There was this guy who I liked a lot who gave me a major boost in life, and then he screwed me royally and sent me on a major downward spiral. I miss him a lot, and I resent him like crazy, without any contradiction in having both emotions at the same time.

There’s a guy I like a lot, although we disagree on almost everything and he has a tendency to lecture me about my lapses in judgment. Actually, there are a bunch of guys like that. Some think I’m too liberal and some think I’m too conservative and all of them know I’d be better off if I recognized the truth that only they possess and follow their lead. 

Relationships are complicated that way.

We all have somebody in our lives, most likely several somebodies, who give and take, build and destroy, advance and retard. People will ask why we still engage with them and we’ll shrug and say there’s more positive than negative. At the same time, people will ask why they still engage with us and they’ll shrug and say there’s more positive than negative. And we’ll both be right about that balance.

We forgive their trespasses and they forgive ours, because that’s what it takes to maintain a relationship. We tell the critics they don’t really know the person, when in fact they do, just as we do, and we let it go. We’ll save our vitriol and condemnation for some stranger who uses the wrong word in a post, because that’s who we are now, but we’ll let it slide for the people who make us laugh or make us feel safe or, at least, share some of their fries.

Nothing’s going to change, at least 99.99% of the time, because we’re all human and have our opinions and we’ve mostly given up on the idea of bringing the other person into the light. And we live with it, or else we would have no friends at all. Because, let’s face it, we can’t find people who agree with us about everything, even if we dive into the deepest silo.

Still, it does happen from time to time that an opinion changes and a position shifts. It’s seldom a U-turn, but no less real. The other guy is suddenly saying things closer to your view of the world and, while they’ll deny it, they’re finally, finally listening to reason. Yes, it’s rare, but it’s oh, so rewarding. Maybe they’ve grown as a human being, maybe my incredible wisdom is sinking in, maybe I’ve started a ripple effect that will change the world.

And maybe I’m kidding myself. You never know. In the meantime, maybe they’ll share some of their fries.

Just in case one of these unnamed people decides to save the world and gives me 100% credit for their transformation, you’ll want to be a subscriber who hears about it right away. Just click here to make it so.
 
 
 

Not only do oldsters write in a secret code called cursive, we’re also coming up with hip new lingo and a cure for short-term memory loss. Making it less of a drag getting old this week…

• Remember to forget it. I finally found the cure to short-term memory loss. If I just wait a few hours, everything becomes a long-term memory and I recall it perfectly. Sometimes, I need a few days before the transfer, but eventually it’s back in the right folder. And, yes, it took me three days to remember this blog item and write it down.
• Highly suggestible. As I get older, it’s much easier for me to talk myself out of things than into them. Unless it’s something really stupid and embarrassing, in which case I am 150% committed.
• Granny the Crinkler. And why does Generation ZAA+ get to dictate all the cool new words? I’m okay with Rizz and Sus, but why don’t oldsters have a shot at coining new phrases? When I’m standing in the kitchen and finally remember why I’m there, it’s a humph. When I try to get out of bed in the morning and my left leg is still asleep, it’s a grimk.  Be sure to memorize all our new jargon before you visit with Gramps and Granny…or you might get crinkled (written out of the will). Just sayin’.
• Equally uninformed. Have you noticed that all the AI help desks and chat bots are just reading the same website you’re on already? If I have to spend extra time "talking" to a high-tech ventriloquist’s dummy, shouldn’t I get access to their secret files or something?
• Waiting for instantaneous. Speaking of which, have you noticed that it takes much, much more time to get any kind of response from the chatbots than from people? I know these automatons are supposed to save the companies money, but shouldn’t they be faster than when we relied on all those fallible humanoids?
• Wishing I was even worse. We all grew up with someone who was always miserable, always complaining, always whining about how unfair everything was…and we wrote them out of our lives. Today, we give them talk shows and subscribe to their Twitter feeds and make them rich. My biggest mistake in life was not being even more obnoxious than I already am.
• Can we order now? Everyone saves time when lawyers can stipulate to a set of facts that all the parties agree to before trial, and I’m thinking of applying the same tool to my next lunch. I will accept as fact:
  • Traffic was terrible.
  • I can’t believe this weather, either.
  • Parking is such a pain.
  • Everything used to be better.
  • We wish we had bought Nvidia at $12 when they went public.
• Yes, I take Zelle. If I was a class action lawyer, I’d take the opportunity to become a filthy-rich class action lawyer by suing Lyft, Uber, Door Dash, Grub Hub, and pretty much every other portal that advertises delivery/pickup/arrival times before you click and, just like magic, changes the numbers as soon as you’ve committed.
  • “Your car will arrive in two minutes, not ten, if you pay $2 extra and click here.”
    
  • Click.
    
  • “Your car will arrive in 2027.”
    

While you're waiting to join the class-action list of plaintiffs, take a moment to click here to subscribe for more brilliant ideas for revenge.

The guy on the next barstool is curious about the photos I’m taking, so I explain it’s an exercise I do every so often, sitting in one place and finding something picworthy from wherever I’m perched. I show him the shot I took of the champagne flutes, refracted through a water glass, and then we veer off into a conversation about cameras, motorcycles, politics, and abortion.
 
Turns out, he owns one of the condos in the hotel complex where we’re staying and he sells motorcycles, among other things, to put food on the table. I get the feeling he can afford much fancier food than he’s munching on at the moment, but he also seems to enjoy being in a place where everybody knows his name.
 
He took some photos when he was younger, drifted away from it, has considered getting back into it, but life intervenes and you move in different directions. We talk about our kids, who are relatively close in age, their careers and life choices, the way our roles change as we and our children get older, and the complexities of business.
 
I tell him a bit about my career and he gives me a brief tutorial on the motorcycle industry, which leads us into the challenges of updating a brand and appealing to a new generation of buyers. Then we're deep into marketing, supply chain management and the damage that the finance guys have wreaked on American industry.  
 
I tell him re-shoring and the rebuilding of infrastructure are big investment themes for me, now that the Chips and Science Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law are generating results. His state is one of the bigger beneficiaries, but he isn’t all that familiar with them, and I’m not surprised. Based on some of the phrases he uses, I know at least one source of his news, and Biden successes aren’t a primary topic over there.
 
So, now we’re talking politics, focusing on the misplaced incentives that make it more profitable, literally, to create problems than to solve them. We agree that Congress is pretty ineffective at addressing the issues that are most critical, that there’s more grandstanding than real effort in political circles, and there's a gigantic gap where common sense should be.
 
Inevitably, it seems, we end up on abortion. Both of us believe life begins at conception, but neither of us thinks a woman should be forced to carry a dead fetus to term. He said he was opposed to all the proposals for post-birth abortions and I said I would be opposed, too, if that really was a thing. Between those points of agreement, we didn’t quite find a bright line that divides what’s acceptable or not for the two of us. And by “us,” I’m talking about two men sitting at a bar...pretty much a textbook definition of having no skin in the game.  
 
Ninety minutes later, we both have somewhere else to be and some of the world’s problems will need to wait until another pair of old guys grab our stools. As I’m heading out, it occurs to me that it’s incredibly easy to have a congenial conversation with a stranger, to talk about challenging issues without getting angry, to see things differently without seeing an enemy. Clearly, I should spend more time in saloons.
 
 
 

I’m doing a good job of keeping up on the news these days, but I’m not completely sure that any of it makes sense. For instance…

• Growth? What growth? The U.S. economy is about as strong as it’s ever been, but half of us think we’re in a recession…and that’s pretty normal. According to polling, a huge chunk of America always thinks we’re in a recession, whether the economy is growing or not. Of course, we’re the same people who still think it’s cool to do the Macarena, so why should I be surprised?
• I can’t be president now? I see people are calling for an age limit of 70 for anyone who wants to be president, which might or might not be a sensible notion, but I’m wondering why we don’t have more age limits that actually make sense. F’rinstance, nobody over 40 should be allowed to break dance, nobody under 75 should be given a mulligan, and if you’ve reached 37, you must move out of your parents’ basement.
• Hold my beer. It looks like we’re going to set a record this year for unforced errors in politics and life. Whether we’re hiring friends and lovers to work on government projects or forgetting that slavery was the cause of the Civil War, none of us seems to need enemies to foil our plans.
• It can’t get worse, can it? Speaking of which, our own Civil War is well underway, although we’re still in the civil part. Yeah, it doesn’t seem particularly civil now, but just wait.
• Meta morsel. I read recently that Mark Zuckerberg is building a fortified compound/retreat in Hawaii and I understand the need for security when you’re a Jewish billionaire leader of a company doing much more harm than good in the world. Still, it would be just as safe to hide in any office building restroom. Even after you get past the security screens in the lobby, you still have to contend with different passcodes on every floor. They’re like Fort Knox, but I’m not quite sure what treasures they’re protecting.
• Friend-of-a-friend zone. When a news report says someone is “connected to” or an “associate of” an alleged ne’er-do-well, I automatically think it’s fake. And I’m usually right, because too often it’s a guy who worked with a third cousin of the perp on a project unrelated to the alleged crime ten years ago, if the article describes the “connection” at all. I’ll accept “business partner” or “former employee,” or “ex-spouse” in most cases, but the vague “associate” is just too thin for credibility.
• My Height is Six-Two. While we’re being particularly cranky today, I’m truly baffled when someone talks about “My Truth,” as if they can elevate their feelings into a universal reality. And I’m clearly not the only one who rejects the notion. Just ask the state trooper who refused to honor My Speed Limit.
• Pulling the plug. And, finally, am I the only person who watched John Oliver’s report on the decline of Boeing since the finance guys took over…and checked out which planes I’m scheduled to be on for spring break?
  

Speaking of spring break, it's definitely time to spring forward to the page where you subscribe to Dad Writes. What page? Why, this one.

A friend of mine died more than a year ago, but I was too busy to notice.

We worked together for a while, stayed in touch over the years, saw each other every six months or so, and then the visits became less frequent. We moved into the city, he and his wife moved farther into the suburbs, we’d find opportunities to meet in the middle somewhere, but neither of us pursued the connection with the utmost zeal.

Then he took ill, an increasingly common development as my friends and I get older. I went out to visit, as he couldn’t drive anymore, and we had a couples dinner or two, but that was clearly a long, long time ago. I knew he was getting worse, I wrote myself a note to check in on him, and then I made another note and another. I never actually checked in, but I was very diligent about writing new notes.

And one day, it was too late. Not that I knew about it, since I was so busy writing reminder notes. I thought about the challenges his wife was facing, I thought about his descent into a hellish disease, I thought about the small support a check-in call might offer. But there’s a huge difference between thinking and doing and I didn't bridge the gap.

Since the days when everyone lived in the same cave and spoke the same five words, it has never been easier to stay in touch than it is today. We can Zoom or conference, text or email, make a phone call or jump in a ride-share 24/7. And yet, it seems we are more distanced in many ways, unable to find the time or the drive to connect. Sometimes we spend more time making the plans than we actually spend together. Sometimes, we spend more time writing reminders to ourselves than we’d need to make the damned call.

There’s always tomorrow, until there isn’t. In this case, nearly 600 tomorrows have elapsed since the last one that might have mattered. I have no idea what I would have said on the call I never made. People sometimes say it’s important to say goodbye, but that always seems more of a benefit to the person who’s staying than for the one about to depart. The visitor checks a box, while the patient knows they will never hear from their contact for as long as they live.

I’ve done the last-goodbye visit more than once and I’ve always felt it was the right thing to do in the specific circumstances with the specific people. Usually, I try to avoid any indication that I don’t expect to return, even if we both know it’s the final conversation. This time was different, because I didn’t bother at all.

Now I’m wondering if I should do anything or let it lie. Should I call his widow and express condolences, or does my lengthy absence make things worse? “Yes, I ignored you and your husband, my friend, for so long that he died more than a year ago and I never even noticed, but isn’t it great that I’m noticing now?”

Does it reopen a wound to remind her of the people who didn’t show up when it mattered? Am I calling to help her or just to assuage my own guilt? Or, does any expression of sympathy help with the healing, even if it comes much too late from a pretty crappy friend?

Gotta ponder that for a while. Maybe I’ll write myself a note.

I’ll really miss those nipples. The sippy cups? Not so much.

I finally got around to clearing some old junk from the kitchen cabinets, which meant it was finally time to toss the relics of infancy and toddlerhood. The grandkids are older now and they’ve mastered the arts of fine dining, or at least the use of flatware. We’ve even made the last transition from those 50-pound car seats that can withstand both crashes and nuclear blasts, downshifting to the much lighter and, probably deadlier, boosters they can secure on their own.

It’s a rite of passage for each of them, of course, but it’s also another passage for me, one of those moments in life that announces the closing of a door that is almost certainly not going to open again.  I love it when they announce that they can handle some task on their own and no longer need any assistance, with toilet training very high on that list, but it’s also another notch in my own timeline, a milestone on that other path.

Almost all the time, I take it in stride.  I’m energized by their joy, their growth, their discoveries and achievements, and I really feel younger when I get a chance to join them on their much newer journey. There's almost never any melancholy as I give away their childish things, whether it’s toys or clothes or books or car seats. But the nipples are somehow more difficult, the symbol of a moment that is so precious, so overwhelming, that it's almost sacred.

Because I have never been as connected to another human being, never as absorbed in the miracle of life, never as overwhelmed by the possibilities of the future, as when I have bottle-fed an infant. I have never had someone look into my eyes as steadily and without affect, an eternal moment without distraction. I have never been as separated from the world, existing in a space where nothing else exists, as when I have lost myself in their gaze, and they in mine.

Maybe I’m overly romantic about it, assigning a meaning and a connection that’s far beyond reality. Maybe they were just staring at this big lump at the other end of the bottle and worrying that I’d leave before they’d had enough to eat, or that I would fall over and crush them. Maybe they were wishing they knew how to speak so they could tell me I was doing it wrong. But they couldn’t speak, so I get to be the one telling this story and I’m focusing on the sacred moments.

Life is filled with all kinds of great experiences, joyful times, powerful moments when there is nothing but the now, the connection, the infinite measure of a priceless memory.  I’m not likely to have this experience again, so this memory needs to survive as long as I do. Even without the nipples, I’m pretty sure it will.
 
If I ever have an experience like this again, I’ll let you know, but only if you click here to subscribe.