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Grandpappy's house sat at the crossing of two dirt roads that didn't go much of anywhere. It was a small house, three little bedrooms, cracker box style my mother called it. Corn came up to all four corners of that crossroads except the one where the house stood, so that in July, sitting on his porch, you had the feeling of being on an island in a green sea that went clear to the edge of the…
As my wife likes to tell me, "Marco, your norm is not the norm." "Mr. Troeger, there is no record of your ticket in our system," the gate agent tells me after a series of alarming beeps emanated from her ticket scanner. I was connecting flights in Minneapolis, attempting to board my flight home to Grand Rapids. "But I just flew here from San Francisco and this is my connection and that is my…
The mug was still in the cabinet. I'd moved it twice, once to the back of the shelf, once to a box in the garage. Both times I brought it back. It was ridiculous. An oversized ceramic mug from a bed and breakfast in Maine she'd liked so much that she asked the woman at the front desk if she could buy it. The woman said just take it. She carried it home wrapped in a sweater in her suitcase and used…
"Life should not be a journey to the grave with the intention of arriving safely in a pretty and well preserved body, but rather to skid in broadside in a cloud of smoke, thoroughly used up, totally worn out, and loudly proclaiming "Wow! What a Ride!" Hunter S. Thompson, The Proud Highway: Saga of a Desperate Southern Gentleman
A few years ago, I received a text that caught me off guard: “…a very scary thought struck me… that moral people like u are getting extinct.” The message came from my friend Garish, and to understand its weight, you’d need the story that came before it. Garish and I had just finished dinner after a long day of consulting at a client site together. He's originally from middle-class India, came to…
A few years ago, I was driving to the southern part of the state from the home I lived in at the time in northern Ohio to do some consulting work. It had been a nice, relaxing weekend with my wife, and the four hour drive was an irritating, disruptive end to a beautiful Sunday afternoon. My irritation increased as I realized the amount of work I had to do over the next few days. Impatiently, the…
Sometimes when you’re on the road, traveling for work, the world can be a lonely place. A few years ago, while traveling in a less noisy corner of Seattle, Washington, something very simple and slightly magical happened to me. At the time, I was part of a small writer’s group, where we met monthly, submitting and critiquing essays to each other about what we experienced in everyday life. This true…
A few years ago, I joined a friend who runs a small adventure company to climb Mount Kilimanjaro along with several of his clients. He chose the Umbwe route, the shortest, steepest, and arguably most punishing path to the summit. It cuts directly through the Southern Glaciers and the Western Breach, a route that challenges due to the limited acclimatization the other routes provide. The journey…
One of my favorite essays of all time is Robert J. Hastings, "The Station". It speaks volumes about where you want to be in life, what you want to accomplish, and how far you want to go in order to meet your goals. But, what Hastings makes you realize at the end of his essay is that the goals, the achievements, that one place you want to be... your station... those are the ends to which you…
A number of years ago, back when I was still in high school, my next-door neighbor’s daughter got married. Not in a church, not in a chapel, but in the backyard of a township justice of the peace several counties over. Why there? Well, it turns out the justice was a distant cousin of the groom, and she reluctantly offered her backyard for the ceremony. That backyard, while spacious, was basically…