sounds familiar

Little pee splashed out and onto my left shoe at the airport.

Oh you think that’s disgusting? Sorry, my apologies but I can’t help you. Is a fact that, sometimes, a fine pee mist goes everywhere in addition to the urinal, and that’s when you’re being careful.

It’s the brown leather, so the the little specks will stand out like dark mahogany until they dry, which, thankfully, happens quickly. Right on the toe, a little spritzing of dark.

I notice the markings, and proceed to the sinks to wash up my hands. No soap though because this is really only for show, being honest. Run hands under water, dry.

Glance down again, still a visible pee misting. Darn. While folks are judging my outfit, if anyone looks at my shoes, which is highly unlikely, the jig is up. Dude pees on himself, definitely not depeche mode.

If I had just been outside I could play it off as walking through dewy grass or something, but nah, it’s pee. Could say it splashed while washing my hands, but let’s reserve that trick for more the conspicuous khaki splashback.

Walk it off, walk it off.

It’s 5am and we’re piling into a frozen rental car that’s parked in front of the RV. I went out a couple minutes early to start the engine and turn on the heat, it’s below freezing at the Indiana state park we pulled into yesterday.

I’m wearing light denim, a dark blue polo, and my charcoal sports coat with brown shoes and belt. I look a proper business commuter, if not for the somewhat shaggy beard. Neck and head freshly and neatly shaved, though.

Keaton and Sharaun are in pajamas, Keaton with her still-warm blanket wrapped around her. Cohen is fully dressed for the day, saying last night that he wanted to, “Get up at the same time you do Dad, and get dressed while it’s still dark. I like going to the airport when it’s dark.” They’ll keep the car while I’m gone.

There’s frost on the windshield and the heat fogged it up so I’m crouched down peeking out of the little clear spots where the defrost starts working first. Sharaun’s got a bag full of trash between her legs that she pulled from the RV as we were walking out, as the dumpster is unreasonably far from the campground and we can drop it off on our way out of the park.

We’re headed into Louisville, to the airport. Sharaun and the kids will drop me off and I’ll catch a flight into New Orleans where I’m meeting my brother-in-law and will attend an insurance industry conference with him and his CFO. I’ll be gone from the family for four days.

Insurance? Sure. He asked for some thoughts on doing technology related stuff and offered to fly me out. Leaving the family was a bummer, but I love my brother-in-law and New Orleans isn’t the pits.

I expect it to feel a bit odd, attending an industry conference for an industry I know nothing about, tagging along with company folks from a company I don’t work at, shaking hands and smiling and making connections that’ll end up going nowhere.

Until later then, love.

A little thought experiment last night sitting alone by the fire.

But first, because we have time, the fire: Built with 100% scavenged wood and yet probably the most consistent, and also persistent when it came time to go to bed, campfire we’ve yet had. Found a dry solid piece of cherry, which I haven’t seen around the park so I assume someone brought in and abandoned when they didn’t use. Was too long for the firepit and I don’t carry an axe, so I bridged it across the rim until it burned through and I could rearrange it as two long pieces. Was really cooking, then. The hardwood burned hot and long and the smell of the smoke pleasant. I didn’t do much to knock it down before going in, so I worried on it a bit until I heard a soft rain around 3am.

Now, the thinking stuff. I asked myself: What makes you overflow with emotion? What are the things, situations, places, people, acts, etc., that fill me with joy, sadness, wonder, fullness? Maybe, if I made a list of them, I’d see a useful pattern. So I tried.

• Music, both recorded and live
• Walking down Main Street, Disneyland with my wife and children
• National Parks, or more generally a shared reverence for and desire to conserve natural wonders
• The human condition, things like war and civil rights and poverty and struggle and success
• Seeing our kids learn something new or successfully apply something we’ve taught them
• When someone expresses that they value our relationship, especially if they say they’re better or happier for it
• Unhurried time with great friends

I look at it… and find myself without much revelation. Oh, I like it, though. It’s good and nice and true, but is there a theme pulling me to a new calling?

Dunno.

Love & hugs.

We were pulling into a Walmart, nothing special in the course of this trip, when I saw you guys.

The six or seven of you were sitting in a patch of grass on the main turn into the lot. Ratty hair on face and heads, cardboard sign, two dogs, dirt-muted clothes, red plastic gas can on display, the lot. Crusties or railriders, maybe, hard to say from a glance but travelers for sure.

One of you offered a peace sign and I waved back and acknowledgement from the passenger seat.

After we passed Keaton called from the rear, “Hey dad I think those people saw your Grateful Dead stickers on the RV, they were waving and smiling and hollering!” Sharaun parked us clear across the lot from you, way over here in front of the garden center. Because of you, likely. Sometimes it’s easier than lying or saying “no.”

Suddenly I wanted to meet you guys and hear a little of your stories. I decided I’d walk over and give you $20. I separated the bill from the rest and stuck it in my opposite pocket so I didn’t have to thumb through in front of you.

I had to cross the entire lot so you saw me and knew I was coming. At shouting distance I hollered, “What’s up family?,” through a smile. Don’t know what posessed me to say that. A car passed so I couldn’t hear your reaction but a few of you stood to greet me and everything was smiles so I kept coming.

I stood among you and asked how everyone was doing. Up close I could see tattoos that told me even if you weren’t trainhopping currently some of you had before, but regardless of how you identified I quickly decided you weren’t scumfucks.

Your crew was six humans and two pit mixes, bitch and son. I met the dogs first with a sniff and head scratch. Then you. Two from Alabama, the spokesperson and leader & what I thought of as a young protege who you said you’d only recently picked up and was, “turning out to be an excellent traveler.” The mother of the group, though I doubt she’d cotton to my placing her so, and sole woman was from Michigan. Two others, a quiet but funny guy from Minnesota and one dude from Georgia who I didn’t really get to meet because he took the bitch back to the van when she got nasty with me for showing more attention to her pup than her.

You were hoping to get to family somewhere before the rains came. You’d been in California and bought a newer conversion van but you’d abandoned it in Alabama when the state wanted $300+ to renew the registration. We talked about traveling and you shared a little of your ethos, “Never take more than you need. Play it straight.”

I offered the $20 and said I hoped it helped you get where you were going. Hugs were had all around. Real hugs, like humans thanking humans for being humans. As I left and was almost out of earshot I heard Mom say, “See, I told you he was family!”

It’s a good memory. Godspeed, family.

I’ve never considered myself lazy when it comes to work.

I mean, I suppose I don’t have any clue how I’d be with traditional physical work, like driving cattle or digging wells, but in today’s modern setting, I’m a proven cubehand what knows how to ride an ergonomic office chair into career sunset.

In fact, if anything I take work too seriously, devote too much of my time to it. That should be plain to anyone familiar here, as I’ve written reams and reams about my shortcomings and struggles finding the right balance between the non-work and work in my life.

So it surprises me, then, just how strongly I feel that I could keep doing this. Lord, I know I’m wearing this theme thin lately, but it’s so strong on my mind every day. Going back to the only thing I’ve known as work seems almost stupid knowing what I’ve learned.

I’ve learned secrets.

Did you know that you can slow time? That the trees have stories? That your family is a single organism? That you can get there by walking? That water is free? That humans everywhere are beautiful? That our country is otherworldly gorgeous?

Sometimes, when we’re driving through deep rural America, where things are still done with sweat and muscle vs. college degrees and everything seems slower and more deliberate than my life back home, I think maybe I’ve only rediscovered the secret, not really learned it.

It makes me think hard about random things like ways of life that have died or are dying and why people believe what they believe or maybe vote how they vote.

It also makes me think about work, or all I know as work. And, though I don’t consider myself lazy, I must admit I’d choose to keep travelling versus going back hands-down if it were a real option. Some nights in bed I sit and think how long we could keep doing this is we just continued to burn through our savings. If it were that simple maybe I’d do it.

So, maybe I’m lazy. It’s funny, I do chafe at that idea, conditioned as I am by our culture.

Peace.

It’s funny the moments the brain chooses to take snapshots of and file away.

Sometimes I find I can’t remember much but fuzzy generalities from trips or places that are extremely important to me, yet there will be scenes frozen in my mind which seem to be of no consequence at all.

Why would I have such a vivid memory of sitting in the RV in the parking lot of a strip mall, waiting on Sharaun to buy storage baskets at some craft chain?

Of cooking ramen over the RV stove, parked in the dirt on a roadside pull-out on the forested Pacific Coast Highway, the whole rig pitched un-level enough that you could see it in the water in the pot?

Tarantulas crossing the desert blacktop, perpendicular to traffic, in little stuttering bundles of legs.

Meeting a man scavenging along the lakeshore, my family and him the only souls in sight, who walked over to tell me, “God loves you,” and offer me the unopened package of latex gloves he’d come upon because, “I figured you could use them in the motorhome.”

Choking on the smoke of a failed attempt at an evening campfire in Kings Canyon National Park, Gators football on the radio in the background.

Refilling the fresh water tank with 50ft of hose and a hand-held “water bandit” from the only accessible spigot in a campground, which was on the bathhouse and not threaded, designed to discourage said usage but of no matter to our need for water.

Pulling over near the beach in California to use white duct tape to hold the strip of plastic molding around the wheel cutout while bonding cured, after scraping and detaching said molding on a post exiting a campground. Forgetting, then, to ever remove the duct tape and now having it as a permanent vehicle fixture.

So many more. Little vignettes stuck in my head. Love them.

I sometimes feel like I’m not doing enough formal imparting of wisdom to our kids. You know, like the things people say when asked what life lessons they learned from their father. Oh, I give them plenty of information, there’s no lack of interesting (to me) anecdotal facts thrown around, but what about lasting nuggets, words to live by?

So, for a while now I’ve wanted to create a “creed” our family. The motivation for the idea came from a sad place, after hearing about the family creed of a co-worker who died when it was shared at his memorial service. But I think it was precisely that somber context – a final posthumous delivery of life-guidance from the grave – that made it seem so powerful to me. Not that one has to pass to impart that kind of power, but that those words and concepts had such an important part in the definition of the family.

I would never have considered the idea had I not heard the story above, but ever since then I’ve been very sporadically working on ideas for what I might include in a credit creed of our own.

Brevity is key. This isn’t a paragraph and there should be a relatively low word-to-message ratio, I want powerful statements expressed in few words, and I want only a handful of them. Specificity of guidance shouldn’t be too narrow, but also not to broad. Otherwise there’s really no improvement which can be made over the Golden Rule, and we may as well just adopt that (a fine idea, truly, for those not wanting to write their own).

On this trip I’ve gone back to the idea a few times, touching-up the draft list I’ve been kicking around for all these years. Right now I have too many words and ideas, and I’ll admit some statements are more like personalized self-improvement mantras than guidance to the family, but it’s a start.

• Be & do good
• Act instead of worry
• Make time for family
• Surround yourself with who you want to be
• Be resilient in failure & disappointment
• Value nature & its resources
• Learn to defer gratification
• Never stop learning & teaching
• Seek experience over material
• Take worthwhile risks

I’ll keep working on it.

I have this dream that I can get Sharaun on board and maybe one day have it drawn-up nicely enough that we could display it somewhere at the house (afraid to float this to her until she’s had an editorial crack at it herself, though, as she’s so particular about what goes on the walls).

Peace.