Not Grandpa Joe

For as long as I can remember, I had my grandfather model all figured out.

Me with Shep at six months (2023)

The moment one of my children handed me a grandchild, I would become Grandpa Joe, Roald Dahl's irrepressible, bedridden patriarch from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, who springs to life at exactly the right magical moment. Pure delight. No discipline. No logistics. Just wonder and stories and the unearned credibility that grandfathers seem to accumulate simply by existing. I've been quietly rehearsing the role for decades.

Then it actually happened. Kailey and Matt gave me Shepherd in 2022. Then Sadie in November 2024. Then Faith and Will gave me Philip Joseph in January 2026. Kailey will bring a fourth grandchild into the world: baby Bo, due early in September. Four grandchildren in four years. The role has arrived.

There's just one problem. Grandpa Joe lives in the same house as Charlie Bucket. I live in Syracuse.

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Sadie at one year (2025)

Before I go any further, I should acknowledge what I glossed over in my romantic vision of Grandpa Joe: his actual track record isn't great. The man spent twenty years in bed while his family lived in grinding poverty. He shared a mattress with three other grandparents and apparently never once thought to get up and find work. Then the moment a golden ticket materialized, he was on his feet, tap-dancing around the bedroom, ready for adventure. By any reasonable standard, that's not a role model. That's a cautionary tale.

And yet. When Charlie needed someone to walk through those chocolate factory gates with him, Grandpa Joe showed up completely, with every ounce of joy and wonder he had. You forgive a lot in a grandfather who can do that.

I've always wanted to be the grandfather who shows up completely. The problem is that "showing up" has been my whole identity as a father, and it requires a geography that my children, sensibly and lovingly, declined to provide.

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I told them to do it, of course. I've now given four wedding toasts, which either speaks to my eloquence or my stamina. In each one, I told my children that nothing of any value or magnitude tops family. Build your home around the people you love. That's the whole instruction. Kailey and Matt built theirs in Nashville. Faith and Will have started theirs in Albuquerque. Teddy and Taylor, still early in the process, are down in NYC. These are good choices, and I am proud of them for making them.

I am also, let the record show, in Syracuse.

The distance has a particular texture when you're a grandfather. Shepherd, I know. I held him before his sister arrived, watched him develop opinions and preferences, and that specific toddler confidence that makes you wonder where on earth they get it. But Sadie has been on this earth since October 2024, and I haven't yet been in the same room with her. PJ arrived in January 2026, and same story. Some of my grandchildren don't yet know my face, the way I tell a story, or that I have very specific feelings about what they should be called.

Which brings me to the name situation.

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Kailey's family calls me Grandpa Boeke, or sometimes G'Pa. That's the name my own kids used for my father, Richard. I didn't plan it that way, but when it happened, something quietly settled in my chest. A name passed forward like a piece of furniture you didn't know you wanted until it appeared in exactly the right room.

Faith went her own direction. Faith always goes her own direction. It's a defining characteristic, well established over twenty-plus years of loving her, and I say it with complete admiration and only mild exasperation. She has decided I am Opa.

I want to be clear that I have expressed my feelings about this. I want to be equally clear that my feelings have not moved the needle whatsoever.

PJ at six months (2026)

Opa is a perfectly fine name for a grandfather. In Dutch tradition, it's warm and familiar and carries real history. My family does have Dutch roots, so Faith has done her homework. I understand all of that. I am still not thrilled. Partly because no one consulted me, and partly because the same daughter who named me Opa also decided to call her son (Philip Joseph)...Flip.

Flip.

I have a grandson named Philip Joseph Witherow. It's a good, strong name with real weight to it: Philip Joseph, which also happens to share a middle name with his grandfather, a fact I will not pretend I didn't lobby for... Faith sees this name and thinks: Flip. I see this name and think: PJ. We are currently at an impasse on two fronts. This is, I have come to understand, simply what it is to be Faith's father: you negotiate, you persist, and eventually you just call the boy PJ and wait.

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My own father was Grandpa Boeke. He taught me through presence, not lectures, not grand gestures, but the quiet accumulation of ordinary moments. The Cub Scout Jamboree at Moraine State Park. The patience he showed when I didn't recognize the lesson for decades. I wrote about him when we lost him in 2020, borrowing Kierkegaard's line: life can only be understood backward, but it must be lived forward. Looking back at Dad now, I see that he laid the foundation for everything I became as a father. The road trips. The scorecards at Ted's Little League games. The Thursday mornings I spent volunteering in Faith's computer lab, showing kindergartners that a mouse works better when it stays on the desk.

It all came from watching him show up. All of it assumed I would be close enough to show up the same way.

What nobody told me is that the children you raise to build their own lives will, with some regularity, build them somewhere else. You were right to encourage them. You meant every word of it. And now Kailey is in Nashville, and Faith is in Albuquerque, and I am in Syracuse, counting the days until a September due date and wondering when I can get on a plane.

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So I've been rethinking what it means to show up.

This blog started in 2008, when Kailey was in high school. I wrote then that she and Ted and Faith were the reason I write: that these pages were a record of where we'd been, what I'd learned, the laughter and heartbreak and hope we'd accumulated as a family. I meant it as a letter to them. What I'm realizing now is that it was also always a letter to whoever comes after.

Shepherd and Sadie and PJ and future Bo, and to those whose names we don't yet know, will grow up hearing stories about people they never met, places they'll have to imagine, a family history that stretches back through Dutch grandparents and Chicago Cubs loyalty and Christmas elf traditions and a man named Richard who showed up without making a speech about it. These posts are part of that record. They'll be here long after I'm gone, waiting for a grandchild, or a great-grandchild, who's finally old enough to be curious.

But lately I've been thinking about doing something more. I want to record some of our traditional Christmas stories, not just my own, but the ones we've read together for years. The Polar Express. A Christmas Tree in the White House. The classics that found their way into our family's rotation and never left. I want Shepherd and Sadie and PJ and Bo to hear them the way their parents heard them, with exactly the pauses I mean and the voices I can't help making. And yes, I also want to record the story about the year Santa couldn't find Flipper. That's the dolphin, not the grandson, and it belongs to our family in a way no published book ever could. Text on a screen is one kind of presence. A voice reading a beloved story to a child who isn't in the room yet is something else entirely. A voice can travel to Nashville and Albuquerque and wherever they end up building their own lives years from now, and it will still sound like G'Pa Boeke at Christmas.

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Grandpa Joe waited twenty years for his golden ticket. I'm not built for waiting. Anybody who has met me knows this. But I am learning what patience looks like when you don't have another option. And in the meantime, I'm writing, recording, planning visits, booking flights, and calling PJ by his proper name, knowing full well Faith may never stop calling him Flip.

The golden ticket, it turns out, comes in different shapes. Sometimes it's a visit to Nashville when Sadie is old enough to know my face. Sometimes it's a FaceTime call where Shepherd holds up a drawing and waits for my reaction. Sometimes it's a September due date circled on a calendar and a plane reservation I haven't made yet but absolutely will.

In 2008, I wrote that Kailey, Ted, and Faith were the reason I write. They still are. But now there are four more reasons, and counting. And whether they call me G'Pa, Grandpa Boeke, or, God help me, Opa, they are going to know exactly who I am.

I'm going to make absolutely sure.

The Pentathlon Mindset

George Patton nearly drowned in the swimming leg.

It was July 1912, the Stockholm Olympics, and the twenty-six-year-old United States Army lieutenant was competing in the first modern pentathlon ever held at the Games. He had already fired his pistol, fenced, and ridden an unfamiliar horse over obstacles. Now he was in the pool for the 300-meter swim, and by the time he touched the wall, he was so spent that officials had to pull him from the water with a boathook. He went on to run the 4,000-meter cross-country course anyway, staggered through the last fifty meters, and collapsed at the finish line. He finished fifth overall, behind four Swedes, in a field of thirty-two competitors from ten nations.

Nobody remembers who won that race. Everyone who knows the story remembers Patton.

Baron Pierre de Coubertin 

Baron Pierre de Coubertin was a French educator who believed that athletic competition could do what diplomacy often could not — build character across national lines and give nations something better to do than go to war with each other. He spent years lobbying the international sporting community before finally reviving the ancient Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, the first modern Olympics in fifteen centuries. He ran the International Olympic Committee for nearly three decades after that. By 1912, when Stockholm hosted what many considered the first truly successful modern Games, Coubertin had both the credibility and the platform to introduce a new event built entirely around his own philosophy of what an athlete should be. He designed the modern pentathlon with a specific soldier in mind, not the best marksman in the army, or the fastest runner, or the most decorated equestrian. He wanted to test what he called the complete soldier: the officer who could ride an unfamiliar horse into enemy territory, fight his way out with a sword, shoot his way clear with a pistol, swim a river, and run the rest of the way to deliver his message on foot. The whole package. No single skill wins. The whole package wins.

Coubertin's phrase for the ideal athlete was débrouillard, the resourceful one, the person who figures it out. Not the best at any one thing. The one who handles whatever comes next.

I have thought about that word most of my adult life without knowing it had a name.

I got to see part of the actual Modern Pentathlon competition at the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, when the events were held in Coto de Caza in Orange County (where I lived at the time). I was already fencing epee in college, so I went in with some passing knowledge of at least one discipline. That day at the Olympics is what hooked me, and it left me with the kind of confidence only a young man has: the thought that I could pick up the other four disciplines easily enough and make my own run at the Games in 1988. A few real attempts to combine riding, shooting, and swimming with fencing and running at that level knocked that confidence down fast. Each discipline alone took years to master. Doing all five well enough to compete internationally was never going to happen for a guy who'd picked up the sport as a college sophomore.

The ambition faded. The pull toward the event itself never did.

A few years back, an online dating questionnaire asked what Olympic event I would most want to win a gold medal in. My answer, without hesitation, was the modern pentathlon. My reasoning was, and remains, straightforward: I like that it is eclectic and not a traditional American team sport, that it rewards both physical and mental discipline simultaneously, and that its jack-of-all-trades aspect remains very appealing to me. I wrote that I'd done some pistol shooting and was a decent cross-country runner in high school, but I had also played lacrosse, hockey, and baseball, two of which aren't even Olympic sports (yet), so they were all ruled out.

Re-reading that answer now, I think I was describing something deeper than an athletic preference. I was describing the way I am wired.

I did not plan to spend my career in higher education fundraising. I arrived at UCI in the mid-1980s planning to be an aerospace engineer, changed my major to political science and economics my senior year, moved from California to Boston, then to the Midwest, eventually back to California, and back to the East Coast again. I turned down a policy analyst position in Sacramento because the pay was untenable, and ended up taking a job in the development office at UCI because a man I met in an interview saw something worth trying. That first position required me to understand the university's mission well enough to determine how strangers' interests relate to the mission, manage relationships with very different kinds of people, and solve organizational problems with no obvious precedent. None of those things were on my engineering syllabus.

What followed was twenty years of adding legs to the pentathlon. I managed IT departments, special events teams, accounting staff, and alumni communications under the same organizational umbrella. I coached youth baseball while leading a Scout troop. I flew small planes for a while and sailed when I could. I read history for pleasure and studied it seriously enough that it changed how I think. None of these things appear on the same résumé line. All of them turned out to matter.

The pentathlon athlete cannot afford to love any single discipline so much that the others suffer. The fencer who trains ten hours a day and neglects the swim will finish well down the leaderboard, no matter how elegant his footwork. The same goes for the manager who knows his software cold but cannot read a room, or the parent who coaches flawlessly but forgets to just sit with his kid.

There is a particular frustration that comes with this kind of mind, and I should be honest about it. Specialists get to be the best at something. The person who does one thing with total dedication eventually becomes the authority, the go-to, the name people call. The generalist is rarely that person. He is usually the one called when the specialist's answer does not quite fit the problem.

That is a harder identity to carry. It requires making peace with being very good at a wide range of things and probably not the best at any of them. If you are wired to achieve, to produce, to check the box at the end of every day, the pentathlon mindset can feel like a permanent state of almost. Five disciplines, none of them mastered.

My son Teddy is wired the opposite way, and I say that with nothing but admiration.

From the time he could grip a bat, baseball was it. He played Little League, Babe Ruth, travel ball — spring, summer, fall, and winter which is entirely possible when you grow up in Southern California. He messed around with a soccer ball for a season or two and picked up one of my lacrosse sticks a handful of times. But he always came back to the diamond. It was neither indecision nor a lack of curiosity. It was love. Pure, durable love for one thing.

He was good enough that the choice paid off. Not just statistically good, but genuinely good. The kind of good that comes from ten thousand hours freely given because the ten thousand hours never felt like work.

In his senior year of high school, he mentioned for the first time that he wished he had tried another sport competitively. By then, the calendar had run out on that particular door. I understood the feeling, the wistful glance at the road not taken, but I never thought he had made the wrong call. He had found his discipline early and gone deep. That is its own form of courage.

I have thought about that difference between us more than once. He was built for the pentathlon, no more than I was built for one event. We are just built differently. Neither of us had it wrong.

Patton apparently felt this acutely. After Stockholm, he threw himself into fencing with obsessive focus. He hired a French maître d'armes for private instruction and trained harder than anyone on the post. His fencing improved dramatically. What he could not do, what the pentathlon's design would not allow, was let that improvement define him at the expense of everything else. The event kept pulling him back to the whole.

Thirty years later, the pentathlon mindset showed up in a Belgian crossroads town called Bastogne.

It was December 1944. The Germans punched through Allied lines in the Ardennes in what would become the Battle of the Bulge, encircling the 101st Airborne Division and threatening to split the American and British forces. When Eisenhower convened an emergency commanders' conference at Verdun on December 19, most of the men in the room were still trying to understand what had happened. Patton was not. He stood up and told the assembled generals he could attack with three divisions in forty-eight hours. Eisenhower's deputy barely suppressed a laugh. Omar Bradley told him to give himself some leeway. Patton said he could start as soon as he left the meeting.

He kept the promise. Within forty-eight hours, he had wheeled the entire Third Army, more than 250,000 men and hundreds of tanks, ninety degrees from an eastward campaign in the Saar, over icy roads in the worst winter weather in fifty years, and driven north into the German flank. His 4th Armored Division broke through to Bastogne on December 26, ending the siege. By January 16, the Bulge was sealed.

What made the promise credible, even though it sounded like theater, was that Patton had seen it coming. His intelligence officer, Colonel Oscar Koch, had briefed him on December 9 about a suspicious concentration of German panzer divisions that had gone quiet on the Third Army's front. Koch told Patton the enemy was favored if they struck. Patton's response was to keep his Frankfurt offensive on track and quietly order his staff to begin sketching contingency plans for exactly this scenario. When the Germans hit on December 16, Patton already had the maps drawn. The pivot that stunned every other commander in Europe had been sitting in a folder for a week.

Patton understood something about the men around him that made the whole thing possible. He said it plainly: "Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do, and they will surprise you with their ingenuity."

Koch had surprised him. Given a mission and the latitude to pursue it, the colonel found what no other Allied intelligence officer was looking for — and handed Patton the week he needed.

That is not battlefield improvisation. That is the débrouillard in full: see the whole board before anyone else does, run the scenarios while others are still focused on the objective in front of them, and be ready to deliver the message on foot when the horse goes down.

I took a professional strengths assessment a few years ago, the kind that identifies where your natural talents cluster. My top five came back: Strategic, Achiever, Ideation, Responsibility, Intellection. Three different domains represented in five results. My mind apparently investigates possibilities, produces output, generates connections between disparate things, takes psychological ownership of commitments, and keeps a constant internal hum of reflection running in the background.

Reading those results, I recognized the pentathlon immediately. Not one domain. Not one discipline. Five distinct capabilities from three different areas, all pulling toward the same finish line.

The Gallup description of Ideation stopped me cold. It said people with this talent are fascinated by ideas because they can find connections between seemingly disparate phenomena. That is the pentathlon in a sentence. The whole sport exists because a 19th-century Frenchman looked at shooting, fencing, swimming, riding, and running and saw that they were not five unrelated things. They were one thing: soldiers who could handle whatever came next.

I think about this when I think about what I want to pass along to my grandchildren. The world they are growing up in is ferociously good at identifying and rewarding specialization early. Schools sort children by aptitude. Algorithms serve them more of what they already engage with. Travel teams recruit eight-year-olds and develop that one skill relentlessly.

What I hope for them is not that they resist any of that. If one of them finds a diamond the way Teddy did, I want them to run toward it with everything they have. I hope they get enough exposure first. Enough different horses to ride, enough cold rivers to consider, so that when they do commit, they know it is the right thing and not just the first thing.

Some of them will go deep. Some will go wide. The pentathlon does not require everyone to compete.

Patton collapsed at the finish line in Stockholm. He got up. He went to France. He won the war.

The pentathlon did not beat him. It made him.

That is what I hope for my grandchildren. Not a finish line where one skill wins, but a life with enough legs under it that when something knocks them down, they get up anyway.

The Art of Being Lovably Flawed

What Oscar the Grouch and Cookie Monster Taught Me About Building a Life

I am part of the Sesame Street generation, not the nostalgic, "remember when" generation, but the actual first one. I was there for the beginning, sitting cross-legged in front of our wood-grain Zenith television in 1969, watching something that had never existed before: a show that talked to kids like we had brains, that mixed education with pure silliness, and that populated a neighborhood with characters who were unapologetically, authentically themselves.

Oscar the Grouch and Cookie Monster. Those were my guys. Don't get me wrong - Big Bird was sweet and Kermit has great moments. But Oscar? Oscar got it. Some days you just feel grouchy and that's that. And Cookie Monster, the way he'd completely lose his mind over cookies, cracked me up. Still does.

Decades later, as I reflect on the life I've built, the career choices I've made, the way I've tried to parent, the relationships I've formed, I realize how profoundly those fuzzy philosophers shaped my understanding of what it means to show up authentically in the world. More importantly, they taught me lessons I hope I have passed on to my own children.

The Grouch's Gift: Permission to Be Real

I didn't know why I loved Oscar so much back then, but looking back, it makes perfect sense. Every other character on TV was happy all the time - big smiles, cheerful voices, everything's wonderful! Oscar was the only one who said, 'You know what? Today sucks and I'm not pretending otherwise.'

He wasn't a jerk about it. He wasn't trying to ruin anyone else's day. He just sat in his trash can, owned his bad mood, and didn't apologize for it. That was huge for a little kid to see - that you didn't have to be sunshine and rainbows every single day to be okay.

When I found myself translating between temperamental programmers and impatient fundraisers, Oscar's influence was there. When I chose to sit in the political middle seat while others retreated to comfortable extremes, that was Oscar's gift at work, when I admitted to my team that I was struggling after losing my dear friend and colleague Yoko, rather than putting on a professional mask, I was practicing what the grouch had taught me: that authenticity creates deeper connections than any performance ever could.

To my children, I hope you've learned this lesson through watching me navigate both my good days and my difficult ones. When I write about feeling like Charlie Brown most days instead of pretending to be someone more optimistic, that's not pessimism, that's honesty. And honesty, even when it's not pretty, builds trust in ways that false cheer never can.

Cookie Monster's Chaos: The Power of Unfiltered Enthusiasm

Cookie Monster was totally different from Oscar. Oscar sat there being grouchy, and Cookie Monster went gaga over cookies (well, mostly cookies). He'd shove them in his mouth, crumbs flying everywhere, half of the cookies ending up on the floor... 'om nom nom nom.' It was always complete chaos, of course, that's what made it funny. Most characters would eat cookies politely. Cookie Monster attacked them like his life depended on it, and somehow that made him impossible not to love.

Cookie Monster taught me that passion doesn't have to be polite, a lesson that became the foundation for some of my most meaningful choices. When I decided to bring donuts to a struggling database conversion team on Fridays, that wasn't strategic planning. That was Cookie Monster-level enthusiasm for simply showing up and caring about people.

I see his influence in my obsessive Cubs fandom that defies all mathematical logic. I see it in my willingness to drive cross-country with the dogs in a U-Haul, turning a practical move into an adventure. Or volunteering in Faith's computer lab, even though I probably wasn't the best choice, I just really wanted to be there. Cookie Monster taught me that caring too much about something beats not caring at all, even if you make a mess doing it.

Kids, you've seen this in action, whether it was our elaborate Christmas traditions born from last-minute improvisation, or my insistence on keeping score at your baseball games when everyone else was just watching casually. What I hope you learned is that it's better to care too much about the things that matter to you than to care too little about anything at all.

Building a Career on Beautiful Disasters

I built my career primarily as a translator. Not like French to English - more like translating between programmers who think in code and database schemas, and regular people who just wanted the computer to spit out useful information. I got good at taking what the tech guys were saying and explaining it in a way that made sense to everyone else, and vice versa. Turns out there aren't that many people who can do both sides of that conversation.

When I started PRSPCT-L, it wasn't because I was some expert. I just figured that if I was confused about something, other people probably were too. That simple acknowledgment of shared uncertainty became one of the field's most valuable resources.

My weekly donut tradition at Caltech exemplifies this approach. My team was getting killed by deadlines and technical problems that seemed impossible to solve. I should have taken a more official approach, brought in consultants, reorganized workflows, or whatever managers are supposed to do. Instead, I started bringing donuts from Foster's every Friday. For years. This wasn't a grand strategy; I thought people needed something good in their week, and donuts seemed the easiest way to do that.

That tradition worked not despite its simplicity, but because of it. Like Cookie Monster's single-minded pursuit of cookies, the gesture was so genuine, so unfiltered, that it cut through workplace cynicism and created real connections.

Parenting Through Imperfection

These same principles shaped how I tried to raise you. When Faith worried about how Santa would find us in California without a chimney, I didn't have a perfect answer ready. So, we invented the Magic Reindeer Feed and Santa's Magic Key traditions, born of improvisation and sustained by enthusiasm rather than expertise.

When my attempts to get Kailey to eat everything on her plate led to the notorious episode of hiding sweet potatoes in milk, I learned that being lovably flawed meant acknowledging my mistakes, laughing at them (eventually), and adjusting course. Some of my best parenting moments came not from having all the answers, but from being willing to figure things out together with you.

The St. Nicholas tradition we maintained wasn't about creating perfect memories; it was about showing up consistently, year after year, with both celebration and honest reflection. The "however" paragraph in St. Nick's letter, acknowledging that we all have room to grow, became a family touchstone because it made space for the full spectrum of human experience.

Through watching me coach Ted's Little League teams, volunteering in your schools, and navigating the various crises and celebrations of family life, you've come to realize that parents don't have to be perfect to be good. In fact, the opposite might be true: perfection creates distance, while lovable flaws create connection.

The Wisdom of Messes

What Oscar and Cookie Monster understood and what I've tried to practice throughout my life is that our flaws aren't bugs in the human operating system. They are features. The grouchiness that makes Oscar lovable is the same quality that allows him to cut through false cheer and speak uncomfortable truths. Cookie Monster's chaos creates joy precisely because it's so genuinely enthusiastic.

When I lost my temper on the baseball field, made mistakes as a parent, or had relationships that didn't work out, I wasn't proud of those moments. But they were real. And in that authenticity, followed by genuine apology and growth, I hope you learned something more valuable than you would have from a father who never made mistakes.

Look, I hope you guys figure out what took me way too long to learn: nobody's got it all figured out, and that's actually okay. Your weird quirks and the stuff you're not great at - that's not something to hide. People connect with real, not perfect. Show up as whoever you actually are, even if you're having a bad day or you're obsessing over something stupid. That's way better than pretending to be someone you're not.

Looking back now, I think Oscar and Cookie Monster taught me how to be a decent person. Sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud - two puppet characters on a kids' show. But they showed me it was okay to be grumpy sometimes and to get way too excited about the things you care about. That's pretty much how I've tried to live ever since.

They taught me that authenticity isn't just more honest, it's more effective. More connecting. More human. And maybe, if we're lucky, more fun.

A Letter to My Children

Kailey, Ted, and Faith: you've watched me practice this art your entire lives. You've seen me succeed and fail, show up and stumble, get enthusiastic about things that probably didn't deserve so much enthusiasm. What I hope you've learned is that this is what love looks like in practice, not perfection, but presence. Not having all the answers, but being willing to ask the questions. Not avoiding mistakes, but owning them, learning from them, and moving forward together.

The art of being lovably flawed isn't really about being flawed at all. It's about having the courage to be seen as you are, the wisdom to know that everyone else is just as beautifully imperfect as you are, and the grace to build relationships and a life around that fundamental truth.

My hope is that I pass on to you not a roadmap to perfection but permission to be gloriously, beautifully, lovably yourselves. To care deeply about the things that matter to you, even when others don't understand. To be grouchy when you need to be and enthusiastic when something deserves your enthusiasm. To make messes in pursuit of what you love and clean them up with humor and grace.

In a world that increasingly rewards performance over presence, I hope you'll remember what those fuzzy philosophers taught us: that the strongest relationships aren't built on mutual admiration of each other's perfection, but on shared acknowledgment of each other's beautiful imperfections.

Because in the end, the best version of yourself isn't the most polished version, it's the most honest one. And honesty, even when it's messy, even when it makes mistakes, even when it sprays metaphorical cookie crumbs everywhere, is always worth more than the most perfect performance.

Even if it makes a mess.

Especially if it makes a mess.

Three Things, One Ending

Social media will tell you that Buddha said: "In the end, only three things matter: how much you loved, how gently you lived, and how gracefully you let go of things not meant for you." Although this isn't an historical Buddhist teaching (the phrase does not appear in any known Buddhist scripture or canonical text), it resonates with me today.

So normally, I'd roll my eyes at something like this image and scroll past it on social media while muttering something cynical under my breath about new-age inspirational fonts. But this time, it landed differently. Maybe because I’m sitting in the aftermath of another love story that didn't end with a bang, but with the unraveling of two people who, I believe, genuinely tried.

I truly believe that we did love each other, at least that much is true. Somewhere along the way, we carved out a space for each other, one that felt safe and light-filled, even if the world outside was chaotic. There were real moments of joy, partnership, laughter, and a quiet sense of “we’re in this together.” And I believed in it in her, in us.

But somewhere in the middle of making space, we forgot to keep communicating.

I let the pressure get to me. Work was wild, unpredictable, the kind of stress that shows up in your jaw and your blood pressure and your dreams. And with her between jobs, I felt like I needed to carry it all to be strong, to figure out a way to financially support both of us without adding to her burden.

So I stayed quiet.

I thought strength meant silence. That not telling her how hard it was would somehow protect her. I see now that it didn’t protect either of us. Instead, it just widened the distance. Turned connection into assumption, love into guesswork.

And she was carrying her own weight, heavy and invisible. Her frustration built like steam behind a closed door. The more stressed she got, the more it seemed like everything set her off: the kids, the dogs, the state of the world, and sometimes me. Instead of talking to me, she started talking at me. Or past me. Or not at all.

When things were hard, she began to compare me to her ex, expecting that I would let her down in the same ways, bracing for betrayals I hadn’t committed. And I couldn’t convince her otherwise. I didn’t always know how to show up in those moments. Sometimes I got defensive. Sometimes I just shut down. Sometimes I honestly didn’t know what I’d done wrong, only that I’d disappointed her again.

So no, we didn’t end because we stopped loving each other.

We ended because we stopped talking.

And that brings me back to that third thing: letting go.

I’m not good at it. I hold on to words said in anger and texts left unanswered. I replay conversations, looking for the moment I could’ve done it differently. But I’m trying to be better. To forgive her. Ultimately, to forgive me.

Letting go, I’m learning, doesn’t mean pretending it didn’t matter. It means accepting that it did and still choosing to release the future I once held so tightly.

So yes, I loved her. And yes, I tried to live gently beside her. And now, I’m trying to let go not because the love wasn’t real, but because grace demands it. Because if only three things really do matter in the end, then I want to get this one right.

Even if it takes me a little while.

Richard Fredrick Boeke, October 19, 1932 - May 23, 2020

"Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards."

                                                    ~ Søren Kierkegaard

It’s only now, looking back, that I begin to truly understand the depth and meaning behind the moments we shared, Dad. When I was younger, they felt simple, like when you took our Cub Scout den to the 1977 BSA Jamboree at Moraine State Park. At the time, it just seemed like a fun adventure, making rope with David and our friends, learning new skills, and laughing as we discovered a few "new" words you might not have planned on teaching us that day. As we grew older, the moments became more challenging. But now, with time and distance, I see them all differently. That particular memory wasn’t just a fun outing; it was a lesson in patience, leadership, resilience, and love, the kind of lessons that you taught not through lectures, but through living example.

Kierkegaard was right. We move forward through life, not always knowing the value of each experience, not always understanding the meaning behind the choices we make or the words we speak. But when I look back now, so much becomes clearer. I see how the way you led, the way you showed up, the way you handled both joy and difficulty, each of them shaped who I am today.

I am so grateful for every lesson you tried to teach me, both the ones I took to heart and the ones I only came to understand later. I know I didn’t always recognize your wisdom in the moment, but looking back, it’s everywhere. Your presence, your guidance, your values, they’re in the way I try to raise my own children, in the way I try to treat people, in the way I live.

I hope you saw that in me. I hope you recognized that the kind of father I strive to be is, in large part, because of the kind of father you were. Our relationship wasn’t perfect, whose is? But your love was always there, steady and strong, and mine never wavered either.

Thank you for everything, Dad. For the memories, the lessons, and the love. I am so thankful I got to spend those last hours with you to simply be near you, to say goodbye, and to let you know how deeply I care.

I promise I will keep living forward with the understanding I carry from looking back. I will continue to strive to be the best person I can be, because that’s what you taught me, and that’s how I will honor you.

Love you forever.

Remembering When Santa Couldn't Find Flipper

A Christmas Story About Loss, Hope, and the Magic We Can't Always Make

There's a Calvin and Hobbes strip that perfectly captures the quiet exasperation and reluctant love parents feel when trying to fix their child's world. It's night, and Calvin's parents are out in the woods searching for Hobbes, Calvin’s lost stuffed tiger. Calvin’s dad grumbles about how ridiculous it is to look for a toy in the dark, while his mom, flashlight in hand, calls out “Ho-o-obbes!” into the trees. In the final panel, she sheepishly admits how silly it feels, and Calvin’s dad replies, “I may be crazy, but I’m not as crazy as you.” It's a moment that’s both absurd and touching—two parents doing something ridiculous simply because it matters deeply to their child.

I think about that strip every time I remember the Christmas of the Missing Flipper.

The Crisis

Faith was about five, and we were doing last-minute Christmas shopping at the mall that particular kind of December chaos where holiday music battles crying toddlers and everyone's running on caffeine and determination. Faith had brought Flipper with her, as she always did. He was her constant companion, a small gray dolphin I'd picked up years earlier from the gift shop at the Houston Aquarium during a business trip.

Flipper wasn't much to look at, standard stuffed animal fare, the kind you'd find in any aquarium gift shop. But to Faith, he was everything. He had the perfect amount of squishiness, the right weight in her arms, and that indefinable something that makes one toy irreplaceable while a dozen identical ones gather dust.

Somewhere between the food court and Santa's village, Flipper disappeared.

The realization hit like a physical blow. Faith's face crumpled in that way that makes your heart forget how to beat properly. We retraced our steps, asked mall security, and checked the lost and found. Nothing. Flipper was gone, swallowed up by the holiday crowds and the vast anonymity of shopping mall America.

The Promise

Standing in that mall, watching my daughter's world fall apart over a $12 stuffed dolphin, I did what parents do when backed into an impossible corner: I improvised. I made a promise I wasn't sure I could keep.

"Don't worry, sweetheart. Santa will find Flipper. He has helpers everywhere, and they'll look for him. Santa will bring him back for Christmas."

It was the kind of parental promise that feels necessary in the moment and terrifying immediately after. But Faith's tears stopped, replaced by that beautiful, trusting hope that makes childhood both magical and heartbreaking. She believed Santa could do what we couldn't.

The Search

I was confident this would be easy. I'd bought Flipper at the Houston Aquarium. How hard could it be to call the gift shop and order another one?

Very hard, as it turned out.

Flippers that didn't make the cut

The gift shop no longer carried that particular plush. It had been discontinued. The helpful employee suggested I try their website, other aquarium gift shops, or maybe eBay. What had seemed like a simple phone call became a quest that would span two states and the entire internet.

I visited every toy store in Southern California. I bought dolphins from eBay sellers across the country. I examined plush marine life with the intensity of a marine biologist. Gray dolphins, blue dolphins, small dolphins, large dolphins. I acquired enough stuffed sea creatures to stock my own aquarium gift shop.

But none of them was Flipper. None had quite the right shade of gray, the same fin shape, the perfect degree of huggability that made Flipper irreplaceable. Each purchase was accompanied by a mixture of hope and growing dread as I realized the magnitude of what I'd promised.

The Letter

Christmas Eve arrived, and I still hadn't found him. Faith had asked about Flipper every day, her faith in Santa's abilities unwavering. I was going to have to tell her that even Santa had limits.

So I did what parents do when magic fails: I tried to make meaning from the disappointment.

Santa's letter explained that he and his elves had searched the whole world for Flipper. They'd checked toy stores and aquariums, looked in children's bedrooms and under Christmas trees. But sometimes, Santa wrote, when a special toy gets lost, it finds its way to a child who needs it even more, maybe a little boy or girl who didn't have any toys at all, who needed Flipper's comfort even more than Faith did.

Santa was sure Flipper was in good hands, making another child feel loved and safe. And while he couldn't bring back the original Flipper, he hoped Faith would give this new dolphin a chance to become just as special.

The Reality

Faith accepted the explanation with the grace that children sometimes show when adults are honest with them about hard things. She named the new dolphin Flipper 2 and dutifully carried him around for a while. But it was never the same. You can't manufacture the bond between a child and their chosen comfort object, no matter how much love and Santa magic you pour into the attempt.

Flipper Two was tolerated rather than treasured, a constant reminder of what had been lost rather than what had been found.

The Redemption

Faith & a Flipper, St. Nicholas Day 2006.

For a few years, St. Nick, who is fond of bringing good children stuffed animals on St. Nicholas Day, brought a new dolphin to bring to Faith, mainly to assuage my guilt. Soon enough, she found herself with a bed full of stuffed dolphins. She liked them all, but my (and St. Nicholas') quest continued. Finally, a few years later, browsing yet another toy store during the holidays, I found him. Not Flipper, that ship had sailed, but his nearly identical twin. The same shade of gray, the same proportions, the same soft texture that had made the original so perfect.

This time, I didn't promise Faith that Santa had found the original Flipper. St. Nicholas simply left the new dolphin in her stocking with a small note: "Sometimes miracles take a little longer to arrive."

By then, Faith was older, wiser about the ways of the world and the limitations of holiday magic. But she accepted this dolphin with something approaching the old affection, and he became a gentle presence in her room, not quite Flipper, but close enough to bring comfort without the weight of impossible expectations.

The Lesson

In the Calvin and Hobbes strip, Calvin does eventually find Hobbes, his friend Susie had been taking care of him. But the relief comes only after Calvin has experienced the full weight of loss, the helplessness of searching, and the devastating possibility that his best friend might be gone forever. Sometimes the world does restore what's been taken from our children, but not always, and not on our timeline. The magic we create as parents, the reindeer feed, the special keys, the carefully crafted stories, work beautifully when we're building wonder. But has limits when we're trying to heal genuine loss.

What I learned from the Great Flipper Crisis is that sometimes the most honest magic we can offer our children isn't the promise that everything lost will be found, but the assurance that they're strong enough to survive the losing. That love doesn't end when comfort objects disappear. That new attachments are possible, even if they're different from what came before.

New/Old Flipper

Faith is in college now, and one of the Flippers still sits on her dorm room bed, a quiet testament to the enduring power of comfort, even when it comes in unexpected forms. But I still remember the lesson of that Christmas that parental love is powerful, but not omnipotent. Sometimes the best gift we can give our children isn't the restoration of what was lost, but the modeling of how to keep going when restoration isn't possible.

The magic we make works best when it celebrates what's present, not when it promises to undo what's past. And sometimes, that's enough.

Merry Christmas, and may all your important things stay found, but may you find strength when they don't.

Just the Two of Us

Ace, the Glendale Trifecta, and What the Quiet Had to Say

There is a particular kind of quiet you only find on a trail when no one else is around. Not silence exactly. The chaparral has too much going on for that. But a quiet that settles over you like something lifted. The scrub oak moves. A hawk works a thermal overhead. Your trail shoes find a rhythm on the fire road, something between a hike and a run, the pace you fall into when the legs are warm, and the grade is manageable and there's nowhere else you need to be. And next to you, a twenty-pound Schnauzer/Scottish Terrier mix matches it stride for stride, nose down, ears up, doing the job.

That was most of 2014 and 2015 for me. The kids were grown or nearly so. Kailey was in Pennsylvania, finishing college and then starting medical school. Ted was away at school, though I could still catch his baseball games when the schedule allowed. Faith was finishing high school, more independent by the week, her own life assembling itself in ways that were good to see and strange to adjust to. The house that had been full for twenty years was going quiet. I was in a relationship that wasn't what I wanted. Somewhere in that mix of pride, uncertainty, and an open calendar, I started getting up early on Saturdays and taking the dog to the mountains.

Ace and me, out on the trails above Glendale and Pasadena every weekend, covering ground, not saying much to each other because we didn't need to. He wasn't asking any hard questions. Neither was I, exactly. But somewhere on those fire roads, between mile two and mile six, with the city falling away below and nothing required of me except to keep moving, the questions had a way of surfacing on their own.

We were in shape for it. On weekdays, rain or shine, we'd run a morning 5K through our La Crescenta neighborhood, before I left for work. Ace set the tempo, pulling hard through the first half mile until he settled in. By the time the weekends came, we weren't starting cold.

It started simply: hike the peaks above home. Verdugo Peak. Cerro Negro. Mount Lukens. They sat above the sprawl, indifferent and patient. I lived close enough. One weekend at a time.

Ace volunteered without being asked.

Cerro Negro: The Training Ground

We started with Cerro Negro because it was close, and close meant we could keep coming back. Cherry Canyon Park is ten minutes from the house, free, dog-friendly, and on a weekend morning active with runners and trail regulars who know the difference between a hike and a workout. The San Rafael Hills aren't dramatic. They're the small, scrubby range east of the Verdugos that most people in La Cañada Flintridge drive past every morning without a thought. We weren't there for drama. We were there to build.

Every weekend for about a month, Ace and I pushed through the park's 130 acres until we knew it like the back of our hands. Cherry Canyon Motorway. Ridge Motorway. The Cerro Negro Trail proper, a stretch of single track through scrub oak with views east over the San Gabriel Valley. The Five Points junction, where the fire roads fan out, and you pick your line. We tried every combination, figured out which climbs built the most and which descents let us open up. Covering 130 acres on repeat turns a park into a training circuit.

What I remember most about that stretch isn't any single morning. It's the repetition. The way a trail changes when you run it enough times to stop thinking about the footing and start thinking about everything else. In late fall, the light comes sideways across the ridge by mid-morning. The San Gabriels, sharp and snowcapped on the coldest days, appear and disappear behind the shoulder of the hill as you move. Partway down from the ridgeline, where a small creek had coaxed a strip of coast live oaks into existence, the trail went shaded and cool. Coming out of the exposed chaparral at pace, that stretch always hit like a reward. The temperature dropped five degrees, the light went green, and Ace picked up his knees a little as if he felt it too.

The summit tower at 1,887 feet now holds communications antennas, but a painted bench sits nearby, pointed southwest toward Glendale and downtown Los Angeles. We'd stop briefly, water up, take in the view. Ace worked the fence line. The hawk that seemed to live on the same thermal every morning ignored us both. Then back down, moving.

The post-hike ritual was as reliable as the trail itself. A few minutes south on Foothill Boulevard to Juice It Up!, something cold and green for me, shade and a spot on the patio for Ace. He had a talent for making strangers feel personally responsible for acknowledging his efforts. He was usually successful.

Cherry Canyon was our warm-up. By the time we moved on to bigger things, we were ready.

Verdugo Peak: The Figure Eight

I wanted to approach Verdugo Peak from the north, not the way the trail guides suggest. The Brand Park approach from the Glendale side is the most-written-about route, but it puts the city in front of you from the start. I wanted to earn the view. So we started at the end of Whiting Woods Road in La Crescenta, through the gate of the Verdugo Mountains Open Space Preserve, and hit the fire road moving.

The Whiting Woods climb is steep from the first step and stays that way. Steeper than the approaches from the south, which partly explains why the mountain bike traffic thins out fast. Fall was cooling into winter, and the air still carried the faint remnant of the previous season's fires. On those early weekend mornings, we often had the trail to ourselves. Ace worked ahead at his own pace on the north-facing slope, where the cold hangs on longer, burning off the chill section by section.

The Verdugo Motorway opens things up when you reach it. The range is only eight miles long and two miles wide, and from the main fire road you can see both sides at once. To the north, La Tuna Canyon drops away, and the San Gabriel Mountains rise immediately behind it. To the south, nothing yet. Just ridgeline, chaparral, sky. The summit keeps itself hidden until you're almost on it.

At 3,126 feet, Verdugo Peak announces itself with radio towers and a communications building. These mountains are honest about what they are: not wilderness, but the rough working edge of a city that ran out of room. The infrastructure can't take away the view. On a clear winter morning you see downtown Los Angeles to the south, Pasadena to the east, the full San Fernando Valley to the west, and on the best days, Catalina Island, faint and gray. We stopped here long enough to mean it. Ace sat beside me, which he almost never does voluntarily on the trail, as if the summit required a different kind of attention than the climb.

The descent ran us down the southern slope toward the La Tuna Canyon side, skirting the range in a loose figure eight before we climbed back through the preserve and dropped to Whiting Woods. Long miles, good miles, the kind that accumulate in the legs and leave you honestly worked.

The reward was Jeremy's. The little diner on Honolulu Avenue has been a La Crescenta fixture long enough that the servers know the regulars by their usual orders. The shaded outdoor patio doesn't just tolerate dogs. It welcomes them, with an ice water bowl already out when you arrive. Ace would drain it fast, with the urgency of a dog who has covered serious miles. I'd order over-easy eggs with whatever came alongside them, drink too much juice, and watch him go out under the table before I finished my meal. A complete morning.

Mount Lukens: The Hard Lesson

We didn't go to Mount Lukens without preparation. The full loop from Deukmejian Wilderness Park is over ten miles with nearly 3,000 feet of gain, longer and harder than anything else on the list. For several weekends beforehand, we ran the lower trails out of Deukmejian to build legs and get comfortable with the terrain. Ace knew those trails well enough by the end that he'd accelerate through sections he'd sorted out, taking turns wide, reading the grade ahead. Those Saturday mornings had their own rhythm: pre-dawn drive to Markridge Road, hit the trailhead hard, cover the miles, then drive to Everest on Foothill Boulevard for something massive. A french toast and eggs, usually. Everest has never once underdelivered on portion size.

The full summit day started at the Cooks Canyon Trail. The opening miles are unlike anything else on this loop. The trail drops into a shaded creek bottom where a year-round stream runs through a narrow grove of sycamore and willow, the kind of low canopy that doesn't belong to the chaparral at all. Four narrow footbridges cross deep ravines in quick succession. After weeks of exposed ridge running, that cool, green corridor felt almost startling. Ace moved through it with extra attention, nose in constant contact with the ground, processing a completely different set of information than the dry hillsides offered.

The Cooks Canyon Trail connects to the Rim of the Valley Trail, which climbs out of the canyon and links to Haines Canyon Motorway. This is where the mountain starts asking serious questions. The motorway is a long, grinding fire road that wraps around the back side of Lukens, gaining elevation steadily with no shade and nothing to look at except the next section of road above you. The San Gabriel Mountains fill the view to the north and east as you climb, the chaparral giving way to scrubbier, sparser growth. It is not a scenic stretch. It is a work stretch.

The Mt. Lukens Truck Trail branches off near the top and delivers you to the summit. At 5,074 feet, the highest point within the city limits of Los Angeles is marked the way civic infrastructure always marks things: radio towers, locked equipment buildings, chain-link fence. The USGS benchmark is set in concrete in front of the towers. You have to step off the road briefly to stand on the actual high point. We did. Then we ate our snacks, drank our water, and looked. To the west, Verdugo Peak sat on its ridge, visible and now familiar. Beyond it, Griffith Park, downtown Los Angeles, the Pacific. To the east, the ragged skyline of the San Gabriels. The marine layer that had softened the morning start was burning off faster than I'd expected. We felt good. We started down.

The descent follows the Crescenta View Trail, and the name earns itself fast. The switchbacks face south and west, the entire Los Angeles Basin opening below as you lose elevation. It is the best view on the loop. It is also fully exposed, and by mid-morning in late spring, the sun was working hard. Ace's black coat absorbed it all. I noticed him throttle back. Not dramatically. Ace doesn't make a production of discomfort. But there's an unmistakable way his stride shortens and his head drops, and you understand his body is managing something his will hasn't acknowledged yet. I pulled back to his pace and started watching his gait and breathing instead of the trail.

About two-thirds of the way down, he found the redoubt before I did. A circular stone piling we'd named on earlier training runs, a small ring of rocks throwing just enough shade for a twenty-pound dog to press into. On a normal day it was a waypoint. That June morning it was the most critical piece of real estate on the mountain. I poured out the last of our water, half to drink and half over his coat, and we stayed until his breathing steadied and his ears came back up.

The Crescenta View Trail connects back to the Dunsmore Canyon Trail for the final stretch to the parking lot. We covered it at a walk. We made it down.

I packed two extra water bottles and set the alarm an hour earlier every time after that.

Standing at the trailhead cooling down, I ran the math. Cerro Negro. Verdugo Peak. Mount Lukens. Three peaks above Glendale, all done. That's when the name came to me: the Glendale Trifecta. It made the whole thing sound more official than it was. We'd done it, and I liked knowing that.

Pasadena: Learning New Ground

The trifecta was done, but the Brown Mountain and Arroyo Seco loop was still out there. Twenty-six miles. A different order of distance than anything we'd attempted. The Cerro Negro and Verdugo months had built us for the Glendale peaks. For this, we needed Pasadena.

Over the next several weeks, Ace and I explored the trail system threading through Hahamonga Watershed Park, the Upper Arroyo, and the Lower Arroyo, all connected through the hinge of Devil's Gate Dam. The full circuit circumnavigates the Rose Bowl in a loose loop, the stadium visible from multiple angles as you move through it, a strange and grounding landmark for an urban trail run. The terrain shifts constantly. Sandy wash. Oak woodland. Exposed ridge. Paved path alongside a golf course where you could hear golfers debating their lie from across the fairway. It keeps you paying attention.

Hahamonga is 1,300 acres, named by the Tongva people who lived here long before anyone else. The word means "Flowing Waters, Fruitful Valley," and it earns that. The park sits where the Arroyo Seco first leaves the San Gabriel Mountains and opens into the basin, and you feel that transition on foot. The lower trails run through open sandy wash with wide views of the front range, JPL's buildings visible to the west. The upper trails narrow and go shaded in the oak woodland, the temperature dropping noticeably. A disc golf course runs through one section, and you get used to the distant sound of a disc hitting chains while hawks circle overhead. It is a genuinely odd park, and we liked it.

Devil's Gate Dam is the connector. Built in 1920 as the first flood control dam in Los Angeles County, it sits where the Arroyo Seco pushes through a narrow gorge. Its name comes from a rock formation that once resembled a devil's profile in the canyon wall, now covered during restoration and gone, but the name remains. A tunnel under the 210 Freeway links the watershed to the Upper Arroyo, and passing through it always felt like a gear change: from the open, arid wash of Hahamonga into the greener, more wooded character of the Arroyo proper.

The Upper Arroyo trails run alongside the stream, water audible most of the year, Brookside Golf Club pressing against one edge while the canyon drops away on the other. The Rose Bowl appears and disappears as you move. In the Lower Arroyo, the Colorado Street Bridge appears above you, its Beaux-Arts arches rising 150 feet over the canyon. The traffic on it so far up reads more like architecture than road. Ace had strong opinions about the stream crossings in this section, which varied by season and by how much he'd been looking forward to getting his feet wet.

Together, the three parks gave us mileage and variety. By the time we'd run those trails for several weekends, we had the legs for a long day and a feel for how the Arroyo Seco canyon behaved. Knowing the terrain from the bottom gave us a sense of what we were climbing toward.

The post-hike stop on those Pasadena mornings was Lucky Boy on Arroyo Parkway, a roadside institution producing breakfast burritos since 1961 with no signs of reconsidering. The burrito is massive in the way only a place utterly indifferent to trends can manage: home fries, eggs, bacon, cheddar, the whole thing wrapped tight enough to hold together but large enough to challenge the paper bag's structural limits. Ace would get his water. I would get the burrito. Neither of us had complaints.

The Arroyo Seco: Twenty-Six Miles and a Detour

A few weeks after the Pasadena training runs, we drove back over for the real thing. The route ran counterclockwise from the Gabrielino Trail trailhead near JPL, up through El Prieto Canyon, across the Brown Mountain Truck Trail and the Fern Truck Trail, then the Ken Burton Trail toward Switzer Falls, before dropping back down the Arroyo Seco and completing the loop on the Gabrielino. Twenty-six miles. Over twelve hours.

The first several miles up El Prieto were familiar, the same shaded oak woodland and creek crossings we'd trained in, but longer and gaining more purposefully. Ace moved well, sorting the crossings cleanly, nose down in the canyon where the scent register is richer than anything on the exposed ridgelines. The Brown Mountain saddle opened the San Gabriel Valley below us, the Rose Bowl sitting on the valley floor, familiar now, seen from a completely different angle. The trail toward Switzer Falls threaded through increasingly narrow canyon terrain, the creek appearing and disappearing as the walls closed in.

Somewhere on the Ken Burton Trail, we took a wrong turn.

The trail thinned, and the canyon narrowed until we followed the Arroyo Seco into Bear Canyon, a slot canyon where the walls press close, and the creek fills the floor. A fallen tree spanned a dammed pool. It looked passable. It was not. We both went in, Ace first, then me, in a sequence that was avoidable and undignified. The water was cold enough to be instructive. Ace surfaced immediately, swam to the bank with the matter-of-fact competence of a dog who has been betrayed by humans before and expected no better, and waited on the rocks while I worked out my own exit. Patient. No moral support offered. He sat there, soaked and watchful, ready to move as soon as I got myself sorted.

We retraced our steps, found the right trail, and kept moving. Soaking wet, upward of sixteen miles in, still four or five hours from the car. Switzer Falls was worth it. The water drops into a pool that looks impossibly clear for something thirty miles from downtown Los Angeles, and we stood there a while, Ace finally still beside me, both of us dripping, the canyon quiet around us.

We got back to the car as the last light left the sky. No post-hike stop. Twelve hours on trail, an unplanned swim, twenty-six miles. We drove home. Ace ate his dinner, arranged himself on the couch with the settled finality of a dog who has given everything and has no further obligations, and didn't move until morning.

What the Quiet Had to Say

I sat in the quiet of the house and thought about the year.

Kailey was in Pennsylvania building a life I could admire from a distance. Ted was away at school, still letting me catch a baseball game now and then. Faith was nearly out the door, the last of the three, her own story gathering momentum. I'd spent twenty years as an involved parent, present, deliberate, all-in. Now the thing I'd given myself to most completely was winding down on its own schedule, which is the only schedule it ever follows. A relationship in my life wasn't what I needed it to be, and I was slow to admit it. I wasn't ready to answer questions about what the next chapter looked like.

The trails didn't answer any of that. But they gave me a place to carry it. That's what I was looking for, without knowing it: not solutions, just space. The fire roads don't ask anything of you. They go uphill, and you either follow or you don't. The thinking happens somewhere in the middle miles, when the effort is high enough to quiet the noise and low enough to let the mind move. By mile four or mile seven or mile twelve, things that had seemed complicated in the house at six in the morning were sometimes clearer. Not resolved. Held more honestly.

Ace didn't care about any of it. He wanted to be where I was. He woke up every weekday morning ready for the 5K, every Saturday ready for whatever came next. He fell into the creek in Bear Canyon, swam out, shook off, and waited for me to catch up. No complaint. No recrimination. Watchful, patient, ready. That's the best thing about dogs. It's also the thing I was trying to teach myself.

He was better at it than I was.

We kept hiking through 2015, and into 2016, and beyond. The questions got answered, some better than others. The kids kept building their lives. I kept lacing up the trail shoes on Saturday mornings, though the routes changed as I did.

Those two years on the trails above Glendale and Pasadena: the trifecta, the Arroyo, the long Saturdays spent covering ground. I carry them. Not because we climbed anything remarkable, though the views were good. Because of what it felt like to have a few hours every week that were completely uncomplicated. The two of us. Moving through the quiet. Working things out one mile at a time.