I'm opening with a poem by the writer Stephen Dobyns. If you don't know him, he's a wonderfully versatile writer, equally strong writing poetry?-?14 books, fiction, another 13 books, even a series of 10 mysteries that I love that are set in Saratoga Springs, New York based on a PI named Charlie Bradford. It's just a ridiculous amount of great writing, so much so that you wonder why you even try, know what I mean?

I found my way to Dobyns because someone shared this poem with me when I was in graduate school in the 90s. I think it was my now-wife, but I'm not 100 percent sure. It would make sense though, because she knew me well enough to know it would resonate with me, and the worries I carried around with me about the future, and the anxieties I was holding on to about the past. And to be honest, the resonance of this poem only grew as we started a family, a thing that took hold in the quiet moments in which you catch yourself thinking about your life as it is and how you might have imagined it to one day be.Ê

The poem is called How to Like It, from his collection Cemetary Nights, and I wrote him a letter about it earlier this year, and how I've taken it in over the years, and he wrote me back that it was great to hear from me, and to feel free to read it on my podcast. So, with the writer's permission, I read the poem on my podcast. 

How To Like It

These are the first days of fall. The wind
at evening smells of roads still to be traveled,
while the sound of leaves blowing across the lawns
is like an unsettled feeling in the blood,
the desire to get in a car and just keep driving.
A man and a dog descend their front steps.
The dog says, Let's go downtown and get crazy drunk.
Let's tip over all the trash cans we can find.
This is how dogs deal with the prospect of change.
But in his sense of the season, the man is struck
by the oppressiveness of his past, how his memories
which were shifting and fluid have grown more solid
until it seems he can see remembered faces
caught up among the dark places in the trees.
The dog says, Let's pick up some girls and just
rip off their clothes. Let's dig holes everywhere.
Above his house, the man notices wisps of cloud
crossing the face of the moon. Like in a movie,
he says to himself, a movie about a person
leaving on a journey. He looks down the street
to the hills outside of town and finds the cut
where the road heads north. He thinks of driving
on that road and the dusty smell of the car
heater, which hasn't been used since last winter.
The dog says, Let's go down to the diner and sniff
people's legs. Let's stuff ourselves on burgers.
In the man's mind, the road is empty and dark.
Pine trees press down to the edge of the shoulder,
where the eyes of animals, fixed in his headlights,
shine like small cautions against the night.
Sometimes a passing truck makes his whole car shake.
The dog says, Let's go to sleep. Let's lie down
by the fire and put our tails over our noses.
But the man wants to drive all night, crossing
one state line after another, and never stop
until the sun creeps into his rearview mirror.
Then he'll pull over and rest awhile before
starting again, and at dusk he'll crest a hill
and there, filling a valley, will be the lights
of a city entirely new to him.
But the dog says, Let's just go back inside.
Let's not do anything tonight. So they
walk back up the sidewalk to the front steps.
How is it possible to want so many things
and still want nothing. The man wants to sleep
and wants to hit his head again and again
against a wall. Why is it all so difficult?
But the dog says, Let's go make a sandwich.
Let's make the tallest sandwich anyone's ever seen.
And that's what they do and that's where the man's
wife finds him, staring into the refrigerator
as if into the place where the answers are kept-
the ones telling why you get up in the morning
and how it is possible to sleep at night,
answers to what comes next and how to like it.

On to the episode:
***
We're having a harsh winter this year in Central Ohio. The kids have been off school for two days. As I left for work yesterday morning, I shook my teenage son awake and asked him if he might clear the drive before I got home.

That evening, as I drove down our street, I saw that he had, in fact, shoveled the driveway. All the way down to the pile of ice chunks and snow that the street plow deposited at the bottom of the apron at some point during the day. So between my car and the shoveled driveway was about an 18-inch tall ice-chunk berm. And as I paused to look at it, I remembered how specific you need to be with teenagers when giving them a task. Such as shovel the driveway and please clear the apron too, so, you know, cars can get in and out.

I made a poor choice that evening as the temperature dropped below 10 degrees Fahrenheit. I backed my Prius up to give it a running start, and then I made a run at the ice wall in hopes of breaking through to the shoveled drive paradise that lay just on the other side.
Sometimes I forget that I'm driving a Prius.

I made it about halfway across when all forward momentum ceased. What's more, trying to reverse out of it only spun the wheels uselessly. It was as if the car was on a pivot point atop the ice pile, spinning slowly from side to side, but never going forward or backward.
So I collected up my son and my wife and we began a lengthy process of digging out and pushing. It took some 30 minutes before we got the car back into the road, then another 25 of shoveling before we made another run up the drive.

When I finally made it into the house, I made a comment about my son's shoveling job to my wife, who quickly reminded me that I never taught him how to shovel the drive.

Sigh.

This is actually a pretty common refrain in my house, that I often expect my kids to be able to do things that I haven't actually taught them to do. In part, because my memory is fuzzy on how I might have learned to do them. And in part, because, you know, a driveway full of snow and a shovel. What else do I need to say?

And I want to say this about my son: he is not lazy when it comes to his schoolwork, or to things that interest him. Which is to say, he is a 100% typical teenager, and when given a task he finds distasteful, he naturally looks for the minimum amount of work he needs to do to complete it.
I assume I was just the same at his age, and I have one story I remember well that I remind myself of often when I'm thinking through how to follow up with my son on a job not-well-done.

I was a junior, just 17, and it was Spring Break. Some friends and I were trying to get some sort of trip together for the week, but it never came to pass that year. Meanwhile, my two older sisters set off for beaches and sunshine, leaving me alone with my parents for probably the first time in my life. As the youngest, I was pretty used to slipping through the cracks by then, and frankly enjoyed the freedom it allowed. Because I remember that all of sudden my parents were unusually interested about where I was going and with whom and what time I'd be home. It totally sucked. Oldest children, I feel for you.
Also, since I was home for the week, my Dad gave me a handful of jobs he would have liked done, and much like my son today, I looked for the quickest and easiest way out of each of them. I remember actually thinking what BS it was that my sisters got to go on these great trips, and just because I stayed home, I got all this extra work. I wasn't yet familiar with the term entitlement, but I sure was living it.

Things came to a head around the job of thatching the lawn, which to my Dad meant taking his ancient, yellow rusted rake that he bought in 1952 at a store called Uncle Bill's, and then really driving it into the grass and breaking up all the dead blades from previous winter. And, again in the spirit of complete transparency, my 17-year-old self entirely believed that my Dad just came up with this bullshit job just to punish me for some unknown reason.

Because never before in the history of our lawn had we done this job. Not once. I took over caring for the lawn when I was 11 or 12. That was when my Dad taught me to mow the lawn by showing me how to operate the mower and then following me around in the yard a bunch of times telling me about everything I was doing wrong, and, on the rare instances when he wasn't around (remember, he was retired by then and had nothing better to do than this), he had no problem waking me up a the crack of dawn to correct rows he felt were too squiggly or the occasional mohawk misses here and there. It's a shitty way to learn something, this system of constant surveillance and negative feedback, but I think it's how a lot of boys of my generation learned to do yard work. We also learned to hate our Dads.

This latter sentiment is why I don't have my son mow the lawn. When he was 12, I taught him to use the mower and then tried to hang back, tried not be a dick following him around correcting him. He really mangled those first few jobs, and I quietly re-mowed them. But he also didn't have the slightest regard for the equipment. He ran the mower over the steel dog cable in the yard. Twice, because it never occurred to him to pick it up first. And because, and this is important to note, I never told him specifically to do it. In not wanting to be a dick about mowing the lawn, I pretty much gave him a green light to do the minimum, muck about for a while, fuck up the equipment, and then head back inside to watch YouTube videos on his phone.

The Spring Break thatching conflict with my Dad came to a head when I realized, while thatching the backyard (the backyard for christ sakes, the one we didn't even fertilize!) I realized that if I swung the old rake back like a golf club and brought down to the grass hard and fast, it really got a lot more of the dead blades up and out more effectively and, so I thought, efficiently.

Unfortunately, after three minutes or so of this modified scything technique, the rake broke. The yellow rusty head separated entirely from its ancient cracked wooden pole. This is an obvious happening, right? You all saw that coming, right? But teenage me was legit surprised by it. I remember I had picked it up and was looking at it in my hand when my dad, who had been watching everything through the family room window (which I suppose was his version of hanging back) my Dad came charging outside and accusing me of having broken the rake on purpose.

Now, 48-year-old me can see how he reached that conclusion, but 17-year-old me was aghast.Ê

What? I shouted. I did not break your shitty rake. It fell apart on me!

Then my Dad grabbed the handle from my hand and shouted "I WATCHED you doing THIS!" And he began to mimic what I considered to be my innovative approach to thatching the yard.

"That's exactly what I was doing!" I shouted back. "It works way better."

"You're going to buy me a new rake," my Dad shouted at me.

"What!" I yelled back. "You're crazy!"

My Dad did not like to be called crazy.Ê

At all.Ê

I think I could have told him to F-off in that moment and I would have been in less trouble. And I still remember the icy silence in the car as we drove to K-Mart to get a new shitty rake (because I think Uncle Bill's was out of business by then), both my dad and I seething, convinced we were right and the other party unreasonable, two creatures of spite, living on different planets, galaxies apart, an expanse between us patently unbridgeable.

So, I know where my son is at.Ê

And honestly, in my whole life, I've been an "anything worth doing, you do yourself" kind of guy. I'm always weighing the effort to show someone how to do something against how much time it will take to just get it done myself?-?and not just with my kids. This trait has hampered me as a manager and led to long stretches in my career in which my wife regularly tells me that I am going to work myself to death.

As I sit in the coffee shop on this cold day, a simple thought occurs to me: that it has never occurred to me to think of myself to be a teacher. The one trait I value in people who have worked for me? Self-reliance. A willingness to just figure shit out. And, also as I sit here and somehow again for the first time, I'm realizing how sad that is, my reluctance to teach. Because I'm a parent, after all. Teaching is what we're supposed to do.

Now that my kids are teenagers, though, I've told them that I've become less of a teacher and more of a coach. And as they get into their 20s, I'll be less of a coach and more a consultant they sometimes turn to as they figure out living on their own. That's a pretty shitty conversation to have with kids, I guess, but my one hope for them is that they enter young adulthood if not self-reliant, then certainly able to figure shit out on their own.

I've been chatting with my kids as I've worked on this essay, and my daughter reminded me that when they were little?-?say 7 and 5?-?I would give them "No help" challenges, where they had to figure out how to do things like refill the sandbox or set up a sprinkler without any help from me, and if they did it, I gave them a dollar. So I guess even though I didn't follow them around telling them what they were doing wrong, I was still kind of a dick. And also a dollar? Cheap ass dick, I was.

I kept this in mind when I got home from work a few weeks before Christmas to find the head of the snow shovel separated from the handle?-?a clean break. Both parts were  just lying in the center of a half-shoveled driveway.

"What happened to the shovel?" I asked my wife as I came in from the garage.
"Oh," she said. "I asked the boy to shovel part of the driveway and it broke."
"Broke how?" I asked.

And then I paused, and old dog considering a new trick.

"Never mind," I said. "I don't want to know."

And I headed outside to start the snowblower.

Yes. I have a snowblower. When I was in my early 40s, and still convinced shoveling was the best way to clear a driveway, I slipped a disc in my lower back working on some heavy, wet snow. And despite two pleasantly medicated weeks of pain management that followed (and again, my apologies to my clients if I seemed a little bit off during that time), we resolved to purchase a snow blower.

Let me pause for a second and just say this to those of you who live in a snow belt and are still shoveling your snow: just go buy a snow blower. Do it right now. Even if you use it once or twice a year, it will be the greatest value-add to your life. I'm so thrilled with it, that whenever it snows, I do my driveway, the sidewalks to both corners, and all of my neighbors. All of them?-?8 to 10 driveways in all?-?and it still only takes an hour! I may not be the friendliest neighbor-guy I could be, but when we moved from one neighborhood to another, I knew that at least in this small way, I would be missed. 
And I have met my new neighbors this winter when I cleared their driveways and then later as they stopped by the house and gave me plates of cookies and also, once, a lemon bundt cake.

I love being snowblower guy. And I'm pretty protective of the machine, if you're wondering why I haven't taught my son to use it. I have, in fact, shown him how, but I need to be nearby him if he does, and if I am already in the area, frankly, I don't mind doing it myself.

***

So these rationalizations and justifications over how well I have prepared my kids to become working people have led to some fears.Ê

Fears about my kids.Ê

Fears I don't seem able to shake, the kind that wake me up. Irrational fears, I know, but pretty fucking persistent ones as well.

The first fear is that they won't be hard workers. It's easy to think this if you ask your kids to do a job and the groan and barely lift their heads up from their phones.Ê

But this is an irrational fear, I think. They work hard at school, and I suspect once they find something engaging, they'll bust ass at that, too. I've spent a good deal of time recently thinking back to how I changed from the shitty rake-breaking 17-year-old I was to someone my wife thinks is working himself to death.

And I think that change started later that summer of my 17th year, when I got a job, on my own, working in the parking lot at Cleveland Municipal Stadium. Once the influx of cars were parked, you could go inside and watch the Indians and the Browns for free, plus you got paid $5 an hour, cash. Under the table, as they say. Greatest job ever, right?Ê

That's what teenage me thought, and I threw myself into it with a gusto not normally seen in my fellow employees, and before you knew it, I was working weeknights at parking garages and doing valets on weekends, even taking over minor management tasks. I was reliable and I worked hard, and I think it was in this job that I realized that no matter where I worked or what my job was, if I could be just those two things, everything else would work out just fine.

And also, my Dad loved this. He loved that his kid had gone out and gotten the gig on his own. He loved that I drove myself from our comfortable suburb to downtown Cleveland, where I mixed it up with all kinds of people and had all manner of new experiences?-? gritty urban experiences like buying a gold chain from a guy who approached me while I was filling up at the gas station. He took out a lighter, lit it and held the chain to it, which is how, he said, I knew it was real gold. A steal at 20 bucks! In less than a week, it started to turn green, though. Then it left a weird green stain around my neck where I had worn it which I recall taking more than a few weeks to fade.Ê

And my Dad really loved that I always had some cash in my pocket, and stopped asking him for a few bucks to go to the movies with.

During my time in this job, I got many of my high school friends jobs as well. Some of them took to it like I did, working hard and enjoying the free Browns games.Ê

Others kind of half-assed it, and I was often embarrassed that I was the one who had brought them into the fold, and this taught me something about getting your friends jobs, which is why I can be pretty stingy when someone from high school pings me and asks for a recommendation on LinkedIn.Ê
There are a lot of other things my Dad taught me growing up that I haven't passed on to my son. How to change the oil is a big one. I learned how to do it, and my Dad was always checking the mileage on my car to make sure I did it regularly. I hated doing it, which is why when I was 18 and the first 30-minute oil change place opened in our suburb, I took my car there and 30 minutes and 30 bucks later I was done.Ê

But when I told my Dad this, he was enraged. True red hot rage burning from his ears. He demanded I show him the receipt, which I did. And shook his head and said spit out between hot breaths of disbelief that he just couldn't understand why someone would pay someone to change their oil. And I smiled and said "But it is my money, Dad," and that just made him angrier, because it was true, and he stomped off to deal with his anger somewhere else.Ê

I don't know anyone who changes their own oil now. In fact, I took my son with me to the oil change place recently and explained why you should have your oil changed every 3000 miles or so, and we watched as they filled the fluids and fixed a headlight and had us on our way in 15 minutes. When we got home, my wife asked where we had been, and my son said "Dad was teaching me how to change the oil."

I assume my Dad heard this comment across the hundreds of miles that separate us now, and his blood veritably boiled.

And while I still worry that I'm about to send my kiddos off to college without knowing how to bleed their brakes or start a reluctant mower or slip a punch and counter, I suspect what has me worried and occasionally lying awake is on a bigger scale, something that has to do with the nature of work itself.Ê

I realized this last year, when a few of my high school friends and I got together at a bar after work. My friend Dana was in town, so we all met up to catch up, which is something we rarely do anymore.
Here are some things you should know about my friend Dana.

He makes the lamest jokes you have ever heard. Honestly, he has elevated the bad joke into an art form. He was making Dad jokes when he was 14-years-old and has only gotten better at it ever since.
He is one of the hardest working people I have ever known. I got Dana a job with the parking company, and he busted ass at it. Always hustling, reliable and hardworking. Several of his brothers also got jobs there and also worked hard. They're a hardworking clan, and I liked working alongside them.

One time in the parking garage, Dana was walking through the entrance lane when the yellow wood gate arm came down and broke over his head. And while 48-year-old me, looking back, realizes I should have made sure he was OK, and very likely concussed, 17-year-old me fell on the ground laughing, and then told everyone at school about it, giving rise to the nickname Gate-head, which Dana bore proudly up until his nickname changed to Tile-head, and I've just deleted the sentence I wrote explaining this new nickname because, hey, we were all young once and made poor decisions, and there's no need for me to go promoting Dana's any further.

So we're catching up with Dana, talking about our kids, what they do and don't do as teenagers and trying to remember if we were or were not like them, and then he said something that struck me, in the moment, and still hangs out in my mind pretty regularly. He was talking about having his boys help with some jobs around the house with their Dad and GrandDad, and he said 'First, we had to teach them how to work."

Right? Teach them how to work.

That's such a deceptively simple sentence. Who among us doesn't know how to work? Right?
But I get what he meant. He wanted to teach his boys how to work like he does?-?hard and reliably. To make that transition that I made from a shitty rake-breaker to a hard working parking lot guy to what I am now, a well-intentioned creative director taking pains not to work myself to death. What caused that change? Was it normal? Natural? Or was it taught to me, on those long afternoons when my Dad followed me around the yard and told me what I was doing wrong?Ê

And as I think about that, I think there's a series of stages we go through on the path to a career. Or at least I did.

There was the "How do I get out of this stage?" in which I believed there was always a way to get out of an assigned chore. Flooding the lawnmower so it won't start, for example. Pretending to be asleep. Running over the steel dog cable. Things like this.

This gives way to the "What's the absolute minimum I can do to finish this" stage, which was me thatching that damn lawn. Teen boys, in particular, are pretty bad at judging this stage. Their brains just aren't developed enough to realize that a broken rake doesn't mean take the afternoon off. It means get your ass into the car for an uncomfortable drive to K-mart.

This then becomes the "Exactly What You Said" stage, which may be how you go about your first job. You don't worry about being impressive or outhustling your peers. You just do exactly what you're asked, no more, no less. When I ask my kids to do the dishes, this is exactly what they do, leaving the food out, the table unwiped, the floor unswept, sometimes leaving the oven on. When they have to put the dishes away, it never occurs to them that there are specific places different dishes go in our kitchen. I always know when my son has done the dishes Because I'll open up the mug cupboard and find a spatula and the garlic press.

After this, there's "What's do I have to do for this job to be completely done and not require any additional attention from me?"Ê

This is a big transition because it's based on a real self-driven sense of completion, of understanding everything that could possibly come back to you and getting it done beforehand. Cutting it off at the pass, if you will. I always remind my kids that doing the dishes also means wiping down the table and counters, sweeping the floor and taking out the recycling. Someday this may sink in for them.Ê
One more thing about this stage: it's not particular to teenagers, and in fact, it's where I find myself when I'm working on a project I'm not particularly interested in, or working with a person whom I find challenging. Put your head down, I tell myself. Do everything that could possibly prolong this job any further and then move on. You might end up in this stage for your entire career, depending on the kind of people you work for, and if you're interested in developing new skills or not.Ê

I think mulching is a good job to demonstrate this stage, right?Ê

We've got six beds around our home that have to be mulched each year because of some rule in the suburbs that no one will tell you exists directly, but most certainly does. And you can mulch until your out of mulch, but that doesn't mean the job is done. The job is done when you're out of beds. And the beds are in fact weed free. So yeah, it's a long solid two days of work, but if you get it done in May, you don't have to worry for 12 months.Ê

As a quick aside, there's a house on our street that had a stack of mulch bags in their driveway from May until August, when the bags were then distributed to be set in front of their various beds. But in a truly heroic moment of civil disobedience, the bags remained there, sitting in those beds, unopened, un-distributed, forever. They're still there now a year later as I write this. And I hope there's nothing bad going on with whoever lives there (I don't know them). I just hope it's a guy or a lady who hauled those unopened bags around to the various beds and then said: "ahhh, good enough."Ê

The final stage is a bit trickier to articulate, but if you've been lucky and have had decent managers or mentors along your journey, you might arrive at a holistic way of looking at work, of really tuning in to what the end product needs to be or to do, and then making that. It's harder than you think?-?requirements are often vague or liable to change. But if you're clear on the overall vision, you'll keep moving towards the right thing.Ê

When you approach your work in this way, you may surprise and delight your clients. Of course, if you're sense of the vision is off, you might also have some churn to deal with. But when you reach this phase of your career, your experience matters?-?all of the projects you've worked on, all of the things you've done. It starts to feel like each thing you've completed has led naturally to the next.
I think that's as close as you can get to happiness or contentment in a career when you're working for someone else, helping them towards their vision, rather than one of your own. So you take it if you can get it.Ê

Now, have I put my kids on the right path with these stages? I have no idea. I only know that I've taken a far different tack than my Dad's approach, but I don't know that it's been any more effective. The truth is, I'm a lousy teacher, impatient, unsure of what needs to be said, and constantly misreading what one should safely assume.

I remember visiting a friends house back in the early aughts, when we were toting a diaper bag and constantly chasing after two little ones. They had a small wooden sign on their bookshelf that read "prepare your child for the path, not the path for your child." I don't know who said it. The sign didn't say. It's probably generic enough that no one can claim to have said it. But I've thought about that little sign a lot as I parented my kids. And lately, as my son takes the ACT and starts visiting colleges, I find I'm thinking about it all of the time.Ê

Because I'm worried that I have done neither of these things for my son, and that it's too late for a last minute cram session before he heads off into the jungle. I suppose this is another irrational fear. My wife points out to me that kids don't just leave your life when they turn 18, that there's a reason why you can keep them on your insurance until they're 26 and on your Netflix account forever, I guess? But none of these things are comforting me, and the more I wrestle with this essay, the more I'm losing sleep over it, worried that I'm about to throw him to the wolves. It's a unique flavor of anxiety for me. And when it rises, it definitely seems to be in charge.

Now my son and I ended up at the family counselor for a few therapy sessions recently. It'll be a long time before I'm ready to talk about what brought us there, if ever. But I will say that it was here, sitting next to my oldest on a little brown couch, that I was first able to articulate my fear that I have ill-prepared him for what comes next. And as we dug into it, I started to realize how dumb many of my examples were. Like, I haven't changed my own oil in years, so why am I so upset that my son may never do this in his life? It's not like the 30-min oil change shops are going out of business anytime soon.

And I so I wondered if my great worry was really this: that my kids won't be hard workers.Ê
And that seemed like a kind of ridiculous worry, once I said it out loud to my kid, who had just aced his ACT and has no problem digging in for hours on end if the subject interests him.Ê

And when I said I never taught him how to defend himself, how to roll with a punch and counter, he pointed out that he is, in fact, a second-degree black belt, and feels like he's got that covered just fine.
So I did what a Dad should do when his kid tells him something like that. I pivoted my hips, snapped out a jab that caught him just under the chin and whipped his head back into the wall.

Are you shouting What The Fuck right now? I'm sorry. I never did that. I never would. That was a terrible thing to write, and a worse thing to record, if you want to know the truth. Punching someone in the face during a therapy session has to rank right up there with shooting the Pope or paying hush money to pornstars. I think  I was very awkwardly trying to make a joke, because what did happen next is still a little bit hard for me to talk about, and I thought maybe a joke up top would help me ease into it. Jesus, me. What the fuck was I thinking?

What did happen next, after I tried and failed to come with any more good examples of how I have failed to prepare my child for the path, was a very long, pregnant silence, punctuated only by the sound of my son playing with a fidget in his hand. And during that pause, my throat got thick, and my eyes teared up, and I finally said, I said, I guess, the thing is, I'm just gonna miss you, kiddo, once you go.Ê

And I've already missed more than half of all the great stuff you've done growing up, because I was holed up in some god damned cubicle somewhere, breaking my back for someone else, worries about the fucking mortgage and the credit cards and getting the oil changed every 3,000 miles.
And after I said this, it was quiet for a minute while I wiped my eyes and fought an epic battle to keep from breaking down into a completely unhinged blubbering mess.Ê

And then the silence was finally, mercifully, broken by my son, who looked at me and said these words:

Can we go to Taco Bell after this?

And I laughed.Ê

Because there was simply nothing else behind his question other than the obvious: he's a teenage boy who's always hungry. There was no forgiveness in his words. No real sense that he even registered what I had arrived at, or why it was upsetting me so.Ê

And all those things, they still matter, and I hope we'll get to processing them in their due time.Ê
But for now, this moment on this day, my kiddo was hungry, and there was a Taco Bell just up the street. And that's where we went, and ate 20 dollars worth of taco variations, and drank something called Baja Blast Mountain Dew (the availability of which caused my son to do a fist pump), and we didn't worry for a single motherfucking second about what might be coming next, or if we were prepared to meet it, or even, as the poet Steven Dobyns has wondered, how to like it.

***

I finished writing this essay during last year's mulch season, and have been tinkering with it for over a year now. A new mulch season looms next month, but I wanted to end with a text message my wife sent me last year. We had spent the weekend mulching and got about 80% of the beds done, hashtag first world problems, and she decided she and the kids would get the rest done after school on Monday. Here's what she wrote:

The kids and I finished mulching. I had to scream at them to get them to help, and they made me cry three times, but it's done.

That all checks out, you know. Sounds pretty par for the course, if you want to know the truth. If you work hard and settle your family in the comfortable middle-class suburbs, no one tells you that you'll forever be under the thumb of Big Mulch.Ê

Except for my one neighbor across the street, whom I still do not know, and whose bags of mulch are still lying unopened in the beds around their house, a small gesture of defiance of the unwritten rules against which we measure our lives.