Tag: memory

Categories
Dayton Ohio History Memories

The Weight of What Arrived

The first thing you noticed was the smell. Hot metal and oil and something older underneath — not unpleasant, exactly, more like the smell of a thing that knew what it was doing. Dayton Typographic Service on a Saturday morning. Dad already at his machine, pencil tucked over his ear, fingers moving. I was four or five. I had no idea what I was looking at. That was most of the point.

A Linotype machine is the size of a small car and louder than you expect. It sets type by casting individual lines in molten lead — hence the name, line o’ type — and the whole apparatus runs hot, always, a controlled furnace at the center of the work. The operators moved around it with the casual authority of men who understood something dangerous well enough not to fear it. Dad was one of those men. He knew what he was doing with his hands, and watching him work was the first time I understood that intelligence could live in the body, not just the mind. The pencil over the ear was the tell. He was always thinking ahead of his hands.

We lived on Burleigh Avenue in a two-bedroom ranch so small the rooms felt like suggestions. There was a garage out back on the alleyway. The basement held more than you’d expect. The furnace, coal-fed, which Dad stoked every morning before the rest of us were awake — that heat, the warmth that was simply there when I came downstairs, was something he had made. He tended it the same way he tended the Linotype: with patience, with knowledge, with hands that knew the work.

But there was also the kiln. My folks did ceramics, and in a corner of that basement sat the kiln they fired their pieces in. To check the temperature you pulled out a cone — a small pyramidal piece of clay engineered to droop at a specific heat — and peered in at it through the door. I remember doing this, leaning in toward that rectangle of orange light, the blast of heat against my face, checking whether the cone had begun to bend. It was one of my earliest understandings that transformation was not instantaneous. You watched for it. You waited for the material to tell you.

There are men like that in every generation and then one generation there aren’t. They knew how things worked because they had no choice but to know. The furnace would not stoke itself. The type would not set itself. The knowledge was not academic. It lived in the hands or it didn’t live at all.

Union Station was only a few miles from Burleigh Avenue but it existed at a different scale entirely. You went through the main doors and there was a model railroad in the lobby — an elaborate layout, HO scale or maybe O scale, I was too young to know the difference — and sometimes they had it running, the little locomotives making their rounds through their little landscape, and I would stand there watching it with the focused attention that children bring to things they love. I did not know then that I was watching a miniature version of what was waiting upstairs.

The aunts and uncles came from New Jersey on the Pennsylvania Railroad. The Spirit of St. Louis, which ran between New York and St. Louis and stopped at Dayton’s Union Station, was a name that meant something to me before I fully understood what a railroad was. What I understood was this: when they came, they brought TastyKakes.

If you didn’t grow up in the Mid-Atlantic corridor you may not know TastyKakes, which is a condition I regard with sympathy. They are small cakes, individually wrapped, and they came in a cardboard box, and my aunts and uncles carried them off the train the way travelers have always carried the irreplaceable things of home. The Pennsylvania Railroad as delivery mechanism for Butterscotch Krimpets. The whole industrial apparatus of American locomotion bent toward that purpose.

But first there was the platform, and the waiting, and then the thing you felt before you heard it and heard before you saw it. The locomotive did not arrive so much as it asserted itself. The platform shook. The air changed. There was a sound that was also a pressure, a physical fact you received in your chest and your feet simultaneously, and then the engine was there, enormous, indifferent to its own enormity, trailing steam. Nothing I have encountered since has prepared me for anything the way that prepared me for everything. The world, it turned out, contained forces at that scale. It was useful to know.

My aunts and uncles stepped down onto the platform and there were embraces and the good confusion of arrival, and eventually the box of TastyKakes changed hands, and we drove back to the small house on Burleigh Avenue where Dad had been up since before dawn making sure it was warm.

I think about scale a lot now. The furnace that heated two bedrooms. The kiln glowing orange in the basement corner. The Linotype casting its lines of lead. The locomotive making the platform tremble. They were all of a piece — a world in which the forces that ran your life were large and hot and loud and present, operated by people who understood them through their hands. You could go see them. You could stand close enough to feel the heat, smell it, watch it do its work on the material.

Dad is gone now. Union Station is gone — demolished in 1976, replaced by a parking structure. The Linotype machines are in museums, or they’re not anywhere. The coal furnace was replaced by something cleaner and quieter and invisible.

I don’t know what my children will remember. I hope it has weight.

Categories
Reading Writing

The Starting Five I Keep

On November 25, 1963, every journalist in America was at Arlington Cemetery covering the state funeral of John F. Kennedy. Jimmy Breslin went to find the grave digger.

His name was Clifton Pollard. He was paid $3.01 an hour. He had been called in on his day off because the foreman thought he was the best they had, and the foreman was right about that. Breslin spent the morning with him while the ceremony unfolded a few hundred yards away — the dignitaries, the riderless horse, the flag folded into a triangle and handed to a widow. Pollard ate a ham sandwich and kept working.

The piece Breslin filed that afternoon is still taught in journalism schools sixty years later. Not because it covered the funeral better than anyone else. Because it didn’t cover the funeral at all. It found the true subject by ignoring the announced one.

That instinct — turn away from the obvious, walk toward the unglamorous specific, trust that the universal is hiding there — is the one idea I’ve returned to more than any other. It shows up in two very different writers who occupy, in my mind, the same position on the roster.

Breslin got there through deadline fury and a saloon-bred instinct for where the real story was breathing. He didn’t theorize about it. He just did it, on a deadline, in a city that rewarded the loud and the fast. John McPhee got to the same place by an entirely different route: patience, structure, and a willingness to spend six months learning how canoes are made or what happens to a piece of shad on its way up the Delaware River. Breslin worked like a man catching a cab. McPhee worked like a man building a cathedral.

But the underlying claim is identical. If you stay with a specific, unglamorous subject long enough — if you resist the pull toward the obvious center — it will eventually yield something that couldn’t have been reached directly. Pollard and his shovel. The orange grower and his grove. The nuclear physicist who also happens to be a canoe builder. The method is the same. Look where no one else is looking. Wait longer than feels reasonable. Write what you find.

This is one player, really. Just wearing two different jerseys.

The second seat belongs to Wright Thompson — not a single book but a stance. The premise that the most revealing place in any story isn’t the event itself but the moment before and after it, when the subject is alone with something they haven’t yet put into words. Every piece in this tradition is quietly asking: what is this person carrying that they can’t say out loud? It’s a question that turns out to apply well beyond sportswriting. It applies to most things worth writing about.

The third is whatever the Apple design era taught about constraint and clarity. Not nostalgia — something more durable. The idea that removing something can be an act of confidence. That the most useful things often appear to be doing less than they are. This one surfaces constantly in writing, in argument, in the editing pass where you decide what the piece actually needs versus what it accumulated along the way. Features are easy to add. Knowing what to cut requires a different kind of certainty.

The fourth is the philosophy embedded in spaced repetition — not the algorithm but the claim underneath it. That knowledge you don’t revisit isn’t really yours. That understanding decays on a predictable schedule whether you acknowledge it or not. The honest response isn’t anxiety about this; it’s the habit of return. Going back to the same passage, the same idea, the same question on a different day, and finding it has changed — or finding that you have.

The fifth seat shifts. That’s probably the right design. Four constants and one that evolves is roughly the correct ratio for a starting lineup that has to play in different eras. Right now that seat belongs to the question of what AI does to a practiced human sensibility — whether it erodes it by substitution or clarifies it by contrast. Earlier it was held by a certain kind of systems thinking. Before that, something else. The player who earns that spot is always the one asking the question the current moment most needs answered.

The coach who wins five championships doesn’t do it with the same roster. But he does it with the same philosophy. The starting five aren’t the players who happened to be good once. They’re the ones who keep earning their minutes regardless of what the season throws at you.

Breslin knew where to find Clifton Pollard because he’d been looking in that direction his whole career. The skill wasn’t the story. The skill was knowing that the story was never where everyone else was standing.

That’s the one I keep coming back to.

Categories
Dayton Ohio Memories

The Mirror and the Boxcar

When the plane started circling, I needed to disappear.

I was just goofing around on my own with an army surplus signaling mirror in our treeless backyard in Kettering. A thick piece of bright rectangular glass with an opening in the middle where light could shine through a cross. To signal you had to line up the light shining through with the opening.

Living close to Wright-Patterson, C-119 Flying Boxcars were a common sight. I could hear one coming before I could see it. I turned and scanned the sky. There it was.

Maybe this was worth a try. What did it even mean?

I held it up, aimed and hoped.

Then I saw it. The plane started a turn to the left. Uh oh.

I didn’t want to be reported. I ran into the woods behind our house. I watched and waited.

The circle completed. The boxcar flew on.

I walked back into the house and put the mirror back on the chest of drawers in my bedroom.

I never told anyone. Not even you.

Categories
Living

The Unpadded Saddle

The clatter of the wooden track arrives before the speed does. It starts as a gentle rumble beneath the floorboards, deceptive in its innocence. Then the trumpet fanfare blares, the recorded call of “And they’re off!” echoes across the platform, and suddenly you are caught in a centrifugal force violently pulling you toward the edge.

We are so accustomed to the padded corners of our routines that the Derby Racer at Rye Playland feels almost transgressive. Built in 1928, it is one of the world’s last surviving racing carousels. But the word “carousel” implies a gentle, music-box rotation—a docile circle meant for toddlers and waving parents. The Derby Racer, by contrast, spins at nearly twenty-five miles per hour. You sit astride a hand-carved wooden horse, one of fifty-six crafted by Marcus Illions, that leaps and pitches forward and backward with a startlingly realistic gait.

There are no lap bars. There are no padded shoulder restraints locking you into a prescribed posture of safety. There is no automated sensor to ensure you are seated correctly. There is only a metal hoop, your own grip, and gravity.

I remember taking a ride on the Derby Racer years ago. I climbed into the saddle, wedged my right foot onto the top peg and my left onto the bottom, exactly as the operator instructed. Lean in hard or you’ll fall off, the safety spiel went. As the speed built and the outward pull tried to peel me off the horse, my arms began to burn. My thighs locked against the painted wood. The wind whipped my face, and the track roared beneath us. It was exhilarating, yes, but it was also genuinely demanding.

When the ride finally slowed and I dismounted, my legs were wobbly. Beneath the lingering adrenaline was a profound, quiet relief: I had survived.

In 1928, the world was a less insulated place. The people who first rode those Marcus Illions horses understood that machinery required respect. They didn’t expect the ride to take care of them; they understood the unwritten contract of the saddle. Returning to it now feels like stepping through a portal into an era that trusted individuals to hold their own weight.

We spend so much of our time engineering physical risk out of our days. We build software to prevent errors, algorithms to smooth out our choices, and bumpers to keep us firmly in our designated lanes. We have traded the raw, unrefined thrill of hanging on for the predictable comfort of being strapped in. We assume that a frictionless experience is always a better experience.

But there is something deeply necessary about a machine that demands your active participation just to stay aboard. The Derby Racer doesn’t care if you are distracted; it requires your attention in the present tense. It forces you out of the abstract anxieties of your mind and entirely into the burning muscles of your arms and legs. It reminds you that the physical world still has teeth, and that staying upright requires deliberate, conscious effort.

The padding of the modern world keeps us comfortable, but the raw grip of a 1928 wooden track reminds us we are alive.

Categories
Biology Creativity Living

The Compost of the Soul

There is a pervasive pressure in modern life to curate our experiences like a museum curator arranges an exhibition. We want to catalog our memories, label our skills, and display only the pristine, unbroken artifacts of our history. We treat our minds like archives—dusty, organized, and static.

But Ann Patchett offers a different, earthier metaphor, one that feels infinitely more true to the messy reality of being human:

“I am a compost heap, and everything I interact with, every experience I’ve had, gets shoveled onto the heap where it eventually mulches down, is digested and excreted by worms, and rots. It’s from that rich, dark humus, the combination of what you encountered, what you know and what you’ve forgotten, that ideas start to grow.”

This imagery of the compost heap is liberating because it removes the burden of purity. In a compost heap, you don’t separate the eggshells from the coffee grounds or the dead leaves from the fruit rinds. It all goes in. The triumphs, the heartbreaks, the books we read halfway, the conversations we barely remember, and the failures we wish we could forget—they are all just organic matter.

The magic, as Patchett notes, is in the digestion. We are not static repositories of information; we are active, biological processors. Time acts as the earthworms, breaking down the sharp edges of raw experience until it loses its original form.

We often fear forgetting. We worry that if we don’t hold onto a memory with a white-knuckled grip, it loses its value. But in the logic of the compost heap, “what you’ve forgotten” is just as vital as what you remember. The forgotten things are simply the matter that has broken down completely, becoming the nutrient-dense soil that supports new growth.

If we view ourselves as compost heaps, we stop fearing the “rot.” We understand that the difficult periods of decomposition are necessary to create the humus required for the next season of growth. We are not built to be archives; we are built to be gardens.

Categories
Living Massachusetts Nature

The Quiet Neighbor

There is a specific kind of silence that exists only in the shadow of fame. In Lincoln, Massachusetts, just a stone’s throw from where we used to live, lies Farrar Pond. It stretches out, bordered by trails and trees that turn to flame in the autumn, holding its water with a calm dignity.

It is beautiful, certainly. But it is not the pond.

Just over the hill sits Walden. That is where the pilgrims go. They go to see the replica of the cabin; they go to find Henry David Thoreau’s ghost; they go to stand in the spot where American transcendentalism found its footing. Walden is a celebrity. It carries the weight of history, of literature, and of the thousands of footsteps seeking an epiphany.

But we walked to Farrar.

There is a distinct grace in the “next pond over.” Farrar Pond doesn’t have a manifesto written about it. No one quotes its water levels in philosophy classes. Because it lacks the burden of expectation, it offers something Walden often struggles to provide amidst the tourists: actual solitude.

Living close by, you realize that nature does not distribute beauty based on historical significance. The herons stalking the shallows of Farrar do not care that they are fishing in the “lesser” water. The maples reflect just as clearly on its surface as they do on its famous neighbor’s.

“Nature does not distribute beauty based on historical significance.”

We often spend our lives chasing the Waldens—the recognized achievements, the famous locations, the validated experiences. We want to be where the plaque is. But life is mostly lived in the Farrar Ponds of the world: the quiet, unmarked places just down the road. The places that belong to us, not because they are famous, but because we were there to witness them.

Walden belongs to the world. Farrar belonged to the quiet afternoons. And sometimes, the anonymity of a place is exactly what makes it sacred.

Categories
AI

The Second Fire: From Finding to Forming

There is a specific kind of vertigo that comes with a paradigm shift. It’s the feeling of standing on the edge of a map that has just been unrolled to reveal twice as much territory as you thought existed. Lately, as I navigate the vast, generative landscape of AI, that old vertigo has returned. It’s a hauntingly familiar resonance, a structural echo of the late nineties and early 2000s when we first encountered the Google search bar.

Back then, the world was a series of closed doors. Information was siloed in physical libraries, expensive encyclopedias, or the unreliable oral histories of our social circles. Then came that clean, white interface with a single blinking cursor. Suddenly, the friction of “not knowing” began to evaporate. We weren’t just browsing the web; we were suddenly endowed with a collective memory. It felt like a superpower—the ability to summon any fact from the digital ether in milliseconds.

“Google is not just a search engine; it is a way of life. It is the way we find out who we are, where we are going, and what we are doing.”

Today, the sensation is different in texture but identical in weight. If Google gave us the power to find, AI is giving us the power to form.

The “Aha!” moment of 2026 isn’t about locating a PDF or a Wikipedia entry; it’s the realization that the distance between a thought and its realization has shrunk to almost nothing. When I prompt a model to synthesize a complex theory or visualize a dream, I feel that same electric jolt I felt twenty years ago when I realized I’d never have to wonder about a trivia fact ever again.

But there is a philosophical weight to this new “awesome.” With Google, the challenge was discernment—filtering the flood of information to find the truth. With AI, the challenge is intent. When the “how” becomes effortless, the “why” becomes the only thing that matters. We are moving from the era of the Librarian to the era of the Architect.

We are once again holding a new kind of fire. It’s warm, it’s brilliant, and just like the first time we saw that search bar, we know that the world we lived in yesterday is gone, replaced by a version where our reach finally matches our imagination.

Categories
Living Television

The Drift of the Vertical Hold

There is a specific kind of frustration reserved for things that almost work.

In the 1950s, television wasn’t the seamless, high-definition portal we know today. It was a temperamental guest in the living room, prone to static, ghosts, and the dreaded vertical roll. When the “vertical hold” failed, the image would begin to slide—first slowly, then into a dizzying, rhythmic tumble.

“It used to drive my Dad crazy when the screen would start rolling and even have to get up out of his chair and adjust the vertical hold. It would seem to hold for a few minutes and then it would start rolling again. It drove him nuts.”

I remember my Dad in those moments. The rolling screen didn’t just disrupt the program; it seemed to pull at his very patience. It was one of the rare times we might hear him mutter a swear word. He would have to leave the comfort of his chair to fiddle with the dial. He’d tweak it with surgical precision until the picture locked into place. He would sit back down, satisfied for a moment, only to see the image begin its slow, inevitable upward crawl once again.

It was a battle against the “drift.”

We don’t have vertical hold dials anymore. Our screens are perfect, locked in digital amber. Yet, I find that the feeling of the vertical hold remains a central part of the human condition. We spend our lives trying to “lock in” our circumstances—our careers, our relationships, our sense of self. We get up, we make the adjustment, we sit back down, and for a few minutes, the picture of our life looks exactly how it’s supposed to.

But life, by its nature, has a tendency to drift.

The rolling screen was a reminder that the transmission was fragile. Perhaps my Dad’s frustration wasn’t just about missing a few minutes of a show, but about the realization that he couldn’t force the world to stay still. We are all, in some way, standing behind the television set of our own lives, fingers on the dial, trying to keep the image from sliding into the static.

There is a quiet philosophy in that 1950s living room: the hold is never permanent. The beauty isn’t in a perfectly locked picture that lasts forever, but in the willingness to get out of the chair and try to find the focus again, over and over.

Categories
AI AI: Large Language Models Investing

The Ledger of Curiosity

We often romanticize the “back of the napkin” idea. It is the symbol of spontaneous genius—the startup mapped out in a coffee shop, the ticker symbol hurriedly scribbled during a dinner party. But we rarely talk about what happens to the napkin afterwards.

Usually, it gets thrown away. Or lost. Or stuffed into a drawer, becoming just another artifact of a fleeting thought that had momentum but no direction.

In the first two parts of this experiment, I used Gemini 3 Pro to solve the friction of entry (transcribing my messy handwriting) and the friction of analysis (stress-testing the ideas against 10-K realities). But there was one final gap: Permanence.

An analysis that lives and dies in a chat window is barely better than one that lives and dies in a notebook. It is still ephemeral. To truly build a “Second Brain” for investing, the data needs to leave the conversation and enter a system.

“The goal of technology should be to stop us from losing the work we’ve already done.”

I tweaked my workflow one last time. I asked the AI to not just judge the stocks, but to format its judgment into a raw CSV block.

With a simple copy-paste, my handwritten scribble wasn’t just digitized; it was database-ready. It went from a piece of paper to a row in Google Sheets with columns for “Market Cap,” “P/E Ratio,” and “Primary Risk.”

Suddenly, I wasn’t just looking at a list; I was building a ledger. I can now track these ideas over months. I can see if the “Red Flag” the AI identified actually played out. I can measure my own batting average.

The goal of technology shouldn’t just be to make us faster at doing work. It should be to stop us from losing the work we’ve already done. By turning ink into data, we stop treating our ideas as disposable. We give them the respect of memory.

Categories
Books

The Observer Observed

I first encountered Susan Orlean not in person, but in the ashes. Specifically, the ashes of the Los Angeles Central Library. Reading The Library Book was a masterclass in how to weave a forensic investigation with a love letter to a public institution. It was reportage, but it possessed a beating heart. She has spent decades at The New Yorker perfecting the art of the “curious observer”—the person standing just to the side of the frame, noticing the detail everyone else missed.

That is why picking up Joyride felt different.

In a memoir, the observer must finally step in front of the lens. The transition from The Library Book—which is about the preservation of collective memory—to Joyride—which is about the fluidity of personal memory—is a fascinating shift. When a journalist writes a memoir, there is often a tension. They are used to looking outward, hunting for the story in orchids or arsonists. Turning that gaze inward requires a different kind of bravery.

“A commute has a destination; a joyride has only a duration.”

The title itself suggests a specific philosophy of living. It implies that the movement itself is the point. As I read, I found myself thinking about the difference between navigating a life and simply driving through it. Orlean captures that distinct feeling of the wind in your hair, the blur of the scenery, and the realization that the “plot” of our lives is often just the things that happen while we are busy steering.

We read writers like Orlean not just for what they saw, but for how they saw it. In Joyride, she reminds us that the most interesting routes are rarely the most direct ones. A great read!