a message for the outcasts and the hermits on Thanksgiving 2023

Four years ago, an angel came for my mom, took her by the hand, and led her to heaven where she belonged.

Since then, the months between November and January have carried a different weight.

People who know me understand that I rarely take the internet seriously. But during the holidays, when strangers write about the people they’ve lost, I understand it. Loss recognizes loss.

My way of dealing with it has always been simple. I pull inward. I stay quiet. I sit alone and let the memories come.

Today I’m breaking my own rule and writing something serious in a place I usually ignore. Maybe one day someone will stumble across this after I’m gone and understand who I really was—rather than the version people imagined.

My best memories from this season all lead back to my grandmother’s house down the street. A massive old round table. Plates and bowls of food assembled by the women of the family like small works of art.

We devoured everything.

Then came Christmas, when we did it all again.

January meant Mom’s birthday.

Back then, I had no idea that those ordinary days would one day become priceless memories.

Mom is gone now. Gran too. Peggy, Ken, and Toots are gone. Linda is struggling with Alzheimer’s. Bobby is losing his memory while doing his best to care for both of them and hold on to what remains of life as it once was.

Time moves forward whether we are ready or not.

Grief becomes a companion you never invited. It sits quietly beside you, waiting for the moment when a memory catches you off guard.

These days, the feral cats outside my house seem to understand life better than most people. Their philosophy is simple: survive another day and find something to eat.

Raw. Honest. Uncomplicated.

I respect that.

A neighbor recently asked if I would look after her cat while her family travels for Thanksgiving. Of course, I said yes.

What she doesn’t realize is that caring for another living being during times like this is a gift to me. She believes I’m helping her. In truth, she’s helping me.

The cat’s name is Peanut. 

He probably doesn’t know it, but for a little while each day, he reminds me that life is still happening.

And that’s enough.

The holidays can be hard, but I still feel grateful. I read about families preparing big dinners and gathering around their tables, and the memories of when that was my reality come flooding back.

Memories hurt sometimes.

But they are also proof that something beautiful once existed.

I know I’m not truly alone. God walks beside me every step I take, and that has been enough to get me through another day.

Sometimes that’s all life really asks of us.

Just take the next step.

To everyone sitting around those big family tables this year—keep making those memories.

One day, they may be the most valuable things you have.

I miss you, Mom.

But God is here, and I’m still okay.

Happy Thanksgiving.

The Someday Pile - 5am

There comes a point when the “someday” pile in your life stops making sense.

I didn’t sleep much last night. Old echoes kept wandering through my head—the kind that arrive in the quiet hours when the house is still and the past feels louder than the present. By morning, I had convinced myself that today would be the day I got moving again.

The day the piles start disappearing.

There will probably be several trips to Goodwill if I follow through.

My mornings begin the same way now. I sit here alone and write a few words, then check my phone to see if I missed a call or message. The habit remains even though most of the people I’d hope to hear from are gone now—some literally, others just by the slow drift of life.

Nothing there.

So I’ll have my morning conversation over coffee with a friend. Except I don’t drink coffee, and there isn’t a friend, so writing this will have to do.

Time moves differently once you realize there’s far less of it ahead than behind. Wasting time used to feel harmless. Now it feels expensive.

Which brings me back to the piles.

Do I keep this? Why am I keeping it?
Maybe someday I’ll need it again.

But the truth is, those somedays are mostly gone now.

Toss it.

Every time I’ve gotten rid of something, the regret I imagined never showed up. It turns out letting go is easier than thinking about letting go.

So today I’ll try to follow through on the plans that kept me awake last night. Clear the clutter. Make a little space.

Maybe feel a little lighter for doing it.

I’ve already fallen asleep twice while writing this.

That probably tells you everything.

      

The Sound of Silence

Sometimes I think about dying alone and no one noticing for a long time.

Living alone carries a peculiar fear. Not the fear of death itself, but the thought that I might die and no one would notice..

At my age, three things occupy my mind almost daily: my health, the reality of living completely alone, and the strange truth that—unsettling as that loneliness can be—I still have little to no desire to live with or even around anyone.

For decades, I’ve tried to understand that contradiction. I’ve read about people wired this way, hoping to uncover the source of  self-imposed solitude. The research never brings an answer.

Reaching out from time to time rarely helps either. Silence—or a quick reply that fades just as quickly—usually confirms what I already suspect: this quiet life inside my own thoughts may simply be how my story was meant to unfold.

I sometimes ask myself whether I was happier back when life included passions, work, and relationships.

There were moments—when a relationship was new—when life felt exciting, even joyful. But those moments never lasted forever. When they ended, the same question always returned: was the brief happiness worth the inevitable ending?

I’m not sure it was.

Logically, the fear of dying unnoticed shouldn’t matter. After all, I would already be gone.

But it matters anyway.

Perhaps because it would confirm the quiet truth of my life—that no one was checking the door, the phone, or wondering if I was still here.

It isn’t a legacy I’m proud of. In fact, it’s a little embarrassing.

How does someone live six decades and arrive at a place where no one would know if he disappeared?

Solitude may be a choice at first, but eventually it becomes a life.

Sometimes I wonder how many or even if, others are living this same quiet story.

Or am I the only one listening this closely to the sound of silence?

The Weight

My mother’s photograph was smiling at me from the table beside my chair.

The house was silent except for the slow ticking of the clock, and my mind was moving through one heavy thought after another—world problems I can’t fix, careless words that linger too long, things left undone, and things I’ve done that no longer seem to matter.

This is the only life I get. And the measure of what I’ve learned isn’t found in the easy days, but in moments like these—when the weight presses down and I have to decide whether the lessons of this life meant anything at all.

It was one of those nights when the quiet feels heavier than it should.

Then I looked again at her face in that photograph.

The storm in my head began to slow.

It happens like this sometimes. I get buried beneath my own thoughts, tangled in worries and noise from a world I can’t control. Too often I can’t get out of my own way long enough to simply be alive and feel some peace.

Let it go, my friend, I tell myself.
Just let it go.

Sitting there in that quiet room, something simple came back to me.

I’m not alone. I never have been.

The things my mother tried to instill in me are still there. They helped pull me out of that dark corner of thought. And God—He has always been there too, every time I felt like I was walking this road by myself.

So I said a prayer.

For those who are suffering.
For those who are sick.
For the ones carrying burdens they rarely speak about.
For the people who look fine on the outside but aren’t.

And for people like me—who sometimes feel the weight of the quiet more than they should.

I wrote this tonight as a reminder to myself.

The weight of life can get heavy, and there are moments when I feel too weak to carry it.

Some nights I forget that.

But the truth is simple.

I never have to carry it alone.

When the room finally grew quiet again, I looked once more at my mother’s smiling face beside me—and realized that even in the loneliest moments of this life, I have never truly walked it alone.

God bless.

The Papers - March 19, 2023

The Papers

I kept my divorce papers for forty-seven years.

They lived in the back of a closet inside a plain folder that followed me through every move, every house, and every stage of life.

I didn’t read them often.

I didn’t need to.

I already knew what they said.

They were handed to me at the front door of our house in 1976 by a process server. My wife, on the phone with her friend who helped her with this plan, stood watching me while my young son played in the living room, unaware that anything had changed.

Before I finished reading them, she said something I have never forgotten.

“Don’t get upset about some of the things written in there. The attorney said we needed to include things like that in case you contested the divorce.”

Some of those things weren’t true, some of them burned a permanent hole in my soul. 

Words have a strange power. Sometimes they settle deeper than the truth itself and stay there for years.

Those papers followed me through decades of life—through work, travel, mistakes, successes, and long stretches of solitude.

Every now and then, I would run across them while cleaning out a drawer or box. I would feel the same old knot tighten in my chest.

Then I would put them back.

A few weeks ago, I found them again while looking for something else in the closet.

This time I didn’t put them back.

I read them one last time, then carried the folder to the shredder and began feeding the pages into the machine.

Page by page.

The strange thing is, those papers stopped mattering years ago — but I've carried the words and meaning my entire life. 

When the last page disappeared, the room went quiet again.

The past was still there.

But it no longer had a place in my closet.

And after forty-seven years, that felt like enough.

        

I notice everything

How Old Are You, Really?

Early this morning the house was completely quiet.

No voices. No phones ringing. Just the kind of silence that settles over a place when someone has lived alone long enough.

A strange question crossed my mind.

How old would you think you were if no one had ever told you your age?

Inside, I don’t feel like someone living in this century.

The smallest things rarely escape me.

When someone stops calling the way they used to.
When the tone of a voice changes.
When the small habits people once had quietly disappear.

Most of the time, nothing is said. Sometimes I do say something, then instantly regret it.

Maybe that’s what happens when you’re an old soul.

Old souls spend a lot of time watching the world and wondering how it became what it is. People change slowly. Life shifts quietly. Most pretend not to notice.

Introverted. Aloof. A loner.

Labels often given by people who have never felt the weight of thinking too deeply about everything.

Once the need to fit in disappears, so do the filters. The performances become easier to see. The half-truths. The quiet ways people avoid what is obvious.

In quiet moments the same questions surface.

Why this place.
Why this time.
And whether anything done along the way truly mattered.

The smallest details hold my attention.

Wind moving through trees.
The quiet shift of seasons.
Leaves turning, falling, disappearing.

The strong people who once surrounded me come to mind often. They made the world feel steady and understandable. Without them, the world feels unfamiliar.

Older people are easier company. Simplicity suits us. Sitting around a fire. Listening to stories. Letting silence exist without rushing to fill it.

With many others, though, there is a feeling of standing outside the room looking in. As if I arrived in the wrong century.

Old souls often walk alone. The pursuits others chase rarely hold much appeal, and that distance creates long stretches of solitude.

But when someone does understand, the connection runs deep. A kindred spirit is one of life’s rarest gifts.

This has always been true.

If the question from the beginning needed an honest answer—

How old would you be if you didn’t know your age?

Somewhere around 150 or 200 years old would be my answer. 

Old furniture.
Horse carriages.
Ancient streets and quiet buildings.

Another era entirely.

Probably the one where I would feel most at home.

Because the smallest changes rarely escape me.

The things people begin doing.
The things they quietly stop doing.

And the exact moment something between two people changes.

midnight potatoes

At midnight on my birthday, I was standing in my kitchen cutting up two potatoes.

For months, I haven’t felt right. The doctors say my kidney numbers are stable, which is good news, but stable isn’t the same as strong. When you live with one kidney running at about forty percent, even an easy day can leave you feeling like you ran a marathon.

I had just finished a three-day photo shoot. Nothing physically demanding, but by the end of each day, I was wiped out.

Then tonight something strange happened.

After falling asleep in a chair, I woke up around 11:30 with something I hadn’t felt in a long time: energy.

Real energy.

The aches were gone. My mind was clear. My body felt almost normal again.

And the first thing that came to mind was those potatoes sitting in the kitchen about to go bad.

Kidney disease makes potatoes complicated. Peel them, cut them, rinse them, soak them overnight to leach out the potassium. It’s a process. But there I was happily working through it like I had somewhere important to be.

After that, I packed up two camera bodies I had sold, printed the shipping labels, and set them by the door. Took the trash out for morning pickup. Kept looking for the next thing to do.

For a few hours, I felt like the old version of me again, the guy who always had too much to do and not enough hours to do it.

Not the guy who spends most days just trying to get through them.

At one point I almost went for a midnight walk. A mile or two just because I could. I wish I had.

So why write about something this ordinary?

Because someday I might stumble back across this and remember there was a night when I felt almost normal again.

When I’m not exhausted and hurting, I’m a different person.

And I like that guy.

Around two in the morning, I glanced at my computer calendar to see what I had coming up next.

That’s when I realized something.

It was my birthday.

I had forgotten.

Birthdays always seemed like things for kids anyway, but I never forgot my mom’s. And maybe the real reason birthdays matter isn’t the day itself, it’s that someone notices you’re still here.

About twenty-five thousand people have read things on this blog. I don’t know who any of them are.

But tonight I felt good enough to wish myself a happy birthday.

Because there really isn’t anyone left who will.

So here it is for the record.

Happy Birthday, old orphan.

And thanks to Teresa, the last person on earth who remembered. Fifty years later, you still did.

Right now, there are two bowls of potatoes soaking in the sink.

And for tonight, that feels like a small victory.

hello there old friend

The house was quiet tonight. The kind of quiet that almost has a sound to it.

It’s been a while since I last wrote here, though not much has changed. There have been a few good days scattered in, but mostly the kind where nothing much moves you. I still miss the people who are gone, and I still say real prayers for the people who remain. Sometimes I have to remind myself to include my own name in those prayers.

Jason had a birthday a few days ago. The kid I used to hold next to me is now a middle-aged man with a family of his own. I didn’t call. I never want to force myself into a place where I might not be wanted. He knows how to reach me if he wants to.

That thought always takes me back to my own father. Neither of us called. Not once. And then one day it was too late, and he was gone.

Maybe that’s why I stopped in here tonight. There’s a chill in the air outside — not cold, just uncomfortable enough to notice. I know that feeling well. Sometimes it has nothing to do with the temperature. It’s the same quiet chill that settles over a life lived mostly alone.

Still, there is peace in knowing that, unlike so many others who have passed through my life, my God has not left me. Even when the darkness and silence try to convince me otherwise, I believe his promise that I will never walk alone in this world or the next.

Physically, I haven’t been feeling well the past few weeks, but the lab results tell a better story. The disease that should be getting worse has, at least for now, stayed where it is. For that, I’m thankful.

Ruben stopped by a few days ago to check on me. He didn’t look so good himself — maybe a little thinner than usual. I fed him some of his favorite cat food. One tub turned into three, and he ate almost all of it before wandering over to sit with me for a while. We took our first selfie.

Truth is, Ruben may be the only one who regularly checks to see if I’m still around. No one else ever knows if I’m dead or alive these days.

And if I’m being honest, some days I feel like a little of both..

At least the practical things are getting done. I sent all the tax prep to Mel today and took care of some banking and Ameritrade business — things I usually put off until the last minute. It felt good to finish them early this year.

Tonight the house is quiet again.

But for a little while, it wasn’t.

Thanks for stopping by, Ruben.

Writing to No One

OFF LIMITS

The alarm clock hasn’t been set in a long time.

For most of my life, I checked the calendar every night, figuring out where I had to be and what time the alarm needed to go off to drag me out of bed the next morning.

Now most days contain almost nothing that can’t wait days even weeks.

I’m not officially retired, but between the virus and my health, the odds of setting that alarm ever again are getting pretty slim.

These days my thoughts tend to fall into two categories.

Things that are off-limits to talk about — even if there were someone to tell.

And things that feel like pipe dreams, considering how little time there may be left to do anything about them.

A question circles through my head several times a day.

Is it even worth it anymore?

So I write.

Writing is how I break the silence in this house.

But memory has a way of sneaking in when the room is quiet enough.

The clocks tick loudly here now. Louder than I remember them sounding years ago.

Maybe they always sounded like that.

Maybe there were just more voices around back then to drown them out.

For years I pushed most people away. Often for reasons I still believe were good ones. But good reasons don’t change the outcome.

Silence.

Just the ticking clocks in the background and the long hours between them.

Sometimes I look around and wonder what any of this is for anymore.

Two houses that need decisions made about them.

One that could be remodeled. One that could be sold.

Plans that once felt practical now feel pointless.

The cameras sit in their cases with dead batteries.

They remind me a little of the man who owns them.

Once full of energy. Now mostly sitting still.

I have more of everything than I ever expected to have.

More space.
More things.
More quiet.

Except for one thing.

Someone to share any of it with.

Strange how life can end up like that.

Though if I’m being honest, this ending didn’t exactly happen by accident.

My standards for the people I allowed into my life were always strict.

In the end only one person ever truly met them.

And I miss her more than I know how to say.

My friend.
My mentor.
The reason for anything good I ever managed to do.

My mom.

I knew losing her would be hard.

I just didn’t know it would leave the world this quiet.

So now I write to no one about everything.

There are no arguments here.
No interruptions.
No one trying to fix a life they didn’t live.

Just the clocks.

The silence.

And my prayers that God keep his arms around me and those who need it.

Even the ones I pushed away.

I pray for you, too.

Everything works out in the end.

But in the meantime…

The clock keep ticking and I hear ever second.

old dogs

A few nights ago I got the idea of searching the internet for the name of an old friend from decades ago and while I didn't exactly find him, I found an obituary for his father who I had also known long ago. In the obituary for his father it named survived by with the name of the friend I had looked for, his brother who I had known, and then the part where his mother had also passed away years before and his sister all that I had known and been very close to all those many years ago when I was in the process of getting through the trauma of divorce and just trying to find my way. 

As I have gotten older I've found that deaths have the effect of forcing me to look closer at my own mortality and just how quickly death can come and how instant the finality of life is at death. 

I began looking up other names from the past and even the high school FB page from the class I would have graduated in. This was a mistake for me as many names I was familiar with have died. This put me in a place of deep sadness when I realize how short a time we are actually here and how much of that time we just waste as if we can make it up tomorrow. 

I've done very well in some areas of my life and failed miserably at many others. I've spent more time trying to look back and figure out how those failures happened even while knowing there is no going back to fix that stuff and none of those opportunities to make wonderful memories has a do over option. My time spent looking back is an example of the waste a lot of us probably do that makes no sense but we do it anyway and then some of us write about it compounding the waste.

When the minutes, months and decades are pissed off, we don't get any of those back. They are gone forever and in their place lies piles of regrets we take with us for the rest of our days. I'm finding the load to be quite heavy and hard to manage these days. I need to stop beating myself up so viciously at this stage of the life I have left and find ways of not adding more weight to the regrets I already carry. 

Can't go back, can't recover what has been lost or given away, and those who have passed before me would have given anything to have had one more day and you can bet it wouldn't have been wasted looking back and drowning in grief and depression.