Looking for 2071

Stardate 2026.34
The porch this morning.
Coffee.
Amber across from me in the new swing chair she just claimed. Brix and Roman scanning the street for dogs, squirrels, trouble.
Brix, ten and patrols like a Boss.
Roman, two and patrols like he discovered the concept this morning.
He is the trouble.

Shug already dropped Shy off at school.
I fed him waffles at the kitchen island twenty minutes ago.
He calls me Zeke.
He calls Amber Shug.
I call her Shug Night.

Amber and I picked the names ourselves. Whose house would you rather go to? Grandma and Grandpa’s, or Shug and Zeke’s?

We knew the answer.

Dave Matthews coming through the Bose in the living room. Loud enough that Amber and I are not really talking. We do not need to.

This is what 55 looks like.

This is the kind of math that is supposed to do something to a person. Light a fire. Sharpen the focus. Trigger the pivot. I have read those essays. I have written some of them.

It did not do that.

What it did today was make the map visible.

Then my dad texted me.

He is on an honor flight to D.C. today. A planeload of Veterans being escorted to the memorials by guardians half their age. My sister Stacey is his guardian-probably to keep him out of trouble. His text said: Happy birthday. On my way D.C. on an honor flight of veterans to visit memorials. Stacey is my guardian. Hope your b-day is a good. One step closer to 2071.

One step closer to 2071.

He knows the math.

He does not know that I sat on the porch this morning trying architect what to do with sixteen thousand four hundred days. He does not know that his text landed on the exact morning the math was sitting on the table.

He just texted his son the number.

At the prodding of the organization flying these vets, the family wrote him letters this week. We staged the homecoming he never got. He came back from Vietnam to a country that did not know what to do with him, and our family decided fifty-one years was long enough. The letters are waiting for the vets when they arrive home.

He does not know yet.

I wrote mine on a yellow card. Here is what it said.

Dad. Welcome home. All these years later. I can’t imagine what war is really like, but I know enough that signing up to go and serve is a courageous calculation. I admire and respect that in you. I don’t take for granted that I did not have to make that choice. That you and the generations before me, many in our family, did serve, in part, so my generation would not have to make that choice. Thank you for your service, to your country, for your family. It is something I do not take for granted. That the freedoms I enjoy have come at a great cost. That like many others, you put your life on the line and risked your own future for the future of others. With love and respect, Christian.

I wrote that note several days ago. I did not realize what I was writing.

What I was writing was the math.

He bought me the days. That is what the note says, when I read it back this morning with the coffee getting cold and the dogs at my feet, Dave Matthews tuning the atmosphere. He bought me the days I have used and the days I have left. The freedom to sit on a porch on my birthday and do nothing in particular came from a man who got on a plane half a century ago and was not certain he would come back.

He dreamt me. That is not a sentiment. That is an accounting.

Here is what I would tell the version of me who started this.
Not the inspirational version.
The true one.

Love being conditional on being exceptional was the most expensive thing I ever learned. The hero costume is armor. It is not personality. The people closest to you eventually figure out the difference between being loved and being managed by someone with a thesis.

I told Amber who she was for years because my map said so. That is the closest thing I have to a confession. She is sitting ten feet from me. She waited longer than she should have for me to stop narrating her and start seeing her. I am grateful in a way that does not fit in a sentence.

The things I deconstructed cost more than I planned. I was nothing the inside of that world had a category for. Walking out of that life required killing a version of myself who was beloved by people I still love.

I am not finished with that grief.

The friendships I let drift are the regret I cannot intellectualize my way out of. I thought there would always be time. That is the lie of being twenty-five.

Music is the only place I have ever been fully myself without performing.
A guitar does not need a thesis.
A song does not require a strategy.
When it’s just me am my guitar in my room.
I connect.
I am.

Shy is six. I am coaching his soccer team this fall. He does not know who I was before he knew me. He just knows Zeke shows up. That is the job.

I have figured out that being man has four legs, like a good stool. the four Ps.

Protection: emotionally, physically, spiritually
Provision: food, shelter, resource, teaching, wisdom
Presence: listening actively, undistracted, leaning in & forward
Partnership: noting is too small, everything is my job

Here is the part I did not tell you yet.

I picked the name Zeke from a television show. NBC ran it from 2010 to 2015. It was called Parenthood. Craig T. Nelson played the patriarch of a sprawling family in Berkeley. His name was Ezekiel. Everyone called him “Zeek”. I changed the spelling.

I picked it because of how he showed up. He was not a perfect man. He had cheated on his wife. He had hurt his children in the specific ways patriarchs do. He carried himself like a soldier in a kitchen and got it wrong as often as he got it right. When his son Crosby made the same mistake he had made, he was the first to forgive him, because he had been there. He listened when it counted. He spoke when it mattered. He did not run.

What I did not know when I picked the name was that Zeek was a Vietnam veteran. West Point, class of 1962. Green Berets. Two years in the jungle.

I did not know that there is a scene in season two where he takes his granddaughter, whose name is Amber, to look at the wreck of the car she almost died in. He tells her he spent two years in Vietnam dreaming his way home to her.

I dreamt you, Amber.

That is the line.

That is what fathers do in the worst places on earth. They dream the daughters they have not yet had. They dream the partners those daughters will marry. They dream the grandsons who will call them by names they have not yet chosen. They dream their way home through whatever they have to walk through, because the dream is the only map they have.

My father did that. He was a young man in some jungle he should not have had to be, and he was dreaming me. He did not know my name yet. He did not know my face. He knew only that he was coming home to find out.

I picked a name. I did not realize I was picking the architecture.

My father served in Vietnam. My wife is Amber. My grandson calls me Zeke. The fictional patriarch I borrowed from spent his fictional war dreaming about a fictional Amber. My actual father spent his actual war and came home and raised a son, a family.

I’ve never had to go to war, but I wear a dog tag Amber gave me. The Jung quote engraved on it is the only sentence I have read every day for years. The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are.

I used to read it as instruction.

I read it differently now.

Sixteen thousand four hundred days, if I am lucky. I’ve been mapping my genome and taking the supplements, so…

Most of them will be ordinary. but everyday will a part of the whole.

My dad is somewhere over Virginia right now with my sister Stacey beside him. The letters are waiting at home. He thinks he is just going to look at some monuments. He is going to read in his own handwriting, and in the handwriting of his children and grandchildren, that he is welcome here. That he was always welcome here. That the country he came back to did not know how to say it, but his family does.

One step closer to 2071.

The math is not the lesson. The math is what someone else’s courage bought you.

I am paying attention.

And I am dreaming,
of the grandchildren not yet born.
of the family members not yet here.
of the freinds still yet to arrive.
of a future I walk slowly towards.

as a witness to myself, to us.

And I will be here.
I will show up.