What happens when you visit a place many times over the span of many years? You’ve changed man.

One of the more interesting things about Lake Geneva in Wisconsin is that wherever a person goes, provided they are on the lakeshore, they will never be on private property. There is an area-wide ordinance, active in multiple little lakefront towns, which says that anyone who owns a tract of land that has lakefront access must provide and maintain their portion of the public walking path, a wonderful many-mile ring that traces the shore of Lake Geneva. My wife and I are walking it. At least half of it. Probably. We’d eaten breakfast at a very cute and kitschy diner that had been driven in from Pennsylvania on a flatbed; a long, train car-like building that resembled a Ford from the 1950’s, all polished and rounded chrome. I had eaten eggs and my wife had gotten an omelet. Both were no frills, inexpensive, and delicious. We’d contemplated counter service but a table opened up quickly enough and chairs with backs seemed like the move for two middle-aged hikers about to walk, well, a whole lot. 

Properly fortified, we set out for the trail. The plan is to drive to William’s Bay, a town along the lake with which I am familiar. We’ve parked the car where I used to fish, where the rock bass with the great, round red eyes are plentiful and eager to take a mouthful of hook. We hop out of the car, my wife and I, do several half-assed stretches, locate the path (easy enough, it is the shoreline), and begin the trek. We immediately cross into someone's back yard. Gravel path gives way to stone pavers that give way to fine brickwork as we cross from one property to the next. My wife is in overalls and a leather jacket. It is unseasonably warm for February. I am in a hoodie. Houses along this path are incredibly varied, some are small, summer cabins. Others sprawl in that gaudy ‘contemporary’ building style which is a hodge podge of ornamentation on giant tan and gray blocks, size for the sake of size. There’s nothing wrong with these houses save for their aesthetic, but the owners I may have quarrel with. I’d imagine that instead of owning a home like this, a person could choose to be quite philanthropic, to do something that benefits others. Still, I wouldn’t object to living in a house with a built-in movie theater and swimming pool, and given my own fairly privileged circumstances, I can’t really pass that much judgement. Externally anyway.  

Our current plan is to walk until we get tired-ish, turn around and head back. The mutually arrived at plan revision involves Uber, which we did manage to find operating here in vacationland. Essentially, we’ve decided to walk as much and as far as we want, leave the trail and find a bench and have a nice Uber driver take us back to our car. 

The sun shines on the frozen lake, ice buckles against the shore line tossing up jagged peaks and translucent spires. It is beautiful. There are people out on the ice, which is melting rapidly (there are puddles all over the surface of it). Air boats zip tourists over the top of the frozen water, something like great red curling…pucks? Kettles? Stones? I don’t know what they’re called, but these boats, hovering on round inflatable bottoms, remind me of them.

Fishermen continue to fish through holes in the ice, families traverse and frolic. I warn them sternly but quietly to get off the ice, at a volume which only my wife can hear. I am, by nature, quite anxious, and although, due to my wife’s proddings, I myself have been on the ice with her and know it to be solid, I can still readily envision a whole family dropping into the frigid water via a sudden crack or hole that appears from nowhere and swallows them leaving only a mitten or an iPhone on the ice next to the hole. But morbidity is not allowed on this walk, because goddamn it is fifty degrees in February and the sun is shining and I crave this outdoor time because it's been a long winter and I need some vitamin D to function. There are times in the depths of late December where I swear I am solar powered, that the sorry state I find myself in annually is caused by a lack of light. The end of daylight savings is a personal holiday. But it is not the deepest, darkest part of winter, it is unseasonably warm and the days are getting longer. And so we journey. She takes the lead for a good portion of the hike. 

We chat, the light and easy conversations that just happen when she and I are together. We talk of future plans, recent reminiscence, hypothetical dilemmas and moral quandaries, of things that are bothering me; we rarely seem to talk about things that are giving her trouble. She either is more internal about such things, or she doesn’t have them in the first place. Or maybe she does and I so enjoy our conversations that I fail to recognize that anything is bothering her. I hope it's not that, but I know she’d tell me if it were. That is the key bit in our relationship. Communication. More than the lighthearted chatter of a walk. The hard things. The big things. If something is happening, we both know about it at the speed of a phone call. If something is affecting one of us, we are both affected, and we are working on it. There are no secrets, there is only a big, real love that eats dark things like isolation and dishonesty. I am incredibly proud of it. She loves me for me, because she authentically knows who I am, faults and all. She knows this version of me because she welcomes it and makes me not afraid to show her. And I love and know her similarly. I know what to do when, I know where to tread lightly, and I know how to sparkle my eyes in a way that communicates more than any combination of words ever could. We are in love. It is not difficult to see, and we wear this love loosely and freely, an open demonstration of what it's supposed to be like. I do not deserve this, but while I have it, I will nurture it for the precious thing that it is. 

Portions of the trail are muddy, there is melting snow draining into the lake, and the landowners who have decided not to do much with their portion of the trail have created mud so sloppy that one sinks an inch with each step. I am untroubled; I have on new hiking boots, because I am a dork. Roughly one pound of slop per boot has moulded itself into the treads. My feet are heavy, but my spirit is light. She glides along without making so much as a footprint it seems. She is built for this, long walks, and she revels in them.

At one point, she needs to pee. Suddenly, there are people all over the place, some coming up behind us, some passing us in the opposite direction (we’d so far been on our own for the duration). Luckily, Lake Geneva is a boat town, meaning that almost everybody has a dock or a pier or some kind of structure that in the summer, juts out into the lake, and in the winter, becomes disassembled and stacked. Some of the larger properties have quite large docks, and Mariana is able to conceal herself in a structure built of white wooden planking and steel pipe bones. She is obscured and squatting; I am on watch, pacing back and forth and whistling. No one comes by, and in seemingly impossible quickness, she is back on the trail in front of me. Her butt is obscenely cute. We’ve been on the trail for a few hours now, and I begin to daydream.

I’ve known Lake Geneva in several iterations, and I suppose those iterations are not of the lake, which remains fairly constant, but of myself. My introduction to Lake Geneva was via my brother-in-law's family; they owned a cabin in the aforementioned Williams Bay. I became close with them and with my sister. She and I had not talked much since high school, I was a fuck up, did a bunch of drugs, and when she went away to college I think she figured there wasn’t much of me worth bringing with her. But my mom and dad had made a concerted effort to get the families together in recent years and we spent a few summers in Door County in a giant rustic VRBO mansion in the woods. Jillian, my sister, and I became cordial, and her husband and I became friends. I’d take my daughter to go visit them at their little house in Iowa City, where Jill had gone to school. She was a homeowner, and I still had my rent paid by my parents. It was a blow to the ego, but I loved them, her and her husband and their kids and their dogs, a perfect little family. I’d stay with them for a few days, run around with the kids, go to local AAA baseball games and farmers markets, work out at the university’s gym. It was incredibly fun, and also needed at a dark time in my life. I had somewhere to go where I, if not belonged, was at least welcomed.

Jill got a job in Madison, and they had to leave Iowa City. Her husband’s parents offered them their Williams Bay cottage so that they were closer to the new job while they were house hunting. So now, visiting with them meant Lake Geneva, and often only a daytrip. Jill’s in-laws owned a speedboat, so you could find us on the water, throttle down, going fast. It was always wonderfully hypnotic, knifing through the water, slight bob and bounce with the waves, sea spray, wind…I always secretly reveled in the moments when the boat was really cooking. But Jeremy, one of their twin boys, disliked the noise and the wind and so we’d often traverse the lake at more reasonable speeds, which I could tell slightly bothered Jeremy’s dad, who like me, wanted to go fast. We’d drop anchor not far offshore and throw out the ‘lilypad’, a giant, floating foam mat on which a person could lay, or jump and splash, or wrestle or whatever. I did all of those things. There was ice cream at The Frosty Moose or Maggie Moo’s, and there were fight nights in the basement of the cabin, my brother-in-law and I watching people beat each other up. These summer memories are golden and melancholy now. I don’t talk with them anymore, because I am, and always will be, a drug addict.

Sometime in the middle of the pandemic, shortly after the legalization of weed in Illinois, I had taken a few hits on a trip to Ann Arbor to visit a friend and to give them a ride back to Chicago for a very necessary surgery. I was away from home, nervous about my friend, and if I’m being honest, coming down off of some Vicodin that I had stolen from my mom who had just had hip surgery but wasn’t taking the pain meds. I guess that’s when my relapse happened, I’ve always had a hard time saying no to opiates, ever since a back surgery in high school where I was given dilaudid and became aware that there was much more to life than alcohol and weed. Dilaudid is Jesus in a bottle as far as I’m concerned, and when I came across a few pills of the stuff in my sister's medicine cabinet, I snarfed them down without thinking twice.

But then I did think twice; I didn’t want to be found out, so I took some of the homeopathic headache medicine I’d gotten for my kid and swapped out the missing pills. They looked similar enough I thought. I was right, tragically so.

My sister, a nurse, was due to give birth to her daughter a few weeks later, and she took the ‘dilaudid’ with her to the hospital. Unable to tell the difference between the genuine article and my decoys, she spent a miserable night in the hospital post-delivery taking homeopathic headache medicine while her entire reproductive system bellowed at her. A few weeks later, she discovered what had happened and asked me point blank if I had done it. I told her I had. To date, that is the last time I’ve heard from my sister. 

I don’t blame her, I am not upset with her, I am just sad. I am sad that I destroyed the relationship that we’d spent so much time rebuilding. I am sad that she breastfed her baby with god knows what in her system. I am sad that my daughter doesn’t get to see her cousins anymore. I am sad that my parents have been somewhat excommunicated themselves for not excommunicating me. I am sad that Jillian doesn’t understand addiction the way I do.

I need to be very clear, explicitly clear, abundantly and powerfully and unmistakably clear in these next few statements. My diagnosis as someone with substance use disorder does not excuse or explain my decision to steal meds from my sister. I did that. There is no excuse. The consequences are earned and real. But addiction does help explain how heavily the scales are tipped in favor of being high…against almost any other measure, any weight, any consideration on the other side of the balance. They were in my hand and then my stomach before consequence one even began to register in my conscious mind. 

People miss this. They don’t understand sometimes how addicts can be so destructive in the face of grievous injury, in the face of consequence, in the face of loss.  How can we be so reckless? Don’t our relationships matter to us? Aren’t we aware of the risks? Don't we care about ourselves? About the people around us? The answer to all of these and a thousand other pleading questions is yes, we do. We care. We do know it's killing us. We do know we’ll lose our friends and families as they grow tired of us using, and using them. We don’t want to die in the gutter. But, if we are in active addiction, we all but can’t help it. Consequences do not factor into the decision making that leads to us ingesting something intoxicating.

If you are not an addict, and you are reading this, remember if you can, the time that you felt the best you’ve ever felt in your life. Imagine a time where you were the happiest, when everything in the world was right. You would not change a thing, and you will try your best to savor how magnificent this time and place is, this perfect place. In moments of sadness, you take a mental journey there and you feel better; it is among your favorite memories and you will cherish it for the rest of your life. Imagine this time, and then imagine that directly before it, instead of the weeks or months or years of work you put into getting there, the gradual progress towards that happy place, where things were alright or even looking up on the way to the final destination, imagine that you are in an emotional pit, a darkness that is nearly overwhelming. You feel miserable. There are no answers here, nothing alleviates your pain. It is unbearably lonely. Everything is a struggle, and you hate yourself for who you are, for what you’ve done, and for what you’ve allowed yourself to become. And then, with a snap of your fingers, you can be out of there and into that glorious place where everything is okay and you are at your happiest. The misery of just a moment ago is a rapidly fading, hazy memory. Would you snap your fingers? Would you wonder what side effects your finger snap may have? Would you sit in that miserable place, covered in darkness, a place that you’d do anything to escape, and ask yourself what the long term ramifications to your overall health finger snapping might cause? Do you consider the feelings of others and how your finger snaps may affect them when you are so saturated with hurt that you can’t see a foot beyond your own immediate misery? If you say that you’d pause and consider anything at all, imagine somewhere darker, somewhere worse. Because, to understand addiction, you need to be somewhere where you would snap your fingers, every time, without thought, almost reflexively. 

That’s what it is to us.

The problem stems from understanding that the effects of the finger snap are only temporary. The first time in life that we do it, we feel a sense of peace and calm that never before existed for us. And then, as the effects of the snap fade, we descend back to the darkness we came from merged now with a new darkness caused by repeated finger snapping. Here are the consequences we should have been considering. The loss, pain, fear, guilt, shame…all back in force. Unless we snap our fingers again. And so we do. I can’t explain it better. That is what it's like. If you’ve experienced it then you know. If you haven’t, I hope you never have to.

I’m sober again now, a direct result of the problems with my sister. I had thought that the nine months or so that I was smoking weed everyday weren’t that destructive, but the truth is that had I been sober in the first place, I never would have taken those pills. I’d still have a relationship with my sister and her family. After admitting what I’d done in that last conversation with Jill, I went back to my 12-step program. 

I threw myself back into that program with an ardor that helped me do the growing necessary for someone like my wife to fall in love with a guy like me. It's impossible to know, to speculate at alternate realities. What would have happened if I never took the pills? If I hadn’t gotten sober? If I’d told the truth sooner? Whatever may have been, the actual reality, the sequence of events that unfolded as a direct result of that relapse, they led me to my wife. I am incredibly grateful for that. I do not know the reasons for a lot of the things that happen in the world, and I don’t need to. I try my best to roll with it, the flow of things, to be okay with what develops, and have faith that if I try to do the right thing, to be kind, good things will happen for me and for those around me. I try not to fight the trajectory of the universe. 

Trajectory. Forward. We are on the Lake Geneva path, and we are moving forward. Thoughts of my sister and her family fade into the background and I welcome the change of mental pace. Mariana is directly in front of me again, and again I think her butt is cute. I think of how happy I am, I think of the fire we’ll have in the pit tonight out back of our Airbnb. I think of taking a post-hike nap in a rented bed, of waking up and going to dinner at a proper Wisconsin supper club. I think of the gas station snacks we’ll procure and consume. I think of love.

I ponder how lucky I am to have found what I found, and how lucky I am that I put in the self-work to make myself appealing to someone like her. The work on honesty, on self-reflection and acceptance, the work on a life that makes finger-snapping seem foolish and unnecessary. I work on fulfilling the desire to be better today than I was yesterday, and better tomorrow than I am today. I’ve learned this through working the 12-steps, and may not have gone back to the program that took me to meet my wife had I not lost my sister. I may not have thrust myself back into the fold with the level of desperation needed to honestly work through hard things, afraid to stay the same, desperate to be better. I am grateful to be who I am, to be where I am, and I am beyond gratitude to get to share this new reality with my wife, who is still in front of me, swishing oversized colorful overalls with every combat-booted step.

A particularly large and beautiful ice shelf has shoved itself up against the shore and ruptured into the air. It acts as a suncatcher, throwing prismed light onto the ground in a striated pattern. I have a strong urge to destroy it. I tell my wife that I am going to kick it. As hard as I can. She advises against that course of action, but watches on with the morbid fascination of someone passing an auto wreck on the opposite side of the highway. The kick seems as though it's already happened and she is there to witness the aftermath. She knows that there is almost certainly no stopping me, for once I get an idea in my head, I can be difficult to derail.  

I line it up, get in my kicking stance, and let one rip. Toe first. Into six inches of solid ice. It does not shatter and explode in the cinematic way I had hoped it would. Little ice shavings splinter off into the air as there is a dull thud and a sigh from my wife. I have stubbed my toe, somewhere between moderately and badly. I do not let on, and limp gingerly for a few hundred yards before the ouch dissipates and I can walk normally. I’m grateful that our walk has not been cut short by my rash, destructive impulse. I’m very capable of that sort of thing sober too, but I now have the beat and pause necessary to evaluate the likely consequences of my actions, and there are no giant, addicted fingers pushing on one side of the scale.

A monstrous complex appears on our left, a sprawling mansion that seems to be a home for smaller mansions. I wonder about who owns it. I imagine that the size of the homes here are likely inversely proportional to the amount of time people spend in them. The family that scrapped and saved and bought their tiny lakehouse spends the whole summer there, and the billionaires who own the big ones stay the weekend  every now and again when they’re in the Midwest and not in Milan or Singapore. And then I remember that anyone who owns lakefront property here is incredibly well off and no one scrimped and saved for any of this. Hell, half of these homes are probably just real estate investments. 

The scrimpers and the savers live a few blocks back, like my daughter’s old boyfriend’s family. They have a little cottage that they visit frequently, and another version of me spent time with them there so that Emily could spend the summer with her boyfriend. 

The Goodman’s were nice enough on the surface. Mom was a big proponent of medical marijuana. In her mind, it had eased the pain of and perhaps even shrunk the brain tumor that belonged to her grade school-aged daughter. When my daughter began having difficulties with substance use herself, Theo’s (Emily’s boyfriend) mom had decried Western psychiatry in favor of herbal remedies, specifically the types you smoke or bake into brownies. Unfortunately, this substance was at the core of Emily’s issues, so although well meaning, Mrs. G’s proposed solution really would only have exacerbated the problem. Theo’s dad was a lighting designer for film and theater. I’m fairly certain that they had a decent chunk of money from their combined parents and I know that the lakehouse we visited was passed to them through their parental lineage. In my own self-awareness and acknowledgement of my upbringing, I do not judge them for being born into a certain amount of money, I was too. If I judge them, it's for somehow seeming as though they felt they deserved it. 

To be fair, I was probably a strange read for them. Emily was Theo’s (their oldest) first girlfriend. They invited us, Emily and I (weird) over to dinner, presumably to make sure that we were…good enough I guess? They sent their kids to private school, and attempted to be very progressive, and they certainly talked the talk. When it came time to walk however, they seemed a bit more conservative, particularly when it came to protecting the privilege their children had. They would ensure that their kids had the best of all the things, and that they would have every available advantage in the game of life. Emily may have been seen as a distraction or even a hindrance, but their appraisal had indicated that Emily was flawed but begrudgingly welcomed. Theo’s dad even took me aside once and told me that he felt I was “basically a good guy”. Well, thank you sir! Yes, despite our many shortcomings, it would appear that my daughter is, at baseline, good enough for a temporary dalliance with your son. Lucky thing he’ll be graduating at the end of the year and leaving town.

That daughter of mine couldn’t drive yet, and so when Theo’s family went to Lake Geneva, if Emily wanted to go, I had to take her. It's only an hour and a half away from home basically, and so we did little day trips. One time, we all went out on the G’s boat. It was…uncomfortable. I was at a phase of my development where I was very raw, freshly sober, really trying, but feeling inadequate in the presence of a ‘real’ adult like Theo’s dad. His seemingly thinly veiled opinion of us didn’t help, and I felt that Emma and I were on trial, that we were being inspected and had been found somewhat wanting.

Another time, to avoid such uncomfortability, I dropped Emily with them and drove around the lake ten or fifteen times until the day was over and it was time to pick her up. This was the first time I tried the Lake Geneva path, from exactly the same, and by that time very familiar, spot that Mariana and I set forth from most recently. It was incredibly hot, and, having forgotten sunblock, I burned. 

I was invited to the G’s for dinner one time, and another time was allowed to take the boat out with just Emily and Theo. They’d dropped me off at a fishing spot so that they could take the boat out and ‘talk’. I knew what they were up to, but it didn’t particularly bother me. They had ‘talked’ many times before, and I got some time alone to fish. When they got back to shore, we tied up the boat and got dinner. I went to the very busy bar to get drinks and put in an order, and I received a certain amount of attention from a few women at the bar. As a non-drinker with self-esteem issues, this was entirely foreign and a little surprising. So much so that I made a fool of myself talking to Mrs. G later that night when returning Theo. I had bragged about the attention, in front of the kids. I still kick myself now.

But growing pains are real, and this iteration of Christopher gets a pass from me now. Those were difficult times, freshly sober, daughter struggling, starting to feel myself a little bit but not really believing that it was real. I was a young dad to a teenage girl, and ‘real’ grownups scared me. My mom paid my rent and my career as a photographer experienced fits and starts, never quite becoming a consistent, reliable living. Real grownups, people who were financially independent, made me feel so much less than; the old self-esteem bug coming back in force. 

My wife now points out that there is no such thing as real grownups and that we’re all trying our best to play act at it and hope that no one notices that we’re all as clueless as I was in the G’s lakehouse living room, bragging about the attention I’d gotten from a couple of drunk ladies at the bar, with all the G’s children right there to witness. I may have even mentioned that I was dating somebody and mentioning that made me feel even ‘cooler’. That, and Theo and Emily had made fun of me for being single, even when I told them that I didn’t have time to date because I was too busy running them all over goddamned town so they could have a relationship. But I had met someone, and was dating them, so Theo and Emily could shove it. And frankly so could the person I was dating. She wasn’t that into me though I liked her quite a bit, and she taught me to know my worth. She had repeated patterns that my daughter’s mother had perfected and strung me along with for years, and they were patterns which I finally recognized and was able to say no to. And I did. And I moved on from this person. This person is the second to last person I will ever date, because very soon after, I met the woman I would fall in love with in a way I never had before, I met the last woman I would ever want to get to know, I met the woman who would become my wife.

I hadn’t been expecting it, had largely stopped hoping for it, and didn’t know quite what to make of it when it finally did happen. My wife avalanched into my life, a few precursorial snowballs followed by an entire ice shelf, rumbling down the mountain with such force and magnitude that my spirit is still vibrating from the impact. We drew close quickly, and after only a few dates, I knew that she was different, that the way I felt about her was different. Time with her was thrilling. She was unlike anyone I’d ever met. She was entirely without pretense and completely and unapologetically herself. As a person who had deliberately chosen which parts of himself to expose and when for most of my life, I admired her forthrightness. I admired her sense of justice and her willingness to help others. She embodied many of the qualities that I wanted to demonstrate, and she did so in a way that seemed effortless. It was a total love. I had been excited before, and she excited me. I had been enamored before, and I was enamored. But I don’t think I’d ever connected as completely or as quickly with anyone as I did with her. I don’t think I’d ever respected anyone in the way I respected her. I know I’d never felt as free and as happy as I did when I was with her and I know I had never been more physically attracted to anyone as I was to her. I know I had never felt as safe in being myself, without thinking everything through before doing it, as I felt with her. I had never loved anyone as thoroughly, completely and without reservation as I loved her, and I never felt as good doing it. She was it for me, and I knew so quickly. 

Decades of hope and loss and hard experience, of effort and failure and learning and trying, had finally crafted the version of me that she would meet and think ‘hmmm, I like this guy’. The man I am now and the progress towards being him has been accelerated exponentially by her loving me, believing in me, sticking with me. I built this rocket for 40 years. She helped me launch it into space.

I have real confidence now. We ran into Theo’s mom at the mall, Emily, Mariana and I, and I saw her differently. I could feel her continuing to judge us, the drug addict daughter and her idiot dad who had put his flip-flop clad foot into his mouth in their summerhouse living room, but the judgements didn’t matter. I knew who we were and didn’t need anyone else’s input on the matter. My daughter was a badass, fighting hard to be sober, to be better too. I was engaged to an incredible woman who was the other half of me, the best bits, the parts of me that needed reinforcing, and I am…a man. I am grown. I am proud of myself and no longer feel like I am faking, or at least not often. I have a cool job helping people, and it actually pays the bills. My daughter loves me, my wife loves me, I love them and they love each other. We’re okay. Frankly, we’re much better than okay. We’re real, and real in a way that resonates. In so many ways, I have arrived to where I was always supposed to be. Mariana had walked the final leg with me, and now we are here. This is not to say that I am done growing and changing, it is just to say that at baseline, everyday, I am starting from roughly where I want to be.

For miles now, I have been watching the distant horizon as the far bank of the lake draws closer and closer. A few more muddy miles, and things begin to be more commercial, less residential. Lakefront clubs, patio bars adjacent to restaurants. We stop again for a moment to allow me to remove a small rock from my boot. We are nearing the culmination of our walk, Lake Geneva, the town proper, lay directly ahead of us. The sun has just begun to set, and the light is golden and polished. Everything looks magical, and somehow everything feels that way too. 

This most recent iteration of myself sees Lake Geneva in a new way again. I have fished in Williams Bay, I’ve been out on the lake in a speedboat, I’d eaten at the crowded tourist spots, and had seen every mile of the ring road around the lake a dozen times. And now, I’d stayed in a little Airbnb, had made campfires and eaten Chinese food on Valentine’s Day. I had bowled the local lanes with my wife and daughter, and I had even walked halfway around the lake staring out across the frozen water. But like the thawing ice and glowing sun, I am coming to life too. As we finish our hike, she holds my hand and for the last few feet, we walk synchronously to the library where we’ll wait for the Uber. We sit down next to each other on the wooden bench out front of the little library, watching families play on the ice, couples walk dogs, teenagers stroll the strip in the first good weather in months. They all look happy, and for once, I don’t yearn to be like them, don’t envy their happiness. I don’t want to be anything or anyone other than where and who I am. I am happy for all of them, and I am happy for me. I am with my wife on the bench in the golden light, legs tired, shoes muddy, and heart full, looking out at my favorite version of Lake Geneva so far.  

“I can’t really pass that much judgement. Externally anyway…”