I recently received through the mail some memorabilia that had been languishing in a box under a workbench in the unfinished back room of my parent’s basement. One small item I noticed was a project that I had undertaken at Jarrow, the Montessori pre-school I attended when I was four to six.

I am looking at a 3x5” black and white photograph from about 1976 of five kids engaged in a tug of war. All five children are exerting themsleves, leaning backwards, pulling enthusiastically on a rope. There seems to be a hint of hilarity as well as effort in all of the faces. The scene is from the lawn in front of our old farmhouse in Bradford, Vermont. It is summer. In the near background is a tree with a sign that reads “South Road Pottery. Open.” In the far distance there is a spectacular elm tree. Behind the action, an unpaved driveway winds off into the distance and meets with a road.

I turned forty years old yesterday. It is my personal record for longevity. As I reflect on this milestone, this unavoidable step into a new decade, I find that I feel surprisingly peaceful about it.

In 1975-6, instead of attending my familiar neighborhood school—Flatirons Elementary in Boulder, Colorado—I spent what would have been fourth grade at the St. Stephens School in Canterbury, England. I did not have much choice in the matter: my dad had exchanged his teaching job for one at the University of Kent for a year. It was quite different for me: kids in that new school officially wore green uniforms; Monday assemblies included the Lord’s Prayer; there was a lot more boiled cabbage and hot pudding in the dining hall; and the other students kept asking me if I really was a “Yankee.” It took me quite awhile to adapt to a foreign country, a different school and new classmates, unfamiliar sports and words and customs.

According to MapQuest, it is one thousand nine hundred eighty six and a half miles from my parents’ home in Boulder, Colorado to the farm in Bradford, Vermont where we spent our summers when I was a kid. According to that web site, it should take about thirty-one hours to drive the distance. We made the four-day trip to Vermont at the beginning of every summer vacation and returned each fall. The trek, in most cases with all five of us in the car, was a part of the rhythm of my childhood, just as much as the start of new school semesters or the changing of the seasons.

When my daughter was a baby, I decided that I would build her a desk for the day she would be big enough to use one. It seemed hard to imagine at the time that she would someday be able to sit on a chair and draw or write. But yesterday, just shortly after her third birthday, I finished her desk, a simple affair, and took great pleasure at seeing her sit at it and draw in her coloring book. (She sat on a little Ikea chair that took a relatively tiny amount of time to assemble.)

In the summer of 1984 I worked at Computerland of North Denver. A father of a good friend owned the store and was kind enough to give me the job. I remember that I made $5.50 per hour. I commuted from Boulder to Westminster, transferring buses once. I had a tiny purple portable radio and earphones that helped make the bus ride more pleasant. I learned a little bit about retail computer sales—profit margins, quality control, inventory, and so on.

As a kid I was a reader (and re-reader) of Greek and Roman mythology (and to a lesser degree of Norse, Christian, Egyptian, and Native American myths). One day when I was a ten-year-old (in school in Canterbury, England for a year while my Dad taught at the University of Kent), we were given a class assignment to locate the answers to fifty wide-ranging questions like “What is the term that describes the type of trees that drop their leaves? It was basically and open-book test to help us learn research skills. So I discovered the word “deciduous.”

For a few seasons quite some years ago I coached a coed soccer team of ten to twelve year olds in the Washington, DC league called “Soccer on the Hill.” It was quite a fun experience, but it was also a lot of work. The kids varied in every way that I could imagine—race, gender, economic background, size, skill, work ethic, and coachability. There were children of Senators and bus drivers, competitive players and others who were easily distracted by butterflies.

In basketball, relative to other players my age, I peaked in sixth grade. I played in the “after school basketball” league at Flatirons Elementary School. We played on nine-foot rims on a shorter than regulation school gym court. I was something of a star, averaging about seventeen points per game (according to my possibly untrustworthy memory) while playing three of four six minute quarters. For years I held the season free throw percentage record that was posted on a wall at the school. I remember from introductions that I was 4’11 1/2 inches tall. (The tallest players, the centers, were in the 5’3” to 5’5” range). I played point guard.

All of life’s big decisions have a quality to them that makes them hard to judge in retrospect. Whatever direction you turn at a particular moment utterly affects the rest of your life, but you will never be able to compare that path with any other. Or, for a better way of putting it, see Robert Frost, The Road Not Taken. Only in the movies (or other fiction) can you explore multiple futures. I have been thinking this morning about the spring of 1984 when I was a senior at Boulder High School deciding what college to attend. It was one of those moments that make all the difference in your life.

Some couples say that they found love at first sight, describe each other as “soul mates,” tell and re-tell their engagement story, or see their relationship as a fairy tale. Today is my wife’s birthday, so I thought I would honor the day by telling the story of how we met. (I have been striving for years to build a romantic mythology around this event, but I have not received as much cooperation as I would like.)