The Shape of Things to Come

When we bought our house, I had decided already that the huge, twin-trunk pine tree overhanging our sidewalk desperately needed a treehouse. This was a little premature as my wife was only pregnant with our first at the time, but it means I did spend some years idly contemplating designs. When my daughter was two or three and showing interest in climbing, I started sourcing materials, including some driftwood my dad and I harvested from the beaches I grew up near. But still the project languished, unstarted. What broke it loose was losing my job and falling into depression, idling my days away while my dad was dying of cancer (see my previous post ). I realized that I needed a project to keep my sanity, something I could pour my heart and soul into and remind myself that I could still accomplish things.  My dad built me a treehouse many years ago; it was in a many-armed willow tree where my mom had originally built a platform for my much older brother. My dad was a carpenter, as w...

I gave my father's eulogy a year and a half ago. It was the midst of a very dark year. He was very fit and healthy, recently cured of Hepatitis C that he'd gotten from a blood transfusion when he was 20. But he suddenly got crippling back pain that was quickly diagnosed as cancer. He had always joked about getting Do Not Resuscitate tattooed on his chest (he was an ambulance driver for our local volunteer EMS), but he allowed us to convince him to do the chemo and try to beat it, mostly because he hoped to get more time with his grandkids. As it turned out, it gave him only about four months, and it's hard to say if it could have been any worse without the treatment.  Those four months turned out to be the same four months I was interviewing at Google. I was the first employee of a small startup where I'd been working for almost two years, when the founder suddenly laid me off. That turned out to be the same week we got my dad's diagnosis. I started doing a lot of i...

I feel oddly at peace in this pandemic. Really, this comes down largely to luck and privilege: my wife and kids keep me from feeling lonely, my wife and I have jobs we can do remotely, my son's daycare is tiny and so has remained open through most of the shutdowns. I live in a beautiful city in a house I love with people I love. But, if this pandemic had struck a year and a half earlier, it would have been considerably more awful, for me at least.  This reminds me of how serious the situation is for so many, and that no matter how much I like to think my good fortune is largely of my own making, the reality is a lot is also dumb luck. If this pandemic had struck when my wife and I had both suddenly lost our jobs, times would have looked much more dire, and that wasn't so long ago.  Still, aside from luck, I find this pandemic oddly comforting and I think I finally understand why. It feels like home, like my childhood. I grew up in a log cabin on a tiny island; I had never hear...