Yesterday I spent several hours pulling hundreds of addresses out of a database, cleaning up the data for a batch geocoder, plotting these points on a map, then checking the mean distances of these points with another set of points I had already derived.

Thanks to all of this work, I can now tell you what proportion of our employees live within 1 mile of an Equinox Fitness Club.

See? Complex problem solving, multiple layers of analysis, less-than-riveting questions.

The thing is, I don’t particularly mind this. First, there is a difference between dull and unimportant.  The work I do has very real implications, and I know this.  But more importantly, the bulk of my time is not spent pondering the dullness of the question; it is spent finding answers. And as dull as many of these questions might seem compared to the Grand Questions of the World, they are never easy. The company dress code might be lax, the rhetoric might be hip and fun, but the methodology is muthafuckin’ rigorous. There will be no slacking. Guessing is okay, but only if it’s the “best unbiased estimate” you can muster. When it comes to data analysis, they mean business.

I shouldn’t be surprised that a company that made its fortunes building hypercomplex algorithms to beat the stock markets would be so quantitatively driven in other ways. What’s surprising is the degree to which this ethos permeates everything that happens there. Even the company’s interior aesthetic, as designed by architect Steven Holl, emphasizes the presence of order in what looks to be random. Over a staircase on my floor hangs a 9-foot-tall tapestry depicting pi to the nth decimal place. You cannot walk to the coffee maker and back without seeing something to remind you that there truly is order in the universe.

Astronomers look for this order in the stars. Geneticists find it in chromosomes. I search for it in the average employee’s mean proximity to high end health clubs. So what?

Most people who live in New York—the ones I know, anyway—loathe Midtown. We scoff at its overpriced, gimmicky eateries and grumble at the impenetrable crowds of tourists clogging the sidewalks. With proper motivation—a new exhibit at MoMa, or some fancy new restaurant, for instance—we might bite the bullet and brave the crowds, but for the most part, Midtown is something to be avoided. Midtown, we scoff, isn’t the “real” New York.

I have to admit that, after moving to New York, it did not take long for me to adopt this attitude. But in all fairness, it’s not exactly the kind of neighborhood you go to for… anything. Not the stuff of daily life, anyway. If you’re looking for an Everybody Loves Raymond coffee mug, Midtown is the place to be. Otherwise, you’re usually better off finding your goods and services elsewhere.

But this particular morning, as I sat in a conference room in the 30-somethingeth floor of this office building looking out over Times Square and the oversized advertisements for Broadway shows like Rent and Beauty and the Beast (last show July 29th!), I remembered what it was like to visit New York for the first time. I remembered how exciting it was to walk down Broadway, marveling at the gigantic ads and news tickers. For a minute, anyway, all my distaste for the neighborhood melted away and I actually got kind of nostalgic.

I first visited New York when I was 17, in August of 1994. The trip was a year-early graduation present from my uncle Brad. We stayed in Midtown and managed to do all the things a tourist is expected to do in our four day trip: World Trade Center, Times Square, Wall Street, a Broadway musical (Grease!), shopping in SoHo, and of course, the Statue of Liberty. We even managed to take a quick detour off Broadway to CBGB’s, which we found surprisingly lifeless and dumpy at noon on a weekday. (It was not until my next trip that I would discover that it was pretty much always dumpy, even when not lifeless.) We never strayed far off the first-time NYC tourist’s to-do list, but it didn’t matter.

On that trip, Midtown was New York to me, and it delivered all the glitz and excitement and bustle that I had imagined. As I sat in that office looking down at it all, it occurred to me that when I first fell in love with New York, I was falling in love with Midtown. In subsequent vacations and over my years living here, I have fallen in and out of love with many neighborhoods, and I’m always finding new reasons to love (and hate) them. But Midtown was where it started.

That morning, in the office of one of those big financial companies that are the reason so many of us dislike the area (the irony is not lost on me), a hint of that wonder and excitement came back to me. It was a nice reminder.

In the garage, the hood was up on his 1981 Plymouth Champ. The Champ—or “Chump,” as it was better known—was a two-door hatchback, as small as a Mini but with charm and good looks of a late-70s Gremlin, and a paint job that through the years had faded from blue, to baby blue, to barely blue. Its crumpled front fender—evidence of at least one accident the car miraculously endured—had been hastily repaired with a drill, leaving the passenger side of the car riddled with what looked like bullet holes. In fact, a shooting range was probably where it belonged. For more than a decade, this travesty of transportation had been passed around the family like a cursed heirloom.

Dad flashed a toothy grin from across the garage. “Come out here, son. I’ve got something for you.” I was old enough to know that “something for you” usually meant “something for you to do,” and that “something” was nothing I was going to enjoy. But at 15, my only means of protest was a bad attitude, so as I dragged my feet across the concrete floor, I made sure to roll my eyes as hard as I could. “Oh, cheer up, you grumpy bastard,” my father chided gleefully. The way he beamed was making me uncomfortable.

On the workbench laid a plastic baggie full of things—rubber rings, thick paper cutouts that I would later discover were gaskets, and more doohickeys I would soon learn to call by their proper names. Beside it was a grease-stained, light blue book—the same color as our beloved Chump—titled Haynes Automotive Repair Manual: Plymouth Champ and Dodge Colt, 1978 thru 1987. “Here,” my father motioned to the blue beast, “this is your new car. The carburetor needs to be rebuilt.” He turned the doodads and whatzits lying on the bench, “Here’s a rebuild kit, and the manual has instructions. All the tools you need are in my toolbox.” Then his tone became stern, “Put everything back in its place, and don’t lose anything.”

This part was important. My dad loved his tools. At Christmastime growing up, as my brother and I earmarked every page of the Sears catalog’s toy section, he paged longingly through the Craftsman hardware supplement, gazing at expansive, shiny sets of ratchets, sockets, torque wrenches, screwdrivers, drill bits, punches, mallets, and cutters—all beautifully laid out before matching toolboxes. But these sets were expensive, so instead, my father collected tools like a kid collects baseball cards, scouring the local pawn shops for anything worth buying. After years of labored scavenging, my father had filled the garage with an impressive assortment of equipment. Now that he had invited me into his world, he wasn’t about to allow his hard-earned collection to fall into disarray.

With this warning about taking proper care of his tools, my father turned and walked back into the house. “Come let me know when you’re done,” he said, the door slamming shut behind him.

I hadn’t spent much time in the garage (that is to say, no time at all), but I knew my father’s mechanical prowess had been indispensable to our family over the years. With both my parents working full-time jobs but unable to afford two reliable vehicles, my father had a long history of driving lousy cars—from a smoking, boat-like Oldsmobile known as “The Fumigator,” to the rusted green Chevy he liked to call “Snot on Wheels”—and managed to keep them all running well beyond their natural life spans. He understood the value of knowing how to work on a car, and come hell or high water, he meant to instill these skills in his first-born. Automobile maintenance was a rite of passage, a step on the bridge to manhood. Manhood sounded great, but I really wished it could have waited until MTV’s Real World marathon was over.

What happened next, as my father would say, was a total clusterfuck. For the novice mechanic, the Haynes Manual’s simple instructions might as well have been in Esperanto, and the accompanying schematic looked like plans for sending a rocket to the moon. For two hours, I loosened nuts, twisted screws, unclamped hoses—and got nowhere. I was covered in grease, high on gasoline fumes, and my hands stung from several clumsy motions resulting in bloodshed. Still, the carburetor refused to budge.

As if sensing my defeat from inside the house, it was at this moment that my father chose to check in, still grinning in that way that I found especially irritating in times of frustration. “Haven’t heard from you in awhile—just making sure you’re still alive out here.” he snickered. Unfortunately, I was still alive—and it was time to admit that I needed some fatherly advice.

“Do you think you could give me a hand?” I asked, my words dripping with petulance.

Unfazed by my attitude, he sauntered into the garage, peered over the engine, and pointed to a couple of painfully conspicuous bolts. “Why don’t you try taking those out?” he asked, his tone much more consoling than before. I felt stupid for not having seen them myself, but he didn’t rub it in. “Let me know when you get the carb out of there, and I’ll help you tear it apart.”

With this advice, and a little more struggling, I finally managed to remove the damn thing. Then, with my father’s help, I even rebuilt it. With the final twist of the wrench, he threw me the keys, and told me to start it up. It took a few tries, but then, with a cough and a sputter, the engine came to life. “Rev it a little!” he yelled to me. I revved, and revved some more, elated by my accomplishment. Its “purr” might have sounded like an asthmatic kitten, but to me, the Champ—my new car—ran, well, like a champ. And it felt great.

So my maiden voyage into the world of automobile maintenance did not end in disaster. In fact, I would say that overall, it was a pretty good day. Not only did I learn how to read a schematic and replace gaskets, after repeatedly slicing my greasy hands on sharp edges, I learned why mechanics are known for their generous and inventive use of expletives. But most importantly, all that hapless struggling—and all the hapless struggling I would do as the car required more repairs—taught me not to be afraid to dive in and learn about the new and unfamiliar.

Fifteen years later, things are different. Not having owned a car in a decade, I don’t often have cause to use the mechanical skills I learned as a teenager. The choices I’ve made in my adult life—college at a fancy university and a series of cushy (if low-paying) office jobs—stand in sharp contrast to my father’s solidly blue-collar resume. And with 2,000 miles separating us, my visits home are shorter and less frequent than I’m sure he would like. But as much as our paths have diverged, I hold on to my memories of those days in the garage. I remember my father’s feisty moods and wry humor. I remember how he’d tinker for the sake of tinkering, or the way he used to take things apart just to see how they worked. I remember the time he took to show me the way around an engine, and the proud look on his face when I’d fix something without his help. I think of my father in that garage, and I look at myself today. It’s then that I forget everything that separates us, and remember all the ways we are alike.

Happy Father’s Day, Dad.

It’s a little sad to think that the days of spontaneously jumping into a car and taking a week-long roadtrip might be over. I may never again get that rush of energy that comes from riding my Lambretta through Times Square, foolishly darting in and out of traffic as if it were some kind of video game. And I’ll probably never again move far away from home with so little preparation as when I moved to New York when I was 24. That’s not to say I won’t take roadtrips, ride scooters, or move somewhere new, but it won’t be the same. It won’t be so… reckless. A lot of people might count that as a good thing, but there’s a certain excitement that comes with poor planning that I kind of miss.

It’s possible that this realization was among the things that have driven me to graduate school. It’s said that a lot of people go back to school because they’re avoiding the so-called real world, and I suppose there’s something to that. After all, my disdain for cubicles and office speak is no secret. But it’s not all about perennial youth, either. It’s about having the freedom to think, to have ideas and realize them. It’s not the kind of freedom that comes from being independently wealthy, but that’s okay; scholars have determined that the fabulously rich aren’t any happier, anyway. For someone about to voluntarily reenter the world of the impecunious graduate student, that’s an important fact to remember.

Maybe my days of following through on hare-brained schemes aren’t over quite yet.

I’m not into “smokin’ bluntz” or maintaining a photo record of the alcohol I consume. (Not anymore, anyway, but such an album would be increasingly uneventful.) I have, however, recently applied for several jobs, so my first reaction to this story was to rush to each of my own personal profiles and check for potentially controversial content. After a quick review, I am happy to report that, unless you are offended by jokes about the French Revolution or really hate Pee Wee’s Big Adventure, my profiles are pretty safe. And although I might be snarky, callous, and even slightly vulgar from time to time, I have decided that the contents of this site are pretty ok, too. Besides, what employer has the patience and time to plow through pages of my vapid musings? I think we all have better things to do with our time.

After scrambling to make sure my own ass is covered, I began thinking about other questions that this article begs, but does not address. When, if ever, is someone’s web presence counted positively in the job search? Is the very act of having a Myspace profile a detriment one’s chances of finding a job? It’s conceivable to think that there are employers out there that might appreciate those dumb history jokes in my Friendster profile, after all. Or maybe that hiring officer is a huge fan of Stax soul; could I get an interview just so we can talk record collecting? In fact, why couldn’t we use these profiles as additional tools in the job hunt? Wanna look sophisticated without being pretentious? Just take Being and Nothingness off that list of favorite books and add The Unbearable Lightness of Being instead. And make sure to include at least one—but no more than three—foreign films as your favorite movies. Employers love this kind of subtle cosmopolitanism. Just balance it out with a big dumb blockbuster (listed as a “guilty pleasure,” natch). And what HR rep could resist a candidate who lists “MS Office,” “Attention to Detail,” and “Written and Verbal Communication Skills” as some of their interests?

Now that we’ve all tailored our Myspace pages to appeal to the boss, we can ask the bigger question: to what extent is this kind of cyber-stalking ok? It’s common knowledge that everyone Googles everyone else (how did we ever screen potential dates before the World Wide Web?), but are the rules different for employers? Just because the personal details of a person’s life are more accessible online does not make the Internet exempt from professional ethics. I suppose it’s good to know if your employee is running an online black market for office supplies, but is it really important—or appropriate—for the boss to peep into your personal tastes, height, and relationship status? I’m tired of being discriminated against for my love of Herman’s Hermits.

I guess this is an issue for which we haven’t yet established social boundaries. But I’m predicting that, as these informal background checks become more widespread, people will begin to question their propriety. I don’t know where the line should be drawn, but until it is, I’m not taking any chances. I’m de-friending Attila the Hun, and replacing “Workin’ For The Weekend” with “She Works Hard For The Money” as my Myspace theme song. Better safe than sorry.

It’s easy to say that, considering my initial test results and other indicators, leukemia was only an outside possibility. I also know that there are a lot of other people my age who have had similar scares. Worse yet, still more are actually dealing with such illnesses. But something is wrong, and when it’s your blood that’s being tested, you’re the one that doesn’t know what’s going on, and issues like life expectancy and finding a bone marrow donor suddenly feel like realistic concerns of yours, probabilities and compassion do little to assuage your fear. After months of escalating measures and constant tests, this is what it’s come to, and despite your self-assurances, no one has thus far told you that everything’s fine. You try not to feel sorry for yourself; you try to stay positive; you try to stay busy and not think about it. But every so often that chill rises from your chest, through your shoulders, and into your fingertips. It hits you: there’s just nothing to do but wait.

It should come as no surprise that this experience got me thinking about what’s really important, where my priorities in life really are. Friends? Family? Fun? Career? Money? What makes me happy, and is that different from what makes me satisfied? If I had only a few years to live, would I live it up, or work tirelessly to make my mark? Who should I be spending my time with, and what should I spend my time doing? What’s worth fighting for, and what isn’t worth my time? After all, confronting mortality has a way of making that time feel a lot more valuable. These aren’t just questions for someone with three years to live; they’re questions we should probably all be asking ourselves.

I don’t have cancer. But getting that call a couple of days ago hasn’t stopped me from thinking about these questions. I haven’t come up with all the answers‚ and probably never will‚ but I’m thinking a lot harder than I used to. I’ve always followed an internal drive that has vaguely defined my priorities, but now I’m trying to make those priorities explicit. I’ve got a long way to go, but I like to think that getting a good kick in the ass has set me in the right direction.

We arose and sat down together in the living room, surrounded by my closest friends. No one said a word; there was nothing to say. We sat still while a thousand memories moved around the apartment like ghosts. I felt like a piece of me was dying.

I loaded my bags into the car and we said goodbye for the last time. It passed so quickly‚ we kissed again before you walked away. I wiped the tears off of my face, forced a smile, and said goodbye once more. I got into the car.

As we drove away, you stood alone on the corner. You stopped to wave, and your bleached hair, sad blue eyes, and bright red coat reduced everything else to black and white. At that moment, nothing mattered more than holding on.

I didn’t wake you with kisses that morning. I spent the plane ride thinking of our many goodbyes, mostly remembering how you looked on that street corner, disappearing into the distance. You were sad, beautiful, and everything else you’ve ever meant to me. You were a portrait burned into my memory like white noise under the thoughts racing through my head. I hold on to that moment tightly, like a little piece of you that I can keep forever.

Okay, maybe you don’t hate your job. But let’s face it: the lexicon of the workplace is stupid. It’s full of bad metaphors and worse euphemisms, and seems designed to facilitate circumlocution and passive aggression in favor of direct action and conflict resolution. It’s something that, sooner or later, everyone in the workplace ends up adopting, if only by osmosis. It’s a part of process of assimilating employees into office culture. But I think it’s more insidious than that. Just as Big Brother implemented a new form of language in Orwell’s 1984, officespeak can control the thoughts of those who succumb to it. “Delegation” of tasks‚ basically shirking one’s own responsibilities and dumping them onto someone else, just sounds like good managerial practice. “Back-burnering” an issue means neglecting it altogether, and “casual Friday” means employees are allowed to wear their second uniform to work on the last day of the week. Tired of wearing suits everyday? Well fear not, today you get to pull out those pleated khaki Dockers and blue denim button-down. TGIF!

There’s another reason officespeak is doubleplusungood. If you’ve ever spent any time around the real bigwigs‚ directors of this or vice presidents of that‚ you might notice that the degree to which they use this kind of jargon is far more limited than that of the average middle manager‚ and I don’t think they ever use it on each other. The language acts as symbol reinforcing the company hierarchy. They’re not thinking outside of the box; they’re telling you to. Why? Because they’re not trapped inside boxes all day like you are.

I’m not going to act self-righteous about this and claim that I’ve never submitted to this aspect of office culture. For anyone that’s spent any amount of time in an office, it’s unavoidable. But after years away from it‚ working in video stores, garages, and academia‚ I think I’ve gained a bit of perspective. I’ve had some time to think of some “enterprise-wide,” “scalable” solutions to this vexing problem. With enough “team building,” enough “proactive thinking,” we can change things.

I think the time is right for a white-collar cultural revolution. The Accounts Payable department is with me, are you?

It’s time to begin translating the tepid metaphors of office life into their literal equivalents. Go to the company cafeteria (hopefully your company is gigantic enough to have one), pick up a styrofoam plate, and go to town at that salad bar. Set the plate at your desk, in place of your to do list. You could even spray it with that weird chemical stuff to preserve it, and hang it on your cubicle wall. I don’t care. Either way, whenever your manager delegates responsibility to you, all you need to do is point to your plate, and ask them to note the contents. They’ll probably be so confused by your gesture that they’ll forget what they came to your cube for in the first place, and stumble away in a state of befuddlement. And inducing befuddlement feels goooooood. Way to stick it to the man.

Wearing a lot of hats is fairly self-explanatory, but for anyone who has not yet learned to think outside of the box, I will offer suggestions. Perhaps go to the costume store and spend a few bucks on whatever hats you fancy. I recommend pirate and swashbuckler hats, since the skull and crossbones are intimidating, and it’s tough to micromanage employees when their giant purple plumes keep tickling your nose. You’re free to pick and choose, but whatever you do, make sure that you buy a lot of them. And don’t forget to get something special for casual Friday!

Though it’s slightly more elaborate, I fully encourage anyone who wishes to backburner items to buy a hotplate for their desk. When HR comes by to make you fill out yet another form to receive those benefits you’ve been eligible for since last June, just throw the form on the backburner, and tell them you’ll get to that once all of your action items are taken care of. But beware‚ items that get put on the backburner for too long might become a safety hazard, and someone will have to come around to put out the fire‚ literally. I guess that’s the point, though, so have at it.

Though these acts of defiance (or are they simply strict interpretations?) of popular office phrases may make you feel liberated, be careful‚ there’s a chance that all those antics will give the company cause to “let you go.” We wouldn’t want that. After all, the mere fact that they could let you go shows just what a grip they have on us in the first place.

As a white male growing up in the Midwestern United States, I can safely say that I have no idea what it’s like to be oppressed. The academic shackles that kept me from breaking free of high school somehow fail to compare to the Jews’ plight in Egypt, and the closest thing to true liberation I’ve ever felt was moving out of Mom and Dad’s basement. Let’s face it‚ when your idea of ‚Äúthe Man keeping you down means squabbling with Human Resources over your yearly allotted sick pay, and the most frustrating part of your day is coming home from the bar to find that paid programming is the only thing on television, you’ve got it pretty easy.

But just because I haven’t actually been oppressed doesn’t mean I won’t still complain about it. After all, that’s never stopped white American men before, has it? We have different names for it‚ ennui, malaise, or disillusionment, to name a few‚ but the idea is the same. We’re not impoverished, imprisoned, or imperiled; we’re bored. Instead of blaming it on the King, the Plague, or the Lord Protector, we blame this condition on something we call ‚ the modern world. And we complain about it endlessly.

In 1995, I would discover‚ and begin complaining about‚ that same vague sense of dissatisfaction felt by so many white men before me. I was 18 years old, fresh out of high school, and staring blankly at a future that was as wide open as it was directionless. Graduation’s greatest benefit seemed to be the freedom to hang out at Denny’s past midnight, and the most tangible change in my life was the presence of a red and gold tassel swinging from my rear-view mirror. Without a high school administration to defy, I suffered from a serious dearth of oppressive figures in my life, and my sense of purpose quickly began to wane. Lucky for me, it wouldn’t be long before I’d have a new opponent in my war on Weltschmurz.

A company named TeleTech had recently opened a new office in town, and was looking for people with computer skills to fill what must have been a hundred open jobs for telephone tech support. Within days of applying, I was called back for what they termed a “group interview”‚ in essence a roundtable gathering that felt more like an AA meeting than any part of the job screening process. After answering tough interview questions such as ‚ÄúWhat are some of your interests? and ‚ÄúIf you could talk to anyone, living or dead, who would it be? we were offered the job en masse. I wasn’t sure if we were a team or a herd, but I’d get my answer soon enough.

Training was mostly comprised of unfunny computer jokes (“Now THAT’S what I call a serial port!”) and mind-numbing exercises entering fake customers and their fake problems into our fake customer service database. Though I would later regret not relishing these precious moments away from the dreaded telephones, my time in this circle of Dante’s Inferno was mostly occupied weighing the pros and cons of getting to leave work early by stabbing myself in the eye‚ and my depth perception was losing value with each passing day. Had training been any longer, I might be wearing an eye patch today.

If training was an experience worthy of escape through partial blindness, getting out of working the phones altogether might have been worth learning Braille. One thing is certain: being blind would guard one from the call center’s soul-crushing décor. Lined with pop-art posters of Warhol and Lichtenstein to give the company the illusion of being hip, the hallway gave no indication of what lay just ahead. At the end of this hall, a pair of doors opened up to a wilderness of gray carpet and 4-foot-tall cubes, all arranged in small clusters lovingly referred to as ‚Äúpods. At the center of each ‚Äúpod was a supervisor’s desk, positioned conspicuously higher than the others, serving as a menacing reminder that we were always being watched. As if this panopticon-like arrangement were not enough, an elevated platform against the far wall housed the ‚ÄúQuality Assurance Team, who gazed coldly out onto the floor through tinted glass windows, listening in and scoring the calls of any employee they might choose.

It was in this environment that I first learned to complain about the malaise of the modern world. In other parts of the world, wars might be tearing up entire countries, but who cares? This job sucks. As a privileged white American, I demand more. There’s got to be a better way!

That’s not to say the job didn’t suck; it did. It is incredibly taxing to know that your every move is being monitored, and talking to irate and inexperienced computer users is an awful lot like training a monkey to not slap its own puddle of pee, but there are worse situations out there. I could have been settling credit card disputes for adult websites, or working prayer hotline for the 700 Club. Yes, it could have been worse. But that’s not going to stop me from whining.

Today, I guess there aren’t many of these kinds of jobs left in the United States. Like manufacturing before it, most telephone-based customer service and tech support has moved to countries with lower labor costs. Think what you will about globalization, but while Americans might lament the loss of these jobs, it is indisputable that their introduction into developing countries has been a major boost to their respective economies. And if all goes well, and the quality of life continues to improve for the citizens of these countries, maybe someday they’ll have the privilege of being as dissatisfied as we are.

The last time I saw him was in 2003, when my then-girlfriend Fran and I ventured to the northern edge of the Great Plains for a family reunion celebrating his 90th birthday. He was frail by then, but it was clear that he’d kept his wits about him. After spending the afternoon showing off his hat collection and explaining to me the importance of getting a job with a good pension plan (advice I have thus far been reluctant to take), he insisted on driving us to the local truck stop–the only restaurant in town–for “supper.” As vegetarians, Fran and I knew we were in for a meal of iceberg lettuce salads drenched in ranch dressing, and maybe some french fries. But he’s a convincing old man, so how could we refuse?

The next day, my parents, cousins, aunts, and uncles–along with plenty of people I don’t remember or had never met–gathered for the big party. Old Norwegian women who claimed to remember me when I was “yay big” sipped on hot coffee in the 80 degree weather, marveling at Fran as if she were some kind of minor celebrity. “We’ve never met a real New Yorker before,” they earnestly exclaimed. I suppose their part of the country, the nether regions of northern Minnesota and North Dakota, doesn’t get many visitors from the East Coast. I think it’s fair to say that Fran had never really seen anything like Rothsay, MN either.

In the middle of everything was my grandfather. He sat proudly in his little green lawn chair, his hair combed perfectly in the style that I have apparently inherited, wearing his best western button-down and a bolo tie. Someone had pinned a flower to his shirt. Taking in the scene around him, he glowed more radiantly than I had ever seen him before.

I have a lot of memories about my grandfather. I know he was father to eight children. He loved to dance, and did so well into his eighties. He collected hats, and meticulously hung them from the rafters of his basement. He tipped according to a standard that must have been established during the Depression. But I will always remember him on that day in August, as he sat in his little chair, beaming with the satisfaction of being surrounded by his family.

Goodbye, Grandpa.