Photographs and memories

Beth’s dad died over the summer. We flew to Texas, of course, to attend the funeral and found ourselves thrust into the unfortunate yet inevitable ugly side of death—the estate wrangling.

Her dad didn’t have a lot, at least in terms of materials possessions. A house whose main value was serving as shade from the hot Texas sun. Whole rooms were emptied and closed off. A window air conditioner was the lone source of cool relief. Meals were served on a folding table and metal chairs. Still, there was haggling. Who would get the furniture? Who would get the house? How would what little money there was in his bank account be divided?

Beth didn’t care about any of it. Life is about people, she said, and death is about memories. The only thing she wanted was pictures.

Yesterday, I spent a bulk of the day scanning more than 150 of those pictures onto our computer, converting into the digital realm the black and white images of a life gone by. It was a fitting thing to do this time of year, I thought, because I spend as much time around New Year’s looking back and within as I do looking forward. This turning of the calendar always causes me to become introspective and aware about life and about time.

When I was a kid there was a beer commercial that boldly proclaimed, “You only go around once in life. Go with gusto.” For whatever reason, that always struck me. Not the beer part or the gusto part. That was marketing. It was the first part, the part about only getting one chance at life, that has haunted me and pushed me over my growing number of years.

Time, I’ve learned, is our most valuable asset and the great equalizer. We all get the same amount, relatively speaking, and there’s nothing we can do to go back and get more. Once it’s gone, it’s gone. Money can’t buy you love, according to the Beatles. Nor can it buy you time. So it’s all in how we use it.

Knowing this, of course, can be a curse. While others are rocking around the clock on New Year’s Eve, I’m wondering if I managed to squeeze everything I could out of the year. Perhaps I should have paid more attention to the beer part of the commercial. Oh well. If nothing else, an awareness of time at least helps us focus on spending it doing what’s important, because in the end that’s what people will remember about us.

At least that’s been my experience. While at the funeral, I found myself standing next to a woman. “How did you know him?” I asked. They were neighbors in an apartment building, she said. She was young, a recently divorced single mom and they had a lot in common: They were both dirt poor and struggling to get by.

One day there was a knock on the door. It was Beth’s dad.

“Does your son need a bed?” he asked. “My kids have grown, and I have an old one in storage he could have.”

Grateful, she said yes. They couldn’t afford a bed, so they were both sleeping on the floor. A few hours later, Beth’s dad returned and unloaded a frame, box spring, mattress and some sheets from the back of his pickup.

“It’s old,” he said, “but in pretty good shape.”

As she was making the bed, she was stunned by what she found: The price tags. He went out and bought the bed because his neighbor had less than he did.

The woman kept it a secret until the funeral. That was her memory of him.

It seems to me that if the beer commercial is right and we only go around once in life, than how we live it is important. Living it with gusto is fine. But living with character and love for others is even better. Living, in other words, so that people will want your pictures and not just your stuff.

Lord of the Rings

I’m writing this from an unusual location, at least for me: in front of the television. I really don’t have time for a lot of television, but for the last week and a half I’ve been sitting on the couch, glued to the tube. I’ve been putting off studying and chores and just about everything else more productive than television, and for good reason.

The Olympics are on.

I must admit, I love the Olympics. I love the pageantry. I love the competition. I love the playing of national anthems when they hand out the medals. I think the greatest thrill in the world would be to be in the Olympics and take part in the Opening Ceremonies. I think the absolute worst thing in the world would be to be in the Olympics and finish fourth.

Right now ski jumping is on. On any given day, I couldn’t give a hoot about ski jumping, but for some reason when it’s the Olympics I find myself mesmerized by crazy people jumping off a big hill. The same with biathlon, speed skating and even something called Nordic combined, whatever that is. (I may draw the line at curling. It’s shuffleboard on ice. I can’t figure out why is this a sport?) And I’m on the edge of the couch when the speed and insanity sports come on. Luge, bobsled, downhill skiing. I’m fascinated by them all. There’s something about living on the edge that I can't get enough of. And I love the new sports they’ve added to the Olympics: halfpipe, snowboard cross, short track speed skating. What were once X Games are now some of the most exciting parts of the Olympic Games.

I must admit that I’m also taken in a little by the nationalism of it all—performing for your country and not because you signed a multimillion dollar contract and are getting paid to be there. Yes, yes, I fully understand that the whole thing has become overly commercialized and politicized. The innocence that the Olympics once had has long been lost, if it ever really existed at all. There will never be another Miracle on Ice, because the miracle of it all was the players on the U.S. men’s hockey team were innocent college kids taking on a Soviet machine that hid its professionalism behind a façade of amateurism.

In some ways, that’s OK. Now you truly have the best athletes in the world competing against each other. The National Hockey League even puts its season on hold so its players can scatter around the globe, return to their home countries and perform in the Olympics.

But it seems to me what makes the Olympics so compelling is not so much the sports as it is the athletes behind them. I’m particularly drawn to the athletes in the lesser-known sports because they practice just as hard and just as often as the better-known athletes, but they do it out of the spotlight and away from the endorsements. There are endless stories about people who live on the edge of poverty so they can compete. They spend four years living for this one moment. And there are stories like the figure skater who performed two days after her mother died. That’s what the Olympics are about. That’s what the Olympics do—they bring out that kind of will in people. And they keep me glued to the tube for 16 days.

A weird lesson

The New York Times ran an interview last week with Tony Hsieh, the CEO of Zappos.com in which he talked about the importance of corporate culture. Zappos is one of the most admired businesses in the nation, and one of the reasons is the culture it has created.

Hsieh had previously founded another dot.com company, but he came to dread going in each morning because as it grew he started hiring his employees based on skills and experience, ignoring the importance of chemistry and culture. Eventually, the company evolved into the exact kind of place he didn’t want it to be. So he sold the company and started anew with the decision to learn from his mistake. Now, corporate culture is Zappos' top hiring policy. The compay actually interviews employees twice—once for skill sets and once for cultural fit.

What struck me as interesting is that they actually ask potential employees how weird they think they are on a scale of 1-10. “It’s not so much the number; it’s more seeing how candidates react to a question,” Hsieh said. “Because our whole belief is that everyone is a little weird somehow, so it’s really more just a fun way of saying that we really recognize and celebrate each person’s individuality, and we want their true personalities to shine in the workplace environment, whether it’s with co-workers or when talking with customers.”

I like that. And it made me wonder what my answer would be.

If you asked my kids, they’d probably rank me as an 11. I’m sure part of that is simply because I’m an adult, and all adults are weird to them. But also because I like to have a little fun with them. When they were little they once asked me what my favorite holiday was. I told them Flag Day. It was a joke, but now every June we have to break out the flag-covered tablecloth and stars-and-stripes paper plates and have a picnic to celebrate Flag Day.

They also asked me what my favorite color was, and I told them plaid. They believed me, and one year when they were shopping for my birthday, they came across the ugliest plaid shirt ever made and insisted they buy it because it was my favorite color. Beth tried to explain that she thought I was kidding when I said that, but to no avail. When they got home, I got a stern warning from my wife: “You better be excited when you open your present because it’s all of your own doing. And you have to wear it at least once.”

Fortunately, the store only had the ugliest plaid shirt you’ve ever seen in an extra large, so I had to take it back and exchange it for something a little more subdued. (Why they didn’t have any in other sizes still puzzles me to this day. Did people buy all of the other ones? Why? Or did they only make one because they knew it was so ugly no one would ever buy it?)

I’m not sure where I’d rank myself, but as Hsieh said, the number really doesn’t matter; it’s the reaction. And it’s the result. Hsieh is absolutely correct in his emphasis on culture. It seems to me that we all work too long and too hard to be stuck in a place that’s not fun. That's a good lesson, weird as it may sound.