:

Not once during Basic Training did I ever have my 341 pulled.

🎖️ The Men in the Campaign Hats

Our drill instructors wore those iconic campaign hats with the perfectly flat brim circling all the way around.

I honestly don’t remember my drill instructor’s name.

I remember his presence.

He could get within inches of your face and make you feel like you were the only person on the planet.

Push-ups became a daily event.

Running became a daily event.

Marching became a daily event.

Everything had a right way.

And if you discovered the wrong way...

...you usually discovered it the hard way.

Then there were the cadences.

The drill instructor would shout:

“I don’t know, but I’ve been told...”

And the entire squadron answered back:

“Air Force wings are made of gold!”

Back and forth it went as our boots struck the pavement in rhythm.

Some verses were motivational.

Some were funny.

Some probably made no sense whatsoever.

That wasn’t really the point.

The point was that a group of frightened young men who had arrived thinking only as individuals was slowly becoming a team.

Exactly as intended.

⭐ The First Time I Truly Felt Proud

Something happened during those six weeks that surprised me.

I started believing in myself.

Not because someone told me I should.

Because I kept accomplishing things I wasn’t sure I could do.

Every inspection.

Every march.

Every challenge.

Every day I made it one day farther than the day before.

Looking back, Basic Training wasn’t where I became a soldier.

It was where I first experienced a genuine sense of accomplishment.

For the first time in my young adult life, I had earned something.

And somehow, beneath all the yelling, the marching, the push-ups, the pickles, the pingers, and the slick sleeves...

...I had begun believing I could become an adult.

That feeling has never completely left me.

📚 Learning My Trade

Graduating from Basic Training felt like a tremendous accomplishment.

The yelling subsided.

The pace slowed just a little.

And for the first time in six weeks, we could begin thinking about the careers we had actually enlisted to perform.

My next stop was Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi, Mississippi.

I believe Technical School lasted about eight weeks, although I wouldn’t swear to that nearly fifty years later.

There I finally learned what my Air Force Specialty Code, 702X0C, actually meant.

I was training to become an Administrative Specialist.

In other words, I was learning to become the Air Force version of Radar O’Reilly from M.A.S.H.

My world became personnel records, military leave, performance reports, official correspondence, discharges, filing systems, and all the paperwork that quietly keeps an organization functioning.

At nineteen years old, it didn’t sound especially exciting.

Looking back, however, I realize those organizational skills became one of the greatest strengths of my professional life.

I just didn’t know it yet.

💙 A Wedding in Dress Blues

During those months in Basic Training and Tech School, Debby and I spent most of our relationship writing letters.

There were no cell phones.

No FaceTime.

No texting.

Just handwritten letters that sometimes took days to arrive, and occasional calls from a pay phone, which I believe had to be made collect.

Those letters and expensive little phone calls became our connection.

Then, on May 6, 1978, we stood together in a small Lutheran church in Morton, Washington, and became husband and wife.

Truthfully, I had almost nothing to do with planning the wedding.

Debby, her family, and her friends took care of all of that.

My responsibility was refreshingly simple.

Show up.

I arrived wearing my Air Force dress blues.

The ceremony itself hadn’t been rehearsed.

At one point, the minister instructed us to kneel.

Without missing a beat, Debby quietly whispered,

“I can’t bend my legs.”

Apparently whatever Lutheran tradition he had planned wasn’t going to happen that afternoon.

Everyone smiled.

We improvised.

The ceremony continued.

Looking back, that tiny little moment seems strangely appropriate.

Marriage, as I would eventually learn, rarely follows the script.

🚗 Our Honeymoon

Our honeymoon wasn’t a tropical vacation.

It wasn’t a cruise.

It wasn’t even a week long.

We climbed into Debby’s 1965 Plymouth Valiant, drove to Yakima, Washington, spent one night in a hotel, and then headed east toward Spokane.

Like most young military couples, we didn’t have much.

But we had each other.

Sometimes that’s enough.

As we drove toward Fairchild Air Force Base, we talked about the future.

At least, I assume we did.

I honestly don’t remember the conversations.

What I remember is the feeling.

Everything was new.

Everything seemed possible.

We were twenty-year-olds with an entire life ahead of us.

🚙 Driving Toward Adulthood

I don’t remember feeling afraid.

Excited?

Absolutely.

Curious?

Without question.

Prepared?

Not even close.

In the span of just a few months, I had gone from a teenager living at home...

...to a Basic Trainee.

...to an Airman.

...to a Technical School graduate.

...to a husband.

Life wasn’t easing me into adulthood.

It had thrown me into the deep end and expected me to figure out how to swim.

Oddly enough...

...I was beginning to enjoy the challenge.

🏡 Fairchild

When we arrived at Fairchild Air Force Base, we had no way of knowing that the next two years would shape us in ways neither of us could imagine.

We were about to meet people we were certain would be lifelong friends.

Some were.

Many weren’t.

As life has taught me over the years, some people are meant to walk beside us for a lifetime, while others are there for only a season. That doesn’t make those friendships any less important.

We were about to discover our first home together.

We’d adopt our first dog.

I’d begin the career that would earn me Airman of the Month, Airman of the Year, and promotions I never expected.

We’d laugh.

We’d struggle.

We’d grow up.

And although neither of us could possibly have known it then, the foundation for nearly everything that followed in my life was about to be poured.

It all began with two kids...

...a 1965 Plymouth Valiant...

...and a drive through the front gate of Fairchild Air Force Base.

Next week: Fairchild. Our first home, Blue the Beagle, John’s unforgettable visit, and the beginning of a military career that changed the course of my life forever.

If this story brought back a memory of your own, I’d be honored if you’d share it with someone who might enjoy the journey.

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📖 Coming Next Week...

Chapter 5, Part 2

The Air Force: Finding My Place

Basic Training taught me how to become an Airman.

Fairchild Air Force Base taught me who I was.

In Part 2, Debby and I begin our first adventure as newlyweds. You’ll meet Dan and Peggy Whye, the couple who welcomed us into military life, Blue the Beagle (who had a few things to teach us as well), and my brother John’s unforgettable visit that still makes me laugh nearly fifty years later.

You’ll also step inside the 92nd Security Police Squadron, where I somehow found myself responsible for helping ensure the men guarding Fairchild’s B-52 bombers were medically and administratively qualified to carry weapons and protect nuclear assets. That responsibility became the beginning of a military career I never expected, eventually leading to Airman of the Month, Airman of the Year, and my first promotion ahead of my peers.

❄️ Then...

Chapter 5, Part 3

The Air Force: Alaska

If Fairchild was where I found my footing, Alaska was where life became an adventure.

We’ll travel through the Inside Passage by ferry, drive through a whiteout on our way to Anchorage, and discover why I still believe Alaska is one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever lived.

You’ll meet our horses, Czar and Reena, learn what it’s like feeding seventy horses while being deathly allergic to hay, encounter black bears, leeches, and a magnificent bull moose standing silently in a snowstorm.

You’ll also meet Bob Pressley, whose friendship would eventually change the course of my marriage and, ultimately, my life.

It’s the most beautiful chapter of my Air Force years...

...and also the most heartbreaking.

🇺🇸 Finally...

Chapter 5, Part 4

The Air Force: The Hardest Decision

Heartbroken but determined to move forward, I left Alaska and began the final chapter of my Air Force career.

You’ll travel with me across America, experience one of the saddest realizations of my life after arriving in Michigan, meet Terry Shannon, Liz, and Nutmeg the Collie, and discover why I turned down an accelerated promotion to Technical Sergeant (E-6) even though my military career had never looked brighter.

The answer isn’t really about the Air Force.

It’s about identity.

About fear.

And about a young Staff Sergeant realizing that the life he was expected to live might not be the life he was meant to live.

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You can browse every published story, including previous chapters of I Could Write a Book!, here:

Second Wind

Life after 60—real, raw, rebuilt Essays, Rants, and Reality from the Road

By Steve Williams

💬 I’d Love to Hear Your Story

Were you in the military?

Did you have a Basic Training nickname?

Or did one decision early in life unexpectedly shape the next forty years?

Share your story in the comments. Some of my favorite conversations happen there.

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🎵 One Last Memory...

If you’ve never heard an Air Force marching cadence, or if you’re a veteran who wants to relive a few memories, here’s one very similar to the cadence we sang during Basic Training:

“I don’t know, but I’ve been told...”
“Air Force wings are made of gold!”

🎥

A continuing collection of stories, memories, misadventures, and life lessons from my first 68 years.

This is another chapter in my ongoing “I Could Write a Book!” series, where I take pieces of my life that probably deserve more than one paragraph, but not necessarily a full courtroom deposition. These are the stories, places, people, jobs, detours, and occasional questionable decisions that helped make me who I am.

🐛 Early Symptoms

Some people catch the travel bug.

I think mine started with tents.

Before I ever needed a passport, there were already symptoms. A family trip around the United States in 1971. Frequent tent camping with my family. Boy Scout backpacking trips. Fifty-mile treks. Snow camping. Canoe camping on the Feather River.

Comfort was optional.

Mosquito bites were apparently included in the price.

Somebody always seemed to be boiling water for reasons that were never fully explained.

Looking back, I suppose those early trips taught me that a person could leave home, sleep somewhere strange, be slightly uncomfortable, eat food that had been packed badly, and still come back with a story.

That may have been the first real infection.

But the first time the travel bug sprouted wings and demanded a passport was when I was seventeen years old.

✈️ Scotland, Steven, and Youth Hostel Diplomacy

I had saved enough money from my job to spend seven weeks in Scotland and England. At that age, seven weeks felt less like a vacation and more like a full-blown expedition. I was not exactly Ernest Hemingway with a backpack, but I did have enough money to get there, enough confidence to be dangerous, and not nearly enough sense to avoid every bar in Scotland.

I traveled with Steven Young, a foreign exchange student who had stayed with my family during the 1972–73 school year. We had already bonded during his time with us, getting into the kind of teenage adventures that probably seemed harmless at the time and mildly alarming in hindsight. By the time we were roaming around Scotland together, he was not just someone who had stayed with my family. He was already part of my story.

We are still in touch all these years later. He became a neurosurgeon, is now retired, and lives in Greece. Back then, though, he was simply Steven, my friend and travel companion for one of my first great adventures.

Back then, we were just two young guys roaming around Scotland in a sedan, sleeping in youth hostels, and hitting bars nearly every night.

At the time, Scottish driver’s licenses did not include photos, so Scottish bars were not in the habit of asking for photo ID the way American bars would later become. Nobody was scanning anything. Nobody was checking holograms. Nobody was holding a license under a special light like I was trying to board Air Force One with a laminated library card.

I was seventeen, in Scotland, and apparently close enough to drinking age as far as the bartender was concerned.

So I drank.

And then I learned, through informal field research, that drinking is not always a skill one is born with.

One night, I became so inebriated that I’m fairly certain I peed on a floor vent. I also tried to climb back into a bunk bed that was already occupied by somebody else. A young guy and his father had to wake me up and redirect me toward reality.

I do not offer this as one of my proudest international moments.

There are no commemorative plates.

But it is part of the story. Travel is not always cathedrals, sunsets, and perfectly framed photos. Sometimes travel is being seventeen years old in a youth hostel, discovering that beer, bunk beds, and poor judgment can form a temporary alliance against you.

Still, that trip planted something in me.

The world got bigger.

I saw places I had only heard about. I slept in strange buildings. I ate unfamiliar food. I met people whose lives had nothing to do with mine. I began to understand that home was not the only possible setting for a life.

And eventually, I would also start to understand that the United States was not the only possible setting for a life, either.

💤 The Bug Went Dormant

Then, oddly enough, the bug went dormant.

I didn’t really travel internationally again until 2010, unless we count Alaska, Hawaii, Canada, and Mexico, which are all real places, despite the way some Americans treat them as casual extensions of the nearest airport lounge.

Life happened.

Work happened.

Family happened.

Bills happened.

Responsibilities piled up like laundry with legal authority.

The travel bug, apparently, is capable of hibernation. It curled up somewhere inside me, probably under a stack of mortgage paperwork, and waited.

Then in 2010, it woke up.

🇬🇷 Greece Woke It Back Up

My friend Brian Robb and I went to Greece. We flew into Athens, then went to Mykonos for several days, and then took a ferry down to Santorini.

Santorini was one of those places that made me understand why humans invented adjectives.

Stunning does not quite cover it. Beautiful is too small. Gorgeous feels like it should be wearing a tuxedo and still wouldn’t be dressed up enough.

Santorini looked like somebody had built condos, hotels, and restaurants directly into the rim of an ancient volcanic caldera, then painted everything white so heaven could find it from a distance. And as if that were not dramatic enough, the dark volcanic islands of Nea Kameni and Palea Kameni sit in the middle of the caldera, reminders that Santorini is still an active volcanic system.

Mykonos was also wonderful. Fun, lively, scenic, and full of that particular energy that makes you think, “Yes, I could absolutely become irresponsible here in an attractive linen shirt.”

Greece did something to me. It reminded me that travel was not just about going somewhere. It was about becoming temporarily available to wonder.

🧳 The Buddy Pass Years

In 2013, Brian and I planned another European trip. The original idea was Italy, Croatia, and possibly a few other nearby countries. But we were flying on a buddy pass, which is a wonderful travel tool if you enjoy uncertainty, humility, and staring at airport monitors like they contain messages from God.

We couldn’t get on a flight from Portland to New York, so the whole plan changed. Instead of making our way toward Italy, we flew directly from Portland to Amsterdam.

There was one small side adventure before we even got on the plane.

We found out we were going to be in first class on the flight to Amsterdam, which meant we suddenly felt the need to look slightly less like two men whose wardrobe strategy had been, “Is this clean enough to leave the country?”

So we took light rail over to a nearby shopping center and found a Ross.

While I was in the dressing room trying to improve my international image, Brian came charging in verbally, if not physically.

“STEVE! I left my bag on the train!”

This would have been bad enough on its own, but the bag also contained his passport, which is one of those travel items best not donated to public transportation.

Brian went into full panic mode. We flagged down a cab and took off across town in what felt like a discount remake of The French Connection, only with more anxiety and fewer stunt permits. Somehow, we managed to beat the train to the other side of town by just a few minutes.

And there it was.

The bag was still right where he had left it.

Passport included.

There are moments in travel when you realize the trip has not even started yet, and it is already writing material without your permission.

Eventually, Brian’s passport and the rest of us all made it onto the plane to Amsterdam.

Our checked bags, however, had apparently decided to honor the original itinerary.

They went to Venice.

🚲 Amsterdam, Paris, and the Bags That Went Rogue

So there we were in Amsterdam, mostly without luggage, waiting for our bags to catch up with us.

And honestly?

Amsterdam was amazing anyway.

So many bicycles. I don’t mean “a lot of bicycles.” I mean bicycles as a governing philosophy. Bicycles as infrastructure. Bicycles as weather. Bicycles as a swarm of cheerful Dutch metal insects carrying people who all seemed much more confident than I felt crossing a street.

We stayed a few days, wandered around, waited for our belongings to return from their independent Italian vacation, and then continued on.

From Amsterdam, we took a fast train down toward Paris, with a quick stop in Belgium along the way. Paris was surprisingly easy to navigate because of the underground rail system, and we did the things visitors are supposed to do.

We saw the Eiffel Tower. We visited Notre-Dame Cathedral, years before the fire. We went to museums and wandered through neighborhoods where even the buildings seemed to know they were photogenic.

🏛️ Romans, Weather, and Naturist Aspirations

Before heading to Marseille, we made another stop that deserves a postcard all its own. We visited Le Pont du Gard , the ancient Roman aqueduct in southern France.

Amazing does not really cover it.

There is something humbling about standing near a structure built roughly two thousand years ago and realizing it is still standing, while I can throw my back out reaching for a suitcase.

We also stayed nearby in Cap d’Agde, a naturist village on France’s Mediterranean coast. Naturally, I was intrigued.

Unfortunately, the weather did not cooperate with our naturist aspirations, which is a polite way of saying that even my naked enthusiasm has temperature requirements.

🏖️ Marseille, Barcelona, and a Gift Called Sitges

Then we went down to Marseille, had some beach time, met a friend of Brian’s, and stayed with him. From there, we drove down to Barcelona.

Barcelona was vibrant and beautiful and full of life. We had a wonderful time there. Then, because standby travel enjoys adding punctuation, we could not get on a flight home and had to stay an extra day.

That delay gave us Sitges.

Sitges was a nearby town with a strong gay presence, and it was the kind of place where same-gender couples walked hand-in-hand all over town without seeming to calculate who might be watching.

That matters.

When you have spent parts of your life scanning rooms, reading faces, lowering your voice, editing your gestures, or deciding whether affection is safe to show, seeing people walk openly through a town with the person they love is not just pleasant.

It is medicine.

Sometimes travel shows you a landmark.

Sometimes it shows you a version of freedom.

🇦🇺 Australia and a Birthday in Full Color

Then came Australia.

In 2025, Brian and I spent twenty-eight days there with a former friend named Craig. I will not make Craig the focus of this chapter, because some people are not travel companions so much as cautionary tales with luggage.

Let’s simply say that Australia was magnificent, and one of the people on the trip later removed himself from my friendship brochure.

That is enough oxygen for Craig.

Australia itself was extraordinary.

We visited Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, Kangaroo Island, and Tasmania, then ended up back in Sydney. As luck would have it, we were in Sydney for Mardi Gras, which is what they call their enormous Pride celebration.

It also happened to fall on my birthday, March 1.

There are worse ways to turn sixty-seven than being in Sydney surrounded by what felt like a few hundred thousand people celebrating queer life in full color.

It was loud. It was joyful. It was huge. It was one of those moments where you stand there and think, “How exactly did my life bring me here?”

At seventeen, I was in a Scottish youth hostel trying to find the correct bunk bed.

At sixty-seven, I was in Sydney for Mardi Gras.

There is an arc there, even if it zigzags.

🇲🇽 Puerto Vallarta and the Relocation Whisper

Later in 2025, Brian and I took another trip, this time to Puerto Vallarta. Brian had never been to Mexico, so that made it fun for both of us. I had been to Mexico before, but Puerto Vallarta got under my skin in a new way.

I fell in love with it.

The ocean, the people, the food, the old town, the hills, the gay community, the walkability, the sense that life might be lived there with more sun and less insulation.

I wrote about that trip on Substack and admitted, perhaps a little too publicly, that I could imagine spending a lot more time there.

I have since decided not to pack up my life and run off to Puerto Vallarta quite yet.

But I have not ruled it out.

That is one of the side effects of the travel bug. A normal person visits a place and says, “That was nice.”

I visit a place and start calculating monthly rent, proximity to grocery stores, whether my dogs would approve, and how much Spanish I could learn before accidentally ordering plumbing supplies for dinner.

At some point, a vacation becomes reconnaissance.

🗺️ Could I Live There?

I do this more often now.

Coeur d’Alene? Beautiful. Close to the grandkids. Could I live nearby?

Spokane? Just across the state line on the Washington side, adjacent to Coeur d’Alene, and possibly more practical in some ways. Could that work?

Puerto Vallarta? Tempting. Very tempting.

Thailand? Still on the dream board.

Even places I have not yet visited start becoming possible versions of my life.

🚗 Some Travel Is Not Vacation

This year, I already have more travel planned. Some of it is domestic. I expect to go to Montana at the end of August, with Coeur d’Alene as a natural stopping point on the way to my brother Michael’s place in Florence. I plan to return to Coeur d’Alene again in September for Mason’s sixth birthday.

I also have another trip to Sacramento in July because my stepdad Jerry passed away, and we are working through some big-ticket estate items. There is an old expression: “The one who dies with the most toys wins.”

Jerry won.

Not all travel is vacation.

Sometimes travel is family.

Sometimes it is grief.

Sometimes it is showing up because that is what the living do after someone dies.

And sometimes, thankfully, travel is a clothing-optional gay campground called Bamboo Acres, which is where I spent this past weekend.

Life is nothing if not varied.

🇨🇿 The Next Big Map

But the big trip this year is already confirmed. In September, Brian and I are heading back to Europe. We leave around September 16 and return to the States from Rome around October 9.

The current plan is Prague and possibly other parts of the Czech Republic, then Germany, including Munich during Oktoberfest, and then Italy. We will make our way down through Italian cities toward Rome, with a side trip to Pompeii before flying home.

That is three weeks of trains, hotels, old streets, unfamiliar menus, probably at least one laundry crisis, and both of us trying to remember where we put our passports.

Especially Brian.

I can hardly wait.

I still have aspirations to go to Thailand next winter, maybe December or January, when the weather is decent. I have wanted to explore that part of the world for a long time. Whether it becomes a short trip, a long trip, or another “could I live here?” investigation remains to be seen.

🌎 Not Done Yet

Travel is different for me now than it was when I was seventeen.

Back then, I was trying to see the world because it was new.

Now, I think I travel partly because I need the reminder that I am not done.

And that I still have choices.

At this stage of life, it would be very easy for the world to start closing in. Same house. Same routines. Same grocery store. Same chair. Same aches. Same worries. Same conversations with the dogs, who are excellent listeners but rarely challenge my worldview unless cheese is involved.

Travel pushes back against that closing-in feeling.

It says: Not yet.

There are still places you have not walked.

Still foods you have not tried.

Still languages you cannot understand.

Still trains you might board in the wrong direction.

Still towns where two men can walk hand-in-hand without apology.

Still islands that look too beautiful to be real.

Still birthday parades on the other side of the world.

Still maps with blank spaces.

I am not a luxury traveler. I am not a travel influencer. Nobody is paying me to stand on a cliff in flowing linen while gazing meaningfully at a coastline.

My travel style is more practical, improvised, budget-conscious, occasionally chaotic, and heavily dependent on whether I remembered the charger and whether my hearing aids are cooperating.

But I love it.

I love the planning. I love the imagining. I love the moment when an idea becomes an itinerary. I love looking at a place on a map and wondering whether some small piece of me might still be waiting there.

Maybe that is what the travel bug really is.

Not just the desire to go somewhere.

The desire to keep becoming.

To keep testing the edges of your own life.

To keep asking whether the next chapter might begin in a city you have not yet visited, on a train you almost missed, in a café where you cannot read the menu, or on a beach where you suddenly realize you are not as finished as you thought you were.

At seventeen, I went to Scotland and England and came home with stories, some of them more dignified than others.

At sixty-seven, I stood in Sydney during Mardi Gras and felt the whole colorful roar of life still happening around me.

At sixty-eight, I am still looking at maps.

Some are actual maps.

Some are emotional ones.

Either way, I like knowing there are roads I have not taken yet.

And apparently, I am still willing to pack a bag.

✈️ Thanks for coming along

If you enjoyed this chapter, feel free to like, comment, or share it with someone who also suspects their next chapter might require a suitcase.

Travel has a funny way of reminding us that we are not finished yet.

Not with the world.

Not with ourselves.

And apparently not with packing.

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Second Wind

Life after 60—real, raw, rebuilt Essays, Rants, and Reality from the Road

By Steve Williams

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🧳 Final thought

At seventeen, I packed a bag because the world felt big.

At sixty-eight, I still pack a bag because the world still feels possible.

There is a peculiar kind of silence that arrives in the second half of life.

It doesn’t come from living alone.

It doesn’t come from an empty room.

It doesn’t even come from the television being off.

It comes when a routine disappears.

For years, there were places I belonged without thinking much about them.

A familiar driveway.

A familiar chair.

A familiar backyard.

The kind of place where you don’t need an invitation because your presence is already assumed.

You just show up.

You belong.

Or at least you think you do.

🚪 The Assumption of Belonging

I’ve started to realize that we’re attached to more than people.

We’re attached to routines.

To familiarity.

To the quiet assumption that we’ll still be included tomorrow.

A weekly lunch.

Frequent text messages.

A dog picture arriving for no reason.

Movie nights.

A friendship that’s lasted so long you stop imagining a future where it doesn’t exist.

Then one day life shifts.

Not necessarily because somebody was cruel.

Not necessarily because anyone intended harm.

Life simply rearranges itself.

People form new relationships.

Families grow.

Priorities change.

Schedules evolve.

And suddenly the places where you once fit naturally now seem to require an invitation.

🪑 The Empty Chair Nobody Removed

What makes this kind of loss so confusing is that nobody actually removes your chair.

The friendship may still exist.

The memories are still real.

The door hasn’t been slammed.

And yet something has changed.

The assumption of belonging quietly expires.

Nobody announces it.

Nobody sends a formal notice.

One day you simply realize you’re standing in a place where you once felt completely at home and now you’re not quite sure where to sit.

That realization carries its own kind of grief.

Not because someone died.

Not because someone was intentionally hurtful.

But because an ordinary part of life ended and nobody thought to hold a funeral for it.

💔 The Part We Don’t Like to Admit

Sometimes there is another layer.

Sometimes it feels like you’ve been replaced.

Not with a fight.

Not with a declaration.

Just gradually.

Someone else’s life fills with new priorities, new relationships, new routines, and less space remains for the role you once occupied.

The hardest part is that nobody wants to hurt you.

So they offer comfort.

“We should get lunch soon.”

“Let’s stay in touch.”

“We should all hang out sometime.”

And maybe they genuinely mean it when they say it.

But then weeks become months.

The lunch never gets scheduled.

The invitation never arrives.

The friendship survives in theory while quietly shrinking in practice.

Sometimes we’re offered a smaller version of something that used to be large.

Not because anyone is being dishonest.

Because nobody knows what else to offer.

And part of us already knows it isn’t the same thing.

⛈️ When Sadness Travels in Packs

One thing I’ve learned recently is that sadness rarely arrives alone.

Instead, it seems to travel with friends.

A family member dies.

A friendship changes.

A relationship evolves.

A routine disappears.

Someone moves away.

Before you’ve had time to process one loss, another one pulls up a chair.

What makes this especially difficult is that sometimes one of those people, places, or routines was serving as your emotional anchor.

The thing that helped you weather everything else.

The person you called.

The place you went.

The routine that made life feel stable.

Then suddenly the anchor shifts too.

Sometimes the loss that hurts the most isn’t the largest loss.

It’s the loss of the person, place, or routine that helped you carry all the others.

The losses aren’t simply added together.

They multiply.

For a while I kept asking myself why I was struggling so much.

Eventually I realized I wasn’t carrying one sadness.

I was carrying several.

And some days, that’s a heavier load than I wanted to admit.

🐕 The Dogs Have It Figured Out

The dogs seem remarkably unconcerned by all of this.

Their entire philosophy appears to be:

Is there food?

Is there a lap?

Can I smell that?

Beyond that, life seems pretty manageable.

They don’t replay old conversations.

They don’t analyze text messages.

For them, home is wherever love happens to be today.

There’s probably a lesson in that.

I’m just not sure I’m ready to graduate to their level yet.

🌿 Learning to Stay Home

Lately I’ve spent more time in my own backyard.

Pulling weeds.

Watching the dogs.

Thinking.

The funny thing is that I’ve always liked this yard.

It’s private.

Peaceful.

Good for the dogs.

And, as any naturist will tell you, perfectly suitable for reading a book without worrying about tan lines.

Yet somehow I spent years treating it like a layover instead of a destination.

There were always other places to be.

Other people to see.

Other routines to maintain.

Now I’m beginning to realize that the house didn’t change.

Life changed around it.

The house was here all along.

Waiting patiently.

🌧️ You Don’t Get Over It

One of the harder lessons I’ve been learning lately is that sadness isn’t something you get over.

At least not the important kinds.

You don’t get over a friendship changing.

You don’t get over discovering that a place where you once belonged no longer feels quite the same.

You don’t get over realizing that some chapters end without anybody being wrong.

For a while I kept looking for shortcuts.

A distraction.

A project.

A trip.

A solution.

Something that would make me feel better by next Tuesday.

What I’ve discovered instead is that sadness has its own schedule.

It doesn’t care about mine.

The best I can do is acknowledge it’s there, make room for it, and keep moving forward.

Over time, it gets lighter.

Not because I conquered it.

Not because I won.

But because I carried it long enough for it to slowly set itself down.

That’s not overcoming sadness.

That’s living with it until it becomes part of your story instead of the whole story.

⚓ Learning to Be One of My Own Anchors

Last fall I wrote about resilience.

At the time, I thought resilience was mostly about getting back up after life knocked you down.

I still believe that.

What I’m learning now is that resilience has another side.

Sometimes resilience isn’t getting up.

Sometimes it’s sitting still.

Sometimes it’s acknowledging that you’re sad.

Sometimes it’s admitting that several things hurt at once.

Sometimes it’s accepting that there isn’t a shortcut.

For much of my life, some of my emotional stability came from friendships, relationships, routines, and places where I knew I belonged.

Those weren’t just connections.

They were anchors.

When life became difficult, they helped steady me.

When I felt lonely, they gave me connection.

When the world felt uncertain, they made it feel familiar.

The problem with anchors is that sometimes they move.

People build new lives.

Families change.

Friendships evolve.

And sometimes the very thing that helped you weather previous storms is no longer available in quite the same way.

For a while I kept looking for a replacement.

Another person.

Another routine.

Another place to belong.

Then it occurred to me that perhaps this season isn’t asking me to replace an anchor.

Perhaps it’s asking me to become one.

Not my only anchor.

Just one of them.

Strong enough that when life shifts, I don’t immediately drift.

Strong enough that when a friendship changes, I don’t lose my footing.

Strong enough that when sadness arrives, I can carry it without letting it carry me.

At 68 years old, maybe one of the lessons still left for me to learn is how to trust myself with some of that responsibility.

To sit in a quiet house and still feel steady.

To experience sadness without being consumed by it.

To enjoy companionship without making it my foundation.

To know that even when life rearranges itself, I will still be here.

Still standing.

Still learning.

Still becoming.

🌅 Maybe That’s What This Season Is

My grandkids still call me Grandpa.

They’re just six and a half hours away now instead of down the road.

My friends are still my friends.

The people I love are still out there living their lives.

Some are simply farther away than they used to be.

Some geographically.

Some emotionally.

Some both.

And maybe that’s what this season of life is teaching me.

Not how to stop feeling sad.

Not how to get back what used to be.

But how to keep building a life while carrying sadness.

The dogs still need breakfast.

The weeds still need pulling.

New friendships are still waiting to be discovered.

The next conversation is still out there somewhere.

The next place to belong is too.

The house may be quieter these days.

But quiet isn’t always emptiness.

Sometimes it’s simply the sound of one chapter ending and another one preparing to begin.

Last fall, resilience meant getting back up after life knocked me down.

This year, resilience feels different.

This year, it feels like learning how to stand steady while life rearranges itself around me.

Maybe resilience isn’t about avoiding the storm.

Maybe it’s about discovering that even after losing a few anchors, you’re still afloat.

A little battered.

A little sad.

But still moving forward.

And for now, that’s enough.

💬 Share Something About This Post

Have you ever lost a place where you belonged, even though nobody moved away, nobody fought, and nobody officially said goodbye?

I’d love to hear your story in the comments.

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Second Wind

Life after 60—real, raw, rebuilt Essays, Rants, and Reality from the Road

By Steve Williams

❤️ Thank you for spending a few minutes with me today.

Until next time,

Steve

🌊 The Analogy

I’m a visual learner.

When something is difficult to explain directly, I usually start looking for an analogy.

This one came to me while sitting through a conversation that felt a bit like a weather event.

Take communication styles for a moment.

To the best of my knowledge, no university has studied this.

Marine biologists may not agree with it.

But I think communication styles are a lot like different bodies of water.

Some people are like creeks.

Some people are like rivers.

Some people are like oceans.

And the fish in those bodies of water are words.

Or more accurately, they are thoughts, stories, observations, opinions, memories, jokes, questions, and random facts waiting to be released into a conversation.

Some people carry only a handful of fish.

Others appear to contain entire marine ecosystems.

In fact, I sometimes wish people came equipped with a fish counter.

Not a word counter.

A fish counter.

Just a little digital display floating above their head showing how many fish are currently swimming around inside their brain waiting to be released.

A creek might have three fish.

A river might have forty-seven.

An ocean?

Nobody knows.

The display simply reads:

ERROR

Or perhaps:

CALCULATING...

Or:

PLEASE STAND BY

And once you start looking at conversations this way, it’s surprisingly difficult to stop.

🏞️ Corey the Creek

That’s where we meet Corey the Creek.

Or perhaps more accurately, Corey is like a creek.

Corey is an introvert.

Not because he dislikes people.

Not because he has nothing to say.

Quite the opposite.

Corey simply doesn’t carry around many fish.

His fish counter usually reads:

FISH COUNT: 3

Or maybe:

FISH COUNT: 7

Every fish matters.

When Corey catches a fish, he tends to hold onto it for a while.

He studies it.

Thinks about it.

Polishes it up a bit.

Sometimes he even rehearses how he’s going to release it into the conversation.

It’s not unusual for Corey to spend five minutes deciding whether a particular fish is worth sharing.

Usually, it is.

That’s the irony.

The fish are often worth waiting for.

The challenge isn’t the quality of the fish.

It’s timing.

Corey likes openings.

Natural pauses.

Little stretches of calm water where he can gently release a fish and see where it swims.

Unfortunately, those openings don’t always appear.

Sometimes Corey waits so long for the perfect moment that the conversation has already drifted downstream.

And sometimes, just as he’s about to release a perfectly good trout, an ocean fish arrives from nowhere and swallows the entire opportunity whole.

So Corey lowers his hand.

Keeps holding his trout.

And waits for the next opening.

Which may or may not arrive.

That’s life as a creek.

Not many fish.

But the ones you have matter.

🚣 Randy the River

Then there’s Randy the River.

Or perhaps more accurately, Randy is like a river.

If Corey spends five minutes deciding whether to release a fish, Randy has already released one, listened to someone else’s fish, asked a question about that fish, and is preparing another fish of his own.

Randy isn’t an introvert.

He isn’t an ocean either.

He’s what scientists would describe as a healthy conversational ecosystem.

Randy has enough fish to keep things moving, but not so many that anyone needs emergency flotation devices.

His fish counter might read:

FISH COUNT: 47

That’s a respectable number of fish.

Enough to contribute.

Enough to keep things moving.

But not enough to overwhelm the shoreline.

Randy releases a fish.

Someone else releases a fish.

A third person releases a fish.

Questions get answered.

Stories get shared.

People laugh.

Somebody changes the subject.

Nobody panics.

Everybody seems to get a turn.

Fish swim in.

Fish swim out.

Everything works pretty much as nature intended.

The remarkable thing about Randy isn’t the number of fish he has.

It’s that he notices other people’s fish too.

When Corey finally releases a trout, Randy sees it.

He asks about it.

He gives it room to swim.

Sometimes he even helps Corey release a second fish.

Marine biologists refer to this as encouraging participation.

Most families simply call it good conversation.

Randy understands something many oceans occasionally forget.

A conversation isn’t a fishing competition.

The goal isn’t to catch the most fish.

The goal is for everybody to leave with the feeling that their fish mattered.

That’s why rivers tend to be comfortable places.

Nobody is fighting for oxygen.

Nobody is desperately searching for an opening.

The fish move naturally.

The current carries them along.

And somehow everyone gets a chance to swim.

🌊 Oliver the Ocean

Then we have Oliver the Ocean.

Or perhaps more accurately, Oliver is like an ocean.

Most oceans genuinely believe they are participating in a group conversation.

Marine researchers remain divided on this question.

Oliver’s fish counter doesn’t display numbers.

It simply says:

ERROR

Or:

CALCULATING...

Or occasionally:

PLEASE STAND BY

Nobody knows exactly how many fish Oliver has.

Not even Oliver.

Scientists estimate the number is somewhere between a lot and good grief.

The interesting thing about Oliver isn’t that he talks a lot.

It’s that every fish seems connected to three other fish.

Ask Oliver a simple question.

Any question.

“How was your weekend?”

Immediately a trout appears.

That trout reminds him of another trout.

Which reminds him of a salmon.

Which reminds him of a fishing trip.

Which reminds him of a guy named Lawrence.

Who once owned a boat.

Which somehow leads to a documentary about squid.

At this point nobody remembers the original question.

Not even Oliver.

The problem isn’t quality.

It’s volume.

And momentum.

Once Oliver starts releasing fish, the current becomes difficult to slow down.

One fish attracts another fish.

Which attracts a memory fish.

Which attracts a story fish.

Which attracts three additional fish that nobody saw coming.

Before long, an entire school of fish is moving through the conversation.

Meanwhile, Corey is still standing on the shoreline holding one perfectly good trout.

Waiting for an opening.

Unfortunately, openings become difficult to find when a commercial fishing fleet has entered the conversation.

Now, to be fair, Oliver isn’t trying to dominate the conversation.

The challenge is that oceans experience fish abundance.

They have so many fish available that they sometimes forget other people are still trying to release theirs.

It’s a little like bringing a garden hose to a wildfire.

Technically you’re contributing water.

But the scale is different.

Very different.

The funny thing is that oceans are often wonderful people to talk with one-on-one.

You ask a question.

You get an answer.

A story.

A memory.

Three interesting side quests.

A historical footnote.

And occasionally a recommendation for a squid documentary.

The challenge comes when multiple oceans gather together.

At that point, the fish counters begin displaying warning messages.

The currents become unpredictable.

The shoreline starts disappearing.

And somewhere in the distance, Corey quietly lowers his hand and decides to wait for calmer waters.

That’s life around an ocean.

The fish are fascinating.

There’s just an awful lot of them.

🌪️ The Perfect Storm

And then there are those rare occasions when multiple oceans arrive at the same time.

Recently several members of our family gathered for one of those bittersweet occasions that seem to bring everyone together.

On one particular day, there were four oceans present.

Four.

Count them.

Four.

Oliver.

Olivia.

Oscar.

And Ophelia.

Four oceans.

Four fish counters displaying various forms of technological surrender.

The rivers fought bravely.

They really did.

The Randys of the world paddled hard.

They released fish whenever they spotted an opening.

Unfortunately, openings were now considered a temporary condition.

Every time a gap appeared, another school of fish rushed in to occupy it.

The creeks never really had a chance.

Corey stood patiently holding a carefully selected trout.

A very good trout.

Possibly one of his best.

But before he could release it, an ocean fish appeared.

Then another.

Then a third.

The trout remained in custody.

One ocean fish triggered another ocean fish.

Which triggered a memory fish.

Which attracted a story fish.

Which somehow spawned three completely unrelated fish from a different ocean entirely.

Soon there were schools of fish crossing paths in every direction.

Fish discussing other fish.

Fish interrupting fish.

Fish responding to fish that had already swum away ten minutes earlier.

Fish making surprising connections to entirely different fish.

Nobody seemed particularly concerned about where the original fish had gone.

The oceans appeared delighted.

The rivers were working overtime.

The creeks were blinking.

And the fish counters never stood a chance.

At one point I imagined them trying desperately to keep up:

Oliver: ERROR

Olivia: CALCULATING...

Oscar: BUFFERING...

Ophelia: ARE YOU SURE?

Meanwhile the fish population continued to expand.

The conversation developed currents.

Then cross-currents.

Then weather systems.

At some point I believe a tide chart became necessary.

For people with perfectly functioning ears, this was probably entertaining.

For those of us whose hearing comes with batteries, microphones, amplifiers, and occasional acts of faith, it was a bit more challenging.

Personally, I don’t know whether I’m naturally a creek or not.

Hearing loss has a funny way of shrinking rivers.

The more voices that enter the room, the fewer fish I seem able to catch.

Eventually, I simply remove my hearing aids.

It’s less chaotic that way.

The conversation becomes much easier to follow once I stop trying to follow it.

Not dramatically.

Not angrily.

Just quietly.

I smiled.

I nodded.

And surrendered to the tide.

I have no idea what was said after that.

For all I know, someone may have solved world peace somewhere between Lawrence’s boat and the squid documentary.

I couldn’t tell you.

What I do know is that once the hearing aids came out, I had absolutely no desire to put them back in.

🌅 Where Oceans Come From

And that’s when something occurred to me.

We spend a lot of time talking about oceans.

How many fish they have.

How fast they release them.

How difficult it can be to find an opening when they’re around.

But oceans don’t magically appear.

They come from somewhere.

Every ocean begins with inflow.

With creeks.

With rivers.

With countless little streams carrying fresh water from places the ocean may never even see.

The older I get, the more I think conversations work the same way.

The new ideas come from somewhere.

The fresh perspectives come from somewhere.

The unexpected observations come from somewhere.

They arrive one fish at a time.

A trout from a creek.

A salmon from a river.

A fish nobody else in the room was carrying.

Without those fish, the conversation doesn’t grow.

It just circulates the same water.

That’s why I think oceans occasionally need a reminder.

Not because oceans are bad.

Not because they should stop releasing fish.

The world would be a quieter and less interesting place without them.

But oceans only get to be oceans because rivers and creeks keep flowing into them.

Without inflow, an ocean eventually becomes stagnant.

Not overnight.

But eventually.

The fresh water comes from somewhere else.

The new fish come from somewhere else.

The stories, ideas, observations, and perspectives that keep conversations alive arrive from countless rivers and creeks.

Including the quiet ones.

Especially the quiet ones.

The fish that take the longest to release are often the ones worth waiting for.

Which is why, if you’re an ocean, leave a little room near the shoreline.

You never know what fish someone else is holding.

And if you’re a creek, don’t give up on your fish.

It might be exactly the one everyone needed to see.

Even if the oceans never realize it.

And if you’re a river?

Keep doing whatever it is rivers do.

The rest of us are counting on you.

💭 Your Turn

Are you more like a creek, a river, or an ocean?

And has that answer changed at different stages of your life?

I’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments.

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Life after 60—real, raw, rebuilt Essays, Rants, and Reality from the Road

By Steve Williams

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Keep swimming, keep listening, and leave a little room near the shoreline for someone else’s fish.

— Steve

📖 I Could Write a Book • Chapter 3

A continuing collection of stories, memories, misadventures, and life lessons from my first 68 years.

🌉 Before the Towel

My grandfather was a nudist.

That’s probably not the sentence most people expect to read over their morning coffee, but there it is.

To me, it wasn’t particularly unusual.

He was just Grandpa.

Grandpa happened to prefer fewer clothes than most people.

He also had what may have been one of the greatest inventions of the twentieth century: a wrap-around towel with snaps.

Most people had bathrobes.

Grandpa had a system.

A very efficient system.

A very well-ventilated system.

He would sit in his oversized living room chair on that towel. If someone unexpectedly came to the door, he could stand up, wrap one side around the other, snap it together, slide into his flip-flops, and become “dressed.”

At least by Grandpa’s standards.

👦 Kids Don’t Overthink Things

As kids, we barely thought about it.

Adults always seem surprised when I say that.

The truth is that children are remarkably accepting of things that adults spend decades overthinking.

One afternoon we stopped by unexpectedly.

The whole family had arrived at the house, but a couple of us kids headed straight out back to say hello to Grandpa.

There he was behind his above-ground Doughboy pool, shovel in hand, working on some project.

Fortunately, his lower regions were obscured by the pool.

We didn’t need visual confirmation.

We knew.

Mom followed close behind, probably because she knew exactly what we were about to walk into.

After our brief and slightly awkward hello, she guided us back toward the house with the quiet efficiency of someone redirecting traffic around a small family hazard.

For perhaps the only time I can remember, Grandpa looked mildly uncomfortable.

Apparently even lifelong nudists prefer a little advance notice before receiving visitors.

🕵️ The Neighborhood Surveillance Team

The irony was that our family rarely paid much attention to Grandpa’s nudity.

The neighborhood kids, however, treated him like a rare wildlife sighting.

Grandpa had installed privacy panels above his fence, making it considerably taller than a typical backyard fence.

That would have stopped most people.

Not determined neighborhood kids.

I remember catching a couple of them climbing up on things so they could peek over the top.

Apparently Grandpa’s backyard had become the neighborhood’s most heavily fortified tourist attraction.

Meanwhile, the rest of us were mostly concerned about whether Grandma had cookies.

Not necessarily good cookies.

But cookies.

Priorities.

🤔 The Biggest Misconception

Before anyone imagines Grandpa was some sort of exhibitionist, let me stop you right there.

That’s one of the biggest misconceptions about naturism.

Most naturists aren’t looking for an audience.

There’s a difference between enjoying being naked and wanting to be seen naked.

Those are two entirely different things.

I know because I’ve spent most of my life on both sides of that equation.

I was painfully shy as a kid, especially once adolescence arrived and turned every social interaction into a potential humiliation event.

I enjoyed being naked.

I did not enjoy being inspected.

🚿 Growing Up Naked Isn’t the Same Thing

Gym class required communal showers.

The Air Force boot camp required communal showers.

In both cases, it wasn’t nearly as traumatic as I feared because everyone was equally exposed.

Nobody had much room for judgment.

Although I do remember one guy in boot camp who was so remarkably endowed that he strutted from the showers, right through the middle of the barracks, back to his bunk with the confidence of a man who knew exactly what people were thinking.

The rest of us were trying to avoid eye contact and get dressed.

He seemed to be campaigning for public office.

🙈 The Year I Didn’t Go

Years later, I learned about a naturist group called OMEN, which stands for Oregon Men Enjoying Naturism.

It’s a long-established organization with hundreds of members, scheduled events, membership guidelines, volunteer leadership, a website, and an active online community.

I knew about it for years.

In fact, I joined nearly a year before I attended my first event.

Why?

Because I was overweight and self-conscious.

Apparently I had convinced myself there was some secret admission standard.

“Sorry, Steve. You’ve exceeded the naturist weight limit. Please try again after losing thirty pounds.”

Eventually, I got over myself and attended my first event.

🍲 Potlucks, Towels & Name Tags

My first event was a potluck at someone’s house.

As it turns out, that’s one of the most common types of gatherings.

Everyone brings a dish, usually assigned alphabetically, a towel to sit on, and their own beverages.

Basically, it’s a neighborhood potluck with slightly fewer laundry requirements.

There are even name tags.

Sort of.

Nobody wears a sticker that says:

“Hello, my name is Steve.”

Instead, one of the volunteers writes your name directly on your chest with a water-soluble marker.

Unless you’re one of the hairier guys.

Then they improvise.

Shoulder.

Arm.

Bald head.

Whatever real estate is available.

It turns out even in naturism, location matters.

Some gatherings include pools, hot tubs, themed parties, camping trips, or karaoke.

Because apparently there are people brave enough to sing in public while naked.

🎤 Neil Diamond to the Rescue

I’ve now participated in karaoke at two different naturist events.

I’ve been singing karaoke for more than thirty years, so that part wasn’t new.

I’m especially known for my Neil Diamond songs, and when I belt out the right one, I can usually count on a pretty good round of applause.

What surprised me was how quickly that helped people remember me.

I became less “the new guy” and more “the guy who sings Neil Diamond.”

After spending nearly a year worrying about how I looked, I discovered people were far more interested in how I sang.

Life is funny that way.

❤️ What I Actually Found

What I discovered at that first gathering was both surprising and completely predictable.

Nobody cared.

The group is genuinely body positive.

There are men of every size, shape, age, and comfort level.

Younger guys. Older guys. Hairy guys. Smooth guys. Guys with canes. Guys with guitars. Guys who have lost a lot of weight and guys who clearly have no intention of starting that particular project today.

Some bodies tell stories of age, illness, injury, weight loss, weight gain, surgery, confidence, insecurity, and just plain living.

And somehow, none of it seems to matter.

Nobody is there grading the merchandise.

They’re just people.

Standing around talking.

Floating in the pool.

Soaking in the hot tub.

Arguing over who makes the best potato salad.

In other words, normal people doing normal people things.

Today, OMEN has roughly 450 members and continues to grow every month, though most individual events are much smaller, usually somewhere between 25 and 50 people.

Which is still enough naked men to make you realize your body-image concerns may have been dramatically overestimating their own importance.

❓ The Question Everyone Wants to Ask

One question people often ask is whether naturist gatherings are sexual.

The short answer is no.

At least at the events I’ve attended, the focus is far less exciting than people imagine.

It’s mostly food, conversation, swimming, hot tubs, karaoke, camping, and trying to remember who brought the potato salad.

Which, frankly, is plenty.

What surprised me wasn’t the nudity.

What surprised me was how quickly the nudity became the least interesting thing in the room.

Once you get past that, you’re just talking to people.

People with stories.

People with insecurities.

People with successes.

People with scars.

People who are learning, just like the rest of us, to become a little more comfortable in their own skin.

🩴 Grandpa Knew Something

My family already knows I like being naked.

What they may not know is that I’ve apparently found around 450 men in Oregon who agree it’s not nearly as unusual as most people think.

Looking back, Grandpa may have understood something that took me nearly sixty years to figure out.

The freedom wasn’t about taking off your clothes.

The freedom was caring a little less about what other people thought once they were off.

Grandpa had a wrap-around towel.

I thought it was just a piece of fabric.

Turns out it was a life lesson with snaps.

💬 Your Turn

Did your family have someone who seemed perfectly normal growing up, only for you to realize later they were a little unconventional?

Or have you ever spent years worrying about something that turned out not to matter nearly as much as you thought?

I’d love to hear your stories in the comments.

Leave a comment

📖 I Could Write a Book is an ongoing memoir series featuring stories, memories, misadventures, and life lessons from my first 68 years.

Previous chapters:

• Mama Mia’s - Part 1

• Mama Mia’s - Part 2

• Grandpa’s Towel (Chapter 3)

🎙️ Prefer listening? An audio narration of this story is available above.

❤️ If this story made you smile, brought back a memory, or gave you something to think about, please consider liking, commenting, sharing, or subscribing.

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☕ If you’d like to support Second Wind:

Buy Me a Coffee: https://buymeacoffee.com/stevewpdx

Thank you for reading and being part of the journey.

Part 1 was mostly about the place.

The building.
The food.
The smells.
The ovens.
The anchovies nobody wanted to touch unless legally required.

But Mama Mia’s wasn’t just a pizza restaurant on Manzanita Avenue. It was a whole little world, with its own geography, its own rhythm, and its own cast of characters moving through it.

And most of us were young enough to think the whole thing was just a job.

It wasn’t.

At least, not only that.

Mama Mia’s paid us by the hour, but looking back now, the real compensation came much later, in friendships, stories, and memories that somehow stayed warm for fifty years.

The Two Worlds of Mama Mia’s 🍷

Mama Mia’s didn’t have booths, at least not the way I remember it.

It had round tables covered in red-and-white checkered tablecloths, the wipeable kind that could survive spilled soda, greasy fingers, parmesan dust, and whatever chaos a family pizza night could throw at them.

When customers walked in the front door, the original dining room was straight ahead. To the left was Angelina’s Garden, the larger addition that replaced what had once been side parking for the restaurant. After that, customer parking was mostly limited to the front area near the road, with a few employee spots out back near the dumpsters.

I believe Angelina’s Garden was at least twice the size of the original dining room, separated by a partial wall with doorways on both sides and window panels in between.

The public side had lattice, fake grapes draped from the ceiling and artfully placed on some of the walls, and that unmistakable 1970s wall paneling that seemed to appear everywhere back then, usually without apology.

That was the side Linda worked.

Linda came into the Mama Mia’s scene after Tom C had left, after Angelina’s Garden had been built, and after the brief Rico’s era. By the time she started, Forrie owned the place outright.

She was a waitress, which meant she worked the side of Mama Mia’s the customers actually saw. She moved through the dining areas, took orders, carried food, filled beers from the tap into frozen mugs, and probably handled more customer personalities in a single shift than any of us in the back had to deal with all night.

There were large chest-style freezers where the beer mugs were kept frozen. If I’m remembering correctly, they had see-through top doors that slid back to open, which the waitresses and bus boys opened and closed to get mugs or restock them.

Wine, as I remember it, was served from large jugs or possibly box wine. I don’t remember there being any sophisticated choice beyond red or white.

Red was likely Cabernet Sauvignon. White may have been Riesling or Sauvignon Blanc.

There was none of the modern wine-snobbery vocabulary we have now.

No notes of elderflower.
No hint of wet gravel.
No playful acidity with a whisper of pear.

Just red or white.

Possibly cold. Possibly not.

Please enjoy your lasagna.

The beer and wine station was toward the back of Angelina’s Garden, near the office in the back corner. The office sat adjacent to that area, on the other side of the beer mug freezer.

It all sounds organized when I describe it now.

I am quite sure it was not always organized when we were actually working there

The Windows Between the Worlds 🍕

There were two order windows, something I recently mentioned to Linda, and she confirmed the memory.

The front window handled Italian food and sandwich orders. Waitresses would place and pick up those orders there, and customers could see movement in the front part of the kitchen, but not really at face level. Mostly they saw cooks moving around back there, half-glimpsed through the working machinery of the restaurant.

Pizza orders were handled farther back, near the Dutch door with the window into the pizza kitchen.

That was more my world.

The back-of-house world was heat, dough, sauce, ovens, flour, the meat slicer, the industrial dishwasher, and that swamp cooler trying bravely, and not always successfully, to stand up to a pizza oven running somewhere around 400 to 500 degrees.

The big pizza oven had two smooth, stone-like shelves where we slid the raw pizzas directly into the heat. We used a large wooden paddle to place them in and pull them back out again.

The dough was yeast-based, made fresh in a huge mixer with a hook-style attachment and a giant bowl, using the secret ingredient. Each batch needed time to rise, because pizza dough, unlike teenagers, apparently benefits from patience.

And yes, I do know the secret ingredient.

I’m just not sure I’m ready to reveal it yet.

Every old pizza place deserves to keep at least one secret.

After the dough was ready, we measured it depending on the pizza size, shaped it into a ball, flattened it by hand, then ran it through a flattening machine instead of using a handheld roller. After that, we tossed it until it was about the right size, shaped the outer crust by hand, added the sauce and toppings, slid the wooden paddle underneath, opened that blast furnace of an oven, and sent it in.

It was hot back there.

Not summer afternoon hot.

Pizza oven hot.

Swamp-cooler-losing-the-battle hot.

The kind of hot where you could feel your teenage face being lightly preheated.

And somehow, in the middle of all that, we had fun

Linda and the Funnest Job 🍽️

Somewhere in that Mama Mia’s era, when we were both about eighteen, I met Linda Helwick.

Linda and I are only three weeks apart in age, which somehow makes the fifty-year thread of our friendship feel even more interesting to me.

We were young then. Not young in the sweet, soft-focus, nostalgic way. Actually young. Half-grown, under-rested, convinced we knew far more than we did, and probably running on pizza, soda, hormones, and whatever sleep we could steal between shifts and school and whatever else we thought was important at the time.

I got Linda a job at Mama Mia’s, and all these years later, she still says I got her the funnest job she ever had.

Not the best-paying job.

Not the most glamorous job.

The funnest.

That says a lot.

Because the thing about Mama Mia’s is that it didn’t look important while it was happening. It looked like work. It looked like orders to fill, tables to clear, pizzas to make, mugs to freeze, dishes to wash, and customers to feed.

But underneath all that, something else was happening.

Friendships were forming.
Stories were baking.
People were becoming permanent chapters in each other’s lives.

We just didn’t know it yet.

The People in the Heat 🔥

A restaurant has the side customers see and the side workers remember.

The customers saw Linda and the other waitresses moving through the dining room and Angelina’s Garden, balancing plates and drinks and customer requests with whatever grace they could manage during a rush.

We saw the back, where the oven roared, the dough stretched, the slicer worked, and the dishwasher slid trays in one side and sent them clattering out the other.

We were all connected by those service windows.

Orders passed through them.
Food passed through them.
Jokes passed through them.
Complaints passed through them.
Probably a fair amount of flirting passed through them too.

Those windows were more than openings in a wall. They were the places where the front and back of the restaurant kept bumping into each other all night.

Out front, the customers saw lattice, fake grapes, checkered tablecloths, frozen beer mugs, and waitresses keeping the night moving.

In back, we saw tickets, dough, ovens, steam, sauce, dishes, and each other.

That was the real view.

The people around the pizza oven.

Glenn V and the Disneyland Decision 🚗

One of those people was Glenn Vogel.

For clarity, this is Glenn V, not to be confused with other Glenns who have wandered through my life. At this point, even my memories require last initials.

When I asked Glenn V recently about his favorite Mama Mia’s memory, one of the first things he said was that Mama Mia’s was a fun place to work.

That matched what Linda said.

It matched what I remembered too.

But Glenn V and I also shared one particular adventure that probably deserves its own warning label.

One night after work, we were out with some of the Mama Mia’s crew at an all-night restaurant. It may have been Denny’s. It may have been Eppie’s. Memory is not always kind enough to preserve the name of the restaurant, but it does remember the feeling: late night, tired bodies, young people laughing, nobody quite ready to go home.

Somehow, in that late-night teenage haze, Glenn V and I tried to convince everyone that we should all drive to Disneyland.

Because, obviously.

That is exactly the kind of thing two eighteen-year-olds think is perfectly reasonable at one in the morning.

Everyone else, showing rare and frankly suspicious maturity, thought we were crazy.

So Glenn V and I went anyway.

We climbed into my white MG Midget, probably with the top down for at least part of the drive, and headed from Sacramento toward Southern California in the middle of the night.

No hotel reservation.
No real plan.
No sleep.

Just a tiny British sports car, youthful stupidity, and the kind of confidence only available before the sensible parts of your brain start asking for receipts.

We arrived in the Los Angeles area around six or seven in the morning, before Disneyland even opened.

Then we called our friend Pat, who had worked at Mama Mia’s and had moved to Corona with her husband, Jeff. We visited them first, probably cleaned up a little, maybe rested for a minute, and then went to Disneyland.

And we didn’t just pop in for the afternoon.

We stayed from opening until closing, which I believe was midnight.

Because after driving all night, naturally the next step is a full day and night at the Happiest Place on Earth.

Then we drove back.

Overnight.

Again.

By the time we returned to Sacramento, Glenn V had to work a shift at Mama Mia’s about an hour later.

I don’t know exactly what he looked like during that shift, but I’m guessing somewhere between Bakersfield and Sacramento, his body made it home and the rest of him was still trying to catch up

+

Lucky We Survived Ourselves ⚠️

Looking back now, that Disneyland trip feels funny.

And it is funny.

It is also one of those stories that comes with a little asterisk attached.

Because we were young in an era when people did things that now make you pause mid-sentence and think, Good grief, how are we still alive?

There were late nights.
There were long drives.
There was probably too much caffeine.
There may have been things we used to stay awake that were either legal, barely legal, or legal only if nobody asked too many questions.

And yes, there was drinking in those years too.

After closing the restaurant, some of us would sometimes gather in Angelina’s Garden or near the bar area. There were beers. And on some nights, one beer became several.

I have one memory from that era that is not funny, at least not now.

One night, after drinking far too much, I drove home in my parents’ white 1967 Impala wagon.

Oddly enough, I not only remember the exact year, make, and model of that car, I remember the license plate: TJH092. I also remember the license plate of an even earlier family car, a 1963 Chevy Biscayne, but that’s a different story for a different time.

I don’t remember the whole drive. What I do remember is a flash of Madison Avenue late at night, probably around two or three in the morning, speeding east toward Fair Oaks on that wide, well-lit road with all its traffic lights.

I was in no condition to drive.

Not even close.

I may have run lights. I may have been going way too fast. I honestly don’t know all the details, and that is part of what makes the memory so unsettling.

I made it home.

That is not a funny ending.

It is a lucky one.

And I don’t want to dress that memory up as some charming teenage adventure, because it wasn’t. I could have killed myself. I could have killed someone else.

I absolutely should not have been driving.

That is part of the truth too.

Some memories make you laugh because everyone got home safely.

Some memories make you quiet because you realize they might not have.

That is one of the strange gifts of getting older. You can hold two truths at once.

You can remember the fun.

And you can admit the danger.

You can have compassion for the reckless kid you were.

And still be grateful he didn’t get the final word.

Back then, we thought we were invincible.

Now I look back and realize we were mostly just fortunate.

Fortunate, and apparently very hard to kill.

The Night My Dad Became the Hero 🧽

Not every memory from Mama Mia’s is wild or funny.

Some are quieter.

One night, the restaurant got absolutely slammed. Not just busy. Slammed.

Pizzas.
Sandwiches.
Lasagnas.
Orders coming in faster than we could make them.
And near the dishwasher, the dishes, pots, pans, and trays kept piling up like they had no intention of stopping.

I usually spent most of my time in the back making pizzas. That was more my world. But I was also quick and efficient up front, so on Friday and Saturday nights during the dinner rush, I often got assigned to the front station making sandwiches and helping keep that side moving.

That night, everything seemed to hit at once.

I assume the rush was unexpected, because the staffing sure didn’t match the workload. By the time we finally closed, I was the one responsible for cleanup and closing the shop.

The place looked like it had lost a food fight with itself.

Stacks of dishes.
Pots and pans.
Cleanup everywhere.
A tired teenage body.
A brain that had run out of cheerful.

I was probably sixteen or seventeen years old. It may have been a school night. I just remember being exhausted and overwhelmed, standing there after midnight with the kind of mess that feels personal.

At some point, I had to call my dad to let him know I wasn’t going to be home when expected. There was still too much work to do before I could close the place.

He could have scolded me.

He could have been irritated that his teenage son was still at work in the middle of the night.

He could have called the owner and complained that a kid had been left with too much to handle.

Instead, he showed up.

It must have been around one or two in the morning.

My dad was not a perfect man. None of us are. But he was committed to his four boys, and that night remains one of the clearest examples I have of what that looked like in real life.

He didn’t come in with a lecture.

He didn’t make a scene.

He didn’t force me to quit.

He didn’t turn it into a lesson about responsibility, although he certainly could have.

He just helped.

My dad had to work the next day, I’m sure. He had his own responsibilities, his own tiredness, his own reasons to stay home in bed.

But he came down to Mama Mia’s and helped his teenage son clean up the wreckage of a slammed restaurant shift.

That was a hero moment.

Not the movie kind. No cape. No soundtrack. No dramatic speech.

Just my dad, standing beside me in the middle of the night, helping me finish the work I couldn’t get through alone.

That memory has stayed with me for fifty years.

Not because it was dramatic.

Because it wasn’t.

It was love with rolled-up sleeves.

Sometimes the moments that shape you don’t arrive with music swelling in the background. Sometimes they arrive smelling like dishwater and pizza sauce, with your dad standing beside you saying, in effect:

Let’s get this done.

Around the Pizza Oven 👥

That is what Mama Mia’s gave me.

Not just paychecks.

People.

Linda, who still remembers it as the funnest job.

Glenn V, who was willing to drive all night to Disneyland on a whim, and somehow still report to work after returning from what was basically a two-person endurance test disguised as a road trip.

Pat and Jeff in Corona, part of that strange little orbit.

Sherry, Linda’s friend, who worked there for a while and later passed away far too young.

Rose, in the kitchen.

Cousin Ron, who worked there for a while too.

Forrie, with the kind of bawdy old-school humor that belonged very much to that era and probably needs its own safety railing now.

And my dad, showing up after midnight when I needed help but probably didn’t know how to ask for it.

That little restaurant was more than a place where we made pizzas.

It was where we made friendships.
It was where we made mistakes.
It was where we learned how much work a busy night could be.
It was where we learned that people could show up for you.

Sometimes with laughter.

Sometimes with a ridiculous road trip.

Sometimes with a dish towel.

Some Jobs Pay You by the Hour 💵

Mama Mia’s paid me by the hour.

I believe it was somewhere in the two-dollars-and-something range, give or take fifty cents.

Not exactly retirement money.

But looking back now, that was never the real paycheck.

The real payoff came later.

It came in the friendships that lasted.

The stories that still make me laugh.

The memories that still make me pause.

The realization that the people beside you in some ordinary little job might one day become part of your life in ways you could never have imagined at the time.

Some jobs pay you by the hour.

Others pay you in stories you’re still telling fifty years later.

Your Turn 💬

Did you ever have a job that paid terribly but somehow gave you memories, friendships, or stories that lasted far longer than the paycheck?

I’d love to hear about it in the comments.

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Someone else may have their own version of Mama Mia’s: the place that paid by the hour but somehow left them with stories for life.

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This one got longer than my usual weekly posts, mostly because Mama Mia’s wasn’t just a job. It was a place, a cast of characters, a first taste of adulthood, and the beginning of friendships that have lasted nearly fifty years.

So I’m splitting it into two parts.

This week is about the place, the people, the cars, the pizza, and the friendships that began there.

Next week, I’ll get into the wilder stories: Disneyland on no sleep, the night my dad showed up, and a few reminders that some of us are lucky we survived our teenage years at all.

Because if I’m going to write about Mama Mia’s, I might as well admit right up front:

There was more than one slice to this story.

📡 The Red Hot Dot

I think my first official W-2 job was at Mama Mia’s, a small Italian restaurant and pizza place at 4751 Manzanita Avenue in Carmichael, California.

Don’t ask me how I remember the address.

Actually, I do know.

Back in the 1970s, a lot of us had CB radios in our cars. Everybody had a “handle,” which was basically a username before usernames required passwords, recovery codes, and a nervous breakdown.

Mine was The Red Hot Dot, because I drove a red 1972 Datsun 1200 that I tried very hard to turn into something cooler than a Datsun 1200 had any right to be.

I put mag wheels on it.
Jacked up the back with air shocks.
Added a big CB whip antenna.
My friend Ron Amaro and I even did DIY tuck-and-roll upholstery.
And I replaced the exhaust manifold with a header, because apparently four cylinders needed to be announced.

For my fake call letters, I used K-MM-4751.

The “MM” stood for Mama Mia’s.
The “4751” was the address.

So yes, somewhere in Carmichael, there was a teenage boy driving around in what I have often described as a pregnant Pepsi can, announcing himself over the CB radio as:

“The Red Hot Dot, K-double-M 4751.”

We were easily entertained back then.

And honestly, I kind of miss that.

🍕 The job that became an era

Mama Mia’s wasn’t just a job.

It became one of those time capsules you don’t realize you’re building until decades later, when someone says one name, one song comes on the radio, or you smell pizza dough in a pizza oven, and suddenly you’re sixteen again.

I believe I started there around 1974, when I was about sixteen. My friend Glenn Vogel got me the job. Glenn and I had gone to junior high together, though we ended up at different high schools. He went to San Juan. I went to Bella Vista.

Glenn was one of those guys who always had cooler cars than the rest of us. His first hot car was a Hunter Green Cougar, the same model and color as the Matchbox car I had loved as a little kid.

I used to make dirt roads and trails and drive that little Hunter Green Cougar around like it was the most important vehicle in the world.

Then Glenn got the real thing.

Hunter Green, no less, which also happens to be my favorite color. Apparently my taste in vehicles was established somewhere between childhood dirt trails and teenage cruising. My current truck is Hunter Green too, so at least I’m consistent.

Glenn added side pipes, mag wheels, probably headers, and whatever else one added in the 1970s when subtlety was not the goal.

That car was the talk of the town.

And we went cruising in it, because that’s what you did.

You didn’t text.
You didn’t stream.
You didn’t doom-scroll in bed until midnight.

You got in somebody’s car and drove around pretending there was a destination.

Sometimes there was.

Usually there wasn’t.

💚 Linda walks in, and fifty years begin

Somewhere in that Mama Mia’s era, when we were both about eighteen, I met Linda Green, who later became Linda Helwick. We are only three weeks apart in age, which somehow makes the fifty-year thread of our friendship feel even more interesting to me.

At the time, she was working at Long John Silver’s. We were young, we hung out, we partied, and yes, there may have been a mutual crush in there somewhere. I was too shy to do much with that information, which is very on-brand for teenage me.

At some point, I told her about Mama Mia’s. She was interested. One thing led to another, and she ended up working there as a waitress.

Linda’s friend Sherry also worked at Mama Mia’s for a while. She passed away in 2011 from brain cancer, but finding this photo brought her right back into the room.

And unlike most teenage work friendships, Linda stayed.

Not just at Mama Mia’s, although she worked there for years after I left, but in my life.

Our threads kept crossing and weaving for the next fifty years. At one point, we even told each other we were pregnant around the same time.

“Hey, I’m pregnant.”

“Really? Me too.”

Our now-adult children are only a couple months apart.

That kind of thing does not happen with every friend.

Some people pass through a chapter.

Linda became part of the book.

When I asked Linda what she remembered about Mama Mia’s, she didn’t give me a timeline or a business history. She gave me something better: the feeling of it.

She remembered having fun.

She said it was her favorite job she ever had.

A few days later, I asked Glenn V the same kind of question. One of the first things he said when he called was that Mama Mia’s was simply a fun place to work.

That may be the whole story right there.

Not who owned what.
Not when the second location opened.
Not which employee worked which shift.

Just that simple truth:

We had a lot of fun.

And somehow, fifty years later, that still matters.

🤌 Tom, Forrie, and the grown-ups in the room

When I first started, Mama Mia’s was owned by Tom Cavalla.

Tom was one of those larger-than-life restaurant guys, Italian by heritage, with dark hair, a big mustache, and a big laugh. I can still picture him sitting at the employee table, telling jokes with whoever wandered in during the day.

Mo from Circle K.
Tony from the liquor store next door.
Phil, the real estate guy.
Regulars.
Friends.
People who probably came in for lunch and stayed for gossip.

Tom expanded the restaurant by adding a section called Angelina’s Garden, named, I believe, after his daughter. It had lattice and fake grapes hanging from the ceiling, the kind of 1970s restaurant atmosphere that somehow made perfect sense at the time.

But that expansion may have stretched things too far. Eventually, Tom needed a business partner.

For a while, a man who owned a pizza chain called Rico’s came into the picture. I believe his name was Mike Cuccia, pronounced something like ka-chia, though I may not have the spelling quite right.

The mood changed almost overnight.

His motto was:

“If you are leaning, you should be cleaning.”

Which meant that if there weren’t pizzas to make, there were shelves to scrub, floors to clean, and things to wipe down that had already been wiped down.

We were not fans.

Eventually, through Tony from the liquor store, Tom was introduced to Forrest Hills, who had previously owned a furniture business called Forest Hills Furniture. We called him Forrie.

Forrie helped push the Rico’s arrangement out of the picture and initially became Tom’s partner. Eventually, he became the owner.

And we loved Forrie.

He was short, Jewish, funny, and always ready with a joke. One I still remember was:

“I was so poor when I was a child, if I hadn’t been a boy, I wouldn’t have had anything to play with.”

That was Forrie.

Linda remembered another Forrie joke too, one that was probably better left in the 1970s, which may be exactly why we remembered it.

He smoked cigarettes with us, apparently under the impression that his wife Marge didn’t know. I’m guessing Marge was not nearly as fooled as he hoped.

Forrie became one of my earliest mentors. He trusted Glenn and me to run the restaurant. He joked with us. He treated us like we mattered.

For a teenage kid learning how work worked, that meant something.

It still does.

🎭 The Mama Mia’s cast of characters

Every good restaurant has a cast.

Mama Mia’s certainly did.

There was Rose, who was basically the unofficial matron of the place. Red hair, high hairdo, warm, funny, motherly, and large-and-in-charge in the way great waitresses often were back then. Think Alice, with a little extra smoke break and a lot more real life.

There was Karen Mathis, who we called Wheels. I think Tom gave her that nickname. She drove a Mustang fastback, and in that world, a car could absolutely become part of your identity.

There was Jimmy Hamblin, who was a character in the best possible way.

There was another guy, maybe named Brent, who had a habit of talking in initials. Around that time, the song “Someone’s Knocking at the Door” was popular, and he would sing things like:

“♪ S-O-K-A-T-D ♪”

And somehow we were expected to decode it.

Most of the time, we did.

To this day, if I hear that song, I think of him, Mama Mia’s, and all of us standing around acting like that was a normal way to communicate.

Which, in fairness, was probably still clearer than half the texts people send now.

There was also another guy whose name I can’t quite pin down. Maybe Frank. He may have been one of Glenn’s friends from high school. I remember training him one night, and while we were covering food containers with aluminum foil, he asked whether the shiny side should face up or down.

At the time, I thought it was one of the funniest, or possibly dumbest, questions I had ever heard.

Years later, of course, I found myself wondering if maybe he had been onto something. Aluminum foil does have a shiny side and a dull side. Or satin, if we’re being fancy now.

So maybe Frank wasn’t dumb.

Maybe he was just ahead of Reynolds Wrap science.

Linda also reminded me of something I had completely forgotten: the waitresses wore red dresses, and apparently someone in the kitchen once lowered the freezer racks so the women had to bend over farther to reach the frozen mugs.

I don’t remember being part of that, and it doesn’t sound like something I would have done. Even before I came out years later, that was not my department.

Still, it’s one of those workplace memories that says a lot about the era: funny in hindsight only because it was so juvenile, and also a reminder that not everything from the good old days was actually good.

🍽️ The pizza was the star

Mama Mia’s was an Italian restaurant, but the pizza was the thing.

There were Italian dishes. There were lasagnas. There were sub sandwiches served on wooden boards with little cup-holder-style indentations for condiments like sub sauce, mayonnaise, and whatever else went into those little paper inserts.

And there was a pepper steak sandwich that I still think about.

Toasted bun.
Pizza oven.
Perfect.

I have not had one like it since.

But the pizzas were what people remembered.

The dough was made fresh daily. Every pizza was made from scratch. We would weigh out the dough, form it into a ball, flatten it, roll it out, and eventually toss it in the air like we actually knew what we were doing.

And we did.

The crust was thicker, flavorful, and people loved it. There was a secret ingredient in that dough, and no, I’m not telling. Some things deserve to remain locked in the vault.

There was homemade red sauce, lots of cheese, plenty of toppings, and a little sprinkle of cheese on top.

And then there were anchovies.

Nobody wanted to make the anchovy pizza.

Back then, we weren’t wearing surgical gloves or using fancy food-service prep systems. If someone ordered anchovies, somebody had to stick their hand into that oily little can of fish doom and put them on the pizza.

It became a standing gotcha.

The waitress would bring the order to the window and call out, “Order up.”

If one of us spotted anchovies on the ticket before anyone else saw us look, we suddenly developed urgent business elsewhere.

Then, with great innocence, we’d say, “Hey, can you check that order?”

Around anchovies, loyalty had a very short shelf life.

⚠️ Next week: the warning-label stories

Mama Mia’s was an Italian restaurant, but looking back, the food was only part of it.

The real recipe was the people: Glenn, Linda, Tom, Forrie, Rose, Wheels, Jimmy, Brent, maybe-Frank, Sherry, and all the regulars who turned a little pizza place on Manzanita Avenue into something that still lives in my memory.

Next week, I’ll get into the stories that probably deserve their own warning label: the night my dad showed up after closing, the impulsive Disneyland trip with Glenn, and the uncomfortable truth that some of us were very lucky to survive ourselves.

Because Mama Mia’s wasn’t just where I learned to make pizza.

It was one of the first places where I started becoming myself.

Your turn

If you remember Mama Mia’s, Rico’s, Mike & Monica’s, or that Manzanita Avenue neighborhood orbit, I’d love to hear what you remember.

Names, stories, corrections, menu favorites, questionable cars, all of it.

Some memories are better when somebody else walks in and says, “Wait, I remember that too.”

If this story stirred up one of your own old memories, consider subscribing to Second Wind.

I’m collecting the stories that keep tapping me on the shoulder, including the funny ones, the tender ones, and the ones that still smell faintly like pizza sauce and questionable decisions.

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Were you part of the Mama Mia’s orbit, or do you remember a place like it?

Drop a comment with the names, stories, menu items, cars, or tiny details that somehow survived fifty years in your memory.

Bonus points if your memory involves a questionable uniform, a jukebox song, or a car that was louder than it needed to be.

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If this reminded you of your first job, your old crew, or the kind of place that became bigger in memory than it ever looked from the street, feel free to share it.

Some stories find their missing pieces only after someone else says, “I was there too.”

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If you’d like to support this little memory excavation project, you can buy me a coffee here:

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Or, given today’s story, maybe toss a few coins toward the pizza fund.

I promise not to spend it on anchovies.

Anyone who knows me well has probably heard me say:

“I could write a book… and I’d call it I Could Write a Book!”

I usually say it after something ridiculous happens.

Or something painful.

Or something so oddly specific that all you can really do is stand there blinking and think:

You cannot make this shit up.

That’s really what I mean when I say it.

Not that I’ve lived some grand, polished, candlelit life with sweeping orchestral music playing in the background. I haven’t. My life has had fewer violins and more:

“Wait. What just happened?”

But it has had chapters.

Plenty of them.

📚 Maybe I Wasn’t Kidding

For years, “I could write a book” was just one of those things I said.

A reaction.

A punchline.

A little verbal shrug after life added another entry to the “you cannot make this shit up” file.

But the more I’ve written here on Second Wind, the more I’ve started to realize something:

Maybe the book has been sitting there all along.

Not as one big dramatic memoir.

Not as some serious, important, leather-bound Life Story with a moody author photo on the back cover.

More like a collection.

A shelf.

A pile of chapters I didn’t know I was writing while I was busy living them.

Some funny.

Some painful.

Some tender.

Some still standing in the corner refusing to explain themselves.

And some that probably need a little more time before they can be safely handled without emotional oven mitts.

🗂️ The Chapters I Didn’t Know I Was Writing

There was being the second son, which is not just a birth order, but apparently a lifelong department assignment.

There was Mama Mia’s in the 1970s, where I started learning that work, family, food, and chaos often share the same table.

There was Scotland and England in 1975, long before I fully understood how travel can plant something in you that keeps sending postcards from the inside.

There were the Air Force years, including Fairchild AFB, Washington, Elmendorf AFB, Alaska, and Blytheville AFB, Arkansas, where young adulthood showed up wearing a uniform and pretending it knew what it was doing.

There was becoming a real dad in 1988, which changed more than my schedule.

It changed the way I understood love, responsibility, and what it means to show up when it matters.

There was the Pacific NorthWet, because apparently I decided to build a life in a place where the weather has moods and moss has ambition.

There was Tucson, twice, because some places don’t just appear in your life once.

They circle back like they forgot something.

There was coming out at 36, which is young enough to still feel dramatic and old enough to have bills, opinions, and a suspicious number of household items you suddenly have to reconsider.

There was Whidbey Island, where another version of me began taking shape against a backdrop beautiful enough to make even confusion look scenic.

There were softball fields, RCSA, CC Slaughter’s, drag queens, campy nights, chosen community, and the kind of laughter that tells you you’ve found a room where parts of you no longer have to whisper.

There was Greece.

There was Amsterdam, France, Spain.

There was Maine.

There was Australia.

There was Mexico.

There was the travel bug, which apparently bit me early, went dormant occasionally, and then came roaring back later in life like it had been training underground.

There was Piper Road, a whole chapter of building, hosting, managing, pivoting, and trying to make something beautiful and profitable out of a property, an idea, and an unreasonable amount of hope.

And now there’s this current era:

Intermittent fasting.
Weight loss.
Reinvention.
Aging.
Reflection.
Dogs.
Long walks.
Strange little victories.

And the ongoing attempt to turn a life into something more useful than a pile of loose receipts.

I don’t know yet which stories will come first.

That’s part of the fun.

Or the problem.

Maybe both.

🧩 Some of You Were There

One thing I already know is that some of these stories won’t come entirely from my memory.

Some of you were there.

At Mama Mia’s.

On softball fields.

During certain trips, family gatherings, old jobs, big transitions, or nights that probably made sense at the time.

You may remember details I’ve forgotten.

A name.

A song.

A booth.

A bad decision.

A line someone said that deserves to be rescued from the attic.

And honestly, I welcome that.

If one of these future chapters touches a season of life we shared, feel free to remind me what you remember.

Not because I promise to include every detail, but because memory is funny that way.

Sometimes one person’s small recollection opens a whole drawer you forgot was there.

That would make this series feel a little more alive and less like me rummaging through the archives alone with a flashlight and a questionable filing system.

📖 Not a Memoir. More Like a Shelf.

Let me be clear.

I am not announcing that I’m about to sit in a velvet chair, sip tea, and write my Important Life Story while gazing meaningfully out a window.

For one thing, I don’t own a velvet chair.

For another, my attention span would wander off by Chapter Two and come back holding snacks.

This will not be a strict autobiography.

I may not tell the stories in order, because life didn’t happen that neatly and my memory does not retrieve files like a competent office assistant.

This is more like a shelf.

Some weeks, I’ll pull down an old story.

Some weeks, I’ll write about what’s happening right now.

Some weeks, the world will do something so absurd that I’ll have no choice but to point at it and ask whether anyone else is seeing this.

And some weeks, I may just need to write about dogs, aging, travel, family, grief, health, humor, or whatever fresh nonsense wandered across the porch and knocked over a plant.

That is still Second Wind.

The book series just gives part of it a home.

🌬️ Why Now?

Over the past year, I’ve written a lot about the machinery of getting through life.

Aging.

Health.

Grief.

Debt.

Family.

Loneliness.

Relationships.

Resilience.

Reinvention.

All the stuff that comes with trying to stay upright, stay decent, stay solvent, stay connected, and occasionally remember why you walked into the kitchen.

Plus dogs who believe treats are a constitutional right and walks are a binding contract.

I’m glad I wrote those pieces.

I needed them.

But I also want Second Wind to breathe a little differently now.

I want more story.

More scenes.

More characters.

More humor.

More places.

More of the strange little details that make a life feel lived rather than merely analyzed.

Because there is a difference between explaining what happened and telling the story of what happened.

One gives the facts.

The other lets people sit beside you for a minute.

That’s what I want more of here.

Not just reflection.

Story.

The kind you can hear.

The kind that has a setting, a mood, a few questionable decisions, and maybe one person in the corner who absolutely should not have been given a microphone.

🧭 What Comes Next

From time to time, you’ll see posts under the I Could Write a Book! umbrella.

Think of them as chapters.

Not necessarily in order.

Not necessarily polished by nostalgia.

Not necessarily tied up with a lesson and a ribbon.

But true to the way memory actually works:

One scene lighting up another.

One story tugging on the sleeve of the next.

Some chapters may be funny.

Some may be tender.

Some may be about identity, family, travel, reinvention, work, fatherhood, gay life, aging, or the strange little moments that explain more than they should.

Some may be about places.

Some may be about people.

Some may be about the younger version of me who thought he knew what he was doing.

Bless his heart.

He did not.

But he kept going.

And apparently, he left me material.

✍️ One Chapter at a Time

So yes, I could write a book.

Maybe not all at once.

Maybe not in order.

Maybe not with a grand plan, a quiet cabin, or a literary agent named Meredith.

But one chapter at a time?

That I can do.

And maybe that’s enough.

Maybe the book isn’t one giant project waiting for permission.

Maybe it’s a series of stories.

A way of saying:

I was here.

I noticed things.

I got it wrong sometimes.

I got back up.

I loved people.

I lost people.

I changed.

I kept going.

And every now and then, I found myself in a moment so absurd, tender, painful, funny, or unexpected that all I could say was:

“I could write a book.”

So maybe I will.

One chapter at a time.

And this is where it starts.

💬 Your Turn

What’s one moment from your own life that made you think, “I could write a book”?

It can be funny, painful, strange, beautiful, ridiculous, or still waiting for a proper explanation.

Drop it in the comments.

I’d love to know what chapter title your life has earned.

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If this post gave you a smile, a memory, or the urge to dig through your own life chapters, you can buy me a coffee.

I promise not to let it get cold while I’m busy pretending this is all part of a plan.

Buy Me a Coffee:
https://buymeacoffee.com/Secondwindsteve

Thanks for reading, remembering, laughing, and following along.

One chapter at a time. 📖

🧠 The Mental Browser Is Struggling

Some days, my brain feels less like a filing cabinet and more like a browser window after someone clicked “restore previous session” and immediately regretted it.

There are tabs everywhere.

One tab says dogs.
One says rent.
One says Substack.
One says back pain.
One says taxes, which should honestly be illegal after a certain age.
One says did I take the Tylenol, or did I just think about taking the Tylenol?

And somewhere, buried under all of that, one tab is playing music.

I cannot find it.

I do not know where it is coming from.

But it is definitely playing.

It is usually playing through my hearing aids while someone is trying to talk to me, so I’m nodding like I’m following along while frantically clicking through tabs trying to find the one making noise.

So yes, apparently this is life now.

🐕 Dogs, Bills, Passwords, and One Rogue Thought

I used to think being organized meant having a calendar, a few sticky notes, and maybe a list on the refrigerator marker board.

That was adorable.

Now I have reminders, texts, emails, portals, passwords, two-factor authentication, auto-pay, manual pay, due dates, renewal notices, unread messages, screenshots I took for reasons no longer known to science, and at least one notebook containing deeply important information written in a handwriting style best described as I’ll know what this means later, which was optimistic.

Meanwhile, real life keeps walking through the room holding a leash.

Feed the dogs.
Let the dogs out.
Let the dogs in.
Check if that dog ate.
Check if the other dog is limping.
Check if the quiet dog is quiet because he’s peaceful or because he’s eating something that used to belong to me.

Then there’s the house.

The room that needs cleaning.
The thing that needs fixing.
The door that needs staining.
The yard that needs attention.
The garage that contains items from at least four different eras of my life, none of which appear to have been labeled by a sane person.

And every time I think, Okay, today I’m going to focus on one thing, my brain opens a new tab called:

What if you completely forgot something important?

Very helpful. Thank you, brain. Stellar work.

🧾 I Came Here for One Thing

The other day, I walked into the kitchen with purpose.

Not vague wandering. Not snack-based exploration. Actual purpose.

I arrived in the kitchen and immediately had no idea why I was there.

So I stood there, doing the adult version of buffering.

Then I opened the refrigerator.

Because apparently when the brain loses the plot, the refrigerator becomes customer service.

There I was, staring into the cool glow of mustard, leftovers, and mild disappointment, waiting for the reason to return.

It did not.

But I did remember three other things I needed to do.

None of which required the refrigerator.

That is the part nobody warns you about. You don’t just forget the thing. You remember substitute things. Decoy things. Little mental confetti pieces floating around, pretending to be useful.

So now I’m standing in the kitchen, holding string cheese I didn’t need, remembering that I should respond to a text, check a payment, take something out of the dryer, and maybe write a Substack post about having too many tabs open.

Which, to be fair, is probably how this got started.

📱 Modern Life Is Not Helping

I do not want to sound like the old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn.

Mostly because these days I’d probably have to check the property line first.

But can we admit that modern life has become a little much?

Every task now requires a login.

Every login requires a password.

Every password requires a symbol, a number, a capital letter, a childhood memory, a blood oath, and the name of the street you lived on before your knees made noise.

Then, once you finally get in, the website asks if you want to receive a code by text or email.

At this point, I want to receive a code by carrier pigeon wearing reading glasses.

And half the time, once I get through the whole process, I can’t remember why I logged in.

Was I paying a bill?
Checking a statement?
Downloading a form?
Canceling something?
Uploading one document into a system that only allows one upload even though life, in its infinite absurdity, has handed me three pages?

There should be a button that just says:

I am a human being doing my best. Please stop adding steps.

I would click that button daily.

Possibly hourly.

🧓 It’s Not Forgetfulness. It’s Decades of Tabs.

Here’s the thing.

I don’t think this is just age.

Age gets blamed for everything.

Forget why you walked into a room? Age.
Need readers? Age.
Make a noise when standing up? Age.
Start a sentence and lose the ending somewhere near the couch? Age.

Sure, some of it may be age. I am not filing a formal objection.

But I also think part of it is that by this point in life, we have accumulated a ridiculous number of open tabs.

Old memories.
Old grief.
Old bills.
Old decisions.
Old relationships.
Old versions of ourselves we still occasionally argue with in the shower.

Then add current life.

Health stuff.
Money stuff.
Family stuff.
House stuff.
Friendship stuff.
Dog stuff.
The ongoing mystery of why every charging cord in the house has migrated to a different ecosystem.

That is not simple forgetfulness.

That is a browser with 68 years of history, cookies, pop-ups, archived emotions, and a questionable number of extensions running in the background.

At some point, of course there’s going to be lag.

🧯 The Tab Called Anxiety

There is also always one tab labeled URGENT.

You click on it, expecting useful information.

Instead, it’s just anxiety wearing a clipboard.

No facts.
No plan.
No clear assignment.

Just a vague sense that something somewhere requires immediate attention and it is probably your fault.

That tab is the worst.

It likes to open at bedtime.

You can have a full day of functioning, feeding dogs, handling errands, answering messages, solving problems, and pretending to understand online forms.

Then you lie down.

The lights go off.

And the anxiety tab clears its throat.

Did you respond to that text correctly?
What if that bill didn’t go through?
Did you lock the door?
Are you sure you took the right medication?
What exactly is your five-year plan, emotionally and financially?

Sir.

It is 11:47 PM.

My five-year plan is currently find a comfortable position and negotiate a temporary ceasefire with my lower back.

Please return during business hours.

🧺 The Myth of Getting Caught Up

I used to believe there would come a point where I would be caught up.

The house would be clean.
The bills would be handled.
The messages would be answered.
The paperwork would be filed.
The garage would stop looking like a retirement community for objects that almost became useful.

Then I would sit down, breathe, and enjoy a peaceful little stretch of life.

That was a lovely theory.

Completely fictional, but lovely.

Because the moment you finish one thing, another tab opens.

You pay the bill, then the confirmation email arrives.
You clean the room, then a dog walks in with outdoor feet.
You finish the post, then you need a title, subtitle, photo, caption, tags, social preview, Facebook intro, and something clever to say in the little box that asks you to “share something about this post.”

Which is a lot of pressure from a box.

A box should know its place.

🪟 Maybe the Goal Is Not Closing Every Tab

I am starting to think the goal is not to close every tab.

Maybe that is not even possible.

Maybe the better goal is learning which tabs need attention today, which ones can wait, and which ones are just autoplay nonsense from a website I never meant to visit.

Some tabs matter.

Take the medication.
Pay the bill.
Feed the dogs.
Call the person.
Rest the back.
Write the thing.
Drink some water, because apparently coffee is not legally considered hydration no matter how strongly I feel about it.

Other tabs can wait.

The garage does not need to become a showroom by Thursday.
Every text does not need a Supreme Court opinion.
Every worry does not deserve a committee meeting.
Every passing thought does not need to become a full-blown project with subfolders.

And maybe some tabs just need to be closed without ceremony.

The old argument.
The imaginary conversation.
The guilt rerun.
The what if they misunderstood me spiral.
The weird mental replay of something I said in 1998 that absolutely nobody else remembers.

Close tab.

No confirmation needed.

🌙 The Little Act of Mercy

So maybe this is where I am right now.

Not perfectly organized.

Not completely calm.

Not living some beautifully curated, minimalist, soft-light life where everything has a basket and every basket has a label.

I am a man with dogs, bills, back pain, family feelings, browser lag, and a mental soundtrack I still cannot locate.

But I am also learning to pause before I panic.

To write things down.

To take the one next step instead of trying to solve the entire circus by lunch.

To admit that being overwhelmed does not mean I am failing.

Sometimes it just means I have too many tabs open.

And if one of them is playing music?

Fine.

Let it play for a minute.

I’ll find it eventually.

Or I won’t.

Either way, I’m closing the refrigerator.

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💬 What about you?

Do you ever walk into a room with absolute confidence and then immediately forget why you’re there?

Or do you have one of those mysterious mental tabs playing music in the background too?

Tell me I’m not the only one staring into the refrigerator waiting for instructions from the universe.

Leave a comment

☕ Buy Me a Coffee

If this made you laugh, nod, or feel slightly less alone in your own mental browser chaos, you can always buy me a coffee.

I promise not to let it get cold.

Well, I promise to try.

https://buymeacoffee.com/Secondwindsteve

📬 Subscribe

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It’s free to follow along, and paid subscriptions help keep the coffee warm, the words flowing, and the browser tabs just organized enough to keep writing.

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Know someone whose brain has too many tabs open?

Send this their way.

But maybe text them first so they don’t forget why they opened it.

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I’m at a point now where I can walk into a room with a perfectly clear purpose…

…and by the time I get there?

Nothing.

Not even a clue. Just standing there like I got dropped off early and whatever I came in for is still parking.

I used to think this kind of thing happened to “older people.”

You know… the ones who’d stop mid-sentence and go,
“Now what was I saying?”

And I’d think, How does that even happen?

These days… let’s just say I have a better appreciation for how quickly a thought can disappear under the right conditions.

It doesn’t just happen… it just kind of becomes a regular thing.

🧠 The Plan (On Paper)

I actually try to stay on top of things.

I’ve got lists.
Tasks posted on the fridge marker board.
Google Calendar reminders.

On paper, I look like a guy who’s got a system.

(And yes, the list is right there on the fridge… next to the thing I forgot to do yesterday.)

☕🐕 A Completely Normal Morning (Apparently)

Make coffee.

Let the dogs out.

Notice the unfolded clothes on the couch.

Walk over to fold those, because clearly that’s the priority now.

Feel a buzz on the Apple Watch.

Text message.

Look around for the phone.

Not on the counter. Not on the table. Not in the usual “I swear I just had it” places.

So now we escalate.

Use “Find Device.”

Phone starts making noise somewhere in the house like it’s trying to survive without me.

Find it.

Two messages.

Read both.

Mentally note I should respond to the first one…

…which is exactly where that plan ends.

Because now Messenger lights up.

Open it.

Meme.

Of course.

Watch it.

Maybe twice, just to confirm it was funny.

Pause.

Now I’m standing there holding my phone thinking:

What was I doing before this?

Look around.

Ah.

Furballs on the floor.

Grab the broom.

Start sweeping.

Dogs see movement near the leashes.

And now they’re looking at me like I just announced a field trip.

So… we’re going for a walk.

Take the dogs out.

Walk around the block.

Come back feeling like I’ve accomplished something productive.

Walk into the kitchen…

…and there it is.

A full cup of coffee.

Still sitting under the Keurig.

Cold.

Untouched.

Like it’s been waiting patiently for me to remember the version of myself that made it.

I don’t even drink cold coffee.

But apparently I make it.

📱 The Reality (In Motion)

And that’s just one stretch of the day.

Because it doesn’t really stop there.

The phone keeps lighting up.

Emails keep coming in.

Some of them important.

Some of them very convincing about being important.

Social media is always one tap away.

“Just real quick” turns into ten minutes of reels, random posts, and wondering how someone has the energy to look that good before noon.

And somewhere in all of that…

whatever I originally set out to do is now just one more unsolved mystery.

🤔 The Realization

And somewhere in the middle of all that…

it kind of hit me.

Maybe it’s not that we’re forgetting more.

Maybe it’s that we’re trying to hold way more than we were ever designed to carry at once.

Texts. Emails. Alerts. Feeds.
Important stuff. Completely useless stuff.

All of it showing up like it deserves equal attention.

And somehow…

we’re supposed to stay focused through all of it.

🪶 So… Yeah

So yeah.

Maybe we are all winging it now.

Not because we’re incapable…

but because the whole thing got louder, faster, and a lot more distracting than it used to be.

And honestly?

Some days, just remembering why you walked into a room…

feels like a win.

At this point, I’m not even sure I forgot what I came in for…

…or if I just changed plans and didn’t notify myself.

📣 Share something about this post

Walk into a room → forget why → make coffee → forget that too.

If that sounds familiar, you’re not alone.

💬 Before you go…

• Ever have one of those “why am I in here?” moments? You’re among friends—drop it in the comments.

  Leave a comment

• If this gave you a smile, share it with someone who needs one today.

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☕ If you’d like to support Second Wind, you can buy me a coffee…
I’ll do my best to drink this one while it’s still hot.
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I started writing this Sunday morning, the day after Carrie passed.

Carrie passed away Saturday night at 10:05 PM.

Mike posted something just a few minutes later. Not an announcement… just a simple image that said, “The light has gone out of my life.”

I knew what it meant immediately, so I cautiously sent a message to the Montana crew:

“Sending love to you all! 💔🥲”