One

I had been thinking of writing my friend Kelly a letter for a while, but for some reason, I kept getting a mental block when I tried to lay it out. Most of the time, I think of writing someone – Bianca, or Tom, or Preston – and I sit down and write, and my subconscious has laid out the structure of the letter beforehand; all my pen needs to do is scratch the paper. But with Kelly, I just didn’t know how it would end up, or how to write all the things I wanted to write in a coherent narrative, so I never started.

So one night, I had an epiphany. I like lists; why not write her a letter that was a list of ten things? I was sure I could come up with ten things to tell her.

So I did. It was an OK letter, and really, letters are nice to get nowadays, even if they are not on Crillon stationary, and it was nice to get ten things out of my head. And then I thought: why not write down ten things as a journaling exercise? Every night, or at random times, I could write a list of ten things that happened that day, or that I am thinking about, or that I am grateful for, just to clear my mind. It could be ten words total, or ten paragraphs, or ten pages.

So I started doing that. I started titling the lists: Dave and Foong Visit, Work Problems, Things I Like About Daniel.

And then: why not use this to solve problems? Think up a problem and then don’t stop until I have ten possible solutions – good, bad, reasonable, impossible. Get them down and then think.

Now, ten things is part of my life. I recommend it. And I am going to try it for this blog.

Two

When Step and I were young, our family took maybe one big vacation a year. My dad was a doctor, and owned his own practice, so it was hard for him to get away. We also didn’t have huge amounts of money, so most of our vacations – in my memory – were road trips to the Sierra Nevada mountains, or the Grand Canyon, and we always stayed in rural hotels that had wood planking on the outside and red or yellowed curtains and served biscuits and gravy and home fries and grease-soggy bacon for breakfast – those kinds of 1980s places.

My most vibrant and enduring memory of these now was getting up in the middle of the night to pee, and walking into the bathroom of whatever hotel we were staying in, and seeing my dad sitting on the toilet, the lid down, reading a book. He was there because it was the only place where the light would not disturb everyone else, and he was on vacation, and it was the 1980s, and nobody could reach him, so he could read. He read a lot anyway, I believe, but no matter how early or late I got up, he would be taking advantage of the time during vacation to read. He would look up, and smile, and get off the toilet so I could use it, and then kiss me goodnight, and close the lid again while I closed the door.

I remember that as I sit in our holiday home in Wales. Alice and the kids are asleep, and we are fortunate that this place has a living room that I can type in without disturbing them. But like father, like son: of all of the vacation goals that I have listed in a Google Keep list, the vast majority of them relate to words – reading them or writing them. Yes, family time will take up the bulk of each day, but my early mornings will be spent open-water swimming, and my late evenings will be spent with paper and pen and pages.

Three

For most of human history, people could raise their children and expect that the new generation would have more or less the same kind of life the parents had with very little change.

We are living at the beginning of a period where the one thing that is certain is that the lives of our children will be nothing like what we experienced, and their future is completely unknowable. I hope it is amazing, even if I am a bit jealous.

Four

I have not had any alcohol all year, and it has been amazing. I have recently found myself struggling on more than a single cup of coffee a day; if I have two, or three, then I am up late and sleep poorly. My body can’t handle more than that. And I need vegetables to feel my best.

“I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.”

Five

My sister got the results back from 23 and Me. We are about 3% African.

This is not surprising to me because we are 3% African; it is surprising to me because family lore has it that our great-great-great grandmother was African, and we haven’t had any confirmation of that. So much of what has been passed down to us over the years about our family is definitely myth, and it is surprising to me that this single story might have been true.

Six

Back in 2015, I had two AirBNB guests come to stay with me, a couple from New York. We were talking in my kitchen, and for some reason, it came out that I had gone to Pitzer. “Stacie went to Pitzer!” the husband said, and I looked closer at her. Suddenly, a scene flashed through my mind: I was a resident assistant in Sanborn, and there was a communal dining hall where a bunch of residents, mostly hippies, made their own group meals. It was always a problem on Thursday, when I was on duty, because they had an open party that night and everyone smoked, and I had to keep asking them to stop smoking in the hallway. I remember one night in particular when I asked them to close the door, and a dark-haired girl with piercing blue-green eyes and dark brown hair took a deep drag off of something, stared at me with utter contempt, exhaled, and closed the door in my face.

And now she was in my kitchen. “I totally remember you!” I said, and we hugged. She had graduated a year ahead of me, and we talked about the people we knew in common, our education, and what we had done since then. I stood there, looking at her, realizing how stupid I was at 19, and how grateful I was that age matures, and how small the world can be.

We added each other on Facebook, and, somehow, she mentioned that someone from my class had started a charity that was focused on getting Israeli and Palestinian children together in the hopes of creating mutual understanding. I had no idea who the man who started it was, but I started donating to the charity. In July, I got a message from a man named Shaul Judelman that had a simple subject: “Thanks old buddy!” I was confused reading an informal, friendly email thanking me for my donation, until he mentioned that I would know him as Stefan, and suddenly everything clicked.

Pitzer’s ethos, I suppose, was to arm us with tools to go out and make the world a better place. I am often astounded by the things my peers have done – leading Google design teams (Anthony), heading up museums (Ben), serving charities (Sarah), reading voraciously (Leilani), starting greeting card companies that get bought out (Katy), and moving into higher education (way too many people to list). We are doing great things, and will continue to do great things. But it is still amazing to me that someone my age could move to Israel, change his name, become a Rabbi, and then work on a project to bring peace to the Middle East. And it strikes me – maybe I am being silly here – that this is exactly the sort of project that starts off small, a bit like a mustard seed, but grows, and eventually changes the world. Knowing Shaul, and thinking of him working away in Israel and Palestine, I can see him having that sort of impact.

If you have the time or the funds, I urge you to support my friend Shaul and his team in their mission.

Seven

Despite being in Wales, it was a quiet book month. I spent the first week of vacation making my way through a stack of New Yorkers from 2015 which I had picked up from a little free library; I love the New Yorker, but gosh, it takes a lot to read even a single article from each one.

Once I had cleared the stack, I read The Old Man and the Sea. Sonny used to say that it was the best Hemingway book; he didn’t care for the others, which was funny to me, as he was so much about machismo. But now I get it; read slowly, it is absurdly powerful, as vibrant and amazing for what he didn’t write as what he did. I was so glad to read it sober, too, and in a house overlooking a bay, and to be hearing the waves crashing as I imagined fearing the Indians of Cleveland.

Actually, sobriety is becoming a bit of a blessed burden. Eight months in, and I absolutely love not drinking – in every situation, it is an advantage, and the perceived social downside is exactly nil. Indeed, several times, people have decided not to drink because I was not drinking, and then thanked me for giving them the space to stay sober.

At the same time, I miss alcohol – not beer or liquor, which I used to drink, but wine, which I rarely chose before.

After Hemingway, I read Essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less, which, while not a Pulitzer or Nobel book, has been on my shelf for a while and seemed to be calling to me. It was…well, very self-congratulatory, but I think that the core message is a good one: we are trying to do too much, and we need to stop and focus more. I am going to take a lot of the lessons away and implement them in my life.

Eight

Over the vacation, Nick suddenly made huge advances. He realised that saying either “Ey-ah” or “Egg-uh” would get him an egg, which, to me, counts as his first word. He realised that if he waddled over to the Echo Dot and pointed and grunted, we would ask it to play “Little Bitty Pretty One” by Thurston Harris, and he would dance by bouncing up and down and wiggling his butt, and then hum to the beat, “Mmm mmm mmm mmm mmm,” which to me counts as a miracle. He realised that if he handed me a bowl, I would get him food, and if he handed me a cup, I would give him water.

He can manipulate us.

Nine

And Daniel: if we remember one thing, it will be the playlist for this vacation: besides Little Bitty Pretty One, he insisted on playing Naomi by Scarlet Gray on repeat in the car, eventually learning enough of it to sing along in a rough approximation. His capacity for listening to a single song on repeat is definitely inherited from me. Then, Bibbity Bobbety Boo by Louis Armstrong, and Los Angeles by Katie Davis.

Also like me, he chugs whole glasses of water as if it is a challenge, and puts huge amounts of food in his mouth, chewing dextrously, then swallowing small amounts as he goes.

Later in the month, we were eating breakfast, and he said, “Daddy, why is ‘fuck’ a swear word?”

I stopped. Kids know swear words; it is absurd to think that they don’t, or that swearing, or knowledge of swearing, will have a negative impact on them. So I answered him as honestly as I could: society arbitrarily decided that some words were not polite, and that people should try not to use them. I didn’t necessarily agree with society, but that I think it best to not say these words until he knows acceptable contexts for them.

“What is a context?”

A situation, a place and time, with the right people around. Generally, he should not say swear words around teachers, or other parents, but…there are contexts where nobody would object.

And a few days later, Daniel and I were sorting out some of our stuff in the living room. Suddenly, he jumped up and said, “Oh shit! I haven’t done my bath time!” and marched out of the room. I thought: he gets it.

And an important step in his financial education: Alice started giving him an allowance, £3 a week in 50p pieces. She also got three jars for banks, one each for saving, spending, and charity. He has to put one coin in each, but then can add coins in wherever he wanted. After a few weeks, I took him to a flea market, and the first thing he ever bought was a toy fire truck for £1. He learned how to hand over the money, and that it entitled him to walk away with whatever he bought.

A few days after that, Alice found a hole in a sock, and commented on it. Daniel said, “Mommy, I can buy you new socks if you want.” So he is learning charity, too.

Ten

Alice’s brother, Henry, visited us in Wales. We were grilling and talking, and Henry asked: how is Daniel’s vocabulary so extensive, and how is he so good at communicating? Is it because we read so much to him? I paused, and responded: we are always doing our best, as are all parents; I have no idea, but various things probably contributed to that. And is his vocabulary all that remarkable? He is four; they are sponges, he picks everything up like every other kid.

Then, on the last day of July, I was making soup, and I heard Daniel and the child minder talking about where they could go for the afternoon. Daniel said, “We can go to the Little Red Kite! It is literally across the street from my house.” I stopped chopping leeks, turned around, and asked him to repeat himself. Then I hugged him.

At four, he has a better grasp of the meaning of “literally” than…well, literally, most adults.

Eleven

And gosh, he is pretty.